Copious and Clear

Out hereabouts, in the Vermont woods, I feel a tad ridiculous. Sweat (and rain) soaked layers of synthetic fabric cling to my hot, sticky skin, but it's cold this morning on the trail. Tendrils of floating vapor twine with the branch-scape above, soaring up into the wizened canopy of the forest. Our progress wends ever downwards. We slog through sucking pools of shiny black mud. We creep down slippery rock faces, our fingertips tracing the craggy disposition of the mountain. Three successive days of rain have fallen, and the Green Mountains are saturated. The excess water travels down with us, leaking from the porous soil, turning our path into a snaking, sloping waterfall.

It's the last day of our five day hike, and we are searching for a dry, flat spot to set up camp so we can spend our last night away from the front country and its highways lined with lights, its showers and ivory toilet bowls and wonderfully ordinary technology.

Lost in my own thoughts, I keep my eyes trained downwards, searching out a path for my mud-caked hiking boots to tread. I'm ignoring the spectacle of our descent, how we all must appear--a bedraggled train of Harvard students, carrying teetering packs on our backs, a swath of human chatter in the primordial wilderness. The mountains make me feel tiny, but it's a welcome feeling, this anonymity. Out here, I'm invisible, and no one is here to poke and prod, to demand my action, to draw out of me some shrewd and erudite retort to the world's clamoring requests. I'm solitary, but not alone. My fellow FOPers inhabit this memory with me. They populate this recollection with laughter, shared pasta, the powerful camaraderie of hauling lumber together up a mountain slope. I speak with them in short bursts, divulging little chunks of my past and receiving similar slivers of their lives in return. This exchange is simple and honest and I put little effort into establishing anything enduring.

The truth is I came out here for myself. I signed up for this trip not to meet people or test myself physically. No, I just wanted to get away, to distance myself in the most drastic way possible from the suburban, cloistered clutches of Tennessee. Out here, in the verdant Vermont back country, I had grieved at each quiet trailhead, each starlit campsite. The natural beauty all around me was like a shot of morphine, numbing the shock of leaving home, helping me cope with all the floating faces of friends I left behind in the airport terminal thirty minutes from my house, whose limp waving hands could not say enough to quell my sense of disaster.

I emerged from the bread loaf wilderness with my FOP mates, covered in mysteriously earned scratches and a glossy patina of sebum. We stopped for lunch by the Clark Brook, and I watched the water as it flowed, so clear and copious.