I got caught in a downpour today. Me and my CD's, which I was carting across town. They were damned heavy... By the time I got inside, you could have rung me out and I would have lost about 40 pounds in rainwater alone. As I was stumbling blindly back to my mom's house to save her dogs from the lightning and thunder, I thought of a story to tell...
We made it to the lean-to by about 7 or 8 that evening. I guess we'd started out around 3 or 4. It had taken us somewhere between 3 and 5 hours to get to our first campsite. It had probably only been a few miles: 3 or 4 at most, but none of us were used to our backpacks yet. By that last hour, several of us were crying, myself included. Everything was so fucking miserable. SO miserable.
Imagine you're 11 years old. Let's start with that. If that's not miserable enough, put fifty pounds of weight on your back. Imagine you're 11 and you weigh ALMOST double what your backpack weighs, but you're not quite triple digits yet, but maybe you will be when you grow boobs. Imagine that you really, really want boobs, but instead, you're out in a forest with a huge backpack strapped to you. Imagine you're hot and damp and sticky and tired. Imagine that you hurt, everywhere - that your tiny little boney shoulders are about ready to crumble off and leave your weakened arms laying on the rocky ground to scream in relieved agony.
Imagine you're 11 and you're cranky.
I think I was the first to cry, maybe the second. Maybe Rosie cried first. The two of us were soul-sisters that week, I tell you. When she cried, I cried. And when she laughed, I laughed. And when she had an asthma attack on top of a mountain, I had a panic attack because she was having an asthma attack, which I had never seen before. She was my best friend in the world for a week. We survived together.
But we made it to the lean-to before it was dark.
We set our backpacks down in the lean-to, all of us. I think there were twelve, maybe thirteen. There was Pearl -- whose real name was Gyöngyi, but nobody could pronounce it except me -- who was 26, and Amy, who was 17. They were the adults. Then there were ten or eleven of us kids. I think the oldest was 15.
Finally fucking over with, everything set down and everybody rubbing each other's shoulders to get the feel of the backpacks off our backs. We'd sung songs on the way up, to keep our spirits up. It didn't work. Nobody was happy until we'd put the backpacks down. And so, joyously, Rosie and I rubbed each other's shoulders, and waited for Pearl and Amy to tell us what to do next. Probably eat some food out of our packs, and roll out our sleeping bags and tell ghost stories, or write letters home or something.
Nope. Next, we gathered wood.
WHY did we have to gather wood? FUCK wood! Who the hell needs wood? But somebody had the brilliant idea of making hot dogs over the fire... Only, we didn't HAVE a fire, because we didn't have any wood. FUCK wood! I HATED wood. I especially hated wood when it began to rain as we were gathering it in the fading light. I don't know how many of you have actually ever BEEN in the forest in the rain, so I'll describe it for you.
Imagine you're hungry and miserable. Imagine that it's raining and your clothes are sticking to you. Now imagine that your arms are full of sticks, and that the bark is coming off all over your sweater and your hands. Imagine your hands wrinkling up -- you're getting what my little brother used to call "great-grandma hands." Imagine wet leaves sticking to you -- green ones and dead brown ones. Imagine slipping in mud and getting covered in nasty old leaves and bark and little rocky beads of dirt. Imagine it's cold. And snuggling into your sweater doesn't really do much good, because it's soaked through. Imagine you're alone -- not really alone, but far enough away from the other girls so that they won't be able to hear you through the rain if you try to talk to them. Imagine not being able to tell your tears from the rain.
Now imagine trying to light a pile of this wood on fire. Yeah, fun, huh?
We ate our hot dogs. For the most part, they were cold. We stuck them on the ends of sticks and tried toasting them over the fire, but the fire was wimpy and all we really got accomplished was getting stick-bark in our hot dogs. Yum, fiber.
We went to sleep. I slept next to Rosie. We were cold, so we snuggled together. If we'd all been a little older, the other girls would have called us lezzies. Thankfully, no one said a word. Maybe they were all cold too. The lean-to was maybe 20 feet by 12 feet. We crammed all of ourselves and all of our backpacks into that lean-to.
I woke in the night thinking I heard a sound. Jackie was snoring. Rosie's nose was whistling. I thought I heard something else too -- I thought I heard... I dunno... I guess I didn't hear anything.
We woke to find half of our food gone. A chipmunk -- a fucking CHIPMUNK -- had eaten like, 5 loaves of bread, cereal, and some lunchmeat. He left muddy tracks all over the lean-to. He'd scampered right over Jackie's sleeping bag and broken into the food. Jackie wailed at the track marks. I smiled to myself. I didn't like Jackie. Plus, that was less food we had to carry on the trail.
I can't remember why Amy and Colleen left that day. It was still raining, and everything was soggy. I think we'd lost our map. Or maybe we needed some supplies. Amy -- the 17-year-old -- and Colleen -- the 15-year-old -- left anyway, in the direction of the forest ranger's hut. They left in the rain, wearing several sweaters apiece, and ponchos: one was blue and one was yellow.
And so, that day, Pearl stayed with the rest of us girls. We sang songs -- Pearl didn't know the words very well. She told us stories about Hungary. She spoke a few sentences in her native language for us, and we all giggled. It sounded so stupid. She taught us a few words, but all I can remember was her name. Gyöngyi. It meant "pearl." We told ghost stories. We talked about our families and our pets. Pearl had a boyfriend, if I remember correctly. So did the two oldest girls. Colleen was the oldest, and she was hiking over to the forest ranger's hut, but her best friend told all her juicy secrets while she was gone. The rest of us -- most of us were 11 and 12 -- were highly impressed with the girls who had boyfriends. We asked all kinds of questions: what was it like to have a boyfriend? what was it like to go to high school? what was it like to kiss a boy? When we started asking about kissing and stuff, Pearl put a stop to that kind of chatter. Maybe it was just Pearl's nature, but Rosie and I decided that Hungarians must be prudes. We giggled. We wanted to kiss boys. Jackie had kissed lots of boys, or so she said, and she was only 12 or 13. Jackie was 12 or 13 and wore a C-cup. Jackie was a ho. By the end of the week, Jackie had discovered a nest of boy scouts with tents nearby, and spent a night in their tents snuggling up to a nasty fat guy. The boys were disgusting, but they gave us fresh bacon and eggs the next morning for breakfast. I guess it pays to stick close to the sluts sometimes.
The day Colleen and Amy went looking for the forest ranger, the rest of us stayed in the lean-to. We just talked all day. It was the backpacker's version of staying in all day and playing board games and watching football with your family on a rainy day.
It rained. And rained. And rained. Finally, the rain tapered off to a drizzle, and that was even worse, because we thought it might never stop coming down. It was slow and murky and sort of... insane. We ate crackers and cereal and tuna fish.
Finally, the clouds lifted. It was late in the afternoon, maybe five or so. Amy and Colleen still weren't back. But the rain had stopped, and that was enough to raise our spirits.
The clouds lifted off the sky, and the rain evaporated off the trees. A great fog lifted off the mountains. We'd barely been able to see the mountains, and suddenly, there they were, all around us: these great, vast, towering mountains. Rocks hung off the sides of them, like scaly patches of skin. Our lean-to overlooked a lake, and the fog rose off the lake, too, first in thin little wisps, then in great, curling waves. It looked like coffee. The entire landscape: the mountains, the lake, it all looked like coffee. At 11, of course, I didn't drink much coffee, but I knew what it looked like: steam rising in curly little white ripples. You could smell the foresty, bark-like smell of old coffee everywhere. Now that I do drink coffee, I can tell you with some certainty that the forest after a day-long rain shower does indeed smell like stale coffee. A dark, bitter flavor, ground extra fine and left out for a day...
I don't think I had ever seen anything so beautiful as that lake and those mountains after the rain stopped.
I wanted very much to kiss a boy. To light the stupid campfire, to get boobs and clean, dry clothes, to get the tangles out of my stringy hair, and to kiss a boy in front of those mountains. They encircled us like a bowl. The water lay glassy and dormant in the bottom of the bowl, and our lean-to stood a mere thirty feet from the edge of it. There we were: Pearl and nine girls huddling together, learning to speak Hungarian, and thinking about kissing boys in a shitty wooden lean-to encrusted in the side of a Giant's big round coffee-mug.
Amy and Colleen arrived back soaking wet and looking like leftover dog shit microwaved three times. "We both threw up," confessed Amy to Pearl. Pearl recounted our day spent doing nothing, just watching the rain and waiting for our two companions and the forest ranger. Amy described all of her symptoms and all of Colleen's symptoms. "I think we caught a virus from being out in the rain all day," said Amy. I stayed away from Amy and Colleen for awhile.
We stayed another night in the lean-to, if I remember correctly. We moved on, then, pitched tents, set up camp, drank water from streams that had been stirred around with iodine tablets. We peed behind trees. We hung our backpacks in trees so bears couldn't reach them. We told our deepest darkest secrets. One girl said how her dad was an alcoholic and beat her, and she thought she was fat, so she threw up after she ate. Jackie told us about boyfriends and parties. Rosie and I talked about stupid 11-year-old longings: to kiss a boy, to hold hands in school, to get as much attention as Jackie without being so damned nasty...
On the last day of our trip, Amy told us all a secret: Pearl had been keeping a journal... Delighted, we attacked it and grabbed it from her. The composition notebook was tossed aside in frustration when we discovered none of it was written in English, and nobody but me could decipher the handwriting anyway. Pearl and I wrote each other letters for almost two years after that; we were both active writers. But she never told me what was in that journal. I didn't dare ask. I wish I had that notebook; I'd translate it myself if I had to. All the letters and notes I wrote during that trip got soaked. All I have left is the vague imprints left on my brain.
We spent ten days in the Adirondack State Park. I think I learned more about the world in those ten days, more about priorities, more about friends and female-bonding than I learned in my next seven years of school.
I also decided I like coffee. I like it dark, and I like it bitter.
~Helena*
PS -- tomorrow I'll post pictures from that trip...
"Walking through the woods I have faced it, looking for something to learn... 30,000 thoughts have replaced it, never in my time to return... I would give my life to find it, I would give it all. Catch me if I fall..." --R.E.M.