Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [118]
“Hor . . . hors . . . moose!” I gasped.
It was a moose, a moose without antlers, a female moose! Her head was sticking through the thick brush, and at first I couldn’t figure out what a horse was doing in the bushes beside the trail. Then I realized this was where all the huge pellets of poop were coming from!
I tried to repeat myself quietly so that Nightwalker and Mooch, who were coming up behind me, would understand the situation. I pointed and once again whispered, “Moose!” But seeing that she was about to turn and trample into the forest, I called out louder, “Moose, moose, moose!” Then I watched her gigantic backside disappear in the distant hedges.
The boys never saw the moose. They were disappointed, and I felt bad they had missed her, but then again, they had seen a bear back in Virginia. Now that I was in Maine, I resigned myself to the fact that I probably wasn’t going to see a bear on this trip. And although I hadn’t really thought about seeing a moose, the five seconds that passed between recognizing the four-legged creature and watching her bound through the thick forest immediately became a highlight of my hike.
The descent down Carlo Col demands hugging the mountain as if it were a rock-climbing wall and slowly inching down the serrated incline. It was hard, time consuming, and exhausting. Nightwalker and I were both six feet tall, and Mooch could look down at both of us, yet there were several places where even our long legs and extended bodies couldn’t reach the next ledge. We had to jump, slide, and spot each other coming off the rocky grade.
After that, I thought the trail would get better. I thought it had to get better.
I was wrong. The unwieldy traverse that led into Maine was only a taste of what we encountered the next day at Mahoosuc Notch.
Mahoosuc Notch was a mile-long stretch of gnarly, jagged, oddly shaped boulders in a gulch that was sandwiched in between two imposing sheer cliffs. There wasn’t any walking through Mahoosuc Notch. The only way through was to squeeze, slip, and slither on top, in between, and beneath the rocks.
It was late June, but we still saw snow on the ground in some places, and we could feel cold air from ice trapped in crevasses beneath the boulders.
There were several points where I felt like a wrong step could lead to serious injury, and I was thankful not to be hiking alone. But as a group, we were discouraged at how long it was taking us to move forward. I kept thinking about world-class track stars who could run a mile in under four minutes. I was pushing myself as hard as I could, and I was lucky to make it a hundred feet in four minutes.
“This sucks,” said Mooch.
“I’m so tired,” I complained.
“C’mon guys,” said Nightwalker. “It’s not that bad. Just think of it as Mother Nature’s jungle gym.”
The fact that Nightwalker wasn’t struggling as much as Mooch and me made me a little resentful, but the playground analogy did flip a switch in my head. I finally accepted that there was nothing we could do to increase our speed. At that point, I stopped trying to hurry and just started to enjoy the rock scrambles.
Suddenly the hardest mile of the entire trail became one of the most enjoyable. We stopped trying to fight the elements and began to embrace them. We laughed as we threw our packs off large boulders and pushed them between small cracks before trying to squeeze our bodies through to the other side. We played an adapted version of hide-and-seek as we rounded each turn, and threw our hiking sticks to each other in a skilled game of catch.
It took us an hour and a half to traverse the one-mile Mahoosuc Notch, and when we finally came out at the east end, we were exhausted, proud, and happy. We had completed the hardest mile of the entire trail.
Unfortunately, we were unaware that it was directly followed by the second-hardest mile on the trail.
I might have had a clue if the words “Mahoosuc Mountain” appeared in the Data Book after Mahoosuc Notch, but instead it read “Mahoosuc