Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [89]
“Yeah, right,” he said. “You just want to race Neon!”
“How’d you know?” I laughed.
We stayed up talking and eating pie well past my normal hiker-bedtime. There was a lot to celebrate, after all. This was our last night in Pennsylvania, and I couldn’t wait to leave.
15
MORTALITY
DELAWARE WATER GAP, PA, TO BEAR MOUNTAIN
STATE PARK, NY—107.9 MILES
The rocks continue into New Jersey just past the glacier-formed Sunfish Pond to High Point and then begin to disperse. The soft earth is a welcome transition, but during a heavy rain, the path quickly turns to mud. There is an enchanting mile-long boardwalk that spans a mile of protected wetland near Vernon, New Jersey, and a scenic dirt path that leads through a marsh and bird sanctuary in Unionville, New York. Thirty-four miles north of New York City, the trail crosses the Palisades Parkway and climbs up Bear Mountain before descending to the Hudson River—at 124 feet above sea level, this is the lowest point of the trail.
After 230 grueling miles in Pennsylvania, I had made it to New Jersey. I expected the rocks to disappear immediately when I left Pennsylvania, but they didn’t. I also thought things would suddenly get better in New Jersey, but I was wrong.
For one thing, I didn’t think I would miss Raptor as much as I did. But my first night in New Jersey, when I found myself in Gren Anderson Shelter alone with Neon, I felt like I had made a mistake by hiking ahead.
Neon insisted on setting mousetraps throughout the shelter. I don’t know if he carried the traps in his pack or if they were already in the shelter when he arrived, but he baited the devices and encircled our quarters with them.
“I don’t want any mousetraps around me,” I told him.
“The mice are going to get your food.”
“A mouse hasn’t gotten into my food so far. Plus, I move around a lot in my sleep and I don’t want to roll onto a trap. And I always have to pee in the middle of the night, so I’ll probably end up stepping on one too.”
Neon rearranged two traps to give me an aisle out of the shelter if I needed it. But I still wasn’t appeased.
“It’s not the mice’s fault, you know. It’s our fault. If we wouldn’t lure them here with our crumbs and dinner smells, then they would never be here. They’re just trying to survive.”
Despite my aversion to rodents at the beginning of my trip, they now seemed kind of cute. After all, I was in their world, and I had no more right to a shelter than they did. Perhaps in a house I would have felt differently, but after living and walking in these woods, I believed the trail was not a place to kill for convenience, but a place to respect life, to watch it and learn from it.
I had not quite fallen asleep before a trap snapped, and I heard a brief squeal.
“Gotcha,” Neon gloated.
The next morning, I awoke and left the shelter before 6:00 am to put distance between neon and me.
It was a beautiful, warm morning, one of the first days on the trail that I could hike in shorts instead of pants. The grass had changed from faint lime green sprouts to dark green clusters dotted with small purple flowers. The promise of new life abounded.
I was about eighty feet from the top of Sunrise Mountain when I pulled out my camera to capture the stunning vista below me. True to its name, the mountain framed a rising sun, whose majestic ascent highlighted the mist-filled valley below in a glowing light.
I embraced the stillness and tranquility of the moment. Even after packing away my camera and continuing to climb, I remained mesmerized by the expansive valley to the east. It wasn’t until I came upon flat terrain and the open-air pavilion that marked the summit that I looked away from the valley.
I froze.
My stomach lurched, and I felt sick.
It couldn’t be . . .
I stood frozen, and the seconds felt like minutes as I tried to process what my eyes were telling me.
There, twenty feet away, a limp and motionless body swayed gently from a rope tied to the