The next four days passed in a deluge of rain, which, at that point, had become more the norm than the exception (we would later learn that 2003 was the wettest year to date). I scrambled over boulder fields, climbed up to beautiful wet overlooks, walked over a mile through a marsh on a wooden boardwalk and white knuckled my way across a suspension bridge. Erin and I sometimes hiked together but we hardly ever saw See Blue during the days. We’d reach the shelter at the end of the day and find Blue there; smoking, humming to himself, writing in his journal, his mood turning increasingly dark after Trail Days. One of the nights I heard a rare happy Blue voice booming from the shelter and turned the corner to see we’d caught up to Eric and Kristy again. Just like each time we’d hiked with them before, I found them to be a breath of fresh air.
On the third day, I sat at a shelter during lunchtime, waiting for Erin to arrive, talking to Eric and Kristy about their time in the Peace Corps. It was rare for me to get ahead of Erin, at first because she hiked so much faster than I did and lately because I feared she’d collapse again like she did in Shenandoah. That morning, though, I’d been feeling really strong, and she’d seemed fine, so I’d passed her early on.
I’d been preoccupied chatting, but now worried about how long I’d been there when Erin walked up. I could see from her expression that something was clearly wrong.
“This fucking pump,” she said as she flung off her pack and sat heavily on the ground. She told us she’d started feeling sluggish and cranky that morning, but hadn’t thought much of it because that was how we felt most mornings. Then her head started to hurt and she got crazy thirsty and somehow, through the fog, put together that her blood sugar might be going high. She increased her insulin but it didn’t help. She’d stopped to pee (something that happened frequently when she went high) and finally realized her pump was actually disconnected from her body so she hadn’t received insulin all day.
“I feel like I’m walking through quicksand… but I’m fine now,” she assured us when she saw our concern. “I just need to sit here for awhile. Seriously. Don’t worry.”
“Okay,” I said. But I was worried. Erin was so outwardly nonchalant about her diabetes that it was easy to forget how scary things could get, especially out here, especially if no one else around. I said a quick thank you to the universe that Erin was fine, that she was able to figure out what was happening before her symptoms got too serious, for the reminder (again!) that I should be more aware. And when we started back on the trail, even though Erin would never ask me to, I followed behind.
Our fifth day on the trail, I woke up to total darkness. I had a moment of sheer panic—had I gone blind in the night? It had to be the water I hadn’t carefully purified earlier that day, or the head trauma, or an infection from one of my many open wounds, right? Then I remembered, through my sleepy haze, that I’d been cold and put my fleece hat on in the middle of the night. It was now pulled down over my eyes. I lifted the flap to let the sunlight in, crisis averted, and rolled over to see See Blue putting on his pack and Erin stretching her arms out of her sleeping bag, too. She caught my eye. “THREE MONTHS,” she whispered excitedly so as not to wake the sleepy day-hiker sleeping soundly next to us and held out a fist.
“Three months!” I yell-whispered back and gave her the pound.
It was May 23rd and we’d officially been hiking for three months. We made plans with See Blue about where to stop that evening.
“There’s this working friary about seven miles past Bear Mountain that is supposed to be cool,” Blue told us, not bothering to whisper. He took off in a cloud of cigarette smoke and as we started to pack up our things, rain began to fall.
“Cool. Rain,” Erin muttered, one of our running jokes.
“Maybe there will be mist today, too,” I said.
“You’re a dreamer!” Erin mock exclaimed.
We hiked the 8 miles to Bear Mountain together, Erin telling me how when she worked at a summer camp in the Bronx, they would bring the kids to Bear Mountain for day trips. Bear Mountain Park is less than an hour outside of New York City and yet most of the born and raised city kids would feel like they were in a foreign country being out in the woods.
“We took them on an overnight to a lodge upstate, and the kids were like, for real, scared of how quiet it was.”
As if on cue, we caught sight of school buses parked along the road winding towards the summit of Bear Mountain and then were bombarded by the sound of what seemed like 8,000 kids running around the mountain’s bald peak.
“Eh, maybe we’ll skip the view,” Erin said, looking at children streaming in and out of the tower that stood on the summit. Our guidebook told us that on a good day, you could see the NYC skyline from the top of the tower.
“What view?” I said, looking at the mist surrounding us.
We continued on down the mountain to a swath of parking lots and development. Other than the drive to Bear Mountain peak itself, the park hosts a museum and small zoo (which was where we saw our first, and only, bear on the trail), the Bear Mountain Inn, playing fields, a merry-go-round, a pool, skating rink, and even a post office. While the area is a respite in nature for people coming from the city, for us, after three months in the woods, all of the activity felt jarring.
Of course, the smallest sign of civilization signaled one thing to us—food—and so we made a beeline for the Inn and treated ourselves to a hot meal in the formal dining room. To his credit, the waiter barely flinched at the strong smell coming off of us and our gear. After lunch we hit the post office, where I picked up packages from my mom (a funny card and book), my dad (a packages of band aids and a $20 bill), and Kevin (snacks, fuel, a sweet letter, and socks he told me were from his mom), and then found a bank of payphones. Erin was busy trying to track down the phone number for her friend Chris G, who was teaching at a school in Harlem. We had decided we wanted to take the train into New York City for a day (it was part of our master plan to give Mike and Ben time to catch up to us), and we were hoping to stay the night with Chris. I talked to my mom and then called Kevin.
“Hey darlin’, you caught me at a bad time. I gotta run out the door to the jobsite,” Kevin told me. He’d taken a job with a big construction firm after graduation and in less than a year was already moving up.
“It’s okay, I just wanted to hear your voice and say thank you for the package. Your mom was right, I need new socks,” I told him, feeling a little sad and a little relieved. We’d been having a lot of short conversations lately, but I’d also been milling around Bear Mountain for a few hours at this point and I was ready to get back on the trail.
As I hung up, I looked over to see Erin shaking her head.
“No luck?” I asked.
“Nope. I got his number but he wasn’t home. But my brother checked my email for me and there was one from Sug. He and Pilgrim aren’t far in front of us. We might catch them because he is getting off to go to a wedding and Pilgrim went home for his graduation.”
“Dude. That would be awesome if we caught them and then Mike and Ben caught us and then we all hiked together forever!” I said, my words jumbling together in an excited rush.
“There you go again, ya dreamer.”