Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [107]
Hanover is home to Dartmouth College. After asking a few students for directions, I soon found my way to a brick building that housed the Dartmouth Outing Club. The DOC was a campus organization that facilitated skiing, hiking, backpacking, climbing, water sports, and anything outdoors for the college community. The club also maintained part of the Appalachian Trail and served as a resource for thru-hikers.
Inside the DOC headquarters, I asked a student volunteer about lodging options near Hanover. He presented me with several hotels within walking distance, all with prices over three digits, and then he said there was a bus line if I was hoping to get something in the seventy to eighty dollar range.
I was hoping for free. This was a college campus and I was twenty-one and it was the summer. There had to be thousands of empty rooms and beds in this town. I was pretty sure that if I made a sign and stood on a curb, a kind student would share her room. All I wanted was a shower and a place to put my sleeping bag.
“I really don’t have that much money to spend on lodging, especially if I can’t split the fee with any other hikers,” I told him, looking as pitiful as possible. “I was hoping to spend the night and take a shower here, but I guess I’ll just keep hiking. By the way, I heard that it was supposed to rain tonight, do you know if that’s true?”
The young man took a minute to run his fingers through his hair and then replied, “Look, I’m not supposed to do this without checking with my roommates, but I live in a house just down the road, and I’m sure you could take a shower there and spend the night on our couch if you want.”
“Really? Thank you so much! I’ll be gone first thing in the morning. Promise.”
The student gave me directions to his building, which sounded pretty much like a coed fraternity house. But I didn’t care as long as it had a shower and a roof. Along the way, I stopped to pick up brownies so I would have an offering to present when I arrived. The gift was well received by the DOC housemates, and in exchange, I was offered a clean towel and a twenty-year-old couch on the front porch.
I had everything I needed for the night, and I planned to head back to the trail the next morning to begin New Hampshire. But then I checked my cell phone messages and discovered that Nightwalker and Mooch would be arriving in Hanover the next morning.
That was a problem.
It shouldn’t have been a problem, because Mooch and Nightwalker were my two favorite people on the trail, and I knew that hiking with them would be fun. But then there was this feeling that I hadn’t really dealt with that I had been trying to leave back in Connecticut. You see, I kind of liked Nightwalker. And the worst part was that I was pretty sure he liked me too.
If I stayed and we started hiking together, the feelings would be unavoidable. But if I kept hiking, it would be an obvious and potentially hurtful dismissal of two good friends who had been there when I needed them the most.
I didn’t know if I was ready to have permanent hiking partners, because that’s what they would be. It was an unwritten rule that you don’t start hiking with people in Hanover and leave them somewhere in the middle of Maine. This was the last and the hardest part of the trail, and hikers either teamed up and finished as a pack or continued solo to the end.
I didn’t sleep well that night, partly because the twenty-year-old couch smelled like mold and partly because drunk college students walked past the house all night long, but mostly because I was nervous. I wished Nightwalker had never called me, because if we had happened to meet up on the trail it would have felt natural. Now it was