Mushrooms, not the Mountain
the Accomplishment Beast
The Green Tunnel swallowed us right away. We went in all cocky, and it immediately chewed us up and spit us out; dumping us at the end of our first day hiking at an overcrowded Appalachian Trail lean-to in the rain, in the dark, with nowhere left to pitch a tent that wasn’t on an incline or right next to the privy. We crawled miserably inside our leaning and toilet-adjacent tents to try to get dry and sleep.
Micki and I were 5 miles short of our first day’s goal, had fallen in a river, and at one point had walked in the wrong direction for more than an hour. I wasn’t the one who took a bath in the river, so the backtracking was, to me, the deepest cut to morale. What a rookie mistake. The damn woods were so thick and dark that we hadn’t even noticed that we’d just walked that part of the trail. Instead we were high-fiving each other for getting our ponchos on before the rain really let loose, visually ridiculous over our bodies and packs together, but practical for keeping us dry. We high-fived right back down the trail where we’d just been.
We’d approached these last 100 miles of the Appalachian Trail with such hubris that such a stupid blunder wasn’t even on our preventative radar.
Micki and I have been backcountry hiking together since 2015, and we have never, ever, just walked backwards on the trail. We’ve gotten lost off trail, we’ve taken the wrong trail. Never the same trail backwards.
And though sometimes we start a little slower than we expect, we always pick up speed as we go.
In Maine’s 100 Mile Wilderness we just never did.
This is the story I didn’t want to write. It’s not a story of overcoming or of victory. It’s the mountain I didn’t summit, so the hike I didn’t really finish. What’s worse, it marked the beginning of a sabbatical from work where I intended to find some peace and direction in life.
What did this failed hike mean for my goals for sabbatical?
I’d planned to write all summer, starting with this east coast hike–the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, which ends with Mount Katahdin. But getting bested by this wilderness scrambled me. I didn’t want to write it down. Doing a hike so slowly that we skipped the last part felt embarrassing. It’s unaligned to the person I want to be, and certainly the person I want to present to the outside world through writing. Not weak, not a quitter, someone who makes it to the end.
Three days in, we were having a conversation that was very different for us. At that point, we were a full day behind our itinerary for this 8-day hike. We’d both fallen multiple times, much more than normal. The going was slow, and we weren’t getting faster.
God, it was slow. People had warned us about the roots (yes, tree roots), and I’d laughed it off. Ha, roots? In the woods? Goodness what else, might there also be dirt and trees? Such weenies, I’d thought, these east coast hikers.
If you also rolled your eyes, then hey. Let me tell you about roots in Maine.
Imagine walking in the woods with the normal amount of dirt and rocks and elevation changes. But! Some jerk brought out miles of ropes–different sizes, of random unpredictable stiffness, and just threw them in wild bundles all over the trail. Then made some slick as snot, while others are grippy enough to step on safely. And you can’t tell the difference by eyeballing them. You just find out by hitting the ground or not.
Okay, now that you picture the roots–fill up any space between the roots with water or mud. Good. You’re getting the idea. Why not also sprinkle in some rain and mosquitos and midges that dart straight into your eyeballs while you’re trying to see where you’re going to trip and fall next?
That’s Maine.
We’d hike for a grueling hour and make it…a mere mile. Our feet ached in a way I’ve not experienced in the last nearly 10 years of hauling a pack through the wilderness for days on end. Was it the 12+ hour days of being on my feet? Was it that we only got a demoralizing 8 or 9 miles out of it? Or was it the constant twisting and flexing over those hateful roots?
All of it, sure.
So. Three days in, and I was still doing my usual nighttime map review in my tent, figuring where we’d end up the next day, comparing it to our plan–stuff I do every hike. Then talking to Micki about it the next morning, made extra hopeful from the seductive energy boost of backcountry caffeine + sugar.
Problem was that we weren’t speeding up by even the third day. We can usually count on that to get us back on track to complete our plans.
And for the first time ever, we were dealing with something we hadn’t contended with before: we were running out of food.
A food resupply was scheduled for us on day 4 when we would cross a logging road. But we were a day behind at this point, and had just been ravenously powering through our food supply. Again, not normal for us; the altitude of our usual hikes out west really keep the hunger at bay. Sweating our asses off under ponchos while slipping over heinous roots made us hungry. So we certainly didn’t have extra food banging around in our packs.
This was so depressing. We were slow, and in pain. We felt dumb for our mistakes and under-calculations and misplaced ego about what we would have been able to do. Adding insult to misery, we were going to be really hungry for about a day.
Then: some luck. We made a desperate phone call from a mountain that had some cell signal, and finagled a closer food drop for that afternoon. What a relief! We’d get to eat dinner!
And with that, we had some real talk. How to finish this hike?
Micki was talking about not doing Katahdin. I, on the other hand, was still trying to figure out how to fit it in by cutting short our post-hike extra two days in Bangor, where we’d planned to visit friends, relax, and see Acadia National Park. I really didn’t want to miss the planned time being a tourist with Micki. But I hadn’t even considered not finishing our hike.
She assured me she’d be fine to wait for me while I completed the mountain. But that would be all day–the ranger at trailhead warned us to allow at least 8 hours round trip “if you’re fast” (followed by a skeptical eyeballing of us, which annoyed me then and humbled me later).
Anyway, from the way she was talking, it was clear Micki had already decided not to summit. Which made sense, given how miserable the going was, but it still shook me. Other than our very first hike back in 2015 when I was the most hilarious walking calamity and we were lucky to make it back out of the wilderness at all, I’ve never known Micki to cut out some of a hike.
She was clearly over it.
I considered it, summiting alone. But it felt like an empty endeavor. It would be the whole day on the mountain without her, when already our difference in paces was keeping us quite apart on the hike, robbing us of the usual long conversations and banter we enjoy in the woods.
We would miss most of our post-hike relaxation time. I’d likely miss seeing friends. It felt like I was giving myself over to some kind of accomplishment beast, just keeping myself strapped in to a careening ride that nobody was requiring me to endure.
Something shifted in me. The powerful accomplisher in me got pushed out of the way by…something else. I told Micki that the mountain could shove it; I wanted our fun time together. I wanted to see my friend’s blueberry farm and wander around Bangor. I wanted Acadia National Park.
So we ditched our Katahdin plans together. Micki told me that we should plan for Acadia at sunrise our first morning off the trail. We’d heard it was special. Chatting through the Acadia sunrise plans quickly replaced our “will we/won’t we” Katahdin plans, and it struck me how fulfilling even just the new plans felt.
A few hours later, after we resupplied our food at the new location, I told Micki I was also ditching something else: hurrying through the hike. I’d passed on swimming in a particularly gorgeous waterfall in order to make our food drop on time, and if I wasn’t trying to hustle to bag that mountain anymore, then by god I was going to swim in every damn body of water I possibly could between there and the end of the 100 miles.
I was going to enjoy this hike, even if I had to rewire my thinking to do so.
So this is what it looked like to leash my Accomplishment Beast:
We only went 3 more miles after the resupply that afternoon, even though we had plenty of daylight to go farther. There was a river and a shelter at that 3 mile point, East Branch Lean-to, which meant it was a good place for camping.
I sat in the river and let the warm afternoon sun just radiate over my face while the water flowed over and past me. I set up my tent in a great spot, early in the evening, and leisurely collected water after having what felt like luxurious spa time in the river. Micki and I ate a slow dinner in our “clean” evening clothes, our hair wet from the soak and our feet drier than they had been in days.
The next day we gambled for swimming, and planned to eat lunch at Cooper Brook Falls shelter. My hope was that there were swimmable waterfalls there. I told Micki if it was nice, I was getting in that water.
And ooh, what a gambling payout. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky or a soul at that site. A long, twisting waterfall led to several pools in a river around a bend that were perfect for sitting: large, flat rocks at 1-4 feet submerged in the water, the water cold enough to make you gasp, but tolerable for a good 10 minutes before shivering sat in. We stopped for an hour and swam and ate lunch. It was glorious.
When we made it to Antlers campsite, which so many people had assured us was amazing, we were disappointed to find it already overrun by a pack of more than 10 teenage boys. They were so loud and took up so much space. But we found a tent site nice and far from them, went swimming anyway, and ended up meeting a young woman who hiked in for an overnight and was flush with great snacks and hilarious stories, both of which she shared as we ate dinner together. Great big belly laughs while sampling the Maine delicacy of pretzels + Fluff was an unexpected delight.
The next night we stealth camped at Nahmakanta Lake, stopping short of the Wadleigh Stream shelter because we heard from other hikers that the same pack of boys had stopped there for the night. Even though it meant we’d make even less mileage that day, we tucked into the woods towards the lake off the trail and found a beautiful beach in a secluded cove.
Clearly this was someone’s secret campsite–two perfect tent pads in the woods right on the water, and no wonder. That’s where I’d keep a secret campsite too. It was scenic and serene. Our second to last night on the trail gave us silence and lakefront beauty…and again, some swimming.
I slept with my tent flap open and watched the sky bloom orange, pink, and red the next morning as the sun came up.
Putting aside my irritation with the thickness and sameness of the woods, I began to take pleasure in the (many many) breaks taken from walking. I made it a game to photograph all the mushrooms I could find.
Their vibrant colors pushing up through the forest floor signaled to me a kind of audacious middle finger to conventional outdoor beauty.
Sure, swaths of wildflowers on a mountainside are breathtaking. But can you spot the single orange mushroom curling up out of the decaying leaves in the break of trees off the trail?
I think maybe you need to be going slowly to do so.
If you can, lucky you.
I did feel lucky. The annoyance I’d started with at all the stopping I had to do and my very slow pace gave way to finding delight in these pauses to examine something intricate on the ground.
The forest carried on being a forest as I stood still, listening to my own breath and the dripping water making its way through the canopy.
The drive to push was still there. Go faster, go farther, get there sooner. But I had mentally exchanged my mountain for the experience of the hike, and the after-hike. Something about remembering that there was nothing to climb at the end made it easier to stop and look at mushrooms. The beast wasn’t gone, but certainly leashed.
Leashing the Accomplishment Beast also looked like: finishing the trail, not giving Katahdin a second thought, and bumming around the Bangor area together.
It was sunrise at Acadia, blueberries with friends not seen in a long time, and taste-testing some seriously yummy cider. We napped on a beach, ate breakfast twice in one day, and enjoyed the pleasure of indoor plumbing in a way that only time in the backcountry can really do.
It’s uncomfortable to me to feel like I’m throwing in the towel on anything. A part of this hike felt like giving up. A part of taking a sabbatical from work felt like giving up.
I think it took something sneaky like the backcountry of Maine to trip me out of the daily sprint. Unexpected slowness, those roots that made me roll my eyes so hard, a forgotten mountain.
I don’t think I would have slowed down otherwise. Standing still in the woods, getting eye level with the fungi, smiling in my tent at being awake for the first bird singing in the morning.
This ordinarily would have been a story of scaling a mountain. Instead it is one of kneeling before mushrooms. I think that’s the start I needed.
