A Long Post About The Long Trail

In May, 1998, I backpacked for the first time.

I went with my sister-in-law (Grasshopper) and a friend of hers, Invisible Woman, to hike the Long Trail in Vermont. We were to start in Rutland, and hike to the Canadian border. I brought my golden retriever, Whiskey. Grasshopper brought her dog, Bailey. Bailey had wandered into my driveway the autumn before, a feisty black puppy wanting to play with Diva Dog. Her owners wanted to find her a new home. Grasshopper wanted a dog. It was a good match.

It was a drizzly late May afternoon when we arrived at a trailhead (almost capitalized that) off a highway outside Rutland. I hoisted the heavy pack I'd borrowed from Grasshopper, picked up Whiskey's green nylon leash, and stepped onto the trail.

It was late when we started, so we camped at a shelter a mile down the trail. It was cold, and despite his thick brown coat, Whiskey began to shiver. I dragged the tent fly out of my pack and covered him up, tucking and arranging until he was a big blue mound next to me. I burrowed back into my sleeping bag and scooted closer to the dog. I was firmly awake, flooded with the awareness that by sleeping in a three-sided shelter in the forest, I was abandoning myself to the many mysterious sounds out there. Come get me. I'm right here.

I awoke early. The tent fly was now shapeless and draped over the edge of the shelter. I looked around for my dog, my gaze landing at the fire ring. Whiskey lay there next to Bailey, his head turned up to the sky, sniffing the air. He was very happy.

We only made it five miles that day, and the last mile took us three hours. A series of massive storms had battered the area the previous fall and winter, and the trail was hopelessly lost amid the blowdown. Eventually it became completely impassable. Grasshopper had read that some blowdown was to be expected, but this was far more severe than anticipated. Whole trees had been uprooted and tossed like candy wrappers across the trail. Everywhere. And it was too early in the season for any trail maintenance to have been performed.

We stopped to consider the situation. We were deeply disappointed. Ultimately, we decided to head back to the shelter from the previous night. The decision made, I looked down and saw that Whiskey had fallen asleep. I attempted to rouse him, but he refused to get back up. I knew what he wanted. I took a Power Bar from my pack and fed him half. Five minutes later he hauled himself up and began wobbling back down the trail.

As we approached the shelter, we saw it was already occupied. Three hungry and enterprising college guys had purchased a pizza and beer in Rutland and packed it in, and they immediately offered us a share. Twenty minutes later another man arrived, bearing a heavy pack with tools attached to it here and there. He told us he was there to do trail maintenance. We laughed and told him what he had in store. In turn, he told us it he'd heard the trail was impassable all the way to the border.

The next day we stuck around, doing trail maintenance with our new friend, and tried to decide what to do. The inevitable conclusion was that our hiking plans were irretrievably botched. But Grasshopper and Invisible Woman, who had both done significant long-distance hiking, found the notion of turning back deeply unsettling. They were trained to keep moving steadily forward, never looking back, and certainly never going back. On the other hand, we had made a mile in three hours the day before. At that rate, we wouldn't reach the border till Christmas.

This was, in a word, a pisser.

A new plan was formed, involving trails in upstate New York and waiting another several days for another friend of Grasshopper's to join them. I was obliged to bow out of this, as the timing of the plan conflicted with one of my principal goals for the summer -- namely, getting admitted to the bar and not getting fired from the job I'd been hired to start in September.

So I went home. I attended bar review classes that summer, planted tomatoes in my new garden, and took (and passed) the two-day bar exam. Meanwhile, I had placed my hiking boots in the corner of our bedroom, and pondered them occasionally. I felt stymied by the aborted trip, and wanted to follow a trail. I'd had a taste of the wilderness, and I wanted to go back.