Nick Ripatrazone

Patriots’ Path

I spend the summer trying to connect Patriots’ Path.  To complete the forgotten route. 

~

Last night’s rain sheaths the planks like a recent varnish.  A sign on the park service bench warns that bear or fox will lap drippings from fatty bacon, lick drained orange cartons, or ruffle marshmallow packages.  There is no lake to hang my garbage over, and these trees are bare of branches.  My last hot dog is boiling over a blue flame, so I close the Sabrett bag between my fingers and welcome poison ivy on my kneecaps.  I cross the unmarked land, the pockets of pure forest that patchwork the cleared campsites.  I pour the remnants of pig onto a carved log and the brown runoff lightens the bark.  Back at the campsite, the water boils over the pot and spreads in the pine-needled dirt.  I stomp the mess, hoping some motions of my boot will quell the smell.  I should have tied yarn around these trunks that surround me, but the bark is curiously scarred, almost shingled.  Oval nubs of sap bruise the wood.  A friend once called these hemorrhage-like forms owl vomit: red, white, and parts purple.  I press my thumb into the sap’s rubbery film.  I wrap the flimsy hot dog in white bread and continue to kick the meat smell into the earth.

~

I toss the shoelace-tied bag over the high, woven-wire fence.  Chunks from the last Cortland keep my lip cold.  I have eaten six thus far because I do not want to pay by the pound.  I already paid a dollar to step foot on the orchard, so I consider these trees and their roots property of the earth.  A college student employee slows by on a Steiner.  His faux cowboy hat looks the texture of a fortune cookie.  He gives me the simple chin nod of a twenty year-old summer maintenance worker but it is October now.  He’s past season.  He turns down a row of trees, trunks painted orange, apples clustered near the apex.  Smashed, worm-holed cores pebble the rooted grass below.  I release the Galas bundled under my sweater and eat another.  The wire fence has enough give to remain comfortable: I am reminded of a postcard spotted at a yard-sale.  Three men with the same hat as this boy playing cards with a brown-dressed woman standing next to them, the four of them relaxed before a bevy of bulls, only a wire fence to stop the stampede.  The control of beast by chicken-wire.  The Galas are ripe today, for sure.  A vision of choking on an overanxious bite, and then my unconscious heap being tossed in the trailer pulled by the Steiner, stuns me for a moment.  That juice-induced image ends with the college boy’s brim splintering the sun.

~

Marshall wears an “Alice in Chains: Dirt” t-shirt, and his sneakers hang over the cliff.  Pike’s Peak is damn cold, but I manage with a scarf and a fleece.  I have never been this high.  Marshall says Colorado is a fine place: he would move here but we’re all only sixteen and that sort of decision is not yet made.  Bare bushes stubble the red rock.  At this altitude, the forest has given way to bare dirt.  The rest of the soccer team accepts this windy rest.  Matt’s armpit hair is pressed between his arm and chest.  I leave the laughs and scan the forest we have ascended, and although it had been dark as we hiked, now the forest appears darker from my view: the forest is the green-black seen only in rustic American watercolors or at the bottom of lakes.  My trip down this mountain will be colored by a simple fear: I rarely see such an encompassing view of a planned route, and the knowledge is like an outdated map in hand.  Sometimes novelty supersedes reality.  I drink from my canteen.  The water has a minivan’s backseat-lukewarmness.  I pour the tepid liquid on a leaf to see how it wilts, how it succumbs to the weight of water.

~

The spinner snags a Samuel Adams, and within the tan bottle floats a cigarette and an injured minnow.  I pour the mess back into Jim Fear Pond.  The last drips of alcohol mix with the pond-top’s froth, which resembles a bowl of smashed peas.  I hurl the bottle into the woods, and hope the lopsided trajectory flies clear of Eric and Park, who are smoking something foolish.  I pray they do not walk the shore with burning sticks between their fingers, and breathe a cloud to the sky, so that the leaves collect ashes.  I know they will soon return, haphazardly hook a worm, and then nag a bass within minutes.  So, for now, let them remain in the forest.  I have not caught a fish in years, and prefer solitary practice with my brother’s yellow tackle box.  I toss lure after bait after worm into the pond with a name that scares children.  Once I was scared of this place, but not because of the pond.  Behind the water and the woods rests a township pool, the older of the two town swimming facilities, and the less well-maintained.  Lifeguards have always been curiously old, and the snack bar serves a superabundance of toasted, starched pretzels that spin under an amber light.  One morning, while fishing with my father, I compared this pond to my idea of the pool, and decided the pool was also a good place.  I wanted to dip my foot in the pool, though a high-schooler at the door denied me entry.  No badge, no swim.  I looked back to my father, who waited for the red and white bobber to dip below the surface.  I snuck into the forest in hopes of finding an unguarded entry point.  After minutes my palms were full of thorns, and neither the pool nor the pond could be seen.  I sat on a log and picked thorns from my skin: my hands were scarred with red and black pinholes, and I searched for some way to connect those dots of pained flesh.  There my memory ends.  My line is snagged again: this time I cut it loose, and donate the lure to the pond.  I will not catch a fish today. 

~

The vision of hundreds of bent-backed Forest Service employees cleaning and marking trails between the arbitrary years of 1895-1968 resurfaces each time my boot meets park dirt.

~

We drive down the muggy parkway.  Frozen at 25, the speedometer betrays reality.  The possibility of unchecked speed pushes our minivan forward.  By the time morning reaches afternoon, we reach Little Egg Harbor, and soon the Red Chief Campground is eight dollars richer.  The campsite is flat, and next to a river: normally a good find, but today we are the only people for miles.  Wednesdays in April are never booked.  Dave and Ryan hurdle leftover, warped firewood into the river, and Kyle lines the grill with quarter-dollar burgers.  I bought them last night: I am sixteen years-old, and that was my first solo trip to Foodtown.  The seemingly silly world of coupons and check-out lines confused me more than the assembly of this tent, snapped by the wind.  Here in the forest, mistakes of the manual kind are unforgivable, but social customs end the second the road becomes dirt.  Kyle feeds the makeshift fire under the makeshift grill.  His cursory burger flips bother me, and sure enough, my finished hamburger is raw as a tongue.  I spit clumps into my Cola can and swallow slices of cheese and near-stale potato chips.  Ryan accepts the undercooked pleasure and washes the sickly meat down with Amstel Light.  He snuck beer in the cooler, and revels in the juvenile crime.  I await the midnight ranger check and look at Kyle, who has not touched any food.  Bad sign when the chef will not try his own creations.  Three hours later, Ryan is in the outhouse, shitting himself dry: turns out the Amstels were skunks, replaced by his older brother, and the fresh bottles are now stacked in a mini-fridge somewhere at Penn State.  We pelt the outhouse with rocks, but soon let Ryan suffer in peace.  We wander the outskirts of the campgrounds, contemplate why we came, and return to our tents.  The moon has taken place of the sun.

~

Our canoe is stuck in the milkshake mud, and the dock is a quarter mile’s paddle away.  We drifted here in part because of the dusk wind, but also because Clint has been delinquent in his paddling duties.  His sixth-grade hands have been digging into his jacket pockets and backpack to fish the Marlboros he had planned to smoke underneath the willows on the other side of the lake.  I am happy he has lost his smokes: after the onion-bagel body odor of my bunkmate, I have had enough of smells for the weekend.  This trip to Stokes State Forest is a welcome break from sentence diagrams and obtuse angles, and word was that Kevin Bacon was killed here in 1980 by some jerk named Jason.  Last night Tom told me Friday the 13^th was actually filmed 20 miles south in Blairstown, thus ending the welcome legend, although the weekend had not totally been worthless: the long wooden tables in the mess hall looked as if they had been plucked from Medieval Times, and my gym teacher relished the opportunity to spasm a solitary square dance.  Now all was lost.  My oar is bogged in gunk: the standing fin looks like a nautical mile marker.  Two community college counselors wave us to shore, but we are not moving.  Clint ends his search with a sigh and says he needs a puff because his mouth is dry.  I accept the contradiction and dig my hands between my wool hat and my damp hair.  I will not leave this damn canoe.  Although I brought enough tissues and t-shirts to last me a month, this is my only pair of socks.  Soon Clint has one boot in the water.  His hands are already fists from the cold; he says the lake is only knee high.  I say there could be dips.  He gives me the finger and stomps away.  The willows pull the sun completely behind their green, and the moon paces Clint’s waddle toward shore.

~

After Brian empties his intestines, we resume our search for the Jersey Devil, a four-foot beast seen thousands of times since the 18^th century.  While Lee Harvey Oswald was learning how to shoot in the Marines, the New Jersey State Police were chasing this devil across the Pine Barrens, a vestige of swampland and moss that stretches from Central Jersey to the shore points.  Our expedition here finds nothing--not a feather nor a snout--and because people back home are waiting for a story, we choose the only respectable option: fake the entire trip.  We could not leave the Pine Barrens without a piece of the legend, so why not add to the legend: revise it, coax it, coat it with a new tale.  At midnight we speed down the campsite’s empty oval roads.  The speedometer dial shakes from the rocks beneath our tires, but remains a quick witness to our lies.  Ryan beams a spotlight from the front seat.  The requisite shaking video camera is complimented with screams and the fog of tire-kicked dust.  With the forest as our dim studio, we could avoid the boring reality of diarrhea-inducing meat and faulty minivans.  The legend would continue.

~

Snake--bare-chested and bulbous--walks onto our site.  Jen and I shake his hand: I notice her eyes focus on the teeth hung from his neck.  Not his own: he’s got a full set.  I focus on the rolls of his belly, the cigarette ashes caught between the skin.  Snake is a regular here, but this weekend is for free because he’s giving a python show on Sunday.  His daughter is with him, he says, and points to his truck, where an indiscriminate blond mass bounces to Cream.  He says don’t worry--she only handles garters.  I still worry.  He punctuates his talk with a request for firewood.  I look to my filled trunk and say no.  Snake leaves, but not before he offers us salted steaks and local brew.  We decline, and unload the split logs from my Ford.  The logs are warped from rain, and wouldn’t burn if they were drenched in kerosene, but wood is sparse in this park, so I feel guilty, especially considering Snake’s offer.  I do not have the guilt to go back on a lie, though, and Jen and I manage a candle sized flame by midnight.  We hesitate to sleep as smoke overcomes the orange.  I wake to the crackling spit of Snake’s flame that steals the navy blue night, and feel awfully safe in these woods.

~

Hardwood floors make for easy sleeping.  Grain captures sound and keeps heat.  The Methodist minister upstairs wakes up at 4, so before sleep passes into morning, we rise hoping for breakfast.  The minister says no man eats breakfast before fishing.  Soon we stand outside the trucks.  He blesses me with words that are not my creed, and I punctuate his weary prayer with the sign of the cross and shove my tacklebox into the trunk.  During the ride I contemplate the minister’s general words, and although only twenty, I have accepted my particular brand of rustic, orthodox Catholicism, and see forms of ritual in all good things--even in the rhythm of that man’s words.  We follow amateur maps into overgrown brush, across suspect formations of dark rock, before the river reaches our felt-tipped boots.  I stand in the current like a Northern fool, reeling too fast, skipping my line off the surface.  I lose interest: my catching drought will remain.  I sit on the shore and try to complete my interrupted dream from the morning, but soon accept the present ending, not out of laziness, but from the sense that the completion of the story has arrived.  In that dream I drive a tractor through a field that becomes marsh, and then becomes mud.  The tractor tires spin; I turn off the machine and walk away.  This recollection forces me back into the water, fishing, pinching the fly backward in sudden, sharp leaps.

~

Existence is pockets of life, unrevised breaths of being and knowing, unprintable and blasphemous and unprintable and miraculous.  Mine most often happen in the forest.

~

I buy old Morris County maps.  I make copies of withering state atlases.  I search the remaining veins of Patriots’ Path in hopes that my feet will discover some untouched stretch and connect the broken trail.  According to the local park commission, the trail system began nearly forty years ago, but suburban development has complicated or comprised many sections.  Grass-spiked asphalt leads to sumac-soaked clearings; less trails than recessions of growth.  Familiar vertical trail markers have been displaced, replaced with random strokes of red paint.  Patriots’ Path dissipates during today’s run: bare trunks rise from where the center of my trail should lie.  I pick the peeling bark and wonder my place here.  It is 2 o’clock on a July afternoon during a day off from my summer job as a groundskeeper at The Seeing Eye, the guide dog school.  I spend afternoons chopping swaths of yellowed grass; I mow the school’s fields because I imagine them a farm, a patch or pocket of untouched peace.  My pastoral haven in an overpopulated state.  I thrive on that created reality; now I am in my other pocket--the wilderness--and I am lost.  I run between trees.  I expect copperheads as I stride over logs.  Willows block my path; I double-back.  I am not running forward: my route is cylindrical.  Obtuse.  Ephemeral.  The man-stomped path has evaporated.  I am guided by the woods.  I welcome their course.

~

I have not left the forest.