After my first mother died my father was the only authority in my life and he was gone most of the time, leaving home early in the morning, getting back late at night, strip mining coal in Altoona, Alabama.
I was eight when my brother, Dave, who is two and a half years older, and I started smoking cigarettes.
A really good honey-flavored syrup.
Dad had a syrup factory at our farm near Gadsden, Alabama, where he manufactured Dixie Dew Syrup. The slogan printed on the label he said he made up himself: “Gives a Biscuit a College Education.”
To get money for cigarettes Dave and I began stealing jars of syrup. Then we would ride our bikes to Green Pasture Road, a black neighborhood a mile or two away, and sell or trade the syrup for whatever we could get. Money if we could get it, something else to sell, like turnip greens, if we couldn’t.
And when we had enough money, we would peddle to a store we called the “E-Light Club,” on Highway 74, and tell the man our Daddy had sent us to buy cigarettes. Lucky Strikes or Camels, either one.
Many years later I was visiting relatives in Gadsden and I rode out to the old farm place to see what I could see, past the club where Dave and I bought cigarettes when we were children. The club had been closed for years but the weather beaten sign was still hanging there, by a thread.
It’s hard to appreciate how black total darkness is because we so rarely experience it. There’s always a little light somewhere, if only from the face of a digital clock. So I was surprised when my cap light died on Blood Mountain and I couldn’t seeanything. It was as if I were standing in a closet at night with my eyes closed and the door shut — wearing a blindfold.
I dug into my pocket and pulled out a cigarette lighter. But it wouldn’t light. I discovered later that the flint was wet.
That’s when I told myself: You make one more mistake –if one more thing goes wrong –you’re not going to Maine. You’re not going home, either.
I had a spare cigarette lighter in my tool bag. Now if I could just find it in the dark and coax my fingers, which were freezing and not working all that well, to make fire. I fumbled through my pack and, somehow, I did find it. I shielded the lighter from the wind and got fire. With that light I was able to replace the batteries in my cap light. Now I was back in business. I put the cap light back in my mouth and, in a few minutes, I had my tent up and I was inside, in my sleeping bag, starting to get warm. Outside it was still sleeting.
Did I pray any that night when I was lost on Blood Mountain? Oh yes, without ceasing.
This photo was made at Neel Gap two days later, after the storm passed.
There was light coming through my tent when I woke up next morning. It was 6:40 a.m. Time to move. I had to get off that mountain.
Everything was frozen. I could not open or close zippers. My tent was frozen to the ground cover and the ground cover was frozen to the ground. I peeled them off. The joints of my tent frame were frozen. I huffed and puffed warm breath on each joint, warming them up enough to pull them apart.
Worst of all, I had left my wet mittens outside and they were frozen. I should have slept with them. The frozen mittens were a major problem. Unprotected in that kind of weather your fingers freeze in a few minutes and then they stop working.
I couldn’t just put my hands in my jacket pockets because I couldn’t hike on ice without using my poles. So I stuck my frozen mittens under my shirt, next to my stomach, to melt the ice enough to get them on.
My plan was to walk down the Freeman Trail until I found the A.T. or I found civilization. No more turning back. I jammed my frozen gear in my backpack, strapped it on, and headed down the mountain.
It was slow going on the ice but, two hours later, there it was, a beautiful white blaze. I had intersected the Appalachian Trail. In another 45 minutes, I could see the roof of Mountain Crossings hostel through the ice laden trees. What a beautiful sight! Warmth, food, safety.
NOTE: I got frostbite on two fingers, a thumb, and one of my ears but the sores healed in a few days. The feeling returned to my fingers in a month or two and over the past two years part of the feeling has returned to my toes.
Postscript:
That’s me, sitting by a fire the next day in an outfitter store adjacent to the hostel.
I stayed at Mountain Crossings for two and a half days with seven other A.T. thru-hikers, waiting out a terrific winter storm and zero degree temperatures. I was glad to be indoors, but the hostel was not the toasty refuge I had imagined it would be.
It was cold inside the hostel.
How cold? So cold I wore a toboggan when I took a shower.
Nah, I made that up.
But how about this: the water in the dog’s bowl froze. No, the bowl wasn’t on the porch. The bowl was sitting on the “living room” floor of the hostel. And, no, I didn’t make that up.
