[at-l] 30 years ago today.....

[Tom McGinnis]

--- On Tue, 7/14/09, Felix J <AThiker at smithville.net> wrote:
> Tom McGinnis wrote:
> >  And later, they laughed loudly when one last
> bolt of lightning flashed brightly through the door of the
> outhouse, and I yelled "&$)#&@! I'm gonna get it
> right here on the crapper!"
> > Yep. Thirty years ago today.
> >   
> So, did you live? 

### I did. Wandered into the hostel the next evening (took me all day to get there), and went with a fellow Connecticut hiker named Steve (whose last name I'll remember in a while, but he wore blue jeans and a cotton oxford button-down for the entire AT) down the hill to The Bottom Of The Fox pub (the building has been a burned out restaurant shell for years), where I had some pizza finally, and wayyyy too much beer. We steered ourselves back up the hill after dark, which was wayyyy after hiker Midnight. 

### The next day, I called home. I had written from Duncannon to the college I was scheduled to arrive at on September 1st, and asked when would be the latest possible date to start classes. I explained that I had been delayed on the trail down south, but was moving well now, and really was devoted to finishing. At Delaware Water Gap, I got the news that the last day to drop/add classes was September 18th -- so if I finished on September 11th, that would leave me with 2 days to bus out to Wisconsin, and allowing 2 days to hitchhike home from Katahdin, I could be home for nearly two days. That ADDED eleven days to my Katahdin window -- 900 miles in 9 weeks -- I could do it. I could even skip the (55+85) 140 miles of Connecticut and Massachusetts if I had to, having hiked the distance the prior year, and Connecticut multiple times. (As it turns out, I did hike Connecticut again -- I felt I had to -- and it was so worth it.) I made sped home, arriving two
 weeks later on July 28th, a mere 4 weeks behind my Springer Mtn schedule.

### So, having made the decision to (in the phrase of the day) "Go for it!" I ordered a new parka shell, to be sent to Connecticut, thus ending my lack of rain gear stemming from that thieving rat Harold-Thomas-Prentzel-III.-from-New Jersey stealing my prior shell from the Waynesboro Fire Department locker just before Shenandoah. I wore that shell for what seemed like two weeks straight in rainy nastiness from North Adams, Mass through Vermont and into New Hampshire, falling in love with Gore-Tex and pit zips. What a great garment. (The prior one, also "GoreTex", simply did NOT work -- thank goodness it was stolen.)

Okay, so, the details are not nearly so interesting. Oh, and it was Steve Shurter (spelling?), from southwest Connecticut -- maybe Greenwich? Stamford? Good man. Spooky resemblance to Buddy Holly when I took a shot of him crossing the I80 bridge over the river as we exited town.

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