Abandoned Roads, Part VII

The mosquitos are biting my skin and filling themselves with my blood as I fill my Platypus reservoir with water from a pipe.  We are all drinking, but I smack them and kill them to eliminate the pain because I have been taught to avoid discomfort.  A swarm of mosquitos lingers around the stream like bored office workers huddling around the watercooler.  I am outnumbered and they are not going anywhere.

 

There is a concrete block above the pipe that somehow found its way inside the remote woods of Georgia.  I am sitting on this and watching water drip into my reservoir when a gray-haired man descends the hill behind me.  Even far-flung animals meet at the watering hole.

“This is what it’s all about,” the man says.

“What is?” I say.

“Being out here.”

“It’s something all right.”

“I try to get out here as often as I can.”

“What do you do?” I ask.

“I work at an office.  It’s as exciting as it sounds.”

I do not press him for details about how he spends forty hours of his life each week, so instead I ask him about the trail.  He is a section hiker.  He has hiked the White Mountains in New Hampshire, the most challenging portion of the trail.  He has hiked in Maine and in Pennsylvania and in Virginia.  Each year he takes three weeks’ vacation from his job and tries to hike as far as he can during his time off.  This time his goal is to reach the Tennessee border.  I try to imagine him in a shirt and tie, and I wonder what he is running from.

“Are you a thru-hiker?” he asks me.

“Yes.”

“You can always tell.”

“How can you tell?”

“You’re young.  You’ll be able to tell the difference between section-hikers and thru-hikers just by looking at them.  And by their smell.”

I smell like sweaty gym socks and garlic and wet dog, and this is the only appropriate time and place to harbor such an offensive odor.  He starts telling me about what to expect on the trail ahead of me.  Hikers get their legs in Virginia and start busting out twenty mile days.  I am already doing this, so I imagine myself hiking thirty miles with legs that relearned their purpose and now know nothing else.  The countryside in New England is beautiful, but first you have to traverse Pennsylvania, the place where boots go to die. 

“When you get to Pennsylvania, it’ll be a hundred degrees, and you’ll run out of water,” the man says.  “The rocks will cut up your shoes.  It’ll take you an hour to cover a mile.” 

The future is looking brighter and brighter.  I will slog through this endless barrage of trees only to dehydrate and damage my feet and get an office job that I hate so that I can run back to the woods to experience real pain.  I top off my reservoir and climb the hill to cook my breakfast.  Steaming hot chocolate scalds my throat, but the warmth is inviting.  I shove spoonfuls of blueberry oatmeal into my mouth.  I have my cookware, food, and my book spread over half the table.  The gray-haired man sits down next to me and fires up his JetBoil stove.

Despite his ominous warnings, I am comforted by his presence.  He shows me a UV wand he uses to kill parasites in a liter of water, and he tells me I’m carrying too much olive oil.  I need to divvy these sixteen ounces into smaller bottles.  He asks me what I am going to do after the trail, and I tell him I want to get my Masters in journalism and that one day I would like to become an English professor.  He tells me he has children in college now, and they have jobs lined up at Google and NASA.  He seems very proud of them.  I want to ask him:  If your children have such successful jobs, what are you doing in the woods?

 

No matter how long you walk in the woods, your problems will be waiting for you when you return home.  There is money to fret over, boredom to kill, gas tanks to be filled, traffic to sit through, and labor to produce.  There is no medicine in the forest.  There are only hardships that alter your perception about your hardships at home.  

In many ways, the trail mimics life.  When the trail climbs higher, you must climb with it.  When the trail sinks into the valleys, you too must follow.  You cannot get angry when you see another mountain to climb because anger will not make the mountain go away.

The mountains do not go away, so I climb them as I bake under a fierce sun.  My lips are dry and I am covered in sweat and running low on water when I see the chubby old man again.  I cannot remember if he is wearing a new outfit or the same one as yesterday.  Is this the same man?  Am I hallucinating?  Is this how nonbelievers find God?  He approaches me, and we greet each other.

“I have crossed paths with you the last few days,” the old man says.  “You are off to a great start.”

He has been going on day hikes in the opposite direction as me, and he must know the area well because he can judge the ground I’ve covered and the speed at which I am traveling.

 

“Keep up the good work,” the old man says and vanishes somewhere south of me.

All I know is that there is land behind me and much more in front of me.  I forget the names of places I visited yesterday and I put one foot in front of the other until I know that my heart is not in this quest.