Blistered Kind Of Love

by Angela Ballard

  It was gloomy and nearly dark by the time we reached White Pass. Slipping and sliding, we went straight down grassy wet ski slopes to Highway 12 and then across the road to the ski lodge. It was still overcast and drizzling the next morning as we sat at the One-Stop Mini Mart, hoping for clearer skies. With us were a group of other thru-hikers, mostly new faces. We spoke about the weather.

  “They say that Rainier gets more than seven hundred inches of snow a year,” said Ken Powers, a thin, middle-aged man with a white beard that made him look a little like Santa Claus after a crash diet.

  “That’s fine . . . just as long as it waits until October,” said his wife Marcia. She was even thinner than Ken and wiry as a wood elf.

  “Fat chance,” Ken replied. Looking at him as he said this, I couldn’t help but smile at the irony of the comment. There was no fat on his frame or his wife’s, or ours for that matter; there hadn’t been for a long time. That was probably part of the reason we all felt perpetually chilled.

  “You know, the weather was great in ninety-eight. Not a single drop of rain the entire time. September’s a good month; it’ll clear.” This prognostication was from Weather Carrot, a tall hiker with a bushy red beard. Weather Carrot had been a long-distance hiker for ten years. He did trail work in the off-season to earn enough money to hike in the summer. This kept him on an extremely tight budget, but he didn’t mind. With obvious pride he declared that he’d taken less than ten showers all summer. Judging from the odor emanating from his vicinity, he wasn’t exaggerating.

  “I don’t recall too much about the weather back in seventy-seven; after so much time, it’s all a blur,” Chad chimed in. Chad was returning to re-hike the trail twenty-three years after his first adventure and doing so with the same backpack—the only external frame I’d seen on a distance hiker the entire summer.

  “Well, the guidebook keeps advertising these vistas of Rainier, but yesterday all it got was rain-ier.” As I said this, I wondered how many people had used this joke before. Casey would have been disappointed; he once declared the pun to be the lowest beast on the humor food chain.

  “You know what they say . . . locals tell the weather by looking at Rainier. If you can’t see it, it’s raining, but . . . if you can see it, it’s about to rain.” Ken’s joke was slightly better.

  “I can’t see it,” Angela glumly stated. She wasn’t happy about sitting here in limbo, ready to walk, but waiting. Evidently, she could sympathize with Mark Twain’s quip that “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

  Morning turned into afternoon, and the other hikers ventured out into the wetness. Although it was still drizzling, occasional shafts of sunlight illuminated the One-Stop parking lot. It wasn’t likely to get much clearer than this, so we walked down Highway 12 and then up a muddy trail trenched with hoof marks.

  Just as we entered the William O. Douglas Wilderness, the drizzle escalated into a shower, and soon a full-fledged rainstorm was pelting us. The trail underneath our feet rapidly deteriorated—slippery mud gave way to puddles as the earth became saturated. Balanced on the puddles’ surfaces were thin sheens of dirt and pine needles, giving the illusion of dry trail. These illusions resulted in repeated splashes, submerged sneakers, and yelps of discomfort. After about forty-five minutes, the puddles morphed into a frothy torrent of muddied water racing down the trail. At first, I tried to hopscotch around the flow, but soon the entire trail became an ankle-high current and I was forced to just struggle upstream, wincing as chilly rainwater enveloped my toes. After several hours of this misery we were cursing not only our waterlogged feet and bitterly cold hands but also our earlier decision to leave the One-Stop. Nearly all of Angela’s fingers had turned blanch-white, the worst Raynaud’s flare I’d seen. Every ten minutes or so, I’d pause and she’d wedge her hands under my shorts and onto my bare but toasty butt cheeks. In the past, this cheek-grabbing maneuver had always relaxed her blood vessels, allowing her fingers to regain their normal color. But not today—my magical buttocks were useless against Washington’s wet fury.

  We hiked on and evening further darkened the skies. Making camp in this deluge was not an option; movement was the only way to stay somewhat warm. Sooner or later, though, we’d have to stop. I could only hope that by then the rain would have abated. “Perfect setup for hypothermia,” I muttered to myself.

  I’d been warned of the dangers of hypothermia (abnormally low core body temperature), particularly in conditions like these. Many people associate hypothermia solely with blizzards, icicles, and arctic weather, but the combination of cool and wet can be just as deadly. This is especially true when clothing gets damp, thus intensifying the cooling power of evaporation. Evaporation, one of the four primary mechanisms by which the human body dissipates warmth, refers to heat loss from wet surfaces (in this case, skin). Evaporation makes sweating an effective means of cooling down, but given the wrong conditions, it can also turn wet cotton garments into death suits. The colonel, our old hiking instructor, had adamantly warned us about this. “Cotton kills,” he’d said again and again.

  Hypothermia strikes quietly and insidiously. It doesn’t jump out of the woods and claw like a cougar or strike from underneath a rock like a rattlesnake; rather, it slowly weakens the mind and body. Someone suffering from mild hypothermia (a core temperature loss of two to nine degrees) will shiver uncontrollably and may suffer from unsteadiness or impaired judgment. If the wet clothing isn’t removed and a source of warmth found, the condition may progress to moderate hypothermia (a loss of nine to seventeen degrees Fahrenheit). A moderately hypothermic person becomes increasingly confused and eventually stops shivering. In fact, the person might feel flushed and start undressing in order to, of all things, cool off. It’s as if that song by Nelly dances restlessly in the mind, “It’s getting hot in here (so hot), so take off all your clothes, I am getting so hot, I wanna take my clothes off. . . .”

  If this seems counterintuitive, well—it is. Some of you may have read about Scott Fischer, one of the Mount Everest guides portrayed in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air. Fischer had already summited Everest and was following his group down the mountain when a fierce storm swept in and left him stranded on an icy ledge at 27,200 feet. Later that night, fellow guide Anatoli Boukreev climbed up from the expedition’s camp to rescue him. Krakauer quotes Boukreev, “I find Scott at seven o’clock, maybe it is seven-thirty or eight. . . . By then it is dark. Storm is very strong. His oxygen mask is around face, but bottle is empty. He is not wearing mittens; hands completely bare. Down suit is unzipped, pulled off his shoulder, one arm is outside clothing. There is nothing I can do. Scott is dead.”

  The disheveled state in which Boukreev found Scott Fischer is a morbid illustration of the phenomenon of “paradoxical undressing.” At 27,200 feet, and assaulted with ice, Fischer (paradoxically) had unzipped his down suit and ditched his mittens. Why? Because hypothermia had caused his brain’s temperature regulation system to shut down. Instead of restricting blood flow to peripheral tissues to preserve blood flow to vital organs such as the brain, his thermoregulatory center had relaxed them. Blood rushed to his arms, legs, and skin, just as it would on a hot day. Fischer suddenly felt uncomfortably warm, like an Eskimo in Haiti. And his brain was too oxygen-deprived to question the logic of shedding his clothing in the middle of a snowstorm.

  Soon, Fischer entered the realm of severe hypothermia (defined as a core body temperature of less than 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and by this point was about as lively as a Popsicle in a meat locker. Fluid filled his lungs, his blood pressure fell, his heart thumped irregularly—and he felt none of it because he had lost all perception of pain. His death was painless, and in this respect I suppose it’s not a terrible way to go. I can certainly think of worse. Nevertheless, a paradoxically undressed death was not high on my summer agenda.

  It was seven o’clock. The rain had eased a bit but we were both thoroughly drenched. I assumed that the garbage bags d
raped over our packs were keeping our gear relatively dry, still, I didn’t see us warming up without a fire. But how could we start a fire? There wasn’t any dry timber to be had in this soggy forest. We could light our stove, but propane was a precious commodity. Who knew how many rainy days lay before us on this nearly hundred-mile walk to Snoqualmie Pass? We couldn’t decide what to do. So we kept walking, hoping the rain would eventually stop.

  As we approached Buesch Lake, my nose caught a whiff of good fortune. Wet, thick smoke, the smell of damp wood overwhelmed by bonfire. Saved! A sweet inferno! How our perspective had shifted since Whitewater Canyon in Southern California. Back then we would have recoiled from a campfire like Superman from kryptonite.

  Seated on a log next to a fire pit at the edge of the misty lake was a very large man in full camouflage fatigues, rifle in hand. I was taken aback, but we had little choice—we had to approach him or risk shivering the night away. The imposing figure greeted us with a smile. His name was Travis, and he was a native of Olympia. He was waiting for a friend to join him for a week of elk hunting. One elk would be enough to feed them both for the entire winter, he said. A full-grown black bear would provide just as much meat, but neither Travis nor his buddy liked the taste or texture of bear meat. Too tough to chew, Travis said. We stood silently by the fire for some time. Angela’s fingers regained a pinkish hue, and the rain softened back to a light drizzle. Travis offered to share his camp spot with us, and we gladly accepted. I was extremely relieved—if we hadn’t found Travis it would have been an unpleasant and perhaps hypothermic evening.

  “I can’t believe you use those things.” Travis was cleaning his rifle the next morning, watching us as we prepared to leave.

  “Which things?” I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

  “The Walkmans.” I was in the process of strapping my radio to my backpack’s chest strap.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Cougars. They’re everywhere and they’re aggressive.”

  “Have you seen any?” asked Angela

  “Oh yeah, last summer a big’un nearly jumped me. I turned just in time, because I sensed something. He was only ten feet away. . . . Scared the crap out of me.”

  “Have there been. . . .”

  “Attacks? Oh, yeah. This kitty would’ve had me if I hadn’t been paying attention. I’d be careful with those Walkmans.”

  I made a mental note to use only one earphone.

  “Did you shoot him?” Angela’s face got longer and her eyes got wider.

  “Oh, no, that’s illegal. I just stood my ground and tried to look big.” Looking big came natural to Travis.

  I was sure that I’d hear more about this from Angela. But to me, wet weather remained a bigger threat than a cougar attack. We thanked Travis and strode back to the trail through a dense fog. We still had ninety-three miles to cover before Snoqualmie Pass—ninety-three soggy miles.

  Over the next two days we covered forty-seven of those miles, to Government Meadow and the Mike Urich Shelter—a large wood shelter named after a 1940s trail worker. It was only five in the evening when we arrived, but given the recurring pattern of fog-drizzle-fog-shower-drizzle-fog-shower, we decided to stop and give our gear a chance to dry out. Hopefully, a shelter would also cure Angela’s sudden bout of late-night illness. The previous night, at Sheep Lake, she’d rushed outside the tent twice in the middle of the rainy night to throw up.

  Almost as soon as we’d laid our packs inside and set up the stove on the porch, the rain started again. We scuttled our dinner inside and were shoveling down mac ‘n’ cheese when Weather Carrot arrived, gasping for breath, having run from a now-driving storm. Soon Chad appeared, his entire body and pack covered by a gigantic parka. After dinner we all laid out our mattresses and sleeping bags on the wood floor. The rain pelted the roof and tinkled down the chimney of the wood-burning stove. Mice scurried in the corners. Weather Carrot was giddy to have company for the night, like a young boy at a sleepover. He launched into a long stream of trail stories, full of strange trail names. I tried to pay attention, as I thought it would make great material for our book. But my focus was worthless; my thoughts turned to Angela, to our life on the trail, to our lives off the trail, and to . . . banana slugs.

  How long would it take a banana slug to hike the PCT? Could one do it in a lifetime? Or would it have to be a several-generation relay, passing the slime baton off to the next slug in line? Banana slugs were slow; it most surely would take several banana-slug lifetimes. At top speed they probably could cover—what, a hundred feet an hour? Less than half a mile a day. What was their life expectancy? I didn’t know. I decided that it would probably take hundreds of slug lifetimes to hike the PCT. “She’s got just one foot, she ain’t got no toes, she hangs out in the forest, and helps it decompose. BA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA-NA, BA (clap) NA (clap) NA (clap) SLUG!”

  Really, I couldn’t believe that Angela and I’d argued so bitterly over a slug kiss. A strong dose of unruly Washington weather had cooled us off. Petty arguments were forgotten now that Angela’s fingers were turning to ghosts, hypothermia haunted us, and cougars waited around every corner.

  The challenge of the Northern Cascades lay in front of us, and I wasn’t sure what would stop first, the rain or our hike. We had a little over three hundred miles to go before the Canadian border. I didn’t realize it yet, but those miles would be filled not only with rain, snow, and pain, but also with an unexpected reunion.

  Panic and Precipitation

  I COULDN’T MOVE. WORSE, I COULDN’T BREATHE. Gasp. Heave. Gasp. No good. My throat was closing up. “This must be what it feels like to be buried alive,” I thought. I tried to scream but nothing came out. I hyperventilated. I gagged. The feeling of being trapped was overwhelming. I was zipped tight in my mummy bag, swaddled in rain gear, two layers of fleece, long underwear, and two pairs of socks. “If I don’t get out,” I thought, “I’m going to die.”

  When I’d climbed into my sleeping bag (a new mummy-style bag we’d bought in Oregon in anticipation of Washington’s cold weather), I’d been shivering, unable to get warm even after putting on every article of clothing in my pack. Now I was boiling. Rain pelted our tent, which was zipped up, too—like a coffin. The nylon hung heavy and close to my head. I had to get out. Now.

  Thrashing and unzipping, I wiggled out of my sleeping bag, tore off layers of clothes, and stepped on Duffy’s hand as I crashed out of the tent into the rain and mud. My bare toes sunk into the earth as I bent over to vomit, dry heave, and vomit again. In my desperation to escape I’d taken off nearly everything I was wearing. I stood shaking in the darkness. A man camped across Sheep Lake yelled to see if I was okay. I crouched to expel diarrhea and vomit simultaneously and meekly replied, “Sorry to wake you.”

  Duffy was dumbstruck. “Chiggy? Chiggy? What’s wrong? Are you okay? Come back in the tent, you’re going to freeze.”

  Still hyperventilating, I paced outside the tent door. I didn’t want to go back inside, but my bare limbs were covered in goose bumps and rain. It couldn’t have been more than thirty-five degrees out. Tears ran down my cheeks. What was wrong with me? Finally, dizzy and thirsty, I crawled into the tent and my sleeping bag, but no matter how cold I was, I couldn’t put my clothes back on and I couldn’t close my bag. I was too scared of that feeling.

  Tremors plagued me the rest of the night. Lying beside me, Duffy wondered whether we should hike two miles south, back to Chinook Pass, and hitch a ride to the nearest hospital. The farther north we went, the more remote we’d be, and if I were seriously ill, getting help would be difficult.

  The next morning, I was tired and dehydrated but capable of moving on. I knew that if we went to the emergency room, we might not come back—with 325 miles to cover in thirteen days, the sand (and dirt) in our hourglass was running low.

  It drizzled on and off the entire day, and we covered the twenty miles to the Mike Urich Shelter as fast as we could. As we climbed onto the shelter’s large rai
sed porch and dumped our packs inside, the heavens started dumping water. Subsequent thunderclaps were as loud and piercing as rifle shots. Soon, Weather Carrot came running out of the forest, followed within minutes by Chad. As the four of us ducked into the mildew-scented cabin, we rejoiced at our good fortune. The grumpy weather gods could piss the night away; we’d be safe and dry, for the next ten hours at least.

  Warming my hands around a mug of our favorite hot drink (hot chocolate mix, an envelope of Sanka, and dehydrated milk), I watched my cabin-mates, including Duffy, drift off to sleep. The Urich Shelter was relatively large, with a high ceiling; still, I was a little frightened of curling up in my mummy bag. I was sure it was going to come back—the sense of smothering—I just wasn’t sure when. Eventually, with my body half out of my bag, I fell asleep. When I awoke in the morning the sun was out, and I’d had a peaceful night.

  The following evening, however, I wasn’t quite so lucky. Leaving the Mike Urich Shelter, we began the two-day hike to our next re-supply at Snoqualmie Pass. That night, in our tent, it happened again. Sweating, panting, shaking, panicking! I woke with a start. “I’ve got to get out of here,” I screamed. There wasn’t enough air. There wasn’t enough room. “Let me out!” Out in the cold rain, throwing up freeze-dried chicken with rice and then dry heaving when there was nothing left—this was becoming a late-night ritual. Over the course of the forty-odd muddy Washington miles since my last conniption, Duffy and I had tried to figure out what mysterious illness had stricken me. During the day, while we hiked, I felt fine—a little sleep deprived, but otherwise as healthy as anyone who’d just walked 2,350 miles could expect to be. But at night—well, we weren’t sure what to expect.

  “I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic,” Duffy said as we stepped off the trail to allow a mule team to pass, “but I think it’s all in your head.”