Barefoot Sisters: Southbound Read online

  Under the thick mesh of spruce boughs, the ground was so dark I could barely see where I was putting my feet, so when the pond opened in front of us, reflecting all the light left in the sky, it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to its brightness. There was a person coming toward us, out of the woods. More people behind him. Then I saw the tents.

  Our friends Blue Skies and Matt were camped there, along with three people who'd started just ahead of us, whose register entries we had been following for a week. There were Nor'easter and Creen, a couple from the Midwest who drew witty cartoons about Trail life and wrote their adventures in verse. We also met Waterfall, a solo hiker from Louisiana whose exuberant register entries had cheered us in some of the swampiest, most buggy places. She could describe thunderstorms in a way that made you want to step out of the shelter, turn your face to the sky, and feel the rain stream off your forehead and run down your shoulder blades.

  Catching up to the people whose register entries had cheered and entertained us felt like meeting minor celebrities, people whose voices we'd heard on the radio, but who we'd never expected to share a campsite and a cup of tea with. Tired as we were from our first fourteen-mile day, we stayed up for an hour after dark, listening to each other's stories of how we came to the Trail, making our plans and wishes to hike together, while the pond beside us darkened and filled with constellations.

  jackrabbit

  n the morning, a thin mist drifted over the surface of the pond, evaporating where the sun touched it. The amber-colored water glinted with refracting sunbeams. I filtered two liters into our water bottles and packed up the tent while Isis cooked a pot of oatmeal.

  We hiked out early and stopped at the top of the first mountain for a drink of filtered pond water: brownish and slightly musky, but refreshing. I turned to look over the land we had crossed. Blue-gray lakes in the valleys shimmered with cat's-paw winds. Huge cloud shadows lumbered across the green carpet of forest. My breath slowly returned to normal, but my legs were still aching and trembling. I wondered how many people had stood in this same spot and felt exactly what I felt then: Triumph. Exhaustion. Doubt. I thought again of the wooden sign on Katahdin. If eighty-five miles felt like this, how would two thousand miles feel',

  Isis took out the map, a long strip of waterproof paper. The top part was a normal topographic map, showing perhaps thirty miles of the Trail corridor. We usually concentrated on a tiny strip along the bottom: the elevation profile. Today's profile looked like the seismograph for a medium-sized earthquake.

  "You've got to be kidding me," I said. "Look at this, Isis. They even ran out of names for these lumps. There's Chairback, and Columbus, and then it just goes Third Mountain, Fourth Mountain ..

  "Yikes."

  "Fourth Mountain Bog. This ought to be interesting. I hope we don't have to run through it like that bog before Antlers."

  "Ooh, that was awful." I remembered the sound of mosquitoes audible even before we reached the bog and the feeling of the cloud of insects hitting my skin as I ran.

  As it turned out, Fourth Mountain Bog was beautiful. Cedar trees on either side of the trail leaned at crazy angles. A breeze swept through their open canopies, fending off the mosquitoes for once. Frogs winked and disappeared in the small pools, and insects jumped crazily across the bog bridges underfoot; the flowers of cranberry, cotton grass, pitcher plants, and sundew swayed in the wind. Red and green leaves stitched the surface of the pinkish green sphagnum moss like patterns on a quilt. Overhead, we could see clouds building up in clotted towers, signaling a storm, so we hurried for the next mountain.

  For the third time that day, a spruce grouse exploded from the bushes just in front of Isis. Its thudding wingbeats split the silence and wakened my adrenaline. The small brown bird flapped up against Isis several times, desperate to distract her from the flock of chicks that ran peeping into the underbrush. We stopped and stood still until the bird gave tip and disappeared under the hushes.

  "I actually caught hold of its tail," Isis said.

  "And you let go?" I asked, incredulous. "That's a lot of protein."

  "Yeah, but it wouldn't really fit into our pot. Aren't you supposed to dip a bird into boiling water before you cook it, so you can pluck the feathers?"

  "Hmm. Yeah. We could cook it on a spit, roast it."

  "What about the little chicks, though?"

  "They'd cook even faster!"

  "Jackrabbit! Wait a minute, aren't we supposed to be vegetarians?"

  "Any food we don't have to carry is good in my book"

  "We're only five days out. After a month of this, you're going to be a total scavenger!"

  We reached Cloud Pond Lean-to just after the rain began. Matt sat on the edge of the sleeping platform, his long lean form folded up with his arms around his knees. A pot of water simmered on his stove beside him. "Hey, sisters."

  "Hey, Matt. Found a trail name yet?"

  "Nope"

  Blue Skies and Waterfall came up from the lake, carrying pots of water for cooking. They shook the rain from their ponchos and stepped into the shelter. Both of them had their hair in pigtails, and they looked like a pair of scruffy girl scouts.

  "Hi, ladies." Blue Skies gave a tired grin. "Quite a day, wasn't it?"

  "We were just talkin' about that profile niap;' Waterfall said in her soft Southern accent. "I could swear there was a mountain out there that wasn't on the map."

  "Yeah, right between Third and Fourth," Isis said. "We should call it Mount Three and a Half"

  "How about Mount Three and a Half Kicking-ass?" I said.

  "How about a profile map that shows it like it is?" said Blue Skies.

  Matt sighed in a knowing way. "Profile maps are evil."

  "How so?" Isis asked as she slung her pack off.

  "Well, they give you false expectations. They're never really accurate. Sometimes the map looks harder than the trail really is, and you think you're in great shape. Sometimes the map looks easy, and the trail's not, so you get frustrated" He paused to adjust his stove, which was hissing ominously. "I don't even carry the maps any more. Just a Data Book"

  "What's a Data Book?" I asked. Matt, Waterfall, and Blue Skies all fell silent and stared at me. By their expressions, I had a sudden sense that my question had been akin to asking "what does `subtract' mean?" in an algebra class.

  Matt fished something out of the top of his pack and tossed it over to me. It was a thin volume with a photo of Katahdin on the cover. The title read Appalachian Trail Data Book 2000, and inside there were columns of numbers: the distances between shelters, springs, roads, and mountains, all the way to Georgia. I thumbed through it, watching the numbers grow. It hardly seemed possible that 2,160 miles of trail could be boiled down into sixty-seven pages. Into the quiet came the sound of rain on the roof and far-off thunder.

  "Thanks." I handed it back to him.

  "So you guys don't have a Data Book?" Blue Skies finally asked. "How did you plan your hike?"

  "Well, we have the maps for Maine," Isis said. "We're going to buy the other maps as we go along, you know, just sort of wing it."

  "Wing it. Wow. No mail drops or anything?"

  "Mail drops?"

  "That's when you send yourself a box of food and stuff in a town," Waterfall offered helpfully.

  "Oh. No, we're just going to buy food in grocery stores as we go."

  "Wow." Blue Skies digested this information, and I felt sure she was weighing our utter lack of knowledge and experience. I waited for her judgment to fall. Instead, she said, "When do you plan on finishing?"

  "Oh, around Christmas," I said.

  She brightened. "Maybe we can hike together, then. That's just about when I'm planning to finish."

  When the storm had subsided, I set up our Zip stove on a log by the firepit and gathered twigs to cook supper. Under the thickly woven branches of hemlocks and spruces, the forest floor had stayed almost dry. Waterfall sat beside me, wearing a head net against the clouds of blackflies th
at had emerged after the rain. Frogs began calling as dusk settled.

  "Are those loons?" Waterfall asked.

  "What? Oh. No, those are frogs. Loons are mostly on bigger lakes. They sound like somebody laughing, kind of, but sad and wistful too. I hope we'll get to see one-they're beautiful birds, all black except a white ring around the neck"

  "Wow. I've never even heard a loon, let alone see one. I'm hard of hearin', actually. My hearin' aid's all right for most things, but I have a hard time tellin' what's what with high sounds"

  I noticed, for the first time, the tiny coil of plastic in Waterfall's right ear.

  "I used to he embarrassed of it in high school. I wouldn't wear it, so people thought I was kind of a snob. They'd say somethin' to nie, and I wouldn't hear, and they'd think I was ignorin' them. In college, things got a lot better. I just figured, I'll he me, and if people don't like nte, it's their loss."

  "Way to go. I think college is a good place for figuring out who you are, what you want.

  "Are you just out of college?"

  "Yeah. You?"

  She laughed. "I've been out of school for quite a while. But thank you. No, I work as a technical ,vriter in Baton Rouge."

  "Technical writer? I)o you write instruction manuals and cereal boxes and that kind of thing?"

  "Pretty much. Most of What I do is actually editing. People bring reports to inc and I make them readable." She laughed. "Oh, I make it sound so borin'. But really it's a pretty good job."

  "So what brings you to the Trail

  "Well, I discovered backpackin' when I was in school. I just love it. I feel so ... so connected to everythin' out here. I feel like I can see what really matters when I'm on the Trail. It's so peaceful. I've had this dream of hiking the whole Trail for probably ten years now."

  "And here you are.'

  She laughed again. "Here we all are. Isn't it great?"

  I was tired, and wet, and hungry; my muscles ached and a new batch of bug bites were itching; but none of it mattered-in that moment it u'au great to be there, right there in the darkening wet forest, with people who had been strangers just days ago and who now felt like old friends.

  Isis

  n the morning I discovered how Cloud Pond got its name. Mist clung to the branches of cedars along the shore and hung so thickly over the water that its surface blended imperceptibly into sky. When we hiked out, the whole mountain seemed to he caught in the underbelly of a cloud. Legions of gnarled spruce trees took shape from the air as we approached them, their dark trunks streaked with rain. The moss beneath them glowed emerald, and by contrast, the spruce needles carpeting the trail turned a bright red-brown. The springy ground muffled our footsteps; the only sound in the world was the steady drip of water from the trees.

  In this weather we came to the Barren Ledges, at the southern end of the Barren-Chairback range. From register entries at Cloud Pond and conversations with northbounders, we knew that this was one of the best views in the Wilderness. Below us to our left lay the wide Lake Onawa, dotted with islands, and on three sides of us rose the steep-sided, round-shouldered mountains of Maine. I walked out to the edge of a smooth granite outcropping and peered into the blowing fog.

  Beside n)e, jackrabbit mused aloud, "I wonder if there's another ledge ten feet below us, or if its a thousand-foot drop straight down to the shore of the lake?"

  Although the shapes of the mountains we'd seen so far made a series of ledges seem far more likely than a drop-off below us, I felt a shiver run through my spine as we sat down for a snack on the rock's edge. A shiver, not of fear, but of something strangely akin to delight. I thought of Milan Kundera's definition of vertigo: a longing for empty air beneath our feet.

  As we walked down the mountain the wind picked up. Close beside us in the mist, two tree trunks scraping together made an eerie moaning sound. Halfway down to the lean-to where we'd planned to eat lunch, we stepped out below the cloud layer and found ourselves in a forest of tall, straight spruce trees, interspersed with yellow birches. Between the gusts of wind surging through their branches, we could hear an occasional mutter of thunder in the distance. Just as we reached the shelter, the stand of hemlocks around it darkened as quickly as if someone were turning down the lights in a theater. I scrambled around picking up wood for our stove while jackrabbit went looking for water. The first fat drops of rain were already ringing on the shelter's tin roof by the time we sat down to lunch. Lightning flashed and a great peal of thunder echoed across the sky almost before our eyes had readjusted to the gloom. I made a pot of tea and pulled the last of my pound of chocolate out of the bottom of my food hag. By then the tin roof sounded like the whole percussion section of a jazz band.

  We were on our second pot of tea when a very wet little dog bounded into the shelter, followed shortly by an equally sodden young man. When he saw that we were trying to dry the shivering dog with handkerchiefs, he gave us a sweet dimpled grin. He introduced himself as Tenbrooks, and the dog was Molly, navies he'd chosen from a bluegrass song. Molly was a stray who had followed him out of a town somewhere in North Carolina. He'd always wanted a dog, so he picked up some dog food and took her to a vet for shots, and they'd been hiking together ever since. He was a flip-Hopper, not a northbounder: a new term for us. He explained that he'd started at the southern end of the Trail, hiked as far as central Virginia, and then hitchhiked up to Katahdin to walk south from there. He would complete his hike at the place where he'd gotten of} the Trail in Virginia. He said he'd set out to do a regular northbound hike, but soon realized that he wouldn't have enough time to enjoy the Trail if he hurried to reach Katahdin before Baxter State Park's midOctober closing date.

  The storm didn't clear until five o'clock by Tenbrooks' watch, so all three of us decided to stay at the lean-to for the night. The sun broke through the clouds; the ground steamed where its light fell into the clearing in front of the shelter. Jackrabbit went down the water trail to play her penny whistle-soon the strains of "The Sally Gardens" mingled with the quick stream's laughter. I asked Tenbrooks where he came from, and he answered with a story that sounded like an updated version of a fairytale. He was the youngest of seven sons, and most of his brothers were lawyers. His parents wanted him to go to law school too, but law didn't interest him at all. I asked what did interest him.

  "Playin' bluegrass music and wanderin' in the woods," he answered. He threw his head back and laughed, spreading his arms wide as if to embrace the whole clearing, the hemlocks, and the sunbeams. "So here I ani"

  He looked so beautiful, with his strong arms outstretched and his clear eyes sparkling under thick golden lashes, that I wanted to kiss him. Only once, I told myself, and only for comfort. But I stayed where I was sitting, in the dappled shade of a hemlock. Beside this joyous child of fortune, I felt like an old woman, full of secrets and darkness-certainly not the princess who belonged in his story.

  The next morning Tenbrooks and Molly left early, planning to hike fifteen miles into Monson. Jackrabbit and I had no intention of trying to hike a fifteen, but we still got out pretty early, for us. About half a mile out from the shelter, we paused to study our maps and discovered that the steep slate streambank beside us was part of the Slugundy Gorge. Half a mile farther on, we would traverse a landscape feature known as the Bodfish Intervale. We were still laughing about these navies when jackrabbit slipped on the damp pine needles, landed on her bottom, and slid a few feet downhill.

  "Are you hurt?" I asked, hurrying over to her.

  "Of course not," she answered, arching her eyebrows. "I'm just practicing my Slugundy Slide for the Summer Olympics. It's an Extreme Hiking Maneuver," she explained.

  "If that's a Slugundy, what's a Bodfish?" I asked, offering her a hand up.

  She thought for a moment. "A Bodfish Squat," she said slowly, "is when you're on a ledge a few feet high, and you turn sideways and reach one leg down to the bottom while bending the other knee. The distance between the top of the ledge and the ground is the Bod
fish Intervale."

  A hundred yards farther, the trail turned and curved steeply down the bank toward a ford.

  "I don't think I'm going to attempt a Bodfish," I told jackrabbit. "Too big an intervale for me" I sat down on a root, reaching both my feet toward the ground while steadying myself with both hands.

  "This," I announced, "is known as the Nesuntabunt Five-wheel Drive."

  Over the course of the day our lexicon of Extreme Hiking Maneuvers had grown to include the Piscataquis Pirouette, which involves grabbing a tree and pivoting around it on the way down a steep slope, and the Potaywadjo Posthole, in which one sinks up to one's knee (or beyond) in a particularly swampy section of trail.

  In the early afternoon we turned a corner in the trail and came upon a most incongruous apparition. Seated on a stream bank, filtering water just as if he were a hiker, was a man who looked altogether too civilized to be there. He wore a button-down shirt in a shade suspiciously close to white, and a Tilley hat perched on his long, neatly combed hair. He was so thin that he looked fragile; his legs were like sticks beneath his khaki pants. I wondered how he could have walked, even from the nearest logging road, on those legs. Still, there was the water filter, and I noticed that he was leaning against what appeared to be a fairly substantial pack. I asked if he was hiking the Wilderness.

  "I'm hiking the Appalachian Trail southbound," he answered. "And you?"

  That night, our last night before Monson, we shared a shelter with hint. His name was Alan. He was a chef from San Francisco, and he'd never backpacked before. After hearing about the A.T. from a Canadian uncle of his, he'd decided on the spot that he wanted to hike it. He had prepared for his trip far more than we had, spending months dehydrating fruits and vegetables from his local farmer's market and leaving carefully sealed and labeled packages of theni for a friend to mail to hint at various points along the Trail. But he'd had no time to practice hiking. It had taken hin► twenty days to get through the Wilderness, compared to our eleven. Still, he said, he had plenty of food, and he didn't want it to end yet.