4th of July

My two favorite 4th of Julys are as follows:

1. The summer after graduating high school, I got invited through a friend to a sort-of friend's boat. It was definitely more of the "cool" people and I may have just been invited because I had been one of these people's best friend for pretty much his whole life, but I still had gone to school with these guys for 4-6 years, and some of my best friends were there too. 8 or so of us went out on his boat and sat in Portland harbor (along with a billion other boats), and watched as fireworks were set off into the ocean, pretty much directly over us. It was beautiful and awesome- just a fantastic moment of being with close friends one last time, watching fireworks in a boat. It gave me a feeling that somehow, maybe we'd all stick together into college. Of course, we didn't.

2. 3 years ago, Kevin had a party at his house in Ashland, and we walked into town (like a quarter of a mile) to where the town set off one of the most amazing local fireworks shows I've ever seen from a football field right on main street. Looking out from the field, the town goes uphill, so everyone got a spot on the hill, and Kevin said that the town pretty much only cared about the 4th of July, so all of their money went into that show. This was pretty obvious once it got going. This would be the first year that I had even considered watching fireworks while listening to music. So, I lay down in the woods with some of my best friends around me, a BBQ chicken calzone from my favorite pizza place in my lap, and blasted Explosions in the Sky and Caspian, while thousands of dollars of fireworks shot off directly over my head. I could sit up and talk with friends and eat deliciousness, then lay down and have my entire view be fireworks, with nothing but epic instrumental beauty and the sounds of explosions in my ears.

In past years, following the very sad theme that life has become, people have all gone their separate ways- couples went off on trips or went to separate parties with people I didn't know- friends spent weekends with their families, etc. The 4th as I had known it, started to get sad. For some reason, I always feel kind of sad and lonely on the 4th- even in a huge crowd- something about the fireworks gets to me in a way that I don't even fully understand. This year, literally every couple or friend I had was in a different town, and I was faced with either finding something cool to do on my own, or doing absolutely nothing.

So, I did something incredibly awesome.

I hiked to the top of Mount Major and watched every fireworks display for 30 miles in near complete darkness while blasting Caspian into my ears.

I tried to get people to go, but with it raining and people being boring, I struck out. So, leaving waaay too late, I drove way too fast to Alton Bay, to try to catch their 9:20 fireworks display. With traffic and crowds, I didn't get on the trail until about 8:40. With it being about 2 miles to the top and an elevation gain of 1,150 feet, saying it was going to be "tough" for me to make it to the top by 9:20 would be the understatement of the year. I stretched for about 20 seconds, loaded up my bag with the necessities (ipod, iphone, 1.5 liters of water, doo rag, headlamp), and started walking as fast as my fat body would let me.

I took my first break at about .4 and got out the doo rag to wipe the already pouring sweat off my face. I put my ipod on, chose the new August Burns Red album, and got the headlamp out. It was quite dark, but my night vision and the small opening in the trees made the trail fairly visible. Eventually, on break 3 or 4, it was finally too dark and I needed to put it on.

I wish for once, a hike would have all the hard stuff right at the beginning, and then all of the easy flat stuff at the top. Mount Major is pretty easy up until a point, and that point was of course, when my speed, lack of stretching, and out-of-shapeness turned me into a wheezing, crazed lunatic. I looked at my ipod, and it was like 9:10 when I hit the hardest part. Awesome. I had already pushed myself to near exhaustion, but was so close, I had to keep going. I slipped on a rock and hurt a muscle in my leg, but just kept pushing on- I was NOT going to miss the fireworks. 

30 feet later, I stopped on a rock and sat down, facing where I had come from while drinking some water. I immediately heard rustling under the sound of my music, and paused the music to hear a weird grunt. This was most likely a person, but since I saw no lights, I started wondering if it was an animal, and got a tad scared. Upon shining my light into the woods, I heard "Dude! You're killing my night vision!" Some lunatic was hiking the trail- sorry- was hiking through the woods next to the trail, about 3 times faster than me. He caught up to me and asked where the trail went. He told me he had 2 others behind him, also with no lights. I'm all for adventure, but that's just stupid. 

oh weird, an apple shirt

Not wanting to meet up with his other stupid friends, I got back on my feet and began the last stretch. I would meet this guy two more times before I got to the top (where he was waiting, asking if I had seen his friends). Each time, he was asking me where the trail was. By the time I got to the top, I was exhausted, but I'm proud to say, it was only about 9:30. I had somehow hiked to the top in about 50 minutes. I was pouring with sweat and dead.

I was both surprised to see people, and surprised that, once I realized others had had this idea, there weren't more people. There were probably about 20, divided into 3 small groups of 18-25-ish year olds, and 1 family with some small kids. Mostly everyone was facing towards Alton Bay, waiting. I walked right past everyone and went to the other side of the summit, which faces the rest of Lake Winnipesaukee. Once I stopped panting and chugged some more water, I truly had an amazing experience. 

Here is the view from the top of Mount Major in the daytime:

I wish more than anything that I had some sort of camera to be able to capture what I saw, but just imagine this (and this is about 20% of the total possible view of the lakes region) completely black, with a ton of lights from houses, even more from boats, and fireworks displays everywhere- from huge ones in other towns to small ones at people's houses- some across the lake, some on the side just below me. I summed it up pretty well in my TWEET: "Listening to Caspian, looking down on all of Lake Winnipesaukee, watching the world end in beautiful colors. This is pretty spectacular." And it was. 

People were talking from the other side, but with my music loud enough, it was just me up there. A cool breeze kicked in, and I just sat there, watching fireworks everywhere, going off in different times, with distant explosions and light flashes constantly going off. It really did feel somewhat like I was looking down on the world ending, but it was ok- I had a mountain top and Caspian. I was good.

The Alton Bay fireworks didn't start until about 10 (after most people started to leave) and they had many pauses in them- I think there might have been a problem or concerns over it raining again. I only was able to capture 1 firework with my camera. 

It looks like it's just far away and above, but nope. I was above all of them, which is a pretty neat feeling.

I had been up there for about 40 minutes, and I was starting to get cold. Most of the fireworks were done, so it was time to leave. I, of course wandered around, waiting for people to leave so I could walk down alone. I let the horde of people go down the loop side (which is stupid, since there is tons of steep exposed rock which was all wet on that side) and started walking back the way I came, when the night got interesting. 

"Hey, you're the guy I met earlier on the trail right?"

"uh.. yea." 

"Can me and my friends go down with you?"

"uh.... yea."

I hate strangers. I had headphones ready to go, and wanted to walk down at my pace, in my world. And now these 3 guys wanted to use me because I was the only one of them smart enough to bring a light. Turns out I was the only one smart enough to not get drunk at the top either. 

But off we went, the fat out of shape guy leading the way, while 1 guy talked a bunch and ended up walking in front of me in the dark anyway, another guy walked WAY too close to me and kept apologizing, and the third guy slipped and fell over and over again in the darkness behind me, yelling about how he was drunk and had a 4.0 GPA but he wasn't stupid to be doing what he was doing and he's not gay, you're gay. I kind of just laughed nervously at everything they were saying and gave small-talk answers. I got lots of "Mike, you're awesome"s and was there with a quick joke here and there to try to make the 2 mile hike down more bearable. 

About half way through, the drunk guy pulled out a gun. 

He said he wanted to shoot cans or a tree, anything. He is in the National Guard and to him, guns aren't a big deal. While the apologetic guy and the talkative guy way up front were saying "dude! put that away, you're slipping on rocks and drunk, this could end very badly," he got mad and decided, in an act of "don't tell me what to do," to point the gun directly at apologetic guy, who was next to me, meaning the gun had to swing around and pass me before reaching him. A gun held by a National Guardsman, who was drunk, slipping every 10 seconds, and combative. 

I suddenly remembered that I had made fun of him a minute earlier, saying that a guy who supposedly went through basic training should have no trouble walking down a hill, and what is he, a pussy?

Good stuff. 

Once we convinced him that guns aren't funny and we don't like them, he put the gun away and I began to eventually enjoy myself with these 3 random lunatics. They had all been in random bands before, gun guy was the singer of a metal band and played drums, they liked doing crazy stuff like this all the time, they lived by a principle of "challenge excepted," where one would basically state that they would do something absurd (like this) and the other person would have to agree that they would, in turn, do it too. They made a billion gay jokes as all mid-twenties drunk guys do, they asked me about my musical tastes and what instruments I played, etc. We spent the last 20 minutes talking about metal and how I appreciated death metal but found its lack of dynamics to be boring, and we all agreed that Between the Buried and Me ruled wicked hard. Of course, a "Mike, you're awesome, I want to friend you on facebook" happened, and for some reason, I actually told gun guy my last name, and he sent me a friend request right there on the trail. 

We ended the night with them saying we should jam sometime, they were gonna send me friend requests, and we should do this again. They all thanked me, and after apologetic guy and talkative guy convinced gun guy once again that he should probably not shoot cans in the parking lot while little kids were 40 feet away, and he fired the gun into the sky to prove that it wasn't that loud (it actually wasn't, but still, come on dude), we awkwardly went our separate ways, with me driving away as fast as humanly possible while trying to not appear like I was driving as fast as humanly possible. 

I'll be honest, I did not want to have anything to do with these guys, but the walk down was interesting to say the least, and for the most part, actually nice. They were all really nice and I had much more in common with them than I ever would have thought. I've never met strangers and then spent an hour talking to them in the dark before. I didn't even know what one of them looked like until I got to the bottom. What an odd experience, and a completely insane night: hike in the dark against time, conquer a mountain, have epic beautiful firework emo time in the dark, then walk down the trail with 3 complete strangers and a gun. Maybe I'm just high on my survival, but it was nice. Good stuff.

The next day, apologetic guy had sent me a friend request with a message saying "Thanks for saving our lives" which may have actually been true. I turned the light off towards the end of the trail, and it doesn't get more pitch black dark than that. They had cell phones, but drunk+trying to find a trail in the dark with a cell phones=bad. I accepted both the friend requests and am kind of just wondering how long I keep them on there until I "accidentally" delete them. 

Gun guy posted on my wall later on that day. All he said was "Epic night."

currently listening to: The Crinn- Dreaming Saturn, Counterparts- Prophets