Monday, August 29, 2005
Day Five - get off the mountain before the mountain gets you
It’s my firm belief that the reason so few Westerners take God seriously is because they take so few risks. It’s kind of hard to see God at work when you’ve holed yourself up in front of the TV with a bag of crisps. What’s He supposed to do, change the channel for you? That’s why faith is way more prevalent in countries where even clean water is a miracle.
A lot of people laugh at outdoorsy types who describe their experiences as ‘spiritual, man’, but it’s true. You can’t climb a mountain, or view the earth from 10,000 feet before plummeting towards it with only a piece of silk to break your fall, without knowing God is looking out for you. It’s the same for hikers, and it was especially true on our last day on the mountain.
Nina woke up in a bad mood, so I should have known instantly that something was wrong. But I figured it was just the rain (damp gets to everyone after a while) and got on with packing up the camp. It gradually became clear, though, that Nina wasn’t feeling herself at all. She had that ‘just driven 12 hours to New Hampshire’ look again.
“My stomach’s getting pretty sore, Suz,” she said eventually. “I’ve had this before and it always turns into cramps. Usually they’re so bad I can’t even walk.”
Remember what I said about the wilderness? About dying of exposure before help comes? About being invisible to helicopters below treeline (which is where we were)? Nina looked scared, and with good reason. If she couldn’t walk, it would take me a good few hours to get down the mountain and raise the alarm.
The only thing she could do was take painkillers and hope they kicked in before the cramps did (they never kicked in after, apparently). Then we prayed and started walking.
For twenty minutes, it was all pretty nerve-wracking. At one stage Nina stopped for a breather and I went on ahead (catching up with me is pretty easy, even with stomach ache). After a few minutes, though, there was no sign of her, I yelled her name. Silence. I yelled it again, using my best stage projection voice. What if she was sitting in agony on a log somewhere?
But after an eternity her voice floated down the trail in reply, followed by her Cheshire grin and then the rest of her, uncramped.
“The painkillers kicked in!” she said. “My stomach’s slightly sore and that’s it. This has never happened before!”
The relief was so great that, for a few minutes, my legs stopped aching. The foot of the mountain was only a few hours away on an easy trail. Gravity would get us there and then we’d have showers, hot food and real beds. Life was good.
Getting out of the wilderness after four days was much weirder than I anticipated, though. Not that I wasn’t looking forward to it – I had the legs of an eighty year old and my shoulders and hips were bruised from the backpack – it was just very strange. After several hours walking through an ethereal forest where the trees stretched their limbs through the mist, inviting us to fall asleep (it was tempting) and meet our doom like in some weird German fairy tale, we found ourselves in a field. While our eyes told us it was deserted, our ears told us we were twenty metres from an interstate highway. As we got closer to the end of the trail, we could hear voices. We were back in civilization.
The voices belonged to a group of fresh faced teens who were about to take on the mountains. Their gear was new and clean, they didn’t smell and they had actual energy. As Nina and I walked past, their chatter died away. I guess the thought of looking like us in four days’ time was a pretty sobering thought.
Stepping out onto the hard shoulder of the interstate, I realized the hard work was pretty far from over. We still had to hitch 16 kilometres back to the car, and nobody seemed particularly bothered about stopping for us. We started walking. My backpack felt like it was about to dislocate my shoulders. Nina needed the bathroom. It was all a huge anti-climax.
And still we trudged, and still the lone drivers in their SUVs whizzed past us. Our feet were killing us (it’s amazing how hard pavement seems when you haven’t walked on it for a while) and we were dehydrated. But just as we were really starting to flag, just when it seemed like we’d be walking to town in the dark, someone stopped for us.
Moving along at 80 miles an hour seems like warp speed after days on foot, especially when you’re in the back of a pickup truck. Nina and I whooped and cheered as the wind blew through our hair and we saw the trail disappearing behind us. Soon we were in the nearest town, where we scored another ride in a matter of minutes. Before we knew it, we were back at the car and the hike was over.
One of the best things about hiking is how much it makes you appreciate the simple things in life. Nina’s humble Civic seemed like a gold-plated chariot that would whisk us away to a world of hot showers, non-dehydrated food, and soft dry beds. We booked ourselves into a hostel and, once we were clean, headed straight to J’s. The food was even better than it had been four days ago.
Then it was back to the hostel to hang out with our fellow hikers, sharing tales of bravery, hardship, and narrowly escaping death. After five minutes of getting to know people, though, I realized I had very little to contribute. Almost everyone in the hostel was thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, which ended just 300 miles up the road having snaked its way through mountains all the way from Georgia. They’d been hiking most of the last 5 months. I hadn’t even done 5 days.
I was also put off by some obscenely boring bloke who’d done the Appalachian Trail two and a half times and its west coast equivalent (the Pacific Coastal Trail) twice. My first question to him was: why?? He then launched into an essay about how there are three types of people who do the AT, and which of them stick it through till the end, and the percentage who do, etc etc. He was one of the people trying to figure out where their life was going, and had spent five years walking and thinking. Five years!!! What a total waste of time! Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, but spending five years in the woods just seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. I guess it’s his life, though.
The other two types of people are college grads and retirees, both of which were represented at the hostel and spent the rest of the evening talking about trails and hiking gear and weather conditions. Boring guy dominated the conversation with tales of how he’d caught sleep apnea or something. Eventually I couldn’t take it any more and trooped off to bed. Just as I was falling asleep, I noticed a lightning storm brewing over the mountains and was very glad I wasn’t there. There are some people who can hike for months in all conditions, eschewing showers and beds and bars and cinemas and shops and all the other things that make up modern civilization - but I am definitely not one of them.
A lot of people laugh at outdoorsy types who describe their experiences as ‘spiritual, man’, but it’s true. You can’t climb a mountain, or view the earth from 10,000 feet before plummeting towards it with only a piece of silk to break your fall, without knowing God is looking out for you. It’s the same for hikers, and it was especially true on our last day on the mountain.
Nina woke up in a bad mood, so I should have known instantly that something was wrong. But I figured it was just the rain (damp gets to everyone after a while) and got on with packing up the camp. It gradually became clear, though, that Nina wasn’t feeling herself at all. She had that ‘just driven 12 hours to New Hampshire’ look again.
“My stomach’s getting pretty sore, Suz,” she said eventually. “I’ve had this before and it always turns into cramps. Usually they’re so bad I can’t even walk.”
Remember what I said about the wilderness? About dying of exposure before help comes? About being invisible to helicopters below treeline (which is where we were)? Nina looked scared, and with good reason. If she couldn’t walk, it would take me a good few hours to get down the mountain and raise the alarm.
The only thing she could do was take painkillers and hope they kicked in before the cramps did (they never kicked in after, apparently). Then we prayed and started walking.
For twenty minutes, it was all pretty nerve-wracking. At one stage Nina stopped for a breather and I went on ahead (catching up with me is pretty easy, even with stomach ache). After a few minutes, though, there was no sign of her, I yelled her name. Silence. I yelled it again, using my best stage projection voice. What if she was sitting in agony on a log somewhere?
But after an eternity her voice floated down the trail in reply, followed by her Cheshire grin and then the rest of her, uncramped.
“The painkillers kicked in!” she said. “My stomach’s slightly sore and that’s it. This has never happened before!”
The relief was so great that, for a few minutes, my legs stopped aching. The foot of the mountain was only a few hours away on an easy trail. Gravity would get us there and then we’d have showers, hot food and real beds. Life was good.
Getting out of the wilderness after four days was much weirder than I anticipated, though. Not that I wasn’t looking forward to it – I had the legs of an eighty year old and my shoulders and hips were bruised from the backpack – it was just very strange. After several hours walking through an ethereal forest where the trees stretched their limbs through the mist, inviting us to fall asleep (it was tempting) and meet our doom like in some weird German fairy tale, we found ourselves in a field. While our eyes told us it was deserted, our ears told us we were twenty metres from an interstate highway. As we got closer to the end of the trail, we could hear voices. We were back in civilization.
The voices belonged to a group of fresh faced teens who were about to take on the mountains. Their gear was new and clean, they didn’t smell and they had actual energy. As Nina and I walked past, their chatter died away. I guess the thought of looking like us in four days’ time was a pretty sobering thought.
Stepping out onto the hard shoulder of the interstate, I realized the hard work was pretty far from over. We still had to hitch 16 kilometres back to the car, and nobody seemed particularly bothered about stopping for us. We started walking. My backpack felt like it was about to dislocate my shoulders. Nina needed the bathroom. It was all a huge anti-climax.
And still we trudged, and still the lone drivers in their SUVs whizzed past us. Our feet were killing us (it’s amazing how hard pavement seems when you haven’t walked on it for a while) and we were dehydrated. But just as we were really starting to flag, just when it seemed like we’d be walking to town in the dark, someone stopped for us.
Moving along at 80 miles an hour seems like warp speed after days on foot, especially when you’re in the back of a pickup truck. Nina and I whooped and cheered as the wind blew through our hair and we saw the trail disappearing behind us. Soon we were in the nearest town, where we scored another ride in a matter of minutes. Before we knew it, we were back at the car and the hike was over.
One of the best things about hiking is how much it makes you appreciate the simple things in life. Nina’s humble Civic seemed like a gold-plated chariot that would whisk us away to a world of hot showers, non-dehydrated food, and soft dry beds. We booked ourselves into a hostel and, once we were clean, headed straight to J’s. The food was even better than it had been four days ago.
Then it was back to the hostel to hang out with our fellow hikers, sharing tales of bravery, hardship, and narrowly escaping death. After five minutes of getting to know people, though, I realized I had very little to contribute. Almost everyone in the hostel was thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, which ended just 300 miles up the road having snaked its way through mountains all the way from Georgia. They’d been hiking most of the last 5 months. I hadn’t even done 5 days.
I was also put off by some obscenely boring bloke who’d done the Appalachian Trail two and a half times and its west coast equivalent (the Pacific Coastal Trail) twice. My first question to him was: why?? He then launched into an essay about how there are three types of people who do the AT, and which of them stick it through till the end, and the percentage who do, etc etc. He was one of the people trying to figure out where their life was going, and had spent five years walking and thinking. Five years!!! What a total waste of time! Maybe I’m being a bit harsh, but spending five years in the woods just seems like a bit of a cop-out to me. I guess it’s his life, though.
The other two types of people are college grads and retirees, both of which were represented at the hostel and spent the rest of the evening talking about trails and hiking gear and weather conditions. Boring guy dominated the conversation with tales of how he’d caught sleep apnea or something. Eventually I couldn’t take it any more and trooped off to bed. Just as I was falling asleep, I noticed a lightning storm brewing over the mountains and was very glad I wasn’t there. There are some people who can hike for months in all conditions, eschewing showers and beds and bars and cinemas and shops and all the other things that make up modern civilization - but I am definitely not one of them.
