In hindsight the troubles that were to befall me throughout the month of June had, like most little troubles that grow into big troubles, inauspicious beginnings.
I crossed into Massachusetts on June 1st. It was my fifth border crossing and marked nearly 800 miles of steadfast progress. The day should have been one for celebration.
Entering a new state gives every thru-hiker a lift, whether they admit it or not. It’s another notch on the belt and the only really definitive evidence of movement when you hike at 2 MPH through a landscape that changes at the same somehow imperceptible pace of the hour hand on an analog clock.
Up till now I’d been just as thrilled as every other hiker to walk out of one state and into another. But crossing into Mass was anticlimactic. I was tired and felt a sort of numb apathy.
This was the first sign of trouble.
That night I slept in a field by a monument that honored Daniel Shays and the rebellion he led against unfair taxes levied by the federal government in the mid 1800’s. He hadn’t been successful. He and all his men were killed. They were probably buried here too, I remember thinking. Sleeping in a graveyard is never a good idea. There are all kinds of nightmarish things you’ve got to watch out for, not least of which are ghosts out to curse you for sleeping on their bones.
Two days later I would be 30 miles further into the little state and not entirely certain how I got there. The skin on my face felt like pretty soon it might just decide to sag off my skull and basic motor skills were just about all I could muster. I was becoming a hiker zombie.
The previous nights had been long, tossing and turning affairs, that left me edgy and irritable when the sun rose. So when I arrived in Cheshire on the 4th and staggered up to the front door of St. Mary’s Church and Hostel I hoped this night would be better.
It wasn’t.
We were promptly directed to a cafeteria-like antechamber with cold tile floors and long empty tables. “We don’t heat the place during the week to cut the bill,” the janitor informed us. I didn’t know whether to feel like a fish on ice or a corpse in a moratorium as I splayed out on the floor. A heavy rain hammered at the windows all night.
June 5th I climbed Mt. Greylock in 15-step intervals, a minute’s rest between each. Try as I might I just couldn’t move any faster. It was irritating having spent 80 odd days on trail only to passed by parents with kids on their shoulders. I choked down my pride and chalked the whole thing up to fatigue. Must just need more rest.
Later that day I sat under a tree in the parking lot of a Super Stop and Shop a quarter mile off trail with a newspaper, a chocolate milk, and a dozen donuts. Cars came and left in an unbroken current while I sat there like a rock in the middle of the stream, or figure of a person made out of stone, or Gautama Buddha under his tree. During that time I was keenly aware of how fast the world around me was moving, full of an undeniable frenetic energy, and how lethargic and slow my movements were in comparison. I felt drained. Even after sitting for the better part of two hours. Just lacing up my boots wore me out.
But you don’t finish a 2,000 mile hike without developing a tolerance for pain and a certain stubbornness of will. The second sign of trouble had reared its ugly head – and I made a point of ignoring it.
I would be out of breath and drenched in sweat before I made the two easy miles to camp that night.
The fatigue was worse when I crossed into Vermont. Didn’t even bother to commemorate the moment with a picture. Instead I kept walking. Exhaustion tightened my vision, contracting my peripherals, until all that was left were my feet. They almost looked disembodied and it was hard to believe that I was the one moving them, synapses sparking muscles into motion like pistons in a V-8 engine. Scratch that. Think V-4 in a junkyard beater and you get a better picture of the shape I was in.
All told I was still moving but each step took more out of me than the last. My transmission was gummed up. I was spitting black fumes. But I thought all I needed was some “real” rest.
We were almost to a family friend’s Vermont cabin, which they’d kindly given Cosmo and I permission to use, so on the 9th I found myself pushing 21 miles through a twelve hour deluge in holey boots, a wet t-shirt, and a tattered rain jacket.
At lunch a hiker friend pointed at my blue lips and told me all about hypothermia like a mother would. The only escape was back out into the rain. So the zombie hiker with sunken eyes and blue lips staggered back out into the cold.
At the end of the day Cosmo and I dropped $70 for a five mile taxi ride with a grumpy old man who must have taken a masochistic pleasure in hydroplaning through puddles. His van was in dire need of a visit to Goodyear. My boots had more tread than his tires, and I’d walked a long way. A Hawaiian hula girl bobble head jerked erratically on the dash.
But we made the cabin. And it was less a cabin than a house. And it was incredible. And there were three showers, a real stove, cable tv, and a hot tub on the porch outside. And my mother managed to spoil us from a thousand mikes away with a dozen bags of groceries delivered to the front door by some under-the-radar local service. And the fantasy that got me through the day, to keep putting right foot in front of left, came through in the end as a reality which was something of a miracle really because it’s rare for reality to live up to your expectations, and rarer still for it to exceed them.
But despite it all this one fact remained: I was pretty goddamned tired.
And I was still tired even after I slept 10 hours in a warm bed and spent an entire day on a couch watching tv.
And there was a suspicion growing even then in the back of my mind that things were about to get a whole lot worse.

Remembering the dark age of July — Nomad