Appalachian Trail, Part 7

You are welcome to find solace here

When I walk these trails, I regularly catch a glimpse of someone ahead. The flash of a leg, the pop of a backpack, a sunglass glare. But as I near where this person should be, I realize it’s not a person at all. Just a shape of one in the trees, rocks, and shadows.

Sometimes these visions are in my peripheral, and when I quick turn to look, they disappear. But I talk to them anyhow. “What’s that over there?” I ask aloud. “That blue thing, just past the outcropping?” I keep a keen eye on it as I approach, squinting to help my brain figure it out.

It’s blue, but more than blue. And not indigo or navy or cobalt. It’s warm and soft. It’s a memory. A Hot Wheels car in the dirt of my childhood driveway. A Mexico City cafe. The wallpaper of the restaurant where I got down on one knee. It’s a purring calico cat on the living room’s shag rug.

And just when I’m sure it’s a bit of someone’s hiking gear—a poncho or rain skirt, perhaps—it transforms into a patch of water reflecting the sky above. I witness this and wonder how anything can truly be real. Because everything I see is so much more than I first think it is. And also, so much less. And sometimes, what I see is nothing at all.

NYC skyline on the AT—zoomed in from Black Mountain

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I stop to chat with a some day hikers I met the previous afternoon at William Brien Shelter. It’s their first backpacking trip, and when we crossed paths they were debating whether they should stop and sleep in the shelter, or press on and spend the night in their brand new tent. “It’s pretty buggy here,” they said. And they were right. The biting flies were out in force, and more than usual I was motivated to hurry and make camp. When my tent was up, they were gone, and I figured I’d seen the last of them. But now here they are. Just as the trail starts to climb up Bear Mountain.

“How was it?” I ask them. They tell me they didn’t sleep much. Too much noise in the bushes. “We thought it was bears, and I kept poking my head out the mesh to see. But I never saw anything,” one says. “Except squirrels,” echoes the other. I tell them everything is louder at night. “The longer you’re out here, the easier it gets,” I say.

As we wrap up our conversation, another hiker comes blasting towards us. Rarely have I ever seen anyone so effortlessly stride up an incline like him. So, in an attempt to gap him with lunging steps of my own, I high-five the newbies and get cracking. It’s not long before all I can hear is my heaving breath and his approaching steps. I turn around and he’s right behind me. So I pull to the side to let him pass. Which he does, then he immediately stops to chat.

He is Seamus, originally from Ireland and now living in Manhattan. Seamus takes a quick sip of water before pressing on. I keep his pace, barely, and learn he’s from Sligo. “Benbulbin!” I shout—naming one of the few things I recall about my visit there in 2002.

“I fell in love in Sligo,” I say. Seamus doesn’t pry. Doesn’t ask if I was smitten by the landscape or by someone in it. If he had asked, I’d have said both. My lasting memory, I’d tell him, is not the flat-topped, rippling landform that commands the skyline. Nor the ancient Dartry Mountains, the Carrowmore megalithic cemetery, or the grave of William Butler Yeats. What remains is a pang of having left the one behind. Or, more accurately, of having been too uncertain, too immature, too afraid to believe that I could find such love. Or that I even deserved it.

Photo credit to Barry J. Dillon (poached from Wikipedia)

Now, more than twenty years later, I say her name and still, it sends my heart to song. I ask if he knows her. Her name, at least. Because he must. I imagine she’s a local celebrity, of sorts. Someone everyone knows, or knows of. I imagine she’s beloved by not just me, but by all. Seamus spends a second thinking while repeating her name, then says no, he can’t place her. Which surprises me. Even though it probably shouldn’t.

Seamus’s clip is impossible to keep time with, so I give in and wish him well. “See you at the top,” he says. But I know he’s just being nice. It’s the sort of thing I say to people when I zip past them with similar strength and ease.

At the summit of Bear Mountain is a massive inn that teems with walloping crowds. Scores of sunburnt city slickers in expensive swimsuits and flashy arm dangles occupy gridded barbecue spots, each of which sports a single picnic table covered in myriad foodstuffs. It’s a late spring soup of culture and language. Of music and smells, feelings and dreams. The messy American middle—magnetic, obnoxious, and loathsome all at once.

As I walk past, backpack clad and salt-skinned from a string of showerless days, the glampers give me their full attention. Only then do I realize I’ve strayed from the white blazes. Once back on track, I stumble into an overpriced cafe where I sip a double espresso and inhale an overcooked hot dog with extra pickles.

Bear Mountain snack and people-watching stop

My extended break is replete with a sudden barrage of mundane. The people watching couldn’t be better. We, all of us together, are novelties. A weird hill of human ants, zigging and zagging cluelessly through this wild and heavy life. We stare at each other as if to say, I see you. Which, right now, makes me feel like I am a part of something. Even if that something makes me want to GTFO as soon as possible.

The trail leads me away from the inn and through the Trailside Zoo where I can’t tell if the porcupines on display are sleeping or dead. I reach the suspension bridge to cross the Hudson and, half way across, my attention is drawn to a tiny freight train blowing its horn on the tracks below. My body explodes in a burst of emotion and I stop to wipe a spray of tears from the inside of my sunglasses.

There have been times on my various long walks where trains were my only link to the outside world. Their mere presence offers a degree of reassurance, a proof of life. A clue that I had not, in fact, missed the apocalypse. A reminder that I’m not out here alone, even if that’s how I feel most of the time.

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I camp at Dennytown Road with two other hikers, Half Gear and Sue. Our tents sit unevenly on a grassy patch adjacent to a clean porta potty and public water spigot. Around hiker midnight a friend sends an Instagram message asking if I have any spooky trail lore to share. I tell her I don’t. “If anything I feel more at peace on the AT than any woods I’ve ever traversed,” I write. “The Appalachian range is one of the oldest on the planet. It existed when the earth’s landmass was all one clump. Bits of its original chain are now scattered across continents.” I claim that anything with such history is bound to be magical. “I often imagine if these rocks remember what it was like to tower over everything else. To be massive if only in memory, and yet now exist so small.” She gives my message a heart, and writes back simply, “I am excited to follow along.”

I break camp before anyone wakes up. The stretch out is marked by antique walls of stacked rocks that note previous property lines. Following that is a rare flat stretch along Canopus Creek. It’s a luxury to walk mindlessly, and I’m struck by the abundance of birdsong. Specifically by the hammerings of a pileated woodpecker who jumps from tree to tree, seemingly matching my pace and path.

As always, human litter uglies the trail as I near a road. My steps quicken when a large trailhead marker comes into view. Signage on it includes facts about Fahnestock State Park, how to avoid Lyme disease, the phone number of an AT shuttle driver named Sloth, and an assortment of aged business cards dropped between the stand and its foggy layer of protective plexiglass.

Also hanging from the marker is, inexplicably, a black rotary telephone. A poster to its left explains why:

The Telephone of the Wind is for all who grieve.
You are welcome to find solace here.
Please use it to feel the comfort of their memory.
May you hear their voices in the wind.
May you be at peace with your losses.

I lift the phone from the receiver, triggering a soft but definitive release of the heavy, plastic handset from its weathered metal cradle. I put the piece to my ear and use my index finger to move the number nine counterclockwise towards the curved wheel stop.

I release my finger, and the dial clicks smoothly backwards until reaching its starting point. I repeat this with others, and eventually dial the first phone number I ever knew, 4-4-3-9-2-1-1, and then my current number, area code first. The moment echoes a core detail of auditory nostalgia. A refrain of my childhood soundtrack. I’m swept back to simpler times.

I take a flurry of goofy selfies and, in doing so, crack myself up. My mind swirls with buried details of calls that were only as private as the cord was long. Of how if our home phone rang at dinnertime, my parents would bark, “Let it ring!” because who in their right mind would call during dinnertime. I remember the days of memorizing phone numbers. Of telephone books. Of how one year Santa delivered our family an extra-extended cord so I could flirt in peace with my girlfriends, and how thereafter one of my weekly chores was to keep it untangled.

Cheesin’

But all this novelty leaves me feeling like I’m disrespecting the phone’s intention. So I read the poster again and find deeper meaning in the line, You are welcome to find solace here. I take a deep breath, then pick up the phone again and, without dialing, say, “Hi dad. I thought I’d give you a call.” My voice cracks and I pause. Then I say, “You know—just to check in with you and share some things. Because it’s been a while.” My throat closes and I choke on every word that follows.

I tell my dad I’m out on this trail—and that he’d probably like it out here, too. I tell him I’m not using a stove—and I say this because I know it will raise his brows. I tell him I’m putting away big miles, even though I’m trying to keep a smarter pace than usual. And when I say this I concurrently think that maybe I ought to take it down a notch.

I tell my dad that now, at this point in my life, and likely more than ever, I would really like to share this sort of experience with him. “Like when you paced me at Western States,” I say. “I really wish we could do something else together. Just one more thing would be nice.”

I clear my throat, then tell him we have some unfinished business. But that also I’m doing my best to work through it alone. “Because I don’t want to carry any of that around anymore,” I say. “I’m just sorry we couldn’t somehow have worked it through together.” I tell him I’m finally ready to sit down with him to hash it out. That he left too soon.

But maybe this right here is us working it out. Maybe that’s what he and I are doing right now. I tell him this, too.

I stop talking and crying engulfs me. With the phone still pressed hard into my ear, I prop a stiffened arm against the trail sign. I hang my head and let tears water my shoes.

Between my choppy heaving, I hear the soft babble of the nearby creek. The whistles and chirps of flitting birds. Tires on distant gravel. And the loudest noise of all—the baritone breeze bellowing hints of coming rain. We are all here together, it seems to say, Let’s just keep on.

The Telephone of the Wind @wind.phone.ny