The Rogainers

By Francis Boscoe

The Rogainers tells the story of the United States Rogaining Championship, a 24-hour footrace using map and compass to find checkpoints scattered over a vast area. Three protagonists, unknown to one another, are thrust together as teammates owing to late arrivals and no-shows. Thea Brand is a beginner with only a vague sense of the rules, Todd Simko is highly competitive but not nearly as skilled as he perceives himself to be, and Bruce Pingree is an expert navigator and former champion well past his prime. All are in pursuit of adventure so long as they can get back to the office on time on Monday morning.

 

Throughout the day and night the slow-moving team confronts deep ravines, defensive beavers, angry bees, uncrossable marshes, derelict cemeteries, inaccurate maps, and the elite women's team known as Ask Us For Directions, ever mindful of a predicted storm. Certain that they are out of the running and ready to quit, they instead make a decision that nearly costs them their lives. 

 

Along the way we meet many other patrons of Prattworth State Park: historic preservationists, teen partiers, open-water swimmers, balloonists, and state bureaucrats, all of whom influence the race outcome. Behind it all lies the guiding spirit of park founder William Prattworth himself.

 

This book is for those who dream of adventure but for reasons of temperament or circumstance will never get very far, which is most everyone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Francis Boscoe
• Release date: Mar 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201968373

Francis Boscoe

Francis Boscoe lives in a small town in coastal Maine with his wife and their three-legged cat. This is his first novel.

Book preview

1

Todd Simko was seriously late. He knew the dirt road he was on was too small to lead to a park entrance, and sure enough, it had ended without warning: three large boulders impeding further travel. If that had been the only problem, he would have been fine. But he had been slow to get out the door that morning and got stuck behind a Labor Day parade a few towns back. He did not know why there would be a Labor Day parade in a part of the state so reliably Republican except that people will take any excuse to see fire trucks and the high school marching band. He had looked for a way around it, but Maple Avenue was blocked, Oak Avenue was blocked, Poplar Avenue was blocked. No matter the tree, it was blocked.

He glared at the three boulders through his windshield. He had relied on his cell phone for directions, and it had brought him to this unpaved dead end. The irony was not lost on him, nor was the further irony of the word lost that appeared in that expression. How does one fail to navigate properly to the United States Rogaining Championship, the nation’s foremost test of long-distance navigation? He sought a suitable analogy. Like a personal investment advisor with a shabby sign in front of a shabby office? He had seen such a place a few towns back. No, that was a contradiction with economic roots. Like a master chef burning his breakfast toast? Maybe, but that seemed like more of an honest mistake. Perhaps he was like a doctor sneaking a smoke in the hospital parking lot. Physician, heal thyself.

No, none of those was right because there was not a single thing worse than getting lost on your way to the nation’s premier test of not getting lost. Technically, he was not even lost. He knew exactly where he was, within two miles of his target destination, able to walk the rest of the way were it not for the weight of his stuff. He probably wasn’t allowed to leave his car here. It also seemed unwise to go on a thirty-minute hike immediately before a twenty-four-hour one.

The problem was that the map—more precisely, the mapping application on his phone—did not reflect the reality on the ground. The boulders blocking his path, he was pretty certain, marked the boundary of Prattworth State Park. When the state had started charging admission to the park during a budget crisis a few years ago, it had closed off many of the minor access roads, but this information had not reached the app. A later internet search revealed that he was only the latest in a long line of navigational victims, including the host of a well-known birding podcast. Since he had no cell phone coverage, his phone couldn’t plan a new route. He needed his trusty decades-old paper road atlas, but it was buried in a drawer back home. He had failed to use a paper map to get to the premier event for measuring one’s proficiency with a paper map.

His only option was to back out to the nearest state or county route and look for signs for an official park entrance. Even if this meant traveling an extra ten miles, he still had fifty-seven minutes until race time, so there was no cause for panic. True, he would have no time for planning a strategy, pitching a tent, organizing gear, or ingesting sufficient calories, but at least he would make it to the starting line. His teammate, Bruce Pingree, had been competing in these events for decades, had won a bunch of them, and could plan the route in Todd’s absence.

Missing the planning phase was a shame because that was one of the sport’s nicest features. You were presented with a crisp, bright, oversized new map of a new place, rich with color, details, and promise. All was possible; there had been no wrong turns, failed headlamp batteries, or shortages of potable water. Could you find the best route to each of the checkpoints, indicated with numbered magenta circles? Absolutely! That said, Todd did wonder if the planning phase was strictly necessary. He had arrived late one time before, and it didn’t seem to affect the result. You never ended up following your original plan anyhow, and it seemed almost as effective just to pick a direction and go. With a sport as minimal as this one, though, one had to be careful about wanting to pare it down further. Right about now, there would be a field full of folks plotting their upcoming day and night on folding tables with their multicolored push pins and string. Todd slapped the dashboard and swore at himself for missing it.

He had yet to meet Bruce Pingree in person, though he knew him by sight, having been to more than a dozen of the same events. In the Terragaine, in Virginia a few years ago, they had even finished with nearly identical scores, Todd’s team just one position behind. Undoubtedly, they had passed each other in the middle of the night, heads turned to prevent blinding one another with their headlamps, a muttered How’s it going? followed by It’s going. He wondered if this was the only sport in existence where it was possible to be meeting your teammate for the first time at the starting line of a national championship. Compare it to, say, beach volleyball, where teammates train together for decades and anticipate each other’s every movement. He supposed that certain track and field athletes met for the first time at the Olympics, but track and field was not really a team sport. Maybe something like the Italian Olympic baseball team, back when baseball was an Olympic sport. Baseball was virtually unknown in Italy; the team was a thrown-together collection of third-generation Italian-American college players and retired major-leaguers who would not have known each other beforehand. But they must have at least practiced a few times, had a few simulated games, shared a few meals, agreed upon everyone’s positions. They would not have sent an email the day before that said, Wear your red, white, and green ballcap to the Opening Ceremonies to help us find each other.

Ideally, Todd would have done what most of the competitors did, which was to arrive the evening before and pitch a tent—a perk included in the registration fee. But between the sounds of nocturnal creatures and snoring from nearby tents, he would not have slept at all, which was the last thing you wanted before a twenty-four-hour race. He once tried checking into a nearby hotel, but that had not gone much better. Though he set his alarm for nine o’clock, he was wide awake by five. Better to save his money, sleep in his own bed, and do all the driving the morning of. Even so, he had only ended up getting six good hours of sleep, tops. After midnight, his younger daughter had had a nightmare that required soothing, and his mind raced for a long time afterward, reviewing the checklist for the day ahead.

He found his way back to a paved road but saw no park signs. To be safe, he stopped at the first gas station he saw, where the cashier insisted on giving him directions to all three of the primary entrances to the park, identifying their respective pros and cons. The clock ticked. He saw that he had a single bar on his phone, so he tapped out five min to Bruce, even though he doubted that he’d see the message until Monday. Resuming his drive, he found his turnoff into the park, just past a sign welcoming him to Senecaville. After a few miles of unpaved road, a group of cars came into view in a field to his right, with some tents visible beyond. A small orange sign at the road’s edge said Registration above an arrow. His watch read 11:34. Twenty-six minutes to spare.

2

Thea Brand scanned the field of tents and campers, where plenty seemed to be missing. Items waving in the breeze, for starters: flags, banners, inflatables with corporate logos—not a one to be found. Indeed, there did not seem to be any corporate sponsors at all. There was no public address system, no DJ playing The Final Countdown, not even a competitor making up for the absence of a DJ by playing it through his car stereo. No one hawking commemorative medallions or liniment. Not a single video screen. Not even any socializing, really—no clusters of old friends swapping stories of past adventures.

There was not any movement at all, come to think of it. No one warming up with little sprints, lunges, or stretches. Everyone hid in their tents or sat on camp chairs, absorbing the morning sun in silence, eyes half-closed. Thea associated sports with energy, but this was an exercise in energy conservation. Even the air was still, nullifying her observation about the lack of items waving in the breeze. Then there was the age distribution, which made her wonder if this was specifically a master’s or senior’s event, and the overall turnout, scarcely more than one might find at a well-attended local birdwatching meetup.

All in all, it was about as far from a national championship as one could imagine: no frills, no glamour, not even any qualifying standards, but a formally sanctioned national championship just the same. The irony was that Thea had been a pretty good shot-putter and hammer-thrower back in the day, but the closest she could ever get to the U.S. Track and Field Championships was the bleachers. Now she had stumbled upon this twenty-four-hour navigation race, where all you needed to do was to show up.

As a first-timer to the sport, Thea was nervous. There was no reason to be, as no one knew or cared that she was here. But too many unknown and unpredictable elements lay ahead, the absence of her teammate being the uppermost. She looked at her cell phone once again, but, of course, it still read no service. It would not be until late the following day when she would see the message from Jeannine.

Sorry, my mother-in-law has passed away unexpectedly. I won’t be able to make it.

It had been sent the previous evening, after Thea was already here, snug in her sleeping bag.

Jeannine Stortz was a friend of a friend who had been casting around for a female teammate for months without success. Their mutual friend had approached Thea, knowing that she enjoyed geocaching, and this sounded like something similar. She was right, in the way that Spanish and Portuguese are similar, sharing many features in common, but mutually unintelligible. Thea, recognizing that she had become a bit of a shut-in as of late, had agreed, so long as she could be a passive participant. Jeannine would pick the route, handle the navigation, and decide whatever was necessary. Thea had never hiked anything close to twenty-four hours straight, but it didn’t seem like it would be too difficult. She had hiked that much in the Alleghenies the previous year, spread over three days. Jeannine assured her that she was not competitive and was open to taking generous rest breaks and even a nap in one of the lean-tos scattered throughout the park. Since Thea lived in Pittsburgh, and Jeannine lived near Buffalo, they had agreed to meet in person for the first time the day of the event, Thea camping the night before and Jeannine driving in that morning.

An announcement broke the calm at precisely ten o’clock. It was time for the distribution of the maps. The racers emerged from their cars and tents to form a queue, Thea positioning herself at the back. As they collected their maps, the other competitors beheld them with expressions of awe. Thea suspected the lack of frills was because the map was the only thing that people really cared about.

Reaching the front of the line, Thea also found the map breathtaking, though in a less positive sense. She had found some sample maps online—even printed out a few—but none were like this. The level of detail was overwhelming, the print quality first-rate. It was also unwieldy, roughly two feet on a side. There would be a lot of folding required, and the waterproof and tear-proof paper did not easily lend itself to this. She took a seat at an unoccupied picnic table. Teams began arranging multicolored push pins, connecting them with bits of string, debating which streams were crossable and which checkpoints they could skip. They had until 11:45 to study and plan their routes before the mandatory rules meeting.

Scattered across the map, as if a fistful of lentils had been cast from a stepladder, were sixty-three numbered magenta circles indicating the places the competitors were supposed to visit, each with a point value equal to the number, 2,016 points in all. Among these was a single magenta triangle, indicating Thea’s current location. It was in a part of the park that saw few visitors, being well-removed from the river and the popular attractions. She ignored the checkpoints for the moment to familiarize herself with the park’s layout.

Until the previous day, she had never visited Prattworth State Park. The dominant feature was the serpentine Caniseo River, which bisected the map from southwest to northeast. On the upper half of the map, she found the road she had taken while sightseeing the previous afternoon, with black rectangles indicating the visitor center, museum, and the restored Seneca Indian village. Thea was unaware that it was against the rules to visit the competition area before the race, but her sightseeing gave her no real advantage since none of the checkpoints were near the places she had visited.

A dashed red line indicated the park’s border, which bracketed the river by a few kilometers on either side. Thea did not typically think in terms of kilometers, but this was a metric map; thin reference lines divided the terrain into 500-meter strips. Within the park, the dominant white and green map colors indicated open and dense forest. Around Thea’s current location was mostly green, signifying that this part of the park had been farmland until recently. It was now in the early stages of forest conversion, dense with honeysuckle and small, closely packed trees. The grassy field in which she sat was colored orange on the map, denoting open land. The edges of the map were also mainly orange, indicating farmland outside the park’s boundaries.

Upstream of the visitor center, she identified the massive railroad trestle that spanned the gorge, and west of that the street grid of the small village of Senecaville. The falls and rapids in the river were shown with spiky black lines, somewhat hard to see underneath the dense vertical red lines denoting out-of-bounds. That these areas were out-of-bounds would seem obvious, but if her career as a software designer had taught her anything, it was not to make assumptions.

Behind all of these features were the pale brown contour lines, denoting every undulation in the terrain with precision. In some places toward the river, the lines merged into a blur, indicating impassably steep terrain.    

She did all that she could with the map, but there was still no sign of Jeannine. At last, she got up and approached the person in charge.

Excuse me, but I seem to be missing a teammate.

I know, responded Mike Carciufo, the race director, but you may be in luck because so is he. He pointed to the man standing next to him. He was older—perhaps sixty—small and lean, with a trimmed gray beard and fancy-looking prescription goggles. He had the air of someone who was very good at this, but that could have just been Thea’s self-consciousness.

Yes, my teammate also seems to be a no-show, the man replied. Too bad there is no cell service here, or we might find out why. But there is never cell service at these events, is there? He raised an eyebrow at the race director.

You are, at this moment, the only unpaired registrants, Mike Carciufo clarified.

The older man frowned. How much of a hiker are you?

I’m pretty sure I can keep moving for twenty-four hours, said Thea, not at all sure of this. It had only been eight weeks since she had connected with Jeannine and resumed regular exercise.

He deepened his frown, then shrugged. I suppose we are now a team. He extended his hand. Bruce Pingree. Welcome to the United States Rogaining Championship.

Thea Brand, replied Thea. I have to warn you: I am somewhat new at this.

The race director clicked his tongue. Don’t worry, Bruce will take care of you. He’s been doing this for a very long time.

I’ve won a few of these in the past, Bruce said modestly, glancing over at the trophy cup displayed on its own card table. His name appeared on it six times, more than anyone else’s, though none were recent. To be precise, the trophy was for the Mid-Atlantic Rogaining Championship, not the United States Rogaining Championship, though today they were one and the same. The United States Championship was officially sanctioned and held all over the country, while the Mid-Atlantic Championship was what Mike Carciufo called the event that he put on every summer, always held within fifty miles of his home. I’ve slowed down some this year. He gestured at his knee brace. Surely, she could keep up with this guy, thought Thea. Plus, he was an expert navigator. Thea was suddenly optimistic.

Your job will be just to follow me. Bruce motioned toward a picnic table just outside the registration tent. Let’s sit here for a minute, and I’ll show what I have in mind.

He unfurled the map on the table. No one ends up following their original plan, but now is the time to dream big. I thought we could head here first, he said, pointing to a few isolated checkpoints in the northeast corner, and then come down this trail here to pick up fifty-two. He proceeded to trace out an agenda that captured nearly all the points. This map covers a smaller area than a lot of rogaines, so I’m sure there will be teams that get them all. We will not be one of them, but we should do okay. How old are you, by the way?

Forty-three, said Thea.

We are veterans, then, replied Bruce. I’m a super veteran myself. Soon to be an ultra veteran. These were the age-classification terms peculiar to rogaining. Ultra veteran meant over sixty-five. Bruce did not look like he was sixty-four, but now that he mentioned it, Thea noticed the telltale creases around his eyes and his spotty hands. Surely, she could keep up with someone who both wore a knee brace and was more than twenty years her senior. But was that really how she wanted to spend her weekend? She had driven all this way; she might as well see it through.

And how are your compass skills? Bruce continued.

Um, evaded Thea. She had a brand-new championship-caliber Finnish-made extra-stable compass, but she had yet to use it much. She had watched a couple of online videos and taken it with her on a few of her park excursions, but she was more comfortable using GPS as a guide. Although Thea had not put in the proper training hours for an event of this magnitude, she was well-outfitted. As the event approached, she had gone to a high-end camping store, described to a sales clerk what she had signed up for, then bought everything he recommended. I’ve mostly done geocaching.

Really? How many finds? asked Bruce. He checked to see if Mike Carciufo was eavesdropping. He was; his eyebrows were raised. Mike was of the strong opinion that geocaching was kid stuff.

Oh, a few hundred. The true number was 86, which seemed too paltry to admit.

At least you’ve spent plenty of time in the woods. Oh, let’s not forget our dibblers. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small plastic device that resembled a USB drive and was attached to a lanyard, along with a Tyvek wristband like those used at concerts. Thea had seen these in her registration packet, but had left them there, awaiting instruction. She watched as Bruce threaded the lanyard around the wristband and attached a the plastic device to his middle finger via an elastic loop. This is how we keep score. Let’s reconvene in forty minutes. Bruce waited until Thea’s back was turned, then covered his face with his hand.

3