Look Upon My Neckerchief and Know that I Am Eagle! (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine February 2002

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Look Upon My Neckerchief and Know that I Am Eagle! (Cont.)

EIGHTEEN MILES into the big trek—the 20-mile slog that caps the requirements for the Hiking badge—the November rain turned to sleet. My left Achilles had announced a mile earlier that it was working under protest, and if I ever wanted to play tennis again I better cease this nonsense pronto. Even more irksome was the camp smoke rising up ahead in the gathering dusk. Although the route I had mapped out leads into an industrial wasteland surrounding the train yards of Missoula, I figured that in the chill of early winter the hobo jungles here would be deserted.

"Best set yerself," a voice called out.

He could have been 20, or 60. He had Charlie Manson eyes, hair so matted it had gone to dreadlocks, and the tip of his nose was missing. But the scavenged plywood nailed above him in a clump of haggard cottonwoods was keeping off the weather, and there was a dry lawn chair next to his fire. In my exhausted state it looked like a throne.

"Where you headed?" he asked. If this guy was a bludgeon killer he was certainly pleasant about it.

"Downtown," I groaned in relief as I sat down, imagining again the cheeseburgers and beer that were waiting for me at my favorite grill, if I could just get there.

"You don't want to go down there. They got a new loiter law, and you can't panhandle no more neither."

I rubbed at the cramp building in my calf and wondered why this hike was causing me such grief. After all, I had polished off with relative ease the five ten-milers also required for the badge. For one of these marches I went on a tour of Kota Kinabalu, the sultry and buggy capital of Malaysia's Sabah province, carved from rainforest on the north coast of Borneo. On another, I trudged along the Ptarmigan Wall in Glacier National Park, annoying other hikers by singing "I Love to Go A-Wandering."

After I finished with this litany the man looked at me hard, then reached into a brown plastic garbage bag under his chair. I flinched, thinking that he was going to brandish a tire iron after all. But what he held out was a pint of Lewis & Clark vodka. I took a pull on it.

"I was a Scout," he said.

This was news that simply clobbered me. By the looks of his rummy eyes the only merit badge he'd ever earned was for Distilling.

"Yeah, had my Star badge."

I braced for some heart-wrenching tragedy. "What happened?"

He took a hit from the bottle and screwed the cap back on. "Got more interested in 4-H. The steers. And whatnot."

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