My trip down to Georgia.
In preparation for a trans-Virginia Appalachian Trail section hike this summer, I decided to fly down to Georgia over spring break and give a shorter trek a shot.
I touched down in Atlanta at noon and caught the Metro to North Springs. After half an hour at the train station I was picked up by a greying man in a black Ford Ranger.
The man’s name was Murris, and the truck’s dashboard counter boasted 326,000 miles, having survived 3 complete transmission replacements and 10 years of hiker-shlepping. The inside of the cab was plastered with AT stickers, assorted knicknacks, and more paper maps than could ever be necessary. Stacks of esoteric religious pamphlets fell from the sun visors every time we hit a bump. The chihuahua’s name was Katy and it treated that center console like a damn jungle gym. While speeding through increasingly rural Georgia, Murris and I got to know each other, but mostly about him. He introduced himself as being raised both “by hippies” as well as “hard-core Protestant”, but had since converted to Eastern Orthodox. When I told him I didn’t know anything about that particular denomination, he pulled up YouTube and started playing deep-throated Latin chants from his phone speaker. This would backdrop our conversation for the next half hour. Murris was a Georgia Tech-trained civil engineer, but had never really made it big, having declined the biggest job offer of his career: designing the Yangtze River Dam in China. When I asked him why he didn’t want to work in China, a deeper and perhaps more authentic side of Murris began to reveal itself. In the remaining half of the car ride, we would discuss every facet of life, such as travel:
“Thailand is probably the most Wicked country on earth.”
living on a budget:
“Monasteries will let you stay there forever if you just tell them you’re interested.”
and work:
“My sniper buddy had a gig in Angola for a while shooting trespassers on an apple orchard, but couldn’t do it any more after the owner asked him to buy some eight year old girls for him in town. Turns out he was a pedophile. Wicked people. Almost like Haiti.”
Other topics of conversation included nutrition, Biden, Israel, the “amoralism of the LGBT”, seed banking, motorcycles, hang gliding, Catholics, the Nephilim, and recent archeological evidence for a pre-Adam race of giants:
“They just found Goliath’s bed in Jordan or Syria or one of them. Made of bronze. Maybe iron.”
The dog also pissed in the car about two thirds through. After two hours on the highway and one on a bumpy Forest Service road, Murris dropped me a mile from Springer Mountain with a handshake and a pocket sized New Testament for my travels. It was a pretty solid start.
The first day of hiking was pretty easy, about eight and a half miles from 2pm to 6. I was the last to arrive at Hawk mountain shelter and barely found a spot to pitch my tent.
After being the last to leave the campsite in the morning, I was pretty happy with my hike on day 2: 16.5 miles from Hawk Mountain to Lance Creek. Walking into the site with the sun beginning to set behind me, I was feeling pretty confident about my summer plan.
I hung out with some older guys for an hour and ate my dinner before crashing again at sundown.
I reached Neel Gap, my originally determined 32-mile endpoint, at around noon. I still had two days left, but after the next 12 miles of trail there would be no place with road access for me to get picked up and shuttled back to Atlanta, so I decided to stay the night at the Mountain Crossing hostel.
The other hostelgoers were pretty young and mostly friendly. I had dinner with some NorCal ex-finance guys and an aspiring Tennessean Air Force officer (“I wanna do, like, air strikes and stuff”). We talked hiking, creatine, Joe Rogan, and the effects of microplastics on “American men’s plummeting testosterone levels.” I slept next to a spectrum-y guy who carried a hatchet in the webbing of his 50 pound pack alongside a monstrous full-sized King James edition. The only thing I ever heard him talk about was religion, which he spoke of with the sort of tone you usually hear in discussions of sports teams: “Nah man, their belief system is just busted.”
The fourth day, though initially freezing, was delightful. I had all the time in the world, and spent 3 or so hours sunbathing on different mountaintops. An ex-Atlantan Irishwoman gave me a bag of chips free of charge because she thought I looked hungry. She also carried two bottles of wine up the mountain, which you have to respect. I was too afraid to ask for any.
At the foot of the final peak I was met with two tables full of free food and gear for thru-hikers. I sat down at the first, better-stocked one, and talked to the two older gentlemen behind it for an hour or so. They were from a local church group and had been giving out food to hikers for a decade at that very location. They didn’t proselytize me or anything, but they did display fliers for their outreach program, subtly titled “Nudge”. After I helped them load up their van with leftover supplies, one of them sent me off with a minute-long personalized prayer and an extra beanie hand-knit by his church group. The guy at the second table gave me two beers and a pat on the back. With an angel in one ear and the devil in my other I set off towards the last campsite.
Whitley Gap Shelter.
When I arrived at the Whitley Gap Shelter, I was surprised to find that I was the only hiker willing to go a mile and a half off trail to reach it. I was giddy. I had my last night all by myself to build a campfire, cook my dinner, and jot down the events of the last few days. The lean-to had only scarce mouse droppings around its edges and the privy overlooked the sunset.
To my mild disappointment, two other hikers showed up right before sundown, a 21 year old Virginian and a 63 year old electrician from Alaska. They proved pleasant enough and we chatted for a while over the fire about their journeys on the AT. The younger guy missed his Bulgarian girlfriend and predicted that he wouldn’t make it the whole way through the trail, while the older was more confident. He had convinced his wife to hold down the fort at their cabin in Fairbanks while he tackled the trail with his 75 year old hiking buddy. She had persuaded him to move up there in the first place while he was working on the Trans-Alaska pipeline decades before, so it seemed pretty fair. I’m sure he had more stories to tell, and I wished I could’ve talked to him longer, but no thru-hiker I met would stay up long past sundown, and soon I cozied up in the shelter as well.
A curious mouse and a sharp mountain breeze kept me up most of the night, but I didn’t mind too much. I only had a couple miles to pack out in the morning, and the moon was shining like I had never seen. The whole campsite was visible, bathed in a pale glow about the brightness of a dim streetlight. I’d never known that a tree could cast a shadow during the nighttime.
Murris picked me up the next morning at 9:30. Over the next two hours, this man would deliver a monologue covering women, religion, and rock’n’roll the likes of which I have never heard. While only ever referring to me as “Bubba”, Murris described the “two, maybe three” separate instances in which his soul had left his body, his rules for finding a worthy partner (“just go on a mission trip, trust me”), as well as his motives for supporting Putin in the Russo-Ukrainian war (“the Ukrainians are a wicked, wicked people”). As he attempted to pull up a song by ’90s Christian-goth-metal band Savior Machine on his android, he went an astonishing minute and thirty seconds with zero hands on the wheel as we sped at 60 miles per hour down a packed three-lane highway. It was pretty badass. As we neared the North Springs metro station, we stopped at a red light on the corner of Walmart Way and E. Main street in Dahlonega. A billboard out my right window advertised a $20 chiropractor. Murris twirled a pair of gilded brass knuckles around his index finger. Sighing, he gazed out at the road ahead before leaning over the chihuahua that sat panting between us. “I like Zoroastrianism too,” he whispered, “don’t tell anybody.”
After he dropped me off, I sat on the train a little glum. My trip was coming to an end. I was back in the loud, crowded world, and was about to pass through the busiest airport in the US during peak season. I was also a little disappointed knowing that I might never meet someone with as many opinions about the world as Murris. Thankfully, we’ve kept in touch.
All in all, it was a great time. I met some interesting people and covered some solid miles. I’m excited for the summer.
Good read as usual.
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