vituperation

“Good morning,” I said to the approaching man. We walked toward one another across the floor of McKay Hollow off the backside of Monte Sano mountain. He looked a bit like Michael Palin (It’s K-k-k-ken, c-c-c-coming to k-k-k-kill me!).

“Hi,” he replied, smiling. “Seen any snakes?”

“No, not for weeks.” I tried not to sound disappointed. “You?”

“I saw one yesterday, over on the Arrowhead trail. It’s over near the Natural Well?” He lifted his eyebrows questioningly, as if I might not know where the Arrowhead trail is.

As if I might not know where the Arrowhead trail is. I nodded.

“I’ve been around the Arrowhead trail several times. Was it a good snake, like a rattler, or just a racer or rat snake?” Ever since I saw a rattlesnake last year and didn’t have the camera with me, I’ve yearned to see another, with two caveats. First, I want to have the camera with me. Second, I don’t want to see it after it bites me.

I’m weird, but not stupid. At least, I don’t think I am.

His face fell a little.

“I’m not sure what kind of snake it was. It was in the leaves and caught me by surprise. He was moving his tail, but I couldn’t see the end of it.”

“King snakes do that as a defensive move,” I said, as though I were some sort of expert.

Steve Irwin would never lose a snake in his car, I bet.

“I know,” he told me.

“What color was it? Tannish-brown, or gray or black? Rattlesnakes look pretty distinctive.”

He shook his head. “My eyesight’s not so good, and it was really fast. You should’ve seen it take off.”

“That sounds like one of the racers. There are a lot of them up here. Matter of fact, the last snake I saw, about three weeks ago, was a racer. Nothing even comes close to them for speed.”

“It was probably a racer, because it was gone pretty fast.” He grinned ruefully. “I was pretty jumpy the rest of the day, getting spooked every time I’d step on a branch and the other end would move in the leaves.”

“I know what you mean. The only time I ever saw a rattler up here, back in June 2004, I got so jumpy that I did a big goosestepping run down the trail when a briar popped up and stuck me in the calf.”

He laughed. “You come up here a lot, I guess?”

“Yeah, all the time. I love these trails. Especially the hilly ones, like this one. I can’t wait for the climb at the end of this one, back up to the picnic area.”

“I just took my son and his Boy Scout troop up to Fiery Gizzard last week. It’s got some really steep, rocky trails. Lots of big rocks to climb. Sounds like your kind of place. If you pack in something to sleep in, you can get to some real wilderness.”

“Fiery Gizzard’s on my list of places to hike,” I said. “I have a couple of books on good hiking spots in Tennessee, and Fiery Gizzard and Savage Gulf look to be good ones. I’m not much of a camper, though; I like my bed too much. I tell my wife that I’m going to do the Appalachian Trail as soon as they make it so I have a hotel to stay in every night. Love to be outside all day, but not so much at night.”

“You can still get some good all-day hikes up there, with plenty of big hills. Just make sure you stop in with the rangers and get a map first. They have some of the best maps I’ve ever seen. If the map shows the tiniest curve in the trail, it’s going to be there. The maps they have here aren’t nearly as accurate.”

“Have you seen the maps from Briar Tech? They’re pretty awesome. This guy, Norm…I can’t remember his last name, hiked all the trails on the mountain with his GPS, and made detailed maps with grid and topographic overlays. They’re incredible. They’re online at Briar Tech. Dot com.”

“No, I haven’t seen those. Just a second.”

And he did something that outdorked anything I’ve ever done in my life. In the middle of the forest, a mile from people in any direction, he pulled out a PDA and turned it on. Using a stylus, he entered the name of the site while I spelled it out for him.

Then he hung the PDA back in its home. On his belt.

“Looks like you’re prepared for anything,” I said.

“I’m a Boy Scout.” He grinned. “I always carry food, water, a GPS, and my cell phone. I figure if I ever fall and break a leg or something I can spend the night if I need to.”

I didn’t say anything about his walking stick, fashioned from a broom handle and sporting both a rubber cane tip and a leather wrist strap.

“You do the minimalist thing, huh?” he asked, because all I had was a plain hickory stick, sans the rubber tip, wrist strap, and bear whistle (a bear whistle, for God’s sake) it had had when I bought it.

“Yeah, if I’m going less than 6 miles I usually skip the water unless it’s the middle of summer, and I’ve got a cell phone if there’s an emergency. Even if it doesn’t work I tell my wife exactly the route I’m taking, and what time she should start to worry that something happened to me. Most of the time, I even leave her a JPEG map with my route mapped out in Photoshop. I know these trails like the back of my hand now, so I don’t worry about getting lost. If I’m going somewhere new, I take my GPS so I’ll always know where I am relative to my car.”

I basked in my dorkiness until he spoke.

“It’s hard to believe the number of people who come out here unprepared. They just pick a trail and start going, without any idea where it’s going.”

“Tell me,” I replied. “I give directions all the time to people who’ve wandered off onto a less-traveled trail, like this one, all the time. Just last week I had to help two women and their five dogs—five dogs—get up the Waterline trail. It’s probably the hardest trail on the whole mountain, and they’d just taken off on it. I tried to tell them it was just going to keep getting steeper and harder to get up. Last time I saw them they were trying to get their dogs up a 40 foot rock waterfall.”

“We got here a few weeks back and there was a fire truck in the hiker’s lot,” he said. “I went over and asked them if there was a fire. Someone decided to hike, without a map or anything, and managed to get off the trail. They had a cell phone and were talking to the firemen, but couldn’t tell them where they were. The firemen were blowing their horn to see if the lost guy could hear it.”

“Jeez,” I said, and shook my head.

“I guess I shouldn’t say anything,” he said. “I was out here with my son a couple of weeks ago, to see the stone cuts. I saw an unmarked trail and figured it would get us to O’Shaughnessy Point and we started on it.”

“Sounds like the Goat trail.”

He nodded. “It was, and we’d probably still be out there wandering around if we hadn’t run into someone like you who knew the trails really well. He told us how to get up to O’Shaughnessy Point.”

“You ever try the trails over on the Land Trust?”

“Not yet. We’ve just been coming here.”

“There are lots of cool things to see over there—Three Caves, huge rock waterfalls, springs. And it’s got the Waterline trail, which is a great climb. You probably don’t want to take the kids on that one though. It’s pretty steep.”

“We’ll have to give that a try.”

We were silent for a moment.

“Well,” he said. “I guess I’ll let you get back to your hike.”

“Alright. Have a good weekend, and watch out for snakes.”

We went our separate ways.

Humorously, this past weekend I bumped into another guy on the McKay Hollow trail, who said he was “a little disoriented” and wondered if I knew how he might get to the Natural Well from where we were.

I told him, in detail, but I don’t know if he ever found it or not.