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206 pe a k e x pe r i e n ces Timothy Muskat Curses, Excursus Hut-to-Hut Musings For Carla, Harrison, and Galen, the intrepid triumvirate I think of all the wild way. The most common universal experience of reality is love. The prose man falls in love once or twice, or according to some psychologists, thrice. If he keeps it up, he is in danger of becoming a poet. —Karl Shapiro, “What Is Not Poetry” Part I Warming for the Chance to be Invisible—Lafayette Place Campground to Lonesome Lake Hut via Lonesome Lake, Cascade Brook, and Fishin’ Jimmy Trails; 1.6 miles, 10:30–11:00 a.m. For a largely lazy White Mountain lifer like me, the hardest part of beginning a monster hike at communal Lafayette Place is that there are picnic tables everywhere, and half the time I want to sit down at one of them, eat my woefully meager sandwich, listen idly for random birdsong, wait for the cool touch of evening to find me and then get back in my car and drive home. But I get myself started by pretending I’m both sturdy horse and willing rider, and, well—giddyap, yeehaw and soon the two of us are moving. As the crafty crow flies, the hike I’ve set my sights on is a nearly northeast line, a fairly straightforward declaratory sentence for the spirit that will lead me over 52-plus miles of White Mountain terrain from Lonesome Lake to Carter Notch and require only the most momentary of breathy cessations at each of the eight structures that constitute the AMC’s hut system. If I go as I know I can, bearing the bare minimum of necessities on my back and thinking more carbo-loading tortoise than simple-sugar hare, I figure I can do it in 24 hours. Add in the variables—the sidewinding curves and tortuous turnings, the unforgiving unevenness of the surfaces I’ll be striding on, the strenuous ups and the knee-mangling downs, nearly 12 hours of encumbering darkness, and a final east-wending descent into the Madison Gulf leading directly to a journey-ending pull up and over 207 o d y sse y s the gnarly Wildcats—and the goal becomes exponentially more difficult, a test-quest for both mind and body, psyche and soul. I’ve hundreds of substantial climbs behind me in every form of weather, and I know the Whites more intimately than any place on earth, but every new venture betides newnesses and sometimes near-calamities one cannot possibly predict or foresee. Given vicissitudes of both self and sky, then, the end envisioned is rarely the one that one comes to at the end of the trail. Three things I’ll half-confess to before starting out. First, though I am fifty years old, I have the lungs and quadriceps of a much younger man. And, it must be added, a foolish, romantically tilted heart. Entrepreneurial, I’m not; practical?—perhaps you’re thinking of the guy next door. From as far back as I can remember I’ve loved Cervantes and Shakespeare, Keats and Lawrence and Woolf—minds alive with the beseeching, questing, ineluctable, utterly useless pulse of words. Second, I have been labeled (libeled?) by many—as crazy, intense, extreme (not always in this order). As my dear mother put it: “You’ll go for miles and miles in one direction just to see if you can make it all the way back.” Third, and perhaps most important for the story I’m about to tell, I have been unabashedly and incurably in love with New Hampshire’s White Mountains since a moonless summer night forty-four years ago when my father, younger brother, and I got caught high on South Moat without a flashlight and with a virtual posse of rangers frantically in search of us from all four points of the compass. And it wasn’t the lostness that hooked me: it was the walking. I fell head-over-heels in thrall with the idea that I could go this way then that, up, down, over and around with only the best sort of carelessness and astonishment as companions. Father, brother, and I made it to safety on our own power those many years ago, and the only immediate consequences to my five-year-old worldview were the literal sting of a few good branch-thwacks to the face and an inexpungible...

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