After leaving Rangely, the next week was to be characterized by eleven hour hiking days (which we were quickly growing used to) and the blossoming eccentricities of my crew members (which heretofore had been repressed, dormant, but seeing as we knew each other now…all cards on the table). 
Everybody seems to go a little stir-crazy after too much time in the woods, but to the trained eye it’s just a slow tumble out of madness and into sanity. That sense of societally imposed anxiety gradually slips away because even big brother can’t put a camera on every tree. There’s no 6th sense premonition (“paranoia”to the realist) that somebody somewhere is watching you from a one-sided window. You can grin maniacally at just being alive without worrying about spooking Joe in the next booth over whose rug business just fell through and is trying, failing to alleviate his growing depression with a hard mug of decaf and at present is ready, eager even to leap onto a pedestal and rhetorically dissemble the no-doubt structurally unsound worldview of any unsuspecting stranger that seems to have positive outlook on life (breathe). And because being perfect isn’t cool these days, and impossible besides all that, everybody lives in a house of glass. That’s me and you. So we go on polishing our windows while Joe is over there fuming and looking all around for a big damn rock that he’s gonna use to bring the place down on our heads and expose our insecurities.
And Joe could be anybody. And anybody could be Joe. At some point in my life I’m sure that I had a bad day and was angry enough to drag someone down too, just so I wouldn’t be miserable alone. I like to think I wouldn’t but at some point you have to look at yourself in the mirror and up to your vanity. The fact remains that we’re all intertwined and all it takes is one glum person to trip you up and turn your good day bad. Seems more and more people are glum these days.
However being in the woods sometimes with a small group, sometimes alone, takes the edge off things better than a cup of black ever could.

Kennebec River Crrossing

It also helps when you’re with good people who’ll walk with you and laugh at themselves just as quick as they do at anyone else.
And when we do come back in touch with the world it’s in the warmly lit confines of small town diners like The White Wolf Inn and Cafe in Stratton, Maine. Greasy haired vagabonds in for an hour to drink cheap beer and order “the biggest burger you got” all while adding to the place’s monthly electrical bill by surreptitiously charging every electrical item they’ve got.
After The Wolf that same night, July 8th, I haul out a pound of cherries to celebrate most of our group’s 2,000 mile mark. The next day we finish the Bigelows, the last mountain range before Katahdin. Fittingly, someone had left a cartridge of boxed wine at the shelter so for the second night running we celebrate. This time we toast to making it over the last real hills until our final summit.

Three days later we make it to Shaw’s hostel in Monson. It’s July 12th.
Tomorrow we’ll begin a stretch of trail that I’ve been looking forward to since day one. A length of trail that is rumored to be wild in every sense of the world and that cuts through the heart of Maine. No resupplies. No roads. The name says it all. Tomorrow we begin the 100 Mile Wilderness.
The Fellowship of the Ring was on tv at Shaw’s that last night and I watch until long after everyone’s gone to sleep. Tolkein’s words hang in the air…”Its a dangerous business, stepping out your door. And if you don’t keep your feet who knows where you might be swept off to?”
Quite ready for another adventure — Nomad