Day 24: Melville Nauheim Shelter to Seth Warner Shelter

Two days left to finish the LT, and neither of these carries a massive mileage. Today I walk from 7:30 a.m. til 6 p.m. -- that's normal now. It was a slow and bouldery start, descending to VT Route 9. 

The other hikers at the shelter told me the U.S. government is shut down. The first evidence I see of this is that the USFS toilet I excitedly hiked towards is locked.

I feel briefly annoyed about not being able to use a real toilet (which is quite a thrilling treat these days -- I'm 9 days out from my last shower and newly appreciative of all bathroom fixtures), but then I contextualise this inconvenience in relation to how annoyed the USFS workers likely are about not getting paid. Why are we governed by petulant sulkers? That's all I'll say.

By the river is an empty dome tent, an extensive picnic setup, coolers, religious texts, and abandoned cell phones ringing inside the tent. It's an unusual scene, and I briefly wonder if these campers are OK. In the nearby carpark, two guys in skullcaps are changing into what I can only describe as ritualistic outfits. I slither spandexily past them and start off up a really long and pretty annoying boulder-staircase trail from the road. Note I'm still complaining about uphills, though I chose to hike a trail with 65,000 ft of elevation change. My grumpiness is intensified by the close and really humid weather. I know part of my annoyance at the LT is that the end is in sight -- like the end of a band, or a relationship, or a job, there's a point where you just want to be done and not prolong the transition. Often, intense irritation is how I protect myself from the sadness of something coming to an end.

I rustle through dry leaves on top of a small hill, and the humidity lets up a little.

I like how the AT sign is sort of a tree, sort of an arrow. 

16.8 miles to the first road in Massachusetts. Or 1,563 miles to the southern end of the AT. 

"The first half nearly made me want to go back but the last half was easy and flat" -- Alex, I'm right with you on this. Sums up my Long Trail experience overall. 

One thing I've noticed is that the earth itself has as rich a palette of colours as the autumn foliage. Here, the mud is very nearly black; elsewhere it's ranged from pea-green to beige to burgundy to chocolate. 

The guidebook mentioned "beaver-challenged puncheon" -- here it is. 

I walk through some beaver lands. It's striking how significantly beaver activity changes the landscape. I'm walking on boards below the waterline to my right -- beaver engineering holds the pond up around the height of my ribs:

To my left, the land is spongy and yellow and anticlimactic -- a sepia reflection of the pond. 

It seems like beaver ponds drown out the trees; their dead stumps give a prehistoric feel to the scene. I mentally witter on with all my unfounded beaver-related thoughts, and add "books about beavers" to "books about moose" on my wishlist for when I get home.

All this beaver talk has probably irreparably altered the SEO profile of this blog... So let's talk toilets. I stop at Congdon Shelter and am pretty happy they have one of the new, garden-shed-sized privies. I assume it's a quirk of federal funding that, deep in the inaccessible forest, the new-built privies must be accessible and ADA-compliant. Very thankfully, the LT-system privies are not locked while the government's in sulky shutdown. I leave a brand-new, ziplocked roll of TP and mini hand-sanitizer behind -- I overpacked on privy supplies and see no way I could get through them all in the next 48 hours. 

I have lunch at the shelter with a couple of ladies from Montana and STL respectively. They're hiking the AT from New York state up to Hanover, NH. They seem really nice, and bonded by an easy friendship. Apparently the AT in Massachusetts is pretty; the AT in Connecticut is flat. There's an Amtrak station right by the trail in New York state. I stockpile all this information, and toddle off on the river-side trail. 

I climb to Consultation Peak. It's a sunny-rustly day now the humidity has cleared. My feet hurt. I'd expected the kind of blisters I'd endured on the Coast-to-Coast -- improbable fractals spiralling from every toe, and from foot-surfaces I never thought capable of hosting such angry, distorted, pulsing, erupting horrors. Instead, I've just got these weird deep blisters on both big toes, that have made both toes nervily numb over periodic bone-aching pain. In fact, writing this just before Thanksgiving, I haven't felt my right-big toe since Labor Day. But I have faith sensation will return before the end of the year -- the dead patch is shrinking every week. 

As I'm finishing the LT, though, the actual bones of my feet are wailing. Last night at the shelter, bony-nervy pain in the very centre of both feet stood between me and sleep for quite a while. I still think I'd take this periodic stabbing pain over the surface-level grating-pain of C2C-style blisters. It's a functional discomfort.

As the sun shifts and the shadows get longer, I go into what I think of as "weary-power" mode -- I'm super tired but moving faster than usual. Because I want to get where I'm going and take my protective but rigid boots off my damn feet.

I thought I saw a dead moth on the trail, but it was just hiding out:

I saw this clean sign -- 5K to the state line. I sort of couldn't believe it. Pushed on for the shelter; a group of deer flashed their white tails at me in the dusk. 

What do these last two pictures have to do with the LT, you may wonder. Well, as I headed down to the shelter, my stupid body decided that -- for the second time in three weeks on the trail -- it was necessary for me to enter that Special Time where, ya know, I'd usually be compelled to either cartwheel on a beach in white trousers or retreat to a chaise lounge and scoff bonbons.Grrrr. I guess this was a kind of humourous reliation ("You want me to carry you how many miles? Well, OK -- but in that case I'll be putting you on spin cycle. I think you'll find the bonbon and chaise lounge count round these parts to be... zero!)

I pitched the tent. I went to get water in the dark. I fell in the water just a little bit, chilling my toes through my Crocs. I cooked some ramen. I chatted to the one older gent who was camping in the shelter itself -- he very politely didn't say anything as I hung my food bag right at a perfect height for a black bear to stand up and snag my remaining snacks. I was tired. He'd been hiking the trail in sections for the last 40 years -- I asked how things had changed. Apparently the trail itself has been improved a lot, and of course the shelters keep getting replaced periodically because they have this tendency to burn down. I asked whether there were more people hiking now than in the past. Apparently it was tough to say, because loads of people were hiking the LT in the 70s, when "it was a fad" relating to the back-to-the-land movement.

I love megamid. It doesn't pretend you're doing anything other than sleeping in the dirt. 

Despite the extensive whingeing above, it was a good day on the trail. I'm just never all that into the penultimate stages of any project. Earlier in the journey, I was writing a lot of new music and songs in my mind as I walked; now, the mental jukebox is re-playing stuff I already know -- impatiently anticipating the end of the trail. I haven't too far to walk tomorrow -- I sleep cosy and remind myself that 24 hours from now... I will be clean.