We’re All Going To Live

It is August 22nd, 2024. The temperature on Zealand Ridge is maybe fifty degrees, maybe lower, and it’s raining. Everything I’m wearing is wet. Wet rain jacket over a wet wool t-shirt. Wet rain pants over wet shorts. My shoes and socks are wet from the mud and the streams. Earlier in the day I slipped on a wet bog bridge and did a full banana-peel Vaudeville slapstick pratfall. You stop for a snack, but as soon as I stop I get very cold. I have to keep moving. I eat a Luna bar as fast as I can and tell you I’ll meet you at Galehead Hut. I worry about you a little when we split up, and I usually like to be the one coming along behind, but this time you have new raingear that I bought you at the Pinkham Notch Visitor’s Center, and you’re obviously doing better in these conditions than me. I should have bought myself some new raingear.

A little later I reach the summit of Mt. Guyot for the second time in my life, and for the second time I’m greeted with freezing cold rain and high wind. I don’t know what I did to this mountain, but it wants me dead. The wind across the bare summit cuts right through my soaking wet ultra-breathable rain jacket, and I start shivering immediately. I know I need to add a layer, and I know that whatever layer I choose won’t be dry again today, or probably for some time. It won’t be dry later to keep me warm at camp. I put on my synthetic puffy, because it will add more wind protection than my sweater. It’s immediately wet, but I am warm enough now. I start thinking that I’m probably going to make it to Galehead Hut, but that this would be a very bad time to break an ankle. It makes me feel better to know that you’ll be coming along behind me, at least.

It is September 1st, 2024. We’re sitting under the bridge over the White River in West Hartford, Vermont, eating lunch. The concrete foundation of the bridge pillar is warm beneath us from the sun. On the far side of the river, the current ripples over a series of shallow rocks. On the near side a wide eddy loops sluggishly back upstream. In front of us a half collapsed lawn chair and a tackle box sit on the boulders, as if awaiting the imminent return of some Green Mountain Huck Finn. Flickers of sunlight reflect off the water onto the concrete underside of the bridge. 

You’re slicing a cucumber you got from a basket in front of a house on the way into town. The basket had a sign that said: “Free cuc’s for hikers.” We debated that spelling briefly at the time. I pointed out that “cucumber” doesn’t actually have a “k” in it, but you argued that clarity overrides orthographical strictness here, and “bike” sets a well known precedent. I had to agree. There was no need to even mention the apostrophe. 

I’m looking away from the river for a moment when I hear a whoop and then a heavy splash. A little later there is a second splash. I tilt my chin at the heads now bobbing in the river, and say “gotta be hikers.” You nod. 

They do turn out to be hikers, when we finish our lunch and cross the river to find the trail on the other side. In fact they are two other southbounders who we’ve met before. One is Zeb, a Michigander we first ran into way back at Abol Bridge, at the infamous “last moment I felt okay” before the hundred mile wilderness fiasco, and who miraculously recognized me again at the Hikers Welcome hostel a few days ago in New Hampshire. The other is Plum, who I met on the way up Moosilauke and you met slightly earlier, on the summit ridge of Kinsman. 

We will all hike together for a bit, then leapfrog each other for the rest of the day, and wind up at the same shelter that night. I’ll hang up a string of lights that I got at the REI in Williston and haven’t told you about yet, declaring that the shelter is in party mode. Plum and Zeb will build a campfire, only our second campfire of the trail so far. We’re Sobos in Vermont and we’re euphoric with the new certainty that we’re going to live.

It is August 22nd, 2024, later that afternoon. I’m huddled in your rain poncho in the muddy cooking area at Garfield Ridge shelter. Cold, mist, wind. The trees around the campsite are all dead, snapped off at about eight feet as if some giant had swept a careless hand across them. A worn tarp is suspended above the cooking area, tied off to the jagged stumps. It flaps heavily in the swirling wind, showering a fine mist down from above to join the mist blowing in underneath it sideways.  

I already had dinner but even in my quilt inside the shelter I was cold. You sit down next to me and light your stove to cook ramen. “I’m gambling that some hot chocolate will warm me up more than sitting out here to make it will freeze me,” I say, and you laugh. I can see in your eyes that you’re doing fine, and that knowledge warms me up a little too. You’re having an adventure. 

The hot chocolate works. Back in the shelter, wrapped in my quilt and wearing the fleece sweater I carefully kept dry all day, I discover there’s good cell phone service, and between the warm liquid sugar and the virtual connection with people elsewhere in the world who are safe and dry and going about their normal life, I feel like I’m having an adventure too. I start to feel like this moment is already a memory we can look back on and laugh about, a little bit. 

It is September 5th, 2024. I’m sitting at a picnic table behind the red barn at the Stone’s Throw farm stand in Shrewsbury, Vermont. I’m eating a mid-morning snack of fresh sourdough wheat bread with guacamole and cheese curds, and drinking a cold chocolate milk. It’s almost 11 am but somehow the vegetable patch is still sparkling with dew. Sheep graze a nearby field, watched over by a few alpacas. I’m talking to my wife on the phone. “Vermont is literally The Shire,” I tell her, “You walk up and down a few gentle mountains, and then every 25 miles or so there’s a delightful farm stand or coffee shop.” Another hiker at the table laughs. 

We passed each other as I was walking on the road to the farm stand, and you were headed back to the trail. You told me you’d been there for almost an hour. Lately you’ve been leaving camp earlier than me. Sometimes I catch up to you during the day, and sometimes I don’t. After the first time, you told me you realized you’d never actually hiked alone before. I was surprised at first, but then I realized of course not, when would you have? I’ve hiked alone a lot—most of my hiking has been alone, probably. I like hiking with you, but I’m also glad you can have the experience of hiking by yourself. Making your own decisions about when to stop and when to keep going, learning to enjoy your own company. 

I wasn’t planning to stop long at the farm stand, but the food is too good to pass up and the sunlight diffused through the awning over the picnic table makes it the perfect temperature. I stay for more than an hour, and I know it means I’ll get to camp long after you, but it’s fine. Everything is fine here in The Shire. We’re all going to live.