Blistered Kind Of Love (38 page)

Leaving the Crater Lake region behind, the trail rolled gently past lakes and meandered through forests, all the while continuing to follow a string of snowbound volcano peaks. The days flew by, varying little except for the occasional chance meetings with other trail folk.

On one hot and dry afternoon (I continued to be amazed at how dry Oregon was), we turned a corner to find a sixtyish man ambling toward us with a shovel and pruning shears. Trailing behind him was an old dog. The man (named Lance), we learned, had adopted the twenty-mile section of the PCT that we were in the process of hiking and was out checking up on things, taking care of whatever maintenance needs he could.

“I left a cooler about five miles ahead,” said Lance. “There's cold 7-Up, Gatorade, root beer, water, and whatever else my wife bought in there. Help yourself and don't forget to sign my register.” Coolers and similar trail magic are common occurrences on the Appalachian Trail, where one might find them filled with sandwiches and ice cream as well as drinks, but they're rare on the PCT. In fact, this was our first hiker cooler and we rushed the five miles to get to it. Gratefully gulping down root beer, I read the entries in Lance's spiral-bound
notebook and noticed that just three hours before Casey had written, “It's so nice to have something besides water to chase the whiskey with.” We walked on, and I pondered whether Casey was really drinking whiskey on a hot day like this. I imagined that would make the steel-woollike lichen that dripped from the trees look even more like syrup over pancakes.

Over the next few days, we covered miles easily—so easily that we had time and energy to play around. I draped the ubiquitous, lime-green lichen over Duffy until he looked like the Sea Hag villain from Popeye. We lingered by misty lakeshores, listened to woodpeckers busy in the trees above, and counted baby grouse that scampered across our path—two dozen in one day. The going was easy in Oregon and it became even easier when, about halfway through the state, Duffy's parents met us at Odell Lake.

For the next five days, the Ballards shuttled us to the trail every morning and to a hotel each night, sometimes even meeting us for a picnic lunch in between. Because they transported our gear as well, we were able to hike while carrying only daypacks. And given that the Oregon terrain was rolling at its worst, we found that we could cover more than twenty-five miles in eight hours. Sometimes we'd jog. As you can imagine, thru-hiking purists frown upon such “slack-packing,” but with our window of opportunity rapidly crashing closed we decided we'd rather walk some of the Oregon miles lighter and faster than not walk them at all.

Our slack-packing ended at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood. The climb to 6,000 feet and the lodge took us over a sandy, gray debris fan, the remains of mud flows caused when Hood last erupted two thousand years ago.

Timberline Lodge was completed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the Great Depression and provided hundreds of artisans with work. Its design is rustic, utilizing natural materials with Native American and Western motifs. Carved wooden animal heads decorate the outside while others sit atop banisters. Every nook and cranny of Timberline holds a craftsman's treasure—a stone fireplace, intricately carved railings, hand-wrought iron door knockers, brightly colored textiles on the windows and beds, paintings and mosaics of forest creatures. Iron gates mark the entrance to the Cascade Room, a four-star restaurant where organic blackberry syrup
is served over blackberry pancakes, and for desert you can order alpine silk mousse. We celebrated Duffy's mother's birthday there, toasting her sixty years and our 110 days on the trail. It was good to get a taste of home and to receive a strong dose of moral support.

Seeing Duffy's parents made me think of my own. But really, they'd been on my mind all along. As I've mentioned, walking for a living gives you a lot of time to think. Take that time, mix it with a little deprivation and physical strain, add a splash of the type of peace one can only find in the wilderness, and you get a special perspective on life. It didn't happen overnight, but it seemed that each mile brought me closer to something (besides the Canadian border). Where distress had lived, I was finding understanding instead.

I spent a lot of time thinking about why I was the way I was. My parents had dedicated their lives to raising me to be strong, intellectually inquisitive, and loving. These were the things that enabled me to walk the length of two states and would keep me going for one more—strength of body and mind, insatiable curiosity to see what was over the next ridge, and the capacity for intimacy. Unwittingly, my parents had made this trip possible, and for that I owed them much. This realization didn't make everything right, but it was a start.

On August 25, we continued north along the Pacific Crest and Timberline Trails, which run in conjunction for a few miles. Above us loomed the peak of Mount Hood. At 11,235 feet, Mount Hood is the tallest mountain in Oregon and one of the world's most frequently climbed snow-capped peaks. Each year more than ten thousand people attempt to summit Hood. While requiring some technical mountaineering skills and equipment (including an ice axe, avalanche beacon, and crampons), Mount Hood is regarded as a fairly simple climb. The South Side Route is actually nicknamed the Dog Route because, given the right conditions, your average Rover can make it to the top and back and still have energy for a game of Frisbee. But not all days provide the right conditions, and simple does not always mean safe. In 2002,
three climbers coming down the Dog Route ended up dead.

The tragedy added to Hood's sordid history, which includes a snowboarder who slipped off an icy ridge and plunged 2,500 feet to his death (also in 2002) and seven high school students and two teachers who froze to death in 1986.

Mount Hood's deadly disposition was well disguised on the bright sunny day when we left Timberline Lodge, and skirted its slopes to the west. Cotton-ball clouds floated around the volcano's cone while wisps of fog settled in the uppermost gullies, giving the mountain a soft, hazy aspect.

Traversing Hood's flanks, we walked through fine sand and fields of yellow and purple flowers. Glacier-fed streams raging down steep canyons were milky white with “rock milk.” Just as we crossed one of the streams, a dog came rushing out of the bushes barking viciously. Two curious goats and a man's yells followed him—“Bessie, Jasper, git back here.” In a clearing just beyond the stream a fortyish man with a round, bald head and glasses sat amongst blankets, a tarp, multiple cooking pots, and sundry bags of other gear. He was a goat-packer, we learned, which meant that his goats (pint-size black and white Bessie and the large, brown Jasper) carried his gear. “Bessie gives good milk, too,” he told us, while she pulled a straw hat from a bag and began eating it. “Goats can walk about fifteen to twenty miles a day and they graze like deer, so you don't need to carry much food for them.”

“Besides straw hats,” I thought as I watched Bessie nibble the hat's rim daintily.

Leaving the goats, we descended into a deep, lush forest blanketed with ferns and came upon Ramona Falls. Here a sheet of water rushed over a dark volcanic cliff and broke on a bed of rocks, emitting rainbows in myriad directions. The forest around the falls was so dank and gloomy that any light in the grove seemed to be emanating from the falls themselves.

On the advice of both our guidebook and a local trail maintenance crew, we veered off the PCT at Indian Mountain and headed down steep and muddy Indian Springs Trail to Eagle Creek. We hadn't gone far down the Eagle Creek Trail when Duffy, who'd taken off his pack and sat down on a rock, held out to me a manure-green, mini-wiener-size slug. I shied away but he kept shoving his mittened hand closer, holding the slimy thing in my face.

“Kiss it. . . . Come on, Chiggy, kiss the banana slug.”

As I stared at the banana slug (which was busy secreting slime), I came to a few conclusions. One, no way was I kissing that mutant sludge ball. Two, since Duffy had already smooched his new oozy buddy, I didn't plan on kissing him anytime soon, either. And three, someone (possibly the Forest Service) was pumping steroids into the northern Oregon wilderness.

Everything about the area surrounding Eagle Creek (approximately thirty-five miles from Timberline Lodge and 15.6 miles from the Washington border) seemed immensely exaggerated, from the mammoth slugs to the lush undergrowth with leaves the size of dinner plates. I felt like Alice in Wonderland—no, make that Alice in Wonder-jungle.

Light, airy moss hung from the trees like beards. The rocks were covered with carpets of a thick, spongy moss. Countless varieties of fern tickled our legs. Drizzle and dampness augmented the rain-forest effect. But while the verdant wood, literally sweating with dense vegetation, was spectacular, the real star of the show was Eagle Creek itself.

Roaring below us, Eagle Creek was like a watery Rube Goldberg contraption, whipping around corners, cascading into pools that overflowed into falls (and vice versa), pouring over basalt flats, and cutting through cracks. Even the trail along the creek was a wonder. Blasted into the cliffs of volcanic rock and frighteningly narrow, the precarious footpath heightened our sensitivity to the power of the water below. At some especially harrowing stretches trail workers had installed iron hand cables for safety, and I took full advantage of them.

Like a fine piece of classical music, Eagle Creek's delights started subtly, with rock-bound washes, a fifty-foot cascade, and clear deep pools. Soon, though, the composition built to a crescendo with a two-stage hundred-foot fall sliced into a gorge and hiding around a corner. And the finale, Tunnel Falls (a popular day-hiker attraction) brought us scarily close to the heart of a 150-foot waterfall with the trail actually leading to its showery edge about halfway up, and then ducking, via a narrow, wet tunnel, behind the thundering cascade. And then came the encore, an eighty-foot fall and then the Punch Bowl, a huge pool with a sapphire hue fed by a boisterous, forty-foot plunge.
The bowl would have tempted Duffy with a swim if he could have found a way down to it.

Eagle Creek is a hydrophile's delight. And if we'd stuck to the PCT we would have missed it. While we were down by the creek, the PCT was high and dry above us, plodding through the same pine-forested terrain we'd seen a lot of in Oregon, proving once again that the PCT is not always the most scenic route to Canada.

Because horses and other pack animals are permitted on the PCT, it's often forced away from major sites such as Eagle Creek and Crater Lake. And rightly so. Heavy hooves can damage trails; hikers and horses are often skittish around one another, making injuries a distinct possibility; and stock (when improperly attended) have a tendency to muddy water sources and defile campsites. This is not to say that the PCT should become horse-free; on the contrary, that would be quite unfair considering that equestrian groups played a critical role in building the trail in the first place and continue to be instrumental in its maintenance.

From Eagle Creek Trail we took a 2.4-mile bike path into the town of Cascade Locks, where I picked up a package from my friend Lisa that contained a new pair of sneakers. With my new shoes hanging off my pack, we headed to the Bridge of the Gods over the Columbia River Gorge. Made of metal and painted blue, the Bridge of the Gods didn't quite live up to its name; the only godlike thing about the bridge was the fact that when cars whizzed by me on it (there was no sidewalk), I screamed, “Oh, my God!” The risk of becoming road-pizza made taking photographs difficult.

The 1,243-mile Columbia River begins in Canal Flats, British Columbia, and empties into the Pacific Ocean at the Washington coast. Along the way, water temperatures range from thirty-eight to seventy-three degrees. From our vantage point on the bridge, the water appeared clear and inviting, but I knew that it was heavily polluted with neurotoxins and other nasties. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, there are zinc levels sixty times greater than the safe limit for aquatic life in the Columbia River, along with thirty-five different types of pesticides, sixteen at levels higher than is deemed safe for human consumption, and some, like DDT, that are banned. Fourteen dams
have created thirteen lakes along the river that are polluted with arsenic, chainsaw-bar oil, slag from metal smelters, sewage, and even nuclear waste. Downriver, in Portland, it's not safe to swim in the Columbia, eat its fish, or drink its water. The once mighty Columbia, the famous watershed, is in a sorry state, but the boaters below appeared to be blissfully ignorant.

Arriving safely on the other side of the bridge, I looked across the river back into Oregon and couldn't really wrap my head around the fact that this was it. We were in Washington—the homestretch. I was melancholy yet proud that we'd made it so far. I was excited to see what Washington would bring, but frightened, too. What would happen when this was all over? We'd go home, to Philadelphia. But what then?