Re: Re[5]: [at-l] AMC Hospitality

[goinggoinggone@webtv.net]

Just a tad of historical perspective...

   I walked from Springer>Katahdin in 1972, and from Katahdin>MA in the
late fall/winter of 1973, and although the through-hiker population was
sparse back then, those of us who did meet and relate about the
hutsystem pretty much felt like they ( hutpersons/employees ) didn't
like us at all ( and we didn't smell that much worse than them ). I
remember that someone ( not I ) figured out that AMC stood for ********
who Make Chow, ( loosely ryhmes with Paytolls or 
  Go Now ).
      It eventually occured to me that the hutpersons' attitudes were
just class-related: most of them were ( and they made sure you knew )
students at ivy league or seven sisters schools, and most of the through
hikers that I knew ( all six of them ) were people that had actually had
to work and save to be able to hike that far ( yogiing was unknown to us
). Well, there was one rich guy from Harvard but he got the neatest
baked treats in his drops that he shared more than generously, so he was
cool ( Hope your liver survived that summer, Charley ) Then, there were
a few guys taking the back way to Canada, and much like the Nippon
soldiers who popped up in the Asian jungles 30 years after WW2 had
ended, I wonder if some of these soldiers of conscience are still
hiking, and cursing their random birth into the class of war-fodder, as
opposed to that of the class of the deferred hutperson/fratboy. ( No,
that's not class-envy, that's just an off topic memory of some buds who
got blown to bits for nothing because they were born on the wrong
immigration-list ).      Anyway, the hutperson prefix/phrase that sticks
in my memory is " MY mountains ", or " OUR mountains " and it was
seemingly used to put us sloggers on notice that we were interlopers on
AMC ( rhymes with: you'll never be as good as me ) property. It was in
the White Mtns. that I actually first experienced someone literally
looking down their nose at me: I thought they had injured their neck for
a minute until I realized what they were really doing, and my second
reaction was that they were just racist ( I had just introduced myself )
and had probably never seen an Hispanic person carrying a backpack. But,
this hutperson/womyn , who was really attractive in every other way,
actually asked me how I was liking HER mountains: I was stunned, but in
all fairness, at that moment my speechlessness was more a result of her
long legs in those Limmers. I don't remember what I stammered in
response, but meeting hiker-babes back then was so rare that even a
surly demeanor didn't dull the wonder at actually seeing a woman-hiker.
But back to the point-at-hand: I suspect that the elitist tradition has
been perpetuated, judging from the gist of a number of posts; I can
imagine that the hutpersons that I met in the 70's eventually sat their
progeny down for the AMC talk: " now, you need to be prepared, Mummy and
Daddy are counting on you:  when you and Muffy get to be hutpersons,
you'll see these people called through-hikers, but they're not like
us....

No, indeed we are not...

<Al>