Barefoot Sisters: Southbound Read online

  "Where have you been all this tinge?"

  "What do you mean, where have I been? I told you I was going to wash my feet"

  "It took you forty-five minutes to wash your feet? It's your turn to cook. I've been waiting for you to make dinner."

  "Okay, okay, I'll make it now. Help me gather sonic wood for the stove, and it'll be done in no time."

  "No! I won't help you. It's your night to cook, and besides, I'm so tired I'm not even hungry anymore!"

  "Fine, then. I won't make dinner. You can eat gorp"

  Ignoring the bag of gorp I flung in her direction, jackrabbit crawled into her sleeping bag and flopped down on her mat with her back to n)e. I ate a few handfuls of gorp, and then, feeling a vague guilt over the fact that I'd failed to make dinner for jackrabbit, I put the food away and got into my own bag.

  We had four smooth, downhill miles to hike to the town of Stratton, but it took us all morning to get there. Every half-mile we had to stop, sit down on a rock, and eat something. The third time we stopped, jackrabbit said, "I think that was a bad idea, skipping dinner last night."

  "No kidding. What came over us?"

  "I don't know, but I think I was kind of a bitch"

  "Yeah, you were, but I was, too. I got so cold, I couldn't think"

  "Does hypothermia make you grumpy? It might've been that"

  "I think it does. Yeah, I remember something like that from first aid classes. You get irritable, then disoriented, then you start to think you're too hot instead of too cold, so you pull off all your clothes and jump in a snowbank and die"

  "Good thing there weren't any snowbanks around last night," jackrabbit laughed. "Don't worry. Now that we know the symptoms, we'll look out for each other. If one of us starts to get hypothermic, the other will do something about it"

  "Does that mean that next time you get bitchy, I can tie you up in a sweater and stuff you in your sleeping bag?"

  She jumped into a Tae Kwon loo fighting stance, then winked at me from behind her raised hands. "You could try."

  jackrabbit

  s we climbed the shoulder of Sugarloaf Mountain, south of Stratton, the trail came out of the woods onto a steep slope of tumbled scree and small shrubs. Traversing the inside of a cirque, we could see the sweep of the mountain above, gray-green and wreathed in dark clouds that lowered as we watched. The trail was strewn with small sharp stones, and landslides had cut across it in places, so we walked carefully.

  A hiker was making his way down the path toward us. His scruffy beard and thin frame, and the loping grace in his stride, marked him as a northbounder. When he saw us, his face lit up with recognition.

  "The Barefoot Sisters! I heard all about you"

  We smiled and said hello. I was becoming less startled by the attention we were attracting-he was probably the tenth hiker to recognize us-but no less uncomfortable. We had explained numerous times that we were barefoot because we enjoyed it, because we loved to feel the trail underfoot and experience hiking with all our senses, but every time we were niet with the same incredulity, and often with a kind of hero-worship that I found embarrassing.

  The northbounder was staring at our feet. Bugbitten, begrimed, and slightly pink from the cold, they were far from impressive.

  "Amazing. Absolutely amazing. Can I take a picture?"

  "Sure" Isis started to climb the embankment on the upper side of the narrow trail so we would both fit in the frame, but the northbounder shook his head.

  `Just the feet;' he said. "I just want a picture of your feet"

  When he was down the trail and out of earshot, we laughed ourselves silly.

  "We ought to give our feet trail names, since they attract so much attention," Isis said. "Remember the cowboys on Prairie Home Companion? I'm going to call mine I )usty and Lefty."

  As we made our way along the narrow trail, I wondered why anyone would want a picture of our feet alone. It was a little disconcerting. Had we become a sideshow attraction in the AT. carnival? I wanted to be remembered as a person, not a pair of disembodied feet walking the Trail.

  At the summit of Sugarloaf, it was impossible to see more than a few feet ahead in the driven mist. The wind screamed across the broken stones, sucking the warmth from our bodies. Goose bumps instantly rose on the exposed flesh of our legs and arms.

  "Where is this Octagon supposed to be?" I yelled to Isis over the roaring wind.

  "I don't know. Let's go upwind first"

  I agreed-it would be easier to backtrack that way if we didn't find it. We struggled against the onslaught of streaming clouds. In a few minutes, a tower came into view. It looked like there was a tiny room in the base of it, but the whole building was surrounded by a chain-link fence. The gate was padlocked.

  "Is this it?" I yelled.

  "There's no way in!"

  "I'm getting too cold."

  "So put your Gore-Tex on!"

  "We must be almost there"

  As we sagged against the fence, catching our breath, I caught a faint scent of wood smoke.

  "We should go hack," Isis said. "What if it's not there? We can go on and find a campsite ..

  "It's there, I know it is."

  We headed into the wind again, and there it was, probably less than fifty feet from the first tower. The building was hidden by clouds until we stood on the back porch. Isis threw the door open and we tumbled onto the rough wooden floor inside. My ears rang with the sudden silence.

  The "Octagon" turned out to be a hexagon, with plate glass windows on almost every side. The view right then was a uniform pearly gray. The lodge was a large building, closer to the size of a house than the cramped confines of a shelter. The entry we had used opened into a high-ceilinged room, taking up half the hexagon, with a map of the ski area covering one wall. Steps led up to a higher platform in the other half of the building, where we found some familiar faces.

  "O.D.! Bugbiter! It sure is good to see you guys."

  "Hey, jackrabbit, Isis. Good to see you, too" They sat on benches in front of a gigantic woodstove. The radiating heat felt delicious.

  "Did you guys bring in all this wood?" A pile of gnarled spruce skeletons lay next to the stove, probably enough to keep it going for three days.

  O.D. shrugged. "My kid has way too much energy. We got here early, and he was still rarin' to go"

  The teenager struck a muscleman pose. "I am the unstoppable Bugbiter- tron!"

  As the mist outside darkened, we sat around the fire talking. "Can I ask you something?" O.D. said.

  "Go ahead."

  "Well, out in the real world, I'm a physical therapist. And I was wondering ... could I have a look at your feet?"

  "Sure." I held up my grimy right foot for inspection. The sole had a leathery callus, stained yellowish brown from the forest floor, and the arch and ankle bulged with muscle. In the heat from the stove, veins stood out from the surface as though from a weightlifter's biceps.

  O.D. shook his head. "That's truly amazing. I have never seen a foot with muscles like that. I see so many people with fallen arches, or sprained ankles, and they have these little feet that are nothing but bones. Wow. You guys are something else."

  Bugbiter tossed a log on the fire. "Dad, aren't people supposed to walk barefoot? I mean, didn't we evolve, and, like, come out of the trees barefoot?"

  "Good point."

  "You should try it some time," Isis said.

  Bugbiter looked slightly alarmed. "I like my boots. What you do is cool and all, but I just don't think I could hack it. I kick rocks and stuff all the time"

  "You have to develop an awareness. When you start out, you always have to think about where you're putting your feet. After a while it just becomes second nature"

  The morning dawned clear and calm. In all directions, ridges of sawtoothed mountains shone bluish behind the plate glass windows, under a peach-colored sky. The distinctive shape of the 13igelows, two small peaks and two large ones, loomed across the valley, and far beyond them on
the horizon was a silver knife-blade shape that might have been Katahdin. Innumerable other peaks dotted the landscape, with lakes shining like small silver coins in the valleys.

  "Looks pretty impressive, doesn't it?" 0.1 ). said.

  "Yeah," I said. "Feels like quite an accomplishment.

  He grinned. "Look over there." He pointed off to the south. Ranks of hare, imposing summits, jagged ridges, and deep-shadowed valleys stretched off to the horizon. In the early light, the mountains looked like agitated storm waves on the ocean. "That's where we're going"

  Isis

  lie day after Sugarloaf, we hiked eleven miles over some of the roughest terrain we'd seen. The trail was so steep in one place, where it descended through a tangle of spruce roots and rocks beside a small waterfall, that we had to take off our packs and hand them down to each other. At the base of the waterfall, we came to a lovely quiet stream, with maples and cedars leaning over its clear pools, in which the peaks of surrounding mountains lay reflected. We sat down for a late lunch on a boulder in the middle of the stream, where we were soon joined by a tall, gray-haired hiker with braces on both his knees. He pulled a heavy-looking camera out of a pouch on his hip-belt, focused on the reflections in the stream, and waited for a fallen leaf to drift into the sky beside the highest mountain.

  As he returned the camera to its pouch, he asked if we were hiking the whole 'Gail. When I answered in the affirmative, he sighed.

  "You kids are so lucky," he said. "If I had hiked when I was your age, I would've lived my life dif}erently "

  "How so?" I asked him.

  "I went straight from college into an accounting firm. I did well, got pro- nioted. Married my college sweetheart. What's left of all that? Alimony payments and a house too big for one old man. I started hiking fifteen years ago just to do something with illy vacation time after the divorce. Nov., I'm retired, I've got more time, but my knees aren't what they used to be. I've hiked all the way here from Georgia in a bunch of hundred-fifty, tsvo- hundred-mile sections. And I love it. If I'd realized, when I was twentyone, how little money it took to make me happy, I Would've been a nature photographer."

  That evening at Poplar Ridge Lean-to, I met a man with a very different perspective. He, too, was a section hiker, a paramedic from Atlanta. In the flickering light of our Zip stove, his round, clean-shaven cheeks and the bald spot in the middle of his light brown hair gave him the appearance of a jolly Medieval monk.

  "I'm on vacation," he said, "but I'd like to know what you girls are doing in the woods, at this point in your lives. I)o you have jobs?"

  Jackrabbit answered that we were thru-hiking southbound. "I just finished college; my sister's been out for a few years"

  His jaw dropped. "Do you know what you're missing out on?" he asked. "The job market is at an all-time high. Kids your age, you go into technology, and you're making eighty thousand dollars your first year! With paid vacations and business trips to Las Vegas! All you have to know is how to turn on a computer"

  The language he was speaking, of job markets and computers and casinos, seemed so alien to the world of white blazes and wood fires and lean-tos in which we were living, that neither jackrabbit nor I could come up with any response.

  Mistaking our silence, he continued, "If you're not intelligent enough to work in technology, you could always go into nursing. It's steady employment with good benefits, and there's always a demand for nurses. You'd never be out of a job."

  jackrabbit

  e crossed the Saddleback Range, with its expanses of high heath bogs and open granite, on a splendid day. The sky was clear blue from horizon to horizon, and a light breeze kept us cool. Like Moxie Bald, these mountains reminded me of home. I remembered that today we would cross the 216-mile mark: one-tenth of the Trail. It was a small accomplishment compared to the nobos we had seen, but it still felt worthy of celebration. As I hiked, I formulated a piece of doggerel to write in the next register:

  Climbing down into the spruce woods, off the open ridges, I suddenly felt a jab of pain in my right hip. It was as though a hot needle tore into the joint with each step. I stopped and stretched, trying to breathe deeply and subdue the pain. My sister, meanwhile, was blithely floating on down the path, almost out of sight around the bend.

  "Isis!" I called after her. My voice cracked. "I think I've got to ... take a rest ... just for a little ..

  She turned back, her forehead furrowed. "Are you okay?"

  "I think so" I tried a few steps, and the pain faded in and out. "Yeah, I Just I must have done something to my hip. It's not comfortable."

  "You want some vitamin l?" Ibuprofen-a bit of hiker slang we had picked tip from Maineak on the trip where Isis got her trail name.

  "Yeah, I think I'd better"

  Three of the extra-strength tabs were enough to get me to the parking lot, where a dayhiker gave us a ride into the town of Rangeley. I leaned against my pack in the back of the pickup, worrying. Every bump on the road sent a fresh jolt of pain through my hip.

  We thanked the driver as we unloaded our packs by a pizza place on Main Street.

  "No problem," he said. "You guys staying in town?'

  We glanced at each other. It was an unwritten rule between us never to tell a stranger our exact plans. He seemed trustworthy, though, and given the lateness of the hour, it was probably pretty obvious that we'd be in Rangeley for the night.

  "Yeah;" I said.

  "There's a good hostel here. Bob, the owner, he's a friend of mine. Here, let me call him on my cell phone"

  We thanked him again.

  "Silver station wagon. He should be here in a half hour or so"

  "Excellent. Take care"

  The Gull Pond Lodge was a small two-story cabin at the end of a woods road, right by a lake. "Make yourselves at home;' Bob said. A tall, soft-spoken man with a shock of white hair, he reminded me of my grandfather.

  We shared the bunkroom with O.D. and Bugbiter. Their gear was spread across every available surface when we came in. Bugbiter looked up with a guilty smile. "Pardon the pack explosion" 1-1e hurriedly stuffed clothing and food into his pack, clearing off two of the bunks.

  "No problem. How're you guys doing?"

  "Good," Bugbiter said. From his bunk, O.D. mumbled something unintelligible. "Dad's not feeling too great, though"

  "What's the matter?"

  "Some kind of sinus thing," O.D. said, rousing himself. He sounded stuffed-up, and there were dark rings of fatigue under his eyes. "If it doesn't clear up soon, I want to get it checked out."

  "Hope you feel better. This is the bunkroom of the walking wounded tonight." I told him about my hip pain.

  In the morning, I called the Rangeley medical center. No appointments were available until the next day.

  "Guess we've got to take a zero" Bugbiter sat on the couch and picked up the remote.

  "Take a zero?"

  "You know, like, zero-mile day? I heard some nobos say it."

  "Sounds good"

  It was wonderful to relax for a day. We took one of Bob's canoes out on the lake with Bugbiter, and looked for moose in the secluded bays and inlets, with no success. Bob took me to the Episcopal church, where I played the piano for hours. It felt as though a part of me that had been missing had returned. Isis shopped for food, and she cooked pizza and apple pie in the evening. Licking the last of the pie from his fingers, O.D. said, "If you cook like this in every town, I'll follow you to Georgia!"

  "I have a surprise for you," Isis said, as we sat in the bunkroom packing our resupply. We decanted the rice, macaroni, and crackers from their bulky cardboard boxes into Ziplocs and divided the weight between our two food bags. Isis flashed me a triumphant smile and reached into the last shopping bag. She pulled out a copy of Time magazine, featuring the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Isis had introduced me to Harry Potter when I was home on winter break from college, and I had devoured the first three books of the series in a week.

  "Excelle
nt!"

  When we finished packing, she read the chapter aloud. O.D., Bugbiter, and I lay on our bunks, enjoying the spooky tale. It ended with a cliffhanger, of course, and left many intriguing threads of plot unresolved.

  "Do you think we can wait six months to read it?" I asked her.

  "Oh, it's going to be hard!" She leafed back through the pages of the magazine. "Look, there's a sidebar here with statistics about the book: 734 pages. Two and a half pounds" We fell silent, considering.

  "Two and a half pounds ... that's like, a couple nights of pasta-"

  11 -or one full water bottle ..."

  "You guys are nuts!" Bugbiter said.

  "So, you're hiking the Appalachian Trail?" The doctor made a few notes on his chart. He manipulated my leg in every direction and asked me to walk, stretch, jump. The pain was difficult to pin down, and it seemed to fade in and out. It was never as sharp and unbearable as the day it had happened.

  "You have a groin strain," he announced, and showed nie some stretches to relieve the tight muscles.

  "Can I keep hiking?"

  "Well, yes" Relief washed over ine. "It would be better if you could rest, but I know it's no use telling that to a hiker. Keep doing those stretches. And you should probably take an anti-inflammatory drug to keep it from bothering you too much"

  He wrote out a prescription for 600 mg ibuprofen tablets. "You can take up to three of these in a day. Any more than that and you run a risk of liver and kidney trouble."

  I thanked hint profusely. He shook his head. "You hikers. I had a guy come in here with a fractured ankle, and he wanted to keep going. Stay healthy out there. Whatever you did to this the first time, don't do it again. Oh, and good luck."