Diarrhea, a backpacker’s nightmare, hit me like a train running non-stop through station after station. What caused the sickness? Not drinking enough water the two previous days while clambering over the exposed terrain of the northern Presidentials? Hiking up the dreaded Wildcats with their five peaks and clawing foliage in record heat? Stopping medication that had given me jitters, dry-mouth, and insomnia and no discernible benefit? Having eaten something in a high hut the night before that soured in my stomach? Combinations of the above? Regardless of the cause, Karen and I found ourselves at the Carter Notch Hut with me more often in the toilet than not. The sickness struck when we walked into the hut late that afternoon from the punishing hike. No sooner had Karen and I found bunks and set down our backpacks than I quick-stepped it to the privy. Over the next hour I made several of those trips. A brief respite came around suppertime and I ate, foolishly thinking that something had simply needed to pass through my system. Within an hour it started again and continued through the night. Rain came, too, turning into a steady pour as if to underscore the bad state of my gut.
Karen and I had teamed up for a second summer and completed the first leg of our journey by finishing the northern-most part of the Presidentials. At Pinkham Notch, we resupplied our backpacks and set our eyes first on making it up and over the Carter Dome and then steeply down to Gorham, New Hampshire. From there we aimed to hike the Mahoosuc Range with its infamous Mahoosuc Notch, the hardest mile of the Appalachian Trail. Before “The Notch” and its ceaseless jumble of car- and bungalow-sized boulders could slow us to a crawl, my gut slammed on the brakes.
As the night at the Carter Notch hut deepened, dark thoughts of letting Karen down and failure swirled through my mind. Karen had to know that I was not improving because every time I headed to the privy, despite how quiet I was leaving our bunkroom, the door made a slight bang. Sleepless, I kept going over the map and trail guide in my mind to come up with an alternative, what I called Plan B, plotting where we might camp the next day if we tried to hike but had to stop short because of my stomach. But was it worth the risk of dehydration in light of the toll the sickness was taking on me? Would I be placing Karen at risk, too, if we pressed ahead? If we did not go on, what would happen to our trip? I felt so bad for Karen because this was her vacation, and I did not want to stop her progress towards completion of the trail. For a while I could laugh at myself saying, “Stupid diarrhea,” but by 3am the humor had passed with everything else in me.
When morning came and the rain continued to pour, we decided to take a “zero day” at the hut if they had room for us to stay, which they did. It was a good decision because I spent the day going back and forth between bunk and privy. Adding insult to injury, my mood nosedived growing darker by the hour. By early afternoon, I lay in the bed with tears trickling down my face, feelings of failure and worthlessness pouring over of me like the persistent rain. I blamed myself for having possibly eaten something that gave me a touch of food poisoning. I blamed myself for eating supper the previous night, knowing I needed the calories but that I should have given my gut a good rest. I combed my mind to review if I had touched any impure water. I blamed myself for having been on the medication that had made me feel less than 100% from the beginning. I blamed myself for having had such depression that it required medication. I blamed myself for trusting a psychiatrist who seemed dismissive when I explained problems I had before with such a family of medication. I further blamed myself for having had to quit alcohol consumption altogether in April and the major adjustments that entailed, including the medicine. I kept second guessing myself for having carried through with the trip, though I knew that I had worked up to it physically and mentally, and I knew it was what kept me going. I kept thinking that my sickness had let Karen down. I wondered what went through Karen’s mind since she knew of the trials I had been through since April. But I knew that I was genuinely much better than I was in April physically and mentally. Because I was the one who had thrown a wrench into our carefully measured itinerary, I felt it was my responsibility to devise a viable alternative, but I could only think of that one variation on the one I imagined during the night, Plan B, which was becoming less feasible by the hour as my stomach refused to settle.
Meanwhile Karen had been putting her mind to an alternative, too. That afternoon she came to me with the idea that after we stabilized my stomach we could take public transportation to New Jersey and hike the section there, where her husband Jeff could pick us up at the end when he also went to collect their daughter from her summer camp. Though neither of us relished backpacking in the high heat and humidity of a New Jersey summer, such a plan would further our goal of completing the entire AT over the next two years. I was game, but I could tell that Karen had not set her heart on the plan. Indeed, she had not and her mind kept scanning the sections of Maine as well as the mid-Atlantic states we had yet to hike. A gift of God and friendship that is often lies unacknowledged is possibility, especially perceiving possibility and the hope it brings when you think you have hit a dead end.
By nightfall my stomach had not improved, but Karen had come up with Plan C, a stroke of genius that excited both of us. By stepping out of the box of contiguous section hiking, she came up with the idea to skip a part of this year’s planned hike and fill in the gap next year. We could arrange car shuttles to take us to and fro our new beginning and ending points. Goal number one was to stabilize my stomach—what we called “operation cork”—and we laughed that “C” was not only our latest Plan but the first letter in the word “cork.” Karen had not lost her sense of humor and she revived mine. More important, she had not given up on me or our trip. The sickness and the rain had proven no great time for her either, but she knew me well enough that I wanted to keep going even if it meant changing the itinerary. Our goal was to hike the whole trail, and we would do it in pieces, maybe not the pieces in the order we planned, but in pieces nevertheless. I have thought that life more often involves Plan B or C than the original plans people envision for themselves. So plan C it was. Not only would we hike out to a road the next day and get useful medical help by calling my internist rather than the sorry psychiatrist (fired him and got another when I returned from the trip), we would skip the Mahoosuc Notch, get a ride to north of there, and hike initially to our planned destination, beyond if possible. Some say that when life hands you lemons, you are to make lemonade. This time when life handed me the three D’s—disappoint, darkness, despair (maybe a fourth D, diarrhea?)—the solution wasn’t up to me; it was up to God and my friend. God had given me, Karen, one who simply and concretely combined the godly qualities of possibility, determination, and hope in a way that carried both of us.
The next morning had sunshine and we put our plan into action. I only had to stop twice “for relief” in the course of three rock strewn miles to reach the road. More mercy followed. Within a few minutes a van appeared that shuttled hikers between different trail heads in the White Mountains, and we flagged it down. The young woman who drove asked us what we needed—a ride to Gorham. She told us that her bosses did not allow her to give lifts to people who did not belong to an organized hike, but seeing our distress she would make an exception as long as we would not broadcast it in town. With huge smiles we gratefully climbed in the van. I chuckled to myself, “The van from God,” as if there were such a thing. In Gorham, I called my doctor’s office and was immediately connected with an extremely helpful nurse. As soon as I hung up the phone, Karen and I made a beeline for a nearby drugstore, bought Imodium (aka “little while cork pills”), and headed to a hostel where we met fellow hikers and found beds for the night. Through the afternoon as Karen and I walked around the town visiting bookshops and outdoor stores, the pills worked their magic. By suppertime, my color and appetite had returned. “Corked,” Karen declared.
Over the next week, we covered not only the distance we intended but twenty-four additional miles. As a measure of the health that returned, our joy and my humor returned. On our first night of resumed camping, we pitched our tent at a site beside a stream in Maine. It also happened to be Shabbat, so we lit a candle, prayed over a tortilla and water, then danced around the campsite singing to God, the mosquitoes, and dragonflies, “Shabbat, shalom! Shabbat, shalom! Shabbat, Shabbat, Shabbat, Shabbat, Shalom!” Afterwards, we sat on the logs and undertook a funny pseudo-math exercise that I devised. We graphed our mood in relation to the elevation profile of the trail. Oh, surprise! (not)—our mood moved inversely proportional to the elevation change: where the trail went steeply up our mood went as steeply down, and where the trail went down, our mood went equally up. A few days later our humor moved us to ponder the philosophical implications of which part of the mini-Teddy Graham to eat first. If you ate the legs, did that mean you were removing the grounding of the Teddy Graham? If you ate the arm, did you bite off with its potential for “reach”? Or, did you go ahead and put the Teddy Graham out of its misery by biting off its head? We laughed as we looked at each other and said, “It has come to this.” We also laughed with shelter mates over otherwise absurd questions and answers but ones that have particular immediacy when long distance hiking. One man told us about the conundrum he and others face one evening when ants started falling into their food: would they pick out each ant while their food cooled to an almost inedible temperature, or would they go ahead and eat the ants? The man, who was from eastern Kentucky and spoke with a strong twang, confessed: “I just stirred them rascals on in, and they was crunchy.” Others mused about names for specialists in massage. One person whose feet were aching after a long day of hiking over rocks and boulders asked, “If a person who gives you a body massage is called a masseuse, what do you call a person who gives foot massages?” Another hiker quickly quipped, “A godsend.”
The need for Plan C’s continued to mark Karen’s life and mine whether on the trail or not, sometimes humorous, sometimes not, but always leading us to blessing. Who could have imagined us having to find ways to keep from being trapped overnight in the Delaware Water Gap visitor’s center at the I-80, New-New Jersey-Pennsylvania border because we were drying out our rain drenched gear under the hand driers in a rest room? Who could have expected my left knee to require a repair that prevented me from climbing Katahdin with Karen, but opened the door for her to summit it with her husband Jeff for whom the climb marked the completion of his second hike of the entire AT as well as the climax of the hike for her? Who could have anticipated that six years later Karen would be visiting her mother in Raleigh the same weekend I was being ordained to the Episcopal priesthood there, making it so that she could attend? Possibility, determination, hope, courage, and holy delight—all because of my friend who in her special way embodies Plan C.