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.

Mtaylor325@gmail.com

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Sometimes, life gives us more than we can bear

Every year around this time I remember how glad I am to be alive. Even with the grim knowledge that winter is on its way, I’m happy to simply be drawing breath.

Because 39 years ago a bear almost ate me.

Believe me, when you’ve been almost eaten by a bear, every day after seems a blessing.

I was just a kid, 17 and therefore fairly bursting with the assurance of my own immortality. I was young and strong; death — or even serious injury — was a faint shadow lurking at the periphery of my awareness, something that happened to other people, those whose lives were less charmed than my own, those who had not been charged with my unique manifest destiny.

 Armed with this mindless (and baseless) confidence, I ventured into the woods. Like Robert Frost, I took the road less travelled by. In fact, in late October, 1976, the road I took was travelled not at all.

I picked up the Bruce Trail near Tobermory, Ontario and — carrying only what would fit in my battered Kelty backpack — I headed south along the trail with the intent of going as far I could go in seven days, and then hiking back.

I don’t know what it’s like now, but at the time, the Bruce Trail wended it’s through nearly 900 kilometers of Canada’s most beautiful, uncompromising terrain, from north of Tobermory to the southern edge of Lake Ontario. It was heartbreakingly beautiful, but it was, make no mistake, what even hardcore backpackers think of as “the wild.” 

I had heard that during the summer months, the trail is heavily travelled by hikers and nature lovers of all stripes, but in October, I was pretty much it.

On my fourth day out as the sun was setting, I made camp. I was an experienced hiker and knew enough to hang my backpack from a tree branch to keep the critters away from my food and clean underwear. (I’m kidding; I was 17; I didn’t own any clean underwear.)

But after pegging out my tiny “bug” tent, I hung my pack from a nearby branch anyway. I built a small campfire and boiled up more Cup-a-Soup. These were the days before every grocery carried a full line of freeze-dried, gourmet “camping food.” Cup-a-Soup came in small, lightweight envelopes and could be reconstituted with water straight out of Nottawasaga Bay, as long as you boiled it first. Sure, it tasted like something that had been sweat off the back of a dyspeptic gorilla, but it was edible and easy to carry.

Maybe it was the smell of the soup cooking that attracted the bears, a mama and at least two cubs; I’ll never know for sure.

After washing up, I snuggled into my goose down mummy bag, zipped closed the tent and curled up with my machete. I had never used the machete for anything but cutting firewood, but having it beside me was somehow comforting. I dozed. 

The snuffling sound woke me. Outside, a full moon bathed the forest in a flaxen haze. Shadows traversed the semi-transparent, orange nylon surface of my tent. One of those shadows was big. Real big.

My machete suddenly felt about as formidable as a moist Q-tip.

Other shadows passed, smaller than the first, though still big enough to intimidate by the light of this Hunter’s Moon.

The shadows were accompanied by a good deal of snuffling, growling and noises that were, to my city-bred ears, all but unidentifiable. I did, however, recognize the sound of my backpack being torn from the tree limb and shredded like so much wet newspaper.

Bears, it turns out, can climb trees.

I considered exiting the tent, machete in hand with the intent of making a lot of noise and scaring the bears away from my small store of foodstuffs. Then I thought about how nice it would be to live until my 18th birthday and huddled further into my bag instead. I was not, I decided, going to offer myself as the main course to the bear’s Cup-a-Soup appetizer.

An hour or so later, having eaten my Cup-a-Soup, envelopes and all, the Three Bears padded back into the forest. It was at least another hour before I screwed up my courage to the point I dared leave the tent.

My pack lay in tatters; even the aluminum frame had been bent until it was virtually useless. My soup, the little bit of jerky and the crackers I had been carrying were now inside the bears. I, thankfully, was not.

I was camped between Wiarton and Owen Sound, a day’s hike in either direction. I had no food. And unlike the present, back then I did not have large fat reserves to call upon in times of famine.

Eventually, I hobbled into Owen Sound, the broken remains of my pack, sleeping bag and tent bungeed together like something one might find tied to the end of a hobo’s stick.

But then, like now, I was simply glad to be alive.

More Reality Check online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com. Email Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com.