Saturday, June 10 – Happy Hills
Its another world over here – from New Hampshire’s rocky and steep to Vermont’s smooth dirt trails, with a dusting of soft pine needles.
We park one car at the end of our 2-day hike ahead of us and leave another car here in the lot in Hanover that says they’ll tow us if the car is left overnight. It’s the same lot where Pat and I got dropped off last fall when we hiked from Hanover up and over Moosilauke. The Dartmouth police say we won’t get towed here though we might lose our catalytic converter. We’ll take the risk. It’s far too convenient. We take pictures on the bridge over the Connecticut River, the border between New Hampshire and Vermont. We head up the sidewalk and into the woods.
We clip along and half an hour later we’re delighted to see we’ve already done a mile. Towering white pine but alas no flowers, no lady slippers here. I’m missing the color and beauty of the Zealand trail. It’s truly a different world and woods over here. As I remember, two different continents joining here at the Connecticut River, the New Hampshire side and White Mountains torn off from Scotland meeting the original continent containing Vermont. Vermont’s limestone truly makes the grass greener over here than in the Granite State.
Today I’ve chosen a better lunch. I’m weary of my handful of nuts and dry protein bar while my friends munch on tuna or peanut butter sandwiches. Today I’ve followed their lead once again, as I do with so many of my hiking choices, and bring a burrito shell sandwich stuffed with cheese, avocado and tomato. One squashed messy delicious mess of a sandwich.
We pass Taylor the NoBo through-hiker who is among those Pat follows on You-Tube. Pat says Taylor eats crap and gets a lot of crap about her dietary choices. As she bounds away behind us at a brisk clip, it doesn’t look like her diet is affecting her stamina.
At last, 5:00 and here lying in the tent sweaty and sticky. We found this site at the top of a rise in the trees. Before dinner we wander out into the field above our site, find the little bench. Like so many fields we’ve walked through today, yet another beautiful view over distant hills.
And at the edge of the field the one flower we’ve seen today. The “Jack” of the Jack-in-the-Pulpit gets lots of titters from the women.
Sunday, June 11 – Light and Fast
The conversation on the trail today is all about the choices between going light and fast versus heavy and slow. The kind of choices that can lead to life or death decisions on the trail.
Those who will run into wet and cold out here (like we have all week!) have to find the balance between having the right stuff you need to survive (remember those 10 essentials – not the 25 essentials?) and having a light-enough pack to keep moving and stay warm when the weather turns.
The forecast today bodes warm. A passing hiker joins our conversation. He asks his hiking buddy if he’d rather be hot or wet? “Definitely wet!” he says, “I can’t stand this heat!”.
Today we get it all: hot and sweaty-wet!
The other question on the trail today is whether we call it today when we reach our car and give into the inevitability of a forecast that has rain and cold everywhere on the AT from Maine to Vermont.
Another NoBo through-hiker passes. Pat is ecstatic to see Frizzle and gives her a big hug. She loves her you-tube postings, her spunk and perspective.
Speaking of perspective, around the bend ahead we come to another grassy field with a ripple of blue hills in the distance. I look down and see the small pointy green leaves of wild strawberries and a few white and pale red berries. We step off the trail to look for more and find a patch of bright red berries. Like every other fruit or vegetable you can buy in the grocery store, wild strawberries are a completely different fruit than store-packaged strawberries. Tiny little berries that are packed with flavor and oh so sweet.
I devour handfuls stem and all. We also gather handfuls for Barb who has gone on ahead of us. Unfortunately, our berries never quite make it to her before they turn ever more salty in our hands and disappear into our mouths.
Speaking of sweet, we pass mysterious lines of blue, black and clear tubing strung around trees. Jen tells us they are in fact lines for maple syrup. She tells us that every season they have to go over the lines inch by inch to check for places where mice may have bitten through.
My morning energy tires to slow. Yesterday we passed Podunk Road, an Algonquin word for “mired in mud”. It’s how I feel – tired, perhaps more tired than any other day. The Vermont trails, smooth as they are, seem to go straight up the hills. I’m eating, drinking but nothing seems to help. We cross a stream and I sit with my feet in the cool water while eating lunch. That helps. Also devouring my second squashed avocado, tomato and cheese sandwich. So delicious! I feel better.
We have just one hill left between us and the car. We start up Dana Hill when the couple who passed us with the little brown furry dog come back down the trail towards us wide-eyed. “We saw a bear cub on the trail and heard the mother breathing in the bushes. We’re headed around and up the road.”
We have no such luxury of going around and up the road. We are here to hike the AT and we need these miles. So we turn to loud, very loud, exuberant singing as we ascend Dana Hill with my favorite preschool song that I teach my hiking companions,
I’m dressing myself what is this here?
These are my underpants my darling dear.
Underpants, underpants rinky dinky doo
That’s no way to a party!”
The song continues with socks and pants, shirts and shoes, and everything else you need to dress yourself and keep the aforementioned bear away.
On the other side of Dana Hill we meet the couple and their dog. They tell us they’d heard us singing as they walked down the road and yes, met a big bear sprinting across the road in front of them. Our singing our way through was a great success. No bear and AT miles complete.
As we reach the end of our hike and Barb’s car we have our priorities right. First, head for ice cream and the amazing “Vermont Maple Creamy” made of course with real Vermont milk and maple. Beyond delicious.
We also make a second delectable choice. It’s supposed to pour tonight and while we have talked about staying at the lean-to a mile up the trail from here, the idea of staying at a motel sounds even more delightful. So we’re off for hot showers followed by burgers and brew at the Long Trail Brewery. Perfectly decadent. So wonderful.
I learn alas that the brewery will not in fact offer me a free tee-shirt if I return with proof of actually completing the Long Trail.
Monday, June 12 – SlackPack
Barb decides that she will take a day off today and visit with a friend in Woodstock. She’ll sherpa us over to our trailhead and pick us up at the end of the day. And we’ll take full advantage of leaving most of our belongings and everything that is heavy behind us at the motel. Since it’s supposed to pour again tonight and tomorrow morning, we’ll treat ourselves to another night with a real roof over our heads! So good!
We’re planning to hike east and back to the road where we ended yesterday. However, the challenge of actually finding our way to the trailhead is its own mis-adventure as our alleged Google-maps “shortcut” turns into a “Class 4 road”, rough and impassable. On a bike ride last month we found ourselves on a “Class 5 road” which must mean “left to return to woods” as we had to lift our bikes and carry them over several downed trees across the road.
I’m so happy out here on the trail today. Where does such happiness come from? Is it the swing of the beautiful smooth trail, the surprise of a cloudy day without the expected rain, the immersion in woods? Is it the convergence here of what brings us joy – movement, nature, beauty, companionship and solitude? Is it the simplicity of one foot in front of the other? Of eating when you are hungry? It comes for sure from spotting eight lady slippers in the first mile of the trail, our first sightings in Vermont.
So Yes! to the marvelous restoration of sleep and waking in a warm hotel with dry clothes. Yes! to slackpacking and Yes! to the anticipation of another night at the motel and not out in the rain. This is not a bad way to travel!
I ponder ease and the invitation to relax into the moment. Letting things evolve as they will.
Express yourself completely,
Then keep quiet.
Be like the forces of nature:
When it blows, there is only wind;
When it rains, there is only rain;
When the clouds pass, the sun shines through.
(The Tao Te Ching, Chapter 23, Stephen Mitchell translation)
We pause, listen to the silence.
My tracking silence and serenity is interrupted by my own frantic yelp when I look over to see the gray face off the side of the trail which I mistake for a bear.
Said face is thankfully not a bear but Martha the through-hiker sitting in the grass and taking a break. Martha tells me she started out on the trail several years ago after the end of a long marriage. “I followed the only thing I wanted to do, to hike the trail.” Somewhere along the way she broke her foot and she’s now back to complete her trek north. She’s in no hurry, hence, sitting here off the trail under the tree. “The trail has already worked its healing in me and jumpstarted me to a new chapter in life.” We talk about the joy of the trail, the wonder of being in your 60’s.
We stop for lunch at a small cabin that has a long ladder leading up to a little platform on the roof. And yes, a most gorgeous view of the surrounding green hills. I munch determinedly on my apple determined not to think about being on the roof and how much weight this little rooftop platform can hold and if through-hiker Dirt, Pat, Jen and I will soon tumble to the ground. Unable to stop thinking about how high up we are and how much I hate heights I clammer down the ladder to the safety of the ground below.
All afternoon it’s like this, tracking my moods up and down, down and up. Like troughs and crests of waves my mood swings. It’s funny how these feelings follow us and are all so fickle and fleeting. I was comforted last month to talk to a couple of hikers who shared that they too tracked their feelings of rumination, despair, delight and joy as they plodded down the trail. We move on, move through. The moods come and go. No feeling is final. (Rilke)
It looks on the map that the trail is all downhill from here. But no, not true. Instead the trail winds up and down, up and down when we think we’re done with up.
Trail runners bound past in skimpy shorts and teeshirts as we lumber on with our slack packs.
Late that afternoon we meet Barb and return to beautiful Woodstock, Vermont. Woodstock was bought by the Rockefeller’s and restored to look like an idyllic New England village that in fact never existed. The town green complete with green grass and bandstand that would in fact have been a grazing spot for cows. The whole town would have had a particularly pungent stink instead of the waft of fresh baked bread and roasted coffee that fills the streets today. It’s a wonderful Vermont version of Disney World and a fabulous place to stop again for ice cream!
All of the New England landscape has been shaped by disturbance. From farming to fires, hurricanes to lumbering. And yes, by the invention of an idealized place like Woodstock that never existed.
But this truly exists: tonight’s scrumptious salmon salad at the drive-in staffed by five women from Jamaica. So many surprises along the way, so many wonders to meet.
Tuesday, June 13 – Vermud
Our choice of staying a second night at the motel is a most wonderful choice as we wake to pounding rain. A perfect day to linger in bed until it stops. However, others in our group have other ideas. It’s supposed to clear in an hour, so we best get ready now so we can hit the trail. No time for another delicious breakfast at the diner next door like we had yesterday where we met Madolyn who is off on an adventure to hike at least 4 miles in every state. She’s off today to Boothbay Harbor and we filled her with oodles of ideas of where to walk and what to see.
Barb will drop us off at the dirt road where we began our hike yesterday. We’ll hike the five miles up and over Quimby Mountain and meet her on the other side this afternoon.
“This is it!” I call out when we round the bend to what appears to be a parking lot. Alas, as Barb drives away to meet us at the close of the day, it is soon clear that this is not in fact the parking lot where she had left us off yesterday. Instead, we’ll discover it’s a good mile or so up the road where Pat, Jen and I are now trudging.
As we ascend Quimby, we meet two women in bright pink who offer us trail magic candy bars and peanuts. The hiker with hands wrapped for arthritis tells us that she would have been the oldest hiker to complete the AT this year. Alas, she had fallen earlier and broken something. Now healed, they’ll go as far as they can this year before stepping back into it next year. I hear so many stories out her of all the physical and emotional weights these hikers carry and I wonder how I can complain! And yet, here I am complaining as I slip and flop into the mud. Around the bend, a second time. Ugh. Another loud groan, the kind that accompany me along the trail as I step up and over a downed tree or up a steep trail. UGH! OOOF! OUCH!
Mud-spattered and groaning, I am passed by two 60-something year old hikers who exude vibrancy. As they bound by with a wave, I ponder vibrancy and from whence it comes. All the pictures of me on the trail show a worn and weary face. As Pat stops for a picture of the three of us, I slap my cheeks, open my eyes wide. All to no avail I see, I still look worn out. I’ll never make the cover of Backpacking Magazine.
“Great day out here isn’t it!”, yet another buoyant and bounding hiker cheers as he passes us by.
At long last we reach Barb and she decides to join us for the last five miles of the day. Before we take off for our afternoon ramble, a stop for sandwiches at a deli in Killington. The special for the day is a ham, cheese and salami sub with a long list of other things on it as well. Yes, of course we’ll have that. And a bag of chips, a donut, iced tea too, thank you very much. The women open their sandwiches and remark that they have enough here for lunch and dinner. I inhale mine, all of it. And the donut. I’m already thinking of dinner and the wonder of how it can be I can eat all this and still not be full.
The trail ahead looks promising on the map – a winding beautiful and fairly flat trail by a pond, passing through a state park. The hiker we pass remembers that it’s a good trail ahead although it is also quite clear that he’s not very clear about much of the terrain he just passed through.
Once more, I slip and plop down hard on the mud.
Ahead we hear, Thundering Falls. So beautiful, some of the most beautiful falls I’ve ever seen, sparkling white cascades down dark rock.
A text message that Mom has pneumonia, dad a respiratory infection. I’ll call them, check in later today. Feel powerless with nothing I can do for them. A sharp pang of grief, a twitter of anxiety as I feel the angst of not knowing what to do when there is nothing to be done. There’s a life question to ponder. I return to being present, with each footstep to take, each tree to grab along on the trail.
The trail ends at the foot of Killington where hopefully someday we’ll return and complete our next section of the trail heading south.
But today, we’re headed home to Littleton this afternoon, where we’ll devour a pizza and salad dinner, and figure out what’s next. After hot showers and the promise of clean clothes, we determine that we don’t need to head off to Maine to find better weather but that in fact the Whites look more promising. We’ll head back up to Greenleaf tomorrow and see if its possible to complete our trek over to Galehead Hut and then down to Zealand and out the next day.
Navigating Through Change 