Foul morning
Today, we woke up in a stinking and full hut, rows of dripping shirts and underwear hanging from the ceiling, soaked shoes lining the walls, 12 people packed in a small double-decker hut with only a small doorway for air circulation.
I hiked with Typical, Sideshow, Globetrotter, and Pig Pen, knowing that each obstacle passed is one fewer between myself and the completion of the hike. We clambered up and over a series of bald granite domes on nearly sheer faces of rock. On top, there were knee-deep or deeper alpine bogs, filled after the heavy rain, loose like quicksand. Our legs were brown and dripping. This was good reason to feel ready to move on with life.
Creative movement
Then we descended to Mahoosuc Notch, a famous gap. The notch demands one’s best acrobatic skills, activating the arms and core after much dormancy. The notch is ringed with cliffs and filled with jagged bounders. It’s about a mile long but takes two hours or so to finish because of the navigation and climbing challenges. You swing around tree trunks gripping the edge of a granite cliff, hold on a gnarled root while you dangle over an edge, crawl through a tunnel under a rockpile. I completed the section with Showtime, and both of us were glad to show off our moves and creative routes to each other.
In the notch, we literally passed through a tunnel, which made me examine my tunnel vision. This section of trail is no doubt the most difficult of all, but in the tunnel, I was struck also by how much fun it was. It became not a day of drudgery but instead, of creative movement, exploration, geographic wonder, calling upon my body to overcome. Approaching the trail with tunnel vision, focused solely on getting to Katahdin, would lead me to miss the wonder.
Why do we focus on the destination, not the journey? Why do we tell ourselves to keep our eye on the prize? Mostly, efficiency and coping explain this. Until the journey takes you through a Mahoosuc Notch. Suddenly, the journey itself – not just the destination – is a physical and psychological reward. This reward reminds us to stay in the present, to be less goal-oriented, to remember the future is not yet here. We live in a continuous sequence of nows. I will not let tunnel vision take now away.
