How to Find a Flock

by Chris Vola

  Street canvassers, the good ones, don’t have the vaguest interest in the causes we promote. The real idealists – energized, new-adult faces with genuinely pleading eyes – never last. They’d rather spend their formative years scraping organic matter off the walls of a drained dolphin rehabilitation tank than hustling yuppies and guilty college kids who have discovered social consciousness as a side effect of a two-day coke hangover. And that’s cool. Because it is a hustle. Community Crusades, Inc. is a for-profit company, meaning that nonprofits pay us millions of dollars a year to run fundraising drives on their behalf, funds that tend to vanish after expenses. I’m required to begin my spiel by explaining to you that I’m a “paid fundraiser for grassroots campaigns,” but all that stuff Robbie tells us to spew about “one hundred percent” going to the nonprofit is exactly what it sounds like: dolphin shit.

  The position didn’t require a resume. I wouldn’t have known what to put on one anyways. Two-and-a-half degree-less years at a state school with a moderately storied basketball program? As far as extracurriculars go, getting date-raped and ODing isn’t particularly noteworthy or uncommon, although I guess it doesn’t usually happen in that order.

  Under the Required Skills & Experience section in Community Crusades’ Craigslist ad all it said was that they were looking for local candidates “who enjoy interacting with people, are stable, have a great attitude, and care about our planet!” Bonus points for customer service experience, the ability to “overcome objections,” and weekend availability. The correct combination of Xanax and Starbucks solves all the world’s problems and my interview with Robbie went stellar, mostly due to my embarrassing knowledge of contemporary major-network sitcoms – thanks Netflix courtesy of Karen, my dental hygienist big sis, she of the disposable income! We spent way more time discussing the inherent pathological slant in each of the major character dynamics in Modern Family than whether I could convince some ADHD-stricken fool on the street about the imminent perils of ozone depletion.

  But yeah, pity talkers. No bueno. The only one I ever really let get the better of me was the Park Ranger. He has a name, a fake one he told me once, but I never think of him as anything less than the total sum of what he was, or what he believed himself to be.

  The first words he said to me, over a year ago when I was out canvassing for a group that plants saplings in deforested wetlands: “I love making broken things beautiful.”

  From a potential donor standpoint, that’s a cue to start scanning the street for the nearest law enforcement personnel. As a pick-up line it was creepy but unique. We went to a falafel spot and had coffee and he started talking, a bunch of random life trivia. Growing up in North Carolina in a woodsy pit-stop town near a major hiking thoroughfare. Encountering a massive whitetail deer in a rut the first time he got stoned off his ass and how he knew he’d found his “animal spirit guide.” His current job cleaning up after hikers and repairing trail shelters in the mountains of New Hampshire. He kept tugging at this gingerbread beard that reminded me of a kind of out-of-control lichen that would grow on the trees at the lake upstate where my family used to camp sometimes. Meaning, sort of cute. I didn’t ask what he was doing in the city or why he was still wearing his beige and olive National Park Service uniform.

  “There are small moments,” he said out of nowhere. “And sometimes I think that’s all there is.”

  I was like, “Cool, so are you having any good ones now?”

  He sipped the latte he’d bought and made these weird grimace-smiles that looked like he either had a low tolerance for coffee or was wrapping his mind around something that had been a long time coming, jumper-cabled in irregular bursts and starts. He told me he had to catch a bus, that he had to get back to work. I got his number (he didn’t ask for mine) and was sidling up for an awkward goodbye hug and he just shrugged back, took out a small, wilted brochure from his pocket, pressed it into my hand. The cover had an illustration of a guy who looked kind of like him but with a backpack and walking stick, wearing shorts and standing in the foreground above a valley with waterfalls, pixelated sunset, generic nature clipart.

  “I like your smile lines,” he said. “They remind me of a stream bed that’s never tasted acid rain. Great biodiversity.”

  He left the restaurant.

  I stood there for a while, uhhhh.

  I looked at the brochure. Thinking about how many like it I’d stuffed into commute-sweated palms, how many I’d seen tossed seconds later into sidewalk receptacles, how few I’d actually read beyond the cover.

  I bought another coffee, sat down.

  It was a beginner’s guide to the Appalachian Trail. Figured. But the more I forced myself to skim, the more I found myself getting into it, even though the pages were mostly just maps. I traced the 2,200 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, passing through fourteen states in mostly wilderness with the occasional trail town, road, or river. The text boxes about section-hikers, thru-hikers, purists who follow the white blazes (the tree markings that denote the official trail), blue blazers who take mostly negligible shortcuts, and the yellow blazers, gentrified pussies who try to hitchhike whenever things get a little rough.

  I’d always been more into oceans and marine life, the vast unknown spaces and all that jazz, even did some nonprofit work in a former life I’d rather forget. But the more I read, the more I kept getting these visuals, kind of like tripping, but really clear snapshots – a patchwork of light-slivers through pine boughs illuminating a root-gnarled trail twisting around a bend to nowhere, mud-wrenched legs hugging a precipice overhanging a cobalt snake-skin river, a flame-bright meadow of flowers refracted and expanding in a dewdrop’s mirror. The feeling of being welcomed by a vastness, a bird-flung other-world drowned in the pleasant ache of a sleeping bag, spiking and fading within a clock-less biorhythm of slumber and movement, the absence of anything besides my thoughts, my lungs, the land.

  Meaning, not having to approach assholes and near-dementia retirees on the street.

  At home I burned through Wikipedia pages, websites of various conservancy groups, digital backpacker magazines, mostly useless personal blogs. I figured out how much it would cost to do the entire trail in one season, what kind of sleeping and cooking gear I’d need, preparatory cardio regimens, proper poop disposal. I bought maps and marked the trail towns where I’d need to re-up on food and take a shower. Where to buy high-energy snacks, water filters, flashlight batteries, first-aid stuff, a whistle (three blasts is the international signal for help). Most of the cold-weather stuff I’d take from the room that used to be my sister’s.

  I made a list of everything that could go wrong, researched fatality statistics, looked at pictures of compound fractures and gangrene fingernails and rotting abscesses caused by spider bites. Heat stroke, lightning strikes, diarrhea, foot blisters, biting flies, and tick-borne diseases, all the negligible hazards. Pretending to be a gung-ho martyr is a lot like getting mauled by a bear, only much more wasteful. At least as a meat product, one hundred percent of my energy would go directly toward sustaining life.

  It was good to have a goal, an end-point, one that might kill me before I reached it.

  That made me feel better.

  I called the Park Ranger a couple weeks later during a lunch break. What was I was going to tell him? That him giving me the brochure had catalyzed what was starting to become a potentially unfeasible obsession? That I’d developed hiking fever and could he help me feed the flame? That I wanted to apply for the National Park Service and call dibs on a personal lean-to where I could cook Ramen noodles and canned hash every night and listen to the delicate, non-human majesty of bullfrog mating rituals?

  “I’m back in town,” he said, after I reminded him who I was (she of the exceptional biodiversity). He happened to be staying at a friend’s apartment a few blocks from where I was canvassing. I asked him if he wanted to do something later and if it would be cool if I could just come over to his friend’s
place after work and drop my shit off so I wouldn’t have to go back to my car.

  The building was a gray-brick, six-story walk-up, a little gross. Non-existent buzzer, walked right in, blunt-gut and Cheetos-dust stairwell, aromas of curry and something that struck me as vaguely Caribbean, though I couldn’t say why. The fourth floor rumbled with the bass-fracking and booze-hoots of someone’s day off, adjacent to the apartment where the Park Ranger told me he’d be. He opened the door, scowled.

  You know how when you walk into a place or a situation where something is off, where it feels like you’ve stepped into an oblong distortion of the reality you expected, that cartoon thing should happen where the needle scratches off the record and everything freezes and goes silent? Meaning, at the very least your fight-or-flight should kick in to the point where you realize you need to make a decision and act on it?

  Maybe I’d been so inundated with googled hiking propaganda and my visions of what form my personal journey would take that the studio, lit only by a popular LED lantern model I’d been thinking about purchasing, didn’t faze me as much as it probably should have.

  There was no TV, sofa, table. Any refrigerator or microwave had been ripped from the windowless back wall long ago. Most of the ceiling was covered in garlands of dried wildflowers. I recognized bluets, jewel weed, columbine, and lady’s-slipper. Fallen petals carpeted the hardwood floor. Huge trail map print-outs covered multiple walls, different colored tacks marking who knows what. Posters and photos of whitetail does and fawns, beaver dams, swimming moose, hourglass-banded copperheads, undulating ridges capped with snow, tunnels of greenery and autumn-scarred scenic overlooks – orgasms of nature.

  The Park Ranger – same uniform, beard still a nest – motioned me to where someone had set up an MSR Hubba two-person tent (highly recommended by veteran trail enthusiasts) and adjacent to it, a portable cooking stove and pot system surrounded by a semi-circle of what looked like lacquered tree stumps.

  “Take a seat,” he said. He disappeared into the tent and reemerged holding a pair of mugs.

  I was trying to figure out how to fit the majority of my ass on a chunk of wood that appeared to be stolen from a kindergarten classroom. The mug he handed me was blue with writing that said Keep Calm and Think of Mountains. A brownish green teabag inside. The Park Ranger flicked a lighter and the stove ignited, flames stroking the underside of the lidded metal pot.

  I noticed a large, flowerless gap on the ceiling, directly above the ring of stumps. Black burn marks in a circular pattern.

  “Is this set-up covered by your friend’s renter’s insurance? His super must love you.”

  “Chamomile,” he said, squinting at his mug.

  I still couldn’t tell if he was truly autistic or if this was his preferred style of fucking around with near-strangers. Either way, the appeal had almost evaporated. But I had trail-related questions, stuff I couldn’t find online, and he was the closest thing to an expert I had.

  “So I want to do a thru-hike next summer,” I said, “the entire trail, one season.”

  His brain fog lifted, injection-quick, an excited beard tug. “You liked the brochure? I thought you might connect with it. Did you have any questions?”

  I started spitting them out while I had his attention, tried to ignore the smell of spoiled fruit wafting from the tent and the absence of an obvious bathroom. I asked him how expensive the trip would actually be (way more than the budget I’d allotted, of course), the towns and states with the cheapest resupply stores (Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains and the Grayson Highlands in Virginia were apparently populated by generous souls while Connecticut was understandably “rife with yuppie indifference”), the ideal ratio of carbs-to-protein based on my body-mass index. When it came to less concrete, opinion-related fodder, like what was his favorite type of rock formation to dry off on after a particularly sweaty stretch or to warm up on during a sunrise, he was nebulous but weirdly inspirational: “It’s true that you become what you absorb, but you have to remember that your heart is stronger than anything you take from the sky.”

  As we were talking the pot started making bubble sounds. The Park Ranger poured steaming water into my mug, then his. My nostrils gorged on a sweet, crisp brightness, wild herbs hidden beneath a moonlit treescape.

  He sipped. “So, who’s your partner?”

  “I’m single.”

  He snickered. “OK, but who is going to be hiking with you?”

  No one. That was the point. I hadn’t really considered that most people wouldn’t want to be totally alone in the woods for more than half a year. That pit stops at communal shelters and trail towns were more like sanity-sustaining re-immersions into the hobbit-stink matrix of mountain society than ordeals to be relished with the fondness of a root canal. Even the Park Ranger had at least one likeminded friend, whoever’s place this was.

  “No one.”

  I sipped. The tea was strong. Those two words in my throat sweetened it.

  “Well if it’s your first time and you’re going solo,” the Park Ranger said, “you’re going to need some trail magic.”

  “Trail magic.”

  “It can be anything really,” he said, “big or small, sometimes a beer, a bottle of water, maybe your blisters are acting up and there’s a tube of bacitracin someone’s left for you at an abandoned fire site. An act of kindness from one hiker to another when you didn’t know you needed one. Happens all the time. Maybe you sprain your ankle and, out of nowhere, someone out on a day trip shows up with a set of car keys and GPS to find the nearest clinic. That’s a trail angel. You’ll want to meet a few of those.”

  He finished the tea in a gulp, the runoff forming tributaries down his face, his eyes lidded, heavier.

  I took another sip. Other faces and random plastic gifts had been pleasantly absent from my trail visualizations. The idea that reliance on handouts wouldn’t stop once I quit Community Crusades started working its way down my esophagus, corroding. “So you’re saying there are all these littering Samaritans lurking everywhere, who get off on just abandoning supplies that they might actually need themselves? I call B.S. When you want to pretend to care you give money, it’s quick and a tax write-off. There has to be some other motivation. How many angels are really just looking for a thank-you blowie in a pastoral setting?”

  I followed the Park Ranger’s gaze to the back of the apartment, to a red and white gingham shirt I hadn’t noticed nailed to the wall, its sleeves crucified, outstretched. A smudge of undecipherable rust-colored crud obscuring the left breast pocket. Above, where a person’s head would be if they were wearing the shirt, hung a pair of deer antlers wreathed in either dried grass or really blonde hair.

  I took a sip of tea, crossed my legs.

  “I found her when I first started clearing trails and working on shelters in New Hampshire,” he said. “A couple college students had called into the station, reported her creeping around where they’d made a campsite. My supervisor told me to check it out, probably a harmless tweaker lost in the woods, wanted me to make sure she didn’t have any kids or anything, if we needed to send up some EMTs. I hiked to where she was supposed to be, an area that had been mostly cleared and mulched, and sure enough she was there, wrapped in a filthy white sundress, hugging herself under a large dogwood. It was late September and freezing rain was in the forecast. I called out and she spooked, rabbit-fast, took off into the trees. It was surprising to see something so small and skinny run like that. I left my jacket and a couple oranges.

  “I came back the next day and she was sitting in the same spot, wearing the jacket and tossing an orange between her palms. I approached and she took off again, but this time I could see her watching me behind some undergrowth. Wild and shining hair, eyes large and clear blue. This went on for weeks. I’d bring shirts, sweaters, boots, a tarp, kindling when it got colder, jerky, water bottles, granola. The food she wouldn’t touch – there was a growing pile of wrappers and plastic under the tree – but she
’d take everything else. Where, I don’t know. It got to the point where I’d almost be able to hand her the packages before she sprinted off, could smell her, could touch her breath.

  “One day she didn’t run. She was waiting, holding the antlers. ‘Never lose it,’ she said when she placed them on the ground in front of me and backed away into the trees. How could she know how important the deer, the idea of what the antlers meant, was to me? But walking back to the station I began to understand the truth she had taught me. When you give pieces of yourself to the forest, you become the forest. You become part of something bigger, something that feeds you, heals you. You never lose it. I only saw her once more after that.”

  I looked into the mug, the teabag pulsating in the gunk that remained. A slight thud in my chest, a thickness

  “That’s, uh, nice.”

  Then a buzzing that was both auditory and physical, like being bathed in a high-pitched white noise strong enough to make the hair on my arms pucker.

  Unexpected but not unfamiliar.

  “It’s why I chose you,” he was staring at me but his eyes were kind of rolling around, spindly. “Because I knew you needed it. The trail. But also because I knew your spirit was a pristine ecosystem. You’d want to become a part of the forest.”

  “Chose me?”

  I tried to steady myself, tried to swing my neck around a little, tried to focus on something I’d just noticed in one corner of the room: a pile of beige and olive pants and shirts, thrift-store-beaten, an open shoebox containing what looked like various park service patches and different nametags, sewing needles, several spools of black thread.

  “I have something for your trip,” the Park Ranger was saying as he stagger-crawled into the tent, clumsy and failing to zip up the door flap all the way. “Don’t look yet.”

  Above the increasingly loud buzzing, metal on metal, a vague pressurized release.