Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [96]
In general, I held it as a principle not to walk more than I had to on this journey. And although I had already hiked these six miles, and they in no way helped me get any closer to Maine, it just seemed like I needed to take a few steps back before I could go forward.
I needed to remember what the trail was like before the mid-Atlantic and before the suicide. I needed to remember the adventures I had in North Carolina and Tennessee, the confidence I had gained in Virginia, and the fun I had with the boys in Shenandoah National Park. I needed to reflect on all the good memories from the trail, because that made me want to keep hiking.
Hiking with Mooch and Nightwalker made it easy to focus on the good. During the first few miles, Mooch sang us a few songs and told us a few jokes before he was forced to separate himself from the group and take a long bathroom break in the woods. I was left walking alone with Nightwalker.
“I was really worried about you,” he said. “I can’t imagine what that would have been like.”
“I’ve had better days. But your mom helped a lot, and so have you guys.”
“Well, if you ever want to talk to us about it, or if you want to hike with us for a while, we’re here for you.”
“Thanks.”
Even though six miles was a relatively short distance compared to what I had been hiking, I made more progress that afternoon than at any other point on the trail. It had been a hard, sad week, but after those six miles, I knew that I was going to make it to Maine.
I knew that I was going to make it to Maine, but restarting the trail from Bear Mountain State Park took me longer than I thought it would.
Magic Momma held me captive with the lure of food, a bed, clean clothes, and multiple trips to the trail to visit Mooch and Nightwalker. She thought I should take a few days off to rest and spend some time hiking with the boys before setting out on my own again. And she didn’t have to work too hard to convince me.
When I was truly ready to return to the trail, my mom decided I couldn’t get back on until I first visited my aunt and uncle in Wallingford, Connecticut. She said they wanted to see me, and it would be rude to be this close and not pay them a visit, but I knew that she really wanted a mental health checkup. She needed a family member to make sure I was okay before I got back on the trail, so I obliged her and took the train from Stamford to New Haven, where my aunt picked me up.
I love my aunt. If I had her energy, I would probably be in Maine already. After a day spent following my aunt around central Connecticut, I was convinced she had more endurance than anyone I had met on the trail.
The first stop we made that morning was a grocery store, where she insisted on buying every food item I might want for my next resupply. Then we went to the house where my wonderful uncle was making a breakfast of scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, fresh berries, and muffins. I enjoyed the food and needed the energy, because as soon as I placed the last berry in my mouth, my aunt and I were off again.
She wanted to give me a walking tour of the prep school where my uncle taught, a driving tour of their hometown of Wallingford, and a multi-modal tour of nearby New Haven. Somewhere in between hearing about the prep school’s annual fund and architecture, looking for cows in the fields of Wallingford, and visiting the libraries and museums at Yale, I decided that I would be less tired if I’d simply spent the day hiking thirty miles on the trail. Sure, I had just gotten to see two volumes of the Gutenberg Bible at the Beinecke Rare Collections Library, but all I wanted to do was sit down to eat something.
About the same time that I decided I couldn’t set foot in another museum, my aunt decided that she had fulfilled her quota of cultural enrichment for the day, and we finally stopped for a snack, followed by a visit to the local outfitters.
After fifteen hundred miles of shoulder pain, I decided that maybe I didn’t need to toughen up; instead, maybe my brother’s hand-me-down