Becoming Odyssa

by Jennifer Pharr Davis

  We stepped inside, took off our muddy shoes, and waved to Spring, who was standing over a pot that filled the cabin with a smell of rich, salty broth.

  “Thanks for inviting us in,” said Second Gear. “This is a really cool place you’ve got here.”

  “Thanks,” said Zeus. “We moved here two years ago after we thru-hiked the AT. We wanted to be close to the trail so we could hike all year round, and so we could encourage other hikers on their journeys. Here, let me show you around the place.”

  As we walked around the bottom floor of the cabin, Zeus took particular pride in pointing out and explaining the numerous Appalachian Trail photos and maps that lined the walls. The home had enough trail paraphernalia to pass as an AT museum or gift store.

  After Zeus finished showing us around the house, Spring invited us to the kitchen table, where our places were set with bowls of homemade vegetable soup. While we sipped the warm broth, Spring recounted stories from the thru-hike she and Zeus had shared.

  “We didn’t think we were going to make it,” she said. “At least, not in six months. We were plagued by injury and illness. I had to take a week and a half off the trail to heal a twisted ankle in Virginia, and Zeus experienced flu-like symptoms for much of New England. For a while we thought that he had contracted Lyme disease. But on October eleventh, four days before they closed Katadhin for the winter, we reached Baxter State Park and finished our hike.”

  “It was the best day of our lives,” said Zeus.

  “Well, that and our wedding day,” laughed Spring. “But it’s true, after thirty years, the trail did make us feel like newlyweds again.”

  Spring diverted her attention from refilling our bowls and turned to look lovingly at her husband. She stared at Zeus with raw emotion, and then, without averting her gaze, she said to us, “You think you’re just out there hiking, you think the Appalachian Trail is just a footpath. But it’s more . . . so much more.”

  Zeus returned his wife’s loving gaze and then looked at us. “You must enjoy every day,” he said. “There are no guarantees on the trail. I don’t care how healthy you are or how good a hiker you become, there are always going to be loose rocks, slick roots, water parasites, and disease-carrying ticks. There are factors that you can’t control and you can’t prevent, so you just need to enjoy every day, because it is a rare few who are strong enough and lucky enough to make it to Katahdin.”

  Zeus and Spring’s hospitality was uplifting, and the wisdom they imparted would serve as a reserve of strength for the rest of the trail. The fact that Second Gear and I had been crossing the nearby road on one of the days that Zeus and Spring opened their home to thru-hikers felt predestined. I guess with the trail name Odyssa, it’s no coincidence that I spent an afternoon with Zeus and his wife.

  When we were warm and full, Second Gear and I thanked our hosts and started back to the trail. There were five miles until the next shelter, and I walked with Second Gear the whole way.

  I had found out a little about him while sitting around the table with Spring and Zeus, and now that we were back on the trail I wanted to know more. On our walk to the shelter, I learned that he had grown up two hours away from my hometown, on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains in Johnson City, Tennessee, and that, like me, he had just graduated from college.

  It was becoming clear that an overwhelming number of thru-hikers were recent college grads. The obvious reason was that college graduates were able to devote four to six months to the trail without leaving a career and family behind. That also explains why recent retirees are so prevalent on the AT. But more than that, I think college grads are called to the trail because we have a lot of figuring out to do. We’ve spent our entire lives under the influence of family, school, and religion, and we need to test our doctrines. The trail provides a place to sort through the fact and fiction of our childhoods.

  That was one reason it was so important to me to meet as many different people as possible and not become part of a group: I wanted to retell my story and explain who I was until it made sense. And, just as importantly, I wanted to listen to other hikers and learn from them.

  When we arrived at Little Laurel Shelter, I could hardly remember what the previous stretch of trail looked like, but I knew all about Second Gear’s family, his high school experience, his ex-girlfriend, and his post-trail ambitions.

  Instead of sleeping in the shelter that evening, I decided to tent a few yards away. I was glad about that decision when, just as I drove my last stake into the ground, a tall middle-aged man hiked up the trail.

  I could hear him swearing to himself from fifty yards away, and not an “Ouch, I stubbed my toe on a rock” type of cursing, but rather a constant stream of four-letter words occasionally interrupted with coherent English. His angry, aggressive rant made me imagine him grabbing the tree in front of him and violently shaking the roots up from the ground, then lifting the trunk over his head and hurling it into the bushes.

  When the towering brute looked my way, I quickly shifted my eyes back to the ground. In an effort to look preoccupied with my camp chores, I re-staked the last tent peg into the ground, calmly unzipped my tent fly, carefully removed my shoes, and then dove as quickly as possible into the sanctuary of the synthetic walls. Once I was safely inside my tent, I listened to the ruckus near the shelter for another twenty minutes, until the profanity sputtered to a stop.

  With my mind still racing and my heart pounding inside my chest, I decided to write in my journal until I was calm enough to fall asleep.

  April 5th

  Out on the trail, I don’t know whether to trust people or to run from them. This afternoon I went from trusting complete strangers and spending time in their home to wishing that I was back at my parents’ house, away from the crazy guy at the shelter who is cursing at the top of his lungs. It’s not the profanity that bothers me, it’s his anger and unpredictability. I want to pack up and find another spot to camp, but that would be too obvious. I’ll try to wake up extra early tomorrow and hike extra fast so I can get away from him—I just hope nothing happens before then.

  The night proved uneventful, and the next morning I held to my plan. I pushed out of camp as dawn broke and didn’t stop for a rest until the sun reached the middle of the sky. But just after I finished making my peanut butter and Pop-Tart sandwich, my spine stiffened as I heard the rustling of someone coming down the trail. I stood frozen and breathless until Second Gear rounded the turn and I could relax.

  Second Gear had also decided to tent last night. Well, actually, he didn’t really tent because Second Gear used a hammock, but regardless, he stayed outside the shelter and avoided any interaction with our unsavory neighbor. And, like me, he decided to rise early and hike hard this morning to distance himself from any more obscenities.

  By now, I had seen several hikers use hammocks instead of tents. By suspending a lightweight cocoon between two opposing trees and then hanging a tarp above the hammock, they were protected from the elements, but they didn’t have to sleep on the ground. It seemed like a cool concept, as long as there were trees around.

  As he sat down to join me for lunch, Second Gear commented on my sandwich.

  “Peanut butter on Pop-Tarts?”

  I admit that my trail nutrition was not what it should have been, and I was still experimenting with my no-cook diet, but I was quite confident in one culinary truth. “Peanut butter tastes good on everything,” I said.

  “Everything?” inquired Second Gear.

  “Yes, everything.”

  Then, looking at the contents of my food bag, Second Gear proposed that I test my theory using Slim-Jims.

  Unwrapping the processed stick of beef jerky, I dipped it in my peanut butter jar, stuck it in my mouth, and confirmed: “Yep, everything.” Two weeks ago I had never eaten a Slim Jim; now I was eating them with peanut butter and enjoying it.

  After lunch, Second Gear and I spent the remainder of the day hiking together. It’s amazing how
much you can learn about someone in a few hours when there are no distractions. Except for short stops to admire the view, or to analyze a tuft of wild boar hair in a berry thicket, we spent the afternoon engrossed in conversation.

  As I talked with Second Gear, it struck me how honest we were with one another. I wasn’t trying to be exceptionally open or sincere, but there was something about walking through the untamed forest with a relative stranger that allowed me to share more of myself than I ordinarily would have.

  The thru-hiking community was the first group I had been part of that didn’t have a hierarchy. Being a thru-hiker was not like working at a job where you answered to a boss, or like being part of a family that was subject to its elders. On the trail, I wasn’t expected to be mild-mannered, but I also didn’t need to be authoritative. Everyone was on an equal playing field. I think that helped hikers to express themselves openly. That and the confidentiality.

  Most people you encounter on the trail you will know for less than a day, and even those you see more than that will most likely not be part of your life once you return home, so the chances of a leaked confession are slim to none. Counseling and Catholicism finally made sense to me: there was something cathartic about sharing my thoughts, desires, sins, and successes without worrying about rumors and public perception.

  At the end of a six-hour stretch with Second Gear, I felt absolved. I had shared so much with him in such a short time, and after just over twenty-four hours together, I felt that I knew more about him than friends I had known for four years in college. Then it struck me: I knew his background, his preferences, and his ideology, but I didn’t know his real name—and the nice thing was, I didn’t need to.

  The intimacy of the afternoon was disrupted that evening when we found Hogback Ridge Shelter full of weekenders. Until now, I had viewed weekenders as backpackers who couldn’t take six months away from work and family, so instead they would spend twenty-four to forty-eight hours in the woods at a time. Tonight my opinion changed.

  Tonight they felt like overindulgent, inconsiderate houseguests. They came to the trail with full stomachs, and they continued to eat throughout the weekend, filling the campground with tempting aromas and stuffing their faces in front of starving thru-hikers. They hiked less than ten miles a day and usually settled into camp before 4:00 PM. And worst of all, on nights like tonight—nights when the clouds hung low and threatened rain—they filled an entire shelter with their stogies, whiskey, and laughter without leaving any room for tired thru-hikers.

  As I set up my tent near Second Gear and three other unfortunate thru-hikers, my frustration festered. It just didn’t seem fair that I had to sleep outside in the rain tonight and pack up a wet tent tomorrow morning, carry it all day, and unpack a wet tent again tomorrow night, when the weekenders only had to hike two and a half miles to their cars at Sam’s Gap and drive home to their warm, soft, dry beds. There might not have been a hierarchy among thru-hikers, but I definitely felt like we should be able to pull rank over weekenders.

  As I had predicted, when I awoke the next morning, I heard a heavy rain falling. After much delay, I began the Tai Chi of getting dressed inside my sagging shelter before grudgingly stepping out into the dreary downpour. I packed up my soaking tent with cold fingers and stuffed it inside my drenched pack. Then, leaving behind the giggling, dry weekenders and their breakfasts that smelled of bacon, I started hiking uphill, in a layer of rain gear, with just my nose sticking out.

  The trail began that morning with an unrelenting climb up a muddy slope. My rain gear kept out most of the external moisture, but my base layer became soaked with sweat from the lack of airflow inside my “breathable” rain clothes. As the elevation gain brought me into increasingly colder air, the damp sweat chilled my core and left my teeth chattering and my body shivering.

  When I reached the ridgeline, I found myself on a long stretch of exposed trail that wandered over the supposedly scenic Big Bald. The only view I had was of the faint dirt path beneath my feet. The bald was smothered with a fast-moving fog that was pushed across the grassy landscape by a strong, blustery wind. I could not lift my foot off the ground without the wind forcing it several inches off the trail. The way my legs crossed and my feet flew up in the air, I felt more like a country-western line dancer than a hiker.

  I thought back to Max Patch and the challenge of crossing over its exposed summit. These balds were supposed to be the most rewarding sections of the Appalachian Trail in the Southeast, yet I found myself wanting to hike over them as quickly as possible.

  I was absorbed with the task of walking forward when a strong gust of wind swept over the mountain and blew my pack lid open like a sail. The added resistance caused me to stumble off the trail and land with my hands and feet planted on the frost-covered straw that lined the path.

  I quickly jumped to my feet and tried to secure my pack, but the wind made it almost impossible, and before I could fasten the buckles, my fleece mittens flew from the top of my pack into the dense white mist. I desperately tied a quick knot in my pack strap to keep the rest of my belongings contained, then threw it over my shoulder, and started into the abyss to find my mittens.

  Thankfully, they were caught in a frost-covered hedge a few feet away. I immediately put them on, and then looked around to try to locate the trail. All I could see was a fast-moving sheet of white and the ground directly below my feet. I zigzagged for several minutes looking for the small strand of dirt. Then, when I found it, I guessed which direction to follow it in.

  Praying that I was in fact on the Appalachian Trail and headed north, I soon caught the outline of someone hiking in front of me. As I drew near, I could make out a petite woman who was struggling even more than I was to press through the toppling wind and thick fog. Sensing my presence a few feet behind her, she momentarily glanced back and caught my gaze with her youthful brown eyes. I felt an immediate connection, and I knew that my success in escaping this bald was now tied to making sure this woman made her way to safety, too.

  As I watched her struggle in front of me, I wished there was something I could do for her, but the wind carried my words off before they reached her ears, and I was so preoccupied with my own footing that all I could do was walk slowly behind her and make sure that, finally, we both reached tree cover.

  Tall, guardian-like pines finally appeared through the mist. Passing underneath their protective limbs, I fell beneath their branches in exhaustion. The hiker ahead of me collapsed nearby, and again we caught one another’s eye, this time with a softer look and a sigh.

  “That was horrible,” she said. And then, out of nowhere, she started to laugh. I wasn’t sure if she was laughing with shock or relief, but it was contagious.

  “I know, right?” I said through my laughter. “That was insane!”

  “This trail is the worst idea I have ever had. By the way, my name’s Iris.”

  “Is that your real name or trail name?” I asked.

  “It’s my trail name. Iris is the Greek goddess of the rainbow, and I saw a rainbow on Springer Mountain. Plus I was a Classics major in college.”

  “Really?” I was dumbfounded. “My name . . . I mean, my trail name is Odyssa, and I was a Classics major too.”

  Iris laughed even harder. “That makes sense. It figures that two people who both chose to study dead languages would also lack the practicality to stay off an exposed mountaintop in this horrendous weather.”

  “So where did you go to school?” I asked.

  “I graduated five years ago from UNC Chapel Hill.”

  “I love the Tar Heels,” I stammered. “In fact, I was the only person in my family to not go to Carolina.”

  Then I looked closely at her. On second glance, something about her did look familiar.

  At twenty-seven, Iris was six years my senior, and the youngest female hiker I had met on the trail. And since I had no clue what I was going to do with my Classics major, I eagerly listened to her recount the past five years
of her life.

  Iris sat at the base of the tree, resting, snacking, and telling me about the year she lived in Greece working at archeological digs and the two years she had just spent in West Africa with the Peace Corps. She explained that she had left her boyfriend in West Africa, as he still had six more months in the Corps, and the trail was a way to occupy her time until he returned.

  “When I started the trail, I cried myself to sleep every night because I missed him so much. Well, because I missed him so much and because it was miserably cold outside. It is a little hard to adjust to winter after spending two years in Africa.”

  Wait a minute . . . She cried herself to sleep? The pieces began to come together. I knew that I had felt a strong sense of familiarity toward Iris, but it wasn’t just an inner connection—I had already met her.

  When I thought back to my second night on the trail, I was certain that Iris was the young woman who had been crying in her tent near where I had camped. I looked at her face and could now envision her poking her red wool cap out of the tent and briefly looking around the campsite before darting back inside.

  She confirmed my story, and then laughed as she confessed, “I still take my cell phone out on top of every mountain, searching for a signal strong enough to call Africa. It’s really hard being half a world away from the man you love.”

  “What will you two do in the fall?” I asked.

  “Oh, my boyfriend will move to New Haven with me and look for a job when I start back to school.”

  “For what?”

  “Law.”

  Yale Law School—I was in awe. I wanted a poster of Iris to hang on my wall after the trail. Moreover, I wanted my mother to meet Iris, so she could maintain hope that I would eventually do something productive with my life.

  “Okay, so one more question,” I said. “What’s harder, the Appalachian Trail or the Peace Corps?”

  “The Appalachian Trail,” she said. “Definitely!”

  Putting my food bag back into my pack, I was shocked to look at my watch and see that two hours had elapsed since I had started talking to Iris. I was exhausted, and I still had several more miles to go before I reached no Business knob Shelter.