Five years ago this morning I was waking up at a place in Maryland called Raven Rock Shelter, along the Appalachian Trail. I’d been having a off-and-on kind relationship with water that weekend.

On Saturday I’d hiked into the Washington Monument State Park in a heavy rain. And it’d been raining all day. I think that really was the most rain I had on that hike. Everything I carried was thoroughly soaked. But, very fortunately, Ann had arranged to meet me there in the park and whisked me off to a nearby motel where we spent pretty much all evening on my gear: washing and drying clothes, doing a little sewing, and using the room’s hair dryer trying to dry out my shoes.

Sunday the 28th dawned sunny and dry. Back on the Trail I ran into a hiker who asked whether I had any water to share. (Ah, if only you’d been here yesterday!) My trail journal says that he first asked if I had a water filter he could use since he hadn’t brought one with him. Turns out he didn’t have a suitable container to attach my filter to. So I offered him the 32 ounces of water I had with me, and he emptied that into the container he did have. He thanked me, I wrote, “because the 64 oz. he already had might not get him to the shelter.”

I ended up being a little short of water that evening at Raven Rock, though I had enough to make supper and have some for the morning. And I could easily fill up at a park that was 5 miles ahead right on the Mason-Dixon Line.

The evening of Monday the 29th I stayed at the Tumbling Run Shelter(s) in Pennsylvania. It is one on the very few spots along the Trail that has two separate shelters, and a covered picnic table. It feels like a resort when you get there.

I noted in my journal that as I wrote I was listening to a conversation of 5 fellow hikers, 3 American girls and 2 German guys. They had taken up with each other some ways back and were hiking together. I’d first met them the night before at Raven Rock. Here they were discussing whether or not to keep going after only 13.2 miles. And how far they wanted to go each day for the next few. And on and on. I wrote that “They may just discuss it so long that it doesn’t make sense to walk on tonight.” Which is what happened in the end.

Reaching a consensus in a situation like that is difficult — and one of the reasons I prefer to hike alone. I don’t know how long they stayed together as a “tramily” (the term many hikers use these days for ‘trail family,’ that is, the ad hoc group of people you intentionally hike with for some period of time, maybe even for most of the Trail). But they were at least still together on 1 July when I last saw them at Pine Grove Furnace State Park where we took part in a time-honored hiker ritual of eating a half gallon of ice cream to mark the half-way point along the Trail. That’s half a gallon of ice cream each. Some people find it easier than others.

I keep saying that long distance hiking is like life (or it could be the other way around, I guess). It includes family, hard work, struggle and progress, meeting people, helping strangers, sharing experiences, losing touch, relaxing, time together and time apart, and the occasional ice cream.