A Walk in the Woods: Chapters 17–21

Popular impressions to the contrary, relatively few victims of hypothermia die in extreme conditions, stumbling through blizzards or fighting the bite of arctic winds.

Hypothermia is a gradual and insidious sort of trauma. It overtakes you literally by degrees as your body temperature falls and your natural responses grow sluggish and disordered.

We decided to start with Mount Lafayette, and to that end set off by car one clear July dawn and drove the two hours to Franconia Notch State Park (a “notch” in New Hampshire parlance is a mountain pass), a famous beauty spot at repose beneath commanding summits in the heart of the 700,000-acre White Mountain National Forest.

Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused.

Bill, who seemed serenely impervious to cold and of course had no idea that we were doing anything but proceeding along a high ridge in an unseasonal breeze, looked back from time to time to ask how I was doing.

Built in a commanding style described optimistically by the architect as “Spanish Renaissance,” it was the pinnacle of grace and opulence, with 2,600 acres of cultivated grounds, 235 guest rooms, and every detail of finery that heaps of money could buy.

But already it was something of an anachronism.

Worse, they had begun to attract the wrong sort of people—parvenus from Boston and New York.

In the 1924 edition of New England Highways and Byways from a Motor Car, the author gushed about the unrivaled splendor of the White Mountains—the tumbling cataracts of Franconia, the alabaster might of Washington, the secret charm of little towns like Lincoln and Bethlehem—and strongly encouraged visitors to give the mountains a full day and night.

His expression begged me to drape him with plaudits.

It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other.

It seemed a confirmation—we were in the wilderness now—and a gratifying, totally commensurate reward for a day of hard toil.

And on that premonitory note, we strapped up and set squelchily off up Moxie Bald Mountain.

Since only 10 percent of thru-hikers make it this far, and it is too distant for most day hikers, the trail in Maine is much more thinly used, and so the foliage encroaches.

A dozen or more loons from all the neighboring ponds fly in, and they all swim around together for a couple of hours for no discernible reason other than the pleasure of being together.