[at-l] Bear Mountain Tango Part III

[cballs@mindspring.com (cballs@mindspring.com)]

Part III - Bear Mountain Tango

Through the trees I could see the base of the Fire Tower.  I struck out for the final jaunt to the top, which took only several minutes.   The Trail crosses the road again just a few yards from the picnic table, then across a paved road and down into a gully. Just overhead, running along the side of the gully toward the tower is the ruins of what looks to have been a water system of some kind.  Old iron pipe, about a foot in diameter, most of it half buried, runs the length of this portion of the Trail.  Some of the sections of pipe are broken and tossed around like wrecked train cars.  One more lift up the rock outcropping at the summit and I was standing on asphalt again.  

Bear Mountain is a very busy place.  There’s a parking lot and overlooks and the fire tower and a water fountain and a comfort station.  There were about 10 motorcycles parked alongside the road just in front of the tower.  The car parking lot was full and the mountaintop was crowded with sightseers and day hikers and, of course, the motorcyclists who had driven up the mountain on those wonderfully candy colored motorcycles, red, yellow, black and silver.  They looked good enough to eat.  I went straight for the water fountain next to the tower.  I unhooked my pack and nearly fell into the fountain.  There were several people around the fountain, mostly kids playing in the water.  As I was about to dive in, a man standing there with his wife and child said in a distinct European accent,  “I zink ze watar es bad.”  I thought, surely the NY State government wouldn’t try to poison us, at least not here.  How bad could it be?  I sampled a little.  Rusty.  I went for it.  “It’s onl!
y a little rusty, that’s all.  It’s the pipes,” I answered.  The European didn’t say anything, just grinned, haughtily.  He was French.  After drinking my fill and filling my canteen, I milled around the overlook and contemplated the views of West Mountain and the gently rolling ridges that disappear into the horizon.  The vistas open your soul and restore your sanity up here on Bear Mountain perhaps not as effectively as more secluded spots but they still have the power to awe.  I looked South, longingly, trying to imagine the southernmost terminus of the Trail.  Trying to imagine just how difficult it will be.  How beautiful.  It will be early spring in Georgia when I start.  I imagine the trees will just be budding.  I’m madly in love with the Southern spring when every living thing blooms in riotous color, profligate and aromatic.  I miss the Southern spring so badly I ache sometimes.

It was hot.  I pulled off my all-cotton T-shirt and strapped my backpack to my bare back and started looking for a white blaze.  I wandered past the parking lot on the west side of the mountaintop until I spotted it, and down I went across a broad expanse of outcropping and into the trees.  About 100 yards down the Trail I met my first thru-hiker on this outing, an Anglo woman.  She was flyin’ up that mountain with her hiking poles and feet movin’ like she was cross-country skiing.  You shoulda seen her go! But the woman stopped to say hello.  She said her name was Happy Feet and Michigan was home.  She started in Georgia in April and was having an exciting, wonderful time, especially down South.  She said she loved the South.  She said the people were so sweet and generous and she had experienced a lot of Trail magic.  We spoke about my plans for next year and she encouraged me to “go for it.”  She said it would be the best thing I’d ever do.  

Shortly after beginning rather steeply, the Trail becomes gently sloped down the west side of Bear Mountain.  About a quarter mile down it passes a grassy, flat clearing, spotted with large boulders, toward the outer edge of the mountain.  I imagined dinosaurs herding up from below and racing across the plateau. The Trail then enters a tunnel of green, dark and smelling of moist, decaying leaves, until it crosses the road.  Following the Trail along the road, I could see the Palisades Parkway far below, the traffic looked like toy racetrack cars from this height.  I wanted to get off the road.  I don’t like walking on roads, especially paved ones.  They’re hot and dangerous.  After about another quarter mile, the Trail led back into a kind of Disney enchanted forest, uniformly spaced trees all of similar size, clear of underbrush, fully shaded, spread across short, rolling ridges.  Except for mountain bikers on the road, spooned into florescent-colored Lycra and wearing primar!
y-colored insect shells on their heads, I hadn’t seen anyone since Happy Feet.  Just inside the woods, I spotted a perfect stool-size rock about half way up the ridge just above the Trail.  Good place to take a breather, I thought.  I took off the pack, finished off the rest of the water from my canteen and removed my boots and socks.  Once I looked at my feet, it occurred to me that I hadn’t done what I’d meant to do several days before, clip my toenails.  Not that they were grossly overgrown, but they had been tapping the toes of my boots on the way down the mountain and they were a little sore.  I could see how hikers loose their toenails out here if they don’t keep them in good order.  I thought I’d have to just bear it until I got home, and then I remembered that I’d packed some nail clippers in the first-aid kit. The afternoon breezes were blowing through the forest, the sun was to my back, and I had a Trailside amphitheater seat to watch the hikers walk across the fores!
t stage as I set to work on my nails.  By the time I got to the little one, I’d cut my finger.  “Damnit!”  I’ve never cut my finger before while clipping my toenails.  I was hot, tired and the clippers were not big enough.  It wasn’t a serious cut, just enough to break the skin and bleed.  A day hiker couple passed from the south while I sat there bleeding.  I didn’t doctor on it.  I don’t know why.  I mean I knew it was unwise not to put something over it.  It could easily have become infected, dirty as I was by this point.  But it only bled for a minute, besides I’d already done what comes natural - I’d stuck it in my mouth.  Who knows what the couple thought as they passed: a middle-aged, barefoot man in the woods sucking on his finger.  No wonder we didn’t speak.  I decided to use the scissors I’d brought along to finish off the job.  Which worked fine and made me think that perhaps I didn’t need the clippers at all.  One more thing I could mark off my packing list.  After!
 recovering from my run-in with the nail clippers, a young man appeared over the ridge from the southward direction.  I called down to him, “Hello.”  He looked only barely old enough to be out here by himself.  I asked him if he was thru-hiking.  He looked packed enough to be thru-hiking, but a little too clean.  No, he said, he and his buddies were on a five day hike from New Jersey to Connecticut.  Two more young fellows rounded the ridge and passed us by.  He fell in behind them and they went toward the road.  After a minute or two, three more young men came up the Trail from the same direction.  “Hello,” I called out.  “You guys on your way to Connecticut?”  “Yeah,” came the chorus.  “Well, your buddies were just through here. They’re lookin’ for ya.”  They smiled and dropped their heads down toward their chests in that blushing boyish way as they picked up their pace again to move on.  I watched them as they crossed the knoll and then disappeared from sight down the other!
 side.  I could hear them laughing all the way to the road.  It made me want to go to Connecticut too.

I reshoed and reharnessed and set off.  The Trail meanders around for the next one half mile or so, up and down, through some gullies, over some knolls, over rocks, bald spots, clearings, brush, weaving and zigzagging until it begins a sharp descent down to another highway. Just before descending, a young man came up behind me and passed me.  He wasn’t carrying anything, just walking.  We said hello but neither of us stopped.  It was getting on toward early evening and I needed to get up West Mountain.  I was aiming for the shelter before pitching camp.  I caught up to the same guy half way down the steep rocky slope next to the road.  He spoke this time and said he was just out for the day.  He said he was from Staten Island and his girlfriend hadn’t wanted to do anything so he came out to walk in the woods.  He was looking for the Freedom Trail or the Thomas Jefferson Trail or the George Washington Trail or maybe it was the Thomas Paine Trail.  It had some kind of patriotic !
ring to it anyway.  At the road, a short, fat, late middle aged white man sat on the guard railing.  He didn’t have any kind of pack with him.  He saw my rented EMS 4500 blue backpack and my beautiful Fabiano Rio hiking boots and assumed I was thru-hiking.  “You thru-hiking?” he asked.  It was kind of an ego boost to be mistaken for the real thing.  But I don’t mess around with that stuff.  I didn’t know this man from Adam’s housecat.  For all I knew he coulda won the Thru-Hiker of The Year Award or something.  He mighta had a whole shelf of hiking trophies at home for all I knew.  If I’d said, “yes,” he might have started to rattle off place names and names of mountains and trail towns and hiking legends and hiking lore and expected me to be conversant with all of it.  I woulda had to stand there and go, “Duh, yeah.  Really, yeah. Ummmm.  That’s right. Oh, yeah” and ended up sounding like a country fool, even if I am from the country and have played the fool a time or two.  B!
esides, I didn’t want to go down as the first person in history to impersonate a thru-hiker.  I don’t mess around with that stuff.  “No,” I confessed, “I’m just practicing.” Well, as it turns out he’s a section hiker, and he spoke with some authority about various sections of the Trail.  He said you can’t really prepare for it, the thru-hike.  You just have to lay around and get fat like he was and then go out and loose the weight walking up and down mountains.  He warned me about blisters and snakes and hornets and pack weight and shelters and poison ivy.  He said he didn’t want to keep me any longer cause the hike up West Mountain wasn’t going to be a piece of cake and I better get on if was going to make the shelter before sundown.  He told me it was off the AT on a blue blazed trail.  I never did ask him why he was standing on the side of the road.  I didn’t think it was any of my business.  Later, after I thought about it, I decided that no one worth their thru-hiker salt!
s would have confused me with a real thru-hiker.  I wasn’t near grungy enough.
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End Part III