The Trail Book of Life

This is a very short story suitable for Yom Kippur but probably not for children.

Over several years, I took part of the break between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur to hike in New York’s Adirondack Mountains with my friend, Bob Cohen. Bob was a doc and he needed the get-away. I was a prof, so my whole life was a kind of get-away. Nevertheless, for us as for many in many different religious traditions, being in the mountains was itself some version of spiritual experience. In the Fall, the colors were resplendent. I can’t say I was “uplifted” or “enlightened” being on and among them. But it felt closer to religious observance then, say, spending the week at the Lake Placid Howard Johnsons, may its memory be for a blessing.

In any event, Bob and I signed in at the trailhead as one is supposed to do. The ledger there records when one enters the woods. And one is also supposed to—OK, secularly commanded—to sign out. Otherwise, when one goes missing there is some record of where one’s remains might be found.

When we signed in, we noticed that we were not the only wayward sheep in the tribe. An hour earlier, Schiffman and Liebowitz had also entered their names in the ledger. This was actually the day of Yom Kippur. The fact that there were other wandering Jews was both a source of comfort and the opposite.

It was a great day in the woods. We got to summits we’d not visited before. Most memorable is a mountain called “The Gothics.” Gothics is best known for its bare rock side, the result of an enormous landslide decades earlier. In the Adirondacks, the soil on the mountains is not deep. A soaking rain can cause a whole slab of greenery to slip away. That added to The Gothics near otherworldly aura and, perhaps, threat . (That said, there is no Mt. Kumbaya in the Adirondacks. There is a little mountain with the cute name of “Jo,” but that can be deceiving. Jo was the wife a snide antisemite who ran a famous lodge, which he spelled “loj,” a century before.)

When we got back to the trailhead, happy and exhausted, we completed the mitzvah of signing out. Evening was approaching and we anticipated some version of Kol Nidre in imagination, not that it housed a lot of Aramaic. Most important, we noted that Schiffman and Liebowitz had not yet signed out. They were out there somewhere, perhaps doing irreparable sin.

With that in mind, I could not risk adding my own heretical note to them in the trail book. “Hey Schiffman and Liebowitz, which part of Book of Life didn’t you understand? Happy trails, God.”

Literally and figuratively, it was downhill from there. Some years later, Bob ghosted me shortly after my wife was diagnosed with a serious cancer (from which she has fully recovered). Dr. Bob disappeared. That sin is probably beyond atonement. On the other hand, I would make amends with Schiffman and Liebowitz if I had any idea of where they are. Or whether they—or, indeed, I—ever made it out of the woods.