Nine and a half miles, our longest day of hiking yet. We strolled into camp at Hawk Mountain Shelter and found Dorothy had arrived some time before us.
“The Yoga Sisters!” she cried out and leapt down from a picnic table as Toto yelped from the loft of the three-sided hut.
My sister’s eyes flitted about, blankly tracking the cacophony of movement and conversation buzzing about the shelter. My calves tingled as I paced, storing up the potential energy to launch me up and over Sassafras Mountain.
Eager to proceed with introductions, Dorothy called out for Sam and Mandy, who emerged from behind the shelter, smiling and seating themselves at the table, shoulders touching.
“We have another sister hiking team,” Dorothy offered.
But Walkie and I had decisions to make before settling in for the night, if that was even what we were doing. We needed space and we needed the privy.
“You might not want to go up there,” a hulking, bearded hiker told us as we skirted the gathering, “it’s really gross. You should just find a tree.”
“Aren’t all privies gross?” I whispered to my sister as our sneakers crunched up the hill behind the shelter.
“I don’t think there are further degrading levels of gross after gross.” Walkie said.
Walkie and I continued up the slope while the sun sank lower in the sky, interrupting each other too often as we tried to figure out what to do next, and quickly.
Excitement gripped me as my sister grew quieter. I painted the scene of our hiking through the night with our headlamps guiding our steps, the shadowy fingers of trees reaching out for us from beside the trail.
All privies are gross, but this one had seen parties the likes of which should not be had in the woods. There had been mysterious choices about the placement of bottoms, and there seemed to be more decoration on the outside than might be warranted. It was not clear which end of things had erupted to leave it thus.
It was during our stroll back towards the group when I finally took notice of the silence permeating from Walkie as she chewed her thoughts.
She slowed to a stop and stared down the sloping hill towards the campsite. Hikers strode back and forth filling their water bottles at the large creek that ran along the outskirts of camp; handheld rocks hammered tent stakes into dirt; and a low roar seeped from the back of the hut where campers were shaking out sleeping bags to lay them over wooden planks.
I hesitated before offering, “We are on this journey together. We won’t go if you don’t want to go. We make our decisions together.”
Darn it, I didn’t want to see her troubled brow or hear the words that she uttered.
“I’m trying to imagine what mom and dad say about this. Stay put? Or leave the shelter in late afternoon and hike through the night up a mountain.”
I sighed a sigh they say is still gusting through windy gaps and brushing by the ears of campers nibbling on their lunches down at Justus Creek. By August of that year, it had made its way to the old fire tower atop Mount Albert, and since, the weight of that sigh has been reported as far away as Virginia.
By the time we reached the log in front of the fire pit, the group of hikers had grown. Greg had arrived and was lying flat on his back on the floor of the shelter. The sisters, Sam and Mandy, sat nearby starting their dinner chores. Dorothy carried Toto like a football under one arm as she descended a ladder and began encouraging the tiny dog to drink water.
Walkie and I laid our packs in the dirt and faced each other across our contemplation log. She took out her notebook and used our shared pen to begin making notes about the mileage and water sources that lay ahead of us were we to continue towards Sassafras Mountain.
To get over Sassafras tonight in the dark, our legs strong, our spirits high, would require approximately seven more hours of hiking. We would arrive at camp sometime after midnight.
It would mean a mysterious night hike through the wilderness, hours more chatter and singing, our faith in ourselves growing stronger, but there were no water sources between here and Sassafras, so camping before we summitted would find us unable to make dinner tonight or coffee in the morning. Meanwhile, Hawk Mountain Shelter lay alongside a large stream. We had all we needed, guaranteed, if we stayed here.
“You guys should probably stay.” The towering hiker, who’d earlier shared his assessment of the privy, was again offering insights.
“We’re still deciding that,” my sister said, returning her eyes to my face.
We had developed an audience of tired, hungry, sweaty campers with no current access to Netflix. Two sisters furtively discussing their next actionable steps was the most interesting thing going on in camp. Someone started snapping photos.
There was an imbalance of wills between us, Walkie’s leaning more towards remaining where we were for the night, mine hyped up with newfound confidence and ready to test our limits.
“You’re safe here; it’s probably not the best idea to leave again.” God help this poor befuddled jay-walking Yukon Cornelius punk. He’d clearly never encountered a woman in the wild before. We side-eyed him and continued making a list of pros and cons.
Then, Greg, still reclining in the shelter, chimed in, “You guys have been talking about this for half an hour. Just stay already.”
“We’re going,” my sister said and stood up, tucking her notepad away.
I could feel the situation spiraling, our only agreement thus far was the one that floated unspoken in the cold mountain air between us; that we should have found a private spot to discuss all of this. Now, two relative strangers, both male, had dared my sister not to trust her own mind and feet, and if nothing else in the world was true of Walkie, she was someone to be doubted at your own risk.
Sam and Mandy sat just to our right, minding their own business, chatting quietly as Mandy reached down and gently turned the dial at the base of their cooking stove, releasing a soft whir of flammable gas.
Being young women, they recognized in us our ability to make our own decisions. In my real life, outside these woods, I had safely enveloped myself in a bubble of trusted companions who did not often question my ill-advised decision making. I was entirely capable of making bad choices on my own and had proved it often. I was thankful for the quiet support of our fellow sister hikers.
“Look,” I touched my sister’s hand, “we haven’t decided anything yet. We can stay. Maybe that’s the best thing.”
My sister opened her mouth to answer just as a four-foot fire ball of leaking gas ignited the space beneath Mandy’s bent legs. The sisters, and Walkie and I, jumped backwards as the can of fuel belched a globe of flames.
Mandy stood just two yards away staring downwards in awe and saying “I think I burnt my leg.” There on her inner thigh, a three-inch-long strip of skin had burnt away like paper, leaving a raw wound underneath.
“Whoa! Everybody stay back. Get further back.” The leaking gas can was now little more than a grenade. Exploding, it might send shrapnel flying outwards in all directions. Most everyone stood hypnotized by the giant orb of flame which ate the air and licked the edges of the metal canister.
Mom instincts took over, and I approached Mandy, touching her arm and gently pulling her further away from the fire.
“My phone! I know this sounds silly, but I need my phone to get home.” Her phone lay just beside the burning canister, and there was no way we could retrieve it—but before anyone could stop him, another hiker leapt quickly in and around the flames and grabbed the phone, promptly dropping it a few feet away in the dirt, as it was too hot to touch.
Kneeling beside Mandy and shrugging off my pack, my hands shook grasping blindly for our first aid kit. “I have some gauze and tape to cover it. Maybe we should sit down.”
“It’s weird, it doesn’t even hurt,” she said laughing and shaking. Yukon Cornelius piped up to ask whether I had any Silver Sulfadiazine cream. I had no idea what that was, but I had Neosporin, and it would have to do. I unscrewed the cap as Mandy told me she was only seeing her sister, Sam, safely to Neel Gap, and then going home while her sister continued hiking towards Maine.
I quietly wondered how she would do, getting over Sassafras Mountain tomorrow with a burned leg open to infection.
Yukon confidently stepped forward, taking my antibiotic and gauze and telling me he was a nurse. Satisfied with that, I grabbed my pack and my sister, and led us some distance from where the fire was now burning itself out.
My sister looked close to tears. She wasn’t sad or scared, two emotions she skipped right over, having assessed them as completely lacking in usefulness. Rather, she was overwhelmed, fed up, and angry.
“We’re staying here. We don’t need to think about anything else,” I said to her.
I thought I ought to babble a little more to keep from feeling the blame I knew was upon me. I had consciously pushed aside her concerns about moving on and had added to the pressure created by the audience of campers who’d interloped on our decision-making. The whole campsite seemed off somehow as the afternoon light gave way to foreboding dusk.
“I don’t want them to think we are two wishy-washy girls who can’t make up our minds,” she said.
“Just forget it. I was wrong, and you were right. Not because we couldn’t make it to Sassafras tonight. We are capable hikers, but you were being wise, and I was being a newb. I got overly excited.”
“I don’t want to be the reason we’re staying,” she continued.
“You’re not the reason we are staying. What just happened is a bad omen,” I said glancing behind us at Mandy who was getting her leg taped up.
“I know Mom would agree. We’re safe here.” I was silently counting our blessings that I hadn’t led us out of here and up a mountain in the dark.
“Thank you, trail.” I said quietly and turned to Walkie, “I was being unwise. You were being mature.”
Miles from anywhere, surrounded by numbnuts, the whole lot of us suddenly seemed like sitting ducks. Vulnerable to accidents springing from actions as innocuous as cooking dinner or tenting under the wrong tree, there was no one to save us from ourselves out here.
We found a site far away from the shelter to set up camp. Silently unfolding tent poles and shaking stakes out onto the ground. Balancing our previously opposing efforts so we could pitch our tent.
Our next door neighbor, situated in an abode under two massive trees, was a camper named Jeff who engaged us, asking about what happened with the fire. We skirted the topic and asked about his hammocking setup. Touring his gossamer tarp and spiderweb of nylon tethers, we watched as he slumped happily into his swinging bed, demonstrating the advantages of hanging aloft above the cold ground.
Sitting on my haunches, elbows wrapped around my knees, I tracked Mandy as she walked briskly across camp to where the stream lay beyond the tree line. Yukon stood nearby, watching too, so I begrudgingly said across the yards of space between us “you did a good job. I’m glad you were here to help her.”
“No worries, buddy,” he said squinting his brooding eyes and staring off, trying to achieve stoicism. “Fireball is just going to sit in the creek for a little while. She’ll be alright.”
“She’s probably sitting in the river crying. That’s what I’d be doing,” Walkie said to me. We tried to improve upon and calm our respective states of mind by turning our attention back to Jeff’s sleeping system. I participated absent-mindedly, reminding myself repeatedly that my sister and I were safe. I was thankful we were together and healthy and had not ventured onwards into the dark woods.
Rocks & Roots 