The older brother was drunk. All three of us were, so this wasn’t particularly surprising. What made the incident exceptional was just how drunk the older brother now appeared to be. He had bounded off into the darkness, jumping precariously from boulder to boulder and screaming “Get down! Get down! They’re coming for us, man!”
The younger brother and I stayed seated near our tents and watched as the older brother’s headlamp bounced in multiple directions; up, down, left, right, right again, left, up, and then suddenly down below our view. The headlamp’s light was extinguished just as we heard a loud explosion of glass, which I assumed was the bottle of wine that the older brother had taken with him when he scampered away from our camp.
Just then the thrumming of a helicopter’s rotor blades became much louder as it materialized over the summit of the mountain. What had appeared to be searchlights from a distance now looked more like some type of required illumination for night flights. The chopper continued its ascent and in minutes had flown over and beyond us, leaving us in complete darkness and silence. We hadn’t built a fire at the campsite because there wasn’t any wood up there, and camping was strictly forbidden on the summit. As a matter of fact, our tents were pitched right next to the official forest sign which had been drilled into the rock reminding and threatening hikers about spending the night up here. We hadn’t picked the spot to be wise guys, it was just the flattest and biggest boulder we could find.
After a minute or two of sitting in the stillness, the younger brother turned his head toward where we’d last seen his brother scurry off.
“Hey! You good?” the younger brother yelled into the darkness.
Nothing.
Without talking, the two of us stood and started to walk in what we thought was the right direction. The brothers only brought one headlamp between them, and I was holding my own light and shaking it vigorously, trying to get it to work. The climb up Old Rag Mountain required us to take our backpacks off at several places to squeeze through tight crevasses in the massive rocks. Apparently, my headlamp had gotten jostled, crunched, or dropped at one or more of these junctures and now would only give off intermittent bursts of light when shaken or struck in just the right spot.
Luckily there was little cloud cover and a three-quarters moon out, so once our eyes adjusted we could see more clearly where one rock ended and another began.
“Hey!” the younger brother yelled again, a bit louder this time, “are you alive?”
In the distance, about twenty feet ahead of us, a pile of hair and two small eyes peeked over a ledge at us.
“Are they gone?” The older brother asked, his voice a drunken whisper.
“Yes,” we answered in unison.
“Good,” the older brother replied, scrambling up from his burrow and limping toward us. He reeked of the cheap wine we’d all imbibed earlier, and I could see that his clothes were soaked. Time has erased the particulars of what brand it was or how and where we bought the stuff, but I know for sure that it was a gallon of jug wine – the type that came in a thick glass bottle with a thumb hold on the side. One of the brothers had carried the thing, nearly full, in his backpack up the 5-mile ascent (described as extremely strenuous in most hiking manuals) to the top of Old Rag.
“I’m sorry I freaked out, you guys,” the older brother said, apologetically. He looked at the younger brother, “I think I broke the headlamp, and the wine bottle shattered when I fell down there.” He held the battered lamp from a broken strap in front of our faces.
“You’re such a dumbass,” the younger brother barked, and sprung upon him, causing the headlamp to fall and shatter again.
The two of them soon became a tangle of arms and legs as they wrested around on the rock, grunting and spitting insults at each other. I was used to it at this point, so I just turned around and started walking back toward the tents. Traveling with these two was like having a pair of moody ferrets around. You never knew when something would set one or both of them off, and then they would tussle around swearing at each other until one or the other would start laughing maniacally, and soon after they were the best of friends again.
But I had bigger things on my mind than which of the brothers would win the bought tonight. Our situation was really not ideal at the moment. Camping illegally on a well-traveled trail with only raw hot dogs, dry ramen noodles, and no water left in any of our canteens. It had been easy to cry “Carpe Diem” at the moon and stars moments earlier as we passed the oversized bottle around and voiced our bravado about how we were too tough and smart and young to fear any situation. And then we spotted the helicopter.
I climbed into my tent just as I heard the older brother screech with a strange mixture of pain and delight, “Okay, okay! Let’s just go back to the tent and eat some hot dogs. They’re really not that bad uncooked!”
They were not good uncooked. And they tasted even worse the next morning, but I ate one anyway when I woke at daybreak. Old Rag is a popular spot for taking in the sunrise, because of the panoramic view afforded by the boulder-strewn summit. But thanks to an overcast sky that had blown in, no overzealous hikers trudged up to find our criminal campground.
The brothers shared a tent, and I could hear one of them snoring as I rolled up my sleeping bag then went out and quickly took down my tent, stuffing everything into my backpack. I grabbed a trashbag from several that I always brought along into the woods and collected all the large and small shards of glass that I could find from the wine jug. Forever after that, my backpack and most of its contents would smell of that dank wine from carrying these remnants down the mountain.
In case you’re getting the over-simplified impression that our trio was an example of privileged white males, who just graduated from college and left their fraternities to travel around the country, staying drunk most of the time while posting their high jinks of breaking laws and trying to have sex with anybody willing on social media accounts, I should set the record straight. First of all, the internet wasn’t a thing yet. It was the early 1990s. So we couldn’t search Google for Old Rag Mountain on one of our cell phones (also non-existent at the time) and find out all of the rules and preparations that should have been made for our doomed excursion. The closest we had in those days was a book called “Let’s Go U.S.A. – National Parks and Landmarks,” which my librarian sister had given to me as a way of researching and planning out our trip. But none of us had opened it. At this time, we were not aware of our white male privileges, and none of us had been in a fraternity, although we did all go to the same college and were all from the same small town. Speaking for myself, I had very little “game” when it came to chasing people around for sex, but even more importantly we were all quite “gamey” for the duration of our trip and whenever we entered a town to buy groceries or fill up on gas, most would-be suiters crossed to the other side of the street. And we were only drunk some of the time. In short, our cross-country adventure was not the stuff of the modern-day reality series.
Eventually, the brothers woke up, and we packed up our gear and headed down Old Rag Mountain. The good news was that the trail is designed in a loop, so we would not have to go down the steep, difficult, rock scrambles that we encountered to get to the summit. We had to hike about 4 miles to get back to the trailhead. And 4 miles is better than 5 miles, especially when you are going down a mountain and not up it. But going down has its difficulties and challenges as well. And it doesn’t help when you only have raw hot dogs in your stomach. And you’re hung over. With no water left.
It’s hard to describe just how difficult the descent was and how miserable we each were coming off Old Rag. If you’ve ever been that thirsty, to the point where it’s all you can think about, you won’t need further description. Every natural instinct in your body screams out to find something to drink. We scarcely talked to each other, and the brothers, particularly the older brother, was too tired and dehydrated to wrestle. We marched and trudged and put one foot in front of the other until it was over. The only things in our favor were that we were young, in shape, and had nowhere in particular to be. This was our time – our coming of age – our Rumspringa (although none of us was Amish). We had just graduated college and set out to see America, to find some adventure, and to enjoy our freedom before heading into the daily grind of a conventional nine-to-five job and predictable lifestyle in the workforce (which none of us ended up doing). But for the time being, for each moment, each footstep, we just needed to get the hell off that trail. To find food. To drink water.
I’m assuming that small water purifying systems were available back in the 1990’s, but we had taken the more affordable option of buying a small bottle of iodine pills to treat stream water in just such an emergency. Unfortunately, we would not encounter any streams until the last mile of the hike, and once we did find a stream and add our pills, the instructions emphasized the importance of waiting a minimum of 30 minutes before drinking the water. By that time we were back at our beloved Ford Econoline Van, rummaging around for every trail bar and bottle of water or Gatorade we’d packed. We ate and drank them all, and then slugged down the water we’d treated with iodine – which tasted absolutely awful.
Thinking back on this time, I’m reminded of the number of close calls and near misses I’ve had in my life. I’ve recounted this adventure many times over the years. It makes for an amusing story about immaturity, overconfidence, and the importance of planning ahead. But these takeaways and messages, like so many others during that time in my life (especially the ones that involved drinking) all hinged on luck, chance, or divine intervention, depending on your personal beliefs and experiences. In other words, our trip up Old Rag Mountain could have been life-altering or life-ending if things had happened just a microscopic bit differently. If the older brother had hit his head when he fell. If he had cut himself badly on the broken glass. If any of us had suffered severe dehydration. If a storm had blown in while we were camping on the summit ( I may recount in another blog waking up in six inches of snow on an Adirondack Mountain after getting our truck hopelessly stuck on a remote logging trail – another poorly-planned incident occurring before cell phones existed).
If anything had gone the slightest bit differently, I would be looking at these quirky reminiscences as major, defining incidents. My life before the horrible thing happened – and then my life after. I’m not sure it’s worth mulling over those worse-case scenarios for too long, but I know I’m extremely grateful that I didn’t become a cautionary and grisly statistic as a result of the many poor decisions I’ve made in my life. I’m also extremely grateful to be living a substance-free life in Recovery now. My day-to-day stories may not be as amusing or compelling to read, but I’ll take this sane, structured, sober life to the chaotic mayhem that, in all honesty, always sounds better in the retelling than it was at the time…
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