Breakfast Buffet

I took a few more steps, felt my stomach grumble, and tightened the waist strap on my backpack. In the three-ish miles between last night’s campsite and the highly anticipated Pinkham Notch Visitor Center, I repeated this ritual three times. I once read that people encountering lean times had tightened their belts, and they even drilled in new holes when they had to go tighter still. Metaphorical or not, belt tightening was something people talked about doing to ward off hunger, so, I gave it a shot.

It didn’t work.

Had I known I was mere minutes from the best meal of my life, perhaps my stomach would have been more understanding.

Hiking this bit of trail before anybody else that morning, I caught every spiderweb that had been put up overnight. Fresh off a spat of spider-based nightmares, I typically would have jumped up and down, thrashing to shake any angry web residents off my shoulder. Today, I just wanted to get there, so I just kept walking.

The central conceit of camping is that artificial deprivation creates laudable suffering. By putting my life into a 75 liter backpack, I hoped to set out into the woods, turn off my phone, and march uphill, then downhill, then left, then right. I would escape the physical and spiritual weight of gratuitous possessions. Simplicity would clear the fog from my vision, allow me to reconnect with nature, and help me move past a recent heartbreak. Perhaps, too, I would gain a greater appreciation of the abundance around me.

I would, the plan was, transcend.

With the next belt tightening, I laughed ruefully at my naive arrogance. The night before, my stove had run out of gas while I made dinner. This was both my fault and avoidable.

Before this 10-day hike across New Hampshire, I did enough research to find the right bus to take from New York, the right campgrounds to sleep at, and a secondary pick up spot in case I didn’t make it as far as I wanted to. At no point did I discover that it would undoubtedly rain or that I should think twice about relying on quinoa for every dinner.

In fact, I thought I had made quite a clever decision by choosing the only grain that I knew needed no draining after cooking. Never mind that quinoa is a seed, I thought from the comfort of my apartment, the only thing worse than a crowded summer subway is draining grains in the woods. So, this singular criterion guided me toward a misguided decision. That quinoa is healthy and cheaper than dehydrated backpacker meals were at best secondary considerations.

I overlooked the half hour of simmering the cooking required, and I failed to convert the 12 ounces of gas in my stove’s canister into burn time. Considering most folks can’t say how many tablespoons are in a cup, I wonder whether Big Camping Stove ought to consider translating the volumes of their canisters into minutes. At the very least, they could add a label that reads “not enough gas.”

So, the evening before, I had found myself shaken in the wake of a harrowing walk over Mount Washington, the tallest peak in New England. I crouched over sore knees, desperately trying to shield a stove from the wind as its flame sputtered toward anticlimax. I had planned to give myself an extra broth cube as a salty reward for my frigid hike through howling winds and sideways rain, but poor planning stymied me. I’d heard that Mount Washington is the home of the fastest wind recorded by man, and a haphazard-but-giant cross that appeared to me out of the mist at one point seemed to confirm its dangers. Wet sleeping bag aside, I made it down in one piece. I was tired enough to quit and set up camp here, a few miles before the next road, a couple thousand feet higher than planned, colder than anticipated.

Abandoning my uncooked quinoa after a couple bites, I found four granola bars in my food bag. Hopped up on the sugar from this candy dinner, I spent the next couple hours awake in my hammock, gently swinging in a stiff wind, wearing all my warmest clothes, thinking myself in circles about how I would wake up frozen to death.

The legality of sleeping at a stealth spot—an unofficial but previously-trodden campsite roughly 200 feet from the trail—was never clarified in my kindergarten-level research. Each time I stealthed, I slept with the paranoid fear of being shaken awake by a ranger demanding what, exactly? the $5 I would have paid to sleep at an established site? When I awoke for the sixth time, it was morning, and exhaustion replaced the panic I’d felt each time some nature sound or other had jolted me awake in the night.

I skipped breakfast as I packed up. After eight days of hiking and an unplanned, unsatisfying binge, I was low on stove-free food. I was pretty sure the visitors’ lodge I headed toward would have something to eat, but maybe I would get there right after a school group cleaned them fresh out of snacks! The Appalachian Trail, after all, is one of the most highly trafficked hiking trails in the United States, so presumably these people deplete the snacks every now and then.

The trail stretches some 2,200 miles across the US’s East Coast from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. Whoever pays for its upkeep can hardly afford 2,200 mile markers, so understanding one’s location with precision is not always easy. This three miles therefore could have been five or could have been one, but either way the time between my chilly wakeup and my arrival at the Pearly Gates of Pinkham Notch felt longer than I might have liked.

Out front, they had one of those meatpacking scales that works like a giant key retractor. The hook hanging from the dial looked sturdy enough to weigh my pack but not for me to dangle on the end. I might have liked to see whether I’d lost any weight, but I hadn’t thought to do a pregame weigh-in anyway.

I unclipped my tightened waist strap and hung my pack from the hook. It clocked in at a whopping 43 pounds, even though I’d eaten most of my food, used up all my gas, and was low on water. The thru hikers, those making the 2,200 mile trip from Georgia to Maine, I met along the way said they tried to limit themselves to about 30 pounds of weight, with full food and water.

Not only had I failed to provision myself, but also I had failed to untether myself from my worldly possessions: I carried at least 20 pounds worth of gratuitous earthly tethers. Rather than beat myself up for my materialism, I chalked up the differential to the water still saturating the Appalachian Mountain Club playing cards I had bought for my dad back at the Mizpah Hut.

As a twelve-year-old summer camper, I had once spent a night at the Mizpah Hut, one of the eight huts that the AMC operates in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. People booking far enough in advance can spend a night in a bed, eat two delicious meals, and buy snacks or playing cards at one of eight huts across the Whites. Thru hikers can sleep on the floor for free if they lend a hand in the evening’s cleaning. On my seventh night, I had slept on the floor of the Lakes of the Clouds hut, just before the Mount Washington summit, among some 20-odd thru hikers. At age twelve, I’d thought the hut smelled funny and the thru hikers had awfully long beards.

The Lakes of the Clouds hut sits on one of the highest points on the Appalachian Trail, above the tree line amidst a rare and fragile landscape that has a fancier name than “diet tundra.” The weather can be unforgiving, and stealth camping is strictly banned. As a result, groups of thru hikers pile up on the floor at the Lakes of the Clouds hut whenever the weather turns and thwarts their plans to summit the mountain.

While the guests ate dinner, I chatted with some new friends in a dark corner. We, the dirtbags, cooked our own dinners outside in the rain and did our best to stay out of the way. Once the guests retired to their princess-and-the-pea mattresses, the hut’s leader would give us the go-ahead to roll out our sleeping bags and nod off on the luxe floor. I’d originally booked a spot in The Dungeon, a set of 10 bunks inside the bad-weather shelter underneath the hut, but I had traded it for two granola bars to a guy named Earth Surfer who hiked with his German shepherd. They don’t allow dogs inside the hut.

Most of the guests were out for only a couple nights, so they gave little thought to staying up late or skimping on sleep. They lounged around in their fresh cotton shirts with their full stomachs, giving no thought to the smelly, scraggly folks in the dark corner. The northbound thru hikers, however, were all several months into their hikes, and they had learned to value an early-to-bed, early-to-rise ethic. Their frustration at being kept up until 9:30 pm, the wee hours of the hiker morning, outweighed any jealousy for the guests’ comfort.

Fuming about the ease with which the guests stole our blissful sleep, I found out which side I was on. A 10 day hike is no walk in the park, but it’s a far cry from four months. Nevertheless, I had week’s worth of grime and grit, and I had become a familiar enough face to some thru hikers that they welcomed me into the dim corner, swapping snacks for jokes. I got to know a college student, an underwater welder, a teacher, and a host of other characters whom I had seen intermittently over the last few days.

That evening’s quinoa seemed altogether less satisfying than the lasagna served to the guests, but I felt whole as the welder regaled me of stories of bears in North Carolina, and a woman named Honey Badger told me how she had never camped before her first night on the trail back in Georgia. Don, who had just finished high school, and Lisa, who hugged me without sharing a single personal detail, whispered to me how the guests paid for a tenth as much satisfaction as we got for free.

At Pinkham Notch, I heaved my pack off the scale, asking myself what that older gentleman named Swimmer hiking all this way with just one shirt would think of my excess. The weight felt heavier than ever as I dragged my pack to the lodge, where I planned to balk at the prices. Was I really hungry enough for a $4 granola bar? Could I be reasonably provision myself for 36 hours at a gift shop?

As I considered the ideal ratio between blueberry crisp and chocolate brownie, I heard the rumbling of a metal gate, a sound uncannily familiar from arriving at my college cafeteria just before opening. I looked over, eagerly. I couldn’t believe it. A breakfast buffet!

$10, including tax, and whatever you could fit would be yours.

Too sore to accelerate, I imitated a sprint and plopped myself third in line. I loaded a tray: three sausage patties, two pancakes, two packets of maple syrup, a scoop and a half of instant scrambled eggs, five strips of bacon, a glass of orange juice, a cup of coffee, four small blueberry muffins. I wolfed and scarfed, my face inches from my tray. The syrup on the sausage created a sweet-and-salty synthesis that no artisanal bacon ice cream has ever approached. Never one for mass-produced egg product, I found these scrambled eggs fluffier than pillows, lighter than a soufflé. The muffins rivaled the finest financier I had ever encountered. And the bacon. The pancakes! It was too much. After just two sips of this watery coffee, I felt a rush of pure life. I couldn’t believe my luck.

I all but licked my plate clean, then I stood up to grab seconds. Piled high again, I returned to my seat only to find two of my friends from the Lakes hut had made themselves at home right next to me. They laughed at my ear-to-ear grin. Don patted me on the back and declared that he had never seen anybody so happy in his life.

He and Lisa had seen me eat my first course, but they knew better than to get between a wolf and his prey. They had kindly granted me time alone to pursue this religious experience and had only moved in to rekindle our friendship once they knew they wouldn’t lose any limbs. I laughed sheepishly and explained how my hunger grew out of my own poor planning. They were taking the day off, hanging around the lodge, where they had booked a night to stay—traitors—so they had all the time in the world to hear my soliloquy on the virtues of the industrial blueberry muffin, and how the ones here eclipsed even the muffins at the car dealership I went to with my parents at age ten.

I asked them how it felt to be paying guests, whether Lisa had forgotten what she told me, and whether they were worried some of my hiker smell would stick to them. They laughed it off, and they said that the hospitality wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Lisa reminded me that after their warm beds, no, we hadn’t just eaten the same meal.

They cautioned me that the next several peaks, the Wildcats, were some of the gnarliest on the whole Appalachian Trail. I would not, it seemed, make it all the way to Grafton Notch, but I could get picked up right after the Carter Dome and even walk over to the Maine border.

I sent a hasty text message to my sister, who would be my ride on the other side. Don and Lisa asked whether I was disappointed I wouldn’t achieve my goal. I took a long sip of coffee, ate another piece of bacon, and I laughed.

I had to loosen my waist strap a couple inches as I prepared to leave. My sister had asked what I wanted for my first civilized meal. I thought about asking for another buffet, but instead I said, “I don’t care, whatever you want.”