On the Trail (Page 1 of 1)

I’m only a few hours home from a 100-mile Appalachian Trail hike. My tent, sleeping bag, backpack and hammock are flapping on a line stretched across my front porch. My feet are tender and my knees are creaky.
I’m two Mexican beers and a green burrito down.

I’m reflecting on the mileage behind me:

There are times when you’re head-low, heart-behind-your-eyeballs climbing and the trail unzips uphill for hours. You’re one-foot-out-front, hiking sticks striking the ground, pack heavy on your back like a sack of dog food as sweat rolls off the end of your nose and your breath comes in gasps.

There are times when you stop to wipe your face and you look at the small tree in front of you and see a cicada bursting from its cellophane shell, white-winged and albino-eyed.  Within hours, you know, this little bug will helicopter buzz the forest and deepen in color until it’s red-eyed, black-backed and orange in the wings.  But for now, it’s wet and brand new and doesn’t even know it can fly.

There are times when you set up camp too late and all you can do is stretch out your tents, unfurl your bags, boil water, swallow your re-hydrated noodles and crawl away to bed.

There are times when you get to camp early and your chores are done and you float hammock-strung and watch the tree-top leaves flap above you: You have nothing else to do — watching the forest canopy and listening to a bird’s three-tone call can occupy all the brain space you have.

There are times when you sit around a blacksmith fire, the wet wood hissing and spitting, the cold wind pressing on your back, and the red-lit faces of your buddies glow and shine around the shifting ring of light.  You say nothing and stare at the dancing coals and the rising column of smoke, and you watch as tiny spark-wings float rudderlessly into the oily black curtain of night.

There are times in the morning when you hunch over a trickling stream to filter-pump the parasites out of the water and an old man limps up, white hair sticking out from underneath his tan ball cap, and fills two Aquafina bottles straight from the source. You ask how he treats his water and he says, “I don’t.”

“You don’t?”

“Sixty days,” he says.

“Sixty days?” you ask.

“I’ve been in here sixty days,” he says, “and it hasn’t bothered me yet.”

“How far do you travel?” you ask him, noticing the stroke-slur in his speech and the hump of his back.
“As far as I can,” he says.

There are times when the guy you’ve known for six years leans over the breakfast fire and says, “So when my dad was at UVA he took an English class for engineering majors and it was taught by a guy named William Faulkner.”

There are times when wild turkeys break with violent wing-beats through the ridge-top canopy and then sail like Cessnas just above the sloping-away forest roof.

There are times when you dig a hole.

There are times when your buddy is back-down on the nighttime ridgeline dirt, a bottle of Dickel on its side beside him, and says, “This is the best night in the history of best nights.”

You ask him for another “best” night and he says, “Valentine’s Day 1987.”

There are times like this one: The trail dropped for two miles off Hog Back Ridge. It was a stumpy limp of a hike, the pack weight heavy on my back and banging my knees. As the elevation fell, the heat rose, until eventually the trail spit us out on a treeless hillside and the sun baked our skin.

We walked under an interstate and the tumultuous speed of the traffic above us heightened our burden.
We followed the road for a minute and our sticks smacked the asphalt.

And then at the fence-break entrance to the trail, the point where we left the road and re-entered the wilderness, there sat a 12-pack of Mountain Dew and two one-gallon jugs of water.

Hikers call such moments Trail Magic, and the drinks were like treasure lying there. We cracked the tops on a few cans of soda and chugged. We filled our water bottles, and then 9-Bones went to toss his empty can in the roadside trash bin and found more booty: Someone had pitched four perfectly good wheat tortillas.

We were hungry.

And then the trail turned up sharply and I went stick-stick, step-step, my breath coming fast and the sweat rolling as the ground bound up in front of me.

I rounded a bend and there on a spur stood the old man who’d drunk straight from the creek. Sixty days in, crooked as hell, he stood with his cheek pressed to the six-foot staff he carried and waited for me to pass.

“Hit’s a big uphill,” he said.

“Yep,” I replied. “I guess it’s gonna be like this for a while.”

“That’s alright,” he said. “I got all day. And if I don’t get there, I’ll quit.”

I walked by him and held up my hand for a high five.

His eyes were so bright. 

All the distance between us — age, mileage and character space — fell away: Our mirrored hands smacked and we were on the same team — two guys deep-breathing and one-step stomping up the mountain directly in front of us.

We were simply our two hands slapping together.

And that’s a pretty good deal.