Erin and I hiked together again the next day, starting early so we could set a leisurely pace to the road where we would hitchhike into Stratton, Maine and wait for the boys at the White Wolf Inn. When we got there, the owner told us that four packs had been dropped off earlier that day. We figured that meant the boys got a slack pack from Bob and wondered who the fourth person was. Erin and I got a room, had showered and were down in the adjoining pub drinking Guinness when the mystery hiker walked in.
“Awww, Turbo! I was hoping it was you!” I stood up to hug him. “Where is Peaches? Is she with you?”
Ben, Sug, and Pilgrim had walked in behind Turbo and were quickly bellying up to the bar.
“So, whatsit, I’m going to like, finish with you guys and then go back and finish with her and Cream.”
“He’s going to do a yo-yo for love!” Pilgrim laughed.
“Fuck yeah, Turbo! Yo-yo for Love!” Erin called up, pumping her fist in the air. A yo-yo hike is the term for a thru-hiker who finishes the whole trail and then turns around and hikes the other way. A true yo-yo would be Georgia to Maine and then back to Georgia.
I was happy to have Turbo back. With the way the group had been feeling lately, it was going to be nice to have his special dose of ridiculousness to keep our spirits up.
We all ate dinner at the pub and as we settled our checks Erin turned to me, “Hey. I’m going to go in on a room with the boys, why don’t you and Ben share the room we got?”
“You’re the best,” I said, hugging her.
* * *
The next morning, Ben and I lay in bed.
“Okay,” I said, rolling on my side to face him.
“Okay…. what?”
“Okay, I want you to move to Cincinnati.”
“Okay!”
“But. I think we should get separate apartments. I mean, we just met each other. What if we get there and you find out that you don’t like me in the real world or you hate Ohio? I just... I need you to have other things going on besides me.” The words spilled out.
I’d been thinking about it for the last few days and I realized that a big part of my hesitancy was that I was scared to be Ben’s whole world. I was going to have law school, which I knew was going to be hard and one of my best friends, Hadley, lived there, so I already had a social circle (not to mention most of my family lived only 45 minutes away in Dayton, Ohio). When Ben said he wanted to move with me, on top of the excitement, I also instantly felt worried about the pressure of being responsible for another person.
But when I’d said that to Erin the night before, she’d looked at me like I was stupid. She’d said, “I don’t think Ben is a needy kind of guy. I mean, he’s the one who's always taking care of all of us, right? And he likes you so much he wants to move to fucking Ohio with you? I don’t want to tell you what to do but I think you’d regret not taking this chance. Just tell him how you feel... he’ll get it.”
“Sally, first, I’m not going to stop liking you in the real world,” Ben said. “And okay, separate apartments is probably a good idea. Look, I’m not asking you to marry me, but don’t you want to see where this goes?”
“Yes, I do,” I leaned in to kiss him and just as our lips touched, there was a loud knock at the door. We pulled apart and then heard someone yelling, “Ben, are you in there? Ben?”
“Oh shit,” Ben laughed, “it’s my dad.”
* * *
Ben slipped out of the room and then came back a few minutes later and said, “Well. Yeah, so, my dad is here. I sent him to the diner, but we should go out there soon.”
His dad, Tim, had already been headed to Maine when Ben had called about postponing our summit date. An avid backpacker and constant traveler, he figured that he would do some hiking on his own before meeting up with us. He’d grown up in New England and had lived in Maine before Ben was born and relished any chance to hike up there. Ben had called home and talked with his mom the night before and she in turn had told his dad where we were staying. He happened to be nearby so he headed over in hopes of catching Ben.
“Dude. I feel like such a hussy. Does he know you’re in a room with a girl?” I said, only half joking, burying my head in Ben’s chest.
He hugged me tight. “It’s okay, he’s really very nice. I told him all about you. Don’t worry. But please... put on some pants.”
We rounded up the other hikers and met Tim in the diner. He was, as advertised, amazingly nice. There was no doubt from looking at him, that he was Ben’s father. They had the exact same build, the same curls, although Tim’s were white rather than Ben’s brown.
I was nervous to talk to him, because I felt like I had already made a bad impression, but he asked me questions about what I was going to do after the trail and seemed genuinely interested in my answers. He kept telling us how amazing he thought we all were for thru-hiking. And then to top it off, he bought all our breakfasts, the surest way to a thru-hiker’s heart.
By the time he dropped us off at the trailhead, I was a fan.
“So... is your dad just going to... hang out in his van for the next 9 days?” Turbo asked as Tim drove off in his VW camper van.
No, Ben assured him, his dad was planning to go up to Katahdin and in a day or two he would start hiking South in the 100 mile wilderness, hopefully meeting up with us a few days before the summit.
“Dang,” Erin said, “your dad really is nice.”
* * *
It’s both a blessing and a shame that Maine is the last state for Northbound hikers. For my money, it’s the singularly most scenic and interesting state for hiking on the whole trail. Its beauty is both necessary to keep tired hikers engaged and mostly wasted on people who have been in the woods for over four months. It took true splendor at this point to make me slow down and really appreciate the view as more than something that I was just hiking past.
That day, hiking over the Bigelow range, did that for all of us. The hiking itself was hard, you gain close to 10,000 feet of elevation over the range and the trail is mostly rocky boulder fields. The range consists of four peaks—South Horn, West Peak, Avery Peak, and the ridge of Little Bigelow. The day was perfect, not a single cloud in the sky. We really did have luck in having good weather when it counted. When we got to the West Peak, we could see all the way South to Mt. Washington and to the North up the ridge and beyond to what seemed like endless green mountains, dotted all over with bright blue lakes. Avery Peak, with its narrow, rocky summit, made me feel like I was precariously balancing on the tippy top of the tallest mountain. At that moment, with all of us standing, looking out over the wild North, it felt like we were the only people on earth.
It was one of the few days where everything else slid away—Ben, law school, life after the trail, moving, the chaos in the world, wondering how I was going handle talking to Kevin again, when I was going to get my next hot meal—and the only thing that mattered was the hike. These were our last big views before we reached Katahdin and I wanted to savor the feeling of standing on top of the world.