A Hiking We Will Go

Hello friends,
Safiul has come back after recharging his batteries to give us his beautiful account of the many hiking trips he has undertaken.
His account makes you feel you are part of the trip.
Reminds me of our own trip to Tiger Hill and The Balason valley.
I really liked it.

Radheshyam

Oh to be in England, now that Spring is here.
Oh to be in England, drinking English beer!

But I’m in New England. Furthermore, I don’t drink any alcoholic beverage, beer or otherwise. Yet it is spring and the blooms are everywhere, tulips are pushing up out of the soil, forsythia and cherry are wafting gently in the breeze. So, perhaps for persons such as myself this would be truer:
Phool khiley shakhon mey nayi
Aur dard puraney yaad aaye.”
[Rough translation: Blossoms flower on boughs anew;
And Oh! recall they old melancholies too.]
Actually, such shayeree also is no longer applicable. Sweethearts, who inflicted sweet hurts, are now long vanished from memory.

Nevertheless, winter is over, the skis have been put away and if “In the Spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love”, what’s an old man to do? -- Go hiking!

No better place to do that than here in good old New England. I call walking on paved surfaces walking and walking on trails hiking. Even tiny Connecticut has some 400 to 500 miles [644 to 805 kilometers] of blazed trails. Blazes are painted marks placed on trees in a scheme such that soon after the hiker passes one blaze, the next blaze comes into view. By following blazes a hiker remains on the trail. Surprising how easy it is to get utterly lost by wandering off the trail. Above the tree line [elevation above which trees do not grow], blazes are placed on boulders. Lacking boulders, cairns [stacks of rocks] are built to mark the trail.

Hiking on a trail is at least twice as strenuous [often much more so] than hiking the same distance on a paved surface. If you pack a lunch, water, and extra clothing, as you should, that dramatically increases the expenditure of energy. But the rewards of hiking are not just salubrious. Even in taciturn New England, you’re going to meet the friendliest folks while hiking. That sensation of achievement upon accomplishing a goal with hard effort is also tremendous. Many claim to feel a “hiker’s high”. I’ve not experienced it, or not recognized it as anything other than exhaustion. Although, I have experienced “a second wind”, which is pleasant, but hardly what I’d imagine a “high” should be. I usually pick hikes that culminate in a peak with views [or a waterfall or some feature of note] – and gazing upon that vista, one that few people get to see [because they can’t drive up to it], is akin to “earning it”, or “winning it”, like a prize.

Our “walks” towards the end of the school year in Goethals, by my definition, would be called hikes. I remember most of the boys hated them, because they took away [once a week] regular games. Others, like me, klutzy and uncoordinated, therefore, no jocks, secretly liked them. Around that time, I read a book, written in Bangla, called “Charanik” [rough translation: “Hiker”] by a Bengali who had hiked around Germany in the 50’s when he was student there. By these events [going on ‘walks’, reading a captivating book on hiking at an impressionable age], a seed must have been planted in me. But that seed lay dormant because I really didn’t do any hiking before coming to New England two and a half decades later.

Here was the perfect soil for my hiking seed to germinate. There is a culture of hiking in these parts. There are businesses catering to hikers, books on hiking, hiking clubs. There are a huge number of volunteers who give up their time to maintain trails, to clear brush, cut away fallen trees, repaint faded blazes, reroute trails, fix trail shelters, pick up trash, etc. Aptly are they often referred to as “trail angels.” There are gorgeous hikes in New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine and pretty ones in Massachusetts and Connecticut. The germinating seed sprouted. Soon I converted my immediate near and dear to a family of hikers.

On a hike in Massachusetts 20 years ago, my wife felt utterly exhausted. This was remarkable enough to warrant a doctor’s visit. That’s how we found out our son was getting ready to see the world! Our hiking did not stop, we simply took easier trails. In that sense, my son has been hiking since before he was born. After he was born, before he could crawl, sit up or stand, he went on hikes with us carried in his Snugli. You know how women in North Bengal [Jalpaiguri, Darjeeling] carry children on their back, slung in a sari or kantha [quilt stitched from old saris]? Well, Snugli is a commercial version of that sling – that carries the baby in front snuggled against you body. When he grew bigger, I carried him in a carrier [a backpack adapted to carry a child]. Now, of course, I’m just too irritatingly slow for him to go hiking with. He has been a leader for 3-day overnight orientation hikes for freshmen at his college. As for my wife, whatever her other idiosyncrasies, she’s a great sport when it comes to hikes. She’s terrified of heights. Yet, she has come on hikes where the trail was so steep that iron rungs were planted in the rocks to provide handholds. Below gaped hundreds of feet of abyss.

I’m not very regular in my hiking. But I’m the most regular of the three of us. When I first started, I did as many different hikes as possible. As the season progressed, I would become fitter; more difficult terrain would become a breeze to negotiate – with aplomb and tirelessness, with an impatient quickness. All that’s gone with the wind. Now, the first hike of the week is nice, because I’m rested. The second is slightly onerous. The third is tiring despite being undertaken at a slower pace. Also, I’m growing increasingly paranoid. Lyme, Connecticut, is the town from which Lyme disease, carried by the deer tick, gets its name. Since deer infest the land here, Lyme disease is rampant. So now I mostly hike on one selected trail. I’ve chosen it because it is broad, so I don’t have to brush against bushes or step on grass – and so the ticks that inhabit grass and bushes don’t have a chance to latch on to me. Of course, I could be jumped by ticks in my back yard, but that somehow does not bother me. Now that the bear population is thriving hugely, perhaps deer numbers will be dampened and Lyme disease will become less prevalent.

I hike alone. Usually on a hike, the only companion I have is this lovely lady called mama nature. Some years ago, I was on a loop trail and a part of it had been closed off, so it was no longer a loop. But I refused to get the hint and continued on the closed trail. I crossed a boggy area on logs. Then the brush encroaching on the trail got thicker and finally impenetrable. So I was forced to turn back. As I was re-crossing the boggy area on the slimy algae covered logs, I found myself on my back with a thump. I have a bad back and I fell on it. Lucky for me, in my daypack was a half-full 2-liter bottle of water that cushioned my fall and saved my back. But think how dangerous it could have been. This was before cell phones were ubiquitous. If I had hurt my back and been unable to get up, since it was a closed trail, and in any case unfrequented, it would have been days before I was discovered! So this is another reason why I always hike the one particular, selected, trail – it is popular, there are bound to be hikers that come along sometime during any given day.

Yet another reason why I always hike the particular, selected, popular trail is that at about the same time as my fall, I saw this movie called “The Blair Witch Project.” Have you seen it? It’ll speak to you if you have had the experience of hikes on lonely, leaf covered trails past abandoned homes exactly like the ones in the movie. Once you see the movie, such utterly deserted trails vanishing into the trees will seem, when you are all by your lonesome, scary rather than picturesque. So I started avoiding them. Before I knew it, there I was, mostly hiking on one single, highly popular, wide trail. It became a habit, like taking a certain route to and from work without thinking. [Seems like a winning strategy. Why, just this Saturday (April 19) I took a different trail and did not meet a single person. I have hiked it several times before, but this time, since there is yet no foliage on the trees, only a few yards off-trail, became visible the ruins of a home. The Blair witch swiftly entered the mind as evidenced by goose bumps that appeared on ye olde body.]

The season guaranteed to be tick free is winter. I had not done much hiking in the snow. This winter just past though, I bought myself snow shoes. Just staying outside in the cold makes the body burn calories trying to stay warm. In addition, walking with snow shoes on flat ground is as difficult as a hike up a bare rocky trail in normal conditions. So walking up a trail, huffing and puffing for all I was worth, I felt very much like the little engine that could. But still, I loved winter hiking. Later I bought special cleats, like crampons to attach to my snow boots and liked them better than snow shoes. There is something exhilarating about hiking in soft snow in bitter cold as gently falling flakes surround and cover you in white, not a soul around, utter silence prevailing. It is magical. You gain a new understanding of Robert Frost.

Hiking in New England in the Fall is indescribable. The colors are spectacular, they have to be seen. Whole mountainsides are set ablaze in a riot of colors by nature. There is a catch, of course. Sometime during Fall, hunting season starts and crazed people with IQ’s in double digits are let loose in the woods with guns. They’ll shoot at anything that moves in their line of sight. In Michigan, I saw a cow on the sides of which the farmer had written in large letters “C-O-W’ hoping to prevent some aspiring Daniel Boone from bringing it down as a prize trophy. [The NRA wants to give them assault rifles to accomplish this goal!]

The King of trails on the East Coast is the Appalachian Trail. Pronounced appa-la-chi-yan south of and appa-lay-chun north of the Mason-Dixon Line, lovingly referred all over as the AT. Its southern terminus is on the summit of Springer Mountain in Georgia and its northern terminus is some 2,100 miles [3,379 km] away on the summit of Mount Katahdin in Maine. The Appalachians are worn down, gentle, ancient mountains. The Trail [AT] picks the most strenuous route through them. About the least strenuous segment is the 50 miles [80.5 km] in Connecticut. But even here, when you get on the AT, you realize immediately that it is a different breed of cat.

We’ve walked sections of the AT in Virginia, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Currently some 200 people do the entire trail from south to north at one go, camping on the way, carrying their food, clothing and sleeping gear in a backpack. It takes most of them six months. They lose all their body fat and a huge percentage of their body weight despite eating amazing quantities of rich food any chance they get [when they come into a town to restock]. They are called through- hikers. Ten times that number start at Springer. A friend and I are dreaming of through-hiking the AT after retirement [background laughter].

Our best and toughest hike ever was a hike up the AT to its terminus on Katahdin. The latter sits smack dab in the middle of remarkably wild [pretty much guaranteed to see moose] Baxter State Park in Maine. The Park is “limited access.” You have to line up at one gate before 6:00AM [the time it opens] because after the small number of day users [including campers already there] is reached, no one else is allowed in. At the start of each trail is a register wherein you need to put your name before starting and after finishing.

We were the first to sign in. Our trail’s starting elevation was about 1000 feet [305 meters] and it climbed to the peak at 5,267 feet [1,605 meters]. In 5.4 miles [8.69 kilometers]. That’s like climbing from Siliguri to higher than Kurseong railway station, but in one-sixth the distance! It took us six hours! Every other group that took that trail that day passed us. The temperature at the bottom was close to 90 degrees F [32 degrees Centigrade] so that the summit temp in the high 50’s [say, 14 degrees C], with a ferocious wind blowing, felt chilly.

The tree line is about 3,000 feet [914 meters] in this region. The trail is just spectacular. Especially above tree line. Those rocks that looked like scree covering the top half of the mountain turn out to be desk-sized, car sized and even house-sized boulders. Below lies innumerable ponds [in New England, lakes are called ponds], “like shards of a broken mirror” as someone said. Within some you may see a muddy circle in the clean water centered on a black dot. That black dot is a moose feeding.

At the summit you can sit on a cliff that falls 2000 feet [610 meters] down to a pond. Another trail, clearly visible from the summit, can only have the name it does -- “Knife Edge.” It is about two to three feet [slightly less than 1 meter] wide, with sheer rock cliffs dropping thousands of feet on either side. We didn’t even think about taking that. Absolutely fierce winds were a constant and a sudden gust could push a person over in a moment of inattentiveness or carelessness. [Later we did a trail in Haleakala in Maui (Hawaii) which had a short similar section but felt friendly maybe because the sheer slopes had trees and scrubby grass instead of being pitiless, hard, jagged rock.]

We couldn’t enjoy the view for long. Had to hurry back. It took us seven hours to climb down the same 5.4 miles [8.69 km] – remember my wife’s fear of heights? –height is more in your face when climbing down. Every other group passed us. We were the last to sign out. There were thunderstorms complete with lightning drenching the surrounding peaks. This was scary. Soaked, it is easy to die of hypothermia on these mountains, especially when strong winds are blowing, even in the height of summer. Finally we had to use flashlights to discern the trail. Eventually we made it and collapsed onto the car’s seats. Believe it or not, directly we did that, within seconds, came the deluge. Somebody was looking after us that day.

So – go for it, experience the adventure, know that feeling of achievement, see the wondrously beautiful face of creation, push yourself to your utmost physical ability, get the “high”, do it all quietly and without fanfare, taking only pictures, leaving only footprints– take a hike!

Safiul