By G. M. Donley
In the upper right quadrant of North America, the ancient Appalachian mountain chain rises for one last increase in elevation after it enters New England. The cool climate and harsh winter winds from the northwest prevent trees from growing above about 4,000 feet, and many dozens of these mountains exceed that elevation, so the peaks tend to be exposed granite, with pockets of lichens and small shrubs hanging on in sheltered crevasses. One sheltered place is just at the top of the tree line on the east-facing slope of Cannon Mountain, overlooking Franconia Notch in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a place that gained fame in the early 1800s as home to the Great Stone Face or the Profile or the Old Man of the Mountain, a natural stone formation that was pictured on the New Hampshire license plate and the road signs and the collectible quarter and everything else. A hiking trail winds its way up from the road that goes through the notch until it gets to a place where a small cliff of 20 feet necessitated that someone build a permanent wooden ladder to allow a safe ascent past the obstacle. Leaning in a vertical crease in the granite wall, just behind the base of the ladder, is a walking stick.
So far, the stick has been here for two winters, 842 sunrises, 843 sunsets. It is dark now.
The stick had begun as a tree branch, of course. A late-fall hurricane that veered inland had separated many branches from their trees, and trees from the ground, and the first springtime trail crews had to deal with all the blow-downs. The chainsaws were heavy and in short supply, so most of the smaller work was done with hatchets and handsaws. More than one of the crews would, as part of this work, identify branches that would yield good walking sticks. They would cut them to a good length and set them aside, leaning upright beside the trail for the next person who needed a third leg.
This happened on the other side of the notch from where the walking stick is now, about halfway up the Falling Waters trail, next to a place where a stream pours over a ledge into a pool 60 feet below and the trail makes its way alongside over a series of natural and human-adjusted rock steps. The stick, a slightly bent length of poplar, was leaned just at the bottom of the stair, high enough so it wouldn’t get wet. In May, a girl noticed it and, copying her big sister who had found a stick some minutes earlier, picked it up.
The little sister was actually quite a bit better suited to hiking than her elder sibling, being lighter and having spent her entire life wiggling and bouncing around and climbing things. The older sister, by contrast, was inclined more toward the employment of small motor skills and less toward outright physical activity. Her favorite thing to do lately was to play Scrabble. Or card games. However, she was not about to be passed by her younger sibling, so she forced herself to ascend the relentless grade. The sound of the streams faded behind. She marched determinedly on, at first trying to match her breaths to the rhythm of her stride but abandoning that strategy as the footing would not allow any regularity of stepping. Three hours, that’s how long their mom had said it would take. Three hours to get all the way up this trail to the top. How long now? Two hours? Gradually, the trees gave way to bushes, and the bushes to smaller vegetation, and finally there were only rocks and lichens. The path climbed onto a ledgy ridge where it intersected another trail. A wooden signpost was visible ahead. “Can we stop for lunch?” The younger sister trotted up beside. “My stomach is growling.”
“Hey Mom, Jessie wants to stop for lunch,” the older sister called ahead.
Their mother stepped off the trail and onto a flat rock. She turned around. “Fine with me Pammie. Lunch Rick?”
“Yes, please,” said the sweat-drenched dad, who was bringing up the rear carrying the two-year-old. “I need calories.”
The oldest sister remained standing long after her younger sibling had sat down. She looked around. Half a dozen other groups of hikers were pausing here, unwrapping sandwiches, guzzling from bottles, sucking from hoses, removing boots. She fished into the side pocket of her back pack and pulled out a deck of cards. “Anybody want to play hearts?”
The stick lay there for three days. Numerous people noticed it, but most assumed it had just been left by someone who would be coming to pick it up any moment now. But on that third day, the first person to come across it arrived just after dawn, and a stick found at dawn by the first person to top the ridge that day could be assumed to be fair game. Rufus had spent the night at the Liberty Spring campsite and was headed across the ridge to make it to a hut by that evening, and that hut was a full-day’s walk under good conditions, so he had left himself plenty of time. His ankle hurt.
Most people doing a single-season south-to-north Appalachian Trail “through hike” starting in Georgia would get to New Hampshire toward the end of August. Rufus had done the southern section two years ago and gotten as far as Pennsylvania before he slipped on some loose crappy scree and broke his ankle, so he was finishing the trek this spring and summer. The initial plan was to beat his dad’s time from 23 years ago, but that game was over the second the bone broke. As his ankle throbbed now, he cursed the loose jumble of small slippery rocks that characterized many parts of the trail in Pennsylvania. It hadn’t been two hours after recommencing his northward trek from the point where he’d injured himself two summers ago that his left heel skidded out on a patch of scree and sent the pangs up that leg. He had paused to assess, removed that boot. A group of three college-age women had passed him a minute later. “All good? asked the first one, who was wearing a gray Pitt sweatshirt.
He had looked up from his bare ankle. “Yeah, false alarm.” She had nodded, they had kept walking. He had pulled back on his liner sock and his outer sock, then his boot. He had stomped a couple times to verify that the ankle was only sore, not seriously hurt. It ached readily since the injury. He had taken a few steps toward New Hampshire, then many more. He had gotten to here. The hiking stick had appeared at a fortuitous moment. He picked it up and hit it against the boulder to make sure it was sturdy. It made a satisfying thwack and vibrated in his hand. If things stayed on schedule, he would make it to Mount Katahdin in Maine, the northern terminus of the trail, by July. He had hiking poles strapped to the outside of his pack, but he had begun walking today without them because he found them difficult to use in the relentless rock-scramble of the White Mountains.
But the map suggested it was pretty level most of the way across the ridge here, so when he saw the abandoned stick, he resolved to pick it up and use it to cross the ridge, then hand it along to someone further up the trail, where he guessed the crowds would begin to build by later morning. This upcoming section was known to be very popular, with many day-hikers making a loop from a trailhead below in Franconia Notch. He set out, the path tracing the highest line of the ridge, sometimes along a very narrow knife edge. He stopped occasionally to look around rather than walking while gawking. He didn’t want to miss the views and he also didn’t want to break his ankle. He remembered his dad recounting a moment of hubris or inattention, well into his own through-hike, somewhere right around here, when he had cavalierly leapt across a small gap only to have his left leg land awkwardly between vertical surfaces. He had felt his shin bone bend but not break. If it hadn’t been for the walking stick he’d picked up ten minutes earlier, who knows? They didn’t have hiking poles back then. You made your own.
Rufus paused. It was a sharply clear morning. To the left, west, he could make out Mount Mansfield and Camel’s Hump, which were almost all the way to Burlington, Vermont. To the right, beyond the low and silent expanse of the Pemigewassett Wilderness, was the Presidential Range, crowned by Mount Washington. He’d make it there in a few days. The ankle, he guessed, would still be hurting, no better, no worse.
About halfway across, the path ascended its way to a rocky parapet that he determined to be Mount Lincoln. After negotiating a narrow boulder-scramble, he emerged on a flatter plateau and could now see Mount Lafayette ahead, rising abruptly beyond another steep dip. The small dark specks of three human figures were making their way down the ledges there, moving in his direction. They would all meet in that saddle somewhere, say hi, keep walking. As he looked ahead at Lafayette’s reddish summit, which was the loftiest point between here and the Presidentials and rumored to have high iron content that attracted many lightning strikes, his boot snagged in a crack and he pitched forward. The walking stick, already firmly planted on the surface ahead, took all his weight and calmly propped him back up, if slightly to the left of where he might have stepped. He thanked it, thumping it into the gravel, and continued. The three hikers appeared sooner than he expected. They stopped and chatted briefly. They had slept overnight at Greenleaf hut, were getting an early start today to try to get across the notch and make Kinsman this afternoon. He nodded, noted he was headed to Garfield.
When he arrived at the summit of Mount Lafayette twenty-five minutes later, the crowds had yet to materialize. He pulled out the map and did a quick calculation and determined that if one left the trailhead parking at dawn and made good time, it might still be three hours up to here, even without a stop at Greenleaf hut, which he could see below him on a shoulder of the mountain. Most hikers would pause there for water and a bathroom before continuing up. There were figures moving near the hut, heading up this way, but still far away. Then the trail ducked out of sight until it appeared a few hundred feet away from where he sat. The sun was now high enough that the shadow on Mount Lafayette had retreated part way down Cannon Cliff on the opposite side of the notch. The white quartz highlights in the rock glared almost painfully. He ate an energy bar and had some water. Garfield hut was at least another few hours further along the ridge. Better get going.
As he stood, a party of five appeared on the trail from Greenleaf. They exchanged greetings. He described his through-hike and what last night’s tent-site had been like with its hungry squirrels, and where he was headed tonight, and when he hoped to finish. The group had stayed overnight at the hut and were going to go down and across the notch from the hut to Lonesome Lake today, so they had run up here without packs this morning to try to get a look at Mount Washington from the Lafayette summit. They all looked to the east. One dense cloud obscured the summits over where Mount Washington should be. But clouds could move. It was chilly up here, but they would sit and wait a little while anyway, as it would be their last chance to see it.
The through-hiker presented the stick to the youngest of the group, a boy of eight or so. “Here, take this—for good luck. It’s got good trail magic.” He said his goodbyes and wished everyone a great day and walked off the summit and followed the ridge trail to the north and east.
The boy examined the stick and held it up against his chest. The stick came up to his chin. The others all sat down so he sat down. They were keeping their eyes on that cloud to the east to see if it would move or lift and let them see Mount Washington. The boy lost interest in that after about 30 seconds and looked around him instead. There was a rectangle shape on the ground nearby of something that it looked like people had built once but that was gone now. Maybe a swimming pool. He could imagine swimming in it, looking up at those fluffy clouds. Too cold for swimming, though. Maybe that’s why they had knocked down one end of the swimming pool and let all the water spill out of it.
“There!” somebody yelled. He looked where they were looking and saw just for a few seconds some kind of pointy radio tower on a mountain over there. Then the cloud covered it up again. Below the cloud was a darker whisp.
“What’s that black smoke?” he asked. “A forest fire?”
“That’s the cog,”
“The cog?”
“The cog railway steam engine that goes to the top of the mountain.”
“Why did we hike up this mountain if we could have taken a train up that mountain?”
“Because the train is very expensive. And far away. And also too, we like hiking.”
“I do like hiking,” said the boy. “But a train would be fun. I never rode one except the T.”
“Maybe sometime we will.”
During the walk back down to Greenleaf hut, the boy used the stick intermittently, mostly to pole-vault across from one rock to another. When he did that, he felt like he was ruler of all he could see. The stick had magic. The dragon swooped around the cliff down below and soared over him now, smoke trailing from its nostrils. He held his staff up to it and the dragon stopped in place, flapping its great bat-wings to hover there. The other hikers screamed and pointed, but he set their minds at ease with a simple waving gesture. The dragon circled once and disappeared over the ridge. He continued down. Every time the stick touched the rock, sparks flew up, and tiny fairies twirled out from cracks and fissures to thank him for sending the dragon back to its cave. The other hikers were amazed. He bowed, and with a wave of his staff, he conjured beautiful music. He vaulted from rock to rock as the music swelled and danced. It became a great festival on the mountainside as he led the people along the tops of the rocks. By the time they got down to the hut, he had blisters on the palms of his hands, and so he leaned the stick inside the door where there were some other sticks. Somebody else could have the magic now.
Three workers from the hut “croo” arrived that afternoon with supplies they had packed up from the trailhead. Bare shouldered all three and drenched in sweat, they heaved their loads up off their backs and placed them precisely along the wall at the edge of the kitchen. Two were women in black tights and colorful sports bras, the other a shirtless young man in green running shorts. “I gotta go back down and bring up those sacks of clothes,” said one of the women, the shorter one in the orange top. “I’m gonna borrow one of these sticks.” She planned to straddle the stick across her shoulders and loop two sacks over each side.
“Wasn’t Danny gonna do that, Rita?” asked the guy in the running shorts.
“Have you seen Danny today?”
“No.”
“I rest my case.” The door slammed behind her.
“She’s always pulling martyr shit like that,” said the other woman, the one in the blue top. There was a tap on her shoulder. The guy in the green shorts pointed at thee trio of young kids sitting and playing cards at the table beside her. “Oops,” she said, covering her mouth. None of the kids looked up.
Rita pulled up her black tights and adjusted the orange sports bra and began to jog. She may have been being a martyr, but she was also training for a trail race in two weeks. It was better to have Nate and Jackie think she was being a martyr than to have them know she was actually going to compete in a race after insisting ever since meeting them that she was a noncompetitive person. She’d have to come clean eventually, but in the meantime, she felt she could do without the extra scrutiny, the “how’s the training going” comments, the well-meaning but stress-inducing words of encouragement. The stick held like a baton in her hand, she trotted down the Old Bridle Path, keeping a sharp eye out for groups of that evening’s lodgers making their way up to the hut. Near the bottom, she passed the boy who had brought the stick down from Lafayette, but he didn’t notice it. And just as she reached the parking lot, she passed Danny headed the other way, carrying the sacks. She leaned the stick against a tree by the entrance to the campground and ran fast a ways down the valley, then turned around and headed back up. Her heart settled into the steady effort, right at the upper end of what she could sustain. Occasionally, clambering over a ledge or an especially steep section, she would go over the edge into anaerobic effort and would back off just enough to catch her breath while still running. She saw Danny ahead and only then remembered the hiking stick, leaning still against that tree at the bottom of the trail.
Better not to have it for these scrambles anyway. She might trip over it, or drop it. She caught Danny just before the hut. “Hey, want a hand?”
He gave her a dirty look. She clapped in mock applause.
“Ha ha,” he said.
The campground sold firewood but the Scoutmaster also liked to forage for smaller fuel in the woods. He grabbed the stick first thinking it would make a good mid-thickness piece for the night’s campfire, but then he saw it had clearly been fashioned as a walking stick. He brought it out as they were preparing dinner in the group camping area to show the boys how they could make a walking stick without saying that he had not made that walking stick.
“How do you make it?” asked one boy.
“With a hatchet,” he said. “But you have to earn your Totin’ Chip first.”
“Why can’t I just find a stick?”
“You could,” said the Scoutmaster.
The wooden ladder was not too far from the campground, not much over an hour’s hike, but it took a few years for the stick to get there. The Scoutmaster decided he liked the stick. It was a handy prop to get the boys excited about meeting all the requirements for a scout to be allowed to handle a blade. So he took it home to Swampscott, Massachusetts. Every year, he would stash it away in the back of the troop’s storage room in the church, and every year he would get it back out when it was time for their annual trip to the Whites.
One year, as the boys made their hike up to Lonesome Lake, one of the patrols got out far ahead of the others. It happened that the Scoutmaster’s son, Jared, was the leader of this patrol. It also happened that Jared had helped himself to the hiking stick for today’s outing. They planned to, instead of walking straight to the lodge at Lonesome Lake, to go around the other side of the lake, and still arrive there before the other, slower patrols. They were strong and fast, and aimed to show it.
However, there was a place back there where you could accidentally get on another trail that would take you over toward Cannon Mountain. Also, not far from the lodge, another trail continued up towards Kinsman Mountain. The boys in the patrol, of course, got on the wrong trail on the back side of the lake.
The Scoutmaster had not anticipated that the boys would go around the lake. His worry upon seeing that they were not at the lodge was that, in their haste to set a world-record time, they had missed the little turnoff from the main trail to the lodge and were now well up the path toward remote Kinsman Mountain.
The boys in the patrol had not gone around the lake before, so they had no memory of what the trail looked like, and therefore they did not immediately grasp that they were not on the round-the-lake trail except for the growing, nagging, ever-more-frequently occurring thought that they had not seen the lake for a long time. The trail came into an open woods in a flat area and merged with another. “Who has the map?” asked Jared. They turned around in place.
“I thought you had the map,” said two other boys simultaneously.
Now they could not be sure which trail had bought them here. And the sun wasn’t going down yet, but it would be setting in a couple of hours. And nobody had portable phones yet in those days, or at least these boy scouts didn’t. There were spies with spy phones and businessmen with car phones, but that was it. “Okay,” said Jared. “How about we split up and that way one of us is sure to find the lodge.”
The boys nodded to their patrol leader but their faces betrayed concern. “Ha, you almost fell for it,” Jared backpedaled. “That would be stupid, splitting up. Remember the buddy system? Okay how about we stay together, walk ten minutes in each direction, all together, then come back here each time if we don’t find it?” The boys nodded. On the second ten-minute excursion, they saw the lake ahead.
The Scoutmaster was very relieved to see the boys and refrained from yelling at them, but rather sought to portray the incident as an opportunity for learning.
“Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that you set out without a map or compass and didn’t tell anyone what you were doing,” he began. Okay, maybe that was equivalent to yelling at them. “But let’s set that aside, as I said, and let’s discuss what you would have done in that situation—no map, no compass, no one knows where you are. It’s almost like you were in a plane crash. You take an assessment and you conclude that no one is seriously hurt, but you have only a couple hours of daylight left. What do you do?”
“I have matches,” said one of the younger boys.
“We don’t have a tent or a flashlight,” said the other.
“Well,” Jared began, “we probably saw before we crashed that there was a little lake nearby, and that where we landed was on a ridge but there was a valley right next to it that had a road going down it.”
“Would you have noticed the hut by the lake?” The scoutmaster asked.
“Too many trees,” said one of the other boys.
“Can we see the trail signs?” asked the other boy. “Like where we had our meeting and propped up the walking stick?”
“Sure,” said the scoutmaster. “If you saw it today, you would see it any day.” Maybe that was true, maybe not.
“It didn’t say anything about a lake but it said how many miles to the campground,” the boy replied. “1.2 miles, 1 hour 15 minutes. I remember.”
“Good eye,” said Jared. He vaguely remembered the signpost but evidently he hadn’t looked at it when they were back there. “It would be smart to follow the signs and we would know that if it was only a little more than an hour away that we could walk down there before it got dark. There’s always a ranger or somebody like that at a campground.”
“And a telephone,” said the scoutmaster. “Good thinking.”
“But it would be better to have a map and a compass, right?” said the boy.
“Right,” said Jared. “How about you guys help me remember that next time? Double safe.”
“Okay,” said the boys together.
They got back down the trail to the campground just at dusk. The Scoutmaster couldn’t find the walking stick but it was too dark to work with blades anyway.
During the night a moose knocked over the walking stick from the place where it had been leaning at the trail junction, leaving it lying across the path.
It was two days before anyone went that way, but then a couple of rock climbers found it on their way up to an access path to Cannon Cliff. They planned to climb up beside the Old Man of the Mountain. One of them picked up the stick, mostly to get it out of the middle of the path, but then noticed it had been well cared for, carefully notched. He used it for a little while, leaving it at the edge of the trail when they got to the place where they had to bushwhack over to the cliff. On close examination, the Old Man may have been a natural formation once, but as they climbed alongside they could see that he was now held together with bolts and cables and concrete and who knew what else. “Vanity, right?” said the guy below to the guy above.
“Make sure to get my good side,” said the other.
The banter was a distraction, a tactic commonly employed on mountain faces. In truth, the sight of all the facial reconstructive surgery made them a little nervous about the stability of the cliff. It reminded them of the sounds like bowling balls they had heard last night, sounds they had decided were probably made by falling rocks. There was a huge boulder field at the base of the wall, as if they needed any more evidence. Every freeze and thaw pried a few more things loose. Every rain, every gust of wind, every time there was a little extra pressure, maybe a chipmunk scurrying or a finch alighting, a new percussion would echo across the notch.
“Do you think,” said the guy who was climbing lead, “that a moose looks up here and says to himself, ‘Hey look, there’s a human dude’s face built into the cliff?’”
“Well it’s not a moose face, that’s for sure. Nobody calls it Old Bullwinkle in the Mountain.”
“Rock,” the guy above said as a small stone bounced down the steep but not quite vertical wall. “Not Rocky.”
“Missed,” said the guy below. “Try again Bullwinkle.”
“Next time for sure,” the guy above laughed. “But I mean think about it,” he continued. “Look at all the effort they went to. All because somebody decided this pile of rocks looks like a human face and therefore you can’t just let it naturally join the rubble down there. Why the big deal?”
“Proof the world was created in man’s image?”
“Well if that stack of rocks at the top of the cliff is man’s image, then so is the boulder field at the bottom, right?”
His companion double-checked his hardware, planted his feet, and looked down. “You make a valid point. We’d blend right in down there in our handsome rustic earth tones. After a few weeks especially.”
It would be natural to think that the two rock climbers dislodged a boulder and fell to their deaths and someone else picked up the stick, but no; they made it up, then rappelled safely back down and retrieved the walking stick and returned to the trail, and the guy who had been using the stick handed it to the other guy, and they did as they had planned to do and continued up along the hiking trail toward the top of Cannon Mountain so they could get cleaned up and have a snack at the ski station and take the cable car back down.
Halfway up the wooden ladder, the guy holding the stick called up to the other guy, who was already standing at the top, “Hey, catch. I need both hands.” He threw the stick, but the other guy bobbled it and it clattered back down and out of sight through the ladder rungs.
“Somebody else’s stick now. Again.”
“You know what we should have done, what would have been a better use for it?” said the second guy as he clambered onto the ledge.
“Prop it under the Old Man’s chin, right? I knew you were thinking that.”
“We all have to work together to be sure the earth stays in man’s image.”
“Want to go back?”
“No.” A cold mist was rolling in, the wind picking up. The gnarly trees waved their boughs. The birds sheltered. Wherever the moose and the bears were, they did what they did.
The sounds continued into the fall and winter: animals moving about, leaves rustling, water gurgling, branches snapping, the occasional sharp crack of granite-hits-granite resounding across the notch, all very old sounds.
The following spring, someone looked up one morning and was the first person to notice that the Old Man was no longer there.
This story appears in The Virtues of Alignment, a collection of short fiction available as a print paperback and ebook. See the Miscagon Publishing Project page for more information.
Contact: info@gmdonley.com