THE PATCH
“We shared many interests, including exploring our state’s natural beauty.”
Nancy and I got to know each other during a series of environmental-compliance workshops we led at the Vermont power company where we worked. We shared many interests, including exploring our state’s natural beauty. When the company offered a buyout to people over 50, we both took it, knowing it would give us the chance to finally hike all 273 miles of Vermont’s Long Trail. Also known as the “footpath in the wilderness,” the trail follows the rugged main ridge of the Green Mountains.
Part of trail culture is to choose a pseudonym for oneself. Hers was LaPie, French for magpie—a nod to her hair, which was dark with a streak of white. Mine was Abacus, a little joke about all the math I did on the trail. How many steps till the next break? How much elevation have we gained? I even used math to explain why LaPie was forever ahead of me: Her legs were 32 inches long, mine were 28, and that 8:7 ratio kept her always out in front. In fact, she was ahead of me in many ways. Her kids were a decade older than mine. She’d published poetry; I wrote in my journal. Her career had brought her recognition that mine had not.
It took us six years of day hikes and overnights to complete the entire trail. Mornings were the best part. The angle of the sun’s rays backlit the spider webs across our path; the clean scent from a canopy of cedar and white pine filled the air. Ferns glistening with dew and rocks covered in moss bordered the trail. We’d stop after the first hour, get out the propane burner and boil water for tea, do some stretching and plan the day. How many miles?
She knew lichens and geology, the names of woodland flowers and ground cover. I knew the ferns. We both knew the song of the hermit thrush, Vermont’s state bird. We recited poems we’d memorized; a favorite was Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things.” “I come into the peace of wild things / who do not tax their lives with forethought / of grief.”
We finished the trail just a few weeks before LaPie's cancer diagnosis; within a year, she was bedridden. We had not gotten around to submitting our hiking logs to the Green Mountain Club, the entity that maintains and protects the Long Trail. These logs would earn us the status of End to Enders, an achievement for which we’d each receive a round green-and-yellow embroidered patch.
I managed to hurry along the administrative bureaucracy so I could bring LaPie her patch before it was too late. When I handed it to her, she thanked me again and again. We reminisced about lunches on sunny rock faces, leaning on our packs as we scanned the landscape below, assessing our location. We laughed about how she liked to pitch our tent in the woods, far from people, while I preferred to be farther from bears and moose. We recalled evenings when we were too exhausted to make a meal and instead climbed into our sleeping bags before sundown.
On our last day together, she handed me back her patch, rallying enough to insist in her weak voice that I take it. “Please keep it with yours. They belong together.”
That was ten years ago. I still hike the Long Trail, with both patches on my pack. Although I suppose there was a time when I knew which patch was which, I no longer remember. But I remember LaPie, always ahead of me, even in death.
—Cynthia Russell
Cynthia Russell lives in Montreal, where she works at the Museum of Fine Arts as a Cultural Link, and in Vermont, where she paints abstract interpretations of the North Branch of the Winooski River.