NCT 10: Format Change
The end of Ohio, and an announcement
Written August 10th:
We made it! Just about two weeks into Michigan and the entire vibe of this trail has turned around. As I write this from a motel bed, I am actively looking forward to getting back to trail and hiking tomorrow. What a concept!
The change, however, was not immediate. For the last five hundred miles into Defiance, the “trail” had been a mix of roads, cycling routes, and canal trails, with paved bike paths predominating as we made our way north from Milford. We didn't really have to resupply, as the bike paths took us through two or three towns per day, and we didn't use our water filters once. When the towns were at an inconvenient distance, we'd simply hit the closest grocery store and pack out pre-made sandwiches for lunch the next day. While this made for light packs and allowed me to restore some much-needed bodyfat, it’s a peculiarly difficult way to hike. You'd think it'd be luxurious (and it is for a day or two), but town every day reminds you what you're missing. It doesn't really feel like hiking, and you feel self-concious in a city with a pack and sweaty clothes. On top of that, we were often next to loud, busy roads, which meant we could barely hear ourselves think, let alone talk to one another. It was great to have a physical break and to gain some weight, don't get me wrong! I'd spent the entire Buckeye Trail wishing that the roads had more towns and that the trail sections were actually roads, but it wasn't the most thru-hike-y section of this thru-hike, and the luxury and boredom both wore away at my resolve.
This state of affairs continued as we left Defiance and finished up the last little piece of the Buckeye Trail en route to the Michigan border. The northern bit of the state was more rural than what we'd just come through, and though we were still hitting town twice a day, we spent most of our time following the bed of the old Miami-Erie Canal. In classic Buckeye fashion, there was a land dispute between the trail agency and a cantankerous landowner over a weedy patch of towpath, and we had to take a road detour to avoid him. According to comments on the Guthook app, he'd told one previous hiker that anyone looking “suspicious” was “liable to be shot”! That was quite enough warning for us, even without the handmade “No Trespassing" signs threatening various bodily harms. As I trotted down the public road past his driveway, the man popped out from between junked cars and grumbled something at me, but I had one headphone in and didn't hear him clearly. I'm sure it wasn't compliment.
That seemed as good a farewell as any, and shortly afterwards we left the Buckeye behind for good and turned up the road on pure NCT route. It was straight as an arrow, due north. Michigan bound! We were so excited that we didn't even stop for gas station pizza on the way to Liberty Center, opting instead to do a mini-resupply at the Dollar General in town. I deleted my Guthook Buckeye app with glee. Buh-bye, Buckeye! It might have been partly my imagination, but even the roadwalk had a different feel to it. It was truly the NCT after all, and for this summer, the NCT is our whole world. After five long weeks away, we were home.
The maps for this last section of Ohio were a little tricky to get ahold of. I'd had to work some magic in Gaia to get an approximation of the mileage, but we'd been able to connect with the NCTA manager for northern Ohio. His name was Ryan, and he'd sent us a long email with information on towns, water access, and potential camp spots along the ~60 mile chunk between the Buckeye and Michigan. It was a huge help; there were a few spots along the trail where the legal camping was not obviously marked. Just outside of Liberty Center, we'd join up with the paved Wabash Cannonball bike path (where we were allowed to camp), cut north through Oak Openings Preserve (where we counterintutively weren't), then get back on the Cannonball and follow it for almost 30 miles before making our final turn north towards the state line. Though we passed through several named places that looked like towns, there were no businesses in them and nothing to buy. For the first time in three weeks, we had to carry our food. You’d think that would be a disappointment after all that town food, but honestly, it came as something of a relief. There were fewer logistics to manage, and we could have lunch any time we pleased.
That night, we camped on a secluded section of bike path in a swarm of mosquitoes, only to watch with delight as a flock of bats rocketed back and forth over our heads. Drawn by the cloud of hovering insects, they swooped down within feet of the tent roof, wheeling and dancing in the last of the setting sun. It was extraordinary; they came so close that we could hear the beats of their wings. I watched their silhouettes against the backdrop of the setting sun, until my eyelids grew too heavy and I had to fall asleep.
Written August 29th:
And that's it - that's all I've managed to write and edit since we entered Michigan a month ago. It's not for lack of trying. I've been agonizing over the blog for weeks, feeling guilty and stressed about it every single day as our miles stacked up and I fell farther and farther behind. As you can probably tell, I'm an incurable perfectionist, and I'm loathe to publish anything that doesn't meet my high personal standards. It's been an issue on other trails before, but those trails were shorter and didn't demand such high mileage or so many logistics in town, so I was able to buckle down and write no matter how tired I was. The NCT is a different beast - we've been hiking mid-thirties nearly every day for the past month, sunrise-to-sunset with barely any time to take notes. Writing polished, introspective personal essays is absolutely out of the question; I can hardly form sentences by the time we get to camp.
Torturing myself about it is obviously not the answer, but it is now mathematically impossible for me to catch up with the time we have in town. For each post, I have to collect my notes, copy and paste them into a document, review video footage and photos to refresh my memory if it's been a while, read my previous posts to find narrative themes, write an outline, write a rough draft, polish the quality of the writing and edit for clarity and word choice, fact check it against the maps to make sure I didn't elide or omit miles, paste that document into Substack's buggy mobile editor, copy-edit for typos and formatting issues (there are always formatting issues), and then do a final pass to make sure I haven't done something annoying. For example, in the first draft of this paragraph I used the word “polished” four times in five sentences, which nobody else would notice but I absolutely can't abide. I actually have a pinned list of words I frequently overuse, so I can do a find-and-replace search more easily (“Actually” is one of those words, as is “absolutely” - I am entirely too fond of an emphatic adverb. See, I just used one now!) (I'm also way too fond of parentheticals). I know that my readers won't care if my writing is comma-spliced all to hell, but I care. I care a lot! From start to finish, a post takes me between six and twelve hours to complete, sometimes even longer if I'm behind and we've been doing high miles. I am now 700 miles behind, or roughly four blog posts, and there's no way I can find 48+ uninterrupted hours to sit and write in town. I need to download maps and respond to emails, I need to do laundry and resupply, I need to sit in bed and eat pizza while watching HBO. Rest is a necessity on a trail of this length, and writing is so intellectually intense that it does not count.
Posting crappy excuse updates doesn't work for me either - I want to be able to tell the story in a timely manner, and being behind stresses me out. This last section, it actually got to the point of a panic attack (I hate that I used “actually” again there, but I'm practicing letting it go). I thought about quitting, and I thought about letting my rough drafts out into the world, but both of those options felt like failure. When it comes to narrative essays, I've painted myself into a corner. In order to get out of this trap, I need to do something else.
Here's the new plan: for the rest of the trail, I'll just be posting my daily notes. I was going to say “unedited” daily notes, but we all know I am constitutionally incapable of not editing. Still, they're going to be different - much, much, shorter, edited only for typos and the most generous definition of clarity. Some days will be a paragraph, and some days might only be a sentence or two, especially as I catch up to the current date. The notes from earlier in Michigan were strictly for my eyes only, and they resemble stream-of-conciousness rambling more than a daily diary. This new format will be titled differently as well. To differentiate between the polished (ugh!) essays and the rough notes, each short-form post will be titled NCT Daily Diary: [date] to [date]. When I get home and have the luxury of time, I’ll go back through everything I've missed and reconstruct the essays I would have written. These posts will be available for paid subscribers, and will cover Ohio through North Dakota. I expect the process of catching up to take me several months, but one post per week in regular life is a much more reasonable deadline. Thank you for your patience and understanding while I sort this process out. I started this blog as an experiment, and I suppose the experiment continues. It’s a lesson in realistic expectations and self-forgiveness; our pace is just too demanding to keep up with my usual rigorous routine.
Daily Diary posts will start coming out tonight, and I warn you that the first couple of them are going to suck. There are some days missing from the older notes, and they're in not complete sentences, but I hope you’ll still get some of value from it. Since I settled on this course of action last week, I've gotten into the habit of writing a short, lightly-edited paragraph each night, so they should get more interesting as we go.
Okay. Whew! I gotta stop giving disclaimers and apologizing. Imagine Bart Simpson writing on the blackboard, “I will not beat myself up” over and over. New format starts tonight, and I'll schedule them to post over the next couple of days. I'm in Marquette right now, so the first contemporaneous Daily Diary will go out from either Ironwood or Duluth. Fingers crossed that I'll feel less stressed about it by then.
Yours anxiously,
Magpie