Roadblock-1 (Even Before the Trail Begins…)

Wise people on the long-distance trails warn that every thru hiker faces at least ten challenges or roadblocks on the trail when one wants to quit the trail. Lo and behold, I had my first roadblock even before I began my trail. What the heck! Now, I have even started counting these roadblocks. Here is number one! Woohooo!!

On Monday (March 22, 2021), I felt funny in the throat when I went on a 12-mile practice trail. By the time I came home, it was a full-blown sore throat. I quarantined myself, started using conventional Chloraseptic spray and took a Covid test early next day. While the test was negative, my doctor started  a standard antibiotics medication. But then things went downhill quickly. By Thursday, I was consuming a so-called “high-strength” painkiller just to get a quick one-hour window to painfully gulp down water and some soft rice. I had no idea what the xxxx was going on!

Finally, at 2 am on Friday morning, me and Anjali landed in the emergency room. There was too much pus around my right tonsil and I needed a minor surgery! The ENT specialist arrived and gave a painful numbing injection inside my throat, removed the pus, and boom, this pain was gone for good. I have not taken any painkiller since my surgery. New antibiotics have now started for the week, and my trail practice is cancelled for a few days. But most importantly, my original date of second Covid-19 dosage was cancelled and has been rescheduled to Monday (April 5).

In all this drama, unfortunately, my start date of the Appalachian Trail thru hike is postponed by ONE week. Predictions of the wise people about such ephemeral plans have come true.

You are all at the front line of my thru hike saga and are getting dragged into this unnecessary drama. But on every such twist and turn, I am learning something that I never thought was possible, and I want you to know about it please. During this saga, I learnt that the stupid action that we all do inadvertently every 15-20 seconds, called “swallowing”, can be a source of so much happiness… only if one notices it. I would have never noticed it without such an excruciating drama.

There is a Japanese proverb which says that “One should eat with one’s eyes first, then with one’s nose and then with one’s mouth”. I have savored beautiful Sashimi to my eyes content in a traditional restaurant in Tokyo, filled every one of the cells in my brain with an aroma of a fresh coffee in the on-campus coffee house at Ann Arbor, Michigan and sipped my beloved “Katachi Aamti” (tamarind based spicy dal curry from western India) allowing it to linger on my tongue forever. But all these foods eventually had to be swallowed. Along with a sip of water in hot and humid Maine, breathing of fresh air on a sharp climb in white mountains and a bite of hopeless Ramen noodles on a famished stomach, now, this swallowing motion will add to the repertoire of simple, basic actions that give me unbelievable pleasures. Who would have thought of such a possibility?

Nitin (Dadhi) Anturkar, March 30, 2021