Basic English Composition Final Words

FINAL WORDS
Remember the passage from Unit 1 about trying to cross a dangerous river? It was
adapted from a short story called Hunger Pangs. It is a fictionalized version of
true events. Here is the full, original version. As you read through it, try to spot
some of the writing elements we have studied throughout this course.

HUNGER PANGS

The crampon-clad sole of my ragged shoe breaks through the compacted snow with a
crisp crunch, followed by a sucking gasp as I am swallowed to the knee. I try not to think
about how hungry I am. The pass ahead and above appears no closer, but, turning back, the
valley has sunk deep below and behind. The trail itself is lost under the white, powdered
blanket; sporadic pine tree tops poke through, and there is no way to know if they are two or
twenty feet tall. Yet the direction of travel is the same as it was yesterday, and the day before
that, and each of the previous eight. Camp in the valley at a lowly ten thousand feet, wait for
the Californian sun to rise, look north and find the pass (the lowest point on the mountain
ridge), zig-zag up a few thousand feet until you reach it, down the other side until the valley
meets you, camp, repeat.
The slog up to the top is all that matters; then I can eat something. I allow my mind to
drift as far as it wants, as long as my feet keep moving forward, one arduous step after another.
My mind heads south; seven weeks and about eight hundred miles ago: the ten-foot metal wall
that separates the Mexican side of the Sonora Desert from the American, and the eight-foot
cairn that marks the beginning of the Pacific Crest Trail. The desert was rough, no doubt about
that. Hiking was restricted to three or four hours after sunrise, and three or four before sunset.
Days were planned around lugging enough water to make it from one piddling stream to the
next. Then the trail started going up. As it went up a little, the red desert receded and was
replaced by grass and trees. As it went up a lot, the green became lost below white.
The trick is the mountaineer’s step. Each time you straighten your front leg, lock it back
a touch further than feels normal, let your weight rest on your bones while you bring your
back leg forward. All those micro-rests you allow your muscles add up over a day. I am
excellent at this technique. My body is accustomed to the rhythm, which allows my mind to
float away once more, this time it goes north. I have never been to Canada before. But, in
about four months and eighteen hundred miles, that is where this trail will lead me. It won’t
always be like this. I have read that hiking through Oregon will mean traversing buggy lakes;
and that Washington’s mountains will be more than green enough if I can get there before
winter. But, right now, it is hard to imagine there is anything beyond a snow covered
California.
The final hundred yards to a mountain top feels longer than any mile that came before
it, especially when you have promised yourself food when you make it. You have to believe
there is a top before you can reach it. But then there is little in life that feels finer than sitting
on top of a mountain. I slip a strap off my shoulder and gravity does the rest, dumping my
pack into the snow. The clips on the front sigh with relief as they are unfastened, and my food
bag comes free from the bag’s body with a minor tug. It is getting light.
Four days ago I got lost. I wanted to put in a good day’s worth of hiking, to set me up
nicely the following day for Forester Pass (at 13,153 feet, the highest point on the entire PCT).
I came down into the lowest point of the valley that separated the passes, maybe I should have
camped there, but my feet still had some more miles in them. I pushed on up the other side of

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the valley and lost my way in the snow. By the time I admitted to myself I was lost, it was too
dark to do much about it, so I just set up my tent in the next patch of grass I found. A storm
blew in that night. By the time the sun came up, I could not recognise where I had come in, I
could not recognise where I should go. I had no choice but to leave my stuff at the makeshift
campsite, and climb each of the half a dozen ridges surrounding me, to try and match the
topography with the map. On the second morning, I unpacked everything and lay all my
supplies on the ground. I always pack an additional day’s worth of food, and, at that point, I
had been lost for a day and a half. If I rationed everything, I generously figured I had five days
worth of provisions left. It would have been two weeks before anyone even knew I was
missing. I did not pray; I did not want to be that kind of hypocrite. I just sat on a rock, took a
deep breath, and silently told myself to figure this out. Then I climbed the next ridge, and saw
enough on the other side to orientate myself back on track.
My food bag gets lighter still as I remove two McDonald’s cheeseburgers and two
packets of ketchup. If you order them plain (just the bun, burger, and a slice of cheese), they
do not get soggy; they taste the same now as they would have if I had eaten them right after
hitch-hiking back to the trailhead over a week ago. A cherry Pop Tart and a Crystal Light
lemonade sachet dissolved with snow melt in a former Sprite bottle complete the banquet. A
few days ago, such meals were almost enough to distract me from the eternal, gnawing hunger.
Now that hunger is the heaviest thing I carry.
The view provides a temporary distraction from the lingering hunger. The layers of
white below, the layers of blue above; somehow my perch makes me feel as though I am
sandwiched between. Patches of green trees dot the valley floors, shards of black rock protrude
along the mountain ridges. From here, it seems the world is full to the brim of only snow and
tranquility. The High Sierras are unrelenting beauty; all at once underwhelming in their
monotonous palate of four colors, yet incessantly surprising in how each valley uses this palate
to shade its features.
I lift my shades for only a moment to glimpse the vista unfiltered, but the whiteness is
blinding. Losing your sunglasses out here would be tantamount to a death sentence. If you
tried to hike in the day, snowblindness would have you splattered at the bottom of a ravine by
lunchtime. If you tried to hike at night, you would die of hypothermia. Even now, with a
midday sun beating down, the cold creeps in anyway.
The keys to progress on a long trail are: 1) taking good care of your feet by talcing them
and changing your socks twice daily – seriously, if your feet are not happy, you are not happy;
2) keeping your shoes in good repair – use dental floss to sew up the rips, it lasts significantly
longer than thread, and; 3) minimizing the weight you carry. You need far fewer clothes than
the real world has taught you. Bring extra socks to protect your feet (wash the previous pair
in a stream then hang them from your pack to dry as you hike), but beyond that, as long as
you can tolerate your own stench, the only functional purpose of clothes is to keep you warm.
Out here, if you are cold, you hike on; if you are very cold, you set up your tent and get in
your sleeping bag. The latter is not an option at this altitude, so the former must suffice until
I am low enough to find a patch of exposed ground to drive a few stakes into.
As I descend, the air becomes fatter and breathing becomes easier. Melted snow drips
all around me, and, in the distance, I hear the trickles meeting to make a rumbling river.
Travelling downhill is travelling in style to a long-distance hiker. Hiking poles and crampons
work in such harmony that a controlled descent is also a graceful one. Once again, my body’s
rhythm is hypnotizing, and my mind soars above.
The trail becomes your whole life. Each day makes it more difficult to remember what
it is like to not be hiking. You miss your friends and family, of course, but you remember
them as though they are the beloved characters from a favourite childhood movie. Being out

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here is a good life, maybe the best part of your life, but not because it is easy. If it was easy,
everyone would do it. But the vast majority of people cannot do it. Most could not handle the
physical toil. Most could not handle the beautiful endlessness of the landscape. Most could
not handle the isolation. Most could not handle the hunger. But I can.
I reach the tree-line. The river is louder now, the sound alone tells me it is getting
towards late afternoon. Overnight, the snow re-freezes and the rivers are calm. As the sun
beams down throughout the day, the snow melts faster and the rivers run rougher. If you must
cross one, first thing in the morning is the safest time to do it. And it is best to do it with
someone witnessing from the bank. But I do not know where the next someone is. It has been
three days since I saw footprints. It has been over a week since I saw another person. In most
ways, that feeling is soul-crushing, but in some ways it is wonderful. There are two archetypes
whom I have met along this trail. The first think they are out here to commune with the spirit
of nature. The second think they are out here to kick nature’s butt. They are both wrong.
Nature has utter indifference to our presence; beautiful, spellbinding, vital, but indifferent.
The descent is a steep one, but the forest is getting thicker, the trees provide shade
enough to remove my sunglasses and let my eyes breathe a little. I am tired. On a normal day,
I would find the next flat spot and set up my tent. But this does not have to be a normal day.
About twenty miles ahead, the trail will skirt the east side of a lake, on that side of the lake is
a tiny pier; every day at 9am, a little pontoon boat passes the pier and takes passengers across
the lake to a fishing lodge. At that lodge, they have steak breakfasts, beer on tap, a little shop
for a modest resupply, and honest-to-goodness porcelain toilets. The sun comes up around
6am, I can hike 3 miles an hour – 4 miles an hour if there is a meal I did not have to carry at
the end of it – which means, if I can put in another eight to ten miles today, tomorrow I will
be satiated.
The snow has all but gone now, and the trail has reappeared beneath my now crampon-
less feet. It leads me ever closer to the thundering river. My eyes flit from tree branch to tree
branch above, naturally finding the best ones for bear-bagging. The national parks here make
you carry a bear vault through them, and I kind of miss the nightly ritual of finding the perfect
rock, tying my rope around it, tossing it over a strong branch, and hanging my food bag so it
dangles at least ten feet from the ground and six feet from the trunk. If pushed, I would say I
am one of the top five bear-baggers in the world.
I am walking parallel to the creek now. I can no longer hear the swooshing sound of my
silnylon rain pants rubbing with each step. Every hundred yards or so, the river plunges over
a waterfall, crashing onto the rocks below. The sun hovers just above the mountains, casting
a broad shadow over the valley. I stop, chomp on a flattened Snickers, and remove my map to
confirm what I already know; to continue on the trail, eventually I will have to ford this river.
Picking up my poles, I start on walking again, whispering to myself that the river will get
calmer further down the ravine.
The trail curls and disappears into the river; forty yards across, I see it reappear on the
other bank. The water is a little calmer here. I have reached some kind of plateau, the last
waterfalls is about two hundred yards back, the next, about two hundred yards ahead. A
tattered rope droops from an old tree next to where the trail vanishes, I can see its counterpart
on the other side; it has been many winters since it last helped anyone. The sun is close to
disappearing behind the mountains. I drop my pack, and pull out my food bag. Two Pop Tarts,
an Almond Joy, one cheeseburger, one instant mash potatoes, one pack of Korean ramyeon
noodles. There is also an eighth-full tub of Nutella; but, since I dropped my spoon (made of
ultralight, but unfortunately white, plastic) in the snow, my only means for getting to the
chocolate and hazelnutty goodness involves the danger of lacerating my tongue by buck knife.
The final Ziploc may have contained suitable dipping implements a week ago, but all that

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remains now is pretzel powder. I have enough food to survive one more day and get to the
boat the day after tomorrow. I could camp right here, eat dinner, and cross this river in the
morning calm. But that will not result in a steak breakfast in fifteen hours. There is just enough
daylight to do this now, if I just go. And I am damn good at this. Leaving my pack, I jog
towards the next falls; a hundred yards before I reach them, I see a patch of reeds, halfway
across the river, straining against the current.
I clip the waistband of my backpack up across my chest, and cinch the shoulder straps
down towards me. The pack bulges against the back of my head, but it should keep the current
from getting to it. Only a sliver of sun is visible above the ridge, no time to dally. I take a deep
breath and step into the water. It is barely up to my knee but pain sensors shoot warning signals
up my spine. I just have to ignore them. Digging my poles into the silt below, I bring my other
foot down. I face upstream so I can position my poles and dig in my feet against the flowing
water. After taking five seconds to control my breathing, I begin side stepping one foot at a
time, six inches at a time.
The next step brings my waist below the water, everything between my legs contracts
so tightly that my panicked breaths rise an octave. Just another few yards to the reeds, but
each step sinks my body lower. My hands are submerged now, and the cold makes it harder
to grip my poles. I am pushing back into the river bed so hard it feels like I am horizontal, but,
with each movement, the river is trying to flip me over. My left hand releases its hold, and the
pole shoots behind me, held in place by the tugging wrist strap. I can feel the reeds between
my outstretched hand, and I will my unresponsive fingers to clasp shut. The reeds are slick to
the touch, but knotted enough to get a handhold. Inching my body across, my right hand joins
the left. Again I take a few seconds to steady my breathing.
I move from reed to reed, trying not to let my feet tangle in the unseen stems below. I
am two-thirds of the way across the river, but every step is still sending me deeper. The
swirling water slaps me in the face, and I feel it licking at the bottom of my back, desiring to
devour both it and me.
I reach the final reed and, with my right hand, wrap an icy fist around it. I want to hook
my left pinky over the hiking pole wrist strap, but the churning water snatches it from my
grasp. I try to snatch back at it, but I am wary of losing the pole altogether. Angling my body
round a few degrees, I try to move the pole into my slipstream. Beneath the surface, the current
tugs at my legs. I squeeze the grip I have on the last reed and flick my shoulder back and
down, and, for a moment, feel the wrist strap between the fingers of my left hand, as the root
from the reed in my right hand dislodges from the river bed. The jolt rolls me to my left and
my backpack dips below the river. It catches the brunt of the current, and I am sucked
backwards.
I tumble in the frigid water, sometimes seeing the dusk sky above, sometimes not.
The first campfire a few miles from Mexico.
Arms are flailing, legs are kicking.
The sound of the rattlesnake I almost stepped on at Mount Laguna.
Empty lungs panicking.
That guy who gave me a ride to Julian and even gave me $5 for beer so I would
remember him…goddam it, what was his name?
The falls cannot be far.
Disturbing the bear coming down San Jacinto.
No one will ever find you.
Vomiting at the top of Walker Pass after eating bad chicken at Lake Isabella.
No one will ever know for sure what happened.
The girl sitting on the porch outside the Kennedy Meadow’s general store.

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Moron.
Taking a naked selfie at the 14,505-foot summit of Mount Whitney.
My hand hooks on something solid. Frozen fingertips clench with everything they have.
Punching through the water, I bring my other hand to the hidden rock. Heaving against the
boulder, I drive my face to the surface and gulp down air. I kick my feet and wriggle my
stomach up onto the rock until my pack is out of the water. My vision normalizes but I can
feel my body is close to shutting down in the cold. I swing my legs in front of the boulder,
grab as firm a grip on my poles as I can, kick off the rock, and scramble to the far shore.
On the bank, I allow myself to the count of ten in a shivering fetal position. Then I force
my body upright, and slowly manipulate my trembling fingers to open my pack. Chattering
teeth flash a smile of relief that the trash-bag liner has held, and everything inside remains
dry. After putting on my down jacket, hat, gloves, and headlamp, I affix my pack properly to
my back, and then take off running.
Just breathe and run. Just run and breathe. Oxygen will fill your blood if you breathe.
Blood will fill your body if you run. Just breathe and run. Just run and breathe.
It is beyond night when I realize that the running and thin air have put a stitch in my
side, but my hands have stopped shaking. I find a tall tree and collapse underneath it. Turning
my lamped head, I see a flat exposed spot behind me that is the perfect size and level for my
tent.
As I wait for my breathing to slow, I stare through the eerie woods. I almost died just
now. I risked my life because I did not want to eat another cheeseburger that had been frozen
and thawed too many times, and because I thought I was better and stronger than any other
hiker. Hunger made me crazy. Arrogance made me stupid. The combination made me cavalier
with my own life. I must never let that happen again. I believe this trail has an end, and I
intend to see it. And if I am going to make it all the way, it will be because this lesson has
nourished me more than a belly full of steak and eggs.

END

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Good luck with all your future writing!