FITCHBURG SPEAKS: The Road Less Traveled - A Storytelling Event (part one of two)

This is the first of a special two part release.

Fitchburg Speaks showcases stories from members of the greater Fitchburg community.  Faculty, Students, and Community members were invited to share stories on the themes of the paths less taken in life and the obstacles we overcome along the way.

This event was held at Fitchburg State University in April 2024, before a live audience in the Falcon Hub in the Hammond Campus Center. 

Fitchburg Speaks was the culminating event from a year of programming inspired by the 2023 Community Read book, WHITE MOUNTAINS STATE, a memoir about hiking and summiting New Hampshire's 48 Highest peaks written by Keith Gentili, a 1993 Fitchburg State graduate.   

Today, we'll hear four stories -- including 

• a Fitchburg State professor's unexpected takeaways from bucket list hikes on Vermont's Long Trail and California's Muir Trail.
• a story about forgiveness and healing between a daughter and mother
• the reflections of an educator and author who learned the power of persistence as the first female cadet at any military school in the United States

and, lastly,

• another Fitchburg State professor's encounter with the kindness of strangers while hiking with a friend.

The Fitchburg Community Read is a collaboration between Fitchburg State University, local libraries, and the surrounding communities.  For more information about the programming around the 2024 selection -- A Woman of No Importance:  The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell -- visit www.fitchburgcommunityread.com.

Thank you to this week's storytellers: Dr. Michael Hoberman, Jasmin Valentin (ENGL '25), Nancy Fillip, and Dr. Chris Picone.

Episode transcript can be found here.

***

This production is a collaboration between the Fitchburg Community Read, Fitchburg State University and the English Studies department, and Perseverantia: the Fitchburg State Podcast Network. 

Victoria Kiolbasa (COMM '25), a student in the Communications Media Department, recorded this event and produced this series.

Click here to learn more about Perseverantia. Join us for programming updates on Instagram. Or reach out with ideas or suggestions at podcasts@fitchburgstate.edu.

Transcript

Nick Castillo (podcast host):
The following recording is a presentation of Fitchburg Speaks: The Road Less Traveled. This event was held at Fitchburg State University in April 2024, before a live audience in the Falcon Hub in the Hammond Campus Center.  

[ Fitchburg Speaks theme – spirited and bouncy like a road trip – fades in ]

Students, faculty, and community members were invited to share stories on the themes of the paths less taken in life and the obstacles we overcome along the way.

Fitchburg Speaks was the culminating event from a year of programming inspired by the 2023 community read book, White Mountains State, a memoir about hiking and summiting New Hampshire's 48 highest peaks.  Written by Keith Gentili, a 1993 Fitchburg State graduate.  

Julia Dufresne, a junior English studies major, hosted the event.  Fitchburg Speaks was organized by members of the Fitchburg community Read.

This is the first of a special two-part release. Thank you for listening and enjoy the stories.

[ Music fades out ]

[ 0min 51 sec ]

[ audience applause ]

Julia Dufresne (event host):
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Fitchburg Speaks: The Road Less Traveled. I am Julia Dufresne, and it is my pleasure to be your host tonight. This event is proudly sponsored by our Community Read Committee dedicated to bringing us together through stories. Tonight is about paths less taken, obstacles overcome, and the stories we never believed we'd be able to tell.

We have nine incredible storytellers lined up for you tonight, each with a unique story to share. Each of these stories is true and based on the storyteller's own experience. Our storytellers are from all walks of life, and they each bring a unique perspective to the stage. Some are professional writers, while others are sharing their stories for the very first time.

But no matter who they are, they all have one thing in common. The courage to share their story with all of us. Now, without further ado, let's get started with our first storyteller. Fitchburg State's very own Dr. Michael Hoberman has graciously agreed to set the tone for our event tonight. Michael Hoberman began his storytelling career at the age of nine, when he and his mother were visiting a Canadian cousin, and he tried to convince them that an angry bear had chased them all the way to the front door of the house where they were staying. When he grew up, he became an English professor. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Hoberman.

[ 02 min 06 sec ]

[ audience applause ]

Dr. Michael Hoberman:
Well, we were visiting that Canadian cousin from, the place I grew up, which was New York City. I grew up in lower Manhattan, in a neighborhood you might have heard of called Greenwich Village. This is in the 1970s, and everybody in the world wanted to live in Greenwich Village, but I didn't. I was a little kid who really did not take well to the urban life. I don't know how I ended up in this body, in a city. But every chance I got when I was young and my parents, one of my parents, took me to the countryside. I just, I came alive. And I remember in particular, once I was probably 9 or 10. My dad took me to a place. It's a very popular destination for people in New York City. It's called Bear Mountain. It's on the Hudson River, maybe 30, 35 miles north of New York City. 

And we went to Bear Mountain. I barely remember anything about it, but there was some path that you could follow to the summit of the mountain. It's not really a mountain.It's just like a little hill.

But anyway, we followed the path to the top of the mountain, and at the top of the mountain there was a marker that I read and the marker said Appalachian Trail. From Maine to Georgia. And I had no comprehension of what this was. And I asked my dad to explain to me.

He said, well, there's a path. We are standing on a path that starts in Georgia and ends in Maine. And I had an awareness that that was 2000 miles long, and I was just absolutely intrigued by the fact that there was a path that people walked from Georgia to Maine. 

[ 03 min 25 sec ]

So as I grew older and I, you know, gained a certain amount of independence, I really got into the whole idea of wilderness camping and backpacking, and I did a lot of backpacking trips when I was in my adolescent years, in my 20s and 30s and, but in not just in the northeast, but also I went to college in Oregon and I went hiking in California and Colorado and all these places. 

But it wasn't until I got to be, just a few years ago when I turned 50 years old, and I had the luxury. My kids were grown up, so I had more time. And I have this wonderful profession of being an English professor, where you get basically from mid-May until early September, you're on your own. You can do what you want to do. And so I decided I'm going to hike one of these paths and, but I wasn't ambitious enough to think that I was going to walk from Georgia to Maine, but I decided first. So this was in 2015. I decided I was going to hike something called the Long Trail. 

The Long trail goes from the Massachusetts border to the Canadian border the entire length of Vermont. And, it's very rugged. And, I think there's like 60 or 70,000ft of elevation gain involved in hiking that trail. And so I decided I was going to take it on. And so, summer of 2015, in July of 2015, I decided to do that. 

[ 04 min 59 sec ]

A few years later, 2021, I decided to take on another hiking trail, which is called the John Muir Trail. It's in California. It's the trail that I dreamed about hiking since I was very young and first read about long distance hiking. It goes the distance between Mount Whitney and Yosemite in the High Sierra. It's an absolutely spectacular trail. The long trail is about 275 miles long. John Muir Trail is 215 or something like that. So I did both of these trails end to end in my 50s.

And the thing that, you know, I've thought about afterwards is when I went into it, I had basically four ideas of things that, these wonderful, liberating things that were going to happen to me on these long distance hikes. First of all, I was going to have an enormous amount of time to think profound thoughts. Right? I was going to, I was just going to be out there on the trail, and I was going to have the most profound thoughts that a human being was capable of having, because all of this space and time.

[ 06 min 04 sec ]

The other thing I thought was, okay, I'm going to be immersed in a wilderness experience, like I will just be surrounded by wilderness and I will have the most, formative experiences of my life just being one on one with the, with, you know, the natural world. The third thing was solitude. I thought, this is going to be a wonderful, these trails are going to offer the most perfect opportunity to revel in solitude. And then the fourth thing was what a sense of accomplishment I will feel when I complete this trail or that trail. So I want to get back to you about these, these different themes, because this is, the turn that they took. 

So let's talk first about profound thoughts. On the first day that I was on the long trail, my wife dropped me off in North Adams, Massachusetts, at about 5:30 in the morning, and I said goodbye to her and our dogs. And then off I went into the woods, and I decided I was going to hike 27 miles that day. 

[ Audience Laughs ]

Right? The whole trail is 272 miles, and I was going to take 10% of it in, in one day, and I did. It was early July. So the days are long, and so 27 miles later, it's about 8:30 p.m. I finally get to the campsite that, I had targeted and I could, I couldn't. Like basically, I couldn't walk, I couldn't move, I was crawling on the ground. I was cooking my meal on the ground.

So my first set of profound thoughts had to do with how much physical pain I was in. And I'll tell you that that's set the precedent right. That first day was like the entire experience on the long trail, the profound thoughts that I had pretty much every single one of them had to do with my feet hurt. My back is killing me. My clothes are drenched. I guess the most profound thought of all that I had was on the fourth day on that trail. 

Basically, what happened was I had a backpack that I had not adjusted properly, and so I was gouging. I saw a picture of it that my wife showed me later. I was gouging like a half inch gouge into my lower back with the backpack, but I wasn't aware of it. I couldn't, I couldn't put two and two together. I just thought that my back was hurting. And, it was on the fourth day on the trail that I decided, okay, that's it. When I get to the first road crossing, I'm going to get my cell phone out. I'm going to call Janice, my wife. Pick me up. This is it. I'm done with the long trail. And I got to the road crossing and there was no cell signal.

[ 08 min 36 sec ]

And, so that profound thought ended there. And then, in fact, what happened was I ran into a much more seasoned hiker, a guy who was actually hiking from Georgia to Maine, because the first 100 miles of the long trail is also contiguous to the Appalachian Trail. And he showed me how to fix my backpack. And so from there on out, my profound thoughts were profound in the sense of bodily pain, but they were milder pains. It wasn't that I was gouging a hole in my back. 

Now, let's talk about the wilderness experience, one with the wilderness. So, on the, on the John Muir Trail in California, you are surrounded, from day one to the end, you are in the most spectacular wilderness surround you can possibly imagine. This is the High Sierra. There are glaciers and lakes and incredible forests. It is the most spectacularly beautiful landscape I've ever been in. 

However, when you're hiking day after day, after day, I spent, I think, 21 days on the John Muir Trail. What you notice more than anything else, I mean, the wilderness is wonderful, but what you really notice is the trail. And the trail, the trail, the thing that you're walking on is a human artifact.

In fact, I read about it later. It took hundreds and hundreds of people and thousands and thousands of donkeys and burros and who knows how many tons of dynamite to create that trail. The trail, which is what you're on when you're wilderness hiking the trail is a human artifact. And so, in fact, my experience on that trail was, yes, it was a wilderness experience, but it was mediated through the experience of being on a trail, and just as a, as an, an example of that.

[ 10 min 22 sec ]

There's a thing on the, John Muir Trail. You can Google it if you're interested. It's called the Golden Staircase. It is. I forgot to look it up earlier today, but basically you lose, if you're going the direction I was going which is south to north, you, basically you lose 2000ft in about three miles. I mean, it's just insane, insane, insane, insane.

And so I'm hiking down this golden staircase, which is the last part of the John Muir Trail to have been built because they couldn't figure out how to do this part of the trail. It was such an incredible engineering feat. And on the way up, heading in the other direction, I met these other people and I asked them, oh, can you tell me a little bit about Muir Trail Ranch?

Because as a hiker, what you're thinking about is basically the first opportunity you're going to have to get a home cooked meal, right? Or the first opportunity you're going to have to charge your phone or something like that. And Muir Trail Ranch is the place. It's at the halfway point of the trail. Muir trail Ranch is where you can charge your phone and where you collect the food that you've mailed to yourself.

[ 11 min 25 sec ]

And so I asked this guy on the golden staircase, right. Very social experience here. Can you tell me about Muir Trail? And she said, yeah, Muir Trail Ranch sucks. They won't. They don't even sell potato chips there. And so the rest of my day was basically focused on, you know, the trail, the wilderness experience of the trail and how disappointing it was to hear that at Muir Trail Ranch you couldn't even buy a pretzel.

It actually was a beautiful place. They had it. There was a natural hot spring there. There were a lot of nice hikers there. I had a wonderful time, but… Okay. And then very quickly. All right. Solitude. I was talking about solitude when I hiked the Long trail. I was on the Long Trail for 17 days.

Every single day. Every single night. There were other people camped with me, and I liked it. It was fun, I enjoyed it, it was a wonderful social experience, but it was not solitude. There was one night when I was camped, basically at the base of Camel's Hump, which is one of the taller mountains in Vermont, and nobody was in the trail shelter, and it was like 9:30, 10, 10:30 p.m. this is the one night that I'm going to have this place to myself.

Around 11:00, these two guys walk in with a fifth of Jack Daniels. There's your solitude, right? There's your solitude. You know, they were nice guys. They offered me some whiskey, but, all the same, hiking a trail like that is a very social experience. 

[ 12 min 43 sec ]

And then finally to talk about the sense of accomplishment, right. All along, when you're on this trail from every night you go to bed, you're thinking, I'm almost there. I'm almost there, I'm almost there, I'm almost there. I can't believe I'm going to complete this trail. And hiking south to north on the John Muir Trail meant that I was going to finish in Yosemite Valley. And Yosemite Valley, I don't know if you guys have ever been there, I had never. I'd been to the back country of Yosemite, but I'd never been to Yosemite Valley.

Yosemite Valley is like if they took half of Los Angeles and half of San Francisco, and they moved them to the mountains for the summer, that's Yosemite Valley. And so the sense of accomplishment I felt, which I did feel at having hiked this most spectacular hiking trail in the United States, was was sort of, muffled by the sense of extreme disappointment and disillusion, because the closer I got to the end of the trail, the closer I got to Disney World, basically.

[ 13 min 44 sec ]

So I don't know how to sum this all up. There's no happy ending here. I'm glad that I hiked these trails end to end. It was a wonderful formative experience for me, but it was nothing like what I thought it was going to be. And I guess maybe that's the moral of the story is nothing is ever the way you think it's going to be.

Thank you.

[ Audience Applauds ]

[ 14 min 04 sec ]

Julia Dufresne:
Thank you, Dr. Hoberman, for sharing such a wonderful story and starting us off this afternoon. Now let's give our warmest welcome to each storyteller as they take us down the road less traveled. First to introduce, please join me in welcoming our next storyteller to the stage. Jasmine Valentine.

[ Audience Applauds ]

Jasmine is an English major at Fitchburg State. She is a proud Rican, who loves to cook, read, crochet, and spend time with her cat, Shego. She works in the Fitchburg State Library. Will be graduating this May. Please welcome to the stage, Jasmine.

[ Audience Applauds ]

[ 14 min 47 sec ]

Jasmine:
Just for reference, trigger warning. There will be mentions of child abuse. So let me know now. 

My ears still hurt from hearing the number 4.5 million kids see someone in their family being abused. Not this one, but it was a smaller one that started the noise. 80 to 90% of victims of domestic violence, abuse or neglect their kids. That percentage echoes in my head like a chiming alarm. It rings and rings in my ears. The ringing doesn't stop. Reminding me of the digging in my ear my mom gave me and my sister from punching us on the head in the car of a family vacation. A vacation that gave me beautiful memories with BuBu and Maudie, my sisters broken memories with mommy. 

My Mom. I love her so much. It wasn't because at times Pa I hit her. It was because, I don't know. Nokky said she was worse before I was born. Which makes me think, if I saw her, what I thought was her worst, angry and ridden with cruelty while throwing me to the ground at nine, or at her worst when she was drunk and taking me and my sister to strange places while my dad with who's nowhere at three.

But this made me think. If I saw her at what I thought was her worst than what did my older siblings go through before I was born? So there was six of us, but never at the same time. So many numbers that rang in my ears. And I can remember three and four because those were the years Nokky visited for a week at a time.

[ 16 min 08 sec ]

Nokky and Tolean, my brother, left for Texas at three. They didn't leave at age three, but they left three kids behind so those two wouldn't be left as well. But they left at three, and it took 13 years to find out that they moved across the country to get away from Mommy's worst. They were scared and found a way out.

I don't blame them, but I haven't found my way out either. And so when Maudie left for Fitchburg State, my other sister. It went down to two BuBu and I. That year I declared there was no way out unless we risk being separated from each other. We didn't trust our parents, but we didn't trust the system either. I mean, it was a system that's saw how scared we were going home, having panic attacks before getting on the bus at the end of the day, and teachers seeing me flinch when my classmates would raise their hand.

The system sent her home with us when she tried to find her own way out. I can't remember if it was before Mommy, before or after Mommy beat her face black and blue. Fucked up, but when we went on vacation, all I could think about was the bruises she always planted on us. 

[ 17 min 10 sec ]

It really is beautiful over there in Puerto Rico. The coqui frog croaking at night, the iguanas crossing the street and the pernil on the table. It's beautiful. It's beautiful until you realize there is a liquor store in every neighborhood, making it always accessible for an alcoholic. It's beautiful until you see the cuts on your sister's wrist in front of the tropical leaves in the forest, wondering how people thought it was okay to let your mom sign her out  of an inpatient two days before we got on the plane. 

It's beautiful until you look at the purple and black sky, but can only think about how much it reminds you of your sister's swollen face at the dinner table, trying to figure out how she's eating when she was screaming in agony hours before. 

Thousands of hours after, Bubu found a way out. A safe way out. As a mom of her own. They were all moms now scared of becoming the 80 to 90% Mommy was.

That night at the dinner table, Mommy made a promise she would never put hands on us again. That is the only promise she has kept all these years. But it became the last week she was fully sober. Thinking about it now, I always associate the smell of rum with my Mom. It's often what I prayed for the smell in her breath whenever I got home from school.

Now that I'm a grown woman myself, I realize that it was the rum that stopped her own ringing in her ears. I love my Mom. It took me a long time to forgive her. I don't blame her, nor do I hate her. I'm just waiting for the day the ringing stops in my own ears.

[ Audience Applauds ]

[ 18 min 35 sec ]

Julia Dufresne:
Thank you for sharing your story, Jasmine. Next up is Nancy Phillip. After 38 years, Nancy has retired from teaching high school and middle school science in math and coaching varsity field hockey and gymnastics. She currently teaches online. And teaches French and art for the ALFA program, and for an enrichment program in Chelmsford. Nancy is an accomplished musician and has written and published nine books. Please welcome Nancy to the stage. 

[ Audience Applauds ]

[ 19 min 03 sec ]

Nancy Phillip:
I'm delighted to be here today to talk about my experience. I was born in 1954, and in 197 2, when it was time to go to college, my guidance counselor told me I was too dumb to go to college, and my father wasn't go ing to have any of that. So I applied to Springfield College in Massachusetts.

I wanted to be a Phy-Ed major because I was a great athlete. I had wanted to go there since third grade and I applied, had the interview, I saw the school. I had the poster hanging in my bedroom for like ten years and they didn't take me. And coming home I said to my parents, I'm not going to college.

And they said, oh yeah, you are. I said, no, I want to go there. That's what I want to do. I'm not smart enough to go anywhere else. So about a month later, my father comes home. He says, guess what? I found a university for you. It's in Vermont, it's Norwich University. I had never heard of Norwich University.

He says, you're going to love it. The ratio is going to be like ten girls to 1100 guys and they have their own ski slope and, he says it's going to be great. So sight unseen. We drove to Norwich in late August. I arrived with the nine other girls. The ten of us were standing there on campus going, this is a military college.

[ 20 min 16 sec ]

So, President Hart came down and said, yes, and you can't live here. You have to live at Vermont College up the street. And that is the reason why Norwich, suddenly, after 150 years went coed. They bought Vermont College. Title nine was just passed, so they had to take the women. So the ten of us moved into Vermont College and took a shuttle bus every day to Norwich, back and forth, back and forth.

And after about two months, President Hart took the ten of us into his office and said, we want you girls in the military. The other nine girls went running out of the office and I stayed behind, and I said, what do you going to do? Because I'm a risk taker and I always have been. And I do believe that the choices that we make at a certain time in your life will ultimately affect what happens to you five years later, ten years later.

And now here I stand at 70 years old, and I don't regret for one second that I made the choice to become the first female cadet at Norwich University, and the first female cadet at any military school in the country. 

[ Audience Applauds ]

[ 21 min 19 sec ]

It wasn't easy. The first three months I called home every weekend crying, telling my father I want to come home. He said, no, you're not coming home. He said, you're setting a path for people behind you. You are setting a precedent. You are a trendsetter. He said stick with it. He says, none of my children quit anything. So I did hang on until December. The cadets on campus looked at me like I was weird. Professors did not talk to me.

I would raise my hand in class. They would ignore me. But there were some that did say welcome and we're glad you're here. After Christmas, another girl transferred in from another university on an ROTC scholarship. She was a sophomore. We became best friends and we were moved into the basement of the infirmary. Now we were on campus. There was a sign on our door that said if any cadet was within 200ft of that door, they would be expelled from the university.

As the time went on, we were more embraced and more welcomed as cadets, and I think it was a point where the cadets were finally saying, oh, I guess we're going to have girls on campus. Both of us got a boyfriend that helped our network grew. Those boys had friends that also accepted us. Eventually, by the time we were done the end of our sophomore year, we were sent to Officer Candidate School, and to me, that was the turning point in my life.

[ 22 min 40 sec ]

I was sent to, to McConnell Air Force Base in, Wichita, Kansas, and  Kansas, and I learned things that I probably never would have learned elsewhere. I learned confidence, I learned leadership, I learned public speaking. I got opportunities to try things that I never would have been able to try. I don't know if my life would have been different if I had gone to Springfield.

I pretty much am a risk taker in general, and I'm willing to try anything once, but there's no question that the things that I learned as a cadet and I learned at Officer Candidate School, and as I graduated and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Air Force, gave me the strength and confidence to go forward and change the trajectory of my life, to do what I want to do.

When I got out, I said, I don't want to be a Phys-Ed teacher. I want to be a science and math teacher. I always have. But my guidance counselor told me in high school I was too dumb. I went back to school and got my degree in physics, chemistry and math. I then went forward and I taught school for the next 40 years.

[ 23 min 45 sec ]

I taught community college. I taught high school. I taught at Saint Leo's and Lemonster. I see a mom out there whose child I had. And I have never, ever once felt like I went to work. It was not a job for me. It was. It was a great calling for me to come and be a teacher. And now, at 70, I still teach.

I teach for the ALFA program here at, Fitchburg, which is the Adult Learning Fitchburg Area. I am on the executive board. I teach French, I teach art, I teach, how to improve your memory. You know, at our age, we need that. And I have felt that I have always, just always made the choice to move forward every single time.

And when something doesn't work out right, you pick yourself back up and you move forward again. I learned about honor and integrity. I learned about leadership in terms of passing on what you know to somebody else. 

I wrote my first novel based on my experience as the first female cadet at Norwich, and wrote a book about a girl who went to. I had to change the name. It's called Stonewall Jackson University, and I wrote that book. And as a result of writing that, I ended up writing eight more. Nine of them are all published. They're all on Amazon. Check them out. 

And, I don't ever regret the choice that I made. I look back on that now, and for my own children and my grandchildren, I tell them the same thing. Take a risk.

[ 25 min 13 sec ]

Take a chance. Don't worry about what will happen. What's the worst that could happen? It doesn't work out for you. Pick yourself back up and move forward. Make decisions that you feel are good decisions and try them out. And just don't be afraid to move forward in your life because you never know what you do, what you learn, what you take in, what you absorb as part of your experience of life, how it's going to play out down the road.

It's 70 now. I'm looking back pretty much at about whatever. Everything has happened, but now I'm looking at myself at 70 as time to reinvent myself. What can I do now at 70? Most people look at me and say, isn't it time to sit down and retire? No, retire is not in my vocabulary. And for some people who know me, they know that that's not the kind of person I am.

That's what Norwich taught me. That's what the military taught me. I am grateful for those experiences, and I am grateful that the people at Springfield College did not take me. So thank you and good luck to you all.

[ Audience Applauds ]

[ 26 min 22 sec ]

Julia Dufresne:
Thank you for that wonderful story, Nancy. Our next storyteller is Dr. Chris Piccone. Dr. Piccone is a biology professor here at FSU. Please welcome Doctor Picone to the stage. 

[ Audience Applauds ]

[ 26 min 37 sec ]

Dr. Chris Piccone:
I get recorded in my teaching almost every day. I've spoken at conferences in front of hundreds of world experts on topics. This is way more terrifying. Let me just tell you. 

[ Audience Laughs]

There we go. Okay. I'm going to tell you about, a mountain range in northwest Maine called the Bigelow Mountain Range. It's a series of about five peaks. It's considered perhaps the most beautiful part of the Appalachian Trail in Maine, which is saying something. And I was fortunate in that I grew up in a family that has had a camp on the lake looking at these mountains. So I have a lot of good childhood memories. And I'm going to share two, stories with you from this range.

And the first story, I was a sophomore in college. I just, spent the summer of my sophomore year of college working in the mountains of Costa Rica. That summer, I mostly wore cheap rubber boots.

I was feeling pretty fit and tough when I got home. Went up to Maine. But I had never backpacked overnight, unlike the story we heard to start us off. I had hiked, but not not overnight backpacking. And no one in my family had ever hiked the entire range of this, of these five peaks, to do the whole thing and walk back home would be about 20 miles in total, which in, on some higher peaks let’s just say it's, that's a lot.

[ 27 min 49 sec ]

So I loaded up an old metal framed backpack from the 1980s. I wrote, I put it in a sleeping bag, protected my sleeping bag with an old trash bag, put in some dog food for my companion, Honey, the yellow lab, and then packed enough sandwiches to last about two days because I thought it would take me that long.

So I started up the steep Fire Warden trail, up to Avery Peak on the far west side of this chain. But as I got to the summit, it started to rain pretty hard. And it just seemed, what a miserable idea to spend two days doing this. Seemed pretty impossible to hike the whole thing in one day. Nobody could do that, I thought. So I, and camping overnight just seemed crazy in these conditions, so I thought I would just give up and do, like, a 12 mile loop and head back home, make it a day hike. That made sense. I was waiting out some rain in a shelter. Gave away most of my sandwiches to some very grateful people that were hiking the entire Appalachian Trail.

If you run into people hiking the whole A.T., they will take food. Yeah. Speaking of the social conditions we heard about earlier. So thinking it was just going to be a day hike, I continued on down the trail about another three miles to a junction, and at that junction it was, it would have turned back, but I could also continue along the rest of the ridge.

[ 28 min 57 sec ]

Well, when I got to that junction, the weather had improved and I was making really good time. So I thought maybe I should do the whole ridge, but I don't want to sleep out. It's mucky today. It's, it'd just be, you know, boggy and miserable. It's kind of soggy. Why don't I just try to do the whole thing in one day?

Let's try it. So, Honey and I continued across the ridge, along a trail that we were, where we were completely alone for hours because no one goes that way. It's off the A.T. at this point. After crossing a couple, two more peaks, the trail started to get smaller and narrower. But I trusted my dog’s instincts to follow a good path, and I was watching out for white blazes that had been painted on the trees.

But the trail just kept getting smaller and smaller. And then I realized that what I thought were white blazes were now actually just patches of lichen that was growing on the spruce trees. We were lost on a deer path, surrounded by miles of wilderness on the top of the mountains. But I had a map. A paper map for those of you who are under 25.

[ 29 min 56 sec ]

And I knew that a mountain, a mountain pond was not far from the Ridge trail I was trying to find. So I spotted that pond through the trees. We bushwhack down a steep slope and got back on the right trail. Off we go. We climbed up some more rock faces to reach the fifth and final summit, Cranberry Peak.

As we came across it . As we came out above the tree line for the last time. I now looked out eye to eye with an oncoming thunderstorm. Lightning was crashing down from the clouds at the same elevation where we were both standing, the dog and I. So I decided, Honey, let's outrun a thunderstorm. 

We raced across the, we raced across the long bald summit. As the storm approached. The whole time I was explaining to myself and my dog, how physics works. You see, a rounded, aluminum framed backpack really should not attract a lightning strike. Made sense to me. The storm crashed just as we reached the other side of the bald on top of the mountain.

[ 30 min 48 sec ]

We found protection in the spruce forest. We descended Cranberry Mountain and emerged at the trail. We emerged at the edge of town on the end of the trail. After a few more miles to walk home, I hobbled up the driveway at sunset. My Dad, my Dad said, I looked like a bedraggled Civil War veteran coming home.

My feet were bloody with blisters. I needed a cedar walking stick and everything soaked. Probably stunk too, I suspect. But I never felt so alive because that day, I just finished something that I had thought was really impossible. 

So that story number one. Now let's go forward two years. Story number two, two years. I'm now in my senior year of college, and I want to show my college friends this beautiful place, this stunning Bigelow Mountain range.

So we went out for a trail hike. Just a one day hike. We started up the Fire Warden trail to Avery Peak. And my friend Jen, whose name will be important here in a minute. My friend Jen came along with Julie, Lisa, and my housemate Mike. It was a classic, crisp fall day in Maine. Now the fire and the Fire Warden's trail is a tough, steep trail.

It was designed by descendants of Puritans who built many of our New England mountain trails. These people thought suffering was redemptive. 

[ Audience Laugh ]

At one point, the trail becomes a natural stone staircase for over half of a mile. You climb a crazy pitch with no break, no switchbacks. It's just up, up, up on stone. When we got about eight minutes from the top, Jen's knee blew out, her patella completely shifted.

[ 32 min 12 sec ]

She could not put any more weight on her leg for the rest of the hike, and we had 2500ft now to descend to get back home. We started creeping back down with two people under Jen's armpits, supporting her the whole way. Step by slow, creeping step. After a couple of hours of creeping progress, another hiker caught up with us.

He saw our situation. He immediately cut off the shoulder straps of his backpack, and he used those to improvise a brace to stabilize Jen's knee. We expressed our gratitude and our shock that he had just ruined his backpack. But we assured him we could make it back to the car before nightfall. We’ll be fine. Fortunately, he totally ignored that idea, and as soon as he got back to town, he called out a rescue team to come and get us.

So now the sun is fading. It's getting dark, and we have a long way to go. At that point, we saw the rescue team coming up the trail. They put Jen in a stretcher and carried her the rest of the way down to, down the mountain surrounded by flashlights. Jen went straight to the emergency department. We went straight to bed.

[ 33 min 14 sec ]

The next day we found out more about our Good Samaritan, who had sacrificed his backpack and who had called out the rescue team. He was a dentist. He hiked that Fire Warden's trail every year in memory of his young daughter, who had passed away. And her name was Jen. Thank you.

[ Audience Applauds ]

[ 33 min 37 sec ]

[ Theme music fades in ]

Nick Castillo:
You've been listening to Fitchburg Speaks, a special two part series.  Please join us next week for more stories about the roads less traveled. 

The Fitchburg Community Read is a collaboration between Fitchburg State University, local libraries, and the surrounding communities.  For more information about the programming around the 2024 selection, A Woman of No Importance, The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonya Pernell visit www.fitchburgcommunityread.com.  

This production is a collaboration between the Fitchburg Community Read, Fitchburg State University, and Perseverantia, the Fitchburg State Podcast Network. Tori Kiolbasa, a senior in the Communications Media Department, recorded this event and produced this series.

Thank you again for listening.

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[ 34 min 10 sec ]

[ Perseverantia theme fades in ]

Anna Gauvin:
My name is Anna Gauvin. I'm an engineering student here, and you're listening to the Perseverantia Podcast Network at Fitchburg State University.

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