[at-l] Re: purity

[Tim Hewitt <thewitt@fairchildsemi.com>]

I must admit that the people on the trail this last season who claimed to be
thru hikers and yet had skipped major miles of the trail really irritated me as well.

I know it's not important in the grand scheme of things, but I really wanted to
paint a big scarlet (or maybe yellow) letter on their shirts so that people we
met along the way would know they were lying. I seek truth in many things in my
life - and this affront to my personal ethics was difficult to take without
comment on more than one occasion. I found myself unable to talk with these
people in a civil manner and in my best defense, simply had to walk away. They
cheapened my hike - but only because I let them.

The only thing I really enjoyed out of all that is they were gone by the time it
got hot and dry and really hard to keep going. They did not continue the false
"thru hike" when it really got hard to do the same thing every day, and the only
ones left were those of us still actually struggling every day to go north.

Then one day, someone showed up in Vermont after skipping ahead  several hundred
miles, and told a woman he was trying to impress that he was a thru-hiker... But
that's another story. :).

-Paddler
GA>ME Class of 99
http://paddler99.trailstories.com
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