The very normal gray and foreboding sky amidst the birch trees. The darker blue is Lake Superior |
Tess and I attempting to make our way down a little dilapidated stairway to a long dilapidated bridge. Notice my muddy pant legs and shoes. |
Smiling because the lopsided bridge wasn't giving way under us |
Goodbye
Gooseberry Falls
After listening to the family in the
site next to ours yell at their kids into the wee hours of the morning, I
finally fell asleep reminiscing about our conversation with Shay and telling
myself that if I slept, I could actually get up and use a real bathroom with
warm water in the morning. Before I go any further, let me tell you about these
state park bathrooms. State park bathrooms would, at any other time in my
normal life, be disgusting to me.
They are very minimal and often dirty and have things like people hair,
pet hair, and old food in the drains of the sinks (There are almost always
signs that say “No dish washing in bathroom sinks” but no one obeys this
because they really need to wash their dishes.). But when one has been backpacking in the mud and mire for
over two weeks, state park bathrooms become a place of refuge and warmth,
despite their normally off putting qualities. When you take a shower in a
state park bathroom, they (meaning whomever is in charge of these places) are
VERY concerned that you not use too much hot water. Because of this concern, they install these push button type
showers that you have to compress every 90 seconds to keep the water running. Sometimes, one can figure out a system
by which leaning on the knob can produce a constant flow, but mostly you have
to just keep pushing. This
unending knob pushing interferes greatly with one’s enjoyment of what could be
a hopefully warm (but often only tepid) and enjoyable shower.* It also
makes the washing of one’s very dirty clothes a type of racing game since you
are trying to gauge how many of your muddy garments you could possibly scrub
out adequately in the 90 second water flow--usually only one pair of
socks. To make this process a bit
simpler and faster, I would often just shower in my clothes first to get them “clean,”
then strip them off to bathe my actual body. The stripping off part was always quite difficult, because
wet clothes are hard to manage, and cold, because the minute the water went
off, the damp chill of the little shower stall permeated my barely warm skin. After
bathing, I used the tiny washcloth I brought along (large towels are not
completely necessary) to try dry myself.
It never fully worked, and I would put my “night time” clothes (remember,
one outfit for hiking and one for sleeping?) on my now-freezing self,
chattering uncontrollably.
Sometimes, if the bathroom had a hot-air hand dryer, I would try to turn
the nozzle upward and absorb a little of the heat. When you are backpacking and cold all the time, hot air
feels like Heaven.
Okay, back to the story at hand. We
arose early, put on all of our clothes because it was, once again, misting and
cold. Brent had gotten up early to heat up some water for oatmeal and we sat
quietly eating our breakfast at the picnic table, trying to ready ourselves for
packing up our wet tents and going on our wet way. We found our way out of
Gooseberry Falls State Park and hiked to the first available campsite in mud up
to our ankles. This mud was so
slippery that, at times, we had to be extra careful not to unintentionally ski
down the hills. After navigating such difficult conditions, and after getting
confused because of poor trail markings, the family agreed that it had been a
good idea to stop when we had last night as this type of trail is difficult at
dusk. This made me very happy.
Tiny
Vampires
The others wanted to hike alone again,
but Cole sweetly said that he would hike with me for awhile, so we walked
together for rest of the morning. After lunch, we backpacked as a group
past two large dilapidated recliners in an open field, and wondered aloud how
they had gotten there (You see strange things like that when you are out in the
middle of nowhere. One time, while hiking in Pennsylvania, we saw a queen
size mattress just lying on the side of the trail. I guess someone decided that comfort was overrated). Arriving at our chosen campsite in late
afternoon, we set up in cloudy (but presently non-rainy) conditions. Tess and I
proceeded to go back down the hill we had just traveled up to try to wash in
the bubbling brook nearby. While I sat on the bank and scrubbed my feet,
Tess walked right into the shallow water, trying to rinse off some of the
accumulated mud. When she sat down
on a rock to inspect the state of her feet, she gave a little shriek; she had
lost the mud but gained an entire colony of black leeches--stuck at uneven
intervals across both feet and onto her lower legs. I also had a few of them
stuck to the bottom of my feet. Have you ever pulled leeches off of your
skin? Those little suckers are
hard to remove (that’s punny) and they hang on for dear life because they want
to drink your blood like tiny little vampires. This is not the kind of discovery you want to make while
bathing--especially since the guys had just gathered water for drinking from
that same little river. When we
returned to our campsite and reported on Tess’ leeches (she had finally gotten
them all off), Cole educated us all on the great effectiveness of Maggot Therapy;
it’s a thing. He had listened to podcast about it and the leeches jogged his
memory. When I came home and looked it up on Wikipedia, I found he was
actually telling the truth. Here
is what it says: “Maggot therapy
is a type of biotherapy involving the introduction of live, disinfected maggots
(fly larvae) into the non-healing skin and soft tissue wound(s) of a human or
animal for the purpose of cleaning out the necrotic (dead) tissue within a
wound (debridement) and disinfection. There is evidence that maggot
therapy may help with wound healing.” And yes, I know
that leeches have a medical history as well, so I decided I needed to give that
equal play here. Here is what I found online about these little
bloodsuckers: “Leeches have been
used in medicine for over 2,500 years. They were more popular in earlier times
because it was widely thought that most diseases were caused by an excess of
blood. As recently as the 19th century, leeches were used to treat everything
from tonsillitis to hemorrhoids. You can imagine what both of those treatments
involved.”
Not to be outdone by
the drama of the leeches, We also had another visitor that evening. While
we ate our supper, we were accosted by a very angry crow. Apparently, we had invaded his domain
because his incessant cawing nearly drove us mad. In our tents now to avoid the
threatening storm, we talked tent to tent about the book, The Raven by
Edgar Allan Poe; a seemingly appropriate choice considering the trip so far.
Cole got so annoyed by the bird’s chatter that he starting throwing small logs
into nearby tree branches to try to silence it. Either he hit the bird, or the
crow decided it had made his point. Regardless, the cawing ceased and we
were able to get on with our nightly routine which included important things
like eating and sleeping.
Post-leech, pre-crow campsite pic with child campers at their respective tents |
Speaking of eating, before Cole and
Brent arrived, Tess I would share a meal each night that consisted of beef
stew, Thai noodles, Mexican rice and beans, or something similar. We
would heat water on our stove, add it to the dehydrated food in the bag and
hold it tightly until the water was absorbed and we could split it between our
bowls. We often had to encourage
each other to finish because our weariness often outweighed our hunger. It
was not like this when the guys came; they were hysterically hungry, and we had
to up our food prep from one bag to three since they kept talking about how
ravenous they were. Guys are
weird. Though we didn’t know it
now, tomorrow, the last day of May, would be the last full day of our very long
walk. And I would be racked with guilt. Stay tuned.
*This very unfulfilling showering process always made me think of what Hell must be like--only in reverse--being constantly freezing and then getting the tiny promise of warmth, only to have it time out before you actually get warm, and never being able to actually get a constant stream of glorious hot water to soothe your battered soul.
-->
Tori, it sounds worse all the time. If I had known all this at the time, I might have tried to "rescue" you.
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