Where's the Next Shelter?

by Gary Sizer

“Trail legs” is the term hikers use to describe a state of maximum physical fitness, balanced with a heavy dose of Zen.

After a few weeks of hiking up and down mountains, your legs cycle through an initial state of shock followed by a rebuilding phase, and eventually you end up with the most muscular thighs and calves you’ve ever had in your life. Along with this comes the ability to simply zone out for 12 hours and then snap out of it 20 or 30 miles up the trail.

Crickets were chirping and the tiny circle of light from my fire was the entire world, a flickering orange disk floating in a dark sea of rustles and chirps.

I’m usually fully awake around 3 a.m. It makes sense. I fell asleep around 9 p.m. Hard. No dreams, no memories. And when I wake up at 3, I feel great—at least mentally. Sometimes it’s just because I feel the need to turn over, but more often I’m awake because my legs have cramped. A few minutes of stretching always helps, but it’s impossible to do so in the confines of my sleeping bag, so I soon find myself standing, and since I’m up I might as well pee.

repeated passage

Morton’s neuroma.

“So what do you do for real, Lode?” “I just told you, I’m a trail magician.” “Really? That’s it?” He stood up again. “I just told you! I’m a trail magician!” If he hadn’t been smiling I might have felt menaced. He was genuinely excited about helping hikers, he explained.

Did I love having my will sapped from the bite of crawling parasites that might bite me again? Actually, I did. I was in the Vortex, and I loved it. Not the one that sucks you into a town and holds you there, but another kind, the spin cycle of life. To outsiders, things may have seemed out of control; from here inside my head, everything reduced to a single simple directive: Keep going. The white blazes, hand painted and unique as snowflakes, were the only consistent and stable thing in a mad, swirling chaos. Everything I needed to survive—in the most real sense of that word—was on my back. My footfalls had become my mantra. I had found Zen.

On those days when it feels like Katahdin is a million miles away, I time travel into a future where the goal is already complete, and I pretend that all this is me simply looking back on how I got there.”

From the summit, the smaller hills below looked like endless mounds of gold and copper coins shining in the sun. Clusters of plum-colored maples formed chunks of garnet tossed in among the treasure.