A walk in the woods with Stephen King
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My trip to Maine earlier this month featured good decisions and bad decisions.
Good decisions:
- Turning around .2 miles from the summit of Mt. Katahdin because the weather was deteriorating and my group was on its way back down.
- Packing way more food and water for my hike than I should have needed.
- Keeping gloves in my pack even though it was July.
Bad decisions:
- Taking a walk in sandals that I know give me blisters the day before our summit.
- Being okay with a combined 16 hours of driving in the day before and day after our hike.
- Deciding to read The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King while camping in Maine.
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon is a psychological thriller featuring 9 year old (but tall for her age) Tricia, the Boston Red Sox when they were still cursed, and a pretty good reason to stay on the trail when you're hiking in the woods. Especially the Maine woods. Because the Maine woods are pretty isolated. Anything can happen out there. This is a fact that I didn't really appreciate until I had driven 8 hours to get there from Providence, RI. Not a great time to be reading a Stephen King book about the very place you happen to be camping.
Let's just say that Tricia discovered the world has teeth while hiking in Maine, and so did I. Her discovery involved bears, the sub audible, and being lost in the woods. My discovery involved freezing rain in July, hypothermia, nightmares in a tent, and way too much time to think while driving a rental car.
Other scary books that take place in the north east:
(Note: I had the good sense to put off reading Jaws until after my beach vacation to Cape Cod last week. I read Doctor Sleep in Vermont last August.)
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