Massachusetts and Montana

This afternoon I took a trip over the mountain for milk. This wasn’t strictly necessary – there is a store a block and a half a way that sells milk – but I had my heart set on milk in glass bottles. I buy it from South Mountain Creamery, a little family business that started back in 2001. They have excellent chocolate milk, thick and full of flavor, which the kids love. To be truthful, I enjoy it, too. But what makes me go the distance is their wonderful, unhomogenized whole milk. (They call it “Creamline,” which is probably better for sales than calling it unhomogenized, which sounds a little too much like unhygienic and would probably be confused with unpasteurized.)
It was an excellent day for a drive anyway, and the house has been crowded and noisy lately (a niece and nephews are visiting), so the trip was as much to escape as it was to get milk. In fact, instead of turning around and taking the quickest route home, I decided to go on into Boonsboro and return by way of Smithsburg, Catoctin Mountain, and Thurmont.
The drive up and over Catoctin Mountain is always a blessing, unless the weather is nasty, in which case it is a holy terror. The road climbs steeply, with sharp twists and turns, through mature forest. Part of the mountain is a state park, much of the rest a national forest and somehwere in the middle of it all is Camp David. Also somewhere through the middle of it runs the famous Appalachian Trail.
I have known about the trail there for years -- probably ever since I first drove that road. There is a sign indicating where the trail crosses, but the trail itself is actually rather difficult to spot. It is really quite narrow, and at this time of year, with all the leaves on, even the white blazes that mark the trail can be hard to spot -- at least from the road traveling 40 miles per hour. Believe me, I tried. And I failed.
But I couldn't miss the two hikers with their thumbs out. Inspired a bit by my recent reading of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods, a hilarious account of a middle-aged man's effort to traverse the trail, I took pity and stopped. The two hikers clambered in as quickly as possible, though it took a while to fit their enormous backpacks into my subcompact. They wanted to know how to get to Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, (one was expecting a package at the post office there). I couldn't tell them exactly how to get to Blue Ridge Summit, but I was pretty sure it wasn't far. I said I would take them to Thurmont, where I was confident one of the locals could point them in the right direction.
I didn't ask their names and they didn't offer, but we had a good conversation nonetheless. They both looked about college age, fit and sunburned. The young man was tall and thin with wavy brown hair, the young woman stocky, blonde, freckled and from Montana. They were both through-hikers who had started in Georgia two months ago, though not necessarily together. He was going as far as Massachusetts, which was home. She was planning on finishing the whole length of the trail, all the way to Mount Katahdin in Maine.
He seemed glad for the company, while she was quiet. We talked about the trail, my own (rare) wilderness adventures in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota, and the importance of packing light. I also mentioned Bryson's book, which it turned out the young man had read and liked, though he thought Bryson might have exercised a good bit of artistic license. I left them off at the square in Thurmont.
Such was my good deed for the day, which made me feel a little less guilty about using four gallons of gas to get two gallons of milk.

Phoebe's Farewell

I lost a friend this week.

Two years ago I met my friend Phoebe at the hospital in the middle of the night. Her heart was wearing out and the doctors said she might not live to see the sunrise. I was summoned by her family because she had asked to be anointed.
When I arrived, I found her remarkably calm, considering her condition. I read scripture, dabbed a few drops of oil on her wrinkled brow, made the sign of the cross there with my index and middle finger, then laid my hands gently on her soft, gray hair and prayed. I don’t remember the exact words I used, but it was most likely a simple prayer asking for peace, comfort and the strengthening of faith. Before I took my leave, I promised to come back to visit the next day. I left, wondering whether there would be a next day for Phoebe.
As it turned out, she had more days left than anyone expected. She recovered sufficiently to go home, was enrolled in Hospice, and I began visiting every couple of weeks. At ninety-six, her mind was still sharp and her sense of humor intact. We discovered common interests -- cooking (she had been a home economics teacher), life on the farm (each of us had grown up on one) and history (I’d studied it; she’d lived it).
Spring came and went, summer followed, and before we knew it, a year had passed. Though she remained bedfast, Hospice decided she no longer qualified for their services. We joked about her being the only person either of us had ever heard of who “graduated” from Hospice.
The calendar pages kept turning and I kept up my schedule of visits. She and her sister Elizabeth, with whom she lived, were always welcoming. Sometimes I brought along something I’d made – cookies, home-made noodles. We talked about how many eggs my chickens were laying, what Phoebe and Elizabeth had seen lately on the Food Network, and what this country was like seven or eight decades ago.
Several more months passed before Phoebe was readmitted to Hospice. Her appetite was poor and she continued to lose weight, but otherwise seemed unchanged. She smiled when I arrived, carried her end of the conversation, and appeared to appreciate my offer of prayer each time we parted. She, like the rest of us, wondered why she lingered so long, but didn’t complain.
I visited her a week before she died and saw no sign that her death was so near. They tell me that a few days before she died she announced that she was “going soon.” She proceeded to have a couple days when she was not her usual self, and then one morning she didn’t wake up. They called and told me later that day.
The funeral was Saturday. Phoebe never had children and outlived most of her contemporaries, so there was only a small crowd in the chapel – mostly nephews, nieces and neighbors. One of her nieces presided. I asked only for the privilege of sharing Jane Kenyon’s poem, “Let Evening Come,” which seemed to fit Phoebe perfectly. (If you haven’t read it, it is worth looking up.)
Phoebe was ready to go, and at her age and in her condition, I can't fault her for that. Still, I'll miss her. Since she died, I've thought often of that call in the middle of the night. Little did I imagine, as I drove the deserted streets, that I was on my way to make a new friend -- but I was. And I am thankful.

Farewell, Phoebe.
I'll see you on the other side.

Behind The Wheel

You know, the next time the doctor tells me that I should have one of those tests to see how my heart responds to stress, I'm going to ask if I can skip the treadmill and instead just ride along with a teenager learning to drive. Nothings gets my heart racing quite like literally putting my life in the hands of someone whose driving "experience" is almost entirely confined to video games with names like "Need For Speed 3" and "Evade the Police IV." The one thing these games have in common, by the way, is that the cars always seem to be crashing. And I'm not just talking fender benders here. I'm talking about high speed head-on and t-bone collisions, multiple rollovers, and fiery plunges off bridges and into canyons.
As you may have guessed, we are in the midst of it again -- teaching one of our teenagers to drive. It is the second time around and I thought it would be less frightening. In fact, if anything, I am more frightened -- not because the first child drove any better than this one, but because I took a statistics course in college and I understand the laws of probability. The more chances you take, the more likely it is that it will catch up with you. And we have one more teenager to go after this. Heaven help us!
Still, as scary as it is riding along with a teenager learning to drive, I realize that it is something that has to be done. People can't learn to drive just by memorizing the rules of the road, or reading the operator's manual for the car, or by watching others drive. If you want someone to learn to drive, sooner or later you have to let them get behind the wheel.