A Walk in the Woods (15 page)

In
The Lost Continent
I gave a specimen list of Gatlinburg’s attractions as they were in 1987—the Elvis Presley Hall of Fame, National Bible Museum, Stars Over Gatlinburg Wax Museum, Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, American Historical Wax Museum, Gatlinburg Space Needle, Bonnie Lou and Buster Country Music Show, Carbo’s Police Museum, Guinness Book of Records Exhibition Center, Irlene Mandrell Hall of Stars Museum and Shopping Mall, a pair of haunted houses, and three miscellaneous attractions, Hillbilly Village, Paradise Island, and World of Illusions. Of these fifteen diversions, just three appeared to be still in existence nine years later. They had of course been replaced by other things—a Mysterious Mansion, Hillbilly Golf, a Motion Master ride—and these in turn will no doubt be gone in another nine years, for that is the way of America.

I know the world is ever in motion, but the speed of change in the United States is simply dazzling. In 1951, the year I was born, Gatlinburg had just one retail business—a general store called Ogle’s. Then, as the postwar boom years quickened, people began coming to the Smokies by car, and motels, restaurants, gas stations,
and gift shops popped up to serve them. By 1987, Gatlinburg had sixty motels and 200 gift shops. Today it has 100 motels and 400 gift shops. And the remarkable thing is that there is nothing remotely remarkable about that.

Consider this: Half of all the offices and malls standing in America today have been built since 1980. Half of them. Eighty percent of all the housing stock in the country dates from 1945. Of all the motel rooms in America, 230,000 have been built in the last fifteen years. Just up the road from Gatlinburg is the town of Pigeon Forge, which twenty years ago was a sleepy hamlet—nay, which
aspired
to be a sleepy hamlet—famous only as the hometown of Dolly Parton. Then the estimable Ms. Parton built an amusement park called Dollywood. Now Pigeon Forge has 200 outlet shops stretched along three miles of highway. It is bigger and uglier than Gatlinburg, and has better parking, and so of course gets more visitors.

Now compare all this with the Appalachian Trail. At the time of our hike, the Appalachian Trail was fifty-nine years old. That is, by American standards, incredibly venerable. The Oregon and Santa Fe trails didn’t last as long. Route 66 didn’t last as long. The old coast-to-coast Lincoln Highway, a road that brought transforming wealth and life to hundreds of little towns, so important and familiar that it became known as “America’s Main Street,” didn’t last as long. Nothing in America does. If a product or enterprise doesn’t constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, nearly always uglier. And then there is the good old AT, still quietly ticking along after six decades, unassuming, splendid, faithful to its founding principles, sweetly unaware that the world has quite moved on. It’s a miracle really.

Katz needed bootlaces, so we went to an outfitter’s, and while he was off in the footwear section I had an idle shuffle around. Pinned to a wall was a map showing the whole of the Appalachian Trail on its long march through fourteen states, but with the eastern seaboard rotated to give the AT the appearance of having a due north-south orientation, allowing the mapmaker to fit the trail
into an orderly rectangle, about six inches wide and four feet high. I looked at it with a polite, almost proprietorial interest—it was the first time since leaving New Hampshire that I had considered the trail in its entirety—and then inclined closer, with bigger eyes and slightly parted lips. Of the four feet of trail map before me, reaching approximately from my knees to the top of my head, we had done the bottom two inches.

I went and got Katz and brought him back with me, pulling on a pinch of shirtsleeve. “What?” he said. “What?”

I showed him the map. “Yeah, what?” Katz didn’t like mysteries.

“Look at the map, and then look at the part we’ve walked.”

He looked, then looked again. I watched closely as the expression drained from his face. “Jesus,” he breathed at last. He turned to me, full of astonishment. “We’ve done
nothing.”

We went and got a cup of coffee and sat for some time in a kind of dumbfounded silence. All that we had experienced and done—all the effort and toil, the aches, the damp, the mountains, the horrible stodgy noodles, the blizzards, the dreary evenings with Mary Ellen, the endless, wearying, doggedly accumulated miles—all that came to two inches. My hair had grown more than that.

One thing was obvious. We were never going to walk to Maine.

In a way, it was liberating. If we couldn’t walk the whole trail, we also didn’t have to, which was a novel thought that grew more attractive the more we considered it. We had been released from our obligations. A whole dimension of drudgery—the tedious, mad, really quite pointless business of stepping over every inch of rocky ground between Georgia and Maine—had been removed. We could enjoy ourselves.

So the next morning, after breakfast, we spread our maps across my motel room bed and studied the possibilities that were suddenly opened to us. In the end we decided to return to the trail not at Newfound Gap, where we had left it, but a little farther on at a place called Spivey Gap, near Ernestville. This would take us beyond
the Smokies—with its crowded shelters and stifling regulations—and put us back in a world where we could please ourselves. I got out the Yellow Pages and looked up cab companies. There were three in Gatlinburg. I called the first one.

“How much would it be to take take two of us to Ernestville?” I inquired.

“Dunno,” came the reply.

This threw me slightly. “Well, how much do you think it would be?”

“Dunno.”

“But it’s just down the road.”

There was a considerable silence and then the voice said: “Yup.”

“Haven’t you ever taken anybody there before?”

“Nope.”

“Well, it looks to me on my map like it’s about twenty miles. Would you say that’s about right?”

Another pause. “Might be.”

“And how much would it be to take us twenty miles?”

“Dunno.”

I looked at the receiver. “Excuse me, but I just have to say this. You are more stupid than a paramecium.”

Then I hung up.

“Maybe not my place to say,” Katz offered thoughtfully, “but I’m not sure that’s the best way to ensure prompt and cheerful service.”

I called up another cab company and asked how much it would be to Ernestville.

“Dunno,” said the voice.

Oh, for Christ sake, I thought.

“What do you wanna go there for?” demanded the voice.

“Pardon?”

“What do you wanna go to Ernestville for? Tain’t nothin there.”

“Well, actually we want to go to Spivey Gap. We’re hiking the Appalachian Trail, you see.”

“Spivey Gap’s another five miles.”

“Yeah, I was just trying to get an idea. …”

“You shoulda said so ‘cause Spivey Gap’s another five miles.”

“Well, how much would it be to Spivey Gap then?”

“Dunno.”

“Excuse me, but is there some kind of gross stupidity requirement to be a cab driver in Gatlinburg?”

“What?”

I hung up again and looked at Katz. “What
is
it with this town? I’ve
blown
more intelligent life into a handkerchief.”

I called up the third and final company and asked how much it would be to Ernestville.

“How much you got?” barked a feisty voice.

Now here was a guy I could do business with. I grinned and said, “I don’t know. A dollar fifty?”

There was a snort. “Well, it’s gonna cost you more than that.” A pause and the creak of a chair going back. “It’s gonna go on what’s on the meter, you understand, but I expect it’ll be about twenty bucks, something like that. What do you wanna go to Ernestville for anyway?”

I explained about Spivey Gap and the AT.

“Appalachian Trail? You must be a danged fool. What time you wanna go?”

“I don’t know. How about now?”

“Where y’at?”

I told him the name of the motel.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Fifteen minutes at the outside. If I’m not there in twenty minutes, then go on ahead without me and I’ll meet you at Ernestville.” He hung up. We had not only found a driver, we’d found a comedian.

While we waited on a bench outside the motel office, I bought a copy of the
Nashville Tennessean
out of a metal box, just to see what was happening in the world. The principal story indicated that the state legislature, in one of those moments of enlightenment with which the southern states often strive to distinguish themselves, was in the process of passing a law forbidding schools from teaching evolution. Instead they were to be required to instruct that the earth was created by God, in seven days, sometime, oh, before the
turn of the century. The article reminded us that this was not a new issue in Tennessee. The little town of Dayton—not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened—was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don’t realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn’t overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn’t so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.

Suddenly—I can’t altogether explain it, but suddenly—I had a powerful urge not to be this far south any longer. I turned to Katz.

“Why don’t we go to Virginia?”

“What?”

Somebody in a shelter a couple of days before had told us how delightful—how gorgeously amenable to hiking—the mountains of the Virginia Blue Ridge were. Once you got up into them, he had assured us, it was nearly all level walking, with sumptuous views over the broad valley of the Shenandoah River. People routinely knocked off twenty-five miles a day up there. From the vantage of a dank, dripping Smokies shelter, this had sounded like Xanadu, and the idea had stuck. I explained my thinking to Katz.

He sat forward intently. “Are you saying we leave out all the trail between here and Virginia? Not walk it? Skip it?” He seemed to want to make sure he understood this exactly.

I nodded.

“Well, shit yes.”

So when the cabdriver pulled up a minute later and got out to look us over, I explained to him, hesitantly and a bit haplessly—for I had really not thought this through—that we didn’t want to go Ernestville at all now, but to Virginia.

“Virginia
?” he said, as if I had asked him if there was anywhere local we could get a dose of syphilis. He was a little guy, short but built like iron, and at least seventy years old, but real bright,
smarter than me and Katz put together, and he grasped the notion of the enterprise before I had halfway explained it.

“Well, then you want to go to Knoxville and rent a car and drive up to Roanoke. That’s what you want to do.”

I nodded. “How do we get to Knoxville?”

“How’s a
cab
sound to you?” he barked at me as if I were three-quarters stupid. I think he might have been a bit hard of hearing, or else he just liked shouting at people. “Probably cost you about fifty bucks,” he said speculatively.

Katz and I looked at each other. “Yeah, OK,” I said, and we got in.

And so, just like that, we found ourselves heading for Roanoke and the sweet green hills of old Virginny.

I
n the summer of 1948, Earl V. Shaffer, a young man just out of the army, became the first person to hike the Appalachian Trail from end to end in a single summer. With no tent, and often navigating with nothing better than road maps, he walked for 123 days, from April to August, averaging seventeen miles a day. Coincidentally, while he was hiking, the
Appalachian Trailway News
, the journal of the Appalachian Trail Conference, ran a long article by Myron Avery and the magazine’s editor, Jean Stephenson, explaining why an end-to-end hike was probably not possible.

The trail Shaffer found was nothing like the groomed and orderly corridor that exists today. Though it was only eleven years since the trail’s completion, by 1948 it was already subsiding into oblivion. Shaffer found that large parts of it were overgrown or erased by wholesale logging. Shelters were few, blazes often nonexistent. He spent long periods bushwhacking over tangled mountains or following the wrong path when the trail forked. Occasionally he stepped onto a highway to find that he was miles from where he ought to be. Often he discovered that local people
were not aware of the trail’s existence or, if they knew of it, were amazed to be told that it ran all the way from Georgia to Maine. Frequently he was greeted with suspicion.

On the other hand, even the dustiest little hamlets nearly always had a store or café, unlike now, and generally when Shaffer left the trail he could count on flagging down a country bus for a lift to the nearest town. Although he saw almost no other hikers in the four months, there was other, real life along the trail. He often passed small farms and cabins or found graziers tending herds on sunny balds. All those are long gone now. Today the AT is a wilderness by design—actually, by fiat, since many of the properties Shaffer passed were later compulsorily purchased and quietly returned to woodland. There were twice as many songbirds in the eastern United States in 1948 as now. Except for the chestnuts, the forest trees were healthy. Dogwood, elms, hemlocks, balsam firs, and red spruces still thrived. Above all, he had 2,000 miles of trail almost entirely to himself.

When Shaffer completed the walk in early August, four months to the day after setting off, and reported his achievement to conference headquarters, no one there actually believed him. He had to show officials his photographs and trail journal and undergo a “charming but thorough cross examination,” as he put it in his later account of the journey,
Walking with Spring
, before his story was finally accepted.