Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [109]
I was trying to keep my pace up through the soupy mud and swat mosquitoes away from my face at the same time when my thumb caught my necklace and ripped it off my throat. I watched the silver chain launch off my neck and sink into the murky depths.
I immediately squatted near the surface and began feeling in the sludge for my lost jewelry. I stayed there for five minutes, feeling and groping for it. The necklace had been a present from my best friend, a reminder of her support and encouragement while I was on the trail, and now it was gone, lost in the mud of New Hampshire.
I dug around until the black flies became overwhelming. I had tears in my eyes and mud all over my body from smacking the black flies with brown gloppy hands. Finally I stood up and left the necklace behind.
After losing my necklace, my expensive, uncomfortable new pack came apart. A stabilizing strap that helped balance the pack weight fell off. I couldn’t figure out how to replace the strap, and although I tied it on where I thought it should go, it remained ineffective. As a result, my sternum strap, which was supposed to ride across my breastplate, now more closely resembled a choker and caused the pack to pull back on my collarbone instead of my chest.
In its new form, the pack was even more cumbersome than before, and I decided to take it off for a moment to rest my neck and hips. As I removed the pack, a clasp from my pack caught my watch and pulled the face away from the wristband. It fell on semi-solid ground, and when I picked it up, it was in two pieces. I put it in my pack and kept hiking.
Apparently, all my gear was only built for eighteen hundred miles.
I was in a sour mood when I rejoined Nightwalker and Mooch at Jeffers Brook Shelter that evening. Mooch tried to make things better by building a small fire and putting our shoes beside it so that they could dry out. We sat in silence as we ate dinner. At the end of our meal, Mooch returned to the flames, and as he bent down to inspect our sneakers, he looked up from them, directly at me.
“What?” I called from the shelter. “What is it?”
He didn’t say anything, just stared at me apologetically, as if he had run over my pet. Then he slowly picked up one of my shoes and turned it so I could see the side that had been facing the fire. It had melted!
The back half of my shoe was brown, and a quarter of my sole had melted away. Mooch expected me to explode in anger and frustration, but after I sat silently for a minute, I surprised everyone—even myself—when I started to laugh. I rolled over on the floorboards of the shelter, stared at the ceiling, and guffawed. The boys looked at each other for confirmation, and when they felt it was safe, they began laughing as well.
I was falling apart. What else could I do?
New Hampshire is rumored to be the toughest state on the trail, and after a hard climb up Mount Moosilauke, and an even more difficult descent that involved ladders, metal bars, and wooden steps, I understood why.
But my shoe had held up. Even missing a quarter of its original foam cushion, it saw me safely down the ladders. My legs were worn out from the jarring descent, my arms were tired from clinging to branches, and my nerves were unsettled by the imposing heights, but my shoe was fine.
I had made it up and down Mount Moosilauke with only one good shoe and a broken pack, and I had covered a third of New Hampshire in just two and a half days. Everyone had told me how hard New Hampshire would be, and I had spent twelve states terrified of it. But standing at the base of Moosilauke, I was no longer intimidated. New Hampshire might be the toughest state on the trail, but I could do this.
What I didn’t realize