TRAIL DAY 122

Tue, June 21, 2016 Breakfast was at a café across the street.  Word was it opened at 6:30 a.m.  Not!

I hung around as long as I dared and then hit the road without breakfast.  Rumor had it that the rocks for which Pennsylvania is famous started just after Duncannon and continued to Delaware Water Gap at the eastern border of the state.  Later we learned that New Jersey wasn’t a whole lot better.  I’d soon learn for myself.

Welcomed by chalk, I walked along the residential streets the trail followed to the north edge of town where bridges crossed the Juniata and Susquehanna Rivers.  Before negotiating a narrow road without sidewalk under railroad tracks my rectal malady hit in a fashion reminiscent of the name Rumpole of the Bailey gave his wife: She who must be obeyed.

I obeyed in a hurry in thick overgrowth at the side of the tracks with barely enough cover.

Sorry folks.  That’s just the way it is on the trail.  Maybe you’re all accepting of the reality of the trail by now – at least my reality.  Why airbrush.  The trail is one very real experience and that’s what I want to share with you.  So hang in there.

I made my way under the tracks and headed for the bridges.  It was a good stretch of road-walking to get to the east shore of the Susquehanna.

But for brilliant sunlight, this was the dirtiest spot on the trail – the whole trail, I think.  Lots of vehicular traffic and on the east side of the river ran railroad tracks for freight trains that followed the river.  The smell of trains, black steel dust, coal exhaust, car exhaust, and more permeated the air.  It was like standing in the New York subway where you’d hear the screech of the approaching train and catch that metallic smell peculiar to trains – very un-trail-like but it had to be endured.  This was the least natural and most industrialized part of the trail.

Across the tracks, the trail ascended steeply up and away from any passing trains.  In time I could see the Susquehanna River to the north and more to the south.  Years ago I had handled a case against Pennsylvania Power and Light Company for failing to mark wires on the approach to a runway just west of the Susquehanna.  The vertical stabilizer (tail) of a small plane caught the wire just 10″ from the top.  It arrested the plane’s flight, causing the aircraft to stall (lose lift) and spin to the ground killing the pilot and his passenger.  Federal regulation required orange balls on the wires and they were absent.

I was in home territory.

Ever so slight a hint of seasonal changes to come was evident in the beauty of a single leaf fallen on the trail.  William O. Douglas, the longest serving Justice on the United States Supreme Court, was an avid outdoorsman.  He wrote about the beauty of a single flower in the woods.  Standing out.  Unique.  Unrivaled.  Beautiful beyond description.  Miraculous!

I noted the work of maintainers in this area – with axe.  Hard and rewarding work, muscles put to use.  Good work.  A blessing to be used of this world for the betterment of others.  To spend oneself for good.

I stopped for breakfast at 9:30 a.m. well above the Susquehanna.  As I sat near the trail, “Megellan” came by.  We had met earlier.  He was a tall, curly-and-dark-haired man in his 60s.  He was hiking “with” his son, “Strider,” who was walking off his time in Afghanistan.  His stride was one his dad could not match. He had told his son, “Go ahead.  Do what you need to do” but missed being with him.

Magellan had encountered Journeyman somewhere farther south and we shared our common enjoyment of that hiker.  He then wanted to get on his way so as not to be too far behind his soldier.  I felt for the father-son dynamics and wished them well.  You can see both sides of the struggle.  Life is just like that.  No two people can be together without conflict.  When the wind blows through the leaves on the tree, they surely collide.  And so it is with the incredibly complex movements in the human spirit, psyche, mind and body aware of unfathomable realities in the universe and within ourselves.  Elbow-scraping love is the only way to follow nearly the same path and at nearly the same pace.  Knee-scraping, muscle-wrenching love.

The rocks presaged things to come.

We crossed another amazing bridge like the one near Carlisle with more gratitude for the work and expense of those who maintain the AT.  PA 225 was below.  A screenshot of Google Earth shows Duncannon relative to Lake Erie on the left and the Atlantic Ocean on the right.  Another shot, zoomed in, shows Duncannon again, the Susquehanna River and 4 parallel ridges extending from bottom left to top right.  A red dot locates the bridge over PA 225 at the point that the highway makes almost a hairpin turn over the ridge summit.

I had lunch at the southeast corner of a parking lot just across the bridge.  I ate leaning up against a yellow metal pole.  As I sat munching, some kids came by heading up Peter’s Mountain Trail which the AT would join farther east.

By 4:45 p.m., I was at Peters Mountain Shelter.  I stopped debating, only slightly, whether to stay.  There were a good number of hikers there and I decided to move on.  I would learn the next day that hikers who stayed had a miserable night.  Some rowdy kids showed up and defecated all along the side of the shelter.  The worst situation I’d heard on the AT.  Industrial dirt and smells to start the day and more human unpleasantness as the day waned.

Continuing east, the AT intersected Victoria Trail, Whitetail Trail and Kinter view.  There were signs for each and it was comforting on this long straight stretch of indistinct trail to have markers to let you know where you were.  This would not always be the case and you could hike for hours with nothing to mark your progress.

But I never lost the sense of blessing to be in the wilderness without rushing except perhaps for the viewpoint south of Daleville, Virginia.

There was the inner mandate to just keep on going but I had enough buffer in time to let my heart open to miracles everywhere.  To the miracle of being at all.  A leaf.  A feather.  Brilliant yellow fungus.  My trail time was priceless!

AWOL notes tell me I camped at mile 1162.7.  I took a picture of someone in a tent without a fly – double meaning here.  In the warm night without rain, all he needed was the mesh to keep insects away.  Theo cottoned to this fellow and tried to hang out with him as the hiker just kept reading.  Zooming in, I see he was into lots of causes judging by the number of rubber bracelets he was wearing.  He was also working on his planning with the entire AWOL book.

My tent was right next door.  I ate supper inside and turned in.  It was a peaceful and comfortable setting.

Day #122  Duncannon (The Doyle) > Campsite (1162.7) 16.1 miles