Four Hundred and Twenty-Five Stairs
Amicalola Falls and the Len Foote Inn Trail
Four hundred and twenty-five stairs
Taken in pairs to wake the quads
Place our crew atop a grand waterfall
Bordered by a parking lot
That dampens the victorious ascent
-
We could have fucking driven up here
I mutter to my two companions
As we sweatily amble past
Plump tourists and geriatrics and children
Whose quads remain blissfully asleep
-
Leaving them to dumbly gape
We forge into the autumnal hills
Five arduous miles of scuffling
Through cranberry burnt sugar leaves
Interrupted by mangroves in troughs
-
Then from the trees emerges
Some looming structure painted gray
A drab and creaky and eerie inn
Where intermittent piss whiffs indicate
That we share this little paradise
-
Our fleeting companions are as follows
A pair of hikers on a garden bench
Some chap in an orange puff jacket
And a grim woman so lost in a book
As to seem dead on first glance
-
Broadcasting our presence
To this charming little coterie
We crinkle pub sub bags
And then observe contemplative silence
Where a quiet understanding exists
-
Between all present parties
That a hours-long trailed toil
Was the necessary fare
For this remote rest stop
For which we all paid our dues
-
The corpse gaze remains fixed on the pages
But puff jacket soon absconds
Garden duo vanishes without a trace
And so we also venture on
Impermanent and intrepid
-
Fall’s yellows and ambers and reds
Lack the stamina for the next peak
Abandoning us among windswept trees
And decaying leaves and sepia tones
That remind us of a cemetery
-
A raven’s cry turns the scene
Into a goddamn cliché
As mother nature calls on line one
And I seek some leafy seclusion
To conceal such a private matter
-
No doubt my adventurous friends
A couple, as it happens
Revel passionately in my absence
As is their prerogative
Ceasing kindly as I rejoin the triumvirate
-
As tribute to the journey’s impending end
The path descends and grows rockier
More treacherous and precarious
Or in other words more fun
Though our knees vocally disagree
-
Our proximity to society is signaled
By giddy dogs who romp along the route
With their hurried human counterparts
And shame our waxing weariness
With their bottomless reservoirs of enthusiasm
-
Last one to the trail’s end is a rotten egg
Proclaims the girl with a five yard head start
And seeing how little time there is to debate
The wisdom of sprinting over crags and tree roots
The boys scramble off in hot pursuit
-
In the wake of a photo finish
Our breathless moment of celebration
At having conquered ten sylvan miles
In a matter of hours is quashed
By the aforementioned parking lot
-
Returned to the top of the waterfall
We gather our lightened packs
And what remains of our resolve
To re-trace that prolonged and awful march
Down four hundred and twenty-five fucking stairs
