Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Life isn’t always good, but sometimes it’s perfect


It was right around this time of year that I had the best day of my life. I believe (for no logical reason) that to each life, a certain measure of perfect moments are meted out at birth.

How many of these moments you encounter along the way depends in large part on the life you lead, how hard you’re willing to seek out those moments. You won’t find them on Facebook, or while watching reruns of “Dancing With the Stars.”

I found one of my perfect moments, and the best so far, in Canada. It was 1975, and I was backpacking along the Bruce Trail, a wilderness preserve running the length of the Niagara Escarpment. Not a trail for beginners, the Bruce traverses over 500 miles of some of the most untrammeled wilderness one can hope to find in the modern world.

And this time of year, in the early spring, it’s especially dicey, since the trail is only poorly marked at the best of times and in the spring it often peters out into impassable marshes, wetlands or densely-populated stands of pine or maple.

It’s not hard to get lost. And while 500 miles may not seem like a lot when you’re passing overhead in a 747, when you’re on foot, carrying a heavy backpack and a rapidly diminishing supply of Lipton Cup-a-Soup – your only food source – it is large indeed.

The trail was sparsely populated in the early spring; it had been four days since I’d seen other hikers. That had been a U of M history professor and her teenage son; they’d caught me napping buck naked on a bed of soft loam by a waterfall. But that’s a story I’ve told before; I’m sure it’s floating around the internet somewhere if you’re curious.

Three days earlier, a mother black bear and her two cubs had ravaged my backpack in the middle of the night and made off with all my food, with the exception of the Lipton’s. Cream of mushroom, if you’re wondering. Food even a bear wouldn’t eat. I’d been living on that since then.

I was down to my last envelope when I realized I’d lost the trail. In theory, all I had to do was listen for the sound of water. That would be the Georgian Bay. I knew I was somewhere between the towns of Lion’s Head and Owen Sound. Unfortunately, “somewhere” encompassed a whole lot of “nowhere.”

As I often do when it looks like all hope is lost, I sat down to eat. The packet of Cup-a-Soup did not exactly fill me to bloating, but it did momentarily tame the tiger roaring away in my empty belly.

While enjoying my scant repast, I took my bearings as best I could using the sun (which was mercifully bright and warm this day) and my old Cub Scout compass. I figured if I hiked south and east, I would eventually find the trail again.

Fast forward eight hours: I was no longer so sure. I set up my bug tent in a soft bed of pine needles and fell into exhausted sleep.

The next morning dawned cold but sunny and I continued my wandering route toward what I hoped would be civilization. Hours passed.

Hunger, exhaustion, solitude. By the time I limped into a small fishing village located bayside, I was a cleaned out shell of a man. All I wanted was a Coke, some donuts, and a cheap hotel room.

At first glimmer, the town seemed storybook perfect. Idyllic little homes set along the main (and only) street, well-tended yards, a ramshackle general store, a white, steeple-topped church.

But no people. None. At 11 a.m. on a whatever day it was (I had lost track). The general store was locked up. It took a few minutes of walking along the main street, but eventually I started getting creeped out by the complete emptiness of the place.

If Rod Serling had stepped around a corner and yelled “Gotcha,” I would not have been surprised. I sat on the general store’s wooden porch to figure out what to do next.

I was so hungry that – for the first and last time in my life – I considered a little breaking and entering. I’d grab a box of donuts and a Coke and leave ten bucks American on the counter. No harm, no foul.

Before I got the chance to begin this life of crime, the church bell rang. The double doors flew open and the congregants spilled out, including the owner of the store. He saw me sitting on his porch and crossed the road.

“Hiker?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“We’re closed,” he said, “sorry.”

“Can I just get some donuts? I’m really hungry, sir. A bear ate my food.”

“Well, I suppose I could open up for just a minute,” he said, smiling. “Christian thing to do and all that. Guess I can’t let you go hungry on Easter.”

Twenty minutes later I was sitting on a dock in the spring sunshine, my back propped against my recently-resupplied backpack. The reflections on the pristine waters of the bay, the sweet, innocent scent of April in the air, my mouth crammed to capacity with chocolate covered pastries … it was one of my perfect moments and I knew it.

Sometimes even now when things get tough I remember that day. For all the bad that happens in an ordinary life, there is an equal measure of good.

You just gotta find it.



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