Head South Pt. 3

After a visit with Nicole last weekend, I had mentioned it was going to be hard to write about the next piece of our trip south. She shook her head and asked me not to make her relive it. If she was serious, I can completely understand. But in truth, she could just stop reading. So let's move on.

Our first stop on our southern journey was The Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. We had driven all night, well that's not true, Gus had driven all night. All sixteen hours. It wasn't as if we refused to help him, or that he didn't want any of us driving his van, it was simply because the man loves to drive. Gus has the name and the heart of a trucker.

We arrived at our campsite in the early morning. None of us had slept particularly well, except maybe Bremner, who has the ability to fall asleep anywhere. Regardless of how sleepy we were, we had one day in the mountains and we had to make the most of it. We pitched our tents and quickly made our way to the nearest visitor center. The plan was to pick a nice day hike, drive into town for dinner, and go back to our tents so we could get up early and move on to our next stop.

The Smoky Mountains have the largest trail system in North America. 800 miles all together. So we had plenty of options. I had only one qualification for our hike and that was distance. I was determined to make the most of our one day, and proposed we take the longest loop trail possible, which is where it turns a little ugly. "Possible" I gradually came to realize, is a relative term. As the rest of the group was looking at the features of many of the day hikes, subtly trying to convince me to look at some of the neat things shorter more scenic hikes had to offer, I chose to ignore them all and picked the fourteen miler covering a good portion of the map. There may or may not have been protests at this point. Someone might have mentioned that none of us could claim to have gotten much sleep in the last 24 hours (excluding Bremner). I don't remember being particularly interested in any input, though I could have sworn there was a little more agreement from the rest of the group. To hear everyone else tell the story now, it's as if I just started walking out the door and they had no choice but to follow me.

Either way, we made it to the trailhead, parked, and began our long walk across the blue ridge mountains. The hike was immediately beautiful. Everyone was in high spirits and the views got nicer and nicer. As we were nearing half way however, a noise that would become sincerely unbearable began to follow the group. It was the sound of Nicole gasping as she tripped over every root across the trail. It was a normal gasp of someone startled, nothing awful sounding. It was just very, very, common. Hindsight allows for some sympathy. As it turns out, the poor woman was so tired at this point she literally couldn't lift her feet high enough to clear the slightest bump in the trail.

We were all tired when we neared the end, but Nicole was especially so. There is a fantastic illustration of this in a picture of her with about two miles to go, standing next to a beautiful waterfall. She looks exactly like a hostage victim. Exhausted and dirty, with just a hint of a smile to make sure if any loved ones see it, it looks like she met her end bravely.

It was dark when we finally made it to the van. We had spent the entire day on the trail, over fourteen hours, and we could all finally relax on our drive down to dinner. We were halfway to town when Nicole asked Gus if he could pull over. Slowly getting out of the car, she walked to the back of the van and puked. This was probably the low point in the trip.

I don't think the severity of Nicole's hellish romp through the woods was fully acknowledged until we saw what the hike had done to her foot. It looked as if her lower leg had tried to swallow it. It was so swollen it was impossible to see where her foot began. Gus, Bremner and I, after close inspection, diagnosed it as a bad case of "clubfoot". There was no other way to describe what was happening to her. She had contracted clubfoot, and it was, I admit, all my fault.

Looking back now, although I still feel bad for being such an asshole, I am glad we did it. We had a serious hike in the Appalachians, which was a first for all of us. And as for Nicole, I know at many points along the hike she felt there was no way she could finish. I remember Saint Gus asking at one point if she wanted to be carried the rest of the way. But she refused and in the end found hiking fourteen miles, with little or no hiking experience, was indeed "possible". I can honestly say, I was proud of her. I rarely try something I don't think I can do. Whether she had any interest in hiking or not, I don't dare argue, but I think we all, Nicole included, learned just how strong a person she is. And maybe more personally, how forgiving she could be.