Jack sat in the door of his tent and stared at his feet. They were pale and wrinkled, like hunks of wet mozzarella. Fat, yellow blisters bulged between his toes. “They look worse than they are,” I said, “Let’s clean them up and see.”
We’d been planning this hike of the 125-mile-long Centennial Trail in South Dakota since early spring. Now, months later, we were just a few days into the walk and it was all coming undone. I retrieved the first aid kit stashed in my tent. I’d pared it down over the years until it contained the bare essentials: a scant collection of ibuprofen, triple antibiotic cream, Vaseline, Band-Aids, and Imodium, and a single safety pin.
On my thru hike of the Appalachian Trail in 2013 I’d developed an array of boils on the insides of my thighs and the underside of my scrotum. They throbbed as I lay in my tent at night, and tormented my every daytime step. When one burst open I sopped up the blood and pus, stuffed a wad of toilet paper into my shorts, kicked back 800 milligrams of ibuprofen, and walked the twenty-five miles to Bear Mountain, New York where my parents had mailed a tube of drawing salve. Usually on thru hikes first aid is just about making it to town.
I knelt in front of Jack and handed him some Wet Ones and Band-Aids. Then I held the point of the safety pin in the flame of my lighter until it glowed. I let it cool and offered it to Jack: “For popping the blisters.”
Jack scrubbed his toes gingerly and I stood up so he wouldn’t feel rushed. His bloody feet were the latest crisis on a trip plagued with problems. Our crossing from Wind Cave to Bear Butte was only supposed to take a week. Already I was doubting we’d make it all the way.
This was Jack’s first backpacking trip. I’d thought he’d be a natural. Motivated. Contemplative. Fit. Tall, broad, and mustachioed, he is the living illustration on a vintage boxing poster. But Jack was beset by ailments from the start and I couldn’t help but blame myself. The paltry first aid kit in my hand represented my folly: I was accustomed to hiking alone, or at least in very particular company.
I set my own schedule on the Appalachian Trail. I carried all I needed on my back for 124 days, sleeping and eating when I pleased and walking as slow or as fast as I liked. I connected 2,186 miles of eastern mountains, pastures, and sidewalks with an unbroken series of footsteps. I crossed every inch of ground between the summits of Springer Mountain and Mount Katahdin with the swing of my own two feet. Even two years later when I walked the 1,000-mile-longer Continental Divide Trail with my girlfriend, we dialed in our system and walked as one fused identity. Holly and I merged our hiking styles through weeks of meticulous compromise to become one amalgamated organism, a two-bodied being that shared food, water, and shelter. We made miles, set up our tent, broke camp, and hitchhiked together.
When I flew to the West Coast the year after that to thru hike the Pacific Crest Trail, I joined up with a tall German named Fabian who I met thirty miles into the desert as I reclined in the shade of some scrubby bushes, sipping a liter of hot, gritty water. “You know,” he said, stopping in the trail and tapping the screen of his Garmin. “There is a good spot for resting maybe a mile ahead.” He was fast and light, I was fast and light, and that made us near-duplicates of each other. Carbon copies. While Holly and I had hiked as a composite being, Fabian and I were clones. We woke at the same time and moved across the land with a shared mindset and ability.
These trails—the Appalachian, Continental Divide, and Pacific Crest—are known as the Triple Crown, an aggregate 7,800 miles of footpath and wilderness corridor across the United States. By the time I walked the length of all three trails in 2016, only about 250 other people had done the same. My mistake was that I set out on the Centennial Trail two years later prepared to walk with Jack the same way.
We weren’t far into our hike when Jack first mentioned that his knees were hurting. Filled with seven days of food, our packs were heavy. But Jack was particularly overburdened. I had spent the previous five years accruing delicate, homemade or expensive, ultralight backpacking equipment. Jack had to make do with the gear he could rent from our university’s outdoor recreation program or buy cheap and last minute from Iowa’s deer-hunting outlets.
By the second day, he’d begun a regimen of ibuprofen and acetaminophen to ease the pain in his knees. The pills let him soldier on, but his condition continued to deteriorate. We struggled to cover even two miles an hour and I worried more as his supply of pain killers dwindled. If he ran out, mine would only last him a day.
I began my Appalachian Trail walk on May 19, 2013, eight days after my college commencement ceremony. The trail was vacant of other thru hikers by that time of year, and day trippers were enamored with a twenty-two-year-old trying to walk across the country. They offered me snacks and cold drinks. Sometimes rides down the road to a post office where I had a box of food waiting. One woman bought me lunch at Cracker Barrel.
But the favors wore off the hairier I grew. I’d been living outside for 105 days by the time I came down from Mount Madison, crossed the West Branch of the Peabody River, and scrambled to the top of Wildcat Peak in New Hampshire. I had walked approximately 1,900 miles. Mount Katahdin was just over 300 miles away. I’d gone more than fifty days with only dips in frigid streams and soapless hand baths near lakes, and it showed. A salt-stained bandana held my greasy hair out of my eyes. My t-shirt was rancid with body soil. My shorts were stretched and faded. My shoes and socks all had holes. I was weary and spare, my six-foot-three frame trimmed to 140 pounds.
Many other thru hikers headed into town for food, rest, and a hot shower, but I avoided this temptation. The only cash I had was a fifty-dollar bill folded up at the bottom of my pack. My bank account had hemorrhaged money ever since April when I bought the food for the trip—cases of Snickers bars, crates of peanut butter, hundreds of packs of instant noodles. My student loans were accruing interest with each passing month. The habit I adopted early on was to visit towns only briefly, to dump my supplies in my pack and get back on the trail as soon as possible. But this strategy was backfiring now. Another skin infection had appeared just above my butt, right where my pack rested against my lower back. I paused on top of Wildcat Peak and winced as I peeled the waistband of my shorts away from the infection. A lump the size of a peach pit sat beneath a hot, red circle of skin.
The next morning I patched up the sore with the rest of my ointment and a folded bandana and wondered about blood poisoning. As I descended to Carter Notch Hut, I thought of MRSA and all the stories I’d heard from my high school health teacher of kids wasting away in hospital beds because they hadn’t showered after gym class. Inside the hut, I found two other thru hikers, Brain Damage and Big Yank, who I’d seen off and on along the trail. Big Yank was a lifeguard back home, and the closest thing I had to a doctor. He peered at the infection. He guessed it wasn’t MRSA, as far as he could tell, and that it hadn’t gone septic either. But in the end, how sure could he be? “What do you want?” He said. “I know CPR.”
I left the AT and followed a side trail along Nineteen Mile Brook to Highway 16 and stood with my thumb out by the side of the road. And I cried because I was afraid it was the end. After three months of soggy shoes, blistered toes, wasp stings, blackfly bites, falls, cuts, bruises, scrapes, chafe, sour clothes, spider webs, spongy green beans, and scrotal boils, it was all going to end for me on the side of a road 300 miles short of my goal.
Back home nobody would understand. It’s hard to comprehend the delicacy of a thru hike. Sure, it would take some time to walk that far, folks admit, looking at a map, but what they can’t realize unless they’re actually out there is that every square inch on that map represents hundreds of thousands of steps. And in every step there are roots, rocks, bugs, and rain. There are aches and pains. There is sweat, exhaustion, hunger, and loneliness. And that lasts for millions of steps. Thousands of miles. Hundreds of days.
Then a pickup truck slid into the gravel by the side of the road and a man with a black ponytail got out, thumbs in the loops of his khaki shorts.
“Always stop for a thru hiker,” he said. “Where you heading?”
“A doctor,” I said, wiping my face. “I have an infection.”
“We’ll want Androscoggin Valley for that,” he said. “Come on, I’m going that way.”
I climbed into the cab and the man turned his truck around in the middle of the road and drove back the way he came.
By day four on the Centennial Trail it was clear Jack was in no shape to continue. He wasn’t sleeping well and complained of nausea at mealtimes. He had nearly stopped speaking and we had transferred his food and tent into my pack. After crossing seventy-five miles of South Dakota dust country—hills and valleys full of coneflower and bur oak, flaxen-hued sedge, ponderosa pines, quaking aspen, and towering rock—we sat together at Pilot Knob and texted our friend Connor who planned to meet us at Bear Butte, the northern end of the trail. He would come to Pilot Knob tomorrow and pick up Jack instead. I would carry on to Bear Butte alone. I was confident I could reach it in a day and a half. Jack and Connor would meet me there. Crisis resolved. Or so I thought.
That next day I cruised north along the trail—until I didn’t anymore. At some point in the early afternoon I fell over the threshold of heat exhaustion without even knowing I was at the door. Suddenly I felt lightheaded and wasn’t sweating. Weather reports I heard later said the heat index peaked at 105 degrees. Though I drank water, it was already too late. My mind became foggy and I wobbled along, drunk but parched. Only half a liter of water swirled at the bottom of my bottles. Before clarity receded, I recognized—like taking one last gulp of air below deck in a sinking ship—that I had gotten myself into serious trouble.
I became paranoid about poison ivy and spent miles inching around leaves—leaves of plants that, in brief and increasingly sparse moments of lucidity, I realized belonged to harmless shrubs. I thought I heard car doors slam and the voices of giggling children. I glanced back over and over, certain I’d see a highway and a family in a minivan I could beg for water. But there was only woods. Thunder rumbled overhead even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The badly-printed maps in the guidebook I carried suggested seasonal streams, but each gulch I crossed was dry.
The doctor at the Androscoggin Valley Hospital pressed on my abscess. “It’s good you came in,” he said. “I doubt this would have resolved on its own.” I was discharged with a course of strong antibiotics. I bought a package of maxi pads at a nearby convenience store, slapped one over the lump on my butt, and caught a ride from a man on his way home from the grocery store. When he dropped me back at the trail crossing he hung out of his window and tossed me an orange. “Take one for the road,” he said, and then drove away.
Near the top of the steep climb on the far side of Highway 2, I stopped on a log to eat the orange. The forest was close, a dripping, emerald screen that plopped and plunked with light rain. Pulp clung to my beard and juice ran down my wrists as I slurped at the rind. I wanted to linger over the fruit, but drops of water fell on my neck and a chilly breeze coaxed me to my feet. I stuffed the rest of the orange in my mouth, juice dribbling down my chin, and sealed the rind in an old Ziploc bag, which I tucked into my pack.
I sucked citrus stickiness from my arms as I set off uphill, minding my step over roots and rocks. Then something made me stop: a shape in front of me. Heavy breathing. My head snapped up. The bear was so close I could nearly jab it with my ski pole. All the other bears I’d encountered on the trail—twenty-two in all—had been dozens of yards off or had bolted as soon as they’d seen me. One had padded around my tent at night, snuffling in circles at the edge of my rainfly until I rolled over. Then it had run away too. This one was going nowhere.
“Hey, bear,” I said, as low and calm as I could. The bear didn’t move. Its fur was dark underneath, but the hairs turned reddish at their ends in a kind of ginger halo. Its nostrils glistened and flexed as it sniffed the air. A cloud of bugs hovered over its rump. “Come on, bear,” I said. “Move along.” Really thinking: Shit. Fuck. But also not even thinking, just trying to find the volume knob for the static in my head. The bear lifted his nose and breathed deeply. I ran my tongue along my mustache and tasted the orange sheen. I smell like a goddamn fruit basket.
Arms above my head, I raised my voice: “Go on, bear. Get out of here.” The bear took an uneasy step to the side and then another back toward me, lowering his head and swinging it back and forth, snuffing.
“Go on, bear. Go home,” I said louder, feeling desperate. I stepped forward and hit the underbrush with my ski poles. “Go the fuck home!” I shouted and the bear broke away and scampered twenty yards into the woods. It turned to look over its shoulder. I scooted past, checking behind me every few feet until I was certain I’d made a clean escape.
The adrenaline of the encounter sped me along the trail for the next hour, and by the time I reached Mount Hayes—a fog-socked hump capped with mossy rocks and scraggy, misshapen evergreens—I had decided I would not sleep until I got to Maine. Only thirteen miles stood between me and the final state on the trail. I paused only to put on my headlamp before rushing on.
Sometime later I stood on a downward-sloping slab of granite. The lights of Gorham, New Hampshire or Rangeley, Maine twinkled like UFOs in the distance.
The trail had led me to the top of a cliff a few tenths of a mile north of the New Hampshire-Maine border with no apparent way down. Mist rushed through the beam of my headlamp on an eternal gust of wind. The loose ends of my backpack straps beat against my chin. Silhouettes of pines waved against the night sky, creaking and whistling and brushing needles. The rock was slick and I couldn’t see over the edge.
Crouching down, I dug my fingers into the dirt near the trees. I inched forward as if testing ice on a frozen lake. Two steps in, my shoes—bowling-alley-smooth from the last 900 miles of walking—slid out from under me. I skidded across hard granite for a second or two and then tumbled into open space, clumps of dirty moss still clutched in my hands.
All the breath left my body as I hit the ledge below. My headlamp smacked a boulder and went dark. I toppled down a few more feet and landed among some rocks. Rain fell on my face and I sucked at the wet air where I lay, tangled in my pack straps. I pulled my hands from the wrist loops of my ski poles and unbuckled my pack, which fell away and rolled down the hill.
My lungs filled and I touched my face. Nothing seemed broken. I felt my forehead and nose and collarbone. All intact. Ribs, hips, arms. Okay. A gash across my shinbone seared, and my fingertips came back gooey with blood. My headlamp was broken open and the batteries were gone, so I slumped against the rocks, panting in the dark. After a moment I felt around for my ski poles between the stones and found my pack where it had rolled against a tree. A white blaze was painted on the trunk, more ghostly bright than anything else around.
I hoisted my pack and limped down the trail, searching through the Maine rainstorm for the shelter I knew should be close. Soon, a small wooden sign: Carlo Col Shelter pointed me down a side trail, and the luster of the corrugated metal roof guided me through the trees. The interior was split in half by a loft about four feet off the floor. A few hikers were already asleep below it, bundled in sleeping bags and hats. Up top, a couple and their dog watched me step inside.
“Hi, there,” the man said.
“Hi,” I said, pressing water out of my beard.
“Looks like you had a rough one out there.”
“Yeah.” I swung my backpack off my shoulders and hung it from a nail in the wall.
“There’s room for you up here.”
I nodded. “Great. Thanks.”
I pulled off my raincoat and hung that on a nail too, slipped out of my sodden shoes and socks and lined them against the wall. My clothes were damp and I shivered in the breeze. I peeled off the maxi pad, which took a layer of skin with it. Too tired to cook, I poured a few ounces of water into a bag of instant noodles and dehydrated mushrooms and drank it crunchy. Then I gathered my sleeping things and pulled myself into the loft. The couple smiled.
“You going thru?” The man asked.
“Yeah,” I said, unfolding my foam pad. The couple’s shirts and sleeping bags were bright and clean. The aroma of deodorant and shampoo was rich against the musk of old wood and soggy forest. I noticed them still staring.
“You?” I asked.
“Oh, we’re just in for the night,” the man said. “We like to get out for the weekend when we can.”
“That’s good,” I said, unrolling my sleeping bag.
“Fun for the pup, you know?” he said.
“Must love it,” I said, zipping my sleeping bag up to my chin. The man turned to speak to his wife and I pulled the hood of my bag over my head and was asleep in an instant.
I woke in the black interior of the shelter to the sound of the man next to me hacking and gagging. I sat up in alarm, but saw he was still asleep. I sighed and listened to him struggle for air, snores coming in threes or fours before one would catch in his throat, making him retch and snort. I laid on the planks of the loft floor, staring up at the log beams etched with the initials and names of decades of hikers, wanderers, and youth reform expeditions.
The next time I woke up was to whispers: “Stan. Stan. Stan,” the woman in the loft hissed at her husband. Stan snored on. “Stan. Stan-uh.”
Finally, Stan stirred. “Maria, what is it?”
“I heard something by the bear box,” Maria said. I peeked out of my sleeping bag. The doorway of the shelter opened out to heavy fog racing by on stiff wind. I doubted there was anything by the bear box, but if there was, I doubted even more that Maria could hear it.
“Maria, I’m sure it’s nothing,” Stan said.
“Stan, there’s something out there. I heard it,” Maria insisted.
“Maria, go back to sleep,” Stan said.
“I heard something, Stan. It’s by the bear box,” Maria said, perched on her elbow now, staring at her husband.
Stan sighed and sat up, strapping on a headlamp which cast a beam as bright as day around the tiny shelter. This is not happening. I burrowed deeper into my sleeping bag as Stan stepped over me. He leaned his head out into the darkness.
“Maria, I don’t see anything,” Stan called over the wind. The dog groaned and stretched.
“I heard it, Stan. There was something by the bear box,” Maria said.
Wisps of cloud swirled around Stan’s long-johnned legs. “It’s nothing Maria. There’s nothing out there.”
The beam swung around as Stan picked his way back across the shelter to his sleeping bag. He consoled his wife in loud whispers. Their dog stood up, shook, circled, and settled back down. Stan turned off his headlamp and I closed my eyes.
I was just falling asleep for the third time that night when Stan pulled in a growling breath and began to snore again. I unzipped my sleeping bag, folded up my foam pad, and took my pack down from the nail. I loaded spare batteries into my headlamp, pulled on soaking socks and shoes, and buckled my hip belt. Just as I picked up my ski poles, I heard Maria rustle in the loft.
“Are you leaving?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said, certain that if I wasn’t sleeping I might as well be making miles.
“You know,” Maria said, her voice suddenly high. “I heard something by the bear box.”
“I know you did,” I said, and stepped back into the night.
I still had about twenty-five miles of the Centennial Trail left before I reached Bear Butte, but only a few gulps of water in my bottles. I struggled to bring the tiny topo map in my guidebook into focus. The only little blue line left to cross was Elk Creek.
I sagged in despair as I descended to the creek a few miles later, my tongue thick and dry as a toad. It was nothing but cobble. A rope strung up across the dry streambed hung frayed and useless in the heat.
What were my choices? Hope to hitchhike out at Elk Creek trailhead? Hide in the shade and then night hike to the I-90 underpass? The trailhead was still over two miles away and the underpass, thirteen. I doubted there’d be anyone at the trailhead who could help me, and I couldn’t fathom walking out to the highway as thirsty as I was.
The rocks of the streambed clacked hollowly as I unbuckled my pack and sat down on a boulder. Water gurgled nearby. The hallucinations had returned. I leaned forward to loosen the laces on my shoes and froze. The gurgle got louder as I leaned toward my feet. I dropped to my stomach, sending wolf spiders darting.
Distinct beneath the riverbed was the babble of water flowing somewhere not far below. Standing too fast, my vision dissolved into sparkles and blackness. I steadied myself and then gathered my bottles and teetered downstream. Around a bend and several hundred feet farther on, the stream burst forth from the rocks, cold and clear.
After my sleepless night at the Carlo Col Shelter, I emerged, sore and tired, from the Maine woods and found myself on the edge of a paved road. A pickup truck sat in a gravel pullout nearby. As I made to cross the road, a man in a green shirt and green pants stepped out of the truck. He wore a bullet-proof vest and carried a gun on his belt. He held up his hand: “Warden’s office.”
I stopped at the edge of the road and leaned on my poles. “Hi,” I said.
“How long you been on trail?”
“Since May.”
“You hiking with anyone else?”
“Sometimes, but usually not.”
“That all yours?” The warden asked, gesturing at my backpack.
“Yes.”
“Your pack and everything?”
“Yes.”
“Seen this woman anywhere?” The man held out a sheet of paper. ATTENTION SPORTSMAN it said across the top. Beneath it was a photo of a small woman in a bright red shirt and khaki shorts. Her hair was tied back with a bandana. She was beaming, squinting behind a pair of dark-framed glasses. She reminded me of a librarian, someone warm and grandmotherly. I skimmed the rest of the information:
IF YOU COME ACROSS ITEMS THAT YOU FEEL MAY BE CONNECTED TO THE DISAPPEARANCE OF GERALDINE LARGAY, LAST SEEN ON APPALACHIAN TRAIL 7/22/13, PLEASE: DO NOT COLLECT OR DISTURB THESE ITEMS. PLEASE CALL MAINE STATE POLICE.
The woman in the photo was carrying the same brand and color backpack as me. She even had what looked like the same fluorescent orange whistle hanging from her shoulder strap. I hoped the warden recognized that any pack this woman could carry would be way too small for me.
I handed the paper back and shook my head. “Sorry. I haven’t.”
“Well, I’ll ask that you keep a look out,” he said. “And give us a call if you see anything.” He strode back to his truck.
Though I didn’t know it at the time, I had just walked into the largest search and rescue operation in Maine state history. Once we learned of it, the disappearance of Geraldine Largay was on every thru hiker’s mind, though we told ourselves the same couldn’t happen to us. We had walked from Georgia and were confident and fit. I’d made good time after the setback in New Hampshire and the trail felt like home again. I was young and would never die.
I was blind to the reality around me.
Stiff, shrubby pines lined the trail and their branches grabbed at my pack. Sharp green needles fell into my shoes. The forest concealed everything, occasionally parting to reveal whole ponds I’d never have known were there. They even hid moose, one emerging twenty feet ahead of me, the size of a Clydesdale, invisible until it stepped into the trail’s thin line of open air. The mountains are old and covered by a dense, wizened forest. A deep mulch of orange needles and moss obscures anything that stands still.
It’s tough country, with a steep, slick path and damp, chilly weather. Short days make a clammy land of long shadows. Rainstorms last for days. Thick brush and decaying logs lay jumbled on the ground. Blackish water flows between crevices in lichen-covered stones. The land leaps for the sky like tangled rickrack, arbitrary and incongruent humps and ripples, a maze of buckled ground. Root pits collect stagnant water at the base of windthrown trees. Off trail the landscape shifts in a kaleidoscope of bark, fern and rock. Squirrels skitter along branches, stomping tiny feet and chattering.
But still rumors swirled between some thru hikers that Geraldine had been murdered or otherwise kidnapped and smuggled away. It was an easier tale to believe. We’d all met weirdos at some point on our hikes, and to consider a violent misanthrope was kinder to our egos than admitting the truth: any one of us was only ever one misstep from a similar fate.
I moseyed along the Centennial Trail with five liters of water glugging in my pack. The fifteen-minute wait for the purification drops to work had seemed interminable, but now I took long pulls every few minutes, resisting the urge to guzzle it all.
Despite my luck, I didn’t feel much better. I probably needed an IV. And I needed to stop walking—to sit in a cool place and rest. A nagging pain began in my chest, accompanied by a strange taste in my mouth that reminded me of how plastic smells when it’s left in the sun. My focus slipped again. I wasn’t going to make the miles I wanted. But then I’d be late meeting Jack and Connor and they would worry. Maybe that was good. Let them call the police. Send in the chopper.
I checked my cell phone even though I hadn’t had service all day. The screen blinked and died. No battery. The light waned as I climbed to the top of a rise. Ahead, something shimmered in the last rays of the setting sun. First, I thought my vision was going, but the shimmer stayed put as I got closer, and I began to believe it was real. What was it? A pane of glass? A pile of snow? Yes. It was snow, I was sure of it. But in July? That didn’t make sense. A moment later I reached the place and saw it was a huge mound of ice cubes. I stepped on a piece and it crunched under my foot. I unbuckled my pack and fell to my knees and thrust my hands deep into the pile. I wriggled in deeper until I was up to my shoulders and then I rolled on my back like a dog. I clutched handfuls of ice to my face. What is this place? What have I found? I popped a cube in my mouth and closed my eyes.
After a long time lying there, I tucked my shirt into my pants and packed it full of ice. I rolled cubes in my bandana and tied it around my neck and stuffed some under my hat. I chugged most of two bottles of water and filled them back up with ice. Then I shouldered my pack and strode away from the oasis, leaving a dribble of melt water in the dusty trail behind me.
A few days deeper into Maine I spent the night at Leeman Brook Lean-to while a tremendous storm dumped rain and thunder shook the logs of the shelter. The forest was soaked and dripping early the next morning. I descended to Little Wilson Stream, which brought me up short. It careened through its course and sent a trembling pool of water a dozen yards onto the trail. I splashed down to the edge of the current, which roared out of the forest like a freight train. A white blaze glistened from the trees on the far side of the stampeding water.
I waded in up to my knees. The current was like an unending thunderclap, all around and consuming. I took another step and plunged into the water up to my hips, managing, barely, to stay upright against the stream’s crashing weight. Fighting for balance, I gathered myself in the eddy of a boulder. Water thundered by, rushing around my ribs. I fought back panic and leaned into the flow. No more steps. Just inches now, feeling blindly for a firm hold among the rocks as the river bellowed and raced around me, against me, droplets wetting my face. Never stretching too far, holding down the fear that urged me to rush, to throw myself forward and paddle like mad for the bank, I poked slippery, submerged rocks with my toes. The whole time, the water crashed and sprayed, incessant, heavy—so heavy—just an ounce away from bowling me over, from sweeping me away. It broke around my stomach in a torrent, pushing, pushing, pushing.
Bear Butte, the northern end of the Centennial Trail, is sacred to the Lakota and other American Indian tribes. Today, it’s a South Dakota State Park, with an education center and a black, asphalt parking lot. I reached it, still a little unfocused and woozy, a few minutes past noon and sat in the shade by the picnic tables.
The morning had come in the blink of an eye. I’d camped less than ten yards from the trail a couple miles past the place where I found the ice. A dreamless sleep had given way to faint dawn light and I packed in my rehearsed and familiar fashion, though I still felt wobbly and dumb. My head was cloudy, my body stiff, and my lungs and chest were tight and painful. I had fourteen miles to walk by noon in order to rendezvous on time with Jack and Connor.
The forested hills had given way to open plains and Bear Butte’s diminishing humps were just visible in the distance. I walked steadily north, nursing my last liter of water until I passed under Interstate 90 and a cacophony of screaming semis. Alkali Trailhead waited on the other side. A trio of bulletin boards bore fliers for a mountain bike race the previous day and I understood that aid station volunteers had probably dumped their coolers of ice on the ground before leaving the night before. I found a spigot at a campsite nearby and used it to douse my head and then fill up my bottles. I slouched against a stranger’s camper while I drank and then rose and carried on.
The final push to the base of Bear Butte was a never-ending march through the prairie’s furious headwind. A trifecta of bison grazed near where I walked, and they raised their shaggy, woolen heads to watch me shuffle by. Slimy purple tongues slithered into their nostrils. One dipped its head, tore a mouthful of grass, and shook its dusty mane. I wondered if they could smell what I’d been through, could read the ordeal in the brownish urine that had dribbled feebly onto the front of my pants earlier that morning. If any creature knew about surviving this country, it was them. They looked on, indifferent.
I crossed a few final washed-out gullies and then I was there, at the parking lot of the education center. The last two miles of the Centennial Trail switchbacked up the butte to its summit. I’d finish that later. Connor’s black Camry wasn’t yet in the parking lot, so I found a place in the pine trees and laid down to drink some water. I wondered how close I’d come to dying, but supposed I’d never know. Maybe I was close. Maybe I was fathoms away. Maybe the maybes didn’t matter. Still, I thought of Geraldine Largay.
By the time the warden spoke to me at that road crossing on the Appalachian Trail five years before, the sixty-six-year-old woman they were searching for was already dead. Her remains would be found two years later on U.S. Navy property that borders the trail. Her flattened tent and the sleeping bag that held her bones were covered in a heap of woodland debris.
The Maine Warden Service concluded that Geraldine became lost on July 22nd after stepping into the woods to pee. She was disoriented and unable to find her way back. She searched for high ground where she might find a cell phone signal, but this only left her more mixed up and in a worse place to be seen. She typed a series of text messages to her husband, but poor cell phone reception meant they never got delivered.
When she finally hunkered down to wait for rescue, she was only 3,000 feet from the Appalachian Trail and less than a thirty-minute walk from the closest dirt road. At times, search and rescue teams passed within several hundred yards of her tent, but the thick Maine woods prevented them from discovering her camp. After twenty-six days, she succumbed to exposure and starvation.
When I was on the Pacific Crest Trail in 2016, I learned that Stephen Olshansky, a hiker who’d gone missing shortly after my girlfriend and I met him on the Continental Divide Trail, had been found dead in Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico. He’d been caught in a snowstorm and gotten trapped in the impassable mountains for over six weeks. Eventually, he managed to reach a campground where he sought shelter in a latrine. Immobilized by frostbite and weakness, he died of hypothermia and complications due to starvation.
These stories of the final hours of fellow hikers weighed heavily on my mind as I polished off a bottle of water and twisted the cap off another. It’s easy to blame these deaths on bad preparation. According to some, Geraldine had a poor sense of direction and was hiking without basic orienteering or woodcraft skills. This is a common criticism of thru hikers and others who take to the wilderness with ultralight gear and leave their maps and compasses at home. They can walk for miles along a trail, but are ill-equipped to help themselves if ever they lose their way.
But even the Maine Wardens—who have a ninety-eight-percent success rate of finding missing persons within the first forty-eight hours they’re lost—and the U.S. Navy SERE instructors—who are intimately familiar with the land on which Geraldine was waiting for rescue—couldn’t find her. Stephen, or Otter as he was known, was an experienced outdoorsman and had with him a four-season tent and collapsible wood stove. He knew his surroundings well. In fact, he knew exactly where he was the entire time he was stuck.
The frightening thing about the moment I learned of Otter’s death was that I’d just come through the High Sierra on the Pacific Crest Trail. Fabian and I had traversed the range much too early in the season, heading into the mountains when they were still laden with snow, encountering almost no one else in that bright, high-up world only just beginning to thaw. We navigated mostly by Fabian’s handheld GPS, postholing our way through thigh-deep snow, floundering through valleys and kicking steps up snowfields on the sides of 12,000-foot passes.
But we also had maps saved on our phones and we carried collapsible solar panels and external batteries with which to charge our electronics. I had detailed paper maps and a compass as a redundancy measure, and I knew how to use them. The risk wasn’t in getting lost. Like Otter, we’d known where we were the entire time. The risk was in plunging through the snow and breaking a leg in a rocky chasm below. The risk was in being swept away by frigid, melt-swollen rivers in the Yosemite backcountry. The risk was in running out of food as Fabian and I both nearly did, arriving at the road to South Lake Tahoe contemplating the edibility of Dermatone lip balm. We survived partly through preparedness and partly by luck, and I think of Otter frequently and how easily, on the PCT, it could have been me.
In the shade of the pines beneath Bear Butte, I stood gingerly and reveled for a moment in my trail-worn condition—crisp, salt-stained pants; grimy fingernails; sore feet; disheveled hair; tired shoulders; stiff hips. Then I walked to the spigot, refilled my bottle and returned to lay down on the bench of the picnic table. I held the liter of water to my chest like a talisman.
Geraldine, Otter, and I all made textbook errors somewhere along the way—not taking a bearing before leaving the trail; not minding the forecast; pushing on instead of turning back; hiking alone; running out of water. Back when I’d stood stomach-deep in Little Wilson Stream, perilously braced, surrounded by a raging torrent, one slippery rock away from vanishing in the roar of deep, fast, vicious water, Geraldine had flashed through my mind. Along the trail and in the years since, I’ve seen many duplicates of the first poster that warden showed me. They were tacked up at road crossings and at shelters, some damaged by rain to the point of illegibility, fading in detail and clarity just as the hope of finding her alive diminished as well. There, in the midst of the heaving crush, I realized how easy it was to vanish like that. This is how it happens, I remember thinking. This is how you disappear.
But I didn’t disappear. I splashed out of the raging stream on the far bank and, maybe a week later, emerged from the Hundred-Mile Wilderness to see Mount Katahdin rising up in the near distance before me. I climbed to the top and stared with bright, bleary eyes out over all the land I’d crossed to get there. I gorged myself on donuts and thought about how I’d never again feel so alive.
A buzzard soared languidly in the hot, hazy sky. Once, on the PCT in Southern California, Fabian and I came across a snake with a toad in its mouth. The snake had the toad by the hind legs and was swallowing it whole. The toad squirmed and belched its own innards. Its eyes ruptured and hung from their sockets like unraveled buttons.
I thought about that toad as tires crunched in the parking lot—about how it had suffered so badly in its final minutes, about the sequence of events that let the snake win the day. Doors opened and shut and Connor’s bouncing gait flickered between the rows of cars. Jack limped gamely behind. I raised my bottle in greeting. Sometimes it’s easy to forget humane exits from life are never guaranteed. We like to think of ourselves as apart from the wild, but it’s really all the same. We live and die by the law of the toad: the Earth owns us and reminds us from time to time.