The first 150

This is a very different hike than last year. In the 12 days I've been out, I've met 9 southbound thru-hikers. Northbound day 12? Probably 50. 

Katahdin was numbingly hard. The 100 Mile Wilderness? Here's an excerpt from my journal:

"Today, I ate wild blueberries and cried. I wept."

Now, I'm moving through rural Maine. 

Things are better, emotionally. Physically, I'm starting to get tired and my shoes are wrecked, but I want to keep going until after the Whites. Then I'll take a day off and be at peace about it.

Maine is water. Wide, shiny lakes and green drowned Ophelia ponds and orange pools and amber rivers. 

Maine is blueberry, bunchberry, clintonia and lichen spread thin over pockmarked rocks, and spruce and fir and deciduous invaders.

Maine is bogs, which are pretty in the cold thunder because you have nothing else to lose at that point; you can see the slimy inside-out-umbrella mushrooms and the Venus flytrap plants. Otherwise, they're just bugs, and you see nothing.

Mosquitoes, the used heroin needle of the insect world, are the dominant life form. Does anyone know if blood type factors in to how often you get bit? Because I get bit alarmingly often. There's not DEET enough. I also have been theorizing that southwest Maine may have a wormhole that allows every mosquito that ever was and ever will be to exist together; this to explain the size disparity of my hunters.

There are roots over the trail like octopus tentacles. There are climbs straight up, where you have to play a "Would I Rather" game:

Would I rather lose my trekking pole or die?

Would I rather break my ankle or die?

When it rains, the world is gone. There is nothing except the tree in front of you. I've gotten so disoriented that I've lost the trail and ended up hiking about .5 north.

I'm at mile 151. Maine ends at 280 something. 

And honestly?

I'm just ready for the Whites.