Barefoot Sisters: Southbound Read online

  "Never the same river twice," I said wryly.

  "You can stow your paddle now" Steve guided the canoe toward a marshy landing area on the far bank. "It never is the same river. When you think you know something through and through, that's when it takes you by surprise. Remember that."

  Isis

  it our first night out from Caratunk, we stayed at Pierce Pond Lean-to with Tenbrooks, Blue Skies, and Matt. I dove into the pond from the small cliff in front of the shelter and managed to stay in the water long enough to lure jackrabbit and Blue Skies in before my teeth started to chatter. Luckily, Tenbrooks had a fire roaring in front of the shelter when we left the icy water. We sat on logs around the firepit, cooking, while the sun sank toward the lake's tar shore, leaving a broad gold path across the water. The smell of wood smoke and the sound of waves lapping against the shore reminded nie of the canoe camping trips of my childhood, when we'd sit around the fire late into the night, entertaining each other with wild tales of pirates and fairies, ogres and ghosts.

  "Let's tell stories," jackrabbit said, voicing my thought.

  She began with a retelling of the myth of Orpheus. Matt followed with a Chinese legend about a nian who gave up all his material goods, one by one, in a quest for enlightenment, but could not hear to part with an embroidered shawl that had once been his daughter's. Tenbrooks sang the bluegrass song for which he and Molly were named, and I recited a Tennyson poem, "The Splendor Falls." The same threads of loss and nostalgia ran through all our stories. We all understood that this would be one of our last evenings together; Tenbrooks and Blue Skies were much stronger hikers than jackrabbit and I were, and I could tell that Matt, too, was eager to stretch his long legs and cover more miles in a day than we could hope to.

  As I spoke the last lines of the poem, the loons started calling. Their wild laughter echoed back and forth over the water, rising in pitch as many voices joined in, then fading away to a single, mournful cry. We fell silent, watching reflected clouds ripple like red and gold pennants across the lake. When the sky darkened, and a pale evening star shone over the mountains, I turned toward Blue Skies and asked if she had a story to tell. She was sitting on a log beside the fire, hugging her knees and gazing out at the water. I'd always admired her strength-both the physical prowess that meant she'd soon be hiking far ahead of us and the steadfast good humor with which she met every challenge, from rainstorms to shin splints. But now, with her eyes wide and her face pale in the dusk, she looked small and frightened and very, very young.

  "I don't know any stories," she answered, "except the one I'm in. And I don't even know where that one's taking me. I'm twenty-two. I've finished college. I'm not ready for the career track, and I haven't thought much about grad school. Sometimes I'm afraid that I'm on the Trail just because it gives me a sense of direction. I get up in the morning, I follow the white blazes, and I feel like I know where I'm going."

  "Yeah," said Tenbrooks. "Me too"

  "Yeah," said jackrabbit.

  jackrabbit

  he next day, Matt and Blue Skies joined us for lunch by a small clear pond with a gravel beach. We'd had a morning of easy walking, a level trail over comfortable forest floors and bog bridges. A fresh breeze kept the mosquitoes down.

  Isis passed me some crackers and cheese, and I handed her the banana chips from my food bag. Matt offered around a Ziploc of what I took to be dried apricots, but the taste convinced me otherwise. I fought the impulse to spit out the unidentifiable brown lump-it was calories, after all. Calories I hadn't had to carry.

  "What was that?" I asked when I had managed to swallow.

  "Chicken-flavored soy chunk. Want some more? I've got plenty."

  "Uh, no thanks."

  Matt took his Data Book from the top of his pack and glanced through it. "Where are you guys headed tonight?" he asked.

  "I'm not sure," Isis said. "We'll probably end up camping by that stream, what's it called ... Jerome Brook. What about you?"

  Matt gave a quizzical smile. "I bet we could all make it to Little Bigelow Lean-to. It's another eight miles, but it stays flat until the last part"

  I did a quick calculation. "That would make seventeen miles today."

  "Yeah," he said matter-of-factly. "A good day."

  Isis protested. "That's more than we've ever done before"

  "We did a fifteen into Caratunk"

  "But that was with our packs almost empty! We've still got three days of food left."

  "We'll see"

  "Little Bigelow is a great place," Matt said. "Hope I'll see you there."

  He and Blue Skies packed up and left, but Isis and I lingered by the shore, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the sensation of full bellies. When I got up, it felt as though all my muscles had stiffened. Isis groaned, too.

  "We must've sat still for too long," I said.

  "Hiker hobble," she said as we lurched toward our packs. "That's what the nobos call it. They say it never really goes away."

  "Great. Two thousand miles of this to look forward to"

  Back on the trail, I somehow settled into the rhythm of hiking and barely noticed the aches and pains in my muscles. It was bizarre, I reflected, that without the pack I could hardly walk, and with it I could go all day. I wondered if "all day" today would stretch to seventeen miles.

  Several roads crossed the trail here, the worn asphalt incongruous amid the miles of forest. At one of the road crossings, we found two northbounders stopping for a water break. They were tall, broad-shouldered men with long dark hair and shaggy beards. They leaned on their trekking poles, their faces full of quiet satisfaction. Yellow spray paint on the pavement spelled out 2,000 MILES.

  I stopped at the edge of the road and took a drink, too. "Hey, congrats on reaching the two-thousand-mile mark"

  "Thanks," the younger one said. Then he caught sight of our mudbrown, bugbitten bare feet, and he broke into a wild grin. "Hey, Jaybird! It's the Barefoot Sisters!"

  The older man perked up and smiled broadly. "No shit," he said, managing to draw the expletive into two syllables. "It's an honor, a real honor. Y'all are famous. I been hearing 'bout y'all since I got to Maine ... Listen, would y'all mind if I got a picture?"

  We posed beside him on the gray pavement, slightly bemused, while his companion snapped a photo. I had never guessed that rumor of our presence would spread so fast, or that our story would cause so much interest. It was flattering to be treated like a celebrity, but also a little disconcerting. The attention felt undeserved. Here were people who had walked more than ten times as far as we had, people who had almost completed the Trail, and they were treating us like something special.

  "This'll be a day to remember. Two thousand miles, and meetin' the Barefoot Sisters. Thank y'all."

  Buoyed by the encounter with the northbounders, we hiked fast, reveling in our ability to skins over the trail. We jumped from rock to rock and root to root, and our feet instinctively formed themselves around the terrain and propelled us forward. Toward evening, though, our energy began to wane where the trail took a sharp turn uphill.

  "Where are we?" I asked Isis.

  "Well, judging from the map, once we start going uphill after this turn it's maybe another mile . . "

  And twenty minutes later we found the side trail to Little Bigelow Leanto. We arrived just before dark, sore and tired but glowing with our accomplishment. Matt and Blue Skies were nowhere to be seen-probably tarping out behind the shelter, which was occupied by a crowd of northbounders.

  "Hi, I'm jackrabbit," I said into the darkening shelter. I caught a few of the names that came back.

  "So, how far did you hike today?" said a skinny blond man, who had given his name as "Patagonia"

  I beamed with pride. "We had a big day today. Our first seventeen"

  He made no effort to suppress his laughter. "Nice. Lipton and I did a twenty-seven"

  I was trying to formulate a reply when a familiar voice came from the back of the shelter. "Hey, these guys
started two weeks ago. How long have you been on the Trail?"

  Tenbrooks! I hadn't seen him in the shadowy corner of the shelter. Molly roused herself from sleep and jumped out to give us doggy kisses.

  "Hey, Tenbrooks. Hey, Molly girl. Good to see some familiar faces!"

  "Hi there, jackrabbit. Glad you made it!"

  I set tip the tent while Isis gathered firewood to cook supper. Matt and Blue Skies emerged from the gloom of the woods behind the shelter and joined us at the firepit.

  Blue Skies leaned close to Isis and whispered something.

  "What?"

  "It's Tenbrooks's birthday. Let's do something special."

  We rummaged around in our food bags for treats we could give him. Someone produced a peanut butter cup, and someone else had a chocolatecovered granola bar. Isis rigged a candle of sorts from a scroll of flammable birch bark. We carried the impromptu cake to the shelter and sang.

  "Thanks, guys," Tenhrooks said. "Is that a peanut butter cup? My favorite!"

  "I hope it's a good year," Blue Skies told him, beaming.

  "It's off to a good start," he said. The crowd of sobos started to disperse, but he stopped us. "Wait. Time to cut the cake." He divided the granola bar and the candy into ten tiny portions, just enough for everyone at the shelter.

  The nobos warmed up to us after this. Lipton, a thin dark-haired woman with a raspy voice, told us about the highlights of the next section of Trail. "Have you guys heard about the Octagon? It's this ski lodge up on Sugarloaf where you can stay for free. It has a woodstove, and the views are pretty sweet. What else ... oh, like, three days from here, there's a moose skeleton right by the trail:"

  "Right next to the trail?" Matt said.

  "Yeah, if the thing had gotten any farther before it keeled over, it'd be ill the trail. You can't miss it "

  We talked for a while longer as the tire died, and then we wished the nobos luck and headed for our tent. In the morning, they were gone before we awoke.

  Isis

  e packed hurriedly in the still-cold morning. The gradual, two-mile ascent of Little Bigelow warmed us, and we stopped for it snack on one of the sunny, sheltered ledges near its peak. As we ate our granola bars, a section hiker who was standing nearby, enjoying the view, struck up a conversation with us. He told us that he'd met Waterfall a few miles back and had a wonderful time talking with her. When I told him that we planned to camp with her that evening, his tare brightened.

  "May I ask you a big favor? Your friend told me she really misses fruit, and I have an orange in my pack that I meant to give her. Could you bring it to her?"

  "Sure," I said. I knew how unfailingly amiable Waterfall was-more than once, when jackrabbit and I had been hurrying to reach camp before dark, we'd passed her standing beside the trail, answering a dayhiker's questions. If a weekender was having trouble setting up his tent, Waterfall was the one who'd stop in the middle of cooking her dinner to offer him help. I smiled, thinking what a treat it would be to see her expression when she received this man's surprise gift.

  He reached into his pack and took out two oranges.

  "I've got an extra, if you'd like it"

  "Awesome. Thank you!"

  He reached into the bag again.

  "I'll be off the trail in two days, and I don't think I'll have time to eat this," he said, pulling out an enormous bar of milk chocolate. "Would you ..."

  "Oh, yes please," I answered, feeling like a child who's just met Santa.

  On the way up Avery Peak, the next mountain of the Bigelow Range, we walked into a sculpture garden of granite. Peach-colored boulders the size of houses leaned at crazy angles over the trail, with ferns clinging to their spines, and slender birch trees leaning from their crevices. I was so entranced that I didn't even hear the first rumbles of thunder.

  "Isis, get under here!" Jackrabbit was crouched in the shelter of an overhung cliff, waving at me. Startled at her tone of voice, I looked around, to see what she was hiding from. A soft breeze rustled the leaves of the birches, and a cloudless sky gleamed through their branches. Then I heard the rain. Drops the size of grapes spattered on the dry leaves of the forest floor. I turned around-a dark cloud seethed over the mountain's rim, moving so rapidly it looked like a time-lapse film. I ran for jackrabbit's impromptu shelter.

  Safe under the cliff, we waited for the storm to abate, singing sea chanties over the roar of wind and thunder. The rain pelted down in huge, pale drops that hung in the moss and slid like rivers of moonstones over the forest floor. A few drops shook loose from a hemlock branch and pooled at our feet. Jackrabbit reached down and plucked one milky gem from the pool.

  "Rain's changed to hail," she said, handing it to nee.

  Five minutes later, the sky shone blue again. We crept out from our overhang and headed up the mountain, slipping on the hailstones that littered the ground. Underfoot, they felt like slick, cold pebbles, smooth as glass. About a mile from the peak, we met a gaggle of wild-eyed teenagers in shorts and t-shirts who were running down the trail. The first one skidded to a halt when he saw me.

  "l)id you-did you see that storm?" he asked. "We were up th-there. On th-the peak. Her hair stood straight up!" He gestured to a young woman whose hair, plastered down with sweat and rain, reached the small of her back. She gazed off into the trees, her eyes glazed. Her teeth were chattering.

  "Do you have a car at the foot of the mountain?" I asked the boy. He nodded. "You'd better keep going," I told him. "Your friend needs to get to a warm place fast"

  As the last kid in the group filed past, he looked up at me and stammered, "watch out-there's a-a big-a big mud up there!"

  A quarter mile farther on, jackrabbit and I found the trail blocked by a deep, muddy puddle full of floating hail. We splashed through it nonchalantly, joking that such a big mud might terrify us-if we had boots to get soaked in it.

  We were still laughing when we turned a corner in the trail and found ourselves at the base of a nmud- and rockslide about fifty feet high. From where we stood, it looked almost vertical. Sure enough, a white blaze beckoned from a tree at the top. I looked at jackrabbit.

  "A big mud," she murmured. "Bit of an understatement, if you ask nee"

  "I don't see any alternative," I said, waving a hand at the cliff that flanked the Big Mud on one side, and the impenetrable tangle of underbrush on the other.

  I started to climb. For every three feet of ground I gained, I slid back two. When I tried to grab rocks to pull myself tip, they came out in my hands. At one point, a twenty-pound lump of granite came loose under nte. Trying to shove it aside so that it wouldn't hit jackrabbit, I lost my balance and slipped to the edge of the clitf. I dug my fingers and toes into the thick mud, scrabbling for something to hold on to. Finally, I caught a root and jerked to a halt. I clung to it, trembling, unwilling to move back out on the shifting slope.

  "Are you all right?"jackrabbit called up to me.

  "Yeah, I'm fine" I answered. Do you hear that? 'ti re flueS. o act like it, I told myself. I lifted my head and peered over the cliff's edge at the place I would have fallen. It was only a ten-foot drop, ending in a pile of brush that would have made a scratchy but springy landing pad. Laughing at my fear, I let go of my handhold and crawled back onto the slick, unsteady path.

  Near the top of Avery peak, the second thunderstorm hit. We decided to wait just below treeline, crouching among the shoulder-high spruce. Luckily, no hail fell this time, but the wind and rain made us shiver beneath our GoreTex. I thought of the section hiker's chocolate bar, stashed in the top of illy pack. I'd intended to bring it to the shelter and share with our friends that night, but I thought a few bites of it would be just the thing to take my mind off the cold. I could still save most of it for our friends.

  "Hey, jackrabbit, how 'bout a little chocolate while we wait?" I asked. In less than two Minutes, we had finished the whole bar.

  We reached the peak just as the sky cleared. To our right, three thousand feet below, Flagstaf
f Lake sparkled gold and deep blue, and the shadows of a few fluffy, fair-weather clouds freckled the verdant slopes of the mountains beyond it. Eastward, on our left, billowing thunderheads sailed into a bruisecolored sky, their undersides pulsing with lightning. Ahead of us, the trail curved along the crest of the Bigelows, bordered with blocks of lichencovered stones. Small pools of rainwater jeweled the path, some reflecting the dark sky, others throwing nothing but sun to the eye in blinding, radiating flashes. All around us, reddish clumps of saxifrage and blooming cranberry glittered with droplets, and far ahead, where the trail dipped between Avery and West Peak, a forest of tiny alpine birches shook in the wind, the facets of their wet leaves catching the light at a thousand angles. Behind them, a wall of cloud rose from the shadowy eastern valley, caught the wind, and streamed off the backs of the peaks, evaporating as it rose.

  In this magical place I forgot myself, it wasn't until we were scrambling down the back of South Horn, the last peak in the range, that I realized I was still cold. I looked at jackrabbit; she, too, was shivering, and her lips were almost white.

  "Let's stop and put on some warmer clothes," I said.

  "No," she answered, her teeth chattering. "Let's keep going. If we stop moving we'll get even colder, and anyway, we're almost to the shelter."

  This seemed logical enough, and an argument would've taken too much energy. I stumbled on, feeling colder and colder as the sun sank behind thick spruce branches.

  At the shelter, I gave Waterfall her orange, along with the section hiker's greeting.

  "You carried an orange all that way for me? That was real sweet of you" She flung her arms around my shoulders.

  "No trouble;" I muttered, shrugging out of the embrace that felt prickly with warmth. I unpacked my camp sneakers and went down to the pond to rinse my feet. Sitting with my legs in the water-its chill was soothing nowI watched a thin mist lift from the pond's edges as the sun set. I would have been happy to stay there all night, watching the stars wheel by, but a dull memory tugged at the back of my mind. Jackrabbit-what about jackrabbit? She was waiting for ine at the shelter-it was my night to cook dinner, wasn't it? As the sky changed from lilac to indigo, I rubbed green salve into my feet, put on my sneakers, and headed back to the lean-to. I found jackrabbit right where I'd left her, perched on the edge of the porcupine trap hugging her knees. When she saw nie, she scowled.