TRAIL DAY 46
Wed, Apr 6, 2016 I had decided the night before that I would not have breakfast at Hogback Ridge because it was only 2.6 miles to the main road into Erwin, Tennessee. I’d have breakfast there – a big one! On waking, we were up and out.
It was an uneventful hike to the road but for a monument erected by the Moye Foundation wishing Christian peace to all passing through land they had donated to the U.S. Forest Service.
In short order, I emerged from the woods at Sams Gap to find that the road into Erwin was a super highway and there’d be no hitching. Just as the trail came to a paved road near the highway, I saw a sandwich board advertising Trail Magic: SCRAMBLED EGGS, HASH BROWNS, SODA, ORANGES.
The sandwich board pointed up a steep hill leading westward to a fenced-in cemetery. As you got up to the top, a short dirt section of road ran off to the left along the near side of the cemetery fence. A tall Trail Angel stood by a pickup and in front of a propane stove at right angles to it. He was facing the cemetery in a blue shell to keep warm. There were two red sports chairs facing him. I placed my gear by one, took a picture and returned to feast!
“Would you like some eggs?”
“Sure.”
He didn’t ask how many I’d like, he just cracked 4, scrambled them up and put them on a plate.
“Would you like some hash browns?”
“Sure.”
He took a long set of tongs and pinched what had to be a pound of hash browns, put them on the plate and handed it to me.
“Help yourself to soda and oranges.”
“Thanks.”
It was pretty cold out. I had hiked 2.6 miles to disappointment about getting into town. And then Trail Magic at its best. The food couldn’t have tasted better or satisfied more.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“Ohio.”
“You came all the way here to do Trail Magic?”
“Yep.”
“How long are you here for?”
“Six days.”
“Are you retired?”
“Yep.”
“What was you work?”
“Mason.”
“Where?”
“D.C.”
“Did you work on the National Cathedral?”
“Yep.”
My Angel was super generous with his time and food but pretty stingy with his words.
“Did you do a thru-hike?”
“Yep.”
“When?”
“Two years ago.”
“Did you have a trail name?”
“Yep.”
“What was it?”
“Quiet Paul.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
I suspect that name was not chosen by my Angel but rather by a fellow hiker who simply named the obvious trait.
“That suits,” I said. “You’re quiet all right and you’re very kind and generous.”
He didn’t respond.
A female hiker showed up in a bit and I was glad she did. My phone had no signal. She let me borrow her phone and down on the bank behind Quiet Paul’s truck I got enough signal to call for a shuttle. The driver knew where the trail met the road and asked that I go to a designated parking lot for pick up. She’d be there in a half hour.
I thanked my fellow hiker and Quiet Paul and headed down the hill, under the highway and over to the parking lot. My driver showed up right on time just as another hiker came along. We shared the ride into town.
I had made my reservations at “Best” Southern back in the woods somewhere and the driver dropped me off there. The fee we split was fair at $25. As was often the case in the south at less-than-top-drawer motels, the owner / manager was from India. Again, as ususal, she was a tad aloof and business like. Just enough politeness to get the job done.
My number one goal at Erwin was to get my phone back and functional. I had parted with it at the NOC, almost 200 miles to the south. I called Eric Lewis of Medtek Mobile in Sylva, North Carolina who told me he could not fix it. There had been numerous calls from the wilderness, including the one on PB’s phone at Cammerer Tower on Day #36, many left messages and many unanswered texts with nothing accomplished. The whole mess was very frustrating.
At one point, early on in our discussion, Eric had suggested I return the phone under warranty. I declined thinking it wouldn’t be covered because it was misuse that damaged it. But now, I was ready to give it a try. I called Verizon – imagine how much fun that was. When you finally get through to a voice powered by a heartbeat, you face the script of a mandatory, programed conversation.
“With whom am I having the pleasure of speaking?”
“Soren West.”
“May I call you Soren?”
“Sure.”
“How are you today, Soren?”
“Fine.”
I left it there, refusing to play the pointless, scripted game. But there was a time when it would go like this:
“Fine. How are you?”
“I’m Good! Thanks for asking.”
Now, his morals aside, help me out here. Are there some people who think to themselves, “Boy, isn’t he nice – so friendly – and genuinely concerned for me. He really wants to know how I’m doing. He’s not just all business. I LIKE this person. I LIKE Verizon. I’m going to bring all my business here. Wait till I tell my friends. . . .”?
Maybe some folks are so kind spirited that, unlike me, they really don’t want to add:
“Look you imbecile. I asked ‘How are you?’ only because you asked me, according to your idiotic, robotic, completely non-communicative script. I’m not being kind in a way that should elicit a ‘Thanks for asking.’ I have simply fallen victim to the mandatory conversation imposed on you and me by your mindless, thoughtless, time-wasting manager who thinks faux friendliness good for business.”
Forget friendly. Personable. Real. Genuine. Human. Warm. Inviting. Responsive. Caring.
In this age of “reality” TV, let’s at least appear to be real when the reality is, “Honey child! There ain’t nuttin’ whatsoever ‘real’ about me because I am a robot in training. Real is gone, Honey, gone! So give up on genuine flesh-and-blood, good-days-and-bad, considerate exchanges regarding the matter you now have taken time out of your busy life to address. Give up on I-am-here-to-help-you-anyway-I-can. Gone! You’ll be real lucky, Honey, if I actually hear your concern at all and luckier still if I bother to access my human (sorry, shouldn’t have used that word) data bank to retrieve a relevant answer or suggestion because the program that governs everything I say may not compute any of our real conversation at all. They have trained me in jargon and that’s all I have. Meet you where you are? Gone!”
Answering machines? Maybe later. For now, just let me say that I take great comfort knowing, while I have committed so much time to being in the woods, my recorded phone calls are being studied, digested and analyzed to improve the quality (?) of something.
Hoping I haven’t irritated you too much with this excursion, let me say that by God’s grace, I had the energy to hang on with Verizon until I actually got to someone with whom I really could address my phone issues. Well. . .by God’s grace and my own innate stubbornness and perseverance – the same stuff that, with more grace, would see me to Katahdin.
I was delighted to learn that Verizon, which I have maligned enough here, really heard me and, in a way I still find astounding, stepped up to the plate and covered my phone under warranty. They got me to a long-awaited solution to a problem that I really didn’t think was theirs – at no cost to me!
Now, here’s where it gets confusing. I remember conversations for hours late in the afternoon with Eric at Medtek and Paul at Verizon. I arranged for Eric to mail my phone which he still had to Verizon and for Verizon to mail the warranty replacement (remanufactured for sure) to me Federal Express. I thought this was all done at Best Southern but my pictures tell me I did not take a zero and was in Erwin no more than 24 hours, roughly 10:00 a.m April 6th to 10:00 a.m. April 7th. I can’t figure how Verizon could have gotten the replacement phone to me in time. And yet, I see in the metadata of my photos that I swapped out the tablet for the phone for pictures between 3:12 p.m. and 6:14 p.m. on April 6th.
I must have learned that Eric could not fix my phone sometime earlier and arranged for the “new” phone to be shipped to Best Southern for the day of my arrival there. I don’t remember doing that at Hot Springs. Mystery. We move on.
I took my meals at a small-town diner that featured Americana. It was the only place I ate.
The late afternoon and evening was taken up with Verizon shifting my account from one phone to another. Meanwhile, Eric at Medtek was backing up my photos to the Verizon Cloud until it filled. He told me he maxed out my cloud storage and only later, after many trail miles of wondering why he hadn’t downloaded the rest to a thumb drive or the like, did he tell me that he had saved all the rest to his PC. Only many contacts false starts, miles and states later, did things come together enough that, in fact, Bonnie received a small USB device that contained the smallest chip I am aware of with the pictures Eric had kindly stored for me. And no cost from Medtek ever. I had asked Eric what his favorite alcoholic beverage was and, when I got home, I sent him my sincere “thanks” with a bottle of what he answered.
Journeyman texted me while I was in Erwin. He was there, too. However, he was at the north end of town and his greater speed brought him to Erwin from farther up the trail. It seemed most people came to Erwin where he did, up by Uncle Johnny’s Hostel. I would be there in a few days.
As night came on, I got myself organized for departure the next day and arranged for the shuttle.
I almost never watched TV. There was too much to do when you were off the trail. Too much planning and things to tend to: bills, blogging if possible, emails, things to fix, laundry, eat, resupply, shower, bed.
Day #46 Hogback Ridge Shelter > Sams Gap (Erwin) 2.6 miles