Forest Under My Fingernails: Reflections and Encounters on Vermont’s Long Trail

by Walt McLaughlin
Watercolors by Roderick MacIver

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Walt McLaughlin has backpacked extensively throughout the Northeast during the past twenty-five years. In this book, he describes his 267 mile backpacking through hike on Vermont’s Long Trail. On the back cover, Walt says, “The forest is under my fingernails. A mountain stream runs through me. My skin smells like rotting leaves underfoot. I inhabit these woods no less than the fleeting deer or chattering chipmunks. Three weeks on the trail and I belong in this green universe…”

Excerpts from the book:

The surrounding forest looks familiar but I’m not quite in sync with it yet. A part of me is still in a Williamstown cafe, enjoying brunch with my wife, Judy, while listening to classical music. It will take a while to match the natural rhythm of things. Several thresholds have to be crossed before that can happen. The first will come in a matter of hours; another after a night in the woods; yet another in a few days. I relish this gradual return to a simpler existence, yet something deep inside me recoils in the mute terror from it. More has been abandoned at the trailhead than the mere amenities of modern living. With a little coaxing from the forest, a wilder self will slowly emerge but only at the expense of something more refined, genteel. It’s a trade-off to be sure.

...Steady movement is much like a mantra chanted over and over. Steady movement reduces inner confusion, and chaos the same that white noise drowns out the invasive, distracting sounds of daily life. I immerse myself in the Eternal Present as I walk, reeling in the absolute immediacy of a trail twisting and turning through the trees. The forest opens to me. Around every bend, a new world awaits – a glimpse of some wild creature darting across the land, a beaver pond appearing unexpectedly, a rare flower blooming. There is no end to it. I savor these small, elemental surprises as the abstract concerns of a more complicated way of life gradually fade away. I become a part of the forest – a woods wanderer, a seeker of wild things, a chaser of butterflies. And the gap between self and other narrows.

After regaining my senses, I venture beyond the safety of the mosquito bar. I make a dash for the pond, keepingChipmunk one step ahead of the swarm. At the water’s edge, I quickly shed my clothes. Then I ease into the cold water as slowly as possible, prodded all the way by bloodthirsty bugs. Unfortunately, deer flies continue circling my head even after I’m neck-deep in the pond. I try to splash them away but they are persistent. One deer fly crashes into the pond’s surface with waterlogged wings. I take note. So does the frog sitting on a rock along the water’s edge. In the next moment, he’s into the lake with an enthusiastic leap. Then his two amphibious eyes are level with mine. The foundering deer fly quickly disappears in a frogmouth swirl of water. I howl with delight, then shoot down another fly for my hungry friend. In a matter of minutes the frog has a belly full of bugs and the skies immediately overhead are clear.

Yesterday’s long hike took more out of me than I thought. Or perhaps it’s just the cumulative effect of so many days on the trail. Either way, I have no energy this afternoon. I drop my pack then sit on a rock to rest. I am carrying too much weight– that’s for certain. Too much food; way too many nuts. It’s time to find some hungry chipmunks or squirrels.

“Hello,” someone says.

I nearly fall off the rock. Looking up I see a tall, thin man standing calmly before me. No idea how he got there.

“Hello,” I say right back. Eyeballing the man’s small rucksack, I add, “Out for the day, are you?”

“No, I’m going to Harper’s Ferry.”

“West Virginia?” I respond skeptically. He nods his head. Upon closer inspection, I can see that this is no ordinary man in front of me. A wild-eyed, fortyish fellow toughened by hundreds of miles of rugged terrain, he’s obviously a seasoned Appalachian Trail hiker. All skin, muscle and gristle. Wandering Oak he calls himself. Bona fide trail junkie, traveling ultra light. Not an ounce of excess weight on him anywhere – not in his pack or on his bony frame. One of those mythical creatures I’d heard about but hadn’t encountered until now.

As if to convince me that he’s telling the truth, Wandering Oak opens his pack to show me a complete though remarkably compact outfit; a rain parka that fits comfortably in the palm of his hand, a first aid kit in a sandwich bag, a food bag the size of a grapefruit, etc. Says he can hike five days on that much food. Yeah, right. No wonder he’s so thin. Yet I admire him. He’s the wizened trail Buddha while I’m a mere novice, muddling blindly towards one-hundred-mile enlightenment. He floats over the ground while I pound the rutted path deeper into the ground. But admiration sours to envy, then to outright resentment as I shoulder my immense load. Out of sheer spite, I’d like to saddle the guy with a two-pound bag of nuts. But no, he’s too smart to accept it. Besides, the encounter doesn’t last long enough for me to even attempt a hand-off. Wandering Oak isn’t one to stand about idly very long. After zipping up his pack, he says goodbye then scoots down the trail with absurd ease. I lumber in the opposite direction, groaning uphill, wondering if maybe I should leave long-distance hiking to those who are better suited for it.

A short while later, I see things in a different light. It occurs to me that the longer one stays out here, the more of an outsider one becomes. Take Wandering Oak out of the woods and what do you have? Can’t imagine him being anything but a street bum back in the lowlands. Hiking isn’t the only thing I do, thank god. I have a life beyond these trees. But who knows? Maybe he does, too. Maybe Wandering Oak is a computer scientist, a stock broker or a corporate lawyer in his other life. You never know.

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A dragonfly lands on my leg. I shake it off without thinking. When it lands on my leg a second time, I try to remain still. The twitch comes anyway. A short while later, the dragonfly returns. This time I am a stone. The ancient, winged creature rests motionless on my knee for as long as it wants before flying away. It’s a brief encounter, only a few breaths of divine communion. But that’s long enough to acquire a different way of looking at things.

When the dragonfly darts away, I feel strangely calm, as if the primitive forces at work out here have just liberated me from all petty concerns. Suddenly, I am in a world as enduring as the elements themselves. I take a long, hard look at the pond, gazing through the reflection of sky and self to see tiny lifeforms swimming around. The muddy bottom of the pond is as unfathomable as life itself. Its subtle wisdom eludes me but I become aware, at least, that there is more going on here than meets the eye. Only then does it occur to me that my journey into wildness is just beginning
.

In Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard wrote: “I came here to study hard things – rock mountain and sea – and to temper my spirit on their edges.” While rambling through the Green Mountains, I graze the forest for whatever morsels of insight come my way. Forest ecology is a straightforward study; casual observations of animal behavior rarely illuminate; the linear trail underfoot offers few profound realizations. But every once in a while something happens, something appears out of the corner of the eye, providing an opportunity to see through the mundane. It’s nothing less than a glimpse of undiluted reality, a flash of the divine. At such times, I pay careful attention. I try to grasp the full significance of the encounter but that’s extremely difficult to do. More often than not, the divine eludes me.

To study hard things – concepts as hard as granite. To study nature – the quasi-mystical relationship between all things animate and inanimate. To study concepts like God, humanity, the world and all those other vague, half-baked notions that surface whenever one is alone in deep woods. Two conscientious hikers might chatter emotionally about saving the earth as they pound a trail together but rarely do they dig deeper. In solitude, harder things emerge – things that resist definition; things that platitudes always miss; things that propagandists and advertisers cleverly avoid; the very things lost in translation whenever philosophy and religion become institutionalized, fossilized, hopelessly political.

Life itself, that ethereal subject, is the absolute hardest thing of all – a vexing cosmological ambiguity forged by the most mysterious forces of the universe. A great deal of effort is necessary to secure any truth concerning it. Such truths, buried deep in the earth, are as rare and as difficult to extract as diamonds. By contrast, half-truths are as easy to come by as acorns in autumn. In fact, it is nearly impossible to keep from stepping on them.

After dropping my gear at Watson’s Camp, I stumble down the trail on the far side of the pond to a rocky spot that allows easy access. There I strip off my clothes and slip into the water. I float like a waterbug on the pond’s surface, between the superheated air and chilled water, with a lunatic grin and happy splashes. I giggle skyward, reveling in the absolute delight of cool, wet relief before swimming froglike back to shore. Only then do I notice the rumbling in the pit of my stomach. Such a primitive way to live – from one sensual experience to another. The trail has stripped me down to fundamentals. The wild flows through me like an electric current. I can’t imagine any other way of being fully in the world, of being completely here/now.

After seeing a few bears up close and personal, I have developed a tremendous appreciation for them – not because they are especially majestic creatures and certainly not because they are gentle, warmhearted ones. Simply put, they represent an alternative way of life on this planet. And that, I believe, is reason enough for us to find a way to cohabitate with them. I do not fear bears, wolves or wildcats nearly as much as I fear living in a world that has been completely tamed. Then there will be no chance of us becoming anything more than the arrogant, self-absorbed, self-serving creatures that we are now. Only those relatively large, toothy creatures keep alive any hope of our eventual rehabilitation. Once they have all been either domesticated or eliminated, we will have no choice but to live in a world entirely of our own making.

God is that which creates order out of chaos – the ultimate paradox of the universe. Nature is the sum total of all that is ordered and unordered, known and unknown. The very essence of our humanity is tied inextricably to wild nature, yet is is precisely the wild that suffers most from our thoughtlessness and hubris. How terribly ironic! We congragulate ourselves for all the technological advances we’ve made over the millennia, as if our problems could be solved by mere technique alone. How quickly we forget our natural history. When we reach the end of our evolutionary tether, it’s doubtful that we will perish in a blaze of apocalyptic self-annihilation. More likely, we will fade in a whimper of bloodless attachment. Perhaps the civilization we have been building will outlast nature as we know it. To what end? As the wild goes, so goes our collective soul. Love and care – it all comes down to that. What matters most? Either we love the world or we hate it. There is no middle ground. In the final analysis, either we revel in creation or we disparage it. The choice is clear.

The hike up Carlton is an odd mixture of sweat, drizzle and chilling breeze. Out of necessity, I put on my rain jacket to finish the day’s hike in relative warmth. A pair of southbound thru-hikers, as fresh as wild lilies in early spring, stop me for a brief trailside chat. I recite a litany of nearly dry water sources between here and Mt. Mansfield before realizing that this afternoon’s deluge has probably changed all that. My spellbound audience ignores the rain-soaked forest surrounding us as they listen to me. Surely they see the dust in my eyes. Or perhaps they are mesmerized by the filthy, dripping wet, wild-eyed ragamuffin standing before them – a vision of themselves a month from now. With weather-beaten skin, bandaged joints and straw like hair, I must be quite the sight to behold.

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