gwax's rumblings

This year being a lit­tle more hec­tic than most, the annual Misogynistic Camping Trip was turned into a day hike. We (Sam, Jack, Smalltime and myself) left Cambridge, MA about 8a this (Saturday) morn­ing head­ing North on I-93. The plan was to hike up to the sum­mit of Mount Liberty and then con­tinue on to the sum­mit of Mount Flume and come back down, which forms a loop start­ing and end­ing in the same place. We were hop­ing to start around 11a and get down before dark.

I should note that we were trav­el­ing in an H3, which added it’s own com­edy to the trip. Firstly, you might ask, why the Hell were we dri­ving in an H3? That’s a ques­tion that I asked myself and, it turns out, Smalltime was bor­row­ing a car from his dad – who works at a car deal­er­ship – and the only one he could bor­row at the time was an H3. You’ve prob­a­bly already encoun­tered my opin­ions on the H3 from the exte­rior but this gave me a chance to back those up with impres­sions from the inte­rior and ride of the thing. My first impres­sion of the inte­rior was that they’d done a fan­tas­tic job of mak­ing it very classy with two-tone leather, lots of pol­ished metal and other fanci­ness but then shortly there­after I started notic­ing things like the cheap plas­tic trim and the fact that the thing is absolutely tiny. The sheer tini­ness of the H3 is sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing the mas­sive inte­rior of the first Hummer and really starts to get to you. The vehi­cle is about the size of a stan­dard SUV these days but it’s got door pan­els that are about half a foot thick (not exag­ger­at­ing), the aver­age per­son will have only an inch or three of head room and then the win­dows are about a foot and a half tall; it makes you cramped and claus­tro­pho­bic; what a waste. Suffice it to say that our con­cur­rant view was that the H3 sucks, though our lan­guage wasn’t so PC.

We man­aged to get hik­ing just shortly after 11a and we were mak­ing fan­tas­tic time until we hit the long swathes of steep snow and ice. Progress slowed down but we kept trud­ing along and even­tu­ally made the sum­mit of Mount Liberty. The views from the sum­mit were really fan­tas­tic; we could see every­thing for hun­dreds of miles in every direc­tion and the snow-covered peaks all over the land­scape were really beau­ti­ful. From the sum­mit we were able to spot the H3 in the park­ing area and I can report that from 3 miles away the H3 doesn’t suck as much. After chill­ing at the sum­mit for a bit, we turned around and headed back (decid­ing against the go on to Flume plan). The return trip was pretty quick and easy, lots of down­hill snow meant jog­ging and slid­ing a bunch.

After we’d made it about half way down and the snow-cover was giv­ing way to more and more ice, an unfor­tu­nate thing hap­pened: I slipped, started slid­ing on my butt, tried to stop myself with my left arm and popped it right out of the socket. My shoul­der dis­lo­cated very eas­ily with­out much pres­sure, imply­ing that my acci­dent this sum­mer actu­ally did leave me with a bad shoul­der; hav­ing dis­cov­ered this, I’m prob­a­bly going to want to get surgery. So there we were, half way down (or half way up, depend­ing on how you want to look at it) a snow and ice cov­ered moun­tain and me with a dis­lo­cated shoul­der. Unlike last time, my shoul­der wasn’t crip­plingly painful and I wasn’t going into shock but we still had to get off that moun­tain. The options, of course, were pop that sucker back in or bind it, climb down and hit up a hos­pi­tal and since none of us knew how to put a shoul­der back in, we opted for the alt­ter approach. Going down was fan­tas­ti­cally slow because I needed to have some­one hold­ing my hand and help­ing me find places to put my feet that were sta­ble enough for me to not fall and close enough that I didn’t have to spread my legs enough to move my arm. As we were slowly pro­ceed­ing down­ward, some peo­ple that we had passed on the way up and back on the way down caught up to us and one of them (Russ or Rusty or some­thing like that) offered me the use of his cramp-ons. With those crap-ons, I damn near walked down the rest of the moun­tain with­out much help, it was really impres­sive. All the while we were going down, my arm didn’t really seem to hurt that much unless I bounced it the wrong way. Eventually, I was feel­ing really hag­gard, stressed and in men­tal anguish but no pain; when we reached the bot­tom and hopped back in the H3 (Smalltime had dri­ven 0.6mi up the Franconia Notch bike path to the trail­head) sud­denly I started notic­ing how very much my arm did hurt and it occured to me that the men­tal stress was prob­a­bly the man­i­fes­ta­tion of the pain behind a wall of adren­a­line, endor­phins and will to not get caught up there at night. At this point, I have to, begrudg­ingly, com­pli­ment the H3 again, it fared fan­tas­ti­cally well get­ting us out on the snow/ice cov­ered bike path with­out Smalltime hav­ing to lock the rear dif­fer­en­tial or switch to low range.

We then drove to the near­est hos­pi­tal, which wasn’t very close, and in some ways, mainly pain, the drive was worse than the ordeal of get­ting down from the moun­tain. We got to the hos­pi­tal and then began the affair of pop­ping my shoul­der back in. I was expect­ing either a quick, painful pop it back in or a sedate me and I wake up with it back in approach but they decided not to take either of those. The approach that was taken was a two per­son oper­a­tion where one per­son was behind me, dis­plac­ing my shoul­der blade and another per­son manip­u­lat­ing my arm to get it to slide back into place. The tech­nique was not work­ing and so they decided that they’d have to go with the more dras­tic, put me under and use machin­ery, approach. The doc­tor put my arm in my lap and then, after the doc­tor let go, I moved my arm slightly and the thing popped itself right back into place; it was really kind of comic. Then the doc­tor checked my shoul­der a lit­tle to make sure that it was prop­erly back, they took some X-rays and sent me on my way.

We stopped at the Ashland Burger King (one exit down from the Hospital) and had the tra­di­tional post-hike Ashland Burger King meal. From there we pro­ceeded back to Cambridge, whence I pro­ceeded back to Concord. All in all, not the most pleas­ant hike I’ve had but cer­tainly one of the most inter­est­ing. Oh, and I do feel pretty damned hard­core for climb­ing down half of a moun­tain with a dis­lo­cated shoulder.