Special 4th of July guest post!

Here's a little treat for the faithful beefloggers. This is an excerpt from my cousin's upcoming book entitltled "Dead Men Hike No Trails", the first person account of his Appalachian Trial thru-hike of last year. This excerpt covers our adventures during the week of the 4th of July last year and is written in his familiar gonzo with a grain of salt style. I just recently read this for the first time myself and it put a smile on my face for sure! Enjoy.

The following excerpt is reprinted with permission and all copyrights are held by RS McKinney, 2005.

On a journey full of seemingly endless favors and kindness and hospitality and graces and trail magic and angels, this one was truly unique. I'd been helped out in time of need by many a trail angel, but real angel Mark beat all.

Thank you Mark Noel, wherever you are.


Then ding! With the jingle and the brief jostle of an elevator ride, I was in New Hampshire. What name would the Namers of All-Things-AT give to flying a section of trail, skipping ahead, as it were, via Flugzeug? (I've always loved the German word for airplane. Oh, and Hubschrouber, that's another good one, for helicopter.) The sky is blue, but blue blaze is already taken. Perhaps jet blaze! Yeah, I like that. Ding! I jet blazed to New Hampshire.

The intention had been that I would, by early July, have hiked sufficiently close to New Hampshire that my cousin could just zip down and pluck me off the trail in Connecticut or so. But I had only made it to very southern Pennsylvania, so fly I did, my father most generously throwing-down for the plane ticket. Most of the week or so spent there is a happy blur, seen only in retrospect as I was way too busy having fun and truly vacationing from the trail to write a word the entire time. Independence Day was, like every other weekend day or holiday in New England that summer, damp. It rained, but did Cousin Justin let the rain spoil his vision of a wild weekend of pool party and margarita debauchery? Heck no.

As I recall, we were somewhere around Tilton on the edge of.. well, Tilton in central New Hampshire's lakes region when the drugs began to take hold. I remember asking Justin just what was IN the MSR hydration bladder he'd gone to an outfitter and bought just to make hiker-me feel "at home while drinking." He had suddenly taken on an unearthly, airplane-toilet chemical blue glow. I flipped down the passenger side mirror to get a look at his girlfriend Jess and sure enough, same glow. When my cousin turned to respond to me, his eyes had gone alien black, and he grinned a wide grin with multilayered, sharklike teeth. Oh, Jeezus, I remember thinking. This is going to be one helluva ride. And so it was.

Justin had spent a small fortune on fireworks; his mother (my aunt) Mary a small fortune on booze. Apparently, I'd specially requested top shelf tequila, fresh lemons and limes and Grand Mariner instead of standard triple sec. Justin squeezed lemons and I whipped up some 5-star margaritas, and with drinks in one hand and roman candles in the other, Justin, Jess, Mary, her husband Chris, myself and Justin's amigo Dennis all ran screaming around their farm in the dark blasting one another with fireballs. Mind you, this came directly on the heels of a long soak in the redwood hot tub in the barn and was performed in the drizzling rain, so there was no danger of immolation involved.

Everyone wore eye protection. Those without prescription glasses wore welding goggles or welding hats with protective face shields scrounged from Chris' shop. Afterwards, and before a scrumptious prime rib on the grill dinner prepared by Mary, we took turns running through the rows while those in the driveway unloaded several gross of bottle rockets into the cornfield. It was good clean American fun, and everyone treated themselves to a double dose of Prozac to celebrate our freedom to wage war on anyone we want all around the Globe. Gosh, it felt good to be an American that night.

We later drove over to Justin's friend Shawn's house on the lake and got completely twisted. All I remember through the haze of Jack Daniels is standing at the helm of Shawn's parent's speedboat, ripping across Lake Winnipesauke at Mach 5 and Justin screaming at me over the wind, something about larceny and "We're dead!" upon which he returned to his fit of giggles, nailed as he was to the back of the boat by the tremendous G-forces. "I'm not dead!" I remember thinking. "I'm more alive than ever." I had no idea what he was talking about.

I remember we did a lot of tooling around in my aunt Mary's new bumble bee yellow and black Jeep. Mary's the greatest, truly the antithesis of all my maternal aunts, although, to the credit of the latter, I never spent a lot of time with mom's much older sisters. But I'm pretty sure that's a good thing. Mary reads like a fiend and is no doubt responsible for Justin being the extremely literate news aficionado that he is. And perhaps because she reads, she more than anyone in my family appreciates what I do and how hard I've struggled to keep at it when all the world wanted me to be a Fuller Brush salesman or something.

Anyway, aunt Mary and cousin Justin delivered the goods. All inheritors of depressive genes, we share a love of self-medication via "ye ole cocktail." We put a good dent in the New Hampshire state liquor store that week, let me tell ya. And every morning, Mary whipped up a batch of her famous bloody namesake to kill the irksome ache of last night and lay the groundwork for another day of liquid summer fun. Although Justin's lovely redheaded, sharp-witted and barely-out-of-her-teens girlfriend Jess never hooked me up with one of her hottie young friends as I begged her do, we did manage to squeeze a lot of fun into that Fourth of July week including waterskiing, wave-hopping with tear-ass jet skis, pole-vaulting over livestock, rope-swinging and jumping off the train trestle into the river, and of course 18-holes of golf with New Hampshire native Adam Sandler, in town to visit his folks.

Jenna Whatsherface from the first episode of Survivor, she's from Justin's hometown of Franklin. She must have been home to visit her parents, too, because we ran into her at this seafood joint on the lake with a dock and boat fueling area out back where my Grandpa used to take me to fuel up the boat. Justin's brother's best friend's cousin's sister went to high school with Jenna Survivor, and I was apparently sufficiently intoxicated that night to draw a six-degrees of separation connection out of all that, bringing it down to one degree as I sidled up next to her at the bar.

I don't remember saying anything to her, kind of like you don't remember the moments leading up to a major car crash you were in. But according to Jess, who smelled trouble and followed me chaperone-like from our booth to the bar, I laid that line on her from the comedy film "Joe Dirt," you know the one with the girl at the fair: "If I told ya you had a nice body, would you hold it against me?" It's that whole useless celebrity thing I was talking about, I guess. I didn't really want her. I guess I just wanted to piss her off. Apparently, I succeeded. The next morning aunt Mary served up not only a bloody but an ice pack for my right eye. That Jenna Whatsherface apparently has a mean left hook.

Just so you don't think my family and I are a bunch of complete miscreants, we did do something altruistic and selfless that week. We did trail magic! That's right. You see, I wasn't the only AT thruhiker playing hooky from the trail that week. Party Girl was in Contooquack or Loonville or whatever the name of that town she's from in New Hampshire. Big Stick was in the Granite State, too, somewhere on Lake Winnipesauke with his family. We weren't able to contact Stick in time, so he missed out. But Party Girl, Jess, Justin and I headed up to where the AT crosses some isolated highway just south of the White Mountains with a cooler loaded with hot dogs, sodas and beer. Oh, and a big jug of whatever insane cocktail had turned my cousin into the Great Black-Eyed Alien Shark back on the ride home from the airport. This was for late-evening consumption, after we'd established camp and spent the day feeding hikers, just in case things got boring.

Well, it was boring all right. Right from the get-go. Why? Because we didn't have one damn thruhiker customer in the two nights spent out there. All I can figure: location, location, location! We were just too far north for the AT in early July, and no one, not even speedy Elly, had yet made it that far north. Sure, we saw hikers and fed or watered a few. But these were all just day or weekend hikers. And I'm sorry, but after a thousand miles, I was already a hiker snob. Day hikers just weren't up to snuff. I gave them sodas but sat on the beer cooler with zipped lips until and only after a hiker had proven their salt. If they were cool, we gave 'em the works. If they were dorks, they went hungry. We were savage and cruel by the afternoon of our second day. I had wanted to show Justin and Jess REAL thruhikers, and I was sorely disappointed and took out my disgust on every ill-equipped day-hiking dork.

No, wait. I remember what it was that really chapped my ass and had me bad-mouthing hikers just out of earshot. It was that whole "don't talk to strangers" fear thing adults instill in their children. Okay. There are monsters out there, and sometimes children get eaten. This is horrid, but it is nothing new. Look at poor toaster muffins Hansel & Gretel from centuries old folklore. But after all the beauty and kindness and trail magic of the south, I'd forgotten to fear strangers in the forest. Everyone in the south was an angel. So I was unprepared to be treated like a potential monster by fearful parents out hiking with their kids. But that's exactly how we were treated.

Think what you want, but it had nothing to do with us. The beer we had for beer-thirsty thruhikers was, as I said, hidden from view. So then was the beer we consumed, poured from cans into our Nalgene bottles or plastic cups. Both Party Girl and Jess are extremely attractive women, and Justin and myself are at the very least non-threatening in appearance. But the fear-addled parental units had never seen trail magic and apparently had no idea why we were sitting there trailside handing out sodas and cooking hot dogs. The children, thirsty from a long hike, would dive for our sodas, but the Units would intervene and tell the children "No, you're NOT thirsty. You can wait until we reach the car."

Yeah. That was it. That was what turned me mean by day's end. I'm disgusted by war. I'm disgusted by television. I'm disgusted that every other show on TV is about cops and lawyers busting people. But what really disgusts me, what I'll go so far as to say I hate, is fear.

Funny. All these years I've been repeating Hunter Thompson's famous phrase "fear & loathing," taking it at face value and enjoying its linguistic weight in describing some general state of darkness surrounding all good and honest pursuits. But you are what you eat, as they say. And the heart listens; the cells listen. And the fear has undercut everything in my life; and the loathing, denied expression in the form of healthy anger, has no doubt also been my downfall.

But philosophical bullshit aside, I would rephrase Thompson and call what I felt there in the woods trying to be an angel but being regarded as a threat, "loathing of fear." And it pissed me off something royal.

So at day's end, we gave up and retreated to our camp not far from the trail and drank the devil's punch. When in Rome, you know the rest. I wasn't the only one who felt smudged by the largely-ill reception of our good deed. And so we drank. And out came the politics: abortion, capital punishment, you name it. I learned that night that Party Girl, like Jester, was a misnomer of a trail name. Party Girl was actually a fairly serious, sometimes-contemplative, sometimes-hot-headed woman with stone-set conservative values. If she was the life of the party that night, it was only because her every political stance was so absolutely 180 degrees from those held by my cousin, and to a lesser degree (because I'm about as fond of polarized political parlance as I am of TV), me.

The party, then, was largely a joust between P.G. (as she would later call herself, trying, like me, to shake her given trail name) and Justin, with occasional shouts, screeches, guffaws and camel-spitting by Jess and myself. I would say it was a drunken joust, and often enough jocular, but there were a few explosive moments, and I recall P.G. claiming she was sober. Anyway, as far as I recall (and this was probably intentional on my part) the debate and all else that night degraded into madness as I took to speaking, nay, shouting in tongues and dancing around and occasionally into the fire like an insane native whose spirit animal is the moth. In the morning, there was rain. A deluge, really. We packed out and went our separate ways.

Then it was off to Hampton on Friday for an all-family barbecue at Dad's house by the sea. Love my Dad though I do, I wasn't looking forward to a weekend in his wife's house (that's what he calls it). With her daughters grown and moved away and my sister and I gone 23 years ago after our parent's divorce settled, the house is like a little museum of New England-flavored.. whatever. Everything is very neat and clean, and one hesitates to besmirch with one's presence. Ever since I arrived fresh off a cross-country train trip, and, upon being shown my room by my father's wife, was told I stank, well, I just feel dirty when I'm there. And unwelcome. The refrigerator in my step-mother's house, like most refrigerators in America, has pictures all over it. But there's something decidedly different about her fridge. One, all the pictures are arranged in a neat square, dead center of the fridge door; and two, every member of our extended families all the way out to distant cousins is represented except one. Can you guess who?

As a joke, Mary and Justin bought the prodigal son a milk advert knockoff t-shirt, black with white lettering that said, "Got Jesus?" Oh, how I wanted to wear it. But going to my stepmother's house meant sobering up. Not out of etiquette, but angst. There's nothing worse than being emotionally hungover in a house where the ill-repute is you. With the copious cocktails of the past week, so went my nerve. Thus, no shirt. I mean, I didn't wear it in front of them anyway. Besides, it would have been a conversation starter. And the last thing I wanted to talk about after 1000-miles of walking off the death of a not-likely-religious buddy who blasted his way into Heaven with a double-barrel shotgun, was Jesus.

Not long into the barbecue, Mary and Justin and Jess drove off in Mary's bumble-bee Jeep and left me. The sting was almost unbearable. A drive to the beach and some time spent with my lovely step-sister helped a lot. When my step-mother made a shockingly uncharacteristic laundry blunder and shrunk my favorite wool sweater, she sent my Dad and me shopping for a replacement. That done, Dad took me to his old watering hole, a fish and cocktail joint off some ocean tributary in Portsmouth. I watched the sun set over the water and all the pretty boats at dock and Dad had a few drinks with me (he doesn't drink around his wife) and eased into himself, into a more comfortable version of himself as the father of a nearly 40-year old man, a man who had inherited all his insecurities and proclivity for depression but was this very summer climbing Mt. Everest 17 times, and it was good. And in the golden light of the magic hour he joked with the waitress and here and there announced my great undertaking to people around us in the bar, and that, too, was good. It made up for the erasure of me from his wife's fridge. In the morning before he took me to the airport, we attended service at his church and some woman he knew well stared wide-eyed upon meeting me, having never heard he had a son. In retrospect, our sunset moment in the Portsmouth pub makes up for that, too.


So now Jesus is a pita here at the Rye Bethany church, and the pastor says he will come like a thief in the night. And steal what? I wonder. All our bread? The pita and the rye. Ha-ha hodeeho. (Until today, I'd never seen a communion where the Body of Christ was finely chopped pita bread.) Let him come. Me, I'm gone. Been here, done the family thing, and determined perhaps once and for all that discussion of politics or the news or religion is pointless with my father. God bless him. The banquet has been laid out, and he will have his place at the table. Me, I'll return to the pure, unquestioning Christianity of my youth when all Christians everywhere open their arms and say all who believe in a supreme being will be welcome in Heaven, religious-affiliation aside.

For now, however, the Jews are out, and forget about the Mormons, the Muslims, and the Buddhists. "Don't get hung up on that," my father says. "Don't get stuck on that issue or you'll never come to know the good things about Jesus." Don't get stuck? Does that mean don't think? Turn a blind eye? Pay no attention to those people being loaded onto boxcars. They're not going to Heaven, anyway. They're not Christians!

I am stuck, thus, at the exclusivity clause. I will probably always be stuck here. Stuck in the Hades between Heaven and Earth. Stuck between the zealous likes of my father and all my independent, intellectual, artistic and thoroughly anarchistic agnostic or atheistic friends who believe in a different god or no god and find my hopeful belief in Heaven an absurdity.

In my father's church this morning I met a pretty woman named Katie. Very lovely, tall, intelligent, no doubt believes in Heaven. I doubt she smokes, probably "my ideal" match. I left the church sad this morning, sure that no such woman would ever embrace the likes of me, a broken and hobbling Christian summer camp refugee-gone gonzo drug-addled devourer of earthly life. Despite all the walking, all the depression-busting levity, all the fun where might have run the blood of suicide, at times like this I feel less the athlete, less the accomplished writer and more the Mad Hatter in an oyster-sucking contest with the Walrus. The Walrus is winning. And after ten days off the trail, I am forgetting. And when the oysters are gone, the Walrus is going to eat me, my hiking boots, this book, and yikes! If you don't let go now, he'll probably even eat you!

It's July 11th here at the Manchester airport bar awaiting the flight that will take me back to Duncannon and the Appalachian Trail, and these are the thoughts that I'm thinking.

Where am I? What's it all mean? And will I, when I crest that cold rock far up in New England where Maine juts hard into Canada, will I have written something worth reading, worth publishing? Will I have stomped the American terra and told the tale well enough and with enough pride and gratitude in my American freedoms to please a nation of fear junkies, and maybe even, the poor battle-crazed soldiers in Iraq?

Will I?

Shark fish turbine with whirl of deadly spinning whiskers walks me, effortless, through cumulous sky seas high into the blue July of coming night. And it's Pittsburgh below...

[end of added material]

Thanks to my cuz for that and for more of his adventures and prose dont forget to bookmark jigglebox.com. He is soon heading out on a fully sponsored hike of the Continental Divide Trail to raise awarness for Depression and Suicide Prevention. Stay tuned for more on that in the future.


J