Gene Hikes the Appalachian Trail

Tag: writing

  • Happy Twentieth Birthday

    Photo by Wiktoria Skrzekotowska on Unsplash

    September 4, 2006 was twenty years ago today. I celebrate that day each year because it is the day I quit smoking. Or, more accurately, it is the most recent day I quit smoking and the first time I did not start smoking again within a few months. I treat this date as though it is another birthday because quitting smoking gave me a new lease on life. And I didn’t even need to do a credit check and put down a security deposit for this one.

    I started smoking fairly late for someone who grew up in the rural south. I never smoked in high school despite my dad smoking over a pack a day for my entire life. Some of my earliest memories of my dad are of me sitting on the floor playing with toy cars while he filled the entire room with smoke that I imagined was the cool fog my mini racers were navigating on their obstacle course that included our coffee table and the legs of his chair. I never took up smoking until late in college, but I quickly made up for lost time. Smoking is one of those things you understand is disgusting and bad for you the entire time you participate, but because it is an addictive drug you are powerless to do anything about it.

    Marlboro Reds were my cigarette of choice. I loved Reds more than baseball fans in Cincinnati. Every time I smoked a cig that wasn’t a Red, I would think of how much better a Red would be. I was able to keep my habit down at about a half pack a day for the decade or so that I smoked. I tried to quit many times. Or, to be more accurate, I actually did quit many times. I just started back up again after a few weeks or months.

    I remember when Boston outlawed smoking in bars back in 2003. I was certain that was going to be the tipping point and I could easily quit if the bars were off limits. Fast forward to me standing around in the freezing cold outside of the Druid in Inman Square taking drags and shivering my ass off.

    I kept trying to quit many other times. Being in the Army sabotaged my attempts as much as anything else. I got to the point that I could quit for the entire month, but come drill weekend I just had to get a pack to smoke in order to make it through the day. One pack to survive the weekend would become a few packs to survive the entire week of, which eventually just became me starting to smoke all over again.

    I know now that my whole problem was that I never really wanted to quit for me. I wanted to quit because cigarettes cost a lot of money. Or I wanted to quit because society told me I should quit. Those were external motivations, and they just weren’t good enough for me. I never actually wanted to try and quit purely for myself until I realized just how destructive it was for my own life.

    Ben Affleck puts it very well in an interview with Howard Stern. Here, he talks about how he was not able to quit drinking until it all but ruined his life. “The cure for addiction,” as he states, “is suffering.”

    In summer 2006 my Reserve unit went to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin for Annual Training. We were there for an exercise with many other Chemical units around the country. On the way there I bought two cartons of Reds, expecting them to last the entire two week trip and beyond. I was wrong.

    I’m not sure what was different about this AT that made me smoke so much more than usual. Yes, it was hard, but AT was always hard. There was a lot of “hurry up and wait”, but that was also nothing extraordinary. Whatever it was, all I did was smoke and smoke and smoke. In two weeks, I smoked both cartons. A carton is ten packs of cigarettes, each pack containing twenty cigarettes. And yes, I did lend lots of smokes to people, but I also bummed at least as many from others.

    Basically I smoked a pack and a half each day. An explosive increase from half a pack a day. Once I got home I knew there had to be a major change. I did not want this to be my new normal. I did not want to get cancer before 40. I did not want to have trouble climbing two flights of stairs.

    The first thing I did was set a date. I chose Labor Day because it was the end of a long weekend. I spent the weekend smoking more than normal, hoping it would cause me not to miss smoking for the first couple of days. On Labor Day itself I went to Olde Country Buffet and got a gluttinous meal of meat loaf, more meat loaf, fried chicken, red velvet cake; all the normal stuff you get at Olde Country Buffet. A few alcoholic beverages were consumed as well. I did my best to make the entire weekend feel like a bacchanalia of vices.

    For the most part it worked. I spent most of the following week just recovering from all the overindulging. Probably the hardest part was not getting three or four ten-minute smoke breaks at work. I never missed cigarettes until the next weekend. By then I could tell myself “you’ve already made it four days, keep going”.

    Because I had so much resolve this time, it continued to go smoothly. My first drill after quitting was tough, just because when I told people I quit they didn’t believe me. So they spent the whole weekend trying to shove lit cigs into my mouth. Other than that, I would occasionally see someone smoking and get an overwhelming feeling of envy. It felt like an itch on my heart. I just desperately wanted to steal that person’s cigarette and smoke it for myself. This happened every few days initially, then slowly got progressively further spaced out. Even now I still get that feeling once every 9 months or so.

    The biggest downside was weight gain. There is a reason every thin, beautiful, eastern European supermodel smokes like a chimney. I slowly put on pound after pound despite doing and eating exactly what I did before. That frustrated the shit out of me, because I was supposedly getting healthier as I watched my pants get tighter and tighter. I put on about 12 pounds before I finally got a handle on it around Thanksgiving, then I needed a few months to lose it all back.

    The second biggest downside was that I picked up spitting outdoors. Like, all the time outdoors. I had developed an oral fixation with the cue that being outside meant my mouth needed to be busy. When I stopped smoking I started spitting all the time, but only outside. It’s pretty fucking disgusting but I have no idea how to stop doing it without smoking again.

    The positives are great. I save tons of money that I used to spend on cigarettes. My health and endurance are as good as I could hope. It has truly been a complete life transformation, and that is why I treat it as a second birthday.

    Of course, having a birthday on 9/4/06 means I share a birthday with the Queen Bey herself. For my 20th birthday and her 45th, we need to have a dance party celebration!

  • Worst Fear: Bruins Win The Stanley Cup

    This is the second post in what will be a series on this blog. In the series I highlight my “worst fears” that might happen while I traverse the Appalachian Trail. In my first entry I talked about my fear of alpha-gal syndrome and went into some depth about how his series will go. You don’t have to read that entry before this one, but if you do it helps my metrics.

    The Stanley Cup finals begin today. Congratulations to the Carolina Hurricanes and Vegas Golden Knights, who won their respective conferences and will compete for the most famous piece of hardware in North American sports. My worst fear is that next year the winner will be the Boston Bruins.

    At this point, I should mention that I am a big Bruins fan. I’m wearing my David Krejčí jersey as I type this. I wasn’t always a Bruins fan. I followed the NBA and college basketball as a kid and only really watched hockey during the Stanley Cup finals. I never quite learned all the different weird names of all the divisions and conferences. The Adams and the Norris winners play for the Wales trophy or some shit? Once I moved to Massachusetts for college I became much more invested in the NHL and college hockey. Going to a Beanpot is a New England rite of passage.

    Since I never really followed a team as a youngster, I kind of picked up the Bruins as my team. This lasted until 1997 when the Hartford Whalers decamped and moved to Raleigh, becoming the Carolina Hurricanes. I am from North Carolina and felt like I owed it to the team that came to the state of my birth to pledge my allegiance. Despite still living in the Boston area, I threw my support behind the Canes. I bought a shirt and a hat and everything. The only problem was that I never really watched the Canes or followed the team because 90% of the hockey I consumed was on NESN. Nevertheless, I told myself and my friends that I was a Canes fan; even as I watched Bruins games multiple times a week.

    This charade went on for almost a decade. I finally came to my senses on the night of June 19, 2006. That night the Hurricanes defeated the Edmonton Oilers 3-1 in game 7 to capture the Stanley Cup. The first and still only major professional sports title won by a team from North Carolina. And while the players were parading the Stanley Cup around the ice I felt nothing. I felt no real pride or satisfaction. I just kind of felt, “oh well, good for those guys”. That was when I realized that if I could not get excited for the team after winning the title in game 7 I was never going to. So the next season I finally admitted that I was a Bruins fan and started to act like it. I bought a shirt and a hat and everything.

    Being a Bruins fan during that period was tough sledding. They didn’t make the playoffs in 2007 and barely made it in 2008, before losing in the first round. The 2009 team finished only one point away from the President’s Trophy before losing in seven games to the Hurricanes. 2010 was the year everything was going to be different. The year all those “we want it as much as you do” banners all over North Station were supposed to finally mean something. That was until the Flyers playoff series.

    Boo this man

    One day I’ll be able to see or hear the name Scott Hartnell without weeping like a small girl, but I have not yet reached that point. In the second round in 2010 Boston took a 3-0 lead on Philly in the best-of-7 series. Through bad play, bad luck, and general bad vibes they blew that entire lead and had to play a seventh and decisive game at home. I happened to have drill that weekend at Fort Devens, but we got barracks and the barracks had cable so after a day on the range everyone could catch hot chow and a hot shower before settling in for the game.

    The game started as promisingly as possible and the Bruins opened a 3-0 lead in the first period. Milan Lucic scored twice. The day room in the barracks was jumping and everything was right with the world. The Flyers outplayed Boston from that point forward and by the middle of the third period it was 3-3. Then Boston took the worst “too many men on the ice” penalty since 1979 and allowed a power play goal to Simon Gagne that proved to be the series winner. The day room in the barracks was a mausoleum and the world deserved to burn to the ground. Hartnell had two points in the clincher and finished the series with 5 points and a +3 rating. The numbers themselves don’t paint the full picture of just how much of an annoying shit Hartnell could be over seven games.

    So going into 2010-2011 the team was still wearing that frustration, but won the division behind captain Zdeno Chara’s league leading +33 rating and Vezina winner Tim Thomas in goal. They exorcised some demons by beating the Flyers on their way to the Eastern Conference title. That led to a Stanley Cup matchup with the Vancouver Canucks in June.

    Being an Army Reservist meant there were lots of sacrifices you needed to make. One of which was that they sucked two weeks of every summer away for Annual Training. Of course in 2011 the Annual Training was in Fort Stewart in Georgia. Also of course, it was during the exact same time as the Stanley Cup. Unlike the aforementioned drill at Fort Devens, this training exercise was a full-on field problem. They took multiple different units from all over the eastern seaboard and dropped us onto a training area with GP larges and mediums as far as the eye could see. No creature comforts. There was barely any cellular service and even fewer locations to keep a civilian computer or wireless phone charged. We were only able to get the scores of each game the morning after when somebody made a run to the DFAC and grabbed hot chow for breakfast.

    And by the way, in case you’ve never had the privilege, Fort Stewart in the summer is hotter than the Fonz is cool. Satan probably does his Annual Training drills for the demons in hell there. I’ve lived in Las Vegas and Austin. I’ve worked in the Mojave Desert and Caribbean jungles in the summer. Fort Stewart is far more miserable. Imagine the most humid place you’ve ever been in your life and then add 50% humidity to it while also well into the high 90’s the entire time the sun is out. Our wet bulbs told us it was heat category 5 every second from about an hour after sunrise to an hour after sunset. We spent at least half of everyday being prevented from training and just sitting in our tents sweating our balls off sucking down as much water as our buffalo could hold. In short the whole thing was horrid, and never knowing what was going on in the Cup Final was the coup de grâce.

    Boston and Vancouver punched and counter-punched through six games and got set for a winner-take-all game 7 on June 15th. This also happened to be the last day of our actual training so the leadership let those of us who wanted take a GSA (minivan) and go to a bar on post to watch the game in civilian clothes. We were forbade from drinking and had to come back as soon as the game ended, but at least it was some kind of reward for a grueling exercise. There were reports of bad weather coming in that night, so we were told to be mindful that if the skies went sideways they would recall us. Of course, the skies went sideways.

    Shortly into the second period, with the Bruins up 1-0, we got the call to leave the bar and cheese it back to the training area. We drove back through a pretty significant rainstorm. What we saw when we got back was crazy, though.

    A microburst had come down right in the middle of our AO. Radio antennae knocked over, tents toppled everywhere, soldiers standing around in various different uniforms fumbling in the dark trying to figure out what was going on. Everyone briefly gathered whatever they had within arm’s reach and walked over to the Reserve Center about three blocks away.

    The Reserve Center was in no way built to provide shelter for all of the soldiers from this exercise. We all had to stand basically nuts to butts in the basement waiting for the “all clear” in case any further storms came in. In my civilian clothes, I was so much more fortunate than those were in the training area when the microburst happened. Everyone was just dressed in whatever they had when the worst of it started. There were people in brown T-shirts and PT pants. ACU jacket and PT shorts with boots. One poor woman had on just a PT shirt and a towel wrapped around her. I guess she was in the middle of a shower at the worst possible time.

    As we all stood there hot and cramped and cranky and miserable, some kind soul was able to get a radio feed of the game over the internet. So I listened to a staticky radio call of the final six minutes of game 7 as Tim Thomas closed out a 4-0 shutout of the Canucks. After the game ended we all stood there for about an hour until they bussed us to some auditorium somewhere or another. We sat in the auditorium until they procured us some barracks to use for the night.

    The next morning we all went back to ground zero and fixed up the tents, collected our things, and got everything ready to tear down. Fortunately, since all of the tents fell straight down most people’s gear stayed right where it was left. A few people lost a few things that had to go down as “field losses” but nothing major like a sensitive item or anything. After packing up our area and spending one more night in the barracks we left on a jet plane back to Boston just in time for the victory parade.

    So basically I missed the 2011 Stanley Cup and did not get to experience it the way I would have liked. Boston went back to the Cup final in 2013 and 2019 but lost both. And the less said about the 2022-2023 season, the better.

    I figure at my age I’ll be lucky enough to see one or maybe two more Bruins championships before I die. Considering what happened in 2011, my worst fear is for them to win in 2027 and I wouldn’t be able to watch or enjoy any of the action.

    Marco Sturm, if you are listening, do well next year. Make the playoffs and even win a round. Bonus points if you knock out Toronto again. But save the deep postseason runs for 2028 and beyond.

  • High Rollin

    So I’m going to do a change of pace here and post something that has nothing to do with hiking or fitness or anything of the sort. It’s allowed; I can do that. I can talk about anything I want because this is my fucking blog. I can also swear casually.

    This past Saturday I went to my first MLS game, Austin FC versus the Houston Dynamo. I had never been to a game here in Austin despite the team existing since 2021 largely for two reasons. One, I feel like MLS is equivalent to third-tier European football, which is something I have never paid to watch either. Two, I have a long-standing, entirely one-sided feud with Austin FC’s principal owner Anthony Precourt.

    Precourt is the sort of billionaire asshole sports owner (BASO) that did everything he could to ruin the Columbus MLS franchise before finally getting an expansion team in Austin. Precourt also happens to be one of those private equity dudes who seems incapable of earning money except by sucking all of the joy out of all of the small things that little people like me enjoy.

    All of that said, if the Austin MLS team was an MLB or NFL team instead I’d happily support them. The sad truth is that every BASO is a douchebag. It’s just that if you are passionate enough about the team they own you’ll look the other way until they do something so bad even their fellow BASOs cannot justify it. Jerry Richardson was the founding owner of my beloved Carolina Panthers. He was a douchebag, the sort of douchebag who puts a giant statue of himself in front of the team’s stadium. That alone was not a fireable offense as a BASO. What was fireable was being a racist, sexist piece of shit.

    Who am I kidding? That alone is not enough. The problem is that Richardson was so racist and sexist that there had to be an investigation. The results of which were so bad they made him sell the team. That is how you get fired as a BASO. Donald Sterling was a known shit sandwich but didn’t get booted from the NBA until they caught him on tape being a racist cocksucker. As long as it wasn’t on tape there was enough plausible deniability to look the other way. Once everything became public record he became expendable. See also, Daniel Snyder.

    Boston Bruins owner Jeremy Jacobs has been a mean-spirited skinflint and outright spiteful to the very fans that feed his bottom line for as long as he has run the team, but he is still a proud BASO. The Bruins are my NHL team of choice because I am a hypocrite and follow Boston despite Jacobs while loathing Austin FC because of Precourt.

    Well anyway this post is not about why every BASO is a fundamentally bad person, it is about my trip to the game. I got a free ticket from a friend who has seats in an unlimited food and drinks section at picturesque Q2 Stadium. He has two season tickets to this area. He had one free ticket because someone else wasn’t able to go. Why? Don’t know, don’t care.

    Now I’ve known this guy since college and I knew he was doing well financially, but I did not know he was doing WELL, if you know what I mean. After graduation he moved to Austin to attend grad school at UT. He was living the life of a poor college student during this time.

    I remember when the Chicago Whie Sox (my team; don’t get me started on Jerry Reinsdorf’s qualifications as a BASO) faced the Houston Astros (his team; he grew up in Houston) in the 2005 World Series we made a friendly wager. I wanted to do $50 but he said that was too rich for him so we did $20 instead. Chicago swept that World Series and I used the $20 to buy a Pale Hose cap with the World Series logo. This was back when $20 could buy a nice fitted baseball cap that now costs about $45 and is sewn together by the lowest bidder that Fanatics can find. I still own that cap even though the bill is literally disintegrating. I swore I’d wear it until we make another World Series and I can replace it. Hopefully Murakami and Montgomery and the boys punch way above their weight soon.

    The point, though, is that he couldn’t put $50 on his favorite team twenty years ago and now he is tossing fistfuls of cash at cushy seats in a swanky stadium. He also lives in a nice house in a gated community in West Austin with an 80″ television. I’m happy for him, and he is now my “rich friend”.

    So we get to the stadium ninety minutes before kickoff because that is when the gates open. Outside they are giving away free cans of Dr Pepper Creamy Coconut, which tastes just like a liquid Mounds bar. First thing we do once we get inside is head for the unlimited food area. I had some street tacos with sumac onions and tahini sauce. Then I got a Karbach Love Street to wash it all down.

    Later on, still before kickoff, I had a smash patty burger with fries, and a serving of pita chips with a whipped feta dip.

    Come kickoff we head down to the seats which are so close to the pitch I am legitimately concerned that I may get hit by an errant free kick. We get to those seats while both two-fisting beers that we sucked down until halftime.

    one fistful of beer

    Second half included more food and beers and a piece of orange olive oil cake. I’d never heard of olive oil cake before that night but I wish I had because it tasted the same way everything else did. Awesomely awesome.

    Oh yeah, and the team actually won 2-0. And they shot like a million fireworks off. And then I went back to my decidedly non-glamorous life where the food and drink is nether “unlimited” nor “delicious” nor even “passably mediocre”. But for one night I got to live like a damn hell ass king thanks to my rich friend. I have not been converted into a fan of Austin FC or Anthony Precourt just yet, but enough more nights like Saturday may change that.

  • Worst Fear: Alpha-gal Syndrome

    The idea of spending five months walking with a heavy pack on, sleeping outside in all types of weather, and foregoing the comforts of home can sound scary. It definitely does scare me on occasion when I think about it. But, like, it scares me in a good way. Like, an I believe this will be challenging but I can handle it, kind of way. There are other things about the trail that scare me in a different way.

    I am a very risk averse person by nature. I’ve never been on a roller coaster, I’ve never scuba dived. I’ve only been outside the continental United States twice (once to Montreal and once to Puerto Rico). The reason I never take risks is because I always play out the absolute worst thing that can possibly happen over and over in my head until I’m convinced it will. Do I want to stand on the edge of this moderately high building? No, because the exact second I decide to stand there I will get hit by a minor vortex that lifts me over the edge and drops me onto a giant pile of broken concrete and rusty safety razors and horse dung. The very fact that nothing like this has ever happened to me just reinforces the idea that my abundance of caution is the reason why.

    I have several very specific fears about things that may happen to me on the Appalachian Trail. They range from the plausible to the irrationally unlikely. But rest assured that wherever on that continuum they lie, I remain equally concerned about them. Perhaps writing them out here in my blog will help to allay my fears. For my first specific fear I have something that is very real and even likely to occur. Fortunately, it is also easily preventable with care and discipline.

    My first fear (that is first chronologically, not first in terms of the amount of heebie-jeebies it gives me) is alpha-gal syndrome. Alpha-gal syndrome is an allergic disease caused by a tick bite. Being bitten causes you to develop an allergic reaction to galactose-α-1,3-galactose (also known as alpha-gal). That carbohydrate is found in the meat of most mammals, which means once you get it you will no longer be able to eat beef, pork, or most other meat. Alpha-gal is not found in humans, so Soylent Green would still be okay to eat. In the worst cases, people with the syndrome are not able to consume dairy like milk or yogurt either.

    The idea of an allergic reaction to alpha-gal is not unknown. What is scary is the idea of becoming allergic to the molecule after you eat it and it circulates in the bloodstream. Alpha-gal is the main reason why pig organs are rejected during transplantation into people. Our antibodies attack the carbohydrate and cause the organs to fail. Fortunately, scientists are engineering xenotransplants which lack that molecule.

    Unfortunately, that does not matter with alpha-gal syndrome. When the tick bites you it can take up to several months to develop the reaction. The exact mechanism is not clear. The same tick could bite two people and one can get the syndrome and the other won’t. Once you have it, a few hours after you eat red meat the allergic reaction begins. No more steak or ice cream or hot dogs, for the rest of your life.

    Which specific ticks can cause this? Way too many. Lone star tick, blacklegged tick, and western blacklegged tick are all known or suspected to cause it. Where is the lone star tick located? Why, the eastern United States of course. Isn’t that where the Appalachian Trail is? No shit. When are they most active? April to September. Well, fuck my life.

    public enemy number one

    As horrific as this is, it can be easily prevented. Permethrin is a miracle compound. Our Army uniforms were impregnated with it and I can proudly say I never got a tick bite despite sleeping on exposed ground many, many times across the southeastern United States. It is also critical to frequently check yourself and each other for ticks when you have a chance. They like to hide in your underarms and between your legs, just like many perverts you encounter.

    There are not many things worse than getting alpha-gal syndrome as far as I’m concerned. As scary as it is, practicing good hygiene and insect prevention is the key to making sure it does not happen to me. There are more than a few other scenarios I will go over in the coming months that are in some ways even more scary than this. I can’t wait to tell you all about them.