“Hiker Trash!” cat-called Soft Serve from the porch of the Dog Patch, where she sat with Just Ducky and Snake, when the three of us approached.
“Oh!” I said, taking in the row of motorcycles lining the parking lot. “So, this is like, a real biker bar.”
As if on cue, four leather-clad bikers roared up behind us. As they got off their bikes, one of the bearded, bandana-ed men looked appreciatively at Erin and called out, “Hey Red!”
Erin looked at me and shrugged, “What can I say? Bikers love redheads.”
“This is my kind of place,” See Blue said, taking off his pack and going inside to get us a pitcher of beer. That one pitcher turned into several pitchers and a round of tequila shots turned into rounds of tequila shots. Before we stumbled the mile to the next shelter, Erin turning down offers from several bikers for a ride back to the trail, we had tried and failed to hustle some regulars at pool, called Pilgrim and Sug from a payphone in the parking lot, and danced on a picnic table with Soft Serve to Bruce Springsteen. It was a miracle that we woke the next morning hangover free, a happy side effect of the fast metabolism our bodies had developed.
The Dog Patch party was the send-off we hadn’t known we needed. The next day we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, said good-bye to Just Ducky, Soft Serve, and Snake, and hiked into Pennsylvania. Even given what we’d heard about the AT in Pennsylvania (mostly that the 230 mile stretch was incredibly rocky and fairly un-scenic), I wasn’t prepared for my reaction to this part of the trail. For me, hiking was almost always a struggle, but through Pennsylvania, for the first time, the trail felt like a job.
And I hated that job.
I hated the rocks that dominated the trail and in some places were more like boulder fields. Erin said it was as though, “someone turned all these rocks on their asses so the flat part is underground and we have to walk on the edges.” I felt like I could never quite get my footing, figuratively and literally. My already weak ankles, a product of my many years of soccer played poorly and recklessly, turned on every slick rock. New hikers often comment that thru-hikers seem to have an innate ability to hike fast while avoiding rocks and roots in the trail. And after weeks on the trail, I’d developed some of that (even though, at my core, I’m always kind of clumsy. Every day on the trail I found a new way to bruise or bloody a different part of my body), but Pennsylvania made me feel like someone out for her first hike.
I hated the dreariness of the scenery. There wasn’t much to distinguish the trail other than the rocks; no real elevation changes, no outstanding views. And even if there had been, the eleven days we spent in Pennsylvania were a blur of fog and rain. The trail through Pennsylvania was nature’s equivalent of the dying steel towns that surrounded it. But it was in that state, where I made up songs as I hiked like “We Will Rock You (aka Pennsylvania Sux),” that we met some of the kindest, most generous people we’d meet during our hike.
One evening, a few days into Pennsylvania, we came across a shelter caretaker named Jim. The whole trail is divided into many sections and generally a local trail club will take responsibility for maintaining the trail and shelters along their section of trail. In that section of Pennsylvania, the trail club had a dedicated volunteer who cleaned and made repairs on each shelter. We weren’t staying at Jim’s shelter that night, so we chatted with him for a few minutes and then hiked on in the rain. But early the next morning, a couple of miles into our hike, we were surprised to come across Jim waiting for us, holding a bag of what turned out to be fresh fruit, muffins, and orange juice. I looked at Erin and could see that, like me, she’d also teared up.
Jim smiled and shrugged as we thanked him for the millionth time. “You are the first thru-hikers I’ve met this year, and it seemed like you could use a pick me up.”
After we ate, Jim offered to drive our packs up the trail to a hostel at Pine Grove Furnace State Park so that we could walk most of the day pack-free.
A guy that worked in Boiling Springs at the Appalachian Trail Conference office gave us a ride through the pouring rain to a hotel so that Erin, See Blue, and I could finally do laundry and dry out for a night. In the rundown town of Duncannon, PA (which our trail book referred to as “the jewel of the Susquehanna”), Erin and I drank beer and ate onion rings with local barflies in the middle of the day at the historic Doyle hotel. After walking on several miles of the trail that crossed a toxic waste site, with ominous signs warning “DO NOT DRINK WATER,” we arrived in Palmerton, PA to find that the town provided a free hostel to hikers in the basement of their city hall (formerly the town jail). The three of us spent the night there watching hockey, drinking beers and shots provided by a hiker-friendly bartender. When we left Palmerton the next day, the woman who gave us a ride back to the trail pressed a twenty-dollar bill in Erin’s hand, telling us to buy lunch on her in the next place we stopped.
One particularly awful day—more pounding rain, Erin’s knee hurting so bad she could barely walk—we found ourselves standing at a deserted road crossing that we knew wasn’t within 15 miles of a town.
“Let’s just give it a half hour and see if we can get a hitch somewhere,” I told Erin, hoping that even a futile effort would take her mind off her pain. Not only did the driver of the first car that passed us (which was also the only car that came along in the 20 minutes we waited there) stop and drive us over 12 miles down the road to a McDonalds, but a different stranger spotted us in the parking lot a few hours later and offered to take us back up to the trail.
But even with all the kindnesses we’d experienced, nothing prepared us for what we found in Port Clinton, Pennsylvania. Hiking into Port Clinton, Erin and I were both in foul moods; the rocks and rain and our cumulative months of “togetherness” taking their toll. See Blue had hiked ahead of us a couple days earlier to make sure he hit a mail drop, but was going to wait for us in Port Clinton. Earlier in the day, Erin and I had stopped at a shelter for lunch. Coming down the spur trail back to the AT, Erin, as she often did, headed the wrong way up the trail. I stood still, waiting for her to realize her mistake and turn around.
“Fuck!” Erin yelled when, after a few hundred yards, she spotted me and knew what she’d done. As she doubled back, she mumbled, “Why didn’t you fucking say something?”
I didn’t answer; annoyed, and for the 10 miles into town, neither of us spoke. Our squabble with each other was well forgotten by the time we ran into See Blue sitting on a bench outside of the Port Clinton outfitter, but our attitudes in general were unchanged.
“You girls okay?” See Blue asked as he led us to the pavilion in the middle of town where hikers were allowed to stay for a night. We changed into our “town clothes,” which for me, meant I put on a long sleeve hiking shirt and zipped on the bottom of my pants, and for E meant black long johns that we called her “sexy pants”, and were thinking about finding dinner when a big guy with a bushy brown beard and blue baseball hat bounded up the steps.
“My first thru-hikers!” He stuck his hand out, an infectious smile on his broad face. “I’m so glad you guys are here! I’m Bag o’ Tricks.”
We didn’t know it right then, although it didn’t take us long to figure out, but we’d just found our very own trail angel. Bag o’ Tricks was one of those guys who was so enthusiastic and generous that a non-trail me would be convinced he had an ulterior motive. But by that point in the hike after regularly meeting people like Jim the caretaker, or any one of drivers who’d gone out of their way to ferry us in and out of towns, it seemed perfectly reasonable that there was someone who loved the Appalachian Trail and the community that had grown up around it so much that he spent his summers looking for thru-hikers that he could help while asking nothing in return.
“Come on, I’m going to take you guys to dinner,” he said and started back out towards the street before we could respond. We hesitated only a minute before we followed.
That night, Bag o’ Tricks loaded the three of us into his car and took us to do our grocery shopping and then to the local pub for dinner and beers, all the while regaling us with outrageous stories of the hikers he’d met over the years. It was never exactly clear to me, but I gathered that he lived nearby and over time had become part of a network of hiker support that surrounded the trail. Often the hostel operators and outfitter owners in towns on the trail were people who maybe at one time had been thru-hikers and became so enmeshed in the community that it was now a central part of their lives. And because they’d lived it, those were the people that helped each new crop of hikers, despite often being ill-prepared and underfunded, complete their hikes.
“Here’s what we’ll do tomorrow,” he started, again, not asking, but telling, “I’ll pick you up in the morning and take you to breakfast. Then I’ll slack pack you to Blue Mountain summit. There’s a great pizza place there and I know the owner, so you guys can camp out back. Okay? Let’s get some beers.”
We nodded and just looked at each other, not sure what was happening, but knowing better than to question his generosity.
“Just call me Tricks!” he boomed as he handed each of us a giant mug of cold Yuengling.
He told us that he enjoyed helping as many hikers as he could, but since we were some of the first thru-hikers he’d met, and Erin and I the first women he’d seen on the trail that season, that we were getting the royal treatment. He took a big gulp of beer and with no segue, “You guys want to hear a joke?”
Again, we nodded and gulped our own beers.
“What’s the difference between a day hiker, a section hiker and a thru-hiker? A day hiker sees a fly in his beer and tells the bartender to give him a new one. A section hiker sees a fly in his beer, picks out the fly and drinks the beer anyway. A thru hiker picks the fly out of the beer, squeezes it, yells at the fly ‘gimme that beer, mother fucker’ puts the fly back in the beer and drinks them both.”
We laughed with him, as much at his joke as at his infectious, raucous, roar of a laugh.
True to his word, the next morning Tricks was back at the pavilion, ready to take us to breakfast. Between forkfuls of pancakes and eggs, I told him about the young couple we’d surprised making out on our return to the shelter the night before. He dropped us back off at the trail with promises to meet us with our packs at the pizza place that night. About halfway through the day, though, as we walked up to a rare four-sided brick shelter, there was Tricks again, beaming when he saw us.
He said, “I thought you guys might like some snacks!” and handed us juice boxes and fruit roll-ups. We accepted them with the delight of children at the half time of a soccer game. As we ate, the caretaker of the shelter told us that he’d met Sug and Pilgrim and that they were killing themselves, hiking big miles to get to New York in time for Pilgrim’s graduation and Sug’s friend’s wedding. We thanked the caretaker for the update, told Tricks we’d see him soon and headed back out into the rain.
I don’t think I looked up once over the next 4 hours as I navigated my way over the ever-slick Pennsylvania rocks. My mind drifted. I was physically on the trail, but mentally, I was anywhere else. I’d developed techniques to divorce my mind from hiking on days when the monotony became overwhelming. A new mixtape from Erin’s brother Brian would keep me occupied for days, I would listen over and over, dissecting the lyrics until the songs themselves became monotonous. I spent countless hours rewriting the awful jokes I’d told during my brief foray into stand-up comedy in Chicago or scripting my audition tape for the Real World (even though, at 25, I was already way too old to appear on the reality show). If Erin and I were hiking together, we’d develop elaborate scenarios about our made-up boyfriends (Shane and Jacob) who were also best friends, a hobby of ours since the 7th grade.
“When we go into New York City in a few weeks, Shane and Jacob are going to surprise us at the train station.”
“That’s so like Shane and Jacob.”
“Yeah, and since we’ll have no town clothes we’ll go to Goodwill together.”
“Oh! And each person gets to pick out the outfit for their partner.”
“Is mine Shane or Jacob?”
“Whichever.”
“Cool. Can we try on lots of different clothes like a movie montage?”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
“And then we’ll go back to the hotel room and get ready while they go get fancy appetizers and wine.”
“I would eat the shit out of some cheese. And then we go dancing after dinner?”
“Of course. Shane and Jacob love to dance.”
That day, though, my mind was on Trail Days, the annual AT hiker festival in Damascus, Virginia that we were going to later that week. Trail Days is held every year in Damascus and many thru-hikers, no matter where they are in their hike, find a way to get to Virginia the second or third weekend in May. Hundreds of former and current hikers, trail enthusiasts and gear vendors take over the town for a massive party celebrating the AT. Erin went when her sister and Chris had hiked the AT in ’99 and said that we shouldn’t miss it. Our plan was for Erin, See Blue, and I to make it through Pennsylvania to the Delaware Water Gap and somehow rent a car in time to drive back to Virginia.
I was so absorbed in the logistics of what Erin and I were calling our “AT Vacation” that it surprised me when I arrived at Blue Mountain Summit, 28 miles from where we’d started that morning. We ate pizza with Tricks, who had arrived an hour earlier with our gear, while he told us wild stories about past Trail Days. He attended every year with a group of friends who set up a party area they called Billville.
“I can’t wait to introduce you guys to Billville, they’re going to love you,” Tricks told me after we’d eaten two large pizzas between us and he’d helped me set up my tent in the picnic area behind the pizza parlor with the rain continuing to pour.
“I’m so glad we’re going to see you again, Tricks. You’ve been such an angel the past two days. You have no idea how much we needed to meet you,” I said when I hugged him tightly goodbye.
Later, in her bivy sack under a picnic bench with me 5 feet away in my tiny one-person tent, Erin said “You know, it was really fucking nice to have someone take care of us for a couple of days.”
“Yeah, he couldn’t have been more perfect.”
“Well, unless he was Shane and Jacob, of course.”
“Of course… which one is mine again?”