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Hikin' Nine to Five: The trail draws out hikers' creativity Appalachia, December 2002 Ruxtable composed the following parody of "Shenandoah" (set far from that river). The name of another river forced an absurd rhyme and a rather long stretch to the hiker's itinerary. This was posted at Atwell Hilton (New Hampshire) on Aug. 24, 1989: Oh, four-wheel-drive truck Another parody, another "river" — by Dancer, a hiker from Iowa whom I actually met on the trail, more than a hundred miles north of Eagle's Nest, Pa., where he recorded this on Oct. 21, 1996: Row Row Row your boat The trail name of the next contributor suggests that he, like the Rhymin' Worm, may have written more than one poem on his way through the Whites. This one was recorded on Mount Madison (New Hampshire) on Aug. 23, 1985:
The range of styles of these poems and songs is limited only by the imagination of the hiker. The following Appalachian Trail "song" would not work very well as a song to hike to (maybe as a song to dance to, if you like that kind of dancing). It was posted at High Top Hut (Virginia) on May 13, 2000:
The author of the above could have simply whined about the bugs. By creating a poem about them, the hiker vanquished those bugs and, at the same time, created an amusement for the next group to come through. The data book is well known to all thru-hikers on the Appalachian Trail. The fact that a hiker would compose a song about it says something about the passion and feelings that surround the subject. The next song, posted on Aug. 9, 1991, at Atwell Hilton (New Hampshire) is an annotation to another hiker's complaint about some trivial inaccuracy in that usually reliable reference work and contains the following introduction: "I truly can't believe it. I loved my data book so much I actually wrote a song about it once." God bless my Data Book. In the second stanza, where the poet seems to degrade the spirit of the piece with a privy reference, he is merely referring to the place where many hikers do their reading. I will conclude this brief anthology with a Robert Frost parody, posted on Aug. 27, 1997, at Old Job (Vermont) not far from Frost's home. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and I — The next hiker wrote in the margin, "This guy is a real pain in the ass." Well, the same could have been said of Frost, and probably was. From this distance, one can perhaps guess why the annotator said such a nasty thing about the trail poet, for the poem might have been a means of scolding another hiker about an improper hiking technique. He does sound arrogant, though, doesn't he? Shelter registers with good poems and songs are spread very far apart — many days, many miles. Two years' worth of registers might not yield up even one good limerick. You might have to hike a long way on the AT to come across a masterpiece. If you're not into long-distance hiking but are still curious about the culture, the Dartmouth Outing Club archives, located in the Dartmouth College Special Collections Library in Hanover, New Hampshire, is a good place to go for further examples; another is the AMC Library at 5 Joy St. in Boston. A third source for songs and poems that I collected off the trail is the archive at the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club (PATC) headquartered in Vienna, Va. —Roger Sheffer teaches English at Minnesota State University, Mankato. A published fiction writer and a frequent contributor to Appalachia, he is currently at work on a book about the wit and whimsy he has found in registers along the Appalachian Trail.
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