The precipitation permeated my clothes and soaked my skin, and as the sun sank towards the horizon, the temperature dropped. I could see my breath in the air, my nose was cold to the touch, and my fingers looked white. I was in the midst of a twenty-six-mile stretch of trail that didn’t have a shelter, and I was inside a state park that didn’t allow tent camping. I hiked to the end of the park, where I thought I could stay in the bear Mountain Lodge, but when I arrived, I found it was closed for renovations.
I tried to get back to the trail from the lodge, but I became disoriented and wandered over to Bear Mountain Lake’s paved pedestrian trail. I felt out of place; I was no longer on the trail, but I couldn’t find civilization either. Shivering and trying to hold back tears, I stopped under a covered park information kiosk to try to regain my composure. I looked down to the lake and saw a mother goose sheltering three goslings under her wing.
I couldn’t hold back my tears any longer, and I pulled out my cell phone to call my parents.
My dad, hearing the tremors in my voice as I told the story, insisted that I get to a road and find the nearest lodging, promising to pay for several nights of rest. My mom, in the meantime, had looked online and found that Bear Mountain Lodge was operating an alternate inn during the renovations.
My parents stayed on the phone with me as I wandered around the lake and up a neighboring hill to find the obscure, dimly lit inn.
The rooms were dark, the attendant was inept, and the only food available was in a fifty-year-old vending machine in the lobby, but in exchange for an outrageous 100 fee, I had a clean, dry bed, a musty room, and a warm bath with brown water.
After treating myself to a 1.50 dinner from the vending machine and a long, murky bath, I was ready for bed, so when my cell phone started ringing, it took all the emotional energy I had to pick it up and talk with Magic Momma.
I had exchanged numbers with Nightwalker’s mom in the Shenandoahs, and she was calling to check on me. She had read about the suicide in another hiker’s online trail journal. I knew that news traveled quickly down the trail by word of mouth and shelter logs, but I hadn’t thought about people finding out through blogs and internet journals.
“Oh my God, I’m so glad you picked up,” Magic Momma said. “I’ve been worried sick about you. How are you?”
“Oh, I’ve been better, but I’ll be okay,” I said.
“Well, where are you? I’ll come pick you up.”
“I’m at Bear Mountain State Park, but I’ve paid for my room already and it’s almost midnight. Don’t worry, I’ll be all right. Really.”
“Well, I’m just an hour away in Connecticut, so if you need anything tonight, or tomorrow, or the next day—if you ever need anything, call me. Okay?
“Okay.”
I had no intention of calling Magic Momma back, but I knew that she wouldn’t hang up unless I left it as a possibility. It was nice of her to call, but I was fine. Really, I was fine.
I called Magic Momma at 9:00 the next morning.
After sleeping for six hours, I dressed in wet hiking clothes, put on my pack, walked through the lobby and out the front door. That was as far as I got.
It was forty degrees, pouring down rain, and the wind was bending even the strongest trees. I waited under the hotel awning for five minutes, trying to find the motivation to start hiking, but it never came.
I decided to stand under the awning for another five minutes, then force myself to hike. But as I looked at my watch to mark the time, I noticed it was May twenty-fifth.
It was my birthday.
There was no way I was doing this on my birthday.
I went back to the front desk to reclaim my room key and returned to bed, where I slept for another two hours. And when I woke up, I called Magic Momma.
She was thrilled to hear that I wasn’t hiking in the nor’easter, and she offered to pick me up after she finished a half-day at work. I agreed, and I was excited to see her, but it still felt odd accepting help from someone I had only met once.
When Magic Momma arrived, she greeted me with a warm hug and reassuring words. I don’t know why I had hesitated to call her or accept her help, because after fifteen seconds in her presence I already felt much better.
I put my gear in her car, which didn’t smell quite so much of hikers as it had in the Shenandoahs, and together we drove over the Tappan Zee Bridge to her home in Stamford, Connecticut.
We talked and laughed the entire way. Magic Momma was the kindest, warmest woman I had ever met, and for the first time in a long time, I felt at ease. When we arrived at the house, Magic Momma positioned me on the couch in her living room with a selection of movies and snacks, and then stationed Tazzy, her affectionate black lab, on the floor beside me. I spent the rest of the afternoon watching romantic comedies and letting Tazzy lick my hand. There is no better medicine than the unconditional love of a black lab.
That night, when Magic Momma’s husband came home, the three of us went out to dinner, and they treated me to a meal at one of the best restaurants in Stamford. Together, we celebrated my birthday with a bowl of pasta, a bottle of red wine, and a chocolate lava cake. There were no tangible gifts to unwrap, but their unexpected kindness and overwhelming hospitality were the best birthday presents that I had ever received.
After dinner, I returned to a strange house in an unfamiliar part of the country with people I hardly knew, but I felt completely at home. My opinions of humanity had traveled on a roller coaster that week, but because of Magic Momma’s compassion, my faith in people had not only been restored, it had been improved.
The next morning, Magic Momma asked me if I wanted to go back to the trail, but she wasn’t talking about Bear Mountain state Park. She was talking about driving down to northern New Jersey to surprise Mooch and Nightwalker.
Magic Momma and the newly named Mr. Magic both decided to take a day off from work, pack up the car with food and drinks, and drive down to find the boys. Magic Momma knew the boys’ location because they planned to receive a mail drop that day. Mooch and Nightwalker didn’t have a clue we were coming, and they had no idea that Magic Momma had picked me up off the trail. So when we jumped out from behind the car to greet them, they were surprised to see us all, especially me.
They had heard about what happened at Sunrise Mountain, but they didn’t mention it. And they never asked why I was with the Magics; they both knew Magic Momma well enough to figure that out on their own. Instead, they each gave me a huge bear hug, and then we picked up right where we left off.
“Odyssa, I’ve been meaning to tell you this since we split up, but you stink!” Mooch said. “In fact, I think you smell worse than most of the guys out here. I mean, you smell okay now, but when I gave you a hug at the end of the Shenandoahs, it nearly knocked me out. And I’m glad you’re here, because I’ve been waiting four hundred miles to tell you that.”
“Thanks, Mooch,” I said. “I’ll try to work on that. How’s the butt rash?”
Everyone laughed. It was the first time I had felt lighthearted in days. Together at the roadside, we ate and recounted our stories from the mid-Atlantic. Then, when the boys were full, I hiked six miles with them to the next road crossing.
In general, I held it as a principle not to walk more than I had to on this journey. And although I had already hiked these six miles, and they in no way helped me get any closer to Maine, it just seemed like I needed to take a few steps back before I could go forward.
I needed to remember what the trail was like before the mid-Atlantic and before the suicide. I needed to remember the adventures I had in North Carolina and Tennessee, the confidence I had gained in Virginia, and the fun I had with the boys in Shenandoah National Park. I needed to reflect on all the good memories from the trail, because that made me want to keep hiking.
Hiking with Mooch and Nightwalker made it easy to focus on the good. During the first few miles, Mooch sang us a few songs and told us a few jokes before he was forced to separate
himself from the group and take a long bathroom break in the woods. I was left walking alone with Nightwalker.
“I was really worried about you,” he said. “I can’t imagine what that would have been like.”
“I’ve had better days. But your mom helped a lot, and so have you guys.”
“Well, if you ever want to talk to us about it, or if you want to hike with us for a while, we’re here for you.”
“Thanks.”
Even though six miles was a relatively short distance compared to what I had been hiking, I made more progress that afternoon than at any other point on the trail. It had been a hard, sad week, but after those six miles, I knew that I was going to make it to Maine.
I knew that I was going to make it to Maine, but restarting the trail from Bear Mountain State Park took me longer than I thought it would.
Magic Momma held me captive with the lure of food, a bed, clean clothes, and multiple trips to the trail to visit Mooch and Nightwalker. She thought I should take a few days off to rest and spend some time hiking with the boys before setting out on my own again. And she didn’t have to work too hard to convince me.
When I was truly ready to return to the trail, my mom decided I couldn’t get back on until I first visited my aunt and uncle in Wallingford, Connecticut. She said they wanted to see me, and it would be rude to be this close and not pay them a visit, but I knew that she really wanted a mental health checkup. She needed a family member to make sure I was okay before I got back on the trail, so I obliged her and took the train from Stamford to New Haven, where my aunt picked me up.
I love my aunt. If I had her energy, I would probably be in Maine already. After a day spent following my aunt around central Connecticut, I was convinced she had more endurance than anyone I had met on the trail.
The first stop we made that morning was a grocery store, where she insisted on buying every food item I might want for my next resupply. Then we went to the house where my wonderful uncle was making a breakfast of scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, fresh berries, and muffins. I enjoyed the food and needed the energy, because as soon as I placed the last berry in my mouth, my aunt and I were off again.
She wanted to give me a walking tour of the prep school where my uncle taught, a driving tour of their hometown of Wallingford, and a multi-modal tour of nearby New Haven. Somewhere in between hearing about the prep school’s annual fund and architecture, looking for cows in the fields of Wallingford, and visiting the libraries and museums at Yale, I decided that I would be less tired if I’d simply spent the day hiking thirty miles on the trail. Sure, I had just gotten to see two volumes of the Gutenberg Bible at the Beinecke Rare Collections Library, but all I wanted to do was sit down to eat something.
About the same time that I decided I couldn’t set foot in another museum, my aunt decided that she had fulfilled her quota of cultural enrichment for the day, and we finally stopped for a snack, followed by a visit to the local outfitters.
After fifteen hundred miles of shoulder pain, I decided that maybe I didn’t need to toughen up; instead, maybe my brother’s hand-me-down backpack just didn’t fit. And although I’d had visions of standing on Katahdin with my external-frame pack and mop stick, I was ready to replace my borrowed backpack with something a little less sadistic.
A nice young man named Jeremy, who looked outdoorsy but probably wasn’t, helped me pick out a pack. I told him specifically what brands and models most thru-hikers used, and even went so far as to suggest certain weight and capacity specifications, but somehow he managed to talk me into one of the heaviest and most expensive packs.
At this stage of the trail, a comfortable pack was worth any cost, even 360, which was the price of the new pack I bought.
After receiving a passing mental health grade and replacing my pack, I was finally ready to get back on the trail. It was time to finish what I started.
16
PERSEVERANCE
BEAR MOUNTAIN STATE PARK, NY, TO MOUNT
GREYLOCK, MA—183.9 MILES
Connecticut has a little of everything: beautiful rolling farmland, a long stroll along the Housatonic River, a steady boulder climb outside Kent, and an untouched ravine just before Massachusetts. Plus, a determined hiker can walk through the entire state in two days. Massachusetts, on the other hand, is like Connecticut’s less attractive half-sister. It has some nice features that run in the family, but it also has bogs and bugs—lots of bugs.
My transition back to the trail wasn’t as smooth as I would have hoped. While I was mentally ready to be back, my body had forgotten how to hike. Up until this point, hiking twenty to thirty miles a day had been routine, but after five days of rest, my muscles felt like they had atrophied, and now I had to work much harder for my miles.
Even more frustrating was the fact that my new 360 pack was not an improvement over my old one. Though the majority of the pack weight no longer rested on my shoulders, now it dug into my haunches. There were two metal pack supports, called “stays,” which ran the length of the pack, and their pointy ends dug into the outside of my butt cheeks. They rubbed hard against the top layer of skin, giving me open blisters that were aggravated with every step. The waist belt also hugged a little tighter than I would have liked, and at one point it pinched a nerve that sent a numb feeling shooting down my thigh to my knee. And while that wasn’t a good feeling, at least it didn’t hurt.
One positive was that the weather was amazing, much better than it had been at Bear Mountain several days before. My first day back was pleasantly warm and complemented by a cool breeze.
After spending my first day back on the trail alone, I was surprised the next morning to come upon a crowd of thru-hikers. A crowd?
I hadn’t seen any thru-hikers besides Mooch, Nightwalker, and Neon in weeks. And now there were five thru-hikers who were just getting back on the trail after a town stop in Kent, Connecticut. The group included four boys and one girl. The girl, named Rainbow, had hiked the southern half of the trail last year and was finishing the section from Harpers Ferry to Katahdin this summer. She wore a long, earthy skirt and a cotton shirt, neither of which were traditional hiker apparel. She also carried a blow-up pink flamingo in her pack, and that wasn’t exactly normal, either.
For my part, I didn’t care what she carried or what she wore; she was a thru-hiker, she was around my age, and she was a girl! Although I enjoyed the presence of all five thru-hikers, I was drawn to Rainbow above the rest.
Male thru-hikers always talked about how there weren’t enough women on the trail. I completely agreed. The guys said that after a few hundred miles of hiking, they actually develop “trail goggles.” Trail goggles are much like beer goggles, meaning that after a while on the trail, almost any woman looks good.
One male thru-hiker elaborated on the concept, telling us, “I was in a town for a resupply and I saw a woman walk into a grocery store. I realized that I hadn’t seen a woman in five days. I wasn’t very close to her, but I could tell that she was a female, and she moved, so I liked her.”
The strange thing was, I had trail goggles too—and it wasn’t for the boys. The boys looked worse the farther I traveled down the trail. They were the only hikers I saw, and they appeared less human and more like wild animals the longer they were on the trail. Their facial hair grew over everything but their eye sockets, and they would spend time at the shelters in the evenings picking the bugs and crumbs out of each other’s beards. It was evidence for the theory of evolution and a sign that we might in fact be able to devolve back into chimpanzees.
Rainbow was beautiful, and I missed the company of other women, so I walked and talked with her for the rest of the day. I listened to her describe the organic chicken farm where she worked in the Southwest, and tried to console her when she mentioned how much she missed her girlfriend—that must have disappointed the goggle-eyed boys.
That evening, the two of us decided not to stop and spend the night at a shelter with the rest of the hikers. Inst
ead, we hiked a little further and found a campsite next to the sprawling Housatonic River.
The water was golden as the setting sun hit the surface, and tall purple wildflowers lined the grassy banks. I felt full, happy, and at peace. I had a new friend, I was in a new place, and everything around me was beautiful.
Before I went to bed, I decided to bathe in the river. It was the first time on the trail that I was able to completely submerge my naked body into a water source. It felt so good to be surrounded by the flowing water. I would take a breath and then sink under the surface of the water and feel the current wrap around me, holding me lovingly until I had to go back up for more air.
So far on the trail, either the water had been too cold for bathing or I had been in the company of male thru-hikers. I decided long ago, while hiking with Moot, that I wasn’t going to skinny-dip when there were boys in the vicinity. But tonight it was just Rainbow and me, in my first and only all-girl campout of the entire trip.
The Housatonic River is beautiful, and it’s level. Ninety-nine percent of the trail fell into the categories of “difficult” or “more difficult,” but along the river the walking was actually easy.
I traveled along the soft riverbank and then back into the rolling Connecticut countryside. I didn’t see Rainbow after leaving camp that morning, but I did stop to eat lunch with Texas Ranger at a shelter. Texas Ranger was a thru-hiker who I had met back in Virginia. He was friendly, outgoing, and aside from Raptor and Neon, he was one of the few fifty year-old hikers who was still at the head of the pack.
Texas Ranger hadn’t seen me since I’d bought my mop stick almost nine hundred miles ago, and he couldn’t get over what a wonderful accessory it had become.
Becoming Odyssa Page 22