‘Ain’t no sissies on this trail!’

[In honor of the nap I just took in my 18th floor, air-conned hotel room (and the strange, vaguely terrifying backpacking-related nightmare that accompanied it) I thought it time to put down my thoughts on hiking the Knobstone Trail, Indiana’s longest footpath at over 50 miles.  Usually I’d write 20+ pages on such a trip, but I will endeavor, in the interest of readership, to keep it to one semi-lengthy blog.  Enjoy at thy discretion.]

When I met the older couple, late on my fifth day out, I was resting, tired after a brief climb but by no means as physically devastated as I’d been.  I’d just had a great lunch stop and had been able to air out my reeking, aching feet, filter water, eat a packet of Saag Paneer with tortillas (beyond delicious) and linger over my map and a cup of mint hot cocoa.  Unlike the previous three afternoons, no thunderstorms were looming.  And, judging by the isobars on my topographic map, the absolute worst of my climbs and dips were behind me.  Mile 39 and I was feeling…well maybe not fine, but at least okay.

They passed me in their white pickup on their small forest road (Pull Tight), then backed up to see if I was all right.

“I’m fine,” I said, meaning it for the first time in days.  “Just taking a rest.”

They then asked me if I needed anything, and I told them that the flint strips on my waterproof matches had worn out, making any match lighting an adventure, but, other than that, I was good to go.

“Hold on,” the man said.  “We live just right up here.  We’ll be right back.”

And they were, bearing gifts: several books of matches, a package of Little Debbie Devil Squares, and, Good God, two bottles of ice cold Gatorade.  As I attacked the first bottle (much gusto, little restraint) the man talked about the Knobstone, which he’d just through-hiked with his nephew a few weeks earlier.

“I’m 56 years old,” he said, “and twenty pounds overweight, and out of shape…I lost fourteen pounds and my blood pressure went down 28 points – in five days.”

Beginning the second bottle I agreed that, like, yeah, it was a toughy.

“Are you coming from Delaney or Spurgeon [the two north-end trailheads]?” he asked.

“I’m coming from Deam Lake,” I said.

His whole demeanor changed.  “You’re coming from the south!” he said.  “Then you already know about those twenty miles of hell?”

“I do,” I said, smiling.

“Have you ever seen any hiking trail like that?”

I admitted, while endeavoring to fit my head inside the Gatorade bottle to get the last few drops, that I had not.

He then proceeded to tell me stories of the army ranger he’d encountered, a man who’d hiked the entirety of the Appalachian Trail, who’d told him that he’d never hiked a trail as difficult as the KT, and the two female tri-athletes who had had to quit the trail after their bodies had literally shut down.  He finished, pointing northward, behind me, with a dismissive gesture: “There’s nothing to worry about between here and the north end of the trail; all the hard part is behind you.”

“That’s good to know,” I said, smiling more.

“Ain’t no sissies on this trail,” he concluded, more accurately than eloquently, and I nodded in laughing agreement, especially considering, for five days, I had not seen another soul on it.    

Then they drove off again, leaving me, as I’d been for most of the previous week, completely alone.
And reinvigorated.

It was not the Gatorades, my first cold drinks in five days, that made me feel this way…although they did certainly help.  Nor was it the longest human contact I’d had since leaving Hyde Park on Saturday morning.  Nor was it the achingly beautiful summer twilight.  Nor was it the knowing that the rest of my hike was to be easy, mostly perfunctory, a dénouement in an almost literal sense. 

No.  I felt reinvigorated because I had verification, from another, that what I had done was hard.  Strange thing, human nature: the fact that I knew that others who had trod this path had had struggles similar to mine – that they had suffered – made me feel good, made me feel strangely vindicated, made me feel happy.  I set off, quickly, lithely, with a spring in my step that had theretofore been wholly absent.
*
Being an introvert, I’ve always felt that all my coolest moments happen when no one is around to see them.  When I am with the other humans, I often feel awkward, talk way too much, say inappropriate things, feel cagey and ill-at-ease.  It’s not that I don’t love people – I do.  It’s just that I’m not great around them.  And I’ve always thought that, were a hidden camera to follow me around, a la The Truman Show, I would come off as cool, collected, dignified, awesome…unlike I do in public.

While hiking the Knobstone, alone as anyone in the world however, I thought none of these things.  There were very few moments (before my conversation on the side of Pull Tight anyway) when I felt cool at all.  I felt hot, stinky, weak, sore, wet, worried, tired, irritated, and beyond my limits…often all at the same time.  I felt, in short, totally humbled, and though I knew I’d finish the trail (a completist by  nature, it would have taken a broken leg or something similarly catastrophic to stop my doing that), I wondered, on several hundred occasions, why I was doing it, and why it was sooooo not fun.

I started off on Saturday, June 15, alone at vespers, my green Kelty pack an overstuffed behemoth on my back.  Never had I hiked a trail so long, never had I set out to hike so long a time alone.  Furthermore, the KT has a (well-earned) reputation as a dry trail, so I really stocked up on the water – about 15 pounds in my pack and probably six more around my neck in my new four-quart canteen.  Never, ever has my pack felt so heavy; it was so weighty, in fact, that I had to stop every five minutes to readjust the straps as they kept pulling loose.  I made only two miles my first day out before finding a cool campsite high on a ridge. 

However, though my fire was too hot for the hot night, and though my pile of food looked ridiculously huge when piled up, all was well.  The sounds of the trees moving against each other in a night wind (a sound like women crying) and a whippoorwill lulled me to repose.

The next day, Sunday, June 16, my birthday, is when things went south – literally.  Miles 4.5 through 8 of the trail were closed due to tornado damage (I knew this) and I planned to hike around the closed portion on forest roads.  Well, first, my canteen failed cataclysmically: the cheap strap was not designed to support the weight of four quarts of water, and it snapped.  I was able to retie it and make about 1/3 of a mile before it snapped again.  Then, I reached the roads (after the first of the trip’s many serious climbs) and quickly realized that they had no intention of doing what my map said they should…a road called Hilltop, for example, was supposed to go through to a another (Flatwood) but ended at someone’s driveway gate.  Luckily, I ended up on a horse trail, where I met a guy named Gary and a horse named Woody.  They gave me great directions back to the Knobstone – directions that cut about five miles off of my proposed route, directions I was able to follow to the letter – and I rejoined the KT right at mile 8.

However, I am dumb.  I was right where I needed to be, still early in the afternoon, ready to rock, but I got completely turned around just as the first of the trip’s many thunderstorms arrived (precluding any navigation by the sun).  I was sure I was facing south and thus turned around, trying to find where the trail continued north – actually turning south and into the heart of the tornado damage when I did so.  Of course the trail was blocked, so I set off on a parallel horse trail thinking I was heading northeast, actually headed southwest into a trail-less hinterland, lightning flashing and rain lashing.  Needless to say, I spent the next several hours lost, hiking down bulldozer paths and ghosts-of-trails, losing my grip, feeling, tangibly, the relaxed schedule I had planned for myself at the outset of the trip becoming more and more frenetic, lamenting the amount of miles I would have to do over the coming days to catch up.  Admitting defeat at twilight, I set out to circle all the way back to where I had started and take the roads (a prodigious undertaking), but, luckily, I met a group of ATV riders who directed me back to the trail (right where I had been earlier) and told me that I should be able to get through.  Then, shortly thereafter, the sun came out, and I realized my directional folly.  Tired, footsore, and depressed, I continued, in deep twilight, northbound on the KT, only at mile 8 after 14+ miles and 24 hours of backpacking.

I made it all the way past mile 10 that night – not fun but I had to; the trail was wet and a bit overgrown (I was soaked) and I could not find anything resembling a suitable campsite.  I don’t mind, at all, backpacking alone, but I like to have camp established, the tent pitched, the fire stoked, and dinner eaten by dark when I do so.  That was not to be possible on this night, however, and when I finally accepted this (and darkness had fallen fully), I sat down in a small, dripping clearing, put my head in my hands, and wished I could cry.  I called my wife, hoping to whine to her lamentably, but she was working and did not answer.

After regaining some semblance of composure, I got up (what else was there to do?) and continued my climb, up and up, away from civilization and into the dripping darkness.  I finally settled, around 11 p.m., on a damp clearing off the side of the trail.  I made camp and ate shells and cheese and then slunk to my tent, feeling lonely and very sad.  Happy Birthday!

One thought kept me going, however: I could make many miles over the coming days…

Little did I know, however, that I had camped on the cusp on the aforementioned twenty miles of hell.

I was to do 12.5 miles on Monday, the first part of it through a sultry soup of heat and swarming insects, the second through two soaking thunderstorms.  My boots were saturated (and were to continue thusly for the duration of the trip), as were my shorts, leading to the first round of painful chafing (ahem…diaper rash).  Too, I had begun to itch, badly, a result of many, many encounters with ticks and chiggers.  I arrived at a suitable campsite in a valley at dusk during a lull in the rainstorm, and was able to get the tent set up and get into some dry clothes (just) before the rain commenced copiously.  I had to cook and eat dinner in the tent, wondering throughout the night if the murmuring voices I fancied I heard beneath the hum of the rain were real or in my head…couldn’t, at that time, decide which was worse. 

The next day dawned sunny and hot.  I’d overslept, a lot, but still vowed to enjoy my lovely valley-bottom campsite…and so did.  Thus, I got onto the trail after noon (d’oh!).  The trail quickly climbed out of the valley onto a flat ridge top…upon which I was to hike, flatly, for nearly two miles.  I felt so good then I even called my wife while hiking, and was able to converse with her without huffing too heavily… “If the trail is like this, I will make twenty miles today,” I told her shortly before I lost reception.

Mile 24…started by dropping like a stone down into a deep valley and then immediately climbing out of it…before repeating the process.  Then I missed a marker and ended up doing a steep loop down into a valley and back up...right back to where I had started my descent.  (My reaction to hiking for an hour only to find myself at the same parking area again is unprintable.)  There was scarcely ten flat feet of trail the whole mile (ahem…two miles) – and that was just the beginning.

All day, I found myself descending into valleys only to immediately climb out again…creating such a feeling of futility.  I was spent when I stopped in a deep valley for a very late lunch, chagrinned when I saw the telltale clouds and heard the faraway rumbling thunder of another approaching storm.  I strove on, reciting ancient Chinese Tang poetry to myself as the tempest arrived in myriad gusts, dropping huge braches and deadfall onto the valley floor all around me, soaking me and my boots once again.

The rain did drop the temps from the low 90s into the mid 60s, and it did lend a degree of ambience to my endeavors (a misty ridge top at mile 29 was particularly lovely, even though I did daydream of sitting in a hot tub throughout, and the cloud-parting sunset over Elk Creek Lake made me think thoughts of heaven) so it was not all bad.  I filtered water out of Elk Creek Lake during the stormy gloaming, wondering, as I looked out over the lake to the surrounding hills and the acres of empty parking spaces, if I were inhabiting a world devoid of humans.  Passing a perfect campsite (too close to the parking area, I thought) I strode off, again hiking by flashlight into the dark.  The trail climbed and climbed silently, and I carried on, thinking that I would find a lovely hilltop campsite with a view.  Wrong.  The trail crested at a forest road and then immediately descended back into the woods.  As it was again after 11 p.m., I thought about just sitting up in the small parking spur off the road, but something about that creeped me out…I thought of how little I would want to meet anyone who’d be out on such a road at 3 a.m., and also of a ghost story I had read as a kid wherein a spirit had run down such a road, invisible, creating loud, echo-less footsteps.  Thus I retreated a bit, back down the hill, to another small clearing that had never been used as a site.  Such loneliness beset me as I made camp, cooked dinner, etc… And something akin to terror beset me when a huge tree fell with a series of cracks and monolithic tremblings sometime during the wee hours of the ultra-still night.  “Why,” I wondered aloud, “am I doing this?”

The next day – more huge climbs followed by more huge drops, again, again, again.  The trail was rerouted onto a high, scorching ridge top, whereupon, spent by early afternoon, I sank down and contemplated my own mortality and the fact that, as I told Patricia laughingly, there may be no God. 

Then, however, after a last huge drop, I came to the John Stewart Oxley Memorial Trailhead, where (as I’ve already mentioned) I had a great, therapeutic lunch stop.  And this is where, dear reader, we came in.

My last night on the trail was everything that I go backpacking for: I found a flat, well-established site by a riverbed and was able to get the tent up, my dinner cooked, and a watery fire going before darkness fell.  I spent the night huffing life into the little fire and reading, and then slept like a stone into the sunny morning.

The last day’s hike was easy and uneventful (even though, as a completist, I felt compelled to day hike the remaining loops, which were more challenging than scenic).  My pal Jeremy Weber, on his day off, met me at Delaney Park, more than a three hour drive from his house, to take me back to my car at the southern trailhead.

“I hiked the Knobstone,” I said, exhaustedly when I met him.

“You smell like it,” he said.

I took a shower at the bathhouse…refreshing even though I had to put on my awful hiking clothes again…and then we went to dinner, on the way south, at a Pizza Hut in Salem.  It was nice to talk to my friend, who is also a backpacker, and to begin replacing the calories I had used (borrowed actually).
We arrived at my car at twilight, exactly 6 days after I had set off. 

And we spent much of our goodbye talking about doing the trail together, with Patricia.

And I spent much of my ride home feeling ten miles high, feeling accomplished.  And all of the problems that I had left at home – some of which had seemed insurmountable, and had troubled my sleep – seemed manageable now, doable.  And all of the struggles I had had and all of the loneliness and uncertainty I had experienced on the trail now seemed somehow cool, somehow vital.

I guess, to sum things up, that that is why I go backpacking.  I guess that that is why I undertake anything challenging actually. 

Sometimes, to affect real change, you have to get out of your comfort zone…maybe not as far out as I did, but out nonetheless. 

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