Creature Discomforts

hands, and, best of all, a divinely animal aroma that induces olfactory visions of aged road kill and yummy, yummy leather. The unopened letter he selects from the pile would, if opened and read by Gabrielle, inform her that a local bank has preapproved her for a home-equity line of credit. The printed word says nothing to Rowdy. What speaks to him is the glue on the envelope. Chew me! it urges him. Tear, rip, and swallow! Bon appétit!
     

Chapter Sixteen
     
    IN CLICHÉD NEW ENGLAND CONTRAST to the day before, this one was sunny and dry. Consequently, the tourists who’d spent the previous day wandering through gift shops in Bar Harbor were getting to the real point of vacation by checking out the gift shops within Acadia’s boundaries. Or so I decided when I tried to park the Bronco where I’d found it yesterday, in the lot near The Tarn on Route 3. The lot turned out to be full. The closest place to get indoors and spend money was near where I ended up parking, in the big lot serving the complex consisting of the Nature Center, the Wild Gardens of Acadia, and the Sieur de Monts Spring. Many of the cars, vans, and tour buses had undoubtedly transported people who would visit the Nature Center shop and, incidentally, stroll through the Wild Gardens of Acadia and glance at the Sieur de Monts Spring before resuming the wilderness-by-asphalt approach to seeing everything the park had to offer. The grandly named Sieur de Monts Spring is housed in a gloomy little building with dirty windows that allow visitors to peer down at a depressing puddle and ask, This is the spring? It is. According to a sign posted outside the Nature Center, the most common cause of injury to park visitors was falling on rocks. After Norman Axelrod’s fatal fall, the warning felt like a timid and vaguely sick understatement, a bit like the fabled warning of the Fall River, Massachusetts, mother who told her children to stay away from Lizzie Borden’s yard because Miss Borden “wasn’t very nice to her mommy and daddy.”
    As Ms. Wilderness by Foot, I got off to an unpromising start. Yesterday, when the dogs had found me, Kimi had been wearing her two-piece pack, and although Rowdy had lost his saddlebags, he’d still been wearing his vest. When I’d removed the dogs’ vests, I’d paid no attention to how they were fastened. Now, with Rowdy still in the car, I struggled mightily with Kimi and the pieces of her pack before finally realizing that I was trying to put everything on backward. This evidence of my incompetence unnerved me. I didn’t even remember my lost competence; I’d inferred it from what my former self had written in her— my?—hiking diary, which I’d studied before leaving Gabrielle’s cottage. According to the diary, the dogs and I had arrived at M.D.I. only four days before my fall. Kimi, I learned, had been carrying rice in her pack not because I harbored a morbid fear of starvation, but because I was conditioning the dogs for backpacking by systematically increasing the amount of weight they carried. The entries for all hikes, including quite a few in the Berkshires and in conservation land in Boston’s western suburbs, specified how much weight each dog had packed and how far we had hiked. The main point to emerge from my notes was my considerable experience in hiking. The final entry, made the day before yesterday, was for an eight-mile hike that had taken us to the summits of Sargent, Cedar Swamp, and Penobscot mountains and down something called the Deer Stream Trail, which I’d described as a “damned steep riverbed of rocks.” I’d added, “Rough footing, but more unpleasant than challenging. No blisters.”
    A few days ago, I’d hiked down a steep, rocky trail. If I’d commented on my escape from blisters, wouldn’t I have noted any problems I had encountered? Rough footing, fell twice? Throughout the diary, the only remarks about anything remotely like injury or discomfort were tediously frequent complaints about hot weather: “Great hike except for broiling sun. No shade! Sweat bath! Goddamned global warming!” And on and on. Furthermore, several entries made within the past six months contained positive reports about a new pair of Fabiano hiking boots: “Weigh a ton, but excellent on rock.” Yesterday, hiking in the cool weather I liked and wearing those excellent-on-rock boots, I hadn’t just skinned a knee or twisted an ankle, but had taken a fall that might have proven fatal. How