Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [102]
When I had spent the day with Heather in Banner Elk, she asked if I would want to spend a night with her brother and his family in Massachusetts. At the time, Massachusetts seemed like a far-off dream, but after one more full day of hiking with Raptor, I found myself off the trail visiting the Millers.
Maybe it’s related to the lack of women on the trail, but throughout all my home stays along the trail, I felt myself connecting very intensely with the women I encountered. They were individually and collectively redefining what I thought a woman could or should be.
Heather taught me that stay-at-home moms were much more than “just” moms. Pastor Leslie showed me that you didn’t have to be a man to tell people about God, and that you didn’t have to be married to have a family. Wendy helped me realize that my body was important and that I needed to value and take care of it. Magic Momma let me know that it was okay to accept love from strangers. And Emily, well, she blew my idea of a traditional family right out the window.
Emily was married, with two daughters and a son. She was brilliant, articulate, hospitable, and charming, and she was also the primary breadwinner of the family. Emily was a pediatrician, while her husband Isaiah was a stay-at-home dad. I don’t know why that shocked me, because I’d heard of it and seen it on television, but I had never seen it while I was living in the South.
I think the perception in the South is that if a man stays home with the kids, then he is somehow weak, but Isaiah was anything but weak. He had basically built their entire house by himself and molded it around the preserved remains of two gigantic oak trees. If you want to assert your masculinity, building a house with two tree trunks shooting out of the living room is an excellent way to do it.
Emily, on the other hand, was as maternal and affectionate as any mother that I had ever met, and she was also a medical doctor. Which was good, because some of my bug bites were the size of a quarter and had become infected. She kindly offered to help me with that.
Whatever system Emily and Isaiah had, however they decided to divide their responsibilities, it was working, because they had some of the most amazing children that I have ever met.
The three kids were bright like their mom and handy like their dad. They helped around the house, they were kind to each other, and instead of playing video games or watching TV (I’m not even sure if there was a TV in the house), they spent time outside or played board games with one another.
For twenty-four hours, the Millers made me feel like family. They opened their home to me, they cooked for me on their woodstove, and taught me their favorite games. On top of that, the next morning, Isaiah offered to shuttle my pack to the lodge atop Mount Greylock so that I could slackpack the section of trail past their house and pick up my things that evening.
I couldn’t wait to reach the summit of Mount Greylock, because on the other side of the mountain was Vermont. It was hard for me to believe that I only had three states left.
Back on the trail, it was a beautiful day, and before I knew it, I was standing at the base of Greylock, the tallest mountain in Massachusetts. The first part of the ascent was pretty easy, since the grade was gradual. I was surrounded by towering pines and lost in a world of dense, pleasant thoughts about how one day I wanted a woodstove in my kitchen and a tree trunk supporting my living room ceiling. It took me awhile to notice the wind picking up and the sky growing darker.
However, even if I had noticed the initial signs, it wouldn’t have mattered. The storm hit so quickly that, five minutes after I thought it might rain, I was running through one of the worst thunderstorms of my life.
The sky was so dark that it looked like dusk in the forest, and the deafening thunder seemed to shake the ground. At one point, I ran with my hands covering my ears to muffle the harrowing blasts.