These posts are quickly falling into a pattern: Fas Co goes somewhere cool, does foolish things that cause his plans to come undone, and then drags himself out of the woods, a broken and battered shell of his former self.

Take, for example, my trip to Joyce Kilmer Wilderness area in Nantahala National Forest. This is a distant, almost forgotten place in the western corner of North Carolina. It is one of the only remaining tracts of virgin forest in the Eastern US, and the oldest designated Wilderness area in the United States. It is incredibly beautiful, but also damn far from pretty much everywhere.

I left for Joyce Kilmer around noon in Charlottesville, VA. Ten hours later, I arrived at the Horse Cove campground in a profoundly humid creek bed just outside the forest. It wasn’t easy to find a suitably flat parking spot (when you’re sleeping in the back of your pickup truck, flat ground is essential), but eventually I did, and slipped into a damp and dreamless sleep.

My plan for the next day was to pack my gear and start hiking, but I quickly realized I had left some important items in Charlottesville. For one, my camera charger seemed to have disappeared. For another, I couldn’t find my synthetic hiking shirt. Most devastating, however, was something I couldn’t hike without: my map.

My camera still had some battery, so I figured it would be ok. As for my shirt, I had to make do with a cotton shirt, and one out of the dirty laundry section of my suitcase. No sense in dirtying a clean shirt on a backpacking trip, I thought, pleased at my foresight. I hopped in my car, and headed for Robbinsville, NC (the closest town) to find a map.

I doubt many of you have ever been to Robbinsville (population 710), but imagine a tiny, isolated mountain town and you’ve pretty much got the idea. I had no cell service in the town, and so I went searching for wifi, with which I would be able to find somewhere that sells maps. I found a McDonalds, and decided to combine my searching with a McMuffin and those incredible fried breakfast potato discs.

I’m not the most observant guy out there, but as I sat down with my fried discs and McMuffin, I noticed there was an odd change had come over the atmosphere in the McDonalds. It seemed quieter than when I walked in, and people seemed to be looking at me and muttering. I tried to overhear some of their conversations, but the Robbinsville accent is completely indecipherable to a yankee like me, even one who’s lived in North Carolina for 10 of my 23 years.

I didn’t have any luck finding nearby outfitters or outdoors stores on the internet, but as I sat in my booth I noticed the Graham County Tourist office was just across the street. I was getting a little uneasy in the McDonald’s, and so I though it was time to make a change.

There were two people in the tourist office – an grandmotherly woman and a kid of 12 or 13 who showed all the symptoms of being forcibly sent to the tourist office to help grandma. I walked in, and though the grandmotherly woman wasn’t exactly unfriendly, there seemed to be a certain awkwardness in the air. She seemed uneasy, and that made me feel uneasy. Only the lethargic child seemed unaffected.

Eventually, I bought a new trail map, and escaped. As I was driving back, reflecting on how odd my time in Robbinsville had been, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps the problem was my personal appearance. I hadn’t shaved or showered in a couple days, my boots were muddy, and though my Obama/Biden 2008 shirt brought out the blue in my eyes nicely, it was both covered in tiki-torch fuel stains, and suggested that I was both dirty and supportive of Barack Obama. Perhaps, I thought, Graham County (which Romney won with 70% of the vote) wasn’t really the best place to sport a filthy Obama shirt. Well, you live and you learn.

Anyway, I began my hike with the Joyce Kilmer National Memorial Trail. Joyce Kilmer, as you know, was poet and soldier who died in WWI, but is most famous for his (I think) trite and silly poem “Trees,” as well as his rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. Read the poem, and tell me that you don’t agree that “poems are made by fools like me”. (An interesting side note – my grandfather once sent out a personal Christmas card with a picture of him cutting down a tree. On the inside, he claimed that only God can make a chainsaw, which besides being a questionable assertion, shows an unusual interpretation of the purpose of Christmas cards.)

Walking through the forest was an incredible experience. This land, by virtue of its remoteness, a well-timed bankruptcy, and the construction of a reservoir, has never been logged. There are 400 year old poplars throughout – each as big around as a car and often more than 100 feet tall. The understory is damp and dark, covered in ferns and moss, and the giant, ancient trees create a somber, reflective atmosphere. This is a tiny section of forest primeval – the vast forest that once stretched across almost all of the east coast. That we allowed this forest to be almost entirely extinguished must be one of our people’s greatest crimes.

I finished the loop sobered, and began my hike proper. I had an extensive plan, but in the first few miles of my hike along the Naked Ground Trail, I realized that my knee was not going to allow it. (As you remember, I originally hurt my knee on the brutal descent from Mt. Mitchell). As usual, I only realized this several miles from the trailhead, having climbed far too high to climb back down again.

I stopped to take a couple ibuprofen, only to discover that I had left my pill bottle at my truck. Damn. My knee was killing me, and since there was no way I could head all the way back down, I could only hike up to the ridge, camp there, and head down in the morning. The prospect of doing this without painkillers filled me with dread. But, of course, I had no choice.

I dragged myself to the top of the ridge and set up camp in a pleasant, grassy site overlooking the valley I’d just climbed out of. It was a nice spot, but as I quickly realized, it had a major drawback – a profusion of salt-crazed bees.

Sweat bees, as Wikipedia has just informed me, form their own family (Halictidae) within the order Hymenoptera, and I can assure you, it is the most irritating family of them all. These bees want salt over all else, and they want it from you. To get it, they gnaw off a small circle of your salty skin, leaving a tiny, itchy red spot. This wouldn’t be so bad if these bees simply went in and did their business, but instead they swarm directly in front of one’s face, occasionally making sorties to try and scrape a little salt out of the inside of their innocent victim’s ears. This sounds somewhat like a lawn mower starting next to the eardrum, and tends to make me a little crazy.

At first, I tried to ignore them. Then, I tried to transcend them, meditating in the hope that I could achieve a zen-like peace with the insects. I sat in my hammock and ommmed for nearly a minute, which I think shows real mental fortitude. My meditation, admittedly, ended with a primal scream and the nearly instant murder of 7 insect souls, but I still felt as though I’d achieved something.

I then decided that the only solution was the final solution – complete annihilation. I reasoned that the insects were easy to kill and finite; they were many, but I had a lot of time. I sat in my hammock and killed every insect that flew into my line of sight. The bugs were quick, but incautious. They had apparently never heard Shakespeare’s assertion that the better part of valor is discretion. After twenty minutes of killing an insect or two every ten seconds, the swarm was down to a few timid survivors. My sanity was perserved, and I slept quite well.

I awoke the next morning to a lovely sunrise, contrasting with my feeling of dread at hiking down the mountain.

The hike down was terrible, but not as terrible as I imagined. It was a long, slow, disappointing grind, and I was sad to have missed so much of Joyce Kilmer, but when my knee heals, I am eager to return.