Tim and I both personally witnessed somebody being nearly swallowed alive by a Sucking Pus Bog yesterday, a bonus feature of the Hakkoda Mountain hiking trip. We were on the return trip from the top when the guide decided to alter the route a bit because one of the people on the trip was bleeding pretty badly.
Please refer to Okonski Trip Rule #1: No trip is ever turns out as planned when an Okonski is part of it.
Although Tim will disagree with me, the Pus Bog was easily the most memorable part of the trip, so I’ll start there: Instead of retracing our route up to the top, the guide took us all the way to the bottom of the mountain by following “Stinky Canyon,” a mountain stream carrying sulphurous waters to a small pond, hence the name. The place smelled like a back room poker session after a dinner of beer and beans. Between the canyon and the pond, the stream flattened out into a wide, boggy swamp, where the guide had to lead us across what looked like a huge, open, infected, seeping wound. The name “Pus Bog” popped into Tim’s and my mind at the same time.
There were some people who flat-out refused to cross it, until the rest of us were disappearing through the undergrowth and they were left behind. It wasn’t so bad at first; it was more like walking across thick, squishy moss, except for where the sulphur had urped up through the ooze, looking like an especially angry exploded pimple, making just about everybody in the group go, “Ewwww!” with at least every other step they took. As the moss got wetter and we sank in up to our ankles, the “Ewwww!”s became more frequent.
The trick was to pick the right place to step, and to keep moving. I once visited a bog in upper Wisconsin, a lake covered with a thick mat of moss and grass. The teacher who took us on this field trip assured us that the mat would hold our weight, but I never got over the feeling that it would swallow us up, given the chance.
Well, the Pus Bog was definitely a man-eater. It tried to suck the boots off my feet a couple times, swallowed one girl’s leg to the knee, and gulped another girl’s leg all the way to the hip. She was pretty unhappy with that, to judge from the quick, one-word method she used to describe her feelings, and maybe even a little more unhappy with the good laugh we all had at her predicament.
Tim liked the Pus Bog fine, but I think he puts the bus ride and the walk down the mountain as the best parts of the trip, in that order. He didn’t care much for the hike up. “What’s so great about hiking up a mountain?” he asked. “It’s boring.” There’s the teenaged view of everything in a nutshell: ‘Do I think it’s boring? Then what’s the point if it is?’ The walk down the mountain was fine, though, because it didn’t take as long. He liked the bus trip because we spent most of it horsing around, stuffing trash down each other’s shirts and making way too much noise for the driver to concentrate.
Oh, yeh, the bleeding guy’s all right.