On a Friday late in July, I took a 7:30am flight out of Charlottesville to reach Boston, having successfully stowed all of my gear and my share of the supplies in two large L.L. Bean duffel bags. Despite the many positive indications, I wondered if Karen and I really would get along, if we could adapt enough to each other’s hiking styles, and if our personalities were truly similar enough. Even two days on a difficult trail can test the best the best of relationships like a marriage, much less with a stranger. The flight boded well as the jet whisked up the east coast through clear skies providing magnificent bird’s eye views of the mid-Atlantic coast, the Statue of Liberty, Manhattan, and the New England shoreline.
I faced the task of meeting someone I had never laid eyes on. I only knew that Karen had long hair, was about my height, and we were to meet at the baggage claim. When I reached my baggage terminal, I suddenly heard a voice, “Heather!” and saw a hand wave. There stood Karen with a huge smile: 5’3”-ish, long, brown hair, shorts, and someone on the lookout for me. I suppose I fit the description I gave: 5’4”’ish, short brown hair with some gray at the temples, wire-rimmed glasses, hiking boots, a long-sleeved, gray clergy shirt with no collar in place, and on the lookout for someone I had never met in person. After a quick hug of welcome, we grabbed my bags as quickly as they appeared and dashed to the bus that took us to a depot where Jeff, Karen’s husband, and Sarah, their daughter, waited. As soon we pulled into the station, we hustled my bags out of the bus, stuffed them into the trunk of the car, and without missing a beat headed for New Hampshire. We made our introductions in the car. How crazy was this?
One of Karen’s friends had asked her what we would talk about since we were complete strangers. Karen’s answer was the obvious one: the trail. Indeed, we “talked trail”—recounting sections we had already hiked, favorite places thus far, and learning each other’s trail name alias, hers “Walkabout” and mine “Prayer and Work” (which she helpfully shortened to P-Dub)—but we discovered that we had so much more surprisingly in common. Music loomed large in both of our lives, especially serious training in classical music: Karen as a pianist at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music as an undergraduate and me as a professional violist in high school. We spoke at length of the undying gratitude we held for the mentors in our lives. We had deep commitments to our respective faith traditions, Karen as an observant Reconstructionist Jew who had made her long-delayed bat mitzvah a year earlier, and me as an ordained minister.
At our campsite that evening in Crawford Notch State Park, we set up our tents, sorted through our respective provisions, and loaded our packs. Karen proceeded to cover the picnic table with a checkered cloth and set it with a challah, wine, and two candles. After lighting the candles, she sang the Sabbath blessing. We all ate the bread and sipped the wine, followed by an exuberant rendition of “Shabbat, Shalom!” Although I had celebrated Passover with my college roommate in my freshman year, this marked my first Shabbat, and it likewise was a joyous, blessed moment. Later that night snug in my tent I sang sotto voce the Compline service that the sisters at Our Lady of the Angels had given me. Wrapped in the warmth of Karen and Jeff’s hospitality, the goodness of Sabbath, and my sleeping bag, I lived a verse of what Psalm 4 in Compline says, “I will lie down in peace and sleep comes at once…”
We arose at 6 as the sun shimmered through the greens, whites, and browns of the birch forest around us. Jeff and Sarah drove us to the trail head, and with final kisses and hugs among the family, and a deep breath on my part, Karen and I took our first steps on the AT together, the blue sky splashed with wispy clouds. Our route that day for most of that day took us on a surprisingly open, gently ascending path marked only by the odd protruding root or rock, the happy scar of an old railroad bed that threaded between rock slides above and a steep, spruce-covered declivity below which ended in the fold of a river.
What many commentators on friendship overlook is the sense of humor and justice that friends share. On our first night, Karen and I began to discover that we had both. While we sat outside our hut and waited for dinner, Karen spied a small brown snake. Keenly aware of the children present because it was a special family weekend at that hut, she called out, “Hey, kids, come see the snake, but be quiet so that you don’t scare it.” No sooner had the words left her mouth than a mean boy picked up the snake to prevent others from seeing it. The snake, however, did not like the greedy boy. Within seconds, we saw the snake drop to the ground and slither away while the boy screamed, “It slimed on me!” “Serves him right,” we smiled knowingly to each other. A moment later when we learned that the snake had “slimed” the boy from the back end, we had to stifle our laughter over the justice that the snake itself had delivered.
On day three the humor tables turned on us. It took us ten hours to hike 7.7 steep miles of rocks, ledges, boulders, and more rocks, sometimes in hot, direct sun with black flies intermittently slaking their thirst for blood by drawing ours. The climb up Mt. Garfield saw us ascend 1,000’ of rocks in half a mile. Two-thirds of the way up, we stopped for a break at the Garfield Ridge Campsite where we sat for about 20 minutes at a conveniently placed bench for prime viewing of the Pemigewasset Wilderness, and joked about “catching rays” and “sunbathing” as if we lolled by the seashore. By day’s end, however, the laugh was on us. The “rays” and “sun” that we had soaked up there and later along the ridge gave us a rip roaring sunburn that even resulted in peeling skin before we made it to Hanover. Because the physical demand of the White Mountains whipped us into even better shape, Karen dubbed our trip the “tone and tan” hike. Although it amused us, we doubted it would do much for a travel agent seeking to market a traverse of the ridge as an alternative to the beach.
Four days later, we found ourselves facing a dilemma at 3:30 in the afternoon that led us into another moment touched by laughter and meaning. Would we hike part of the way up the famous Mt. Moosilauke, or start fresh in the morning? We had received ominous warnings about the ascent. North bounders usually shook their heads and said emphatically, “Ooo, that descent down Moosilauke—it’s a bear,” or “that bit on Moosilauke is really tough.” We met a man who injured his knee so badly descending the year before that he had to halt his thru-hike and have surgery. Moreover, the trail guide italicized “use caution” pertaining to rainy and icy conditions, which we had since learned for other sections meant use caution in good weather. The guide further said that the trail involved using steel hand rungs and wooden steps affixed to the rock slabs “to ascend steeply” along the “many cascades.” In other words, the trail sounded like it could be slippery as well as treacherously vertical going up the side of a waterfall. The word “spectacular” appeared in the description as if to ease the now terrified hiker. As much as I thought about the safety of hiking up such a rock face later in the afternoon, I also had in mind that Shabbat started at sundown. Given the difficulty of the ascent, I wondered if we would have enough time before sundown to set up our sleeping gear, celebrate Shabbat, and avoid cooking supper in the dark. If we hiked to the shelter rather than tented, we would be that much farther down the trail for the next day with its long, difficult descent. The warnings kept sounding in my mind.
In the seven days that Karen and I had walked together we developed a restorative, late afternoon habit, the trail equivalent of high tea—Pop-Tart time. As we faced the decision of whether to press on, we made an important first decision: observe Pop-Tart time. We found a suitable log for sitting on, ate our Pop-Tarts, drink a lot of water, and studied the map. The map showed us that the definition of steep lay ahead: 1,800’ straight up in 1.6 miles. But, as we already benefiting from the break and sensing the day beginning to cool, we calculated that even if we crept up the mountain at half-a-mile per hour, we would make it with ample daylight left. The Pop-Tarts had so refueled us that we renamed them Power-Tarts, donned our packs, and up we went.
The first .3 mile were surprisingly flat, but then we saw our fear: rock slabs with reinforced steel hand-holds and wooden steps bolted into the rock slabs towering 30’ above and higher. Scared, but determined and together, we clambered up the left edge of the stunningly gorgeous cascades, the water pouring along moss-streaked slabs of stone, the late-day sun making it sparkle and glow simultaneously. The beauty and exhilaration of the views alternated with our step-by-step terror to keep us going. Shortly after 5:30 we reached the Beaver Brook Shelter, congratulating ourselves amid our semi-disbelief that we had done it. The view from the shelter was breathtaking as we looked over distant mountain ridge after mountain ridge, including ones we had traversed days earlier. Our shelter mates for the night, who had such colorful alias trail names as Gooch, The Cookie Monster, and Tha Wookie (full red beard and shock of frizzy, shoulder-length red hair), welcomed us warmly as the evening temperature dropped.
Before we ate supper, the reverential and humorous happened. Karen invited me to join her in lighting the Shabbat candle (we did not light the traditional two because an extra candle was heavy enough to carry in a backpack) and observing the blessing over the wine and bread (in this case, water and half of a flour tortilla). She lit the candle and circled her arms over the candle; I made sure it stayed lit in the breeze when she covered her eyes and said the prayer to welcome the Sabbath. We sipped the water and ate the bread. She invited me to say a prayer. I was deeply touched and offered to chant a psalm knowing that our faith traditions shared the psalms. With another nod from Karen, I chanted Psalm 91, “the hiker’s psalm,” using the Compline booklet from Our Lady of the Angels Monastery, only I changed the “he” language to “she” since it seemed more in keeping with the two of us women, e.g. “She who dwells in the shelter of the Most High, and abides in the shade of the Almighty…” When we finished, and Karen had joyfully declared, “Shabbat shalom!” one of our shelter mates spoke up, “Do you mind if I ask you two something?” “No,” we replied in unison and puzzled. “Are you two nuns?” Smiles stretched across our faces. “One of us is Jewish; the other is an ordained Protestant minister; we are both married; and we have young children. That disqualifies us from being nuns.” We explained that we had just observed the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath. I added that the tune I chanted had been given to me by nuns, and that was as close as we came to being nuns. A sense of well-being spread through the shelter, then the glow from the sunset radiated through the shelter leaving us all speechless for a moment. A gentle breeze swept over us, at which point I said to Karen, “Ruach,” the Hebrew word for wind, breath, and spirit. We nodded and smiled at each other.
The moment came as a Godhit. I stood simply grateful, sharing such a blessing with another person on such a journey. Perhaps it happened as no accident on a mountain, for as someone had reminded me several years earlier when I mused over why I seemed to have holy moments in the mountains, “For thousands of years people have been going to mountains to meet their god. Why not you?” That evening I thought, “Indeed. Why not us?” Perhaps it was the Holy Spirit binding us in a way that included each other, that place, and the brief time that passed into the boundlessness of the vista and holiness which held us together if only for a breath.