This first post is a short fiction that I wrote as an undergraduate at Southern Connecticut State University. It was first published in Gulf Stream Magazine – South Florida’s Literary Current- Vol 21, 2004 as the first place entry in their international literary contest that year. I have edited it a good deal from the initial publication. Although it is ‘fiction’ (to use the term loosely), the story, and these characters are very real. I recommend reading the ‘About these stories’ page, before or after this story.
Reliance
About eight miles from the road, in the cool moist shade of a short hemlock hall, I leaned my pack back against a giant boulder and loosened the straps. I took a drink of warm water and popped a mint to dull the iodine after-taste. Fourteen or miles on the day and only 2:00. And I’d woken up late.
I hadn’t seen a single person in two days, a first since I’d hit the trail in Georgia in May. I’d finally found the pocket.
It was early September in Vermont. And with only two and a half states to go, I was a week ahead of schedule. Over sixteen hundred miles behind me. The slopes were getting steeper and I was getting faster. I could do seventeen miles a day comfortably. Eighteen or nineteen wasn’t bad on the right terrain. Twenty was a push, might take a day to recover, but I’d pulled a dozen of them already and I had a few more left in me for sure. Once I did thirty. I won’t do that again, though at only a week away from my thirtieth birthday, I knew that I could. I couldn’t wait for New Hampshire and the Whites.
The trick to moving through the mountains without killing yourself is to travel light. So I’d sent the extras home; my playing cards, walkman, watch, camera, tent, water filter, stove, cook set, sleeping bag, heavy clothes, boots and notebook. I went so far as to cut the handle off of my toothbrush to save an ounce. My pack was down to forty-five pounds with six days of food and four liters of water. I’d started with sixty. But it wasn’t all about the weight.
I liked that I didn’t have to cook and that my only dish was my spoon and the liter bottle in which I soaked my pastas and rice. I liked that my feet could breath in sandals. I camped alone at night, under the open sky when I could, with a thin wool blanket and a tarp for when it rained. I’d pick up my sleeping bag again at White River Junction on the New Hampshire border when I got there, but I’d never go back to a stuffy tent. I passed up shelters and busy camps for empty crags and beds of hemlock. I slept sounder to crawling creatures in the dark than to the snores of neighboring campers. Every five or six days I’d hit town for supplies and laundry. It was always brief. I wasn’t there to hang in towns. I was full of fire and determined to beat the bitter cold to Maine. All I had to do was follow the white blazes north.
I reholstered my bottle, tightened my belt, and smeared a lone mosquito across my neck. The air cooled stiffly and the breeze picked up blowing a chill cloud through the trees, erasing the woods into a white nothing. My legs fired up the gentle grade like well timed pistons, galvonized, beating the slick rocks in time, catching cobwebs in my beard; first to break trail that day.
And just then, as I drew a deep pungent organic hemlock breath and took another leap, my gut balled up in knots and I bent and threw up in the ferns aside the trail. It came out of my nose and burned my eyes. I unbuckled the belt of my pack, but it didn’t release the pressure. I coughed a giant chunk from my throat and my bowels tensed. I was shaking. Cold. Clenching myself together, I leaned my pack on a tree and made for the cover of an upturned tree off the trail, unbuttoning as I went, hoping for the best. I hardly made it thirty feet through the thick bramble, a stubby half stripped hemlock the best I could do. I pulled up a loose rock to make a quick hole and squatted just in time, trembling. Head pitched to the side, I threw up on my hand. I was dripping from every pore. A stiff breeze rattled the woods, and then a rumble, then voices down the trail and the clicking of Leki poles, and it occurred to me that the toilet paper was in my pack.
Shit! There wasn’t a lot I could do. I couldn’t hold it long enough to get back to my pack for the paper. I had to make for deeper cover. I grabbed a couple of ferns, clenched and went for it, ducking into the ditch of upturned roots, just in time to avoid disaster. I could smell their cologne over the hemlock and the clouds, and the moist forest dirt, and over my own barbaric stench. I sneezed, but they didn’t hear.
“That’s odd,” a deep voice said when he reached my pack.
The other, a squeaky voice replied, “Probably popping a squat.”
“Never mind,” said Deep, “It’s going to rain any minute.”
“Shelter’s got to be close by now,” said Squeaky.
“After you,” said Deep.
I leaned my head back into the dirt of the upturned roots. The two hikers gabbed up the trail. Their cologne made me vomit.
They were right about the rain. It came on as quickly as my sickness. I heard it hit the canopy like a drum roll and I was soaked before I could get my shorts up. The ground was flooded when I reached my pack. I put on my rain coat and shouldered my load, twice as heavy as before. I’d have to move to keep warm, but I didn’t make it a hundred feet before stopping again. At least that time I had the toilet paper. I squatted over a pothole off the trail without time to dig, shaking, cold.
But, they where wrong about how close the shelter was. I could count the miles with a mental pace check against my watch. I’d been maintaining about three miles an hour all morning, which put the shelter at about two miles. Which, of course, under normal circumstances would be close, for me, but…I had to stop many times. Each time I felt weaker and more labored. I lost track of pace and it felt like ten miles when I finally reached a cold piped spring and the opening of the empty log shelter. I dove in.
The two hikers had been there, their cologne still stunk. But it was dry inside and the outhouse was close enough. I slid out of my pack and wet clothes, but even in dry long johns, pants and a sweater, I shook; even after I pulled my wool cap over my ears and crawled under the blanket. I tried to be still, tried to stop my head from spinning, tried to keep my gut in check.
The only view from the shelter was the gothic looking trees flashing in and out of an endless gray nothing. I thumbed through the shelter log for distraction, but it was a new one with only a few ‘thru’-hiker entries and no one I knew. Mostly it was full of obnoxious day-hiker logs and I couldn’t concentrate to read anyway. I ate the last of my French bread and took a reluctant drink. I was glad to taste iodine and swashed it through my mouth to kill the germs. My stomach settled a bit.
It was still early. There was time to wait out the rain. I’d feel better soon and get moving up and over the mountain and be camped before dark. Even if it didn’t stop raining, I’d feel better. I lay back and focused on the drumming of the tin roof. The gray world outside the shelter bowed to the storm. I fell asleep with my food bag at my side, my stomach temporarily lulled.
Normally I wake up to anything. I have two older brothers, so I’m always prepared for a sneak attack. But I didn’t hear anyone until I heard the hiss of a stove. I was in the fetal position with my face to the wall. It was dark and really cold. My head was spinning. I had the overpowering urge to vomit , so I dove for the opening and threw up over the log railing with my head in the rain, before I could even look to see who was there.
His dinner began to boil with a light clanking of the lid and the sweet smell of garlic. I wiped my mouth and ducked in out of the rain, holding a low beam above for support. The back of my shoulders and my head were wet, cold. His white beard glowed beneath the blinding star of his headlamp and the shimmer of wire rimmed glasses. He was rail thin. His bright orange pack, twice the size of him, hung on the wall.
“You going to make it?” he asked with a familiar rasp in his voice, shining his light away from my eyes. “Miles, right?”
I’d met Gus only once, and though I had to do a double-take, because I honestly never expected to see him again, I recognized the voice right away. He loved to talk. In one night of cohabitation, in a crowded shelter in PA, the last shelter I stayed in, and one of the only few, with none other than a noisy group of scouts, who’s leader was eager to hear all of Gus’s stories, I’d learned his life it seemed.
He was sixty-three; born in Virginia, but his father had followed work up to Worcester Massachusetts, where he’d grown up and lived ever since. Raised a lot of hell back when. Back before he found God. He was a retired commercial airline pilot. His wife had died three years prior and he’d retired on that day. They had three grown children who sent him care packages on the trail. He was going to be a grandfather soon and he was out living his life the way his wife had always wanted to. She always wanted to just cut loose and travel. And she loved the mountains. But he’d never had time for that stuff,’ because of this and that and blah, blah, blah’ on which he’d talked late into the night. He’d been struggling at the time with the idea of skipping ahead on the trail in order to make it to Baxter before it closed, but he wanted to make it a ‘pure’ thru-hike, because his wife’s dream had been so ‘pure.’ I guess he’d lost the struggle, because I couldn’t imagine him keeping pace with me.
“It’s been a while,” he said. “I hope you’ve been better than you are now?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You?”
“Mighty fine.” He said, shutting off his stove. “You going to claim one of those bunks, or are you just going to sleep on the floor.”
“I’m just taking a rest,” I told him. “I was planning on heading over the mountain.”
“Not a good time now I’d say.”
I didn’t answer.
“I haven’t seen your name in the shelter logs,” he said.
“I haven’t been staying in shelters much.” I told him, noticing my food bag hanging next to his under the overhang, just out of the rain.
“The mice were on your bag. Chewed ya’ a couple of holes before I got here. Don’t think they got much.”
“Thanks,” I said, realizing I’d forgotten to hang it, and feeling violated.
“Tried eating?”
“Yeah.” My stomach turned with the thought. “Didn’t turn out too well.”
“Some potatoes might do you some good,” he said. “Garlic and herbs? You’ve got to get something down. You should see yourself.”
“I’m good.” But, I was seeing double when I turned my head, like tracers from a bad trip.
“Maybe in a little while,” he said.
“Maybe.” I grabbed my raincoat and ran for the outhouse, “Excuse me.”
When I got back, there was a heap of potatoes on a tin lid laid out for me. “I can’t eat that.” I coughed up a straggler chunk from my throat and spit it to the rain. I hung my poncho and got under my blanket.
“It’s there if you change your mind.”
I remember being twelve with the chicken pox, puking in bed, missing the bowl, room spinning, screaming while my mother force-fed me. My eating was the only thing that calmed her.
“Still carrying that little bear taco tent?” he asked.
“No. I use a tarp now. It’s lighter.”
“That’s it? A tarp?”
“Just a tarp and a ground cloth.”
“And no shelters?”
“Not until today. Not since that night we met.”
There was a long silence, just the drumming rain.
“Sounds lonely to me. I’ll take a dry little shanty with friends.” He cracked his back, ate a spoonful of potatoes and sighed. “Why not?”
“Too crowded.”
“Not tonight.”
“I guess not,” I said.
“I’ll take a shelter any night, my friend. Good place to be right now,” he said. “You know that spring over there is some of the best water I’ve ever tasted,” and when I didn’t say anything he said, “Have some potatoes.”
I don’t know why, but I decided to force down a mouthful to appease him, so I slinked out of my blanket and grabbed the steaming lid. It helped to kill the bile, but it nearly came back up and biled my throat again anyway. “I can’t eat any more I told him,” sliding the lid back across the floor. “Thanks anyway.” He flung the potatoes to the rain without a word and I pulled up the blanket, lay back against the wall, shut my eyes and watched my veins flash red. It got so quiet I almost forgot that Gus was there.
I drank spring water as a kid from the well behind our house. “Best water in the world,” my mother always said. And it was good water.
***
I woke to pitch black thunder, head pounding, freezing, eyes burning coals. A mouse scrambled by. My gut bubbled up and I hardly made it to the stoop before I lost the potatoes. Gus flipped on his head lamp. “You need to eat some more,” he said.
I shook my head no, trying to force a swallow as he got up and made for his food bag. He handed me a crunchy granola bar, but I wouldn’t take it.
“Really though,” he said, “you’ve got to get something down.”
“I’m fine.” My gut was kicking up hard again and I caught my teeth nashing.
“You need to eat.”
I didn’t answer and he said no more.
He was worse than my mother. I was shaking, like the time when I was 12 and my oldest brother’s friend stuffed me into one of those large commercial dryers, and I got in trouble for it somehow, because I’d taunted him, made fun of the giant hairy birthmark on his back, and I got reamed out and grounded for two weeks, even though I had burns on my arms and legs to show for it. She was a tough Irish mother. Especially after my father was gone.
A heavy mist rolled through the open shelter. I shut my eyes and drifted off to sleep with a chill thinking about how I’d still like to go back and stuff Mickey Addams in the dryer.
I snapped to, trembling, fetal on my side, arms crossed tight to my chest, shelter spinning, brain pulsing to the tin rain. I couldn’t take a deep breath. I was freezing and it was hard to swallow. I heard his sleeping bag unzip and before I knew what was happening, he was helping me onto a bunk and into his heavy down bag. He went to fire his stove. My stomach swelled sharply, and it took all my energy and focus to clench until the feeling passed. He filled bottles with hot water, wrapped them in socks and stuffed them into the bag with me. I could hear his stove hissing, the water boiling and my mother telling me to eat.
Then he helped to prop me up against the wall and held his cup to my lips before I could resist, and I felt myself drinking from outside myself, drooling hot unsweetened Kool-Aid in my beard. He made me soup, despite me telling him I’d make something later. I took one spoonful at a time, hands trembling, getting as much on the sleeping bag as I did in my mouth.
“I hope this isn’t contagious,” he said, and when I didn’t reply he said, “We’ll get you into town tomorrow. Some town is what you need.”
But I’d be better in the morning. I’d be strong enough to get myself to town. It was only September. All I needed was some rest. And I’d be getting my sleeping bag soon. White River Junction was only a hundred and twenty-five miles or so. “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll be fine.” But, the shelter was still spinning, and I couldn’t steady my hand.
He started to say something, but stopped, just adjusted his glasses and turned to sit on the stoop with his back against the wall. He turned off his lamp, pulled a pipe from his shirt pocket and stuffed it. It burned sweet, glowing rings that evaporated into the dark mist. He sighed deeply and pulled a book from his giant pack.
I sat in the dark silence deep inside the bag, propped up in the corner, because that was how my stomach felt most settled. The weather hardened, with more rain blowing in, and it was colder than I ever imagined an early September night in Vermont. I could feel little droplets condensing in my moustache, shaking down through my beard as I trembled lightly, and the breast of my shirt was wet like a baby’s after lunch.
Gus smoked through the night without a word, a silhouette against the flashing storm outside. I never saw him open the book and he hardly used his light. But he didn’t sleep. His stove hissed and more water boiled. His pipe glowed and frail smoke rings strobed when the lightning flashed. He filled another two Nalgenes and stuffed them into the bag with me, and at some point I fell asleep.
