After making loose plans to meet up with Mike and Ben later that night, Erin and I set off to find Bag o’ Tricks and his Billville friends. We wandered through the maze of tents until we heard someone calling our names. I turned to find Miss Janet standing behind us, arms outstretched for hugs. We chatted excitedly, telling her about how we’d fared since leaving her house in Tennessee weeks before.
“Oh, of course I know Tricks! EVERYONE knows Tricks!” she said when we told her who we were looking for. She took us over to the Billville camp, populated mostly by people who’d done multiple thru-hikes or those like Tricks who supported thru-hikers every year. Billville was replete with a tiki bar and crowded with hikers in Hawaiian shirts drinking beer or some mysterious jungle juice-like concoction. Erin and I felt like mini-celebrities with Miss Janet and Tricks introducing us to everyone as the first thru-hikers of the season, which wasn’t technically true, but we didn’t bother to correct them.
It wasn’t until later in the evening that I found the guys sitting around a campfire in a circle of other thru-hikers. Mike introduced me to his little brother who was hiking with him and Ben for a few days. I pulled up a camp chair next to Ben, handed him one of the beers I’d procured from the Billville gang and said, “well, if we’re going to be best friends, you’re going to have to tell me everything about yourself.”
He laughed at my demand and started talking. We talked for hours, first in the circle and then wandering around the field of hikers. He told me that before the trail he’d been living in Madison, Wisconsin managing a Whole Foods bakery; that he’d moved there on a whim with a friend from High School (they’d put a bunch of cities in a hat and Madison was the winner) because they weren’t ready to get “real jobs” and that after the trail he was hoping to go to grad school for creative writing.
I told him how I’d been living with Kevin in Florida right before the trail and in Chicago before that.
“Pilgrim told me you were moving to Chicago with your girlfriend? You’re going to love it.”
He laughed again and said, “Oh right. That was the plan.” It turned out that after he’d met Pilgrim and Sug, he’d planned to go back to Madison to visit his girlfriend for a week. He’d found a ride from the trail to Roanoke, Virginia and then, while on a payphone outside of a greyhound bus station, they’d broken up.
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “It was hard, but it’d been coming for a long time. The worst part was that it then took me three days to find a ride back to the trail.” Roanoke was over 60 miles from where he’d left the trail near Pearisburg.
“What did you do?”
“I found a seedy motel that had an all-you-can-eat buffet behind it. So, I ate there twice a day and watched TV.”
“Sounds like paradise,” I said.
“It was pretty great.”
I told him about my job with Best Buddies and how after the trail I was going to law school to hopefully study disability rights. His face lit up as he told me about his older brother Ross, who had severe disabilities, about how his mom was the head of Special Education for the state of Delaware and how his dad served on the board of a disability rights non-profit and taught college courses on disability law. Even his other brother and sister-in-law were Special Ed teachers.
“It’s like the family business,” he joked.
“But not for you? No pressure to go into education?” I asked.
“Nah, I don’t think so. My parents know I’ll figure something out,” he said with a self-assurance I don’t think I’d ever felt.
We decided to walk around and found ourselves outside of a drum circle. People all around us bobbed their heads to the bongos. Girls danced with their eyes closed, arms flailing; apparently finding an inner rhythm I couldn’t. I wanted to be open minded, but every part of me was fighting an eye roll.
“This is my first drum circle,” I tentatively told Ben. I looked at him but couldn’t tell from his profile whether he was into it or not. He seemed to be very laid back, and when we’d talked about music earlier, he’d told me that he liked jam bands (and had teased me when Phish was the only one I’d heard of).
“See, this is why I could never really be a hippie,” he said, gesturing to a guy with dreads to his waist, so completely lost in the experience of drumming but so totally off the beat. “I can’t ever not want to make fun of a drum circle and I think that is requirement number one.”
I let out an exaggerated sigh of relief. “Oh, thank god. I thought I was going to have to pretend to take this seriously if we were going to continue our friendship.”
Just then, Mike’s brother tapped Ben on the shoulder. Obviously drunk, he held up a backpack to show us. It was a prototype of a new lightweight pack that we’d seen earlier at one of the vendor’s booths.
“Look. I stole this,” he said in a loud whisper, looking at us expectantly.
Ben and I exchanged a look. Ben put an arm around his shoulder and gently said, “Dude, that’s not cool. You’ve got to take that back.”
Mike’s brother was deflated. He was 17 and thought everyone would laugh at the prank. Ben calmed him down, telling him we wouldn’t bust him with Mike, but made him promise he’d return the backpack.
“I can’t believe that just happened! What was he thinking?” I said after Mike’s brother had left, head down. “I think we deserve another beer!”
I grabbed Ben’s hand to lead him through the crowd as we made our way back to Billville. We found Erin hanging out with a guy named Chomp, who was engaged in a serious debate about Bill Bryson. Bill Bryson and the book about his experience on the Appalachian Trail “A Walk in the Woods” was a frequent topic of conversation among thru-hikers. I’d read and loved the book before I’d hiked, as had almost everyone we met. The argument against Bryson wasn’t that the book was not entertaining or well-written, but that Bryson held himself out as having hiked the whole trail, when in reality, he’d only completed less than half of the 2,100+ miles. The other side argued that Bryson never claimed to have finished a thru-hike and that by writing about the AT had introduced the trail and its culture to a much broader audience. All of the debaters were drunk (as was I at this point) and so the debate raged with no conclusion in sight.
Erin pulled me aside and gave a stern look. “You need to watch yourself.”
“What are you talking about?” I was taken aback.
“Ben. You’re drunk and you’re flirting with him. You were holding his hand! Does he know you have a boyfriend?”
“You’re drunk!” I retorted, a comeback only ever used by the drunk. “And yeah, of course he knows about Kevin.”
“Whatever,” Erin rolled her eyes. “Just be careful.”
“Whatever. You be careful.”
I walked back over to Ben. I was embarrassed and angry with Erin for calling me out. She was right, I had drunk too much and though I didn’t think I’d crossed the line with Ben, what if I had? I’d had such a good time hanging out with him all night and I hated feeling now that I’d done something wrong.
“I’ve got to go,” I said to Ben abruptly.
“Okaaayyy…” he said slowly. “Everything alright?”
The words tumbled out of my mouth, “Look, Erin thinks I’m leading you on or something and I told her you know I have a boyfriend and we were just hanging out and having fun and you should know that I… I’m a good girl!”
Ben smiled, apparently amused. “Yes, you are. And tell Erin it’s cool, I know.”
He hugged me lightly and said, “Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you tomorrow…. good girl.”