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06.11.09
Into The Meatgrinder
The author earns his Budweiser in the foul bush of
southwest Maine's Caribou-Speckled Mountain Wilderness.
by
Derek Pfeffer
 Our
trip into the meatgrinder began on a cold winter night in Lewiston,
Maine. The winds were whipping in five directions and there were rumors
of a frozen corpse somewhere on Russell Street. My friend Greg and I
were sitting on a couch in a function hall he was being paid to monitor,
sipping Natural Light and watching Les Stroud prance around the desert
on “Survivorman.” Stroud was cooking a ground squirrel with a metal wire
and some plastic tubing when Greg spoke up, already slurring his words a
little and drooling from the eyes.
“Make a list!” he
shouted. “Metal wire, rubber tubing. A survival list.”
I took out a piece of
paper and started scribbling:
SURVIVAL LIST
1. metal wire
2. rubber tubing
Two hours later, the
floor was littered with beer cans and the list was affixed to the coffee
table by a 10-inch hunting knife. It was 40 lines long and contained all
we would need to survive an indefinite time in the wilderness: fixed
blade knife, strike-anywhere matches, compass, tarp, rope, tea candles.
Bouillon cubes. It made perfect sense.
Over the next several
months we gathered the items. We bought partially expired iodine tablets
at a good price from L.L. Bean, as well as gasoline camp stoves, axes
and folding spades. The weirder things we had to get from Wal-Mart, like
the tubing and wire, and curved needles for stitching wounds.
Once we had
everything there was little to do but wait for the mud to come out. Greg
turned a little strange while we waited for winter to end, constantly
reorganizing his pack and babbling about terrorists. His plan was to be
ready for the next Red Dawn; he was taking this very seriously. I spent
my time striking matches on my teeth and starting small fires in strange
rooms.
The ground finally
thawed in early May after several straight days above 30 degrees
Fahrenheit, and we set out for the wilderness. Ours was the
Caribou-Speckled Mountain Wilderness, down in the portion of the White
Mountain National Forest that pushes over the border into Maine. The
wilderness encompasses some 14,000 acres and is named after its two
highest points — Mt. Caribou (2,840 feet) and Speckled Mountain (2,906).
“Mt. Caribou got its name after two brothers shot the last caribou in
the region there in 1854,” says the U.S. Forest Service. “Their names
are carved on the top of the mountain.”
Caribou was out of
the question — too many ghosts. We would bushwhack up Speckled Mountain,
following Willard Brook to the summit then coming back the way we came.
And maybe, if we were lucky, we would find the last remnant of some
other species, cowering atop a scrub pine or huddled under a boulder. We
brought the burlap sack and the meat dehydrator just in case.
It was late Friday
evening when we parked the Volvo in a ditch and shouldered our packs,
which weighed just under 85 pounds each. We hiked into a clearing by a
small brook and hung the tarps. Greg rummaged through his food bag for
some canned meats, and I cooked some rice and beans on the gasoline
stove. Darkness fell.
After a slow
breakfast Saturday morning, we brushed our teeth with Dr. McGillicuddy’s
and packed up camp. The air was damp and the ground made odd sucking
noises all around us. We shouldered our packs with mean groans and
consulted the map — not far to Willard Brook, and from there it was two
and a half miles to the summit. Shouldn’t take more than three hours, we
figured. It was 10:00 a.m.
At 3:00 p.m. we
stopped at a small rock outcropping and sat down. Greg’s throat was
hoarse from constantly yelling profanities and my boots were full of
blood. I counted 112 cuts on my legs, and started to doubt my decision
to wear shorts. We ate a slow lunch — more canned meats for Greg, who
was already flirting with the meat sweats, and granola and cheese for me
— and scrunched our faces at the map. A mile remained to the ascent, and
from the looks of the map it was an ugly mile indeed. The contour lines
were so close together they blurred into one. “That will be our death,”
I said to Greg. Greg frowned and called me a pussy.
So we pushed on. At
times we had no choice but to walk in the brook, slogging upstream like
salmon and crawling over moss-covered boulders. The chutes and
waterfalls we bypassed by winding through the scrub pine, ducking under
the jagged branches and shielding our eyes. At one point I heard a
terrible ripping sound and looked down to see a flap hanging off of my
self-inflating mattress. It would inflate no more, by itself or by any
other means.
Better the Therm-a-Rest
than my hip-flesh though, and I smiled at my good fortune. But my mood
quickly turned sour when I heard a series of slurs coming from up ahead.
Greg had buried his left leg in a sinkhole and was struggling to extract
himself. I asked him if he needed help, but he frowned and called me a
pussy.
So I sat and ate some
jerky while Greg ripped off his pack and tried to wrench himself out of
the hole. Once out, he tore through his foodbag and shotgunned two cans
of chicken. By now his entire body was trembling, and I knew he was in
the full grips of the meat sickness. His brain would be gone in thirty
or forty minutes . . .
The trees only got
denser as we continued, the branches more crooked, the roots less
forgiving. Icicles clung to the sides of boulders. I cracked my toe on a
root and bruised my knuckles on a screech owl. Greg started bleeding out
of his ear and it occurred to me that either of us might come out of
this thing with one fewer sense organ than he started with. Ruptured
eardrum maybe, punctured eyeball . . .
So be it. We had
gotten ourselves into this mess and now it had taken hold of us, bearing
us upwards. It was the thrill of the hike, the burn in the muscles and
the fire in the gut. The savage rush of high adventure. I looked at Greg
and his eyes were wild, his mouth fixed in a mad grin and his chin wet
with spittle. He looked at me like he saw the same kind of face, and
nodded in approval. We pushed on.
But the body can only
endure so much, and the mind maybe less, and we did reach a quitting
point. This was around 5:00 p.m. My legs were jelly and I could barely
breathe, and the steepest part of the climb was yet to come. “I’m dead,”
I said to Greg. “I say we camp here and finish in the morning.” But Greg
would hear none of it. He started yelling and babbling about a test he
had to study for. “Either we keep going, or we turn around now,” he
said. “I need to be home tonight.” I shook my head; it would be night
soon. “We can’t walk this thing in the dark,” I said. “We’ll snap our
shin bones for sure.”
“Then we turn
around,” said Greg. He was angry, but deep in the fog of his lizard
brain I think he knew it was right. We drank some water, cursed the
Gods, and turned to descend.
On the way down I
could think only of Chinese food. I felt so battered and close to death
that only the promise of egg rolls and Budweisers kept my feet moving. I
asked Greg what he thought. “Are you kidding?” he said. “I’ve been
thinking that same thing for the last hour. I will eat 40 of everything.
They will ban us for life.”
Three years have
passed since that foul day in the woods of southwest Maine. I am in
Tucson drinking myself into a condition and Greg is in the Marines doing
God knows what. The other night I called him up and told him I had an
idea. “Let’s do the hike again,” I said. “But this time we need to
finish.”
“Are you kidding?”
said Greg. “I’ve been thinking that same thing for the last two years.”
So we mulled over some logistics. Cut packweight to 20 pounds. Don’t
bring the rubber tubing. Limit meat consumption. Forget comfort—think
only of staying alive.
Agreed.
I haven’t done any
bushwhacking since Speckled Mountain. I’ve kept to the trails, where the
miles add up quickly and the blood doesn’t drip so freely. I cover good
ground, but that’s it — I am merely passing through. I’m not in the
woods the way I was on Speckled Mountain, held by the branches and
roots, tied to the Earth. I am not involved; I am in my head.
On Speckled Mountain
we were in the woods, and our blood was on the ground. We were tuned in,
aware, a little insane, in tremendous pain — and when the day was done
we had really been somewhere, and the beer tasted like we had earned it.
Ж
Derek Pfeffer
is a freelance writer, hiker and accomplished beer enthusiast. He's
currently planning his next assault on Speckled Mountain. |
