Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [120]
“Yeah, I own a hostel. I can slackpack you two the next ten miles and then you can come to my place to eat, sleep, take showers, and rest for the night. I can slackpack you tomorrow too, if you want.”
“We would love to!” I exclaimed.
Then I pulled Mooch aside. “Listen, we can both slackpack the next few miles, and tonight at the hostel you can decide what to do when all three of us are there.”
Mooch reluctantly agreed.
We put our packs in the back of the truck and set off into the woods with food, water, and raincoats.
After a few hours we came across Nightwalker, who was jealous and a little mad when we saw us without our packs. That made Mooch happy.
As promised, we were met at the next road crossing by the white-haired man, who drove us to The Cabin. The Cabin was much like any other home, except that the basement had been converted into a hiker lounge and bunkroom. We showered, did laundry, checked the internet, watched TV, and ate a huge dinner. That made Mooch happy, too. But I still wondered whether he was going to go back to the trail the next morning.
That night the three of us lounged around in non-synthetic clothes, talking and eating ice cream—a lot of ice cream. My favorite part of The Cabin was the closet full of comfy clothes for hikers to wear while washing their clothes. I loved having the soft, breathable feel of cotton against my clean, warm skin. After hiking through thirteen states, I hated my smelly, clingy hiker clothes. No matter how many times I washed them, they still didn’t look clean. And even if my t-shirt smelled good coming out of the washing machine, as soon as I put it on and started sweating, the locked-in smell of nineteen hundred miles leaked out. The heat-activated stench was especially bad under my armpits and made me wish that I had chosen to hike in a tank-top for added ventilation.
The three of us weren’t the only hikers lounging around in clean cotton clothes at The Cabin that Night. We were joined by Snowstepper, a hiker I had never met in person but whose trail journal entries I had been following since Georgia.
Snowstepper had decided to start his northbound thru-hike from Springer Mountain last fall. He had hiked by himself through the dead of winter, in snow and ice, often without any sense of whether he was even on the trail. His refuge and release became the shelter registers; they were the only form of communication he had.
In the South, his entries about inclement weather and loneliness were expressive yet good-humored, but the farther north he hiked, the more suicidal the entries became. He started to hate hiking, hate snow, hate loneliness, and hate life. Toward the end of Vermont, I had stopped finding entries written by him. I was convinced he was either dead or taking time off to recover from depression.
Mooch was especially intrigued by Snowstepper, and began to ask him about his hike.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I got off the trail,” Snowstepper said.
“Why?”
“Because I hated hiking and I thought I was going to die.”
“So what are you doing back here?”
“I never thought I would come back. When I got off, I swore that I was done with the trail. I’m glad I quit when I did, because if I had kept hiking, then I probably would have died or gone crazy. But to quit in Vermont—that just felt wrong. I put in so much time and effort to get there. I had overcome so much and then I just quit? Getting off was horrible. Nothing felt right. For three months the trail haunted me, so finally I decided I needed to come back and finish what I started.”
I looked at Mooch, but he refused to make eye contact.
That night before bed, the three of us were brushing our teeth over the kitchen sink.
“Mooch, is there anything we need to discuss?” I asked.
“Nope,” he replied.
“What are you guys talking about?” asked Nightwalker.
“Nothing,” said Mooch. “Absolutely nothing.”
Our two days of slackpacking from The Cabin gave us the boost we needed to make it through southern Maine. I can’t believe