Therese Marie

5:41am

Shaaades is snapping twigs and tossing them into a fire he just made. The wood is splintering and cracking in the flames. The moon is still out. There are still a few stars in the sky, and in an hour we are going to climb Katahdin.

This is the moment I have been patiently waiting for for months.

“Do you want a bagel and coffee or something?” I ask him quietly. The morning is so delicate I feel like speaking normally would break it into pieces.

“Sure, yeah!” he replies, lighting a cigarette.

We drink cold coffee out of paper cups while the world lightens up and our friends start passing by. Easy Going stops by our camp before advancing. We proclaim our excitement in aggressive whispers. Then 12pack and Coach join in. We share hugs and apples.

 

Shaaades begins to get ready,

one last time.

And he says that after every thing he does:

one last time.

He deflates his sleeping pad,

one last time.

“I’m not even really mad right now,” he says prostrate on the ground. “I’m actually kind of reveling in my misery, ya know? Like, I almost don’t want it to end.”

I want to slap Shaaades in the face,

one last time.

Finally, before we can even realize any time has passed, it’s time to start hiking,

one last time. 

And so begins the strangest hike of my life.

At first I feel like everything is normal. I know it’s a 5 mile climb to the top, but it doesn’t matter. It can’t matter. I’m going to do it, no matter what lies ahead, no matter how difficult it is,

I am going to climb this mountain because I walked 1,200 miles to get here. 

I am easy and even and the guys are ahead because they have long legs and the morning is cool and everything feels…

I pass day hikers and they ask how I’m doing.

“Emotional,” is all I can spit out, because with every step there’s something welling up in my chest.

Fear, anxiety – those are words you could use to describe it. But they’re not really correct. I felt the way a child might feel before going to a doctor’s office for a procedure. I knew that other people have survived this, but I didn’t know what my experience would be like. Truth be told I want to sit down and cry, but I am also too jacked up on excitement and anticipating to stop walking. 

Eventually I catch up to Coach and we complete the rest of the hike together.

When we break tree line, all hell breaks loose.

Unsurprisingly, I feel like Katahdin is trying to kill me. I couldn’t get up this thing easily. It had to be a challenge.

Not only is this some of the more difficult terrain on the AT, there are also 50MPH GUSTS TRYING TO BLOW US OFF THE FREAKING MOUNTAIN. 

I react in my usual way: explosive laughter. I mean, how could you not laugh? This was the end of our journey yet we still felt like we might tumble off to our deaths. There were rocks to scale, the trail kept disappearing, it was so cold we wanted to put on our puffy jackets…but we were entangled in the most important day of our lives. We were doing something so beautifully momentous.

The contrast was striking.

Katahdin has a false summit,

if you didn’t know. I ranted about what false summits to your brain in an earlier post. But this time? Man it is WORSE. It is TERRIBLE. We’re getting close to the top of this huge climb and we think it leads to the summit, right?

“Do you think this is it?” Coach asks me.

“I dunno,” I say, craning my neck. “I mean, I guess so, it doesn’t look like it can go much further?”

“You know, with our luck, it’s probably not.”

“Yeah, I bet there’s a huge expanse of land over the top of that rock.”

We are completely right. 1.5 more miles of land stretch out before us. It’s called the Table Top? I had no idea about this. But in a way, I am relieved. The knots that had been balling up in my chest recede. It wasn’t the end yet! We still had time.

Each step takes me closer to speechlessness.

See, even THAT is worded strange. This is the part that gets really difficult to explain, because as I got closer and closer to the summit, I became…well, I don’t know.

Speechless.

I am not emptied. I feel full, but in different way than ever before. I feel part of everything happening around me. I feel motivated, and huge.

I am on top of the world. 

And then the sign comes into view.

“This is it I SEE THE SIGN I SEE THE SIGN,” Coach yells over the wind. I’m walking in front of him, and I’m feeling some tears well up in my eyes.

My heart starts beating faster and I want to ask a million questions. There are so many things I still want to do, be a part of, I want to make sure I’m guaranteed to be in my new friend’s lives, and at the same time I’m feeling complete enough that I could just die and be happy.

My dear reader, I cannot explain what happened next.

At this moment in time, I really cannot tell you what I was feeling when I saw my friends with their arms in the air, screaming for us to get there. I cannot explain how it felt to touch the sign, to let out a wild call so loud you could probably hear it from Georgia. 

Suddenly I became more than myself. 

I became more than I ever have been in my life. 

Maybe one day I’ll be able to explain it to you. I really hope I can, because right now, nothing seems right. It’s been almost 6 days now since I’ve summited and I still can’t properly articulate the moment.

It was a private joy greater than anything I have felt in my life. 

In that moment, us five unlikely friends stood looking out at the world knowing it was our world, confidently gazing at the quiet dips in the blue distance. We were 5,200ft in the air, standing higher than any of our dreams could have taken us. We surpassed ourselves and became something grander.

We let out a call into the wild, wild world.

This is not the end.

It is the beginning of a beautiful, adventurous life.

Fly on,

Lil Wayne.