Cohutta Wilderness
Georgia
September 1992
Steve is my brother, ten years older and so much wiser than me, in his mind. Even though he spent time in the trenches in Vietnam, he was still willing to go out into the wilds of north Georgia with me. We planned a three-day backpack trip in the Cohutta Wilderness, just the two of us.
He laid out the trip, picking trails and campsites. I flew to Atlanta and together we drove two and a half hours north to our destination, shedding the city, watching the landscape turn into wilderness. Here I was, on the way to backpacking with my big brother, my boyhood hero, soon to be in the wilderness, a place that I cherished. Exhilaration abounds.
I looked forward to this trip for us to get to know each other better, one guy to another, apart from being brothers, as well as being brothers. As soon as we hit the trail, the dialog began. We talked about family matters: our middle brother; what it meant to grow up in our complex, dangerous family; what his family, the wife and kid, meant to him.
We talked about guy stuff too: gurls, his service in the military, whiskey, walking sticks and gurls. We advised each other about how to hit a curve ball (which neither of us knew anything about,) how to build a fire, which we did both nights, and generally, what it means to be a man. He read a paper which he was scheduled to deliver the following week to a group of big shots in the psychiatry field and he welcomed my feedback. I pointed out that in my work, I myself used many of the same phrases he read. We mused that we had the same teaching style.
We relaxed in the warming sun and climbed on the rocks of Jack’s River at a series of breathtaking waterfalls.
We cooked on a little gas stove and sucked noodles while sitting on downed logs. We studied the map together. We talked until the embers lost their glow. We both slept on the ground, outside the tent.
We discovered that Mr Kennedy, our high school physics teacher, picked Steve to teach his class on Turnabout Day and then ten years later, Mr Kennedy picked me for the same job.
We spat out the rivalry between our home teams, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Atlanta Braves, but that didn’t go very far as we both knew as much about professional baseball as we knew about hitting a curve ball.
We breathed the same clean air.
Steve told me that Jack’s River, the waterway our trail paralleled, was where John Boorman filmed the 1972 drama film Deliverance. Since Steve was my older brother, I accepted his word as truth. I’m the little brother and he was my hero. When I got older, I found out that, in fact, the movie was filmed on the Chattooga River, 99 miles east of where we were backpacking. Steve did a good job of fulfilling his big brother role.
The two of us look very much alike. It’s not uncommon for folks to do a double take when they see us side by side. We’re used to it.
On the middle day of our trip, a hiker passed us on the trail. He performed the requisite double take and proclaimed, “Hey, you guys are brothers, aren’t you?”
Steve replied, “Nope. I just liked this trail so much I decided to hike it twice.”
In the Cohutta Wilderness, there was a great swath where, several years ago, a tornado had shredded its way through, tearing up the landscape in a neat runway of destruction. A sharp line divided healthy forest from the devastation: large uprooted trees, broken branches and severe soil erosion.
We were taking a break on this dividing line, havoc to our right, lush woodland to our left. I was relaxing on a log munching some GORP while Steve was up, striking random big sticks on random rocks, trees, dirt piles, just for the fun of it. It’s what boys do, even when they’re grown up.
He swung down one branch and a piece broke off, flew back and hit him right on the bridge of his nose. Instantly blood poured out — facial wounds tend to bleed like a river — and he said a bad word. When we determined that he was not too badly injured even with a possibly broken nose, he swore me to secrecy about this embarrassing incident. So I’m not allowed to tell you this story. But I’m telling you because that’s what boys do, even when they’re grown up.