We left the campsite the next morning in good spirits. We’d heard horror stories about hiking in crappy weather through the Whites, and I could imagine how scary it might be to hike above tree line in a rain or snow storm, but we’d had nothing but blue skies and sunshine. People had been telling us that our hiking season was the rainiest on record, and I believed it. The dry, blue skies that stayed with us above tree line in the Whites made this section feel even more alien from the rest of our soggy trail experience.
We spent the morning hiking all together, me teasing Ben about the book I’d seen him take with him to the privy.
He shrugged, unfazed by my taunts, “What? Haven’t you ever read on the toilet?”
“But it’s not a toilet!” I exclaimed, “You’re literally sitting on a mountain of other people’s poop, and you’re over there reading Moby Dick like you’re on an EZ Boy.”
“I’m not reading Moby Dick.”
“That’s not the point!” I said, exasperated.
He was walking in front of me, and now he turned his head and focused on me. His big green eyes twinkled with amusement.
“So, what, you don’t poop?”
“Dude, you know I poop.” And he did, we were all intimately aware of each other’s bathroom habits. “But I’m not fucking lingering in the privy with a book like an old man reading a paper on the shitter.”
“I’m not lingering, I’m just not in a rush. It takes the time it takes. Besides, your sense of smell is mind over matter; I don’t think about it, so I don’t smell it.”
“Okay weirdo,” I shot back, resorting to middle school retorts, but enjoying the sparring.
Turbo piped up, “What do you do, Not Yet? Hold your breath the whole time you’re in there like you’re underwater or something?”
“YES!!”
* * *
We reached Ethan Pond Campsite around 4pm after a day of alternately hiking up and over the Twin mountains and then lounging at two AMC huts; Galehead and Zealand Falls. As AT hikers, we still had to pay to stay in the campsites in the Whites, a fact that incensed me. I was complaining about this to Erin and Sug when we noticed the other three guys waiting for us at the turn off to Ethan Pond.
Pilgrim waved a piece of paper, “Cara left us a note!”
Erin’s face grew still and I could see her steeling herself for disappointment, “If we missed her again…”
“No! She’s at Crawford Notch, she said she’ll wait there until 6pm!” Pilgrim reassured her. “It’s 3 miles away and all downhill. Can you make it, Sweets?”
Relief washed over Erin. “Yes! What are we still doing here?”
We started toward Crawford Notch, a road crossing at 1,200 feet between two big peaks—the North and South Twins at almost 5,000 feet to the South and Mt. Washington, the second tallest mountain on the trail at 6,288 feet. We hiked as a group, going as fast as we could on the steep, rocky, descent.
There was a lull in the chatter when Sug started to sing, “Blue jean baby, LA lady…”
Erin chimed in, pointing to her headphones, apparently tuned to the same station, “Seamstress for the baaand.”
In cinematic unison, all six of us joined in, belting as we walked, “BUT OH HOW IT FEELS SO REAL, LYING HERE…”
“Wait, has it always been, ‘lay me down in sheets of linen?’” I broke in during the chorus. “I thought it was ‘Lady darlin’ she’s so blended.’”
“Whatsit, I thought it was ‘Lay me drowning she’s of Lennon,’” Turbo said.
“WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?” Erin laughed.
“How should I know? I didn’t make it up!” Turbo answered, incredulous.
We started talking about misheard lyrics, Erin telling us that when she was little, she thought the Beach Boys song “Little Douce Coupe” was “Little Loose Tooth.” Sug brought us all back to the song with the second, “But oh how it feels so real…”
I could feel myself getting nostalgic for the moment while it was still happening, knowing that I could never recreate this precise feeling of happiness and warmth.
That warmness grew until I almost burst into tears of joy when I finally glimpsed the gravel parking lot through the trees and there was Cara, standing next to her car.
“CAW CAW!” Erin crowed.
“BASTIAN!” I called.
Cara’s head turned towards the trees, a smile breaking across her face, “WHOOP WHOOP!”
We’d developed our call system when the three of us had hiked the Long Trail together, a way to locate everyone in the woods if we couldn’t see each other. Mine was a reference to the Never ending Story, a movie Erin and I watched on repeat in the seventh grade, when the princess yells out, “BASTIAN! CALL... MY… NAME!”
By the time we’d descended the stone steps into the parking lot, Cara’s trunk was open, revealing a cooler full of Long Trail Ales on ice. Cara handed out the beers, cheers-ed us all, and looked at her Subaru. “It’ll be a squeeze, but if you guys want to pack in, there’s a restaurant down the road.”
She barely had the words out and we were stashing our packs behind a grouping of trees and piling into the car—Erin and I in the front, Ben, Pilgrim, and Sug in the backseat and Turbo curled up in the tiny hatchback’s trunk. At the restaurant, we ate disgusting amounts of food that barely filled us up and then ordered dessert to celebrate Turbo’s birthday.
“How are you 23?” Pilgrim demanded of Turbo. “I’m 23 and you just seem...so much younger than me.”
Turbo did seem younger than Pilgrim, younger than all of us, in a rascally little brother kind of way. He’d graduated from college and had been bumbling around before the trail, trying to figure out his life. At twenty-five, two years out from college and with professional work experience under my belt, I felt like an adult. I thought about my friends at home, many married or engaged, all several years into their careers, some with new houses and kids on the way. That trajectory—college, job, marriage, house, kids before 30—had seemed inevitable for me too just a few months ago. Now my future was murky. Out here in the woods, surrounded by this ragtag group of wanderers, the murkiness didn’t bother me, it seemed natural, but I was headed back to the real world soon.
* * *
We piled back into Cara’s car after dinner and started down the road winding through the mountains, on our way back to the parking lot where we’d left our packs earlier that night. The soundtrack to “O Brother Where Art Thou” was on and as “You Are My Sunshine” started Sug yelled, “TURN IT UP, THIS IS MY JAM.”
Cara obliged and we all joined in, singing the lyrics at the top of our lungs.
“Again!” someone demanded from the back as the song faded out, and we started the song again from the top. We repeated this ridiculousness until we were back in the parking lot, where everyone stayed crammed in the car until “You Are My Sunshine” was over one last time.
“So, I guess we should just sleep in the parking lot?” Ben asked, after we’d said our goodbyes and thanks to Cara and collected our bags from their hiding spot. Cara had offered to drive us to a hotel for the night, but we were all ready to tackle the beast that stood in front of us—Mt. Washington.