"Welcome to the Appalachian Trail roller coaster. Thirteen and a half miles of breathtaking ups and knee pounding downs. So buckle up, and get ready for the most terrible ride of your lives." I could hear the cheery lady announcer say in my head. It was every bit as bad as the lady claimed. "You walk up a steep hill for 500 feet, step over a rock, then stumble downhill for 500 feet, and then you do that over and over and over again," another hiker described. That pretty much sums it up. My feet grew heavy and I gasped for breath on every summit.
Arrow, you are going to cross 1,000 miles today. I told myself as I approached the marker. Can it be? 1,000 miles. Should I be crying? That was a pretty big accomplishment. My eyes remained dry, for my mind couldn't grasp what my body had done.
My feet were in pain. I had no energy. My electrolytes were probably really imbalanced. I hadn't eaten for a while and I was starving. I should probably stop to eat. But if I stopped I would probably collapse, and I didn't want to stop, because pizza, soda, and ice cream were waiting for me just four miles away. It was sheer will that kept me going. Mind over body. The next hills on the roller coaster were the worst. I had left Firefly behind at the last shelter. She wasn't crazy enough to push a 28 mile day. But it was worth it. As I limped into Bears Den Hostel and dropped my pack I felt such a sense of accomplished fatigue. I had earned it.
For years I had looked at the pictures of hikers standing on the porch of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC), wondering what it would be like to be there, at the psychological halfway point. Although still about 71 miles from the real halfway point, the ATC is a good place to celebrate. Since the trail changes and grows in length every year, I imagine it once really was the halfway point. This is also a point where journeys end or begin. Some people decide they have hiked halfway and that is good enough, that they have gotten a healthy taste of trail life and feel accomplished, so it's time to head home. Some begin their journey there, doing a 'flip flop' hike, starting from the middle and going out either direction, returning, and going the other way. I saw one such man begin his journey, eagerness, excitement, and perhaps a little nervousness in his eyes.
The ATC takes pictures of all the hikers that come through for the records, putting them in an album for others to track when friends passed through. Now I was there, posing for my picture.
I had thought about what pose I would do for a thousand miles, and imagined an epic victorious look on my face as I struck a confident heroic pose. But instead I stood lamely and just smiled. Apparently the guy could tell I wasn't pleased with my picture because he offered to take it again, "doing a handstand or something." That I could do.
Harpers Ferry is the town associated with the ATC, a neat historical place where John Brown raided the US armory. All the buildings were squished together on the hillsides, restaurants and shops for the tourists crowded the streets. We checked into a bed and breakfast (that apparently was on Hotel Hell) and got some celebratory lunch.
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