North

by Scott Jurek

  Before the final lip, Jurker’s arms were completely pumped. About fifteen feet off the narrow ledge, his feet slipped out from under him and his body went slack. He was dangling like a rag doll by his arms. Freezing-cold water was streaming underneath him.

  Dean sprang into action and hand-over-handed the same rope as Scott, and when he was just below him he yelled, “Whatever you do, do not let go!” Then he gave a do-or-die command: “Put your feet on my shoulders now!”

  Jurker couldn’t even look down; he was gripped with fear. Dean reached up with one arm and grabbed Scott’s feet and placed one on each of his shoulders. Then Dean pulled his body up on the rope, raising Jurker up a few feet. But Dean saw that Scott was losing his grip. Dean moved higher up the rope and put his head right under Jurker’s bottom and hoisted him up with his head. Scott reached for the ledge and managed to slide his whole body onto it, like a beached whale.

  He was completely soaked through and shaking. Dean and I quickly scampered up and helped Jurker move away from the cliffs. We tried to downplay it, but later Dean told me it was about as close as he’d ever seen someone get to dying. For the Dark Wizard to say that freaked me out.

  Dean and I climbed the face of Half Dome in just over ten hours. That was fast for somebody of my moderate ability, but Jurker was carrying our hiking shoes and extra clothes, so we were able to go superlight. Scott hiked up to the Half Dome Trail and then took the John Muir Trail eight miles down to the valley floor, staying safe on terra firma. He bought us sweet drinks and salty snacks and then quickly turned around and hiked back up to meet us at the summit. I was spoiled, I know. But that’s the kind of guy Jurker is. We all hiked down together, laughing and reliving the Death Slabs. All told, Scott hiked thirty-five miles that day.

  Four years later, the image of the late great Dean Potter’s head almost literally up Jurker’s ass was still engraved in my mind. So I was grateful Timmy, an experienced climber, was going to be with Jurker through the White Mountains.

  Chapter 12

  Vermud

  Day Thirty-Three

  Horty’s mountaintop prophecies about the challenges of Vermont began to manifest themselves immediately after I crossed over from Massachusetts on day thirty-three. “Vermont can be real nasty,” he’d warned me. It was even nastier than that.

  The storm that had rocked us to sleep on top of Mount Greylock must have roared its way north in the night, because as soon as I descended and crossed the border, I ran into mud pits unlike anything I had ever seen. Pools of muck pitted the trail so frequently and expanded so quickly, it was often hard to tell where the trail was. A lot of it was underwater, submerged beneath a soup of rocks, leaves, and wind debris. It seemed more like a streambed than a trail.

  It would end up being Vermont’s wettest June in three hundred years. Horty in his many trips to Vermont had never seen it this bad. “Vermont is usually bad, but this is unreal!” he said. “Usually it’s runnable section, runnable section, muddy section. Right now, it’s muddy section, muddy section, runnable section.”

  Thru-hikers call the state Vermud and it’s a joke among locals up there that there are four seasons in Vermont: mud, mud, mud, and mud. I think that’s probably unfair to winter, when the mud freezes solid under a layer of snow, but it was otherwise accurate in my experience there.

  The mud wasn’t just messy; it became a real obstacle. Forward progress slowed to a crawl. Each mile took longer to cover, and the mud sucked more and more energy out of me. Everyone knows the feeling of accidentally stepping into muck and not knowing where the bottom lies. Just imagine that, but for miles and miles and miles. Every step ended in a cold splash, and then the next required me to pull my back foot up and out of the sticky grip of the trail. My shoes filled with sludge and suctioned to the bottom. It was awful. It was like running with weighted boots and in high gravity. Horty told us that the bedrock was so close to the surface of the trail that the mire had nowhere to go and just floated on top. Trail maintenance was impossible. I could do nothing but wallow along and laugh at how ridiculous the conditions were.

  Perhaps to keep my mind off the here and now, Horty went over the Vermont game plan once again as we slogged through the endless muck. The next hundred miles of the AT would track the gnarled spine of the Green Mountains, and the following fifty miles would veer eastward, crossing against the grain of those same mountains and resulting in many sharp climbs, descents, and a lot of likely falls. It was a real pick-your-poison stretch of the trail, and I looked forward to putting Vermud in my rearview mirror when we got to higher ground in New Hampshire.

  One reason this part of the country was so weather-worn was that it was by far the oldest stretch of the whole AT. For 105 miles, it runs with the Long Trail, which was created well before the AT, back in 1910, by men with handsaws, axes, and shovels. It took twenty years to finish the 272-mile footpath, which stretches from Vermont’s southern border all the way to Canada, and it was the first major recreational trail in America. So it had vintage charm and storied mystique. It was also kind of like one long, sludge-filled wheel rut.

  Horty knew whereof he spoke. He’d established a Long Trail FKT of four days and two hours back in 1999. It was also up here that he’d overtaken his rival Scott “Maineak” Grierson during their mano a mano duel along the AT. After 1,606 miles of chasing each other north, Maineak tried to throw Horty off in this stretch by listing the wrong time when he signed in at the registers at the start of the day, an attempt to make it look like he was far ahead. It worked at first, and Horty was devastated—until he got to a register where Maineak had mistakenly signed in on the following day. Later, he saw someone coming out of the Congdon Shelter and he knew it had to be Maineak. He told me that he’d been fantasizing about that moment since he’d found out about the deception, and he had planned to say, “Guess who I am? Your worst nightmare!” But in reality, he just said hello, and he and Maineak walked six miles together. They played leapfrog for the next three days, trading the lead back and forth, until Horty left him for good. I think Horty liked toying with his prey.

  Around midday, with almost comically bad timing, a local runner found me and proceeded to extol the virtues of wearing huarache sandals while running the Vermont trails of mud. As someone who had huaraches handmade for him by a Tarahumaran in the Copper Canyon, I laughed. What is this guy talking about? You could have worn snow boots or socks out there, and it wouldn’t have mattered; the mud would suction your feet down just the same. Nothing was gonna help me get through this muck except one shoe-sucking step at a time.

  I’d been feeling great in the last stretch of Massachusetts and had entertained the thought that maybe I’d turned the last corner and was going to bolt into Maine just like old times, old races. The muck ended my optimism, quickly. More disruptive than the mud, I was beginning to feel the first real effects of sleep deprivation. There were moments when I was all but hallucinating. I’d been running for thirty-three days, and for most of those days, my eyes had been on the trail and the passing ground, scanning for obstacles. I’d spent hundreds of hours and hundreds of miles like that, my eyes fixed downward, watching half focused, taking in the endless procession of rocks and roots and ruts that streamed past. Every once in a while, I’d look up at Walter or JLu or just toward a white blaze. Instead of the solid, real world, I’d see a strange waterfall world—everything streaming toward me, everything falling down. I wondered if I would see anything but the passing trail for the rest of my life.

  Walter snapped me back to reality. He was steady, strong, and cheerful. On the trail, he talked about how beautiful everything was and how great it was being outside, hanging out. He talked about how nice it would feel to have dinner later, to stretch out. Walter never once complained to me. He was a stoic on the trail. I didn’t know how miserable he was. Later he told me, “I kept having to bite my tongue because it was so heinous, but I couldn’t complain to you, because I’d only been out there three days!”

>   As the gray-dark sky faded to the black of night on day thirty-three, Walter and I ran past some thru-hikers at the Goddard Shelter, below the rainy summit of Glastenbury Mountain in Vermont, and I felt desperately envious of the warm sleeping bags they were curled up in. But we still had thirteen more mountainous miles to go before our day was over. Chilled to our bones in the steady downpour and silent from our muddy efforts, Walter and I finally reached Castle Black at 11:00 p.m. in the shadow of Stratton Mountain.

  The alarm went off on the morning of day thirty-four, but I was sure I was dreaming. It felt like I was swimming, or diving, or drowning. As I shook myself awake, I realized I wasn’t any of those things—but I was definitely wet. Had I accidentally lost control of my bladder in the middle of the night? Then I saw JLu. She was looking at me with an odd expression. I was in bed, in Castle Black, but there was no doubt about it: I was soaked.

  After a quick inspection, we surmised I had just been sweating in my sleep—a lot. Neither of us knew why but it felt like a lingering virus from a couple of days back. Or was it the beginnings of Lyme disease? It was a new development, and an unwelcome one. JLu insisted on giving me a thorough examination, and she got more and more worried as she looked me over; my ribs were visible, my eyes were bulging, and I was covered with a mysterious red bumpy rash. Not to mention I still reeked of vinegar, but that was no mystery.

  The vinegar scent was a byproduct of metabolizing amino acids and the protein in my muscles; I was literally cannibalizing myself. Even though I was eating upwards of seven thousand calories a day and plenty of carbohydrates, I was dangerously tapping into my essential reserves. Being on my feet for sometimes twenty hours a day meant I was always at the edge of gnawing away at my own muscle, muscle I was going to need for the larger mountains ahead.

  As I stumbled up out of Castle Black, the weight of sleep deprivation hit me like a humid day. It was dense. My legs were dense. I needed to be like an alchemist and turn my lead feet into golden wings. But I was moving and thinking too slowly for any magic, and my morning routine seemed to pass me in a series of stills. I lost track of things and only had time to eat a banana and grab some Clif Bars to go.

  There was one piece of excellent news that day, something I’d been looking forward to for weeks. Timmy O’Neill, our good friend from Boulder, was scheduled to arrive that day. With Walter already with us, it meant that I was going to push through Vermud with close friends on my wing.

  Timmy was definitely unlike the other friends and fellow ultrarunners who had joined me so far. For starters, he wasn’t even a runner. He’d never done anything like fifty miles a day before. I’m sure the only times he ran was from the police as a kid and from commitment as an adult. He’d been assuring both Jenny and me for months of his excitement, claiming that he’d even been training with extended solo climbs in the Flatirons above Boulder. He loved trying new things, declaring that once he found what he was really good at, he did it as little as possible in order to continually develop his discomfort zone.

  He was also hilarious, a stand-up comic, and had made a career expressing the droll side of adventure sports. He had outdoor chops—he was a Patagonia- and Clif Bar–sponsored climber—but I was most looking forward to his spirit and sense of humor. He lived with virtually no material possessions, deciding instead to purchase them for others: a house for his mom and a car for his brother. He read a book a week and said he would rather help a friend through a divorce than go to the wedding “because everyone will help you party but few will help you grieve.” He and Jenny were friends from way back, and I knew that she had turned to him whenever she went through a difficult breakup (there had been a few).

  On the trail, he was all smiles when he greeted us, and he told me that he felt great even though he’d been roofied backstage at a concert the night before. I didn’t ask for more details; there were plenty of miles ahead for that story. I just shook my head and said it was awesome to have him out here with us.

  As we headed north, the Green Mountains seesawed up and down endlessly along an eternal ridge.

  The mud was bad, but it would have been hard running even after a long dry spell. This was some of the most jumbled-up country I’d been on yet, thick with rocks that seemed glued together by mud and grass. Making our way forward meant constantly having to seek out stable places, lunging, torquing, twisting. Every surface of my body came into contact with the trail. The storm hadn’t helped; many of the downed trees still had fresh white wood where they’d been broken by the wind, which was still whipping around in gusts of fifty-five miles an hour.

  The Stratton area was beautiful and one of the more inspiring points of the whole trail. It’s renowned for its great skiing, but I was most enraptured by the quiet loveliness of its fire tower. These towers used to dot the national forests everywhere, especially out west, where they’d rise up several stories in the air and terminate in a small covered platform. There, a diligent and self-possessed fire watcher would spend a few months of the year looking for the telltale signs of wildfires. If any were spotted, he or she would leap into action and send coordinates of the inchoate blaze to administrators, who would send out firefighters. Most of these towers have been decommissioned and deconstructed, but a few remain. The tower on Stratton had been renovated and its caretakers were an old French-Canadian couple who seemed so happy, so at peace with their little perch in the sky that I immediately hoped that JLu and I could be like them one day. They reminded me that atop this tower, Benton MacKaye first conceived of the idea for the Appalachian Trail. I wished I could have stayed and tapped into their wisdom and cheer more, but after signing my book for them, I was back in the white-blazed track of muck.

  I was mentally foggy all that day and happy to listen to Timmy and Walter tell stories that had nothing to do with running, records, or mud. I started to slip into a comfortable mode in which I deferred decision-making mostly to them or to the crew more generally. It was easier than weighing options and making judgment calls. The weeks of little sleep had accumulated, and I was finally starting to notice the difficulties that it brought.

  And yet, there were still moments every day when I felt a sense of certainty that I was in exactly the right place, doing the right thing at the right time. I wanted it to end, but I already knew I’d miss it when it did.

  That night, bruised and beaten, we stayed in a hotel in North Clarendon, a little town just past the Green Mountains. Horty had booked the rooms and thought we should all get a night indoors. It had been a wet nine days since the last real roof I’d slept under.

  I woke up on the morning of day thirty-five and realized that I had a little over ten days to go if I wanted to break the record. Close enough to begin to seem urgent. Close enough to seem possible.

  For the first few weeks on the trail, I’d wake up craving more sleep, but I’d also feel like I’d rebounded from the night before. My body was still finding ways to reknit its tears and heal all the damage I’d loaded onto it. That started to change in Vermont. Whether it was a physical tipping point and whether sleep was a factor, I didn’t know. But the feeling was undeniable—I was losing a piece of myself every day now. I wasn’t recuperating overnight.

  Horty had a theory about motivation. He told me that a lot of motivation could be boiled down to this: How bad do you want it? He would ask people, “What’s the furthest you can run without stopping?” After they replied whatever distance, he followed up with “Could you run a mile further if I gave you a million dollars? What if I was running behind you holding a gun to your head, could you run even further?”

  He said, “It’s easy to say you want it real bad when you’re sitting at home on the couch. But when the going gets tough, do you want it enough?”

  We often think we can’t go any farther and feel like we have nothing left to give, yet there is a hidden potential and strength in all of us, begging us to find it. We arrive at it via different means—sometimes reward, sometimes fear. There was something
to Horty’s motivational theory, and finding that desire was the most vexing problem. How bad did I want it?

  The question became less and less theoretical in Vermont, where I started to come up against my own limits. I’ve heard it said that ultramarathons are 90 percent mental. And the other 10 percent? That’s mental too. I was in the thick of that other 10 percent.

  About two-thirds of the way through day thirty-five, I began to worry that Timmy might break before I did. He kept stopping to stretch his legs, especially his calves and ankles. The marathon distance yesterday coupled with the forty miles he’d done today ruined him. It seemed likely to me that he had a condition common among distance runners called Achilles tendinosis, compounded with gross effusion—which he prosaically called his “cankles.” He was done for the night, and maybe for his entire tour. At the first meeting point in the mountains, JLu and I huddled up. Timmy’s overuse injury didn’t only complicate his life, but we had been counting on him to help us get through the White Mountains coming up next, in New Hampshire. He wasn’t a runner, but he covered challenging terrain like a mountain goat and could have helped me navigate the most technical sections.

  It was raining again. In fact, it had been raining ever since that storm overtook us at Greylock and it seemed like we’d been caught in one continuous torment ever since we’d left Springer Mountain on day one. I could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of days it hadn’t rained in the past month. Timmy had had to bow out, and the skies had opened up even wider, and I was starting to have those visions again, the ones where the world rushed by even when I was standing still.