Author: pat Stith

Trail Directions. Wisdom, Too

These blazes are telling hikers,, Come on. This is the trail.
Start climbing, boys and girls.

When I hiked the Appalachian Trail five years ago I kept a sharp eye out for white blazes, the trail markers hikers follow from Georgia to Maine.  They were usually painted on trees or, sometimes, fence posts. Pretty often, on boulders.

Almost all of the trail is in the woods, in the Appalachian mountains. That why it’s sometimes called the “green tunnel.” But the blazes, thousands of them, are not the only signs out there the woods.

Only 1,914 miles to go.
Only 1,914 miles to go, the sign says.

There are signs identifying shelters and roads, signs telling you how far you’ve come — and how far it is to the next shelter.  Or, sometimes, how far it is to Mount Katahdin, the end of the trail in Maine.

Believe it or not, there are a few grave markers close by the trail —  in the middle of nowhere.  Two graves were for soldiers from the North Carolina mountains who fought for the North during the Civil War.  They were ambushed when they came home on leave.

They didn't have to tell me twice.
They didn’t have to tell me twice.

There are also signs warning hikers about rowdy bears and washed out bridges.  The bridge signs were helpful but I didn’t need a sign telling me to give bears a wide berth.

Occasionally there are weather signs, like the one beside the trail just before you begin climbing New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, the highest peak in Northeastern United States at 6,288 feet.

Mount Washington has some truly awful weather.

The sign says, "STOP The area ahead has the worst weather in America.  Many have died there from exposure., even in the summer. Turn back now if the weather is bad." Temper and I climbed it on a beautiful day.

The sign says: “STOP The area ahead has the worst weather in America.  Many have died there from exposure., even in the summer. Turn back now if the weather is bad.” Temper and I were lucky.  We climbed Mount  Washington on a beautiful day.

Until mid-1990’s it held the record for the fastest wind gust ever recorded on the surface of the Earth — 231 mph.   It’s also one of the coldest places on Earth, with wind chills that have approached 100 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

The Mount Washington sign isn’t hype — there have been a total of 161 fatalities on that mountain since 1849, according to NH Magazine, about half the number who have died trying to climb Mount Everest.

Ten days to hike 100 miles?
Ten days to hike 100 miles?

But some signs, one in particular at the entrance to what they call the “100 mile wilderness” in Maine, greatly overstate the difficulties ahead.

The sign says: “CAUTION  There are no places to obtain supplies or get help until Abol Bridge 100 miles north.  Do not attempt this section unless you have a minimum of 10 days supplies and are fully equipped.  This is the longest wilderness section of the entire A.T. and its difficulty should not be underestimated.  Good Hiking!”

I hiked the “100 mile wilderness” in five days, when I was 73.

The arrows point straight AND right.
Do I go straight ahead or do I go right?

I’ve forgotten where I saw, and photographed, my favorite sign of the whole trip.  But ask any thru-hiker, it’s truth is universal and it would be right at home anywhere on the trail.

The A.T. intersects hundreds of other trails and most of those intersections are well marked.  But not all, far from it.  Sometimes it take a while to figure out which way to go.  This sign offered helpful advice. It says, “When in doubt, the A.T. always goes up.”

Truer words were never spoken.

 

 

Whitey Mozingo

Whitey Mozingo was no Sunday School teacher, far from it, but he was a good interview — he had an interesting way of putting things. 

Whity Mozingo
Whitey Mozingo

When I met Mozingo I was a newspaper reporter working on a story about cigarette smuggling.  He was in the Wake County Jail awaiting transfer to a federal prison to begin serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to conspiracy to dynamite the home of a district attorney who was after him, the murder of a witness who had turned on him, armed robbery of cigarette smugglers, and conspiracy to obstruct interstate commerce in connection with cigarette hijacking.

In the early 1970’s Mozingo was the head of a gang that hijacked cigarettes being smuggled out of North Carolina, where the tax was only two cents a pack, to high tax northern states, sometimes by the Mafia.

* * *

“You will never find a guy on the street that believes in being a gentleman no more than I do,” Mozingo told me.  “I dress thataway and if I tell you I’ll see you tomorrow at 10 o’clock, at five minutes to 10, I’ll be going in your door. I mean, I’ve always lived up to my word. If I say, ‘Pat, I’m going to kick your ass next time I see you,’ next time I run into you, you look for that. Everything I do I try to do in a business way.”

* * *

Mozingo, 45, said he quit school in the eighth grade because he was making so much money working as a lookout for bootleggers.

“My job was to watch the path, me and my dog. You see the liquor still is back here in the woods, I’m watching the path that goes to the liquor still.”

He said he was paid in whiskey, which he sold.

“Saturdays, you know, we’d go into the bank and I’d get my money changed into one dollar bills, you know, so I could sport a roll. Then I got to making so much money, hell, I couldn’t see it. I quit school.”

* * *

Mozingo said he rarely took time off from his “hustle,” which is what he called whatever criminal activity he was pursuing. But he liked to fish and one Saturday, he said, he and a buddy went deep sea fishing. Everybody on the boat put a dollar in the pot as a prize for whoever caught the biggest fish. Mozingo said he caught a big one but not quite big enough. So he dropped lead sinkers down the mouth of his fish — and won. Then he gave his fish to the man he had cheated so when he got home and cut that fish open, cleaned it, he would know that he had been had by Whitey Mozingo.

“Yes, sir, I sneaked the money out of the pot with a hunk of lead.”

* * *

Mozingo said he raised pit bulls, fighting dogs.

He said he named them after outlaws – Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Al Capone.

“Everybody names a dog for some reason, you know, you got a reason for naming ‘Spot,’ he’s got spots on him, that’s the reason you named him ‘Spot.’”

“I gave mine bad names, wanting them to be bad dogs.”

* * *

“A lot of people have asked me why, you know, didn’t I go into business. It’s just one of those things. I guess maybe I got off on the wrong foot. Of course, I’ve seen a hell of a lot of times I could have gotten on the other foot, but things just don’t come fast enough on the other foot.”

Money? I asked.

“Yea. Once you get use to it, Pat, I mean, it’s one of those things. Because if you ever eat ham, ham, ham, damn if you don’t despise fatback.”