Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [98]
The strange thing was, I had trail goggles too—and it wasn’t for the boys. The boys looked worse the farther I traveled down the trail. They were the only hikers I saw, and they appeared less human and more like wild animals the longer they were on the trail. Their facial hair grew over everything but their eye sockets, and they would spend time at the shelters in the evenings picking the bugs and crumbs out of each other’s beards. It was evidence for the theory of evolution and a sign that we might in fact be able to devolve back into chimpanzees.
Rainbow was beautiful, and I missed the company of other women, so I walked and talked with her for the rest of the day. I listened to her describe the organic chicken farm where she worked in the Southwest, and tried to console her when she mentioned how much she missed her girlfriend—that must have disappointed the goggle-eyed boys.
That evening, the two of us decided not to stop and spend the night at a shelter with the rest of the hikers. Instead, we hiked a little further and found a campsite next to the sprawling Housatonic River.
The water was golden as the setting sun hit the surface, and tall purple wildflowers lined the grassy banks. I felt full, happy, and at peace. I had a new friend, I was in a new place, and everything around me was beautiful.
Before I went to bed, I decided to bathe in the river. It was the first time on the trail that I was able to completely submerge my naked body into a water source. It felt so good to be surrounded by the flowing water. I would take a breath and then sink under the surface of the water and feel the current wrap around me, holding me lovingly until I had to go back up for more air.
So far on the trail, either the water had been too cold for bathing or I had been in the company of male thru-hikers. I decided long ago, while hiking with Moot, that I wasn’t going to skinny-dip when there were boys in the vicinity. But tonight it was just Rainbow and me, in my first and only all-girl campout of the entire trip.
The Housatonic River is beautiful, and it’s level. Ninety-nine percent of the trail fell into the categories of “difficult” or “more difficult,” but along the river the walking was actually easy.
I traveled along the soft riverbank and then back into the rolling Connecticut countryside. I didn’t see Rainbow after leaving camp that morning, but I did stop to eat lunch with Texas Ranger at a shelter. Texas Ranger was a thru-hiker who I had met back in Virginia. He was friendly, outgoing, and aside from Raptor and Neon, he was one of the few fifty year-old hikers who was still at the head of the pack.
Texas Ranger hadn’t seen me since I’d bought my mop stick almost nine hundred miles ago, and he couldn’t get over what a wonderful accessory it had become.
“It’s great,” he said. “I love it! A mop stick? Who would think about using a mop stick as a hiking pole? That’s gotta be the best piece of gear I’ve seen all trip. You know what would be funny? You should change your trail name to Mop ’n Glow. You’re always so happy, and now you hike with a mop stick. It couldn’t be more appropriate.”
I laughed. “Texas Ranger, you can call me whatever you want. But I was Odyssa on top of Springer Mountain, and I want to sign Odyssa at the Katahdin register, so I think I’ll stick with what I’ve got.”
When I first learned about trail names, I thought they were just a fun tradition that provided anonymity, but now they were so much more. Odyssa wasn’t just a nickname; it was a second identity. Thinking back to pre-trail Jen, there was no way that she could have hiked this far. There was no way she could have gone through all the good and the bad, the hard and the ugly, that Odyssa had experienced. Jen would never have crawled into the cab of a semi-truck with a man she didn’t know, Jen wouldn’t have been able to deal with seeing snakes every day, and she wouldn’t have been able to cope with a suicide or rely on complete strangers for help. But Odyssa was a totally different person.
It was funny to think back to Springer