Rhythm – The walk

Crossing the GA NC state line has the Georgia state song, Georgia On My Mind, in my head. The Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell composition, made famous by Ray Charles, is a great classic with a beautiful rhythm. The walk itself begins to develop a rhythm. New layers are added and pieces are perfected over time. The rhythm of the internal drum has established the rhythm of ascent, acceleration on the plains and the complexity of the descents. Each segment of the trail allows for the development of a new rhythm with these parts mixed together to create a melody as you encounter people and details on the trail.

The camaraderie

After regaining some energy from the segment hike, a group of us chanted briefly at one of the lodges around Blue Mountain. A second short and long formed in one of the shelters another night in the segment between Woods Gap and Dicks Creek Gap. These are short sessions as my voice is only good for about three songs until the general dehydration of my body lets me know I’m straining my vocal cords. I’m drinking a lot of water but I still can’t meet my water needs. I’m using electrolytes, I’m eating pretty well as some of the usual freeze dried backpacking meals have been exceptional, not only compared to other brands, but some products hold their own against freshly prepared foods. I still can’t hydrate myself enough. I have to work on this as it’s getting hotter on the trail for the next climbs. We’re seeing quite a few of the same people, which means our pace is setting. There are faster hikers passing by the group. There are fewer slower hikers that we passed. It looks like the numbers starting in Amacolola are starting to dwindle now, as the ATC Ridge Runners had told us that their season in the opening sections in GA will come to an end next week.

Hostels

In my 22 WVVT LASH I had stayed in several hostels. They are becoming less frequent on the northern section of the AT. Individual hikers and also hiking groups that have formed into trams (trail families) typically have a more established pace on the northern half of the trail. There is less organization, support, and understanding of the struggles of the “start of the walk” compared to the shelters in Georgia. Each hostel has had its own flavor. The three I have stayed in so far have been very welcoming and comfortable. Each had several complex logistical support options for hikers and each had several on-site amenities. Each other’s operations teams really know the local resources. Patronizing hostels instead of going to a hotel really opens you up to locally connected possibilities. For example, today I saw that the church in Clayton GA has a vigil mass at 5 pm. Anyway, I had planned to reach zero today. Now Clayton is 25 minutes from the AT. The hostess of the hostel took me down the hill to Clayton. She told me to check with a gentleman at the local store to see if they had a shuttle service that would get back up the hill at the time I needed. The hostess at the hostel told me not to worry and that they would pick me up if they didn’t. The provider was not able to take me, but called another resource of theirs who will assist the service to see if I can get transportation from that connection. It turned out to be not only a nice afternoon at church, but also an amazing trip back to the lodge. It turns out that the shuttle driver and I have the same name spelled the same way, we are both engineers, we both have three children, we are both Catholic but also attend other churches from time to time, we both play guitar, and we both run triathlons occasionally. Most of the local people you meet really care about making it work for hikers within the limits of reasonable requests.

trail towns

From Dicks Creek Gap there is a village of trails on both sides of the ridge. They are pretty close to being equidistant, but have very different vibrations. The western city, Hiawassee, appears to be a lake city and the eastern city, Clayton, appears to be a larger regional city. Both have many necessary resources for hikers: supermarkets, clothing stores, restaurants. Clayton appears to have a more compact and developed downtown, while Hiawassee has more of a «along the boulevard» layout.

The guitar upside down

At the shelter a few days ago I was playing and singing the Eagles song which is actually the national anthem of California. The session ended abruptly when I broke the high E string. Hostel guitars are famous for being strung with strings that are about to break. I carry spare games. When I went to get my alto string replacement, it must have been in California in my rush to distribute the supply of replacement strings I had purchased in my backpack, I mixed up the strings and didn’t have an 010 on the replacements. So I apologized to the hostel owner and offered to pay him to order a game on Amazon. He said not to worry because he knew they needed to be changed anyway. So let’s go back to the forest. Two days later, I arrived at the hostel where I am currently at zero. They have a collection of stringed instruments available for hikers to play. I started with the full-size guitar and quickly discovered that the hostel musician plays left-handed. So I took the mandolin off the wall, tuned it, and left. After a while I picked up the left-handed guitar again and tried to transpose my hands to try to play. Don’t go. However, I switched it to the right hand (I guess 95% of guitarists in the world play right hand). You could transpose some chords by playing them backwards by adjusting the fingering. It’s been a while since I played as a beginner but it wasn’t bad. After a while, I decided to retune the guitar the same way you would tune a right-handed guitar, only now with some octave differences in the set to account for the strength of the strings. This allowed me to play completely right-handed, but now with the scale octaves turned off at the top and bottom. This became interesting when I discovered it. Very different sound, but clean and fast. I was also interested in how certain keys worked and others didn’t.

The search for guitar strings

So, realizing I had brought the wrong strings and knowing I was going to try to go to church in Clayton, I looked to see if there was a guitar store. Yes there is. An old school music store that is hard to find these days as some large sets make it difficult for the old school mom and dad to survive. This one was amazing. After asking about the strings, I asked permission to take a guitar off the wall and play it for a while. “Please help yourself,” the owner said, and so I did. After a while, I asked the owner if she had any broken packages. This is where someone was previously looking for a particular rope like I am and the rest of the package is relegated to selling a single rope. She introduced me to the «hell box.» A jumble of torn packages and various unidentifiable strings for guitars, mandolins, violins, ukuleles and any other stringed instruments. She said «feel free to take a look». So I started digging into box sorting as I went along. I knew that the probability of finding a 009, 010 or 012 was low, as these would have been what others had been looking for previously, leading to the stock of broken packets in the box. I continued like this. After a while, I found enough small diameter stuff to make the search worth it, but it was about 1 usable rope of the correct diameter for every 50 or so I sorted through. I kept the piles separate and put rubber bands around each different pile, reducing the “hell box” to at least the “hell box.”

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