“It’s great,” he said. “I love it! A mop stick? Who would think about using a mop stick as a hiking pole? That’s gotta be the best piece of gear I’ve seen all trip. You know what would be funny? You should change your trail name to Mop ’n Glow. You’re always so happy, and now you hike with a mop stick. It couldn’t be more appropriate.”
I laughed. “Texas Ranger, you can call me whatever you want. But I was Odyssa on top of Springer Mountain, and I want to sign Odyssa at the Katahdin register, so I think I’ll stick with what I’ve got.”
When I first learned about trail names, I thought they were just a fun tradition that provided anonymity, but now they were so much more. Odyssa wasn’t just a nickname; it was a second identity. Thinking back to pre-trail Jen, there was no way that she could have hiked this far. There was no way she could have gone through all the good and the bad, the hard and the ugly, that Odyssa had experienced. Jen would never have crawled into the cab of a semi-truck with a man she didn’t know, Jen wouldn’t have been able to deal with seeing snakes every day, and she wouldn’t have been able to cope with a suicide or rely on complete strangers for help. But Odyssa was a totally different person.
It was funny to think back to Springer Mountain, where I had chosen “Odyssa” on a whim, as a way to avoid unflattering names that drew attention to my long legs and lack of curves. But now Odyssa felt completely appropriate. I had experienced enough obstacles, magical encounters, and diversions to feel like an epic Homeric character. And like the legendary Odysseus, I was on a journey home. But maybe home wasn’t a physical place at all, but rather a state of truly knowing myself and feeling at peace with who I was.
Maybe that was the point of trail names: to recognize the person that you would become on the trail. For me, the distance between Jen and Odyssa marked the journey between naïveté and experience. I knew that when I reached Katahdin, Odyssa would be a person far removed from the girl who started the trail. I just hoped I could take Odyssa back home with me, and that Jen would get along with her.
That night at the shelter, I felt a little less like Odyssa and a little more like Jen.
It had been a great day, a beautiful day, but as night approached and I hiked off-trail to nearby Riga Lean-To, I discovered that I was the only one there. I hadn’t spent the night alone since the suicide.
A few weeks ago, spending the night alone wouldn’t have bothered me. I had slept on my own in shelters and on the ground many times on the trail. But now it was different. I wasn’t ready to be alone at night.
I hesitantly ate my dinner and prepared my sleeping bag. I prayed that another hiker would come and join me, but then when the sun disappeared, I prayed the exact opposite. I was scared that I would be hurt or threatened. The fear was making me feel sick, and I would have given anything to be somewhere else. But there was nothing I could do. The darkness had trapped me.
I lay awake that evening in fits of terror and insecurity. I tried to keep my thoughts positive, but thinking about my family and friends only made me feel more alone.
I felt unsafe on the trail and foolish for wanting to hike it alone. My mind kept flashing back to the negative encounters in Pennsylvania and the suicide in New Jersey. My current isolation and fears had stripped me of the confidence that I felt during the day. I started to sniffle, and tears began to slide down my cheeks. I looked up toward the rafters and started talking to God.
“God,” I said, sniffling, “I’m scared. I don’t know why I’m out here. When I started, I was so strong and healthy and confident. But now I feel weak, I feel broken. There is so much hurt and heartache out here. I don’t know why I wanted to do this alone. That was stupid.
“At one point I felt like You wanted me here, like You were calling me to the trail, but why would You make me go through all this?
“I don’t feel like I’m loving people well. How could I? I’m not even hiking with other people. And I don’t feel like I’m glorifying You, so if You did want me out here, then I don’t see why.
“But I am out here, okay? And whether it’s Your fault or my fault, I just need You right now. I need You to protect me. I don’t want to feel scared, and I don’t want to feel alone.”
There is never any doubt in my mind that God hears my prayers. And that night more than ever, it wasn’t about whether or not He was listening; it was about how and when He would respond.
Lying in the darkness, I never felt comforted. I continued to feel scared and alone, and I slept in fits of fear. But in the morning, things were different.
I awoke to discover the sun rising above distant mountains and green fields below. I was still in a daze when I saw it, but I immediately tried to find my camera. It was so beautiful; I wanted to save it.
The shelter faced east and offered an expansive view above the tree cover. The entire sky was glowing with radiant, rose-colored hues and bright orange highlights; everything around me seemed painted with an artist’s touch. The scene reminded me of standing alone and watching the sunset on Roan Mountain in Tennessee. I felt like God had designed this moment just for me.
He was communicating to me through the sunrise. He was talking—no, He was singing to me with colors. It was like being woken up with a lullaby. The pink said, I am here. The orange said, I am going with you. And the gold, the bright gold, said, Trust in Me.
It took me two days to hike the fifty-two miles through Connecticut— two wonderful days filled with rolling hills, verdant farmland, lush riverbanks, and rocky cliffs. I was sad to leave Connecticut, especially since it was directly followed by Massachusetts.
Massachusetts started with a descent; a steep, slick, rocky descent off of Mount Everett. I needed to use both hands, both feet, and both butt cheeks to navigate the course.
Since I couldn’t use my mop stick on the downward rock scrambles, I would javelin it off the top of a rocky decline and then use all four of my limbs and my booty to lower myself down the trail and retrieve the yellow pole.
The trail was not marked well in spots, and I was frustrated at how long it was taking me to climb safely down the mountain, but it was fun to watch my yellow mop stick bounce off the large boulders on its way to a resting place farther down the trail. It was like watching Plinko or a pinball machine.
I must have thrown my stick a dozen times during the descent, and because it was a three-dollar mop stick and not a hundred-dollar hiking pole, I didn’t feel bad about it. It sure was nice to have use of both my hands when I needed them. As it turned out, I would need to use my hands for the rest of the day, but not for climbing.
When I reached Jug End Road at the base of Mount Everett, I entered what seemed like a lost circle from Dante’s Inferno. The dark, wet shadows of the thick bog-forest were home to the highest concentration of mosquitoes that I had ever seen.
The tiny, black insects attacked me in swarms, landing all over my body. By the time I had smacked one of them off, five others had bitten me somewhere else. I was completely miserable, and I didn’t have any bug repellent.
I didn’t think I needed bug repellent! I had hiked hundreds of miles and only suffered two bug bites. But in Massachusetts, I counted 137 mosquito bites the first morning.
Without bug repellant, my main line of defense was sprinting. I ran with my pack bouncing up and down on my back, rubbing deeper gashes into the sides of my hips. I used my right hand to wave away the mosquitoes in front of my face so I could see, and my left hand to smash the bugs on my skin.
I fought a valiant fight, and I’m sure I looked ridiculous, but the flailing did little good, and the swarms continued to attack. They encompassed me, and if at any point I had stopped to rest, I would have been eaten alive. The bugs were in my ears, up my nose, under my shirt, and covering every inch of exposed skin. I had done fast miles on the trail before, but those miles paled in comparison to the “10K for Life” that I did at the start of Massachusetts. It took me about an hour to complete six miles, which would have been a decent time even
without a pack on my back.
When I exited the marsh, I was covered in bumps from the bug bites and bruises from smacking myself. To make matters worse, I was exhausted and dehydrated. I hadn’t been able to stop even for a second, and as I left the swamp, I realized that my water bottle was empty. Now at the edge of the forest, the only water was the thick brown sludge that served as a mosquito breeding ground and larvae incubator.
I followed the murky headwaters to higher ground, and as I rounded a turn on a wooden boardwalk, I saw a hiker butt (fully clothed) sticking up in the air. There was a backpack lying beside the swaying bottom, and I could see that a man was trying to filter some water out of the muck below. However, it wasn’t until he looked up that I realized who it was.
“Raptor!”
“Odyssa?”
We didn’t hug, because he would have dropped his filter or fallen off the boardwalk. But we smiled and laughed, and then I sat on the boardwalk beside him as he filtered some tea-colored water into my bottle for me.
I hadn’t seen Raptor since Pennsylvania, and so much had happened since then. As we continued hiking, we talked about the past couple hundred miles, but most of all we complained about the bloodsuckers in Massachusetts.
We spent several hours defaming the buzzing black-winged pests until there were no insults left, and then we started recycling ones we had already used.
One thing I was learning to love about the trail was the sense of community. I hadn’t seen Raptor for hundreds of miles, but now we were together again and it felt like we were family. And if I hadn’t run into Raptor, then I probably would have found another familiar face, or someone who knew someone I knew.
Trail community is a strange concept, because it’s always in flux. Sometimes, mostly down South, I would find myself in a brood of hikers. Other times I would be happy for the company of just one or two, and a lot of the time, especially up North, I was content to be alone and know that there were other hikers ahead of me and behind me. There was never a time, even if I was alone, when I didn’t feel part of a larger community.
In Massachusetts, I was more than happy to spend a few days hiking with Raptor. We needed one another for moral support. The flying, buzzing, biting pests were never as bad as the first morning in Massachusetts, but they were still bad, even with the one hundred percent DEET bug spray that I bought.
I don’t know much about DEET, but after reading the many Poison Control warnings on the outside of the bottle, I was careful to apply it sparingly to my skin, not on my clothes, and nowhere near my face.
I was careful for about two hours, until I discovered that “sparingly” did little to disperse the flying vampires. And even with the spray on my skin, they still bit me through my clothes.
“Argggg!”
I took out the DEET again, and this time I bathed in it. I used half the bottle on my exposed skin, and most of the rest on my clothes and hair.
After dousing myself in the pungent liquid, the bugs backed away immediately. I now had a good four inches of space between the swarming mosquitoes and my body. It was like an invisible force field. But because it was such a hot and humid day, after a few hours I had sweated off much of the solution, and the insects started landing on me again.
I became so frustrated that when I came to Upper Goose Pond, I dropped my pack and ran into the cold blue water, submerging myself until only my nose and eyes remained above water.
I stayed like that for several minutes, and most likely would have remained there indefinitely if it hadn’t been for a small motorboat approaching along the perimeter of the lake. Not wanting to frighten the passengers or risk being run over, I sprang out of the water and waved my arms. I heard a shriek, and the boat rocked so hard it almost capsized, but once the man and woman inside had settled down, they slowly steered toward me.
With my head above water, I introduced myself and explained my predicament.
With great sympathy, Sarah and Rob generously offered to let me join them on their cruise to a local marina. And from there, they said, they could drive me into town.
If there was ever a time on the trail that I was tempted to skip a section, this was it. I wanted nothing more than to enjoy a breezy, bug-free boat ride to a car that would transport me to a protected hotel room. But alas, I declined.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m waiting for a friend who’s behind me, and even if we do go to town, we’ll need to hike to the next road because going in the boat would mean that we’d skip three miles. And we can’t miss three miles. I know it sounds weird, but it’s really important to us that we hike the whole trail, even the miserable sections.”
“Well, we can meet you at the road in an hour and a half if you want,” they suggested.
I was out of the water and hiking almost immediately. I knew Raptor was right behind me, and I felt certain that he would be more than willing to ride into town and split a hotel room with me.
I was right, and five minutes after Raptor arrived at the road, Rob and Sarah pulled up in their Jeep. I didn’t even know the name of the town where we stayed that evening, I just knew it was off the trail and away from the bugs.
When I had spent the day with Heather in Banner Elk, she asked if I would want to spend a night with her brother and his family in Massachusetts. At the time, Massachusetts seemed like a far-off dream, but after one more full day of hiking with Raptor, I found myself off the trail visiting the Millers.
Maybe it’s related to the lack of women on the trail, but throughout all my home stays along the trail, I felt myself connecting very intensely with the women I encountered. They were individually and collectively redefining what I thought a woman could or should be.
Heather taught me that stay-at-home moms were much more than “just” moms. Pastor Leslie showed me that you didn’t have to be a man to tell people about God, and that you didn’t have to be married to have a family. Wendy helped me realize that my body was important and that I needed to value and take care of it. Magic Momma let me know that it was okay to accept love from strangers. And Emily, well, she blew my idea of a traditional family right out the window.
Emily was married, with two daughters and a son. She was brilliant, articulate, hospitable, and charming, and she was also the primary breadwinner of the family. Emily was a pediatrician, while her husband Isaiah was a stay-at-home dad. I don’t know why that shocked me, because I’d heard of it and seen it on television, but I had never seen it while I was living in the South.
I think the perception in the South is that if a man stays home with the kids, then he is somehow weak, but Isaiah was anything but weak. He had basically built their entire house by himself and molded it around the preserved remains of two gigantic oak trees. If you want to assert your masculinity, building a house with two tree trunks shooting out of the living room is an excellent way to do it.
Emily, on the other hand, was as maternal and affectionate as any mother that I had ever met, and she was also a medical doctor. Which was good, because some of my bug bites were the size of a quarter and had become infected. She kindly offered to help me with that.
Whatever system Emily and Isaiah had, however they decided to divide their responsibilities, it was working, because they had some of the most amazing children that I have ever met.
The three kids were bright like their mom and handy like their dad. They helped around the house, they were kind to each other, and instead of playing video games or watching TV (I’m not even sure if there was a TV in the house), they spent time outside or played board games with one another.
For twenty-four hours, the Millers made me feel like family. They opened their home to me, they cooked for me on their woodstove, and taught me their favorite games. On top of that, the next morning, Isaiah offered to shuttle my pack to the lodge atop Mount Greylock so that I could slackpack the section of trail past their house and pick up my things that evening.
I couldn’t wait to reach the summit of Mount Greylock, becau
se on the other side of the mountain was Vermont. It was hard for me to believe that I only had three states left.
Back on the trail, it was a beautiful day, and before I knew it, I was standing at the base of Greylock, the tallest mountain in Massachusetts. The first part of the ascent was pretty easy, since the grade was gradual. I was surrounded by towering pines and lost in a world of dense, pleasant thoughts about how one day I wanted a woodstove in my kitchen and a tree trunk supporting my living room ceiling. It took me awhile to notice the wind picking up and the sky growing darker.
However, even if I had noticed the initial signs, it wouldn’t have mattered. The storm hit so quickly that, five minutes after I thought it might rain, I was running through one of the worst thunderstorms of my life.
The sky was so dark that it looked like dusk in the forest, and the deafening thunder seemed to shake the ground. At one point, I ran with my hands covering my ears to muffle the harrowing blasts. The lightning flashes lit the dim forest with a blinding brilliance.
As if the lightning and thunder weren’t bad enough, next came the hail.
This was my first hailstorm on the trail, and the marble-sized beads of ice stung me and left raised red welts on my skin. It felt like someone was pelting me with stones. To make matters worse, the slick rocks and icy footing made the path treacherous. I slid over the small balls of ice that collected at my feet, like a child trying to roller-skate for the first time.
There were no shelters nearby, and I didn’t have my tent to set up because I was slackpacking. The closest building was the lodge at the top of the mountain. I was worried about climbing to higher elevations in an electrical storm, but it seemed like my only option.
Just when I came within view of the summit, the storm stopped. As quickly as it had started, the lightning and hail vanished. I slowed to a walk and caught my breath as I walked the remaining two hundred yards to the mountaintop lodge.
Becoming Odyssa Page 23