RMC Newsletter - Winter 2009-2010

A Young Man Becomes a Proud Father... Still Looking for a Caterpillar
By Guy Stever

"One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small….Tell ‘em a hookah smoking caterpillar has given you the call….Just ask Alice….”

With the words of Gracie Slick and Jefferson Airplane pounding in my brain, I take one step, then another, and yet another….on past Sunset Rock (now overgrown)….take a left hand turn….a right hand turn….and look up. There it is….Crag Camp….the real one….the OLD one.

After two summers on the trail crew, I was privileged enough to spend two idyllic summers of my life as the caretaker of Crag Camp -- and those were the good old days when Dave Nichols (my colleague at Gray Knob) and I could spend days alone with no people tromping through disturbing the peace.

Perhaps the strongest memories I have of Crag are the people who trooped through my life in those two years. The vast majority were wonderful and interesting people. I remember a man named Jarel (I always wondered if he was related to Superman) who was a photographer and was fascinating to talk to. A few weeks after his stay, I received a package in the mail that contained a gorgeous signed photograph of the ravine taken from Crag.

There was the usual assortment of Randolphians and all “their sisters and their cousins and their aunts” (never any Pirates from Penzance, though). There were the day-trippers and the multiple night stays to converse with in the evening, and the assorted friends who stopped by for a visit and a few mean games of Casino. There were the camp groups (with no size limit back then) most of whom were good -- in fact I started working for one of them (Camp Kabeyun) the year after I left Crag.

And then there were “the others.” There was a time when I rounded that last corner in the trail and looked up….to discover that some ***** had a fifteen foot (or so it seemed at the time) bonfire roaring in the front yard -- twenty feet or so away from the all-wood cabin. The argument that ensued was not pretty, but I finally prevailed when I threatened to bring in Smokey the Bear and call the Forest Service on my walkie–talkie. It was a good thing he didn’t call my bluff as those were the days long before the caretakers were equipped with radios.

Then there was the young boy who arrived at Crag during the afternoon. He said he had hiked up from the valley but that his parents and younger sister had gone over to ride the Cog up Washington and then hike across the range to Crag. Well five o’clock rolled around and no family -- but the clouds had set in in good shape. Seven, eight, nine, ten o’clock and still no family. Finally, at eleven o’clock, Dave and I left Crag and headed up the Spur to find them. We stumbled and bumbled along in the thick clouds with our flashlights playing all over the place like light sabers. We stopped at Thunderstorm to take care of nature and Dave asked if I heard a tinkling bell. I thought he’d finally lost it and made some off-color remark. But he persisted and sure enough, somewhere out there in the clouds we both could hear the tinkle of a dog’s bell -- but there were no flashlights or people. We started yelling and listening, and finally from somewhere out there in the night we heard a response. We finally found the trio. They had only lightweight jackets on, no emergency gear, no flashlights -- basically nothing. It turns out that they had been going from cairn to cairn in the dark. The father swore that he had done the Edmands Path before and clearly remembered that it was just a couple hours max from Washington to Crag. The more he talked, the more dumbfounded Dave and I became. We gave them water and candy bars, and began the long trudge back to Crag and a happy reunion with the son. The family may have said thank-you that night, but I clearly remember that they left for the valley the next day without even so much as a “good-bye.” Thank God they were not the norm.

Then there was the weird (and, at the time, scary)….To quote the opening line from Snoopy’s on-going novel, “It was a dark and stormy night…” and I was all alone at Crag. A thunderstorm raged outside the door and the lightning lit up the heavily socked-in clouds outside. I had the Coleman lantern running and was trying to read a book when all of a sudden there was this blood-curdling howling outside the front door. Every hair on my body stood on end. I inched over to the window and there, as I could see quite clearly in the flashes of the lightning, was this large yellow dog howling at whatever -- there certainly was no moon that night. I admit that the passage of time may have embellished this story in my mind, but we weren’t talking one of Paris Hilton’s portable puppies here. Rather, we were looking at something out of a Jack London novel. After what seemed like an eternity, he stopped and sauntered off into the woods. The thunderstorm abated and the dog never came back, but I lay in my sleeping bag whimpering all night. I don’t know if someone shot old Yella or not, but I never saw him again, though I did see paw prints on the Spur Trail for about a week.

Then there was the stupid….Back in those days, the hut men were expected to attend the RMC Annual Meeting and climb back up after it was over. God knows whatever possessed me (I was no longer in high school after all), but there was this outhouse door that needed to be packed up to replace the one up there. I decided that the cool of the evening would be a grand time to lug this puppy up to Crag. The lower Amphibrach was deceptively easy. However, once past first crossing and on the way to Pentadoi I began to get hung up in trees that I couldn’t see in the dark -- sometimes winding up on my derriere as the tree limb snapped me backwards. Did I bother to stop and change the load or leave it there for the next day? Of course not.... I was young and male. The Spur Trail presented even bigger wrinkles. Sometimes I would get take a big step up onto a rock only to have the door sharply stop my ascent when it ran into a limb and left me struggling to keep my balance. The door finally made it.

Then there was the aesthetic…. Back in the old days before the EPA, Superfund, Greenpeace and environmental issues, Crag’s outhouse was perched on the edge of King Ravine with a SPECTACULAR view across the ravine and up into the Mahoosucs. The outhouse was renowned among climbing aficionados and the view was a frequent topic of discussion -- it truly was a King’s throne that invited great moments of profound thoughts about the nature of the universe (those were cosmic days back in the sixties). Unfortunately (thank heavens it was after I left) the Forest Service decided that the King’s Throne was polluting the waters at the bottom of King Ravine by x parts per something and so the best view in the mountains was abandoned to fall over into the ravine.

Then there was the testosterone…. Like any generation, mine was full of brave (and, in retrospect, foolhardy) attempts to get to Crag as fast as one could, or carry the most weight to Crag or get down to the valley as fast as one could. My specialty was going down -- really fast. During the summer of 1967, I practiced for my assault on the record books -- plotting the best line down the New Spur, taking bone-headed leaps from point A to point B, and trying to avoid becoming a tree-hugger before it became a fashionable concept. Then, on my twentieth birthday -- August 25th -- stopwatch in hand, on a cool and peerless day I launched myself down the Spur Trail. Now here memory, age, and ego blur the story. I believe I made it down in twenty minutes and five seconds -- but to the new Route 2. My understanding is that Johnny Stevens made it to the old Route 2 in twenty minutes. In any event, I concede the record to Johnny (and anyone else who has been dumb enough to pull that stunt). Right now, I’m not sure I could make the first twenty-five feet down the trail in twenty minutes -- oh age! oh human frailty!

But by far the most enjoyable trip I ever made to Crag was one I made thirty-four years later on a cold, rainy, miserable Memorial Day with substantial patches of snow still on the ground past Pentadoi. That was the day that I helped to pack in our daughter Rosalind to begin her first summer as caretaker at Crag. That was a record-breaking summer as Cammee Campbell was the caretaker at Gray Knob. That was the first all female crew at the huts and it was the first time that the daughters of two former caretakers served as caretakers themselves. And that really is my most favorite memory of Crag -- even if it wasn’t the real Crag.

I never did wind up seeing that hookah-smoking caterpillar in either one of my two summers at Crag. But who knows? Maybe when I make it back one more time, all those ghosts of the past will flood out to join me -- including the caterpillar.