A Walk in the Woods

It takes a week to ten days for most people to cross this notorious expanse. Because
we had two weeks, we had my wife drop us at Caratunk, a remote community on the
Kennebec River, thirty-eight miles short of Monson and the official start of the wilderness.
We would have three days of limbering up and a chance to resupply at Monson before
plunging irreversibly into the deepest woods. I had already done a little hiking to the west
around Rangeley and Flagstaff Lakes, in the week before Katz came, as a kind of
reconnoiter, so I felt as if I knew the terrain. Even so, it was a shock.
It was the first time in almost four months that I had hoisted a pack with a full load. I
couldn't believe the weight, couldn't believe that there had ever been a time when I could
believe the weight. The strain was immediate and discouraging. But at least I had been
hiking. Katz, it was quickly evident, was starting from square one--actually, several score
pancake breakfasts to the wrong side of square one. From Caratunk it was a long, gently
upward haul of five miles to a big lake called Pleasant Pond, hardly taxing at all, but I
noticed right away that he was moving with incredible deliberativeness, breathing very
hard, and wearing a kind of shocked "Where am I?" expression. All he would utter was
"Man!" in an amazed tone when I asked him how he was, and a single heartfelt
"Fuhhhhhhhhck"-breathy and protracted, like the noise of a plumped cushion when
someone sits on it--when he let his pack fall from his back at the first rest stop after forty-
five minutes. It was a muggy afternoon and Katz was a river of sweat. He took a water
bottle and downed nearly half of it. Then he looked at me with quietly desperate eyes, put
his pack back on, and wordlessly returned to his duty.
Pleasant Pond was a vacation spot--we could hear the happy shrieks of children
splashing and swimming perhaps a hundred yards away--though we couldn't see anything
of the lake through the trees. Indeed without their gaiety we wouldn't have known it was
there, a sobering reminder of how suffocating the woods can be. Beyond rose Middle
Mountain, just 2,500 feet high but acutely angled and an entirely different experience on
a hot day with a cumbersome pack sagging down on tender shoulders. I plodded joylessly
on to the top of the mountain. Katz was soon far behind and moving with shuffling
slowness.
It was after six o'clock when I reached the base of the mountain on the other side and
found a decent campsite beside a grassy, little-used logging road at a place called Baker
Stream. I waited a few minutes for Katz, then put up my tent. When he still hadn't come
after twenty minutes, I went looking for him. He was almost an hour behind me when I
finally found him, and his expression was glassy-eyed.
I took his pack from him and sighed at the not entirely unexpected discovery that it
was light.
"What's happened to your pack?"
"Aw, I threw some stuff," he said unhappily.
"What?"
"Oh, clothes and stuff." He seemed uncertain whether to be ashamed or belligerent. He
decided to try belligerence. "That stupid sweater for one thing." We had disputed mildly
over the need for woolens.
"But it could get cold. It's very changeable in the mountains."
"Yeah, right. It's August, Bryson. I don't know if you noticed."