On June 11th Cosmo and I wiped the cabin down, bagged up our trash, locked the doors and hit the road to hitch toward trail. I still felt like there were weights strapped to my ankles, but it was easy to ignore that ominous premonition in the moment. The sun was out and the shower I’d taken that morning helped me see things in a whitewash of optimism.
Said optimism withered a bit as all sorts of trucks, suv’s, and vans passed us by without even so much as a courtesy flash of the brake lights. There were no honks of encouragement or waving hands from open windows. Most just sped up, their drivers staring dead ahead with a fixed determination.
Funny how people can so easily dehumanize each other for this reason or that, at certain times to make their particular lives easier at another perhaps to avoid moral guilt. Funny that we deny it too. But we do have that habit, of reducing people, whether we’re ignoring a hitchhiker or shooting at somebody during a war.
This idea really isn’t funny at all. But we’d been road-walking for an hour when I thought of it and my mood was black and I couldn’t stop myself from splashing around in the grim humor of it like a kid who decides to jump in a big puddle for no better reason than that it’s there to be jumped in.
Anyhow, it took us a while to get a lift and when eventually somebody did stop I was all hopped up on sadist comedy and my smile of thanks was the teeth-baring grimace of someone who’s just taken a too-big gulp of bitter, bitter coffee. It was more a thing of forced habit than true sincerity. I was being an ass, but somehow I just couldn’t dredge up the gusto to care. There was only a deep tiredness and, again, that telltale apathy.
Whatever had taken hold of me was getting the upper hand.
The 20 mile hike that day (23 including the early morning road walk) was a thirteen hour lesson in which I learned the true meaning of “drudgery.” There’s no word that relates the experience better. I shuffled down the trail slowly, desperately, not unlike a constipated old man without his walker trying to get to the bathroom at the end of a long hall. A really, really incredibly long hall.
Humor and hubris aside, my weakness stood out in stark relief that day and it frustrated me. It was a minor deductive leap to figure out what was wrong: the miles were becoming vastly harder for me, but the trail looked relatively the same. So if the trail wasn’t becoming harder, it logically followed that I was getting weaker.
The harder question was why this was happening. That one took me a bit longer to figure out.
Cosmo and I arrived in Manchester Center, Vermont at around six on the 11th after our long hike from the cabin and we stayed at the Green Mountain House hostel. That night I slept like the dead and in the morning I woke to the sensation that I was in a coffin.
I hiked out anyway.
It was now June 12th and that evening I was to meet a group of hikers doing the 100 mile “Long Trail.” They smelled faintly of dryer sheets, were energetic, and bounced around the shelter like pinballs. I couldn’t keep up and went to sleep early. A 23 year-old grandpa worn out by the kids.
The 13th a bubbly mess of poison ivy bloomed on both legs and my left arm. Booyah. Things were looking up.
The biggest test came on the 14th though and it had three distinct parts. The physical – climb a 3,500 foot mountain through a unrelenting cold fog. The mental – will myself not to scratch the poison ivy, which itched like a son of a bitch. And the spiritual – defy the mental and physical sloth that came from my mysterious illness long enough to get to a place to sleep. This last was far and away the hardest of the three and the most important too because if I failed this part I’d wind up failing the other two as well.
I passed all three. Somehow. At seven that night I made it to the Mountain Meadows Inn.
It was a hiker’s dream. Full bed, wifi, complimentary tea, a fully stocked bar, tv, instruments to dabble (poorly) with, a library, ping pong table, hot tub and even a sauna. But I couldn’t appreciate any of it. The hot tub, sauna, and even a hot shower were all pleasures I had to do without because poison ivy flares up with exposure to heat. I ordered a pizza but had no appetite when it came. And after long deliberation I decided a beer wasn’t the best idea either. I couldn’t afford to dehydrate my body further lest I shrivel into a man-shaped cut of specialty beef jerky.
I did appreciate the porcelain toilets though, and spent more time in the bathroom than anywhere else courtesy of feeling pretty twisted up inside.
When it came down to it all I really wanted was a bottle of chamomile for my rash and a place to lay down – both of which I got. Then I slipped gratefully into sleep and blissful unconsciousness.
I felt the same in the morning. I decided to hike through it, again.
Notice a trend?
Two days and two centuries later it was June 16th and a worried Russian was giving me a massage on the trail. I had been sprawled out on a rock when he came around the bend with his wife. “What is wrong?” He asked me. “The legs? Neck?” I gestured at everything and said, “Everything.” Immediately he rolled up his sleeves and said gruffly, “SIT. I am physical therapist. I help.”
I sat.
He had me in a chokehold before I could blink, one arm looped under my chin while the other braced against the back of my head, and for a second I thought he was going to end me then and there. Just one twist and pff there I’d go, fizzled out, quietly and with no adieu, a dud firecracker on a sidewalk. I tensed, expecting the worst.
The man smacked the back of my head and barked, “NO! You must loose. You must let me do this.” I reevaluated my situation, decided that I’d take angel wings or the all-enveloping blackness of the forever sleep over poison ivy and crushing fatigue, and resigned to let him do his thing. Massage or murder, I could care less. From my perspective I figured I had a 50/50 chance of life and I was a winner either way.
After he popped my neck into place and smoothed out some knots in my shoulders I felt pretty dumb for running the whole mental scenario.
Finishing up he noticed that I was more limber, but still just as sluggish as before. He frowned, tapped his temple, frowned more deeply. “What is wrong?”
I told him I thought I was sick. Concern flashed across his face and he was quiet for a moment. When he finally opened his mouth again it was to issue another command, because Russians don’t ask you to do things they tell you to.
“Look at me.” He gestured to his eyes. I was surprised, but obeyed. He was my height so the look was level. We stared at each other, saying nothing, for about twenty seconds. Neither of us broke away. We appraised each other wordlessly, something I never could have done with another American because our culture is rooted in “rationality at all costs” and tends to make a mockery of the foreign and the mystic and the unprofitable and really any premodern traditions that were around before the birth of our great, chubby-cheeked nation. Ask an American the difference between a gypsy and a witch doctor and they’ll shrug and say, “Who cares.” The incomprehensible has no place in our increasingly systematic, scientific world.
Thus, you’d be hard pressed to find another American willing to allow themselves to be silently, solemnly judged by someone other than themselves who believes in things they find nonsensical. But it was different with the Russian. He wasn’t self-conscious or embarrassed by the staring contest and the fact that it was an intuitive groping of another person’s soul, an experience completely removed from the realm of common sense and mathematical logos. And so I wasn’t either.
After the seconds had ticked away his face split into a grin. “You will make it to the north,” he said matter-of-factly, “I can see it in your eyes that you are strong.” Then he tossed me a shot of “little water” (because what’s vodka to a Russian whose raised on harsher stuff?) and walked off like a figure from a fairy tale. His wife wished me good luck too and loaded me up with a few granola bars before she followed her husband.
For the next hour I was untouchable. The Russian’s proclamation, “you will make it to the north,” had the ring of prophecy and, as I’ve mentioned before, I grew up on fantasy novels. The point is if there’s an overarching theme to the genre it’s this: prophecies aren’t things easily broken. So I plowed ahead full of new energy and newly fated to overcome any obstacle.
I wish I could tell you I was all better after that pep talk, and I guess I could, but it would be a lie. After the hour mark the fire under my ass went out and I went from hero to zero. I was pissing a dark yellow that could pass for brown, cramping like a woman in labor, and couldn’t twist my neck more than 5 degrees left or right when I stumbled lock-legged into Happy Hill Shelter 8 hours later. Even in my delirium I couldn’t help but grin that masochistic grin at the irony of the shelter’s tagline. Happy Hill. Fate had turned the tables on me and really, isn’t that always the case?
I felt more fragile than I ever had before. I slid gingerly to the ground thinking if I sat down too hard I might shatter. I was most definitely not happy. Four of my friends shared the place with me that night, but I didn’t say a word to any of them.
The next day I slept in out of necessity. Then I walked into Hanover, had breakfast within sight of the quad at Dartmouth College, and took a public bus to the Clear Choice MD walk-in clinic in West Lebanon. On the way I overheard another bus driver crackle through the radio that he’d just seen a woman hit by a car. My bus was just pulling away from the local hospital then. Figures in scrunchies hustled around everywhere. I suspected it would be getting even busier there pretty soon.
After a moment’s silence the driver crackled over the CB again: “Should I stop? Or stick to my route?”
Later, when my blood-test came back clear and the doctor gave me the go-ahead to keep hiking I would wonder the same thing.
My answer came that night when, after being cleared by doc just hours before, I had a sickening feeling of nausea followed by a case of diarrhea. The whole debacle was made even worse by the fact that I was at a trail angel’s house. At 2 AM I stumbled into their flower scented, marble-floored bathroom and 2 hours later I stumbled out towing a cloud of guilt I hadn’t had when I went in and doubted I’d ever be able to erase.
At last though here was my undeniable proof that something was wrong with my body. Now it was impossible to deny that I was sick!
I stayed one more night in Hanover, bunking in the pink-painted bedroom of a welcoming couple’s now-grown daughter, didn’t go back to the doctor, woke feeling the same, and hiked out anyway.
Before you ask – there was no “why.”
…other than the fact I was a damn idiot. Nothing had changed. Nothing at all. And I figured that out when I got to my first hill. It was a tiny one. I barely got up.
Three agonizing days later (Yes, three days – I can be VERY obstinate, doubly so when it comes to denying my own frailty) I had to climb Mt. Moosilauke, my first 4,000 foot peak. It shouldn’t have been a tough climb. I could’ve done it in an hour and a half if I’d felt good. A long climb, but not a hard one. It was good trail anyways…
It took me five hours to get to the top. On the way up at least fifteen people asked me if I was alright. A few offered to help. Some offered food. I put them off any way I could. Out of pride. Because I’d walked this far without help and I could beat this mountain too.
In other words I was acting stubborn and stupid again.
But I was so utterly spent when I finally made the peak that, at long last, I decided to figure out what the hell was really wrong with me.
I went to a family physician in North Woodstock, the nearest town. It was June 21st, more than three weeks since I had started showing symptoms, and possibly even longer since I had contracted said sickness. He told me that I had giardia, a bacterial infection of the intestines and that little parasitic microbes had been stealing nutrients from my body and making me weak and lactose intolerant among other things.
I said, “No shit.” Deadpan.
I felt pretty dumb.
I was pretty dumb.
It only took me a month to realize that getting goosebumps on a 90 degree day while hiking through wrenching abdominal cramps with a 40 lb bag on my back wasn’t normal. A month to admit that my urine shouldn’t be brown after I’d downed 5 liters of water just a few hours prior. Nearly four weeks to wonder why I didn’t have the hiker hunger that had earlier in my journey kept my stomach growling constantly for foooood.
But I knew now. And that meant I couldn’t logically get away with denial anymore. Which left two options: continuing insanely on or calling a halt to the death march in favor of a few nights rest.
A remember reading about a psychological concept called “jouissance,” in college. It was centered in the notion that people could become fixated on a distorted type of pleasure that arouses from the experience of pain. When I realized that I had been forcing myself to embrace the escalating pain of hiking for twenty plus days I thought maybe there might be something to it.
I made a reservation at the Notch hostel after all this, picked up my antibiotics (Metrozinadole) from a local CVS, and bunkered down to rest.
The Notch was great. I would be there for three nights. My friends, Cosmo and the crew, only stayed one. I watched as they disappeared down the road in the back of pickup the second morning.
It was fact that they’d be be miles ahead when I got back to the trail.
I resolved to get better fast.

The slowest gets left behind. It’s the weakest link who’s got to say goodbye — Nomad