A Walk in the Woods (14 page)

•    •    •

Dusk was settling in when we reached Birch Spring Gap Shelter, standing on a slope beside a muddy stream a couple of hundred feet downhill from the trail. In the silvery half-light, it looked wonderful. In contrast to the utilitarian plywood structures found elsewhere on the trail, the shelters of the Smokies were solidly built of stone in an intentionally quaint, rustic style, so from a distance Birch Spring Gap Shelter had the snug, homey, inviting look of a cabin. Up close, however, it was somewhat less enthralling. The interior was dark and leaky, with a mud floor like chocolate pudding, a cramped and filthy sleeping platform, and scraps of wet litter everywhere. Water ran down the inside of the walls and trickled into pools on the sleeping ledge. Outside there was no picnic table, as at most other shelters, and no privy. Even by the austere standards of the Appalachian Trail, this was grim. But at least we had it to ourselves.

Like most AT shelters, it had an open front (I never really understood the thinking behind this—what principle of design or maintenance necessitated leaving one whole side, and all the occupants, open to the elements?), but this one was covered with a modern chain-link fence. A sign on the fence said:
“BEARS
ARE ACTIVE
IN
THIS
AREA
.
DO
NOT
LEAVE
DOOR
OPEN.”
Interested to see just how active, I had a look at the shelter register while Katz boiled water for noodles. Every shelter has a register in which visitors make diarylike entries on the weather, the trail conditions, or their state of mind, if any, and note any unusual occurrences. This one mentioned only a couple of odd bearlike noises outside in the night, but what really caught the attention of the shelter’s chroniclers was the unusual liveliness of its resident mice and even rats.

From the moment—the moment—we put our heads down that night there were the scurryings and scamperings of rodents. They were absolutely fearless and ran freely over our bags and even across our heads. Cursing furiously, Katz banged around at them
with his water bottle and whatever else came to hand. Once I turned on my headlamp to find a packmouse on top of my sleeping bag, high up on my chest, not six inches from my chin, sitting up on its haunches and regarding me with a gimlet eye. Reflexively, I hit the bag from inside, flipping him into a startled oblivion.

“Got one!” cried Katz.

“Me, too,” I said, rather proudly.

Katz was scrabbling around on his hands and knees, as if trying to pass for a mouse himself, enlivening the dark with a flying flashlight beam and pausing from time to time to hurl a boot or bang down his water bottle. Then he would crawl back in his bag, be still for a time, curse abruptly, fling off encumbrances, and repeat the process. I buried myself in my bag and pulled the drawstring tight over my head. And thus passed the night, with repeated sequences of Katz being violent, followed by silence, followed by scamperings, followed by Katz being violent. I slept surprisingly well, all things considered.

I expected Katz to wake in a foul temper, but in fact he was chipper.

“There’s nothing like a good night’s sleep and that was nothing like a good night’s sleep,” he announced when he stirred, and gave an appreciative guffaw. His happiness, it turned out, was because he had killed seven mice and was feeling very proud—not to say pumped up and gladiatorial. Some fur and a nubbin of something pink and pulpy still adhered to the bottom of his water bottle, I noticed when he raised it to his lips. Occasionally it troubled me (I presume it must trouble all hikers from time to time) just how far one strays from the normal measures of civility on the trail. This was such a moment.

Outside, fog was stealing in, filling the spaces between the trees. It was not an encouraging morning. A drizzle hung in the air when we set off, and before long it had turned into a steady, merciless, deadfall rain.

Rain spoils everything. There is no pleasure in walking in waterproofs. There is something deeply dispiriting about the stiff rustle of nylon and the endless, curiously amplified patter of rain
on synthetic material. Worst of all, you don’t even stay dry; the waterproofs keep out the rain but make you sweat so much that soon you are clammily sodden. By afternoon, the trail was a running stream. My boots gave up the will to stay dry. I was soaked through and squelching with every step. It rains up to 120 inches a year in some parts of the Smokies. That’s ten feet. That’s a lot of rain. We had a lot of it now.

We walked 9.7 miles to Spence Field Shelter, a modest distance even for us, but we were wet through and chilled, and anyway it was too far to hike to the next one. The Park Service (why does this seem so inevitable?) imposes a host of petty, inflexible, exasperating rules on AT hikers, among them that you must move smartly forward at all times, never stray from the trail, and camp each night at a shelter. It means effectively not only that you must walk a prescribed distance each day but then spend the night penned up with strangers. We peeled off the worst of our wet clothes and rooted for dry ones in our packs, but even stuff from deep in the pack felt damp. There was a stone fireplace built into the shelter wall, and some kindly soul had left a pile of twigs and small logs by the side. Katz tried to light a fire, but everything was so wet that it wouldn’t burn. Even his matches wouldn’t strike. Katz exhaled in disgust and gave up. I decided to make some coffee, to warm us up, and the stove proved equally temperamental.

As I fiddled with it, there was the singing rustle of nylon from without and two young women entered, blinking and bedraggled. They were from Boston and had hiked in on a side trail from Cades Cove. A minute or two later, four guys on spring break from Wake Forest University came in, then a lone young hiker who proved to be our acquaintance Jonathan, and finally a couple of bearded middle-aged guys. After four or five days in which we had seen scarcely a soul, suddenly we were inundated with company.

Everyone was considerate and friendly, but there was no escaping the conclusion that we were hopelessly overcrowded. It occurred to me, not for the first time, how delightful, how truly delightful, it would be if MacKaye’s original vision had been realized—if
the shelters along the trail were proper hostels, with hot showers, individual bunks (with curtains for privacy and reading lights, please), and a resident caretaker/cook to keep a cheery fire dancing in the grate and who would invite us, any minute now, to take our places at a long table for a dinner of stew and dumplings, corn bread, and, oh, let us say, peach cobbler. Outside there would be a porch with rocking chairs, where you could sit and smoke your pipe and watch the sun sink into the lovely distant hills. What bliss it would be. I was perched on the edge of the sleeping platform lost in a little reverie along these lines and absorbed with trying to get a small volume of water to boil—quite happy really—when one of the middle-aged guys drifted over and introduced himself as Bob. I knew with a sinking heart that we were going to talk equipment. I could just see it coming. I hate talking equipment.

“So what made you buy a Gregory pack?” he said.

“Well, I thought it would be easier than carrying everything in my arms.”

He nodded thoughtfully, as if this were an answer worth considering, then said: “I’ve got a Kelty.”

I wanted to say—ached to say—“Well, here’s an idea to try to get hold of, Bob. I don’t remotely give a shit.” But talking equipment is one of those things you just have to do, like chatting to your mother’s friends in the supermarket, so I said: “Oh, yeah? You happy with it?”

“Oh,
yeah,”
was the deeply sincere reply. “Tell you why.” He brought it over to show me its features—its snap pockets, its map pouch, its general miraculous ability to hold contents. He was particularly proud of a dropdown inner stowage pouch, bulging with little plastic bottles of vitamins and medicines, with a transparent window built into it. “It lets you see what you’ve got in there, without having to undo the zipper,” he explained and looked at me with an expression that invited staggered admiration.

Just at that moment Katz stepped up. He was eating a carrot (nobody could cadge food like Katz) and was about to ask me
something, but when his eye lit on Bob’s transparent pouch, he said: “Hey, look—a pouch with a window. Is that for people who are so stupid they can’t figure out how to get it open?”

“Actually, it’s a very useful feature,” said Bob in a measured, defensive tone. “It lets you check the contents without having to undo the zipper.”

Katz gave him a genuinely incredulous look. “What—like you’re so busy on the trail you can’t spare the three seconds it takes to open a zipper and looked inside?” He turned to me. “These college kids are willing to trade Pop Tarts for Snickers. What do you think?”

“Well, I actually find it quite useful,” Bob said quietly, to himself, but he took his pack away and bothered us no more. I’m afraid my equipment conversations nearly always ended up like that somehow, with the talker retiring with hurt feelings and a piece of formerly prized equipment cradled to his chest. It was never my wish, believe me.

The Smokies went downhill from there. We walked for four days and the rain fell tirelessly, with an endless, typewriter patter. The trail everywhere became boggy and slick. Puddles filled every dip and trough. Mud became a feature of our lives. We trudged through it, stumbled and fell in it, knelt in it, set our packs down in it, left a streak of it on everything we touched. And always when you moved there was the maddening, monotonous sound of your nylon going
wiss, wiss, wiss
until you wanted to take a gun and shoot it. I didn’t see a bear, didn’t see a salamander, didn’t see foxfire, didn’t see anything actually—just perpetual dribbles and droplets of rain adhering to my glasses.

Each night, we stopped in leaky cow barns and cooked and lived with strangers—crowds of them, all cold and damp and shuffling, gaunt and half mad from the ceaseless rain and the cheerlessness of wet hiking. It was awful. And the worse the weather got, the more crowded the shelters grew. It was spring break at colleges all over the East, and scores and scores of young people had had the idea to come hiking in the Smokies. The
Smokies shelters are supposed to be for thru-hikers, not casual drop-ins, and words were sometimes exchanged. It was not like the AT at all. It was worse than awful.

By the third day, Katz and I both had nothing dry and were shivering constantly. We slopped up to the summit of Clingmans Dome—a high point of the trip, by all accounts, with views in clear weather to make the heart take wing—and saw nothing, nothing whatever but the dim shapes of dying trees in a sea of swirling fog.

We were soaked and filthy, desperately needed a launderette, clean, dry clothes, a square meal, and a Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum. It was time to go to Gatlinburg.

B
ut first we had to get there.

It was eight miles from Clingmans Dome to U.S. 441, the first paved road since Fontana Dam four days before. Gatlinburg lay fifteen long, twisting, downhill miles to the north. It was too far to walk, and it didn’t seem likely that we would get a lift hitching in a national park, but in a parking area nearby I noticed three homeward-bound youths loading packs into a large, fancy car with New Hampshire license plates, and impulsively I went and introduced myself to them as a fellow citizen of the Granite State and asked them if they could find it in their hearts to take two weary old guys into Gatlinburg. Before they could demur, which was clearly their instinct, we thanked them profusely and climbed into the back seat. And thus we secured a stylish but rather sullen passage to Gatlinburg.

Gatlinburg is a shock to the system from whichever angle you survey it, but never more so than when you descend upon it from a spell of moist, grubby isolation in the woods. It sits just outside the main entrance to Great Smoky Mountains National Park and specializes
in providing all those things that the park does not—principally, slurpy food, motels, gift shops, and sidewalks on which to waddle and dawdle—nearly all of it strewn along a single, astoundingly ugly main street. For years it has prospered on the confident understanding that when Americans load up their cars and drive enormous distances to a setting of rare natural splendor what most of them want when they get there is to play a little miniature golf and eat dribbly food. Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the most popular national park in America, but Gatlinburg—this is so unbelievable—is more popular than the park.

So Gatlinburg is appalling. But that’s OK. After eight days on the trail, we were ready to be appalled, eager to be appalled. We checked into a motel, where we were received with a palpable lack of warmth, got honked at twice as we crossed Main Street (one rather loses the knack of crossing roads on the trail), and finally presented ourselves at an establishment called Jersey Joe’s Restaurant, where we ordered cheeseburgers and Cokes from a charmless, gum-popping waitress who declined to be heartened by our wholesome smiles. We were halfway through this simple, disappointing repast when the waitress dropped the bill on the table as she passed. It came to $20.74.

“You’re joking,” I spluttered.

The waitress—let’s call her Betty Slutz—stopped and looked at me, then slowly swaggered back to the table, staring at me with majestic disdain the while.

“You got a problem here?”

“Twenty dollars is a bit much for a couple of burgers, don’t you think?” I squeaked in a strange, never-before-heard Bertie Wooster voice. She held her stare for another moment, then picked up the bill and read it through aloud for our benefit, smacking each item as she read: “Two burgers. Two sodas. State sales tax. City sales tax. Beverage tax. Nondiscretionary gratuity. Grand total: twenty dollars and seventy-four cents.” She let it fall back onto the table and graced us with a sneer. “Welcome to Gatlinburg, gentlemen.”

Welcome, indeed.

And then we went out to see the town. I was particularly eager to have a look at Gatlinburg because I had read about it in a wonderful book called
The Lost Continent
. In it the author describes the scene on Main Street thus: “Walking in an unhurried fashion up and down the street were more crowds of overweight tourists in boisterous clothes, with cameras bouncing on their bellies, consuming ice-creams, cotton candy, and corn dogs, sometimes simultaneously.” And so it was today. The same throngs of pear-shaped people in Reeboks wandered between food smells, clutching grotesque comestibles and bucket-sized soft drinks. It was still the same tacky, horrible place. Yet I would hardly have recognized it from just nine years before. Nearly every building I remembered had been torn down and replaced with something new—principally, mini-malls and shopping courts, which stretched back from the main street and offered a whole new galaxy of shopping and eating opportunities.