Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail (15 page)

“Grace,” I said, “we can make it up Unaka Mountain to the Cherry Gap Shelter before dark. It’s about five miles.”

“I’m quite comfortable right here, thank you,” she replied securely.

She had done eleven miles for the day, mostly uphill, which is quite respectable for a section-hiker. But as a thru-hiker I had to be loyal to my miles more than even an enjoyable hiking partner. Thus, WrongWay Grace, Steady Eddie and I said our goodbyes. I didn’t see her again and missed her company. I also didn’t expect to see Steady Eddie again as he lay there smiling in his sleeping bag after a day of climbing. But that would prove to be a very bad underestimation.

AT thru-hikers come together suddenly and spontaneously. Hiking groups just form based on necessity. I had to leave behind some people I enjoyed, and others left me behind based on a survival of the fittest mentality—a kind of “enjoyed it, but we aren’t waiting.”

When the Cherry Gap Shelter came into view at dusk, the shelter was packed and I immediately went to work looking for a place to set up my tarp. I struggled with various formations, but succeeded in none of them. After cursing myself for switching a tent out for this tarp I finally just threw my sleeping bag down on the ground to attempt sleeping “cowboy style.”

A young couple I hadn’t yet seen was watching me flail around. He looked to be in his early thirties, short and rather stocky. With his square cut jaw and dark, brown beard he even resembled a younger version of Ulysses S. Grant. She appeared a good bit younger, and with her athletic physique and doe eyes, was extremely attractive. “May I assist you with that tarp?” he asked in his soft-spoken, working-man’s style.

“No,” I answered, slightly embarrassed. “It’s not supposed to rain.”

He introduced himself as Whitewater (he’s an expert kayaker). The girl, his wife, had the trail name of Nurse Ratchet.

“Now there was a hell-bent lady named Nurse Ratchet in the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” I said, “but surely that’s not a proper characterization of you,” I stated.

“Well, wait til’ you get to know me better,” she replied.

Indeed I would get to know them quite well, and we would end up hiking together a good part of the next 1,200 miles. And when we did get to know each other better Nurse Ratchet admitted that on this first night when she saw me helplessly attempting to set up my tarp she didn’t give me a snowball’s chance in hell of making it all the way to Maine.

I slept like crap, and decided in the future I should leave sleeping cowboy style to cowboys. I was up and off at first light. One problem with beating everybody on the trail in the morning is that you get plastered with spider webs, although I had this problem practically every day due to my height. This particular day was to be a tremendous challenge in topography and miles. After 7.6 miles I stopped for a break at the Clyde Smith Shelter. Nickie NOBO (Northbound), foul mouth and all, rolled in with a couple other guys and immediately his testosterone started acting up again.

“I’m going to beat the
bleep
out of this Crocker asshole that keeps carving, ‘One step at a time—Crocker,’ in every shelter,” he threatened. Then looking around he raged, “Holy
bleep
, it’s
bleeping
hot out here, today. It feels like a
bleeping
inferno.”

Mark, a mild-mannered Indiana biologist, whispered, “This guy has a five-word vocabulary and three of the words are fuck.”

The hot topic along the trail was strategies for dealing with hot weather. The consensus was you needed to take a few hours off in the middle of the day and double or triple your water intake. I noted the irony that now everyone seemed to be obsessing with hot weather the way I had obsessed with cold weather the first month. With that I jumped up and headed off, leaving these “
hyperthermia
freaks” to vent themselves.

From here, the trail dropped off one thousand feet to Hughes Gap and then ascended 2,300 feet up Roan Mountain. It was an interesting progression from typical hardwood southern forest up to balsam-fir “Christmas tree” forest, and proved to be an early taste of alpine hiking in New Hampshire and Maine. The climb was steep to the summit, one of the high points in the southern Appalachians. Occasionally, it required moving on all fours, and it was times like this that some hikers, including me on this occasion, question their fitness and capacity for the entire enterprise. But whether it was the Almighty’s intelligent design or prescient planning by the trail designers, the AT often seemed to let up at just the point when it began to feel impossible to continue.

Finally, the trail topped out at Roan High Bluff, an open, windswept meadow with a Scottish Highlands feel. Then it winds around the shoulder of the mountain and finally comes up on the Roan High Knob Shelter. At six thousand two hundred eighty-five feet it is the most elevated shelter on the entire AT.

This was my original destination for the evening. But when I opened the door and poked my head in it became clear that at this elevation, even this rare four-sided shelter would be cold. I resolved to move on to a lower elevation.

I had thought it was straight down to the next shelter, but couldn’t have been more mistaken. The AT crosses five summits greater than fifty-four hundred feet over the next dozen miles. It traverses open, grassy balds offering spectacular views in all directions. Of course, in foul weather it would have been outright treacherous. Damn, North Carolina (and parts of Tennessee) was tough as hell.

My heart was set on reaching the Yellow OverMountain Shelter, a converted farmhouse. The sun had dropped behind the mountains, and I was running on fumes when I finally saw the sign to the OverMountain Shelter, which was three-tenths miles off the trail. It was my single-best effort as a hiker. I had literally hiked the entire day. I wondered if the two-story farmhouse/shelter would be empty. Nobody from the previous night’s shelter was likely to have traveled the 21.1 miles over this steep topography. Upon turning the corner I saw the lone figure of Seth sitting there on the first deck. My mood jumped from good to great.

“Skywalker,” he said merrily. “I saw Justin today and we wondered whether you were still out here.”

“And what was the verdict?” I responded.

“Well, we didn’t know how far you’d go after the abandoned backpack incident,” he said diplomatically.

“How is Justin?” I asked.

“Did you hear he got bluff-charged by a bear?” Seth said.

“What the hell is a bluff-charge?” I quickly asked.

“The bear charges you, but pulls up short.”

“And what are you supposed to do?”

“Hold your ground,” Seth said smiling.

“I’m kinda’ disappointed I haven’t seen a bear yet,” Seth added sincerely.

“That makes one of us,” I retorted.

The view out into the valley at sunset was gorgeous, and we sat there taking it in. Bill Bryson had written about the
low-level ecstasy
that hiking the AT affords, but which is so lacking in America’s sensationalistic, hyper-materialistic culture. Indeed, after hiking all day I was in a good mood almost every night, as long as I could get warm. It was that priceless feeling of having done a good day’s work. “Man, this whole AT is great, isn’t it?” I said.

“Yeah,” Seth sighed. “But I’m actually thinking about getting off in Damascus.”

“Aw come on, Seth” I responded. “You were the closest thing to a sure bet that I saw in Georgia. And I remember how disappointed you were about not going all the way last year.” “I get bored and depressed out here,” he said quietly. “And wait ’til Virginia. It goes on forever.”

“I honestly look at it as an once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” I said. “This is the kind of thing you’ll be reminiscing fondly about when you’re ninety years old in a wheelchair in a nursing home while crapping all over yourself.”

“Hikers are demanding,” one hostel owner told me. “They have to be taken to the grocery store, the post office, the Laundromat, everywhere. And most of them are half-broke. To top it off they eat like cannibals and smell like rendered cats.”

The owner of the Mountain View Hostel took me to the grocery store to re-supply. When we returned, Whitewater, Nurse Ratchet, their hiking companion Mark, and Air Puppy were waiting on the front lawn. Air Puppy, an early twenty-ish, innocent-looking hiker from New Hampshire, approached the owner in what I would soon learn was his trademark helpless manner and asked, “Would you mind if I did work for stay?”

The owner agreed and sent him over to work on trimming the bushes. A few minutes later Air Puppy approached the owner again with a pitiful look on his face and said, “I’m sorry. I’m allergic to poison ivy.” The owner grunted and looked around for something else for Air Puppy to do. But Air Puppy just went inside the hostel and proceeded to take over the sofa, the television, the radio, and just about everything else inside.