Mile 610. Weary feet.

I arrive at Weary Feet hostel soaked to the bone.   The five steps leading to the wrap around porch of the white antebellum farmhouse are higher than the mountains I have been climbing all day.

Julie and Robert open up the front door to greet me with their warm genteel accents.   “Welcome.   You must be Phoenix.   We’ve been expecting you.    Everyone is just sitting down to dinner.   Let’s get you inside.”

I smile on the inside.   But I’m too tired to lift the corners of my mouth.

With my trekking poles, I hoist myself up, slowly, one step at a time.  

I find a spot next to the rocking chair on the painted gray wooden porch floor.  I unbuckle my pack; and it thwumps to the ground like a soggy dead body.   My poles scatter in opposite directions.   And a puddle of water starts to collect around my shoes, once brightly colored but now a thick clump of black mud.   

I look like I’ve been swimming in a bog.   My grey pants and orange shirt are stuck to my legs and torso.   They are covered in grass seeds, evidence of the last two miles of unmanicured Trail through a rainy Virginia hay field.  

“Do you have a towel I can borrow?” I ask Julie and Robert as I untie my shoes.  “I would hate to get this all over your beautiful house.”   I peel off one wool sock and then another.  They schlop in an awkward pile.

The kitchen is filled with chatty hikers talking excitedly about the Smoky Mountain hiker who recently was nipped in the butt by a hungry bear going for her toiletry bag.   Foxtrot, a familiar face, lights up.  She gestures a hello when she sees me pass by in the hallway.

Robert is walking way too fast for me, as he shows me through the hostel.   I am in pain.   I have three new blisters.  My knees no longer bend as they should.  And the weight of my tired body sparks jolts through all 33 joints in my feet and ankles.

Even dinner is too much work for me.  All I can think about is collapsing into a real bed after a hot shower and clean loaner-clothes.    

The romance of the Appalachian Trail is worn.   The daily grind of through-hiking is here.