Ten Million Steps by M. J. Eberhart

Author:M. J. Eberhart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9780897328791
Publisher: Menasha Ridge Press
Published: 2007-03-03T16:00:00+00:00

WEDNESDAY June 17, 1998

TRAIL DAY 153/58 TRAIL MILE 2,140/738

LOCATION Bryant Ridge Shelter

* * *

I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FORWARD WITH CHILDISH ANTICIPATION for days to standing again at the Peaks of Otter overlook, because I truly believe this vantage to be one of the most magnificent anywhere. These majestic peaks are commanding indeed, with two of the most prominent being formed from Sharptop and Flattop mountains. They give such a remarkably glad and exciting impression of extending—as if reaching upward all the while one continues to gaze—toward a sky that presents to be so heavenly blue, even more so than any such scene in my memory. This morning is there before me pure ether, not a cloud, not a wisp of mist or haze, thus it seems are these peaks draw nigh unto me. The little sign before me here however tells me their grand and striking presence is more than 6 miles distant. No one knows for certain how this mystic storyland came by its name. Perhaps it’s from the Cherokee word ottari, meaning “high places.” Early settlers might have named the peaks after Scotland’s Ben Otter Mountain, which resembles Sharptop. And then again the name may have derived from the abundance of otter that inhabited the nearby rivers and streams long ago. Ah, but indeed, it is all the better for the mystery of it!

It is in times of perfect stillness and calm, as is the ethereal-like vastness before me this morning, that far-off sounds can sometimes be ever-so-faintly heard—melodic sounds, neither cheerful nor sad, but more pensively melancholy, sounds that call from afar, not only in distance but seemingly also from back in time, as if from some other day long past, stirring the fire, the wanderlust deep within, to the core of one’s very soul. For a brief, fleeting moment this morning I hear the Pipes, drifting on the still silence across the vast expanse and o’er the distant peaks. The voyagers of the Far North heard these mysterious and beckoning sounds over a century ago. Sounds likened to the “Pipes of Pan,” spoken about with near reverence by Sigurd Olson in his delightful books Wilderness Days and Open Horizons. The old men of the great north woods surely heard these sounds and were attuned to their far-off call. To read of this mystery provokes such grand imaginings, thoughts that leave one in pure puzzlement and disbelief. “That night I thought I heard them too … Wilderness music? Imagination? I may never know … but for a moment the Pipes had sounded … and a sense of the old fantasy of long ago was mine. While I stood there I was one with all adventurers, all explorers, and those who had ever looked into the unknown, part of a forgotten world of glory and romance, where things cannot be seen unless there is belief.” Could the Pipes be no more than the wind in the hardwood and the pine, or the joyful tunes echoed and reverberated across

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