Becoming Odyssa

by Jennifer Pharr Davis

“Oh, believe me, that happens. Think about it. Eating large quantities of food combined with constant physical exertion and a tight pack belt around your bowels. Trust me, it happens.”

  “Huh. Well, I haven’t done that . . . yet.”

  “Well, then I think you’re fine. We’ve hiked almost two thousand miles. You’re exhausted and tired, and your body is just breaking down. We’re all breaking down.”

  What Mooch knew, which I hadn’t learned yet, was that Night-walker was having some embarrassing physical issues as well.

  I noticed that Nightwalker seemed cranky and irritable that morning, and he was more eager than usual to hike ahead without company, but because of my condition I hadn’t thought much about it; I was just glad that he wasn’t hiking with me.

  When Mooch and I finally caught up with him, he was stumbling up the trail, gritting his teeth, and squinting his eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No. Just keep hiking and let me walk alone.”

  Mooch heeded Nightwalker’s request, but I stayed behind.

  “Really, I can help. Just tell me what it is.”

  Nightwalker flashed me an angry glare and snapped, “My shorts are chafing my manhood.”

  “What?”

  “The humidity and hiking are chafing my penis.”

  Oh, wow. I guess I really couldn’t help.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Then I turned so he couldn’t see me and smiled. I know this was one of those times when you weren’t supposed to laugh, and I didn’t, but it was hard.

  “Hold on, I have to stop,” he said. “I need to duct tape my shorts.”

  Duct tape has a million uses on the trail, but I didn’t know that this was one of them. Nightwalker put a big strip of it on the inside of his shorts to help with the friction, and it worked for a little bit. But after a while the pain came back, and so did his outlandish solutions.

  “Odyssa,” I heard him call behind me. “Odyssa, hold on.”

  “What is it?”

  “I have to hike without shorts.”

  “Hah. Riiiiight. That’s funny.”

  “Look at me, Odyssa. I have tears in my eyes. If I don’t take off my shorts and hike in my briefs, then I won’t be able to keep going.”

  Why did it have to be briefs? Why couldn’t he be a boxer guy?

  “Okay, fine, but I’m hiking ahead of you to make sure no south-bounders come down the trail.”

  I hiked several minutes ahead of Nightwalker without incident. This could actually work, I thought. We might be able to make it to the end of the day without seeing anyone else.

  Then a black fly flew into my eye.

  It landed right in the corner of my eye and dug its way underneath my eyelid where I couldn’t get it out. I batted, I rubbed, but still my vision was blurry and a painful bump remained trapped beneath my eyelid. I needed help. I turned around and started hiking in the opposite direction.

  When I saw Nightwalker with my one good eye, he looked naked. I knew he wasn’t, but his shirt hung just low enough that it looked like he wasn’t wearing anything underneath.

  “Stop fidgeting,” Nightwalker said as he examined my eye.

  “I can’t help it. I’m nervous.” It was taking him forever to work the insect out, and I was quite sure that I would soon see a hiker coming in the opposite direction, while a man who looked like he wasn’t wearing underwear held my face and poked at my eye.

  “Got it,” he said triumphantly.

  Finally I could see clearly, and there was still no one around. I had been spared. And so had Nightwalker.

  He walked without shorts for the remainder of the day, and the only person he had to explain himself to was Mooch. But Mooch didn’t want to hear it.

  “No, really, whatever you two decide to do in the woods is up to you. You don’t have to tell me about it.”

  “Mooch, come on. You know we wouldn’t—”

  “Seriously, how far you take your relationship is none of my business. But next time I would remember to put your shorts back on.”

  Mooch was cracking himself up. He thought he was so funny.

  He was.

  The next day, Nightwalker was able to wear his shorts again, so he walked fully clothed into Maine.

  We had made it! Granted, I had developed a rash on my upper body, my pack was heavy, my legs were tired, it rained that day, and my stomach was a mass of cramping, air bubbles, and foul gases. But that made entering Maine all the more uplifting.

  At a blue sign that read WELCOME TO MAINE, the three of us rejoiced: we took funny pictures, we hummed the Rocky theme song, and Mooch did a ridiculous celebration dance.

  And then we did what we always do: we kept moving forward.

  So much of the trail had been about hiking from Georgia to Maine, and so much of my mental encouragement and positive self-talk had suggested that making it to Maine would mark success. And now I was here.

  After crossing the state line, I hiked in front of the group. I mostly looked at the ground, because looking up was demoralizing, but at one point I lifted my head to gauge my progress, and there it was.

  “Hor . . . hors . . . moose!” I gasped.

  It was a moose, a moose without antlers, a female moose! Her head was sticking through the thick brush, and at first I couldn’t figure out what a horse was doing in the bushes beside the trail. Then I realized this was where all the huge pellets of poop were coming from!

  I tried to repeat myself quietly so that Nightwalker and Mooch, who were coming up behind me, would understand the situation. I pointed and once again whispered, “Moose!” But seeing that she was about to turn and trample into the forest, I called out louder, “Moose, moose, moose!” Then I watched her gigantic backside disappear in the distant hedges.

  The boys never saw the moose. They were disappointed, and I felt bad they had missed her, but then again, they had seen a bear back in Virginia. Now that I was in Maine, I resigned myself to the fact that I probably wasn’t going to see a bear on this trip. And although I hadn’t really thought about seeing a moose, the five seconds that passed between recognizing the four-legged creature and watching her bound through the thick forest immediately became a highlight of my hike.

  The descent down Carlo Col demands hugging the mountain as if it were a rock-climbing wall and slowly inching down the serrated incline. It was hard, time consuming, and exhausting. Nightwalker and I were both six feet tall, and Mooch could look down at both of us, yet there were several places where even our long legs and extended bodies couldn’t reach the next ledge. We had to jump, slide, and spot each other coming off the rocky grade.

  After that, I thought the trail would get better. I thought it had to get better.

  I was wrong. The unwieldy traverse that led into Maine was only a taste of what we encountered the next day at Mahoosuc Notch.

  Mahoosuc Notch was a mile-long stretch of gnarly, jagged, oddly shaped boulders in a gulch that was sandwiched in between two imposing sheer cliffs. There wasn’t any walking through Mahoosuc Notch. The only way through was to squeeze, slip, and slither on top, in between, and beneath the rocks.

  It was late June, but we still saw snow on the ground in some places, and we could feel cold air from ice trapped in crevasses beneath the boulders.

  There were several points where I felt like a wrong step could lead to serious injury, and I was thankful not to be hiking alone. But as a group, we were discouraged at how long it was taking us to move forward. I kept thinking about world-class track stars who could run a mile in under four minutes. I was pushing myself as hard as I could, and I was lucky to make it a hundred feet in four minutes.

  “This sucks,” said Mooch.

  “I’m so tired,” I complained.

  “C’mon guys,” said Nightwalker. “It’s not that bad. Just think of
it as Mother Nature’s jungle gym.”

  The fact that Nightwalker wasn’t struggling as much as Mooch and me made me a little resentful, but the playground analogy did flip a switch in my head. I finally accepted that there was nothing we could do to increase our speed. At that point, I stopped trying to hurry and just started to enjoy the rock scrambles.

  Suddenly the hardest mile of the entire trail became one of the most enjoyable. We stopped trying to fight the elements and began to embrace them. We laughed as we threw our packs off large boulders and pushed them between small cracks before trying to squeeze our bodies through to the other side. We played an adapted version of hide-and-seek as we rounded each turn, and threw our hiking sticks to each other in a skilled game of catch.

  It took us an hour and a half to traverse the one-mile Mahoosuc Notch, and when we finally came out at the east end, we were exhausted, proud, and happy. We had completed the hardest mile of the entire trail.

  Unfortunately, we were unaware that it was directly followed by the second-hardest mile on the trail.

  I might have had a clue if the words “Mahoosuc Mountain” appeared in the Data Book after Mahoosuc Notch, but instead it read “Mahoosuc Arm.” arm? Why can’t New England call things what they really are? Instead of “arm,” they should have called it a vertical rock wall.

  Mahoosuc Arm battered our already fatigued bodies. Traversing the ascent took everything out of us that hadn’t already been extracted by the rocks below. There was no walking; instead I placed two palms out on the trail and pawed my way to the top. The incline was torturous, my quads and calves were screaming, and my arms were sore from pulling myself up on the roots and rocks. The only thing that kept me moving was the ominous dark clouds that were beginning to gather above us.

  We made it up the arm and to Speck Pond Shelter just before the rain started. I collapsed on the floorboards.

  “Well, guys, you want to wait out the storm here and then keep hiking?” asked Nightwalker.

  Mooch and I just looked at each other. I knew by the look in his eyes that we were on the same page.

  “I can’t hike anymore today,” I said.

  “Neither can I,” Mooch echoed.

  “But we’ve only come nine miles,” Nightwalker said.

  It was true—demoralizing but true. It was 3:00 PM, and we had been hiking for eight hours, but we had only covered nine miles. However, those nine miles were more difficult than most of the thirty-mile days I had done in Virginia.

  “Nightwalker, you can go ahead, but I’m done.”

  “Toast,” Mooch agreed.

  “well, let’s just see how we feel after the rain passes.”

  I was more exhausted than I had ever been in my life, and Nightwalker wasn’t making it any better. Without any further conversation, I pulled out my sleeping bag and curled up inside it for a three-hour nap. When I awoke, I heard the boys eating dinner. It had stopped raining, but there was still thunder rumbling in the distance. I pulled out my food bag, made myself a cheese burrito, then after finishing the meal with cookies and water, I went back to sleep for another two hours.

  It was twilight when I woke up again, and the boys were both reading. I took out my journal, scribbled a quick entry, brushed my teeth, then went back to bed. I woke up at 7:00 the next morning, and I was still exhausted. I had gotten fifteen hours of sleep, and I felt like I could sleep fifteen more. Getting out of my sleeping bag and starting to hike was the last thing I wanted to do.

  Out of the three of us, I felt the worst and was having the hardest time. Or so I thought.

  “I’m quitting,” Mooch told me, as the two of us descended Old Speck Mountain together.

  “You’re what?” I asked.

  “I’m getting a ride at the next road and going home.”

  “Mooch, we’re in Maine. We are almost there. What are you thinking?”

  “Almost there? There are two hundred and eighty miles of trail in Maine, and so far they’ve been harder than New Hampshire. I can’t do it anymore; my body physically cannot do it. I can’t keep up with Nightwalker, and I feel like I’m holding you up. I just want to quit.”

  With Mooch it was sometimes hard to tell whether he was joking or being serious, because he was almost always joking. But at that moment his tone wasn’t sarcastic; he sounded pitiful, and I was ninety percent sure he was serious. The worst part was, we were approaching Grafton Notch, and there was a road there. I tried to buy some time.

  “You can’t quit,” I said. “Nightwalker is several miles ahead of us; you can’t quit without talking to him first.”

  “Nightwalker has you, he’ll be fine.”

  “No he won’t. And neither will I. I need you to stay.”

  I did need Mooch. I needed him to make me laugh, to sing to me, and to hike with me. I probably spent twice as much time hiking with Mooch as I did with Nightwalker. Things between Nightwalker and me were great, I liked him more and more every day, but they were also uncertain. Mooch was my rock. I never worried about our friendship.

  We came to the parking lot beside the road. Mooch hiked toward a pickup truck with a white-haired man standing beside it. I grabbed the back of his pack to try and stop him, but he managed to drag both of us closer to the truck.

  “Hey, you guys want to slackpack?” asked the white-haired man.

  “Slackpack?” Mooch was so intent on asking for a ride that the offer clearly caught him off guard.

  “Yeah, I own a hostel. I can slackpack you two the next ten miles and then you can come to my place to eat, sleep, take showers, and rest for the night. I can slackpack you tomorrow too, if you want.”

  “We would love to!” I exclaimed.

  Then I pulled Mooch aside. “Listen, we can both slackpack the next few miles, and tonight at the hostel you can decide what to do when all three of us are there.”

  Mooch reluctantly agreed.

  We put our packs in the back of the truck and set off into the woods with food, water, and raincoats.

  After a few hours we came across Nightwalker, who was jealous and a little mad when we saw us without our packs. That made Mooch happy.

  As promised, we were met at the next road crossing by the white-haired man, who drove us to The Cabin. The Cabin was much like any other home, except that the basement had been converted into a hiker lounge and bunkroom. We showered, did laundry, checked the internet, watched TV, and ate a huge dinner. That made Mooch happy, too. But I still wondered whether he was going to go back to the trail the next morning.

  That night the three of us lounged around in non-synthetic clothes, talking and eating ice cream—a lot of ice cream. My favorite part of The Cabin was the closet full of comfy clothes for hikers to wear while washing their clothes. I loved having the soft, breathable feel of cotton against my clean, warm skin. After hiking through thirteen states, I hated my smelly, clingy hiker clothes. No matter how many times I washed them, they still didn’t look clean. And even if my t-shirt smelled good coming out of the washing machine, as soon as I put it on and started sweating, the locked-in smell of nineteen hundred miles leaked out. The heat-activated stench was especially bad under my armpits and made me wish that I had chosen to hike in a tank-top for added ventilation.

  The three of us weren’t the only hikers lounging around in clean cotton clothes at The Cabin that Night. We were joined by Snowstepper, a hiker I had never met in person but whose trail journal entries I had been following since Georgia.

  Snowstepper had decided to start his northbound thru-hike from Springer Mountain last fall. He had hiked by himself through the dead of winter, in snow and ice, often without any sense of whether he was even on the trail. His refuge and release became the shelter registers; they were the only form of communication he had.

  In the South, his entries about inclement weather and loneliness were expressive yet good-humored, but the farther north he hiked, the more suicidal the entries became. He started to hate hiking, hate snow, hate loneliness, and hat
e life. Toward the end of Vermont, I had stopped finding entries written by him. I was convinced he was either dead or taking time off to recover from depression.

  Mooch was especially intrigued by Snowstepper, and began to ask him about his hike.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “I got off the trail,” Snowstepper said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I hated hiking and I thought I was going to die.”

  “So what are you doing back here?”

  “I never thought I would come back. When I got off, I swore that I was done with the trail. I’m glad I quit when I did, because if I had kept hiking, then I probably would have died or gone crazy. But to quit in Vermont—that just felt wrong. I put in so much time and effort to get there. I had overcome so much and then I just quit? Getting off was horrible. Nothing felt right. For three months the trail haunted me, so finally I decided I needed to come back and finish what I started.”

  I looked at Mooch, but he refused to make eye contact.

  That night before bed, the three of us were brushing our teeth over the kitchen sink.

  “Mooch, is there anything we need to discuss?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he replied.

  “What are you guys talking about?” asked Nightwalker.

  “Nothing,” said Mooch. “Absolutely nothing.”

  Our two days of slackpacking from The Cabin gave us the boost we needed to make it through southern Maine. I can’t believe people think that New Hampshire is the toughest part of the trail. Maybe it was because I wasn’t expecting it, but western Maine seemed far more difficult than anything else we had hiked. There were very few roads, no huts, and the mountains didn’t have snack bars on top.

  The peak that changed everything was Sugarloaf Mountain. There weren’t any other hikers, but there was a great view. And there, in the distance, we saw her—katahdin. She was just a speck on the horizon, but we could see the end, and that affected us all in different ways.

  Nightwalker was so excited that he talked nonstop for the rest of the day. He had a huge smile on his face and his voice was filled with excitement.