The weird contrast between trail and town continues when my funcy breakfast frittata is served on a plate with a single beautiful orange flower. Makes a change from silvery ramen "flavour" packets and setting fire to oatmeal packets. I check out, and wait for my ride to the college wearing both my concert dress and my backpack and getting a few strange looks.
The college has a 4.3 Adams -- I'm thirsty to play marimba, so of course that becomes central in my presentation for the composition students and then my solo concert in the gorgeous recital hall. I talk about intersecting spectra of articulation, pitch and un-pitch, big and small, and composerly control or chance. I play the James Tenney on suspended cymbal and then as a pitchy-to-chordally improvised marimba solo to close out the concert.
Then it becomes a mad rush to re-pack, change and catch the taxi that's arriving in... 10 minutes. I fling clothes and mallets into a box the college admin will kindly mail ahead for me; I encase myself in summery spandex and discard the food I can't fit in my dry-bags. Strap a banana and the salad-remains of lunch onto the pack and I'm out.
The taxi driver is lovely -- chatty, interesting and kindly. It's a gorgeous clear sunny day heading south (I'm skipping Route 125 to Route 4 -- some to do later and some I've already day-hiked with my sis). The taxi driver talks about his idea of there being two Falls and two Springs in Vermont each year -- there's this glorious bright Fall, then the miserable grey Fall sliding down into winter. He says he loves "a good old-fashioned winter" and he loves Fall mostly because it means winter is coming.
The driver flat-out refuses a tip, and I'm at the trailhead doing the usual messing around with clothing layers, bug repellent, blah blah. Put away the mobile phone, get out the map and the iodine pills, encase everything in plastic just in case. A dude about my age comes over to check in and ask about my hike. He's done the LT in the past, and I can tell he's looking for a kind of hiker-solidarity-fix, in the way I doubtless will after the trail is done. "Are you light on water?" he asks. In fact, I'm very nearly out. He grabs a litre of clear, un-iodiney water from the console of his car, and pours it into my Sierra Mist bottle. Only later do I realise that (very uncharacteristically -- the topic of solo-hiking and trust, um, "issues" will be its own blog post) I hadn't thought twice about accepting unlabelled drink from a stranger.
Characteristically, I had trouble finding the right trail out of the lot. I bumbled to a river and back on an unblazed trail before finding the proper way:
It was a good day to be outside -- I didn't reckon it was going to rain, so I furled my waterproofs optimistically.
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| GMC "Long Trail" imprint |
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| United States Forestry Service |
I climbed up to some views. Ate the rest of my salad. Felt content and energized for being not only on the LT, but also on the magical Appalachian Trail that goes on south to Georgia (the state, not Georgia VT).
I was undecided whether to sleep at Cooper Lodge (the LT's highest shelter, just shy of Killington Peak) or go half a mile off the trail to Pico Camp. Because it was not warm, I opted for Pico's lower elevation (when I saw the pretty trashed Cooper Lodge the next morning, I would be glad of this decision). Before the turnoff for Pico there was a kind of interesting landscape of old blown-down trees and abandoned side trails (one, because the 1938 hurricane brought down too many trees to bother clearing the trail). At "Jungle Junction" I turned off for Pico.
Pico was a sort of dark Wendy-house style camp, unusually complete with glass windows. I got in just before dusk, and started the pre-emptive Let's Make This Normal And Not Awks conversation with the older guy in his sleeping bag on the top bunk. He misheard my "I'm Jane" introduction as "I'm gay!", which threw the not-awks effort off track a bit for a little while [only because that would be a weird opening gambit]. He also didn't sit up or show his face at all -- he was "holed up" trying to recover sufficiently from an ankle injury that he could hike out in a few days. Something about the dynamic, and the gloom of the camp itself, made me think I would have bogged off to camp elsewhere if it hadn't been for the third hiker whose gear was already arrayed on the other top bunk. This guy -- an engineer, which seems a pretty popular vocation among LT hikers -- appeared from a spur trail after watching the sunset, and helped establish a Normal And Not Awks dynamic. He asked about my favourite drummers and I cited Jimmy Chamberlin and Janet Weiss most immediately and enduringly. It was pretty cold again -- I scrawled in my trail journal with my breath making visible clouds under my headlight.
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