A Very Long Walk in May, Chapter 11

Tuesday May 30, 2017   Day 16.  Still rainy and cold...big surprise.  Started out around 7am and hiked most of the morning in mud and water--YUK--most of the day actually! Now, the guys are starting to understand our incessant talk about the mud.  Done by 4:00 pm and put in over 17 miles!  Guys are understandably tired.  Inclines still kill me.  Warm weather tomorrow?

The very normal gray and foreboding sky amidst the birch trees. The darker blue is Lake Superior

Tess and I attempting to make our way down a little dilapidated stairway to a long dilapidated bridge.  Notice my muddy pant legs and shoes.

Goodbye Gooseberry Falls

After listening to the family in the site next to ours yell at their kids into the wee hours of the morning, I finally fell asleep reminiscing about our conversation with Shay and telling myself that if I slept, I could actually get up and use a real bathroom with warm water in the morning. Before I go any further, let me tell you about these state park bathrooms.  State park bathrooms would, at any other time in my normal life, be disgusting to me.  They are very minimal and often dirty and have things like people hair, pet hair, and old food in the drains of the sinks (There are almost always signs that say “No dish washing in bathroom sinks” but no one obeys this because they really need to wash their dishes.).  But when one has been backpacking in the mud and mire for over two weeks, state park bathrooms become a place of refuge and warmth, despite their normally off putting qualities.  When you take a shower in a state park bathroom, they (meaning whomever is in charge of these places) are VERY concerned that you not use too much hot water.  Because of this concern, they install these push button type showers that you have to compress every 90 seconds to keep the water running.  Sometimes, one can figure out a system by which leaning on the knob can produce a constant flow, but mostly you have to just keep pushing.  This unending knob pushing interferes greatly with one’s enjoyment of what could be a hopefully warm (but often only tepid) and enjoyable shower.*  It also makes the washing of one’s very dirty clothes a type of racing game since you are trying to gauge how many of your muddy garments you could possibly scrub out adequately in the 90 second water flow--usually only one pair of socks.  To make this process a bit simpler and faster, I would often just shower in my clothes first to get them “clean,” then strip them off to bathe my actual body.  The stripping off part was always quite difficult, because wet clothes are hard to manage, and cold, because the minute the water went off, the damp chill of the little shower stall permeated my barely warm skin.  After bathing, I used the tiny washcloth I brought along (large towels are not completely necessary) to try dry myself.  It never fully worked, and I would put my “night time” clothes (remember, one outfit for hiking and one for sleeping?) on my now-freezing self, chattering uncontrollably.  Sometimes, if the bathroom had a hot-air hand dryer, I would try to turn the nozzle upward and absorb a little of the heat.  When you are backpacking and cold all the time, hot air feels like Heaven.

Okay, back to the story at hand.  We arose early, put on all of our clothes because it was, once again, misting and cold. Brent had gotten up early to heat up some water for oatmeal and we sat quietly eating our breakfast at the picnic table, trying to ready ourselves for packing up our wet tents and going on our wet way.  We found our way out of Gooseberry Falls State Park and hiked to the first available campsite in mud up to our ankles.  This mud was so slippery that, at times, we had to be extra careful not to unintentionally ski down the hills. After navigating such difficult conditions, and after getting confused because of poor trail markings, the family agreed that it had been a good idea to stop when we had last night as this type of trail is difficult at dusk. This made me very happy.

Tiny Vampires

The others wanted to hike alone again, but Cole sweetly said that he would hike with me for awhile, so we walked together for rest of the morning.  After lunch, we backpacked as a group past two large dilapidated recliners in an open field, and wondered aloud how they had gotten there (You see strange things like that when you are out in the middle of nowhere.  One time, while hiking in Pennsylvania, we saw a queen size mattress just lying on the side of the trail.  I guess someone decided that comfort was overrated).  Arriving at our chosen campsite in late afternoon, we set up in cloudy (but presently non-rainy) conditions. Tess and I proceeded to go back down the hill we had just traveled up to try to wash in the bubbling brook nearby.  While I sat on the bank and scrubbed my feet, Tess walked right into the shallow water, trying to rinse off some of the accumulated mud.  When she sat down on a rock to inspect the state of her feet, she gave a little shriek; she had lost the mud but gained an entire colony of black leeches--stuck at uneven intervals across both feet and onto her lower legs. I also had a few of them stuck to the bottom of my feet.  Have you ever pulled leeches off of your skin?  Those little suckers are hard to remove (that’s punny) and they hang on for dear life because they want to drink your blood like tiny little vampires.  This is not the kind of discovery you want to make while bathing--especially since the guys had just gathered water for drinking from that same little river.  When we returned to our campsite and reported on Tess’ leeches (she had finally gotten them all off), Cole educated us all on the great effectiveness of Maggot Therapy; it’s a thing. He had listened to podcast about it and the leeches jogged his memory.  When I came home and looked it up on Wikipedia, I found he was actually telling the truth.  Here is what it says: “Maggot therapy is a type of biotherapy involving the introduction of live, disinfected maggots (fly larvae) into the non-healing skin and soft tissue wound(s) of a human or animal for the purpose of cleaning out the necrotic (dead) tissue within a wound (debridement) and disinfection.  There is evidence that maggot therapy may help with wound healing.” And yes, I know that leeches have a medical history as well, so I decided I needed to give that equal play here.  Here is what I found online about these little bloodsuckers: “Leeches have been used in medicine for over 2,500 years. They were more popular in earlier times because it was widely thought that most diseases were caused by an excess of blood. As recently as the 19th century, leeches were used to treat everything from tonsillitis to hemorrhoids. You can imagine what both of those treatments involved.”

Not to be outdone by the drama of the leeches, We also had another visitor that evening. While we ate our supper, we were accosted by a very angry crow.  Apparently, we had invaded his domain because his incessant cawing nearly drove us mad. In our tents now to avoid the threatening storm, we talked tent to tent about the book, The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe; a seemingly appropriate choice considering the trip so far. Cole got so annoyed by the bird’s chatter that he starting throwing small logs into nearby tree branches to try to silence it. Either he hit the bird, or the crow decided it had made his point.  Regardless, the cawing ceased and we were able to get on with our nightly routine which included important things like eating and sleeping.

Post-leech, pre-crow campsite pic with child campers at their respective tents

Speaking of eating, before Cole and Brent arrived, Tess I would share a meal each night that consisted of beef stew, Thai noodles, Mexican rice and beans, or something similar.  We would heat water on our stove, add it to the dehydrated food in the bag and hold it tightly until the water was absorbed and we could split it between our bowls.  We often had to encourage each other to finish because our weariness often outweighed our hunger.  It was not like this when the guys came; they were hysterically hungry, and we had to up our food prep from one bag to three since they kept talking about how ravenous they were.  Guys are weird.  Though we didn’t know it now, tomorrow, the last day of May, would be the last full day of our very long walk. And I would be racked with guilt.  Stay tuned.

*This very unfulfilling showering process always made me think of what Hell must be like--only in reverse--being constantly freezing and then getting the tiny promise of warmth, only to have it time out before you actually get warm, and never being able to actually get a constant stream of glorious hot water to soothe your battered soul.