Ah, the first full day of Summer, and it's raining. That's very pleasing to me. It may be flooding in the Mississippi River valley, but there's been a drought going on here and we need the rain just to make things grow. It's too bad we couldn't have some of the rain they've been getting, but that's just not how things work. The weather patterns don't seem all that impressed by political borders.
The drought the southeastern states has been experiencing has been spotty at times. We've done better here in the coastal plains because we occasionally get a few showers blowing in from the Atlantic Ocean and the further inland you go from here the less rain they get from that sort of weather pattern. The diagrams they show on the weather programs indicate that the mountains in North Carolina are still experiencing extreme drought. I guess that covers all the southern Appalachian range and down into Atlanta.
I've done a lot more hitch-hiking than I have back-packing. As a matter of fact I'd never really been hiking until I went up on the Appalachian Trail and hiked a couple of hundred miles. There is nothing much to see when one hikes here in the coastal plains. It's as flat as a fly flitter here, and the only place we can see any distance is to climb up on the water towers or a tall building. There aren't many tall buildings around here.
As many times as I have ridden across the mountains I never got much of a sense of what it's like up there compared to here until I did that stint on the Appalachian Trail. Maybe I was up there for a month or so. I walked all day and crawled in my sleeping bag at night. Very seldom did I sleep in the shelters on the trail. The younger hikers would get there and be all set up by the time I arrived for the evening.
Hiking on the AT is/was a friendly thing to do. The hikers all do the same thing all day, and there's hardly anything else to talk about during the campfire chats at night. What people do in their ordinary lives don't come up much on the trail. I guess they go up there to get away from the banality of their ordinary ways. For me to see long distances from a high crag like Chimney Rock is a rare occasion.
All kinds of people from all over the world go to the AT to hike. There seem to be as many reasons for people doing it as there are hikers. I hiked for a few days with a guy from England who made his living as a mercenary and a personal body guard. We had some interesting conversations. I asked a lot of questions. Why would I not? I've never done anything near like that. I was surprised to hear about the kind of people who hire personal body guards, and why they need them.
I did have another experience like this once. I walked on the mule trail down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I guess it was the tourist season, but there was a constant stream of people from all over the world walking up and down that mule trail. It only took a day hike to do it, but I really enjoyed the universality of people there. I walked to the bottom with an MP from England, and walked back up to the top with a guy from India. That's not the same old/same old in the world I live in.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
