TRAIL DAY 4
Wed, Feb 24, 2016 During the night I noticed that Theo was not using his sleeping pad. In the morning I saw that the section of my work-out pad, formerly a thin closed-foam sleeping pad, was disintegrating into black powder all over the smooth, bright, blond wood floor.
I cleaned up with a small, fresh, white hand towel from the bathroom which I soaked and rung out. After wiping up the floor, I rinsed the towel in clean toilet water so all the grime could be flushed away and not clog sink lines. Four or five trips and done. A mess cleaned up.
I take great pleasure in knowing that a mess can be cleaned up. That it can is its own kind of miracle. Mess, clean! Miracle. Just as if the mess never happened. It’s even a challenge: O.K. What’s the best way to deal with this?
A friend told me this past Christmas that he was awake a bit during the night and had a vivid memory of my reaction to our Christmas tree tipping over the year before in a large galvanized bucket full of water and, through a grace well beyond my worst moments, I simply took in the situation and found a way, with my wife’s help, to right the tree and bucket and clean up all the water from floor and rugs and under the bucket – and we carried on. . . .
I fed Theo, had breakfast myself at the clean, blond table. This is when I met “Ten Degrees” and his two boys, “Powder” and “Badger” among others. Somehow I got talking with one of the boys about one-legged squats. I told him about my experience doing these when I was 22 and popping out the cartilage of my left knee. I demonstrated with my fists how the knee can be very unstable in that maneuver. His dad, Ten-Degrees (a name having to do with his selecting the wrong degree sleeping bag because of a confusion between Celsius and Fahrenheit), kindly said that they were O.K. if you did them correctly and then told me that he was retired military and a fitness trainer. I felt comparison and competitiveness within but let them go – this was the trail – I didn’t have to prove myself to anyone. My objective was simply to take a long walk through nature. I let myself feel how nice it was that this fine young dad was out with his two sons hiking. Life’s mini-struggles were getting lighter and it always made me feel good to have someone appreciate Theo.
I finished my breakfast and packed my gear, all of which gets handled somehow whenever you stop, paid up and was shuttled back to Woody Gap. Where you ended is always where you return. It was near noon.
“Gap” is southern for the crotch between mountains. In the north, it’s a notch. Woody Gap, therefore, was, even at 3198′, relatively low compared to surrounding terrain. Back in the woods, on the trail, civilization was a fantasy. It didn’t exist except in the imagination. There’s that brief moment of transition when you’re getting out of the van and getting your pack and poles and saddlebags out, knowing the driver is going to drive away and you’re then in a limbo, neither here nor there. But you are going to be there and here is going to be long gone when the van pulls away.
And so it would be time after time after time, all the way to Katahdin – but it would become more routine and normal.
I returned to the dark, damp woods again, alone with Theo, moving northward, just the two of us hiking our own hike. We weren’t out to set any records – couldn’t if we tried – and we weren’t on a short visa as were those from other lands. I had referred most of my cases and others were O.K. on an indefinite hold, so I had eyes to see whatever was there and time to stop and chat with people I’d encounter. I was 74 when I started and would turn 75 about half way. Perhaps life seems a little more precious from the perspective of years when you know you’re really not invincible, indefatigable, immortal. Life is going to drift away, just like the van that brought you back to the trail.
As I approached the years leading up to the trail and began winding down my practice, I found myself reflecting, “retirement isn’t something you do, it’s something that happens to you.”
And it’s all good.