I suddenly remembered a story I have to tell you. I just got in from another of my cathartic late night drives and part of it took me through a random stretch of fog and I was reminded of this story.
It's spring of 2004 and we're on one of several training hikes for Philmont. It was a troop trip to the Carver's Gap area, and there were at least three different crews taking different routes based on experience of the boys. Each crew's route, however, afforded each the night at the Overmountain Shelter, or the Barn. The events of this trip were responsible for at least three trail names, as I recall. First was Thomas, who decided to lose his retainer in the brush on the side of the mountain, and, through my complex thought process, became Gumdrop. And the Irishman whose real name I still don't know was dubbed Icepick after the icecicles forming on his cheeks and brow, and the general assumption that he would be the type to scramble up Everest with nothing but an icepick. Later, Panama would recieve his name because of the hat he always wore, but mostly because we felt he needed a name in order that he should feel more included in the crew spirit. Anyway, this was a Philmont training trek, and so our fearless leaders decided that we ought to follow full Philmont procedures for setting up camp, according to their interpretation and not that of Strawberry and myself, the two who had previously been. They thought it a good idea that we should set up the dining fly just like we would at Philmont and told us how. Then we did it like we knew it should be done, much to their distress. Our sister crew set theirs up a few yards away in some convoluted fashion that hardly stood through dinner. In the morning we found it quite down the hill. The area at the barn is a flat, narrow strip of grass situated on the side of the mountain. The grass had just been cut and on both slopes the land was clear of most large growth for some distance. Beyond the barn, the underbrush got thicker and large trees appeared. Looking out from the barn, one can see down a beautiful Appalachain valley, complete with Christmas tree farms and the Blue Ridge Parkway. As far as mountain vistas go, this is maybe not be my favorite, but is doubtless a fine one. We set up our dining fly right next to the up slope, facing it. The back of the fly sloped to the ground and faced out away from the slope. Of course I would not discuss a dining fly in such great detail if it were just a dining fly. Again because we were hiking under the guise of Philmont training, we were instructed not to sleep in the barn, as is the custom for both through hikers and weekenders, but rather to set up our tents in the narrow feild before it. This seemed quite absurd, as they should know we are all quite familiar with setting up our tents. So, in the true smart-ass style we sport (you know how we do), we decided to defy them only through technicality. We did not sleep in the barn, as was the rule, but they never said said we had to sleep in our tents. We used all our tents flies as well as those from the boys sleeping in the barn who also did not set up their tents, and we fashioned a rather large lean-to with the dining fly as the base. We put the flies up and out around all sides of the dining fly, extending it out both ways and up the hill for a roof. Then we took ou groundcloths and layed them for the floor. If I remember correctly, there were at least five of us in there (not everyone decided to participate in our little exercise), and it was not at all crowded. Truly this construct would stand as a monument to our skills and expertise as woods engineers. We had some problems though the night with the wind and such knocking the flies loose of the poles, but a little duct tape and a little apathy took care of that without being too much more than a mild neusance. I was much more displaced a few years earler when the massive wooden cross-beam of a heavy canvas tent fell on me during a storm at night a few years earlier, or in Florida when the Spanish moss in the tree above us caught fire from a lightning strike. Have you ever experienced a genuine a legitimate fear for your own life? Not this time, it's just the mist at Carver's, the ever-present drifting mist that did its best to generally soak us as well as pool in the roof fly and pour on one or another of us every time the wind blew. None of us really slept that night. We all did that drifting in and out of being half-asleep thing because we were so cold and wet and pissed off at the pole that kept falling down and dumping water on us even though it wasn't raining. Naturally, though, the leaders know we slept like logs. We made such a big deal out of making this thing and about not doing what they said just because it was what they said that we couldn't back out of this thing now. No, we had to stick it out in there or we'd never hear the end of it. But that's not the story I came here to tell you. I told you that story to tell you this story. I got up to piss sometime during the night, and I went out into the trees behind the barn a ways. Going out all I could think of was how cold and miserable and having to piss I was at the time, but the trip back to the hovel was quite a different thing. I strode through the mist of the silent forest hearing not but the crunchy squish of my steps. As I passed the barn towards the open feild, I saw the brightest darkness there could be. I turned to my right, where the down slope and that pretty view would be and saw nothing. I hadn't thought that nothing could exist, that there could be a nothingness so clear and light and yet so very cold. I've been in a cave, where there is absolute darkness, but even that was not this kind of nothing. In the pitch black you don't see anthing because you ca't see anything. But there is a difference, I think between not seeing anything and seeing something that is nothing. Out there that night, I actually saw nothing; as if it were a thing to see, I saw it and I felt it. I could see things within a few feet of me, but beyond that the whole of existence was consumed in a blinding blanket of light or darkness, I do not know which. In the face of this nothingness, and the exhausted delirium I was in, I would not have known there was existence. The cold pierced me and paralyzed me. I looked deep into the nothing and it reached its icy hand into me, and yet I was warm, hot even, in my mind. I felt my body shiver, but knew only an absence of temperature of sensation. I could not move, either because of the cold or because I did not want to turn my back to this thing that was nothing. There's no telling how long I stood there captive, as I do not know how long I was ever sleeping before I got up, and in general I have a terrible sense of time (gives me my incredible patience), before I finally wandered back to the lean-to and went straight to sleep until the morning.
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