I heard about this a couple of weeks ago from thruhiker Freebyrd (2015) a friend of mine that I dropped off (and hiked with) in Georgia last March. I met Jack a few times while he worked near the Trail (last March, in fact at Mountain Crossings, where he sold me some socks :-). He was one of the few people I met on the trail who was farther right than I (though his reasons were different than my religious ones), and he was pretty inflexible (I tend to be more open minded, though some closed minded folks might disagree ;-). Now that he is gone, I would like to point out that my song "The Ballad of Tinker" was actually based loosely on what I learned from him, and heard from some of his close friends, about his life. His fondness for the bottle is legendary, but I had the sense that he struggled daily to find a place of importance, worth, and true love on this Earth, and did, in part, in the AT community, most of whom could see through his gruff exterior to the lonely soul within. I wished that I could have reached out with the love that God had placed in my heart, but I was not in a good place, spiritually, to do that, so I would thank Jack for his company, cooking skills, and contribution to the Trail community (though he depended more on it than it did on him). With that, I would like to bid Godspeed to the spirit of "Baltimore" Jack Tarlin, and thanks, for everything.