Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [43]
My heart rate began to speed up as they started jogging toward me. I could handle the heckling, but this felt threatening. I was a few steps from the forest, so I pretended not to hear them and tried not to speed up until I passed behind the trees, then I started to sprint. I ran at least a quarter mile before I slowed down to a very, very fast walk.
“Harmless,” I told myself. “Those boys were probably absolutely harmless; they were just teenagers with nothing to do.” But despite my attempts to reassure myself, my stomach felt uneasy and I was filled with anxiety for the next few hours.
As the afternoon wore on, my distance from civilization grew and I slowed to a deliberate walk. Eventually I stopped replaying the day’s earlier encounters in my head, and I became lost in thought, which I very much enjoyed.
In society, I never felt like I was able to follow a thought to completion. Instead, one thought would lead to another thought, which would lead to another thought, and then I would be distracted by a loud noise, a bright light, or a prior commitment and never finish my thinking. On the trail, however, I would have an idea, and that would lead to another, followed by a contrary opinion that would bring up a totally different concept, and at the end of exploring that concept there would be quiet and my brain would feel still. Not still as if it were empty or without intelligence, but just the opposite—still as if it were full and at peace.
Sometimes I would challenge myself to think and think and think, to see how long I could think and put off the peace, but no matter how long my thoughts lasted, the end was always the same. There was peace, the world was silent, and I was by myself.
I was at just such a place of peace when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the black stick beside my foot move and then race to the side of the trail. I jumped to the opposite side of the path and squealed with fright.
A snake!
This was the first snake that I had seen on the Appalachian Trail. I hate snakes. I don’t know why I hate snakes, but I do. That said, I knew that black snakes weren’t poisonous, so I stood several feet away and watched to see what it would do next. For the most part, it just laid still, sunning itself on the trail, but when it did slightly adjust or wiggle its forked tongue in the air, I cringed in disgust.
I was amazed that the snake hadn’t bitten me. My foot had landed within a few inches of its head, and it easily could have sunk its fangs into my exposed ankle, but instead it had just slithered in the opposite direction.
I was shaken up after coming so close to the legless reptile, and I promised myself I would be more careful and perhaps less “thoughtless” in the future.
Thirty minutes later I almost stepped on another snake. I hadn’t seen a snake in four hundred miles and now I had come across two within an hour?
Once again, it was a long, thin, black snake that I had taken for a fallen branch. When I stepped within a foot of its body, it quickly moved away and actually started retreating up the bark of a nearby locust tree. As much as I despised snakes, it was neat to see this one climb up a tree. He used the grooved bark for support and wove his way up the trunk in an S-shaped pattern. He was already six feet off the ground when I decided to continue hiking.
Even though I still don’t like snakes, looking back on the day, I decided that they had been my favorite unpleasant encounter.
I had forgotten how much I didn’t miss the rain until I woke up the next morning to a cold drizzle. I had enjoyed two beautiful trail days since the last downpour, and I was not thrilled to once again take down a dripping tent and shove it into my soaking pack. I even preferred snow over a thirty-five-degree rain. At least with snow I could still stay relatively dry, unlike the piercing wind and pouring rain that chilled my core and numbed my extremities.