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Perhaps the Today’s Opinions newsletter is playing favorites so prominently featuring Rusty Foster’s regular dispatches from his through-hike of the Appalachian Trail, but the Today’s Opinions newsletter can assure you that the next time George Will writes a slightly vulgar quatrain about keeping his posterior dry mid-trek, he will appear in the very top of your inbox, too:

Avoid the roots and skip the rocks

To keep your a-- above your socks.

But alas, my hiking bud,

If you do that, you’ll drown in mud.

Foster and son Mica recently forded through the final treacherous miles of Maine, which necessitated lots of sloshing and slipping and — to look at a photo Foster includes — contorting through a crack in a pile of boulders that would be a struggle even for Gumby.

“We have heard tell of distant lands such as ‘Vermont’ and ‘Virginia,’ where the trails are supposedly paved with dirt and you can walk upon them with the upright stride of a modern hominid,” Foster writes, but the Maine woods are different........

© Washington Post