Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [101]
We spent several hours defaming the buzzing black-winged pests until there were no insults left, and then we started recycling ones we had already used.
One thing I was learning to love about the trail was the sense of community. I hadn’t seen Raptor for hundreds of miles, but now we were together again and it felt like we were family. And if I hadn’t run into Raptor, then I probably would have found another familiar face, or someone who knew someone I knew.
Trail community is a strange concept, because it’s always in flux. Sometimes, mostly down South, I would find myself in a brood of hikers. Other times I would be happy for the company of just one or two, and a lot of the time, especially up North, I was content to be alone and know that there were other hikers ahead of me and behind me. There was never a time, even if I was alone, when I didn’t feel part of a larger community.
In Massachusetts, I was more than happy to spend a few days hiking with Raptor. We needed one another for moral support. The flying, buzzing, biting pests were never as bad as the first morning in Massachusetts, but they were still bad, even with the one hundred percent DEET bug spray that I bought.
I don’t know much about DEET, but after reading the many Poison Control warnings on the outside of the bottle, I was careful to apply it sparingly to my skin, not on my clothes, and nowhere near my face.
I was careful for about two hours, until I discovered that “sparingly” did little to disperse the flying vampires. And even with the spray on my skin, they still bit me through my clothes.
“Argggg!”
I took out the DEET again, and this time I bathed in it. I used half the bottle on my exposed skin, and most of the rest on my clothes and hair.
After dousing myself in the pungent liquid, the bugs backed away immediately. I now had a good four inches of space between the swarming mosquitoes and my body. It was like an invisible force field. But because it was such a hot and humid day, after a few hours I had sweated off much of the solution, and the insects started landing on me again.
I became so frustrated that when I came to Upper Goose Pond, I dropped my pack and ran into the cold blue water, submerging myself until only my nose and eyes remained above water.
I stayed like that for several minutes, and most likely would have remained there indefinitely if it hadn’t been for a small motorboat approaching along the perimeter of the lake. Not wanting to frighten the passengers or risk being run over, I sprang out of the water and waved my arms. I heard a shriek, and the boat rocked so hard it almost capsized, but once the man and woman inside had settled down, they slowly steered toward me.
With my head above water, I introduced myself and explained my predicament.
With great sympathy, Sarah and Rob generously offered to let me join them on their cruise to a local marina. And from there, they said, they could drive me into town.
If there was ever a time on the trail that I was tempted to skip a section, this was it. I wanted nothing more than to enjoy a breezy, bug-free boat ride to a car that would transport me to a protected hotel room. But alas, I declined.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m waiting for a friend who’s behind me, and even if we do go to town, we’ll need to hike to the next road because going in the boat would mean that we’d skip three miles. And we can’t miss three miles. I know it sounds weird, but it’s really important to us that we hike the whole trail, even the miserable sections.”
“Well, we can meet you at the road in an hour and a half if you want,” they suggested.
I was out of the water and hiking almost immediately. I knew Raptor was right behind me, and I felt certain that he would be more than willing to ride into town and split a hotel room with me.
I was right, and five minutes after Raptor arrived at the road, Rob and Sarah pulled up in their Jeep. I didn’t even know the name of the town