Re: [at-l] AMC Hospitality

["Bucky" <mfuller@somtel.com>]

Al wrote:

> 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) 

When I passed by the huts last year on various hikes, I found it
amusing to study the "class" photos of the croo, especially
at the Lake of the Clouds hut. They suggest a definite change in
character somewhere in the mid 70s. Starting from around that time
and moving to the present day, you can see the croo become less
like clean-cut, flannel-wearing ivy league fratboys and more like,
well, extroverted, drama school, AmeriCorps flunkies. Perhaps not
coincidentally, that's also the time when you start seeing girls
in the "croo."

>                                      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.

Interesting. The possible draft connection never occurred to me. 

> (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. 

Thatsa no good. Surely today they're of a more collectivist
and environmentally respectful mindset than to claim ownership
of the mountains.

>                                   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 would have told her that they're pleasant to look at, but
anything more than a handful is a waste.

>        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...

--
mfuller@somtel.com; Northern Franklin County, Maine         $
The Constitution is the white man's ghost shirt.  }>:-/> --->


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