Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [100]
It took me two days to hike the fifty-two miles through Connecticut— two wonderful days filled with rolling hills, verdant farmland, lush riverbanks, and rocky cliffs. I was sad to leave Connecticut, especially since it was directly followed by Massachusetts.
Massachusetts started with a descent; a steep, slick, rocky descent off of Mount Everett. I needed to use both hands, both feet, and both butt cheeks to navigate the course.
Since I couldn’t use my mop stick on the downward rock scrambles, I would javelin it off the top of a rocky decline and then use all four of my limbs and my booty to lower myself down the trail and retrieve the yellow pole.
The trail was not marked well in spots, and I was frustrated at how long it was taking me to climb safely down the mountain, but it was fun to watch my yellow mop stick bounce off the large boulders on its way to a resting place farther down the trail. It was like watching Plinko or a pinball machine.
I must have thrown my stick a dozen times during the descent, and because it was a three-dollar mop stick and not a hundred-dollar hiking pole, I didn’t feel bad about it. It sure was nice to have use of both my hands when I needed them. As it turned out, I would need to use my hands for the rest of the day, but not for climbing.
When I reached Jug End Road at the base of Mount Everett, I entered what seemed like a lost circle from Dante’s Inferno. The dark, wet shadows of the thick bog-forest were home to the highest concentration of mosquitoes that I had ever seen.
The tiny, black insects attacked me in swarms, landing all over my body. By the time I had smacked one of them off, five others had bitten me somewhere else. I was completely miserable, and I didn’t have any bug repellent.
I didn’t think I needed bug repellent! I had hiked hundreds of miles and only suffered two bug bites. But in Massachusetts, I counted 137 mosquito bites the first morning.
Without bug repellant, my main line of defense was sprinting. I ran with my pack bouncing up and down on my back, rubbing deeper gashes into the sides of my hips. I used my right hand to wave away the mosquitoes in front of my face so I could see, and my left hand to smash the bugs on my skin.
I fought a valiant fight, and I’m sure I looked ridiculous, but the flailing did little good, and the swarms continued to attack. They encompassed me, and if at any point I had stopped to rest, I would have been eaten alive. The bugs were in my ears, up my nose, under my shirt, and covering every inch of exposed skin. I had done fast miles on the trail before, but those miles paled in comparison to the “10K for Life” that I did at the start of Massachusetts. It took me about an hour to complete six miles, which would have been a decent time even without a pack on my back.
When I exited the marsh, I was covered in bumps from the bug bites and bruises from smacking myself. To make matters worse, I was exhausted and dehydrated. I hadn’t been able to stop even for a second, and as I left the swamp, I realized that my water bottle was empty. Now at the edge of the forest, the only water was the thick brown sludge that served as a mosquito breeding ground and larvae incubator.
I followed the murky headwaters to higher ground, and as I rounded a turn on a wooden boardwalk, I saw a hiker butt (fully clothed) sticking up in the air. There was a backpack lying beside the swaying bottom, and I could see that a man was trying to filter some water out of the muck below. However, it wasn’t until he looked up that I realized who it was.
“Raptor!”
“Odyssa?”
We didn’t hug, because he would have dropped his filter or fallen off the boardwalk. But we smiled and laughed, and then I sat on the boardwalk beside him as he filtered some tea-colored water into my bottle for me.
I hadn’t seen Raptor since Pennsylvania, and so much had happened since then. As we continued