A month ago, I reached under my bed and moved my hand around in the darkness and dust bunnies until it landed on what I was looking for. I pulled out the 11 year old iPod, caked in cat hair, the thin safety case disintegrating into pieces as I touched it. It was like that moment in Toy Story 2, where Jesse the Cowgirl doll has been forgotten under her kid’s bed, and then is discovered years later. Except in this circumstance, Sarah Mclachlan wasn’t mournfully crooning while I watched on from my couch and wept helplessly into a bowl of corn flakes.

For Christmas of 2012, my parents gave me a 5th generation iPod touch, specifically for me to bring on the Appalachian Trail for writing. For the entirety of the AT, Dumptruck and I didn’t hike with phones. Well, we had a burner flip phone that we got from a Duane Reade that had 30 minutes on it for “emergencies.” I think the only time we used it was when I called my parents to tell them that a nice stranger who gave us a hitch at a road crossing also gave us some fresh strawberries. You know, an emergency.

As I hiked the 2,200 miles of the AT, I would pull out my iPod at night, switch it on, record the mileage we’d done that day, and take notes for things I wanted to write about. Then I would nestle down into my sleeping bag and Whistle would read aloud to us from the His Dark Materials books from her neighboring tent until we fell asleep. When we got to towns to resupply, I would finish whatever writing I’d been working on, and use wifi to upload it. The iPod touch was not waterproof, and I didn’t put it in a case. I DID keep it in a freezer Ziploc bag, so there’s that. It somehow, miraculously, survived the entire trip. The opening photo of this post is from the AT, and you can see the iPod in hand, as I look over the AWOL Guide to record miles.

Not only did the iPod survive the entire AT, it survived the year afterward, bouncing around in my pocket as I trained for an ultramarathon, and subsequently ran with me on that ultramarathon. It survived the year after that, being accidentally fully submerged into a bucket of soapy used shower water, as I slipped across ice carrying said bucket, trying to get to the gray water drain we poured it in when we lived in a tiny house for 5 years and had to manually dump all of our used water. It survived being forgotten and accidentally left behind in a New Jersey beach town cheap motel, only to have the motel call me several hours after I checked out to tell me I “forgot my small, weird phone,” and I drove back to get it. It survived going to India in monsoon season with me, playing audiobooks quietly into my headphones as I drifted to sleep on the overnight train from Mumbai to Goa, lightning, thunder and sheets of rain crashing enthusiastically down around us.

For a long time, I couldn’t fall asleep without listening to the audiobook of His Dark Materials, and my iPod took up a semi-permanent residence under my pillow. Eventually, I started getting better at falling asleep without it, and I would forget it was there. One day, some years ago, it must have slipped out from under my pillow, slipped beneath the bed, and out of my mind entirely.

Recently, we decided to upgrade our phones so we’d have satellite access in case of emergencies (who knows when I’ll need to tell my family about fresh strawberries, afterall). As there are multiple 100+ mile sections as we start the PCT, it’s even more important that my phone doesn’t die before we reach each destination. Dumptruck has several recharge bricks he’s bringing with him, but that’s largely so he can take photos along the trail. I would much rather have my phone off, so that it’s charged and available if I need it. As I walked out of the phone store earlier this month, contemplating what to do, I suddenly remembered my iPod.

After I blew the dust from its tiny, wafer-thin casing, I took a deep breath and plugged it in. I didn’t imagine it would still work. After maybe 20 minutes, it was fully charged. I turned it on, and this is what I saw:

This iPod, having been off for 5 years, turned itself back on and found itself in dark void of airplane mode. Having no other info to go on, it really said “Yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and guess that it’s 7:24pm on Wednesday, December 31st, 1969.

Also, the background image is from when I went to an all-alumni high school reunion at my nerdy magnet math/science high school back in 2016, and took a photo of the field behind the school.

I worried its little brain would melt if I took it off of airplane mode. So many Apple products can only handle a certain amount of updates before they keel over dead, unable to handle the new operating systems. However, it had to be done. I held my breath and toggled off the airplane mode. For a moment, nothing changed, then, the date shifted, quietly acknowledging that it was not New Year’s Eve at the end of the Summer of Love, but instead, a quiet Sunday afternoon at the beginning of June, 2023. I saw that the apps I wanted to use (Notes, Podcasts and Audible) were working perfectly. Spotify screamed and would not download, basically refusing to hang out with the old guy, saying they were incompatible. Rude. Not to worry, my iPod is a gracious host to a whole library of supremely embarassing music that I bought on iTunes from 2013. That’ll have to do.

I toggled airplane mode back on, and left it sitting on a shelf, not plugged in, to see how long its battery would hold a charge before it died.

23 days.

It held a charge for 23 days.

I then charged it fully once more (20 minutes, max) and set it to continually play an audiobook with the volume all the way down, just to see how the battery handled while the iPod was actively doing something. After 35 hours it only started to die.

Horrifyingly, I have officially reached the age where I can say this honestly, with no irony: they really don’t make ‘em like they used to.

I found a new waterproof case on eBay that fits it, and it’s coming with me. If it doesn’t survive the PCT that’s okay, it has already taken up permanent residence in the “all-time favorite toy” part of my brain, alongside the Rolling Rider from my childhood, the class teddy bear that my 2nd grade teacher gave to me permanently when I moved from NH to California, and the pair of action figures of Mr Orange and Mr White from Reservoir Dogs that I share with one of my most favorite people, as a sort of BFF necklace, if BFF necklaces were anguished blood-covered men in business suits.

Regardless of if it survives, I like to imagine it would rather go out epically on the top of a mountain, rather than silently drifting away, lost under my bed. Let’s go little iPod, it’s time for another adventure.

Love,

Thresher

This is me adding some of Whistle’s stickers to the back of my iPod, somewhere in New Hampshire, near the end of the AT in 2013.