When I was in Tennessee last weekend (Oh, didn’t I mention I was in Tennessee? I’ll have to write about that one of these days…), I bought a book*. That book was AWOL on the Appalacian Trail by David Miller, a memoir of one man’s thru-hike of the AT.

I bought it because I’ve hiked a very small portion of the trail’s 2,172 miles, and look forward to doing more. I don’t know if I’ll ever do a thru-hike, but it’s one of those things that I’m maybe keen to try the next time I have five months free I’m not doing anything else with. It doesn’t seem totally unreasonable, and the idea has definite appeal to me.

In any case, I’ve just started reading it, and am really enjoying it. I’m impressed with the author’s dedication to his goal, and his honesty about his experience. I’m also appreciating the window into trail culture, a unique language and set of social conventions I’ve only gotten a small taste of in my limited time on the trail. While I’ve never hiked the whole thing (or done more than a day hikes on nearby sections), I can still empathize with Miller’s experience; his prose manages to capture the essence of being out there on mountaintops alone with your thoughts, moving between waypoints one step at a time.

Perhaps I empathized a bit too well. I read a bit before bed last night, and ended up not so much sleeping as fading in and out of a semi-conscious hallucination of walking through a slightly twisted dreamscape version of the Appalachians for a few restless hours…without the feeling of peace I normally get from spending time alone in nature. I imagine I was helped along a bit by the heat (the A/C was taking it’s time catching up to this week’s nearly 100° temperatures) or maybe by something I ate. All I know is that it was a strange and not-entirely welcome experience. Dreams are strange that way.

Also, my calves hurt. Like descending from Mary’s Rock to Thornton Gap a couple of times over hurt.

I love books, but sometimes they have strange side effects.

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* -book actually purchased in North Carolina, but that’s neither here nor there. I was straddling the state line the whole weekend.