[at-l] The kindness of hikers

[Felix J]

Carla & Dave Hicks wrote:
> Boy that brings back memories of the cold-freezing-rain-on-top-of-snow winter 
> night, quite a few years ago, when an "O" ring in mine gave out.

which reminds me of this...if I may...

The O-ring

I was staring at the o-ring so intently that I couldn't see it. Just as 
it was about to slide over the shaft, my knife slipped. The knife 
tumbled to the table, and the o-ring rolled off the end of the table and 
to a point on the ground I never located. I had been working on that 
stove for three hours. I didn't care anymore.

 As I rolled my eyes and shook my head in angered relief, I could hear 
someone hiking down the approach trail to the shelter. I'm no choirboy, 
but what I thought I heard would have made a trucker blush. As the sound 
got closer, it became more apparent that the source of this 
profanity-filled clatter was unaware of my presence.

 I could see curls of cigarette smoke rising above the trailside 
rhododendrons before I could see him. When he finally emerged from 
behind his evergreen cover, he was somewhat surprised to see me sitting 
there. I was surprised to see that he was hiking, and talking, alone. He 
was making a lot of noise.

 "Hey!!! How ya doin'?" he said, like an obnoxious politician. He was 
very loud.

"Hangin' on. How 'bout you?" I replied.

"Never better, my boy. Never better. That little climb'll get your blood 
moving, won't it?" he asked between smoker's coughs. He walked past the 
table to the shelter. He took his pack off and leaned it against the 
shelter wall. He was very loud.

"I'm headed south. It'll be a downhill for me tomorrow."

"South? Who goes south?" he chuckled.

"Me and mine, I suppose," I said, almost angry that he'd question one's 
choice of direction. Especially one he had known for a total of 25 seconds.

"I hear ya. Goin' south beats not goin' at all, don't it?"


I watched as he started going through the pockets on his pack, mumbling 
to himself all the while. He would unzip and zipper and cuss at the 
contents. He was a big guy, with a pack to match. He had lots of pockets 
with contents to cuss at.

 He stopped searching his pack long enough to light another cigarette. 
His  6'1" frame sat on the edge of the shelter floor. His feet, covered 
with tennis shoes but no socks, swung back and forth on the end of 
skinny, white legs. I wondered how those legs could hold up a man that 
size, with a pack that size. 

 I had grown tired of breathing the white gas fumes from my dismantled 
stove. I decided it was time to do something other than what I was. I 
got up and walked to the shelter. Just as I got there, he found what 
he'd been looking for.

 "There you are," he said. He turned to me and held his hand out. "Here 
ya go. That oughta do it."

"Do what?" I said, leery of him and what was in his hand.

"Fix your stove. That's your stove, ain't it?"

 He was handing me an MSR repair kit, complete with three sizes of 
o-rings and a special tool for putting them on. I looked at the pieces 
of what had been my stove before I tried to do a bit of preventive 
maintenance. I've never been good at doing things to keep things that 
aren't broken from breaking. This time was no exception. Before I knew 
it, he had my stove together and purring along as well as an MSR can.

 He went about the business of getting ready for the night. He put a pot 
of water on the stove for dinner and started telling me his life story 
as he blew up an oversized air mattress. He would blow a puff or two of 
air into the mattress, wease a bit, tell me about the job he had when he 
was twenty-two, then blow another puff or two into the mattress.

 The more he told me, the less I believed. It seemed he had been a lot 
of places and had done a lot of things. According to him, he had been an 
investment banker, computer programmer, Columbia River tour boat captain 
and on and on. He would have had to be 104 years old to have done all 
the things he said he'd done. He was not 104.

 I would feign interest occasionally by listening enough to ask a 
question that would make it sound like I was listening all the time. His 
stories were exciting, to the point of seeming too much like stories. It 
was nice having someone else around, even if I was offended that he 
thought I believed him.

 "Really? Your son is the vice president of 3M? Really?" I said during 
one of my interest-feigning occasions.

"Yup. Proud of him, too. Even if he won't have anything to do with his 
old man. It's my fault, though. I wasn't much of a father, ya know. 3M. 
That's Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing..." he said. I had stopped 
listening again.

 This went on for several hours. Wild and flamboyant stories followed 
each other. We had been in bed for half an hour when he finally asked me 
where I was from. I told him I was from southern Indiana, but gave no 
more information than I had to. This started him on another tale.

 "Southern Indiana? I like southern Indiana. I worked on a railroad spur 
in southern Indiana once. I had a little apartment over a tavern right 
next to the tracks. It was funny because the tracks ran through the 
courthouse lawn. What was the name of that town?" he paused as he 
thought. "Spencer, I think it was. Nice town."

 "What did he say?" I thought. I leaned over and blew out my candle and 
stared at the darkness for a little while. "What did he say?" I thought 
again. You see, I live in an apartment over a tavern next to the tracks 
in Spencer, Indiana. "Goodnight," I said.

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