A Walk in the Woods (34 page)

“Fall down?” said one brightly.

“No, I just wanted a closer look at the water.” You moronic fit twit.

I went back to the riverbank, pulled on my soaked boots, and discovered that it was infinitely easier crossing with them on. I got a tolerable grip and the rocks didn’t hurt as they had on my bare feet. I crossed cautiously, alarmed at the force of the current in the center—each time I lifted a leg the current tried to reposition it downstream, as if it belonged to a gateleg table—but the water was never more than about three feet deep, and I reached the other side without falling.

Katz, meantime, had discovered a way across using boulders as stepping stones but ended up stranded on the edge of a noisy torrent of what looked like deep water. He stood there covered with frowns. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how he had gotten up there—his boulder seemed isolated in an expanse of dangerously streaming water from all sides, and clearly he didn’t know what to do now. He tried to ease himself into the silvery current and wade the last ten yards to shore but was instantly
whisked away like a feather. For the second time in two days I sincerely thought he was drowning—he was certainly helpless—but the current carried him to a shallow bar of gleaming pebbles twenty feet farther on, where he came up sputtering on his hands and knees, struggled up on to the bank, and continued on into the woods without a backward glance, as if this were the most normal thing in the world.

And so we pressed on to Monson, over hard trail and more rivers, collecting bruises and scratches and insect bites that turned our backs into relief maps. On the third day, forest-dazed and grubby, we stepped on to a sunny road, the first since Caratunk, and followed it on a hot ambulation into the forgotten hamlet of Monson. Near the center of town was an old clapboard house with a painted wooden cutout of a bearded hiker standing on the lawn bearing the message “Welcome at Shaw’s.”

Shaw’s is the most famous guesthouse on the AT, partly because it’s the last comfort stop for anyone going into the Hundred Mile Wilderness and the first for anyone coming out, but also because it’s very friendly and a good deal. For $28 each we got a room, dinner and breakfast, and free use of the shower, laundry, and guest lounge. The place was run by Keith and Pat Shaw, who started the business more or less by accident twenty years ago when Keith brought home a hungry hiker off the trail and the hiker passed on the word of how well he had been treated. Just a few weeks earlier, Keith told me proudly as we signed in, they had registered their 20,000th hiker.

We had an hour till dinner. Katz borrowed $5—for pop, I presumed—and vanished to his room. I had a shower, put a load of wash in the machine, and wandered out to the front lawn, where there were a couple of Adirondack chairs on which I intended to park my weary butt, smoke my pipe and savor the blissful ease of late afternoon and the pleasant anticipation of a dinner earned. From a screened window nearby came the sounds of sizzling food and the clatter of pans. It smelled good, whatever it was.

After a minute, Keith came out and sat with me. He was an old guy, comfortably into his sixties, with almost no teeth and a body
that looked as if it had put up with all kinds of tough stuff in its day. He was real friendly.

“You didn’t try to pet the dog, did ya?” he said.

“No.” I had seen it out the window: an ugly, vicious mongrel that was tied up out back and got stupidly and disproportionately worked up by any noise or movement within a hundred yards.

“You don’t wanna try to pet the dog. Take it from me: you do not wanna pet that dog. Some hiker petted him last week when I told him not to and it bit him in the balls.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “Wouldn’t let go neither. You shoulda heard that feller wail.”

“Really?”

“Had to hit the damn dog with a
rake
to get him to let go. Meanest damn dog I ever seen in my life. You don’t wanna get near him, believe me.”

“How was the hiker?”

“Well, it didn’t exactly make his
day
, I tell you that.” He scratched his neck contemplatively, as if he were thinking of having a shave one of these days. “Thru-hiker, he was. Come all the way from Georgia. Long way to come to get your
balls
nipped.” Then he went off to check on dinner.

Dinner was at a big dining room table that was generously covered in platters of meat, bowls of mashed potatoes and corn on the cob, a teetering plate of bread, and a tub of butter. Katz arrived a few moments after me, looking freshly showered and very happy. He seemed unusually, almost exaggeratedly, energized, and gave me an impetuous tickle from behind as he passed, which was out of character.

“You all right?” I said.

“Never been better, my old mountain companion, never been better.”

We were joined by two others, a sweetly hesitant and wholesome-looking young couple, both tanned and fit and also very clean. Katz and I welcomed them with smiles and started to pitch in, then paused and put back the bowls when we realized the
couple were mumbling grace. This seemed to go on forever. Then we pitched in again.

The food was terrific. Keith acted as waiter and was most insistent that we eat plenty. “Dog’ll eat it if you don’t,” he said. I was happy to let the dog starve.

The young couple were thru-hikers, from Indiana. They had started at Springer on the 28th of March—a date that seemed impossibly snow-flecked and distant now in the full heat of an August evening—and had hiked continuously for 141 days. They had completed 2,045.5 miles. They had 114.9 miles to go.

“So you’ve nearly done it, huh?” I said, a trifle inanely but just trying to make conversation.

“Yes,” said the girl. She said it slowly, as two syllables, as if it hadn’t previously occurred to her. There was something serenely mindless in her manner.

“Did you ever feel like giving up?”

The girl thought for a moment. “No,” she said simply.

“Really?” I found this amazing. “Did you never think,
‘jeez
, this is too much. I don’t know that I want to go through with this’?”

She thought again, with an air of encroaching panic. These were obviously questions that had never penetrated her skull.

Her partner came to her rescue. “We had a couple of low moments in the early phases,” he said, “but we put our faith in the Lord and His will prevailed.”

“Praise Jesus,” whispered the girl, almost inaudibly.

“Ah,” I said, and made a mental note to lock my door when I went to bed.

“And God bless Allah for the mashed potatoes!” said Katz happily and reached for the bowl for the third time.

After dinner, Katz and I strolled to a general store up the road to get supplies for the Hundred Mile Wilderness, which we would start in the morning. He seemed odd in the grocery store—cheerful enough, but distracted and restless. We were supposed to be
stocking up for ten days in the wilds—a fairly serious business—but he seemed unwilling to focus, and kept wandering off or picking up inappropriate things like chili sauce and can openers.

“Hey, let’s get a six-pack,” he said suddenly, in a party voice.

“Come on, Stephen, get serious,” I said. I was looking at cheeses.

“I am serious.”

“Do you want cheddar or Colby?”

“Whatever.” He wandered off to the beer cooler and came back carrying a six-pack of Budweiser.

“Hey, whaddaya say to a six-pack, bud—a six-pack of Bud, bud?” He nudged me in the ribs to emphasize the joke.

I pulled away from the nudge in distraction. “Come on, Stephen, stop dicking around.” I had moved on to the candy bars and cookies and was trying to figure out what might last us ten days without melting into a disgusting ooze or bouncing into a bag of crumbs. “Do you want Snickers or do you want to try something different?” I asked.

“I want Budweiser.” He grinned, then, seeing this had passed me by, adopted a sudden, solemn, jokeless tone. “Please, Bryson, can I borrow”—he looked at the price—”four dollars and seventy-nine cents? I’m broke.”

“Stephen, I don’t know what’s come over you. Put the beer back. Anyway, what happened to that five dollars I gave you?”

“Spent it.”

“What on?” And then it occurred to me. “You’ve been drinking already, haven’t you?”

“No,”
he said robustly, as if dismissing a preposterous and possibly slanderous allegation.

But he was drunk—or at least half drunk. “You have,” I said in amazement.

He sighed and rolled his eyes slightly. “Two quarts of Michelob. Big deal.”

“You’ve been drinking.” I was appalled. “When did you start drinking again?”

“In Des Moines. Just a little. You know, a couple of beers after work. Nothing to get in a panic about.”

“Stephen, you know you can’t drink.”

He didn’t want to hear this. He looked like a fourteen-year-old who had just been told to clean his room. “I don’t need a lecture, Bryson.”

“I’m not going to buy you beer,” I said evenly. He grinned as if I were being unaccountably priggish. “Just a six-pack. Come on.”

“No!”

I was furious, livid—more furious than I had been about anything in years. I couldn’t believe he was drinking again. It seemed such a deep, foolish betrayal of everything—of himself, me, what we were doing out here.

Katz was still wearing half a grin, but it didn’t belong to his emotions any longer. “So you’re not going to buy me a couple of lousy beers after all I’ve done for you?”

This seemed a low blow. “No.”

“Then fuck you,” he said and turned on his heel and walked out.

W
ell, that rather colored things, as you can imagine. We never said another word about it. It just hung there. At breakfast, we exchanged good mornings, more or less as normal, but didn’t speak beyond that. Afterwards, as we waited by Keith’s van for a promised lift to the trailhead, we stood in an awkward silence, like adversaries in a property dispute waiting to be summoned into the judge’s chambers.

At the edge of the woods when we alighted there was a sign announcing that this was the start of the Hundred Mile Wilderness, with a long, soberly phrased warning to the effect that what lay beyond was not like other stretches of the trail, and that you shouldn’t proceed if you didn’t have at least ten days’ worth of food and weren’t feeling like the people in a Patagonia ad.

It gave the woods a more ominous, brooding feel. They were unquestionably different from woods further south—darker, more shadowy, inclining more to black than green. There were different trees, too—more conifers at low levels and many more birches—and scattered through the undergrowth were large, rounded black
boulders, like sleeping animals, which lent the still recesses a certain eerieness. When Walt Disney made a motion picture of
Bambi
, his artists based their images on the Great North Woods of Maine, but this was palpably not a Disney forest of roomy glades and cuddlesome creatures. This brought to mind the woods in the
Wizard of Oz
, where the trees have ugly faces and malign intent and every step seems a gamble. This was a woods for looming bears, dangling snakes, wolves with laser-red eyes, strange noises, sudden terrors—a place of “standing night,” as Thoreau neatly and nervously put it.

As ever, the trail was well blazed, but in places almost overgrown, with ferns and other low foliage all but meeting in the middle over the path, reducing the visible trail to a razor line along the forest floor. Since only 10 percent of thru-hikers make it this far, and it is too distant for most day hikers, the trail in Maine is much more thinly used, and so the foliage encroaches. Above all, what set the trail apart was the terrain. In profile, the topography of the AT over the eighteen-mile section from Monson to Barren Mountain looks reasonably undemanding, rolling along at a more or less steady 1,200 feet with just a few steep rises and falls. In fact, it was hell.

Within half an hour we had come to a wall of rock, the first of many, perhaps 400 feet high. The trail ran up its face along a slight depression, like an elevator shaft. It was as near perpendicular as a slope can get without actually being a rock climb. Slowly and laboriously we picked our way between and over boulders, using our hands as much as our feet. Combined with our exertion, the cloying heat was almost unbearable. I found I had to stop every ten or twelve yards to draw breath and wipe burning sweat from my eyes. I was swimming in heat, bathed in heat, swaddled in it. I drank three-quarters of a bottle of water on the way up and used much of the rest to wet a bandanna and try to cool my throbbing head. I felt dangerously overheated and faint. I began to rest more frequently and for longer periods, to try to cool down a little, but each time I set off again the heat came flooding back. I had never
had to work so hard or so tiringly to clear an Appalachian impediment, and this was just the first of a series.

The top of the climb brought several hundred yards of bare, gently sloping granite, like walking along a whale’s back. From each summit the panorama was sensational—for as far as the eye could see nothing but heavy green woods, denim-blue lakes, and lonely, undulant mountains. Many of the lakes were immense, and nearly all of them had probably never felt so much as a human toe. There was a certain captivating sense of having penetrated into a secret corner of the world, but in the murderous sun it was impossible to linger.

Then came a difficult and unnerving descent down a rocky cliff face on the other side, a short walk through a dark, waterless valley, and delivery to the foot of another wall of rock. And so the day went, with monumental climbs and the hope of water over the next hill the principal thing drawing us on. Katz was soon out of water altogether. I gave him a drink of mine and he accepted it gratefully, with a look that asked for a truce. There was, however, still a kind of odor between us, an unhappy sense that things had changed and would not be the same again.

It was my fault. I pushed on farther and longer than we would have normally, and without consulting him, unsubtly punishing him for having unbalanced the equilibrium that had existed between us, and Katz bore it silently as his due. We did fourteen miles, an exceedingly worthy distance in the circumstances, and might have gone farther, but at half past six we came to a broad ford called Wilber Brook and stopped. We were too tired to cross—that is to say, I was too tired—and it would be folly to get wet so near sundown. We made camp and shared our cheerless rations with a kind of strained politeness. Even if we had not been at odds, we would scarcely have spoken: we were too tired. It had been a long day—the hardest of the trip—and the thought that hung over us was that we had eighty-five more miles of this before we got to the camp store at Abol Bridge, 100 miles till we reached the challenging mass of Katahdin.