Day Six

Day Six

I got up early, read my book for a while, then got tired and went back to bed.  Woke up just in time for breakfast at the lodge at 8am.  Breakfast was some sort of frittata, potatoes, bacon and blueberry muffins.  I had a conference call at 8:30 with my partners on a funding issue for one of our investments.  There was a very weak cell phone signal from a signal amplifier in the basement of the lodge.  To make the call I had to go outside and stand next to one of the basement windows.

As I tried to figure out whether I could get a cell phone signal for my business call, I realized that I have been unreachable for a good part of this month, which has been both a blessing and a curse.  Earlier this month I spent a week backpacking on the John Muir Trail in California.  The John Muir Trail runs down the spine of the Sierra Nevada Mountains from Yosemite to Mount Whitney and, after you leave Yosemite, there is virtually no cell phone coverage for the entire route.  After hiking the John Muir Trail I was back in the office for a week and then left for Maine where, of course, I had no cell phone coverage for the first three days of this vacation on Matinicus.

While it is damned inconvenient to be incommunicado, it is also a great luxury.  When you really cannot be available to any jackass who has your cell phone number (note: this is NOT a reference to my beloved partners and staff at CapitalWorks) you are free.  There is nothing you can do to solve problems, stay in the loop, delegate, update, whatever.  Therefore you just let it go.  My current situation at Gorman Chairback was a little different.  If I stood on one leg facing north next to the basement window of the main lodge I could get a weak signal.  This allowed me to read daily emails and make outbound calls if I scheduled the time to do so.  It was a 'tweener--I wasn't out of touch but communication was unreliable and somewhat complicated.

After my conference call we got organized, put on sunscreen, loaded up our daypacks and set out for the Gulf Hagas Rim Trail that, as you might suspect, ran along the Gulf Hagas River.  We had left a car at the end of the trail to avoid a boring walk back on the main logging road back to camp.  The trail was beautiful and was often several hundred feet above the river, providing breathtaking views which, in Ann's case, was not always a good thing.  She is a bit acrophobic and was clearly not interested in leaning over the edges of the cliffs. 

The Gulf Hagas Trail began on the Appalachian Trail for the first mile then cut left along the river.  We were approximately 80 miles from the end of the Appalachian Trail at Mount Katahdin.  We met a number of through-hikers (people walking the entire trail from Georgia to Maine). 

Gulf Hagas Trail

The geology was mostly shale, which had been turned almost perfectly vertical in some ancient cataclysmic geological event.  Fred explained an interesting geological phenomenon that had always puzzled me.  The river cut through hundreds of feet of shale that should have stopped the flow of water and redirected it in another direction.  How had the river ever established such an implausible channel, cutting through tons of rock?  The answer, Fred told us, was that the river was always more or less in its established channel and the earth had pushed up slowly around it over millions of years allowing it to eat away the rising rock slowly while the surrounding rock continued to rise.

Ann

In total we probably hiked 7 miles, taking our time, stopping at overlooks and having lunch.  The hike took us a total of about 6 hours.  We got back to camp around 4pm.  We established our afternoon routine for the remainder of the trip that day--showers, naps, lukewarm cocktails on the porch (we did not have a refrigerator in the cabin), family style dinner at 6pm.  The chef was off that day and the staff decided to make us steak fajitas with homemade tortillas.  I thought the dinner was terrific but the ladies, who tend toward a non-traditional form of vegetarianism (bacon and fish are generally considered vegetables, french fries are not) did not approve.  The staff made up for it with one of the best pies I have ever had--a multi-berry pie with delicious, thin crispy crust.  It was made by the sole female staff member.  We made a point of saving room for anything this woman baked for the rest of our visit--she was in a completely different class from the other meatheads in the kitchen.

We hung out a little bit in the lodge and chatted with the metrosexual, gregarious but mildly annoying dentist from Cambridge.  Cindy pointed out that dentists generally have poor conversational skills since the jabber away while you are incapacitated with novocaine and cotton balls in your mouth.  They misinterpret "Shut up!" for "Please tell me more!". 

Got to bed early and slept like a log.