Split-Pea Soup for the Hiker's Soul

People are flawed. People write books. Therefore, books are flawed. - St. Thomas Aquinas, O' Hypocrita

Would-be hikers, remember that no book is going to save your life, unless it is a special book written by an amorphous, interstellar being. Or perhaps a book that doubles as a knife!

Or even ... one day, as you're walking home from a dinner party, a small metal-plated Bible inserted into your coat's front pocket may indeed save you from the silenced gun of a government assassin.

Barring those three scenarios, I understand that there's a lot of confusion in the world as to what books you should buy. First off, all books I have read leave out the first requirement of being a hiker: how to become unemployed. Secondly, what about would-be hikers who wish to gut a bear, then wear its hide to the Subterranean Costume Ball of Ursus Americanus?

I imagine that since no one is going to explain these things, I will have to at a later date. Frankly, there are so many questions left unanswered by the uninspired "traditional" books and websites, it's a wonder that anyone has successfully hiked the Appalachian Traile at all.

Here's a list of books to do without. More to be added as soon as I can stop coughing up all the poison I licked off of a frog in an attempt to communicate with the spirts.

Books Better-Off Burned:

The Thru-Hiker's Handbook - Bob "501" McCaw

In this rectangularish, forest green autobiography (updated every year so that you can keep track of his whereabouts), Bob "501" McCaw gives 180 pages of anecdotes, drawings and riddles related to his first thru-hike in 1978. One of the most hilarious accounts is the following from pg. 121:

... rock wall just before the highway marks boundary surveyed by 19-year-old George Washington, who, from this very spot, went on to help found the United States of America. What might you do hence?

The humor, of course, stems from what we all know to be true: Washington found the USA beneath a cherry tree. His sister Lucy had sent him to the market to find an avocado, but being an overachiever, he came back with a nation.

McCaw's subtle jokes aside, there is only one thing of value in The Thru-Hiker's Handbook: his systematic pinpointing of 63 "Power lines" along the Traile. This book is most useful to either a.) Frankenstein's Monsters or b.) low-flying, daredevil helicopter pilots.

The Appalachian Trail Thru-Hikers' Companion - An Army of Dwarves

This book wins the contest for creating the least-conveniently shaped guidebook. Measuring 13" diagonally and 3" across, TATTHC also wins the contest for being the most rectangular of all books, and is awarded - year after year - a shining, black obelisk for its joie de vivre.

From a hiker's perspective, this book is probably the worst-equipped to get you from one end of the Appalachian Traile to the other. The Army of Dwarves that compile the book are, after all, hateful of Overworldish humanoids, and will often lead unsuspecting hikers into death traps. These poor souls are then recounted in every new edition!

In 2008, there were 21 mentions of death by lightning, drunken brawls or hypothermic, ghostly spirits. TATTHC, due to several thousand FCC violations, will be adding the adjectives "Satanic" and "blood-drenched" before "Companion" in the '09 edition.

And if I may be so abrupt, this blog is now being filed under the to be continued ... section of Appalachian Redux. More book reviews coming as my quest for truth proceeds!

Legends of the Traile: Myron Avery

A Madman, an Axe, and 2,000 miles of beautiful wilderness that needed to be destroyed

Follow the Appalachian Trail across Maine. It cannot be followed on horse or awheel. Remote for detachment, narrow for chosen company, winding for leisure, lonely for contemplation, it beckons not merely north and south but upward to the body, mind and soul of man. - Myron Avery, In the Maine Woods

When running from the authorities with a bloody axe, I often find myself hiding on the Traile. It doesn't work out very well if you can find yourself whilst hiding, see? Luckily, in the Appalachian Mounts, there are plenty of opportunities for the body, mind, soul and body-mind to become completely hypothermic, or quite confused really. Aha! A nice lake in which to swim. - Myron Avery, unpublished letter found on his person, 1958

Myron Haliburton Avery, the man responsible for clear-cutting all 2,000 miles of the forest (that wanderers today trample upon with heavy boots and walking sticks maiming enumerous molds and grasses), was a peculiar boy.

Born on October 31, 1899 to two Russian whalers from Vladivostok who drifted ashore in Maine after being shipwrecked, it was sometimes rumored that his mother - a startling beautiful woman - was stolen away and impregnated at sea by none other than Poseidon. As the story goes, she waited until he was asleep, slipped from out of her giant oyster shell and escaped his undersea kingdom on the back of a mighty seahorse!

The rumor, though probably true, could never be substantiated. She died in childbirth and neither of Avery's two surrogate fathers wanted to talk about it, seeing as Yusuf had been blinded and deafened in the great tsunami of 1870 and the other father, Fillyp, stole a horse and rode off into the wilderness as soon as he was conscious. The prime difficulty, however, was that no one spoke Russian in those days - not even the Russians.

Since no one could understand him, the young, multi-fathered, nameless child spent most of his days burning fenceposts or being taught survival skills by local chickens.

Often found pecking at their seeds, a local farmer cursed him and ran after him with a belt. As he chased the feral child off into the woods, belt in the air, the farmer yelled out loudly enough for the village to hear: "Let God know ye as a 'Myron Avery'!" This name was responsible for everything that followed, you see, as we can use the 1903 edition of Yon Mainer Dictionayree to see that Myron means "sea creature" and Avery means "misshapen" or "preposterous" in its Ancient Summerian incarnation.

Thusly, the preposterous sea-creature went on to live a life of crude prankery - garnering much hatred from all of the people in the village - and it wouldn't be until he met a drunken, old Native in the Woods (Benton MacKaye), that Avery was able to find his one true passion: chopping things, preferably into halves.As the old saying went, "Hear nary chopping? Look around quick, 'cause a tree is dropping." Needless to say, Avery's proclivity to chop first, ask questions later, garnered him a local status of sorts, and when he was but 14-years-old, he was sought out and hired by none other than Captain Archibald Fritz XIV, the wealthiest man in Maine at the time, or perhaps the entire Atlantic Northeast. Fritz can be seen in the photograph to the right, standing with the much younger Avery. The photo was taken mere days before his death*, and fortunately for Avery, he happened to be the one who murdered him. He then took over all 19 of his paper companies and amassed a small fortune, which then was piddled away on booze and an axe collection that to this day is the largest collection of sharp objects in the world. Lastly, merely as a formality, Avery was chased out of town by a new sheriff, and was forced to cut his way through 14 states of wilderness before getting lost in Florida and freezing to death.

This was the beginning of the Appalachian Traile. To be fleshed out sooner or later!

MacKaye, who promised Avery eternal life, amassed a much larger fortune, but that's a different story altogether ...


* Avery was rumored to have enslaved and trained an army of 50 crabs with the assistance of his Native friend, MacKaye, and while no one witnessed the crabs firsthand on the night of the murder, a crushed crab was found beneath the corpse of Fritz. His body had been riddled with pinches. The pinches were, in fact, ruled to be the cause of death. The axe-hole was thrown out, because according to old records, not a single axe could be found for questioning.

Introduction to Unreality ... also known as 'Fiction'

I am about to lie to you.

The Appalachian Trail is 2,314 miles long, and it stretches through 15 states along the Eastern coast of the United States from Northern Florida to Maine.

Well, how was it? Did you cringe at the falsity of it all?! If you did, good job. The truth is that very few people outside a mystical group of Appalachian Trail hikers and their families, or perhaps Professors Tina Hanlon and R. Rex Stephenson, would know what's wrong with the above sentence.

The below sentence is the absolute truth:

The Appalachian Trail is 2,176 miles long, and stretches through 14 states from Northern Georgia to Maine.

The problem with that statement is that it will only be the truth for a few years. Like any unwieldy, volunteer-driven entity, the Appalachian Trail is constantly getting out of hand due to reroutes and new states trying to get in on the cashflow it provides for small towns.

It is because of this complete uncertainty that I have decided to write a book - a book that is 90% unreal. Unreality, you see, allows a great many more possibilities for a book on the Appalachian Trail because for one, it won't become obsolete in two years, and quite frankly, I don't want to bore you to death. There are already 3,749 books* out there meant to kill your inner child, steal your soul, and decapitate the escape mechanism within each and every one of us. These books attempt to convey how wonderful Appalachian Trail hikers felt as they were eating blocks of ramen, or walking through a canopied rhododendron thicket for four hours only to realize that they'd walked the wrong way. Hikers like to talk about tents a lot and perhaps, if you're lucky, how they contracted genital herpes from a lonely squirrel.

Even this year, someone is going to write a book with dreams of cashing in, and they're going to fail.

I'm not saying these authors-to-be aren't great at lots of things - hiking for instance, but hikers aren't writers. Let's examine the differences.

Hikers are good at walking. Writers are good at watching people walk, then talking about them behind their backs: "Is this guy the new Jesus?" Hikers can start fires with white birch bark and lots of wheezing. Writers, on the other hand, start fire with gasoline at midnight and then try to collect the insurance money. Hikers slay bears with pointed sticks. Writers slay bears with water cannons, laser guns, electrified cattle prods, karate chops to the abdomen, or even a magic missile.

Whose book would you rather read?

I am writing this previously unknown and unrequested version of The Appalachian Trail for you. It promises to be a completely ridiculous voyage, one in which I falsify and fantasize about what the Appalachian Trail should have been, and how it should have been created. I will falsify the historical importance of nearly every person or place associated with the Trail ... sometimes merely stretching the truth, other times ripping the very fabric of space in half.

The best part about Unreality, you see, is that there are no boundaries (did you know that Myron Avery not only built the AT, but the he was also born to shipwrecked Russian whalers and could speak with crabs?). 3,749 books on Amazon.com wouldn't lie. I, on the other hand, promise to lie so much and so perniciously, that together (you, me, and the lies) we may discover the truth - cowering in its corner, urinating on itself, hand stuffed into a bag of lime Tostitos.

See you in 2,314 miles,
Shawn Hudson


* Actual number of books may vary; there's a good chance some delusional windbag is self-publishing his divine manual on hiking that includes no less than 30 pages dedicated to how awesome he is right now, at this very instant.