The trail crossed another highway, which seemed like a good place to stop and eat something. A spring ran down the mountain into a creek alongside the road, so we filled up our Nalgenes before heading on. The pump Jill bought turned out to be a great purchase. It filters a lot more than the iodine tablets can kill, so we could pump water out of basically anywhere and it was safe to drink.
I mentioned before how our clothes were perpetually damp? They were. It was gross. I had some synthetic fiber shorts, so my pants were at least mostly dry most of the time. But I learned the hard way that cotton sucks when it's damp, and it doesn't dry easily. When you're walking through a forest, in pretty consistent shade, with a lot of moisture in the air and a sweaty pack on your back, things just stay wet. When we got to the road though, I realized it was the only sustained, dry sun we'd had in a while, so I took my wet clothes and spread them out to dry for 20 minutes. And...they actually mostly dried. Amazing.
This was the first day that I felt pretty good for almost the whole day, wasn't ready to drop dead by the end, and actually didn't mind getting up and moving again after a break. It was a nice change from the previous days, and I hoped the trend would continue.
I failed to take photos of our last two shelters, but we stayed this night at Little Laurel shelter. There were two kids from Clemson who stayed in tents on the hill behind the shelter, and we never got their names, although they were nice enough. We shared the shelter with a woman named Leigh, a section hiker who had been hiking the trail piece by piece since 1991. She was probably pushing 60, wasn't any bigger than I am, and looked wirey. She worked for the Department of Agriculture doing plant inspections and, but told us that every year she tries to get out to do another section."People tell me I should go ahead and do Katahdin before I get too old," she told us. "But I'm funny that way, I'm just gonna go piece by piece in order, and if I don't get to Katahdin, I don't get there." I kind of want to be like her when I get old. She had hurt her knee climbing some rocks on her hike that day (she was coming from the way we were about to be going) and she was worried she wouldn't get to finish her hike, or that she might have to go to a doctor. We gave her an ace bandage and I showed her how to wrap her knee before we all went to bed.
The three of us got in our bags in the shelter before it was dark out, and the two Clemson kids retired to their tents. We lay there for a little while, exchanging a few words here and there but mostly just starting to slowly doze off. It was almost dark out, but we weren't quite asleep, when the guy who had been hiking since Key West rolled into camp. He introduced himself as Rich and asked if we minded if he started a fire. Nobody objected, and Jill and Leigh lay back down to go to sleep. I felt like if he'd just shown up someone should be sociable, so I got out of my sleeping bag and went over to help with the fire.
The fire was the saddest fire ever. The wood was all soaking wet, so we spent about two hours feeding kindling in between wet logs, getting excited for a few minutes of actual flame, then enjoying the warmth from the coals for a little before shoving more kindling in. It got dark shortly after starting the fire, and we started hearing sounds from the bear cables, like something was messing with them. Clanging and squeaking. At first we couldn’t see anything with flashlights, and I was, naturally, terrified it was a bear. Finally, Rich got up to go see what was going on, and called back that it was chipmunks on the food bags. On MY foodbag, specifically. He chucked rocks at them, and hit a couple, but they seemed to jump or fall off the bag and disappear. Finally I got up to come see for myself. And I saw one of the little bastards FLY from the food bag to a tree that was wayyy too far away for a regular chipmunk or squirrel to jump. My food bag was being attacked by FLYING SQUIRRELS which are, I later learned, native to the mountains of NC and TN. Rich pegged a couple more of them with rocks, and we watched them glide off the cable to neighboring trees. Despite getting nailed with rocks, the damn things kept climbing back up the cables, so we finally went back to watch the fire die and let the flying squirrels do what they wanted. I was pissed in the morning when one of my trail mix bags was eaten into, but if it had to be eaten by something, a flying squirrel makes a much better story than a chipmunk. And it really was pretty wild to watch these things fly through the trees in the dark.
It was also kind of incredible just to sit in the forest in the pitch black (the tiny glowing embers of the fire didn’t amount to much light). Other nights I'd always been in my sleeping bag in the shelter before it got dark and this was the first time I’d been in the forest in the pitch black. And it was pitch black, except for the sky, which was overcast and glowing a dark blue…just enough contrast that you could see the contours of the tree tops when you looked up. It's humbling to realize that, apart from all the civilized stuff we’ve created, you’re left pretty vulnerable and very small. Sitting by the fire, with rocks to throw at animals, I wasn't afraid of anything coming to get us. But if I’d walked in any direction for more than a few minutes, I'd have been completely alone in complete darkness. (I can see now why Prometheus was such a big deal.) The night was beautiful though - the first one that it hadn’t rained, and just chilly enough that the fire felt good. The bastard flying squirrels kept disturbing the silence by shaking up the bear cables, but apart from that it was incredibly quiet, and incredibly dark, and I felt incredibly peaceful.
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