The Notch was good to me. It’s owners, Serena and Justin, let me trim my three day rent by folding laundry, dressing beds, and driving recyclables to the town’s processing building in their Toyota pickup. When I wasn’t acting as housekeeper I was popping my pills, drinking copious amounts of water, eating bland foods that my stomach could handle, and reading the latest book that had caught my eye (this time it was Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air).
Three nights like this and I felt ready to go. I’d been taking antibiotics for each of those three days and still had four more to go but in my mind the healing process was halfway done already and as long as I kept taking the meds the only way I could go was up.
There was another factor influencing me as well: I wanted to catch my friends and that meant I needed to cover some serious ground through some seriously difficult terrain. Looking at the topographical map at the obstacles to come was sobering. Just hiking this terrain at a turtle’s pace would be tough. I had to do it at speed.
On the way to the trail in the back of Justin’s pickup truck I watched clouds roll by, shook out my legs, and hoped I wasn’t jumping the gun.
That first day back was an eighteen. An eighteen that included a 3,000 foot descent followed immediately by a 4,000 foot ascent. A hard day by universal standards.
But I made it, stopping at a secluded spot a mile past a too-crowded shelter just as the sun dropped out of the sky. The shelter, Guyot, had been full of holiday hikers out to enjoy the mountains – 72 of them. I couldn’t stand the crowd. I did manage to bum a mystery sandwich wrapped in foil as I abandoned the tent city though.
In my tent 5,280 feet further north there wasn’t so much hubbub and I unfolded the tinfoil to find the mother of all roast beef ruebens.
For the first time in weeks I fell asleep with the certainty that I wouldn’t slip into a coma before I woke. I had energy again. I had life. My soul wasn’t going to just slip away into the night air. My heartbeat was an added reassurance, loud in my ears when I closed my eyes. For a long time it had been only a quiet murmur.
A seventeen mile day followed. It was the 25th and my first day in the Whites. New Hampshire’s highest mountain range includes Mount Washington and I could see it from my tent after I made the top of the main ridge. It was a rugged goliath in the distance. A boogeyman to some but to me, the zombie hiker come back to life, it was only tomorrow’s delight.
By noon the next day I was eating a hot dog in the Mount Washington summit gift shop. The place was swarming with sightseers, people who go places to look at interesting things and say mundane things in response. A drooping middle-aged woman with a purple purse dangling from limp fingers stands with her arms crossed looking out a window at 100 square miles of land eons old, ripped into shape by the millennial ebb and flow of glaciers miles and miles thick, ridges sharp against a blue sky that curves away into the razor line of the horizon. She looks out at all this then says blandly, “Would you look at that.”
I don’t get sightseers. They content themselves to look at life without interacting with it. But then again I watch television too I guess. Unlike them however I restrict that hobby to my living room.
In a way I didn’t mind the tourists though. Some had their kids on leashes so for me it was lunch and a show. People watching isn’t something you get to do much of while on trail – something to do with the lack of people.
I also had great fun guessing who had taken the trail up and who had taken the tram. As you can probably imagine, there wasn’t much to the game. Both classes of people were generally sitting with big plates of food but only one class seemed to retain the ill-effects of eating said food. There was the guy in bulging khakis savoring his fries slowly who looked like he belonged in a Burger King, and there was his counterpart at the next table, scarecrow-lean with a wild beard who inhaled his scalding chili like a last meal and seemed likely to be a person who might make multiple passes in line at a soup kitchen each time disguised as a different person. “Just another hungry soul,” I can see him say, as he waits for another bowl of that delicious Oliver Twist gruel. In the AT hiker world to tactfully acquire free food is an art and has a term: to yogi.
Hey, hey. Boo, boo. Watcha got in that picnic basket? My college roommate has a knack for accents and always did Yogi’s voice best.
After I had eaten and laughed my fill I left. There were still 9 miles to go and three more peaks ahead. Grey clouds hung on the horizon but they looked far away and moving slow.
They weren’t.
There had been a sign on my way up that warned the unwary soul of harsh weather up here. “The Whites have the worst weather in America,” it said in big, black letters. There was no beating around the bush. The gift shop had an ominous warning too: a scrolling list of people who lost their lives due to weather. It was a long list. The sun was still out at this point. I wasn’t bothered.
An hour after I left Washington to hike 9 more miles on an exposed mountain ridge nearly 4,500 feet above sea-level it started to rain. Then to thunder. Then I started to wonder why this thunderstorm thing always seemed to happen right when I was high enough to touch the clouds. Then, because I’m stubborn and don’t like turning back (which my readers now know well) I started to run.
3 hours. 3 mountains. Vaulting along on two legs and two poles like some gangly rock-hopping beast. Adrenaline. No one else to share the mountain with under the blackening sky. No one brash to the point of idiocy like me. Everyone else hunkered down low, inside. Wait. Not everyone. An old guy wedged under a rock who gapes at me stone-stepping along through the grey rain and shouts something that sounds like, “Damn sonny, you can MOVE!”
At last I make it to Mt. Madison. It’s the last peak and hard to climb. There’s no trail per say, just a white blaze swathed on a rock here, an alpine shrub there. Cairns, pyramidal stacks of stones, lead the way when there aren’t blazes. As I climb through the wind and rain up towards the roof of the world I’m reminded that in some cultures cairns mark graves.
What matters to the story is that at the end of the day’s affairs there weren’t any stones stacked on top of me.
Before going down the north side of Madison and out of this particular stretch of mountains (there are always more ahead), I managed to get a signal from a lone rocky spire. AT&T has horrific networking in New England and this one bar was the most service I’d had in a week. It gave me the juice to pick up a new voicemail. Only one. The voicemail in question happened to be a message left earlier that same day by my uncle. I’d probably been running when he called.
I hit play, cupped it to my ear, listened to it, and then grinned and laughed while the wind tried to tear me off the rocks.
It had been a while since I’d last talked to my uncle and his voice sounded exasperated as it came through the speaker: “YEAH, YEAH, YEAH, JUST KEEP WALKING MOTHERFUCKER.”
Had me laughing all the way down the mountain – I’ll call you soon Uncle Stan and, as always, sorry for the procrastination.
I made it to the White Mountain Hostel a day later and reunited with my friends. But I hadn’t caught them yet. They were still 21 miles ahead of me on trail. I’d caught a ride to the hostel from the base of the Presidentials whereas they’d hiked to the point where the trail intersected with the town it was located in.
To catch them I resolved to slack pack the 21 gap while they relaxed and took a zero the next day.
The 28th was not a fun day. I staggered and stumbled and tripped and ran 21 miles over the entire Wildcat mountain range, a northern offshoot of the Whites that to some queues in as one of the most difficult sections of the entire trail. My loaner backpack broke as I got out of the shuttle to start my hike. I patched it with duck tape and a little ingenuity. Then it started to rain. And then rain harder. And sometime near noon my phone, insulated in an apparent-faulty lifeproof case, decided to drink some water that had somehow gathered inside my rain jacket pocket – short circuiting itself and eradicating months of pictures (which means no June pictures for the June blogs) and daily notes (this entire June segment you’re reading is from memory) with a spectacular lack of flair. And all day I simmered about these leaden clouds that always dumped buckets on me while I was thousands of feet above sea level clawing my way up mounds of shale and loose rock. And all day I thought about my friends kicked back sipping cokes on a plush couch. And all day I laughed a maniacal laugh because I wouldn’t be able to call my uncle back which meant I’d probably have a few more exasperated voicemails to look forward to when I got a new phone.
The hostel owners had a running bet that I was a “nine hour guy.” “I bet you come in the door around 6,” Marni, the matron of the household said, “This Wildcat section is tough but most guys with your build come off in about that timeframe.” Others had me at seven.
I was stripping my wet socks off in the garage at 4:45 and by five I was in a reclining chair staring at, but not watching, the television screen with numb fatigue. The moving pixels were a hypnotizing light show to my unfocused eyes. “You’re pretty fast,” Marni said from somewhere far alway and I lifted me eyebrows, then let them drop. That was as much of an answer that she would get from me. I was beat.
But I’d caught up. And I could smile about that – tomorrow morning though. Not then.
Too tired for social conventions and resigned to talk with just my facial features for now — Nomad