Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [45]
I thought it would take another day and a half to reach Damascus, but after covering twenty miles before 2:00 PM, I was faced with a decision. Stopping yesterday at 4:00 PM had been hard. I didn’t like waiting around for the sun to go down. And if I stopped now, I wouldn’t have anything to do for the next six hours.
On the other hand, I had already hiked twenty miles, and it was ten more to Damascus. My farthest day of hiking so far had been twenty-seven miles, and that had been a struggle. Usually I was happy to hike twenty to twenty-five miles, but today the trail had been surprisingly flat, I still had energy left, and all of a sudden I was craving pizza. But thirty miles? That seemed too far.
As I tried to decide what to do, two thru-hikers in their twenties walked up behind me. They were brothers. I hadn’t met them at the shelter the night before because they had decided to tent a little farther down the trail.
“We didn’t want to stay where someone had been killed,” the older brother explained.
Without a history of homicide at the current shelter, they both started to unload their packs.
“Are you going to stop?” asked the younger brother.
“I don’t know. I usually don’t stop this early, but I’ve never hiked thirty miles in one day, and I don’t know if I can make it to Damascus before dark.”
He replied, “Yeah, we’re too tired to make it there today, but we can’t wait until tomorrow. Damascus is awesome. There’s a pizza joint, a burrito shop, and a Subway in town. Plus, it will be our first shower in two weeks.”
Two weeks? I thought I smelled something. The longest I had gone without a shower on the trail was four days.
In the end the decision was simple: pizza, shower, and a hostel trumped PowerBars, floor planks, and putrescence. I was on my way to Damascus.
Damascus is the preeminent trail town. All the businesses are hiker-friendly, meaning they don’t mind dirty, stinky vagabonds with packs on their backs hanging around. And each May the town hosts a thru-hiker festival called Trail Days, which serves as a celebration for current hikers who have made it to Virginia, and a reunion for thru-hikers from years past. The main event at Trail Days is a hiker parade, where current thru-hikers parade down Main Street carrying water balloons to combat the hoses and water guns that the crowd points at them.
The sun was setting when I arrived in Damascus, and although there weren’t water balloons or a crowd, I paraded down the center of Main Street filled with happiness and pride. The quaint town was beautiful and, like Hot Springs, it was next to a river and bordered by mountains.
The fading sun lit up the Main Street windows in pink, and everywhere I looked there were signs greeting hikers or providing information about specific services, such as trail shuttles, hostels, or resupply options. In other towns along the trail, thru-hikers were a spectacle, but in Damascus I felt like the guest of honor.
I celebrated my arrival with an immediate trip to Sicily’s Italian Restaurant. At first, I was solely focused on food, but after a few slices of tomato, feta, and banana pepper pizza, it struck me—I had hiked almost five hundred miles. I had completed one of the toughest sections of trail along the North Carolina–Tennessee border, and I had made it to Virginia.
I sat there with a sense of accomplishment and enjoyed rewarding myself with pizza. It occurred to me that this was the first time I had ever eaten at a restaurant by myself. I thought back to how nervous it used to make me to go to my college cafeteria alone, not knowing whether I would find a friend to sit next to. I was self-conscious that sitting alone would make people think I didn’t have any friends. But tonight sitting alone didn’t bother me. I was more comfortable with myself and with silence than I had ever