Mount Watatic

N42° 41.806' W71° 53.553'
Ashburnham, Massachusetts

A Walk Across America (here spoiled) made a satisfying thump when I closed it for the first last time. I set it down and stood up away from it. I finally finished the travel saga of Peter Jenkins, a story intimate and frustrating to me. I have mythologized this book for years, and somehow it exceeded my memories. Before, when Mr. Booth read it in class, I got it piece-meal, spoon-fed. Now, though, I've read it myself. Sometimes, I read in great gobs, just raking in the words until they wouldn't fit anymore and I had to stand up and walk away. But just recently, I've left the book to languish because of what happens next.
I reached the chapter where Cooper dies.
If that prevents you from reading the book, so be it. I've never watched Old Yeller or Where the Red Fern Grows, and I am satisfied with that fact. But I've known Coops would die from the moment I unwrapped the book, tearing paper, on my birthday this year. I read it anyway, dreading the moment when I would reach the fateful chapter. And Peter doesn't hide it from you: the map clearly marks Cooper's grave, and he drops unsubtle hints that their forever friendship is soon to expire--say, in a chapter or two. So I stopped reading. I remember putting the bookmark inside, dropping the book into my backpack, and steadying myself for a long session of never reading it again.
But Sunday, I broke my streak. I was packing my bicycle for the journey the book inspired, and there lay the dreaded chapter. There sat Christen. I felt I could throw myself through the chapter at warp speed if I were in public with something for my hands to do, and I could do it though I were unwilling if only Christen would read it. Knowing full well that she's read the book before and knows what's about to happen, I asked. She acquiesced.
Christen read well, and calmly. Cooper died in her words again, just as he has every time someone reads the book, and I cried, just as I believe I did the first time. It was a bitterness, that handful of choked sobs and silver tears. I didn't allow myself to cry as fully as I knew I should. I felt the sorrow like a dull knife enters a ribcage: with tearing and pain. But, with Colonel on my left and Christen on my right, with my knees tucked under me in the grass, I held back the tide. I didn't let myself loose, even though I knew it would strip away the ache, because I was embarrassed. I was probably incapable of losing myself, even if I wanted to. I'm crying now, though.
I remember the last time I cried at a book. I was alone in my room, before even Delight and I were married, and I read The Fault In Our Stars. I couldn't tell you the moment that crushed me, but I screamed at the book and sobbed in a corner. It ravaged me, and I cried it out. But I haven't cried out Cooper. I'm not sure I can, unless I go back and read the chapter again, freeing the words from the page again, living the death again. And I know I'm not strong enough for that.
Christen finished the chapter, laid down the book, and in the next twenty four hours I read the remaining ten chapters or so. I devoured it, because I don't think even Mr. Booth read that piece to us. I didn't recognize any of it. And when I finally slapped the covers closed on Peter Jenkins, I was ready to explore something of my own.

Christen and I planned on climbing Watatic. Neither of us have ever been to the top, despite her three and my three years working in its lee. I knew where it was, and I wanted to climb it. I didn't want to go without Christen, but I needed to stretch my imagination. I needed to conquer something bigger than myself. I needed to feel small. So I went without her. (Perhaps that was a mistake, and perhaps it was exactly what I needed to do. And despite my having told her already that I went without her, she will forgive me, perhaps, and forget it, maybe.)
I wore my cycling shoes, because this is a cycling trip. I wanted to have a bit of a shakedown: what rattles? What creaks? What sounds can I stand, and which are unbearable? Is this bag in the wrong place, or is there any other place I can put it? I got to the mountain without losing any gear, pleased with myself. But my cycling shoes have cleats in the bottom: little bits of metal that bite into the pedals and stick. Normally, no problem. But when I try to walk on rock, they make a clatter like tap shoes and a scrape like knives on bone.
There are sections of the mountain that are terribly rocky underfoot. There's one place where the trail is a series of well-placed boulders that make steps like you'd see in a rich man's garden. Then again, there are sections that are just bare loam and needles, nothing else, all ferns and grasses worn away by a thousand thousand footfalls. And there's not much to see on the hike. Apart from a marsh in the first hundred yards and a rock that's as big as a set of city gates and split open like them too, there's only trees, rocks, and dirt. And people. I met a girl with a dog who lost her keys and a woman who warned me of a swarm of bees, and a girl who (broke my unintentional rhyme. This is because she) was as thin as a splinter whose male companions with something to prove were tramping through the woods rather than use the path. At one point, the trail goes straight up, it seems, and I had to shove down on my knees with my hands because I have crepitus and I hate the sound they make when I bend them.

But finally, I reached the top. 1,832 feet. There's a memorial to a man who was born in the year my sister was, but who died in 2014--very young, but still old enough to merit a memorial for what he contributed to society. There's a geodetic survey marker: my first of the trip! And there's a view. The really good one is not at the highest point, but further southeast, down through a shallow valley between the peaks, and up into a barren span of flat rock, in places carved with messages from fifty, from ten, from two years ago. What a view, though. What a pain to get to. What a noise to walk on. I clattered over the rocks and around a young woman trying desperately to read a book she'd gotten from the library. I asked: she didn't know the title until she looked at it. It had "Love" in the title and wasn't famous, and I guess I don't remember it.

I spent some time just looking. Then I realized: I can probably see the lake from here; Lake Winnekeag, where I worked all summer. I started looking, but at such an oblique angle, all the lakes were a strange shape. Nothing was familiar. Was that Blueberry Hill? Or that? What direction am I supposed to be looking, anyway? I felt really stupid when I remembered that I had a compass on my watch. I pointed myself straight south, where I knew the lake was, and it was clear as day.
I remembered I wanted to take pictures of myself with the geodetic markers I found on the trip. At least: my shoes. So I wandered back over to the first peak and found a different mark, perhaps just a reference mark. I found two other tiny round brass knobs buried in the rock, too. But I couldn't find the first point, and I was getting frustrated. I tried to approach it systematically, but I was thwarted by impatience each time. It's impossible to walk a straight line when every time your eye twitches left or right you follow it. I wandered in increasing circles away from the true peak, hoping to find the marker. Finally, when I had all but given up, I basically stepped on it. How is that fair? I took my picture, mildly proud of myself, and now in possession of two pictures from this peak and one from the other, and all on a trip I never suspected would include any.
Geodetic survey markers hold a strange fascination for me. They're interesting just for where the survey decided they should go: there's one at the base of Devil's Tower, one near Mt. Rushmore, many in the ground at the Capitol, one at the end of our driveway. But paired with these brass plates stapled to the earth, the survey made maps like nothing else you've seen. These are incredibly detailed drawings that go back as far as the 1800s that include driveways and buildings and elevation. If you wanted to, you could find the USGS map of your hometown and make a tiny model of it with a degree of specificity that would take years to complete exactly, but when you finally arrived at the end of it, you would be as close to 100% accurate as if you worked from an aerial photograph.
When I found these maps for the first time, I printed off page after page of them at the middle school. I cut the margins off and taped them together precisely. They made two and a half by three and a half foot rectangles of carefully manicured paper that I rolled up and placed in a poster tube. I would pull them out semiregularly just to look at them, and Delight hated them.
Have you ever had something that you loved and geeked out about, but other people merely tolerated? Have you ever seen something that captured your imagination, but the person you loved thought you had lost your mind? I have. It's poisonous. These maps had enormous potential value for me to begin with, and now on top of that my wife hated them, which makes their total emotional impact on my life staggering. They were some of the most controversial objects in my marriage. That's why, last February when I was cleaning out the house to move, I felt the earth move a foot or two and my heart clawed its way out of my chest. I fell to my knees and felt the dryness of a stabbing sob wrack through me. I found the maps, shredded. The dog had torn at them because he thought they were a toy. Pointless.
I would have understood it if Delight had lit them on fire when she left. I would have understood if they had been forgotten in some dark corner of a storage room. I would have understood if these maps, so precious to me, had been left on my bed with a sharpied message scrawled across them. But this? This tragedy of tiny importance ripped me ragged. I couldn't even get my mind around it, and that moment unlocked memories of joy and sorrow, compounded now by her absence, reverberant and charred as if the church we married in burned to the ground and I was there to watch the bell tower, clanging, crash to the ground. I placed so little importance in the paper itself, but being forced to pick up the tiny scraps of it and carry them, reverently, to the trash can, was almost more than I could bear. I felt like I was burying the conflict in my relationship. I felt like I was burying Delight.
So you will forgive me if I place a little too much dramatic importance in the brass plates of the United States Geologic Survey and the Coast and Geodetic Survey. You will understand if I get a little emotional about finding a new one. You will sympathize, I'm sure, when you see my focus drift out into nothingness, looking into the past, when I collapse next to a survey mark to mourn a loss so insignificant that it memorializes my entire marriage.

I never buried Cooper. I buried a map.