It was a father’s last chance. But school was Middlebury, which happened to lie 110 miles from home.
By Jay Heinrichs ’77
Illustration by Clayton Hanmer
In September 1943, Dorothy “Pinky” de Canizares ’47 rode a series of trains from Philadelphia’s Main Line all the way to Middlebury, a college she had read about in
a magazine. It was the only school she applied to. Thirty years later, Pinky sat in the front seat of our 1971 Dodge station wagon as my father drove us past the Main Line train station and on up to Middlebury. I had applied to six colleges, confident that pretty good board scores would compensate for less than inspired grades. Five colleges turned me down. Middlebury let me in. (Thanks, Mom.)
Thirty-three years after that, in late August, George Heinrichs ’10 walked from our home in Orange, New Hampshire, to the Middlebury campus. George had pulled top grades and excellent test scores in high school. He was an Eagle Scout, captain of the cross-country ski team, a hooker on the rugby team; had picked vegetables on a farm in summer, won a scholarship to tour World War II sites, and been given awards for moral character at two different schools. His counselor told him Middlebury was a “reach.” Like my mother, though, he applied nowhere else. It let him in. (No thanks to me, I suspect.)
As if the admissions process were not arduous enough, George chose to depart for college carrying a pack with 70 pounds of food and camping gear. He walked 13 miles to the Appalachian Trail, crossed the river into Vermont, hung a right at the Long Trail, turned left at Bread Loaf, and strolled into campus—a total of 110 miles. It took him a week. He spent three of six nights in a tent, two in lean-to shelters, and, for one pungent night, in an indifferently swept stall in a farmer’s horse barn.
He did not do it alone. Because I’m his father, and he didn’t have the heart to tell me how much I would slow him down, he let me come along. My pack weighed just 25 pounds; he carried what I couldn’t.
I had always wanted to walk my children to school but never had the opportunity. Growing up, the kids didn’t see much of me, because for years I commuted from New England to offices far away. I missed his older sister’s birthday once. My wife, Dorothy Senior, quit her job to do the parenting, and I was the guy who needed quiet to work. But three years ago we reversed roles: I quit and Dorothy resumed her career. Our daughter, Dorothy Junior, is a senior at UConn who drives herself to campus each term. George’s admission to Middlebury gave me my last chance to walk a kid to school.
So at 7:00 a.m., George and I left our house and walked down Cardigan Mountain Road. It was cloudy and cool, idyllic hiking weather, and a wet summer had left the grass June-green—flowers bloomed, birds sang, and the sharp sweet smell of apples wafted from ancient trees. This early on a Saturday morning, this far in the country, we had the road to ourselves. We passed a beautiful lake, made a couple of turns before the pavement turned to dirt, and paused to eat a few handfuls of peanut M&Ms.
The only thing that would have made this scene perfect was if we knew where we were going. I was pretty sure that this dirt road wasn’t the one we were supposed to be on. We carried only trail maps, assuming we could navigate our own neighborhood—a foolish notion, given my near-total sense-of-direction deficit and George’s genetic inability to remember the names of roads.
“This is bad,” said George, who has a knack for the obvious. “We’re supposed to cover 22 miles today, and you get us lost within four miles of our house.”
“I get us lost? This is your hike, pal.”
“For which you’re the official navigator.”
“We never said I was . . . ” And so on. Our argument was largely pro forma. We knew what to do.
The first thing you do when you’re lost is to sit down and eat something. We did this without thinking, throwing down our packs and digging into the M&Ms. Next, you make a plan, which usually consists of walking until you encounter someone to ask. Other people in our predicament might have trouble deciding which direction to take first, but George and I find it psychologically difficult to backtrack. We tend to follow the same course, even when we’re pretty sure it’s the wrong way. This policy seems stupid on the face of it, but George and I have been lost so many times that we seem to have achieved a kind of clueless transcendence.
We consider getting lost a prime reason for hiking in the first place, having managed to lose ourselves on both coasts and in Alaska, as well as many points in between. While being lost together over the years, George and I have discovered a secret canyon, ancient Anasazi ruins, a hidden pond, a waterfall, and countless interesting toads. Two weeks before our walk to Middlebury, we did the Presidential Traverse to test my fitness. The route covered 26 miles over nine of the highest peaks in the White Mountains. We had planned to climb eight; the ninth was by accident. (It was foggy.) The extra mountain was worth it, because it produced a good yarn, albeit at our expense. This is just the sort of serendipity that comes from losing your way. (The word itself derives from “Serendib,” a fictional Eden discovered by guys who were, naturally, lost.)
You can understand why, before I saw my son walk away on the Middlebury campus, I would join him in going astray one more time. After that, it’s up to him to find his own course, and maybe lose it as well. George is one of the lucky few who get to attend a select liberal arts college. While most other college-bound students have a career path already set, a liberal education offers a prolonged “liminal phase,” as the anthropologists say. It’s an in-between time, an especially luxurious—have you seen the campus lately?—form of purgatory.
To put it another way, getting lost is the essence of a liberal education.
* * *
We must have missed the road after Canaan Street Lake, a few miles from our house. An old man with a flawless can’t-get-there-from-here accent steered us farther in the wrong direction, but shortly after, a young couple showed us a backtrack-shortcut combination that led to the Appalachian Trail. Heading down the other side of Moose Mountain, George reminded me how we used to camp on the summit when he was little.
“Oh, I remember,” I said. “When you were two, I put you on top of my pack and carried you down. Every time you saw a bird you’d lunge and almost land both of us in the rocks.”
“And now I’m doing the carrying,” he said. “If you are what you eat, I’m carrying you.”
“And you’ll carry me for the rest of your life, in your head.”
This is the great thing about a long hike, walking in tandem. You can say things that might seem a little embarrassing if you faced each other.
“That’s how parents achieve immortality,” I continued. “Long after I’m dead, you’ll hear my voice saying all the things you heard me say through childhood.”
“Who took my day pack! Where the hell are my keys!” It really was a good imitation.
It took George and me a full day to reach Hanover. Out of water and dehydrated, we scrambled up vertiginous rocks to a spring that served a shelter maintained by Dartmouth students in the woods above town. A dead mouse lay at the bottom. We trudged down to the Hanover Food Co-op for water, then back up the ridge to our campsite, stretching our first day’s hike to 24 miles. That night we were too tired to fight over our single book, Melville’s Typee. (Its beginning is really just a camping trip spoiled by rain and cannibals.)
At 7:15 the next morning, Dorothy Senior met us on the campus green with a lavish picnic breakfast. It was my birthday. I was turning 51. “You look like hell,” she said. And then George and I crossed the bridge over the Connecticut River into Vermont and it began to rain.
By late afternoon we had hiked 19 miles, and the rain had turned into a solid, driving sheet. A merciful farmer in Pomfret let us sleep in his barn. His dog ecstatically licked George awake in the early dawn. Rain dripped from the eaves, and it continued through the third day, finally letting up as we walked over beautiful hilltop meadows. Hiking 18 miles that day before the light began to fade, we camped between two streams, three quarters of a mile short of our destination. The next stretch turned out to be one of the toughest of the hike—straight up, then straight up again. I grabbed onto trees for support, and more than once brought my hand back with a slug clinging to it. When we arrived at Gifford Woods State Park, a few miles from where the Appalachian Trail collides with the Long Trail, Dorothy Senior showed up in the sag wagon. She handed me a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia and said sympathetically, “Now you really look like hell.” But George was to suffer more than I.
* * *
We climbed steeply out of the park, and by the time we reached the Long Trail, George wasn’t sure he could continue at all. A heat rash on his back had somehow caused his nerves to fire, sending shooting, tingling pains down his spine. He had to stop every 10 minutes to soak his shirt in streams. I gave him antihistamines from our first-aid kit, which did little more than make him groggy. George looked utterly spent.
“It’s your choice,” I said. “If you want, we can quit right now—head down to the road and try to call your mother. Otherwise I’ll carry your pack into camp.”
“Think you can?”
“Sure,” I lied. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and I was feeling every one of my 51 years. “Tomorrow we’ll get up at 4:30 and hike in the dark,” I continued. “The heat seems to affect your back more than anything, so we’ll walk when it’s cold. And we’ll do that the next day if you’re up to it. Unless you want to bail.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to bail.”
I swung his pack up—its weight almost threw me to the ground—and began to walk as fast as I could, figuring that my legs would outlast my back. Miraculously, the trail became level and smooth, dipping in kind little drops that let me jog to save my knees. Our pace increased from half a mile an hour to more than three, and at exactly 3:30 we arrived at the shelter.
“You’re cooking,” I said, diving into his pack for an airline bottle of whiskey and propping my back against the wall of the shelter. It was the finest cocktail I have ever had.
“That was impressive,” said George.
“Yes, it was. And once again, I got to carry you.”
“So how are you going to tell this? I’ll bet the pack ends up weighing 150 pounds, and you’ll say you carried it for 30 miles.”
I just sipped my J&B and brook water and felt kindly toward the world. It’s one of those singular times when you think, Damn. I did things right after all. Then again, I was wearing George’s pile jacket, having left mine in the dark at our last campsite. North Face, 80 bucks, a birthday present.
* * *
We hiked in the dark next morning, slogging through wet weeds tangling the trail. George said, “Do you realize how un-teenager it is of me to get up at 4:30 to hike?” We reached the top of the day’s highest peak in a few hours. Just as we approached the summit, a hundred thin shafts of light pierced the mist and turned the trails greeny moss-gold: a visual angelic choir. We breakfasted and followed the ridgeline, a moderate, lovely Vermont path that suddenly made the trip look easy.
George and I talked more as our mood lifted; he addressed the trail ahead, and I spoke to his back. We discussed the insurance business, actuarial tables, food, what Middlebury was like for me, our favorite hikes, our favorite sounding words: “preposterous” for me, because it’s such a preposterous word; for George, “inveigled,” which he picked up from Melville, and “sagacious” because he liked the sound.
Robert Frost entered the conversation—we were in Vermont, after all—and George recited, “‘I took the road less traveled by / and that made all the difference in the world.’”
“Just ‘all the difference,’ ” I corrected.
“So how did he know it made all the difference in the world?”
“Frost is sly that way,” I said, pleased to lecture before I lost him to the faculty. “People think of poetry as fancy language, but he saw it as the opposite, as language purified—‘a momentary stay of confusion.’”
“Very sagacious of him,” George said.
I grunted.
“You inveigled that out of me,” he added, pleased with himself.
We took luxuriant breaks to bask shirtless in the sun. Clouds were building up on the northern peaks, though. “Could be thunderstorms this afternoon,” I said. “Lots of energy in the air.”
George lifted his head and glared at me. “Why are you always so pessimistic? Every time I say something hopeful, you do your Eeyore thing: ‘We’ll see,’” he said in an exaggerated moan.
“That’s not pessimism. It’s contingency planning.” I didn’t say that that’s what a dad does. He hopes that things will turn out right as long as he has anticipated everything—nature, bad luck, and his own screw-ups.
* * *
We got to the next shelter at 2:30 and had enough time and energy to bathe. I discovered the cause of a terrible rash I had suffered for the past two days: a burr in my shorts.
Our 7:00 p.m. bedtime was beginning to seem routine, and at 4:30 next morning it seemed no trouble to bring George cocoa in bed. Today we would hike to Bread Loaf. He scanned the map by headlamp. “If we want, we can save a couple miles and a mountain by taking a shortcut.” He pointed at a Forest Service road that ended just half a mile above the Bread Loaf campus.
“Is that cheating?” I asked.
“I’m walking to Middlebury. I’m not doing the Long Trail.”
So we reached Bread Loaf at noon. The place was full of Middlebury grads attending Alumni College, along with a couple dozen students who were getting their residential life orientation. Longtime staffer Glenna Emilo recognized me when we walked into the inn’s reception area. She handed us towels and pointed to bathrooms with showers. “After you bathe, stay for lunch,” she said.
Those words moved me profoundly. “God, I love Middlebury,” I said, as we climbed the stairs.
“I love Middlebury, too,” George said, with a striking lack of irony.
He and I slept in the nearby forest and scrounged a Bread Loaf breakfast large enough to raise eyebrows. The rest of the hike was all road, down Route 125 through East Middlebury and a right at Route 7. I felt pretty good for a geezer who had hiked a hundred-some miles, but my sore feet must have altered my gait. Three motorists offered us rides. When we declined a man from Massachusetts, he got out of his car. “Why don’t you just rest for a while in the back seat? I’ll stop as long as you want.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “We’re just walking to campus.”
He leaned in toward me. “Look, buddy, from the way you’re walking, you may not make it.” He drove off, shaking his head.
We reached the A&W three minutes before it opened for lunch, downed root beer floats and burgers, and arrived on campus around one. George insisted on hiking all the way up the hill to Mead Chapel so we could get a stranger to take our picture. Then we stopped off at Meeker House to shamelessly borrow 60 dollars from the editor of this magazine for dinner at Mister Ups. We picked up the keys to the car of my friend Maggie Paine ’79, who was away for the weekend, and drove to her house in Cornwall. As we passed the art center, I turned to George.
“I feel like I ought to say something wise,” I said.
“Don’t let me stop you,” he said.
“It’s just that I can’t think of anything wise to say.”
“That’s the wisest thing you’ve said in a week.”
“You know, you’re starting to get awfully wise yourself.”
“Which is partly the point of hiking together, Dad. It’s to make us sick of each either so you won’t miss me.”
And so you won’t miss me.
The Dorothies showed up with George’s college stuff—Dorothy Junior had a long weekend from college—and we moved him into Allen. His room faces the Atwater Commons dining hall, whose eccentric “green roof” sprouts wildflowers like Hobbiton. Two hallmates—a pair of women—greeted him, and it began to seem clear that it was time to leave. (Besides, George needed a nap. He planned to retie his wet boots and embark on a trail-building trip for MOO, which stands for Middlebury Outdoor Orientation.) It wasn’t until we drove off, when it was too late, that I thought of something wise to say to George:
“Get lost.”
Jay Heinrichs ’77 maintains a Web site, figarospeech.com, which reveals rhetorical tricks and pratfalls in politics and the media. His book, Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us about the Art of Persuasion, will be published by Crown in February.