Location Taken: Maryland
Time Taken: June 2008
Once upon a time, a little more than four years ago to be specific, my Mom decided to walk the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal trail that runs along the Potomac River from Washington DC to Cumberland, Maryland. She recruited her friend Ben and my sister Fiona to go along with her on her first excursion, planned to go from Great Falls Park (a bit north of the Washington Beltway, and a very lovely place to boot, with a magnificent set of waterfalls), up to Harper’s Ferry. That’s about 45 miles of walking, and they weren’t in the best of condition, so they planned to take it slow, about 10 miles a day, camping overnight along the trail.
As for me, well, I was the driver.
I drove them to Great Falls (and got some lovely photos), dropped them off, and then got back to my regular life, waiting for them to call to say “come pick us up!”.
The first call came the very next day.
They’d forgotten some stuff, you see. So I grabbed the gear, and drove the 45 minutes out to the rural convenience store they’d stopped at.
Which, of course, is when I discovered that my cell phone was out of charge, and they were nowhere in sight. It took at least 15 minutes of me looking around before I finally spotted them down by the nearby stream.
While I was searching, though, a flock of guineafowl wandered by. Talk about free range. They just merrily clucked along, looking for more delicious ticks and spiders to eat. They didn’t exactly stop to pose for a photo, but I got a couple anyway.
…This may have added a couple minutes to those 15 I spent searching for my people…
After I found them, we grabbed some stuff from the convenience store. It’s one of those really nice rural stores, where they have just about everything you need on a daily basis crammed into a small room, and a lot of local foods. Ben really liked some of those, though I can’t recall if it was jam or BBQ sauce he bought…
Then I dropped them back off by the trail, and went home. And remembered to charge my cell phone.
Next day, next call.
They’d hit a stretch of the C&O trail where the canal had filled in to become large ponds of stagnant water. And if you know anything about stagnant water, you know that means mosquitoes. Lots of mosquitoes. Miles of mosquitoes.
They’d camped for the night not too far from one of these ponds, and while only the requisite few mosquitoes made it into the tent, the ones outside made their presence known. By buzzing. All night long.
My sister was already half-cracked by the time morning came. She’d not slept well with all that buzzing. And then it was time to get out of the tent, and go out into the realm of mosquitoes. And the stagnant ponds region continued for several more miles.
She had lots of bug spray on, so it wasn’t the biting that was the problem. It was the buzzing, the constant buzzing. She covered her head in a blanket, to muffle the noise, which got her through a few more miles. But it still kept wearing on her, buzz after buzz.
And then, a little after noon, enough was enough. She just sat down on the trail, covered herself with the blanket like a tent, and refused to go any further until they called me to pick them up. She would not put up with another hour of this infernal buzzing, much less three more days of it.
So, I had another 45 minute drive to do. Well, more like 1 hour, since they were further along the trail. They’d gotten to the closest access point to them, which was a tiny, poorly marked road off of a solidly rural road in a solidly rural part of the state. At least they were all paved. I drove past the access road and had to turn around to get on it, but I found it.
And picked them up.
Their grand adventure ended about a third of the way to the goal, defeated not by exhaustion or frustration but by mosquitoes.
