Called Again (18 page)

The sun was setting when I arrived at the top of Moosilauke. I raised my hands and let out a primitive yell. The resulting noise surprised me. I sounded less like a cheerleader and more like a mountain woman. This time, maybe for the first time, my victory cry sounded as good in the air as it did in my head.

Pausing for a moment, I turned toward the east and could see the steep, jagged peaks behind me. They looked like a shark's mouth, with layer upon layer of pointed teeth. Then I turned back toward the west to the rolling green mountains that looked as soft and symmetrical as the arc of a rainbow. I smiled and kept walking. I was through the worst of it.

JUNE 25, 2011—JUNE 28, 2011

H
anover, New Hampshire, is the gateway to the Promised Land for a southbound hiker, a portal to less difficult terrain, more road crossings, and dirt tread. The march through one of the A.T.'s most prominent towns should be a triumphant one. Most hikers loved the easy, flat road walk, but my shin splints were making me hate it.

I began my hike through the quiet streets at five a.m. With my very first step, my teeth clenched and I felt my eyes grow moist.

I did not try to hide the pain; there was no one to hide it from. The only car on the road was Warren's, and he followed slowly behind me. At one point, he turned down a side street and disappeared. Minutes later, he drove up again and offered
me fresh coffee and a blueberry muffin. I took the food and kept walking.

I couldn't believe how bad I felt. Every step on the concrete sidewalk felt like knives stabbing the front of my legs. I was sniffling and gasping for air, but I didn't cry. I refused to, because things were supposed to be better now. I thought if I acted like everything was okay, then maybe it would start to feel that way.

Unfortunately, the hypothermia I'd experienced on Franconia Ridge resulted in some lasting side effects. The morning after I summited Moosilauke, I felt more depleted than I ever had in my life. I had not sweated since hiking across Franconia Ridge, and my bathroom breaks had become infrequent despite my large intake of fluids. Even as I reentered the warm summer atmosphere of the lower elevations, my skin was pale and clammy, and my entire body was bloated and swollen. My shorts felt tight, my fingers were thick, every part of my body was larger than normal, except for—as Brew pointed out—my chest.

But all that was okay because as I crossed over the bridge that spans the Connecticut River and entered Vermont, I was convinced that my multiple ailments would remain in New Hampshire.

After three miles of road walking, I said good-bye to Warren and entered the woods. I wanted my legs to recover immediately from the unforgiving cement, but instead, the pain remained and it felt more acute than usual. During my first mile inside the forest, my right leg buckled underneath me several times. The only reason I didn't fall to my knees was because my hiking poles were bearing the majority of my weight.

I had experienced this same predicament in Maine and New Hampshire. But my leg had never given out this frequently. Every ten steps, I would place my foot down and not be able to transfer my weight without my leg crumpling.

While passing three male thru-hikers at one point, my leg gave out. They asked if I was okay, and I thanked them and insisted
that I'd just stepped funny. I'm sure they could never have guessed that I was trying for the trail record. I did not look very hardcore at that point.

When I exited the forest eight miles later, it was onto another one-mile road walk, and as soon as my shins felt the impact of the asphalt, I started wailing.

Brew was there waiting for me, looking on with sadness and concern.

“The car is up ahead. You can re-wrap your shins and get some more ibuproffen,” he said.

“I don't want to stop. I just want to get past the road!”

“Honey, it will feel better if you take some medicine.”

I had never before, on any of my hikes, resorted to taking pain medicine. I had started this hike with a natural anti-inflammatory supplement, but once the shin splints surfaced, I begged for as much of the stronger stuff as I could take. However, in this moment, the movement was more important than the medicine. I needed to keep hiking because if I stopped, I didn't know whether I would be able to keep going.

I continued to sob and hobble down the streets of the small farming village.

Brew stopped at the car, fished out the medicine, and handed it to Melissa with some fruit juice so she could chase me down before I went back into the woods.

After a while, the medicine kicked in, and the pain in my shins went from a sharp stabbing to a sore ache. I expected the painkillers to wear off in another hour or two, but after hiking twelve miles, it was still working. Best of all, I was finally hiking a consistent three-mile-per-hour pace—on dirt. I had not been able to string together four consecutive hours of hiking three miles an hour since I'd started. The trail felt like a moving sidewalk compared to the gnarly terrain in Maine and New Hampshire. This was it. This was what I had been waiting for. Things were getting better!

I left Vermont Route 12 at three p.m. I had eighteen miles to hike before I could meet Brew, Melissa, and Warren at the next road crossing. I was feeling confident, and as I hiked into the forest, I yelled back at them, “See you at nine o'clock!”

I covered ground quickly and maintained my pace for the first six miles. After hiking for two hours, I pulled out a Clif Bar and washed it down with some more fruit juice. Then I decided I would make a quick pit stop in the woods before I kept hiking.

Afterward, my stomach didn't feel settled. Fifteen minutes later, I needed to run off the trail again, and this time, it was a much longer break. When I finally made it back to the trail, I continued hiking but it felt like someone was punching me in the abdomen—hard. For the next hour and a half, I was forced into the woods every ten or fifteen minutes.

It is never fun to be sick. It isn't fun at home when you can lie on your couch and watch TV or remain stationed in your own bathroom with several back issues of
People
magazine. But it is especially not fun to be sick on the trail.

On the trail, I was alone, without any medicine and without any toilet paper. Over the next three miles, I decimated a healthy population of large striped maple leaves bordering the path. This broad, soft, three-pronged leaf is the Charmin of the A.T., but it didn't make a difference. I could have been using baby wipes and I still would have been uncomfortable. Even when I no longer had anything left in my bowels, I still had to stop frequently to let the cramping in my stomach subside.

The worst part was that, because of my constant stops and the subsequent weakness, I was now covering barely a mile an hour. I felt weak, dehydrated, and exhausted. I had my headlamp, but at this rate, I would not make it out of the woods until one or two a.m.—if I was lucky.

I pulled out my phone to call Brew—but there was no service. I knew that he would be worried sick about me when I didn't show up at nine p.m. This was going to be even worse for him than Mount Washington had been. At least on Mount Washington, we both expected adversity. But now we expected things to get better, and he would be really worried if I were five hours late to a road crossing.

This was it.
Really
it. This was the end of my hike. My body felt like it was running on empty, and after my numerous off-trail excursions, I was confident that it
was
empty. There was no way I could maintain a decent pace feeling the way I did, and making it to the road would use up all of my reserves. I would be far too depleted to wake up the next morning at 4:45 and continue hiking.

I dragged my feet along the path. The flat and downhill walking were still bearable, but every time I had to travel uphill, I felt weak and light-headed.

I didn't think I was in danger, as I'd been on Mount Washington and Franconia Ridge, because I knew that eventually I would make it to the road. I just felt depressed. All my hard work, all my dreams, all down the toilet; or rather, a dozen cat holes. It wasn't a sickness caused by food or bad water; I had experienced enough of those to know the difference. Whatever this was, it was a reaction to the stress on my body and the swelling that I'd suffered the past two days. I was going through a very violent detox.

I kept moving slowly and kept having to make frequent rest-room stops. The sun was starting to set, and I was still six miles from the next road. Six miles should have seemed like nothing. When I was healthy and rested, I could easily run six miles on a trail in less than an hour. But in my current state, those six miles might as well have been on Mount Everest.

I was walking down a gently graded mountain, dreading the thought of reaching the valley and having to hike uphill again.
But when I reached the creek that divided the two ridges, there was something there that caught my attention. It was a road— sort of.

It was a thin flat dirt path that could have easily been mistaken for an ATV track, but it was just wide enough for a car to travel down, as well. I knew that I didn't have cell service because I had been staring at the empty antenna signal on my phone for the past two hours. I couldn't call Brew to meet me here, but maybe the road was close to a campground or house where I could get some help. I looked down the road to the left and right, then I followed it downstream for a few steps.

I thought that I could make out something white through the trees. I continued walking toward the light-colored mirage, then I stopped in my tracks.

It couldn't be! Could it? Eighty yards down the road, there was a white SUV. I rubbed my eyes as if I were hallucinating, but when I took my hands away, the car was still there. I didn't care who it belonged to. They were going to help me.

I started walking toward the vehicle, thinking about how I would explain my predicament without totally grossing someone out. Then, as I drew closer to the vehicle, I heard a noise. Thank God! Someone was at the car. I really
was
saved!

“Hey, Jen, is that you?!”

I froze. I didn't recognize the voice, and I second-guessed whether I had really heard my name. I
had
been light-headed, so it was possible I was delusional.

A man with a beard and a visor stepped out of the car and started walking in my direction.

“Jen, it's Adam. We met at the Mountain Masochist last fall.”

I tried to imagine this man without facial hair, and he started to look familiar. I was beginning to put the pieces together in my head, but it still seemed too good to be true.

I had met a man named Adam at a trail race in Virginia last
fall, and he told me that he wanted to run the Appalachian Trail and that his wife, Kadra was going to support him. I even remembered seeing a Facebook post in the spring that said they were on the trail and had made it to Virginia. But this wasn't Virginia. This was Vermont, the middle of nowhere Vermont. And to come across someone I knew on a road that didn't exist in my guidebook was not a coincidence; it was a full-blown miracle.

“A-Adam . . . ?” I stammered. Saying his name reinforced the fact that he might be real. And when he didn't disappear, I continued.

“I've been sick all afternoon. I can't get cell service to call Brew, and I don't think that I can go any farther. Can you help me?”

At that point, Kadra appeared from a campsite that they'd set up near the car.

“Of course, we can help you,” she interjected. “What do you need?”

I didn't know where to start.

“I've had to go off the trail maybe twenty times today to use the bathroom, and I feel incredibly dehydrated and sick—really, really sick. But what I need more than anything is to get in touch with Brew.”

Kadra walked to the back of their SUV and opened the trunk. Even in my desperation, I was envious of how much better organized it was than our Highlander.

“We have medicine, water, and food that you can have,” she said as she opened the labeled Rubbermaid containers. “And then I can drive you down the road until one of us gets a cell phone signal.”

I sat down and let out a deep sigh. I still couldn't believe this was happening. But I was too tired and sick to question it.

Kadra mixed an electrolyte drink—and handed it to me. Then she gave me some Nutter Butters to nibble on. Adam gave me some medicine, and because he was a doctor, it was really
good
medicine. Then, because there were only two empty seats in the car, Adam decided to stay at the campsite, and Kadra drove me down the narrow dirt road in search of a cell signal.

Holding my phone to the windshield, I thanked Kadra over and over again for rescuing me.

“You're doing great,” she said. “So many people are excited that you're out here. You just have to keep going.”

“It's . . . it's just so hard,” I said. “I mean, I knew that it would be hard, but this feels impossible. It hurts worse than anything I have ever done before, and the hurt hurts so bad, and it hurts all the time.”