Cautiously, I stepped on the narrow boards traversing the bog. Two weeks of almost constant rain had brought the water to the top of the wooden walkway, and at several points the path was completely submerged. A tenuous passage, this was the only route available through the swamp that stood between me and the peak of the mountain.
I was nearly to the top of Mt. Success in New Hampshire, and after crossing this bog and summiting the mountain, I would be less than two miles from Maine, the fourteenth and final state in my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail.
The click, click, click of my hiking poles was the only sound I heard as I crossed the shimmering quagmire. Over the years, rain had accumulated here and created a primordial soup of water five feet deep, seasoned with decaying trees, vegetation, and insects. As I planted my left hiking pole on a half-submerged board, the tip of the pole slipped away and the momentum of the thirty-pound pack on my back destroyed my precarious balance. I heard my own shrill scream of “Oh God, no!” and the bog added a weary hiker as another ingredient in its murky depth.
I sank up to my backpack in the muck. Like a drowning man flailing for a lifesaver, I scrambled to escape, grabbing the board where I’d been walking just seconds earlier, leaning forward over its steadfastness, slowly wriggling my body out of the bog’s grasp. As I lay frightened and gasping on the narrow wooden path, I saw the picture of myself covered in decaying muck and slime, and muttered, “Congratulations, Mom and Dad, it’s a boy.”
I lay there for several minutes, contemplating the journey that had brought me to this lonely spot where I was exhausted, indescribably filthy, and facing who-knows-what around every bend. I could have been warm and dry and well-fed at home. I could have been back at work, in a safe routine, productive, earning a paycheck. Oh, wait—I gave all that up so I could be out here alone in this cold, rainy, godforsaken bog.