Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail (21 page)

A highway with a parking lot lies on the other side of the river. An elderly gentleman jumped out of his car as I approached and said cheerfully, “Would a cold soda do you any good on this hot day?”

“Mentally as much as physically,” I replied lustily.

His eyes then lit up and he said, “I just witnessed the damndest thing. A big group of hikers (the Sleazebags, no doubt) was crossing the bridge, but guess what. One of them swam the whole way!”

“Well, I hope you were impressed,” I laughed.

“I felt like asking him why he didn’t walk across the water,” he chortled.

“What in the world does it cost to build a bridge like that?” I wanted to know. “Two-hundred thousand?” “Try $1.25 million,” he responded.

“Who paid for it,” I asked, “the ATC?”

“A former thru-hiker named Happy Feet spent years arranging it with various agencies. It saves the hikers a 3.2-mile boring walk, much of which used to be on the highway.”

He then shuttled me into Glasgow to re-supply. Summer was now evident enough that even a hypothermia freak like me felt secure enough to send my winter clothes home through the town post office.

Chapter 11

T
he skies had looked threatening all day, and within sixty seconds of reaching the Punch Bowl Shelter, the bottom dropped out in a full-fledged downpour. I counted my blessings that for once I had missed a rainstorm. I counted them even more thirty seconds later, when an attractive, middle-aged woman came running completely naked from the stream down below.

“Oh my God,” she screamed when she saw me. “Somebody is in here. I’m so sorry.”

She continued apologizing profusely (“No, no, really, it’s okay”) as she dressed behind me. Then a minute later a muscle-bound fellow in a pair of shorts came up much more calmly in the rain and said quietly, “We didn’t know anybody was here. We were bathing in the stream.”

He was Rambler, from New Hampshire, and she was just Doris, from Ohio. Despite the extremely fortuitous beginning at this shelter the night ended up being a nightmare. Bullfrogs from the pond, which lies just fifty yards away, croaked at the top of their lungs all night. That, along with insatiable mosquitoes, left everybody lying there in anger all night. It’s the only place on the entire AT I would never, ever want to see again. There was nothing to do but get up blurry-eyed and get the
hell
out of there.

Rambler, Doris, and I crossed the Blue Ridge Parkway again that morning. A couple Gang of 10 members were standing next to a car doing “trail magic” (giving food, drinks, and rides to hikers). Not wanting to ask the obvious question, I politely accepted a cold drink out of the cooler in their trunk.

“We’re down to less than one hundred dollars,” Southpaw quietly said. “We can’t make it to Maine on that.”

“Well, you can feel good you’re not doing what others have done—stay on the trail and welch off other hikers,” I responded.

“We want to hike to Maine so bad,” Nitmuck said poignantly.

All we could do was discreetly leave them a couple dollars in their car and slowly trudge off. They left the trail, went home and got jobs, and a couple months later they had saved enough money to get back on and do the tough northern New England states.

Finally, I came upon the infamous Sleazebags. They were milling around Brown Mountain Creek Shelter, girding for the climb that lay ahead. Sure enough there were nine males, just as advertised. They had picked up the Sleazebags moniker because of the extra-short shorts they wore and because of their cavalier attitude toward women. One trail wit had even described them as “a posse of hikers.”

Bear, a rock solid early-twentyish hiker, started engaging me with standard hiker banter, and others joined in. While the language was coarse, with F-bombs dropping all around, it quickly became clear that most of them were pretty nice guys. Then I asked, “Which one is Hump Master?”

They pointed to a freckled, red-headed fella’ sitting behind me, smoking a cigarette. I turned around and we looked at each other; it was a bit awkward. Neither of us said a word as he continued smoking.

We all departed, despite clouds welling up for what looked like a standard summer afternoon thunderstorm. A two thousand-foot climb lay ahead and the Sleazebags ardently denounced Virginia in a spate of three- and four-letter words.

When we crossed U.S. Highway 60 it had begun drizzling. Some of the Sleazebags decided to hitch ten miles down to a Subway restaurant in a small town to the west. Meanwhile, it started pouring steadily and Camel, a nice nineteen-year-old kid from Atlanta, set up his tarp right by the highway.

“Feel free to get under, Skywalker,” he offered to me.

“Thanks,” I said. But before I could get under there Hump Master quickly positioned himself right in the middle of the sheltered area and puffed away on his cigarettes while reading a paperback. I contorted my body to get it all under the tarp. But he didn’t respond to my non-verbal communication by scooting over and the rain squall soaked my right side as his smoke wafted into my face.

The rain temporarily stopped and we got out from under the tarp, which Camel then pulled up. But a couple minutes later it started to downpour heavily and Camel quickly erected his tarp again. Hump Master once again beat me to spread-eagle himself in the center. And once again smoke hit me from the left side and rain from the right. I tried to rationalize it by thinking just how few truly annoying people I had met thus far on the trail. Finally, it quit raining again and the other Sleazebags arrived from the Subway.

Bounding out of the car, one Sleazebag shouted, “Dude, you completely fucking blew it. The chick at the Subway had a total knockout body. Better than that waitress in Hot Springs and a dead heat with the chick in Damascus.” But another Sleazebag dissented, “Yeah, but her face sucked.”

“Fuck her face,” the first Sleazebag countered. “Who gives a shit about a fucking face out here in the middle of nowhere?”

As they munched on their sandwiches, George and Ray, two nice section hikers I had chatted with earlier, were searching for their food box. These two were doing their annual two hundred-mile section hike. Their method is to bury food boxes in various places near roads to pick up when they pass by. That saves them re-supply trips into town and helps them maximize the distance they can cover in their annual two-week section hike.

One Sleazebag opined, “I saw those two guys earlier today and I guaran-fucking-tee you they’re a bunch of faggots. They’re probably just using looking for a food bag as an excuse to go wear each other out in the woods.”

“Hell yeah,” another Sleazebag responded. “Look at ’em out there with no fucking shirts on, preening around,” ignoring the fact that most of the Sleazebags also were shirtless.

We all started the big climb up Bald Knob, and I chatted pleasantly with Sandy and Camel, between gasps. However, when we got to the top it started raining again and everybody took the disheartening half-mile side trail to the Cow Gamp Shelter. I hurried to claim a spot in the shelter. But when the shelter filled up, lo and behold, Hump Man was right next to me.
Fuck
!

Then the skies opened up again and we were confined to the shelter. For the next two hours I raged within as Hump Master blithely smoked, with the prevailing wind blowing right into my face.

Hanging out with the Sleazebags was like a modern-day rendition of Hemingway’s famous short stories,
Men Without Women
. All night I felt like I was in a junior high school locker room. Every girl on the trail was analyzed from head to toe. Speaking of one girl, Pocohantas—who had the courage to hike with them—Moonwalker said, “It’s the strangest thing. The legs, the tits, the ass all look okay. But trust me, dude, the whole package together just doesn’t work.” Then he felt compelled to add, “Sometimes when I see her early in the morning in a shelter I head straight to the privy.”

Camel had the audacity to throw in some mild dissent saying, “Come on, now. Pocohantas is pretty cool.” It was a good thing he mounted that minor defense because he and Pocohantas became an item for the last thousand miles on the trail. And unlike most trail romances, it apparently continued.

But there was one name that apparently was far too sacred to even mention: Vogue.

However, at nightfall as the rain slacked off, a former Sleazebag who had fallen behind arrived at the shelter with his headlight on. Immediately, he was debriefed on every detail of the Gang of 10 and specifically, Vogue. “They act like we (Sleazebags) are crazy,” he said. “But, let me tell you, the minute they get to a shelter Vogue goes straight to your entries, Hump Master.” This generated excitement all over the shelter. And Hump Man got up and walked around like a matinee idol as a knowing smile and “gotcha” look came across his face.

A half-hour later, as the noise lessened, George and Ray trudged through the mud and dark. They looked inside the shelter, saw it was full, and walked over to a clearing to set up their tent. This prompted a Sleazebag from the far corner of the shelter to remark, “Better put the earplugs in tonight.”

“Earplugs, my ass,” someone blurted from the middle of the shelter. “Remove butt plugs from backpacks and insert immediately!”

The shelter was full, as was often the case on rainy nights. Some contact and bumping was probably inevitable, but Hump Master had his legs draped over part of my sleeping bag. I got so distraught I tried switching from head-to-toe in the middle of the evening.

Overall, the evening was better than the previous evening with the bullfrogs, but not by much. I anxiously packed my bags in the morning and hurried out of there by 7 o’clock before the Sleazebags had even arisen. I didn’t know about Hump Master, but most of them seemed like good guys. It was just too much testosterone gathered in one group for any sort of balance to prevail.

After thirteen miles I took a steep side trail to a hostel to escape the Sleazebags. I saw Ug there for the first time since Tennessee and with a full-flowing blonde beard and shoulder-length hair he looked like a true mountain man. But with his broad, easy smile he soon became my favorite trail hippie.

Ug (hippie, not caveman) and I took the big climb back to the trail where we ran into a stray member of the former Gang of 10. After several hundred miles of unity, their solidarity had cracked. “We’ve disbursed, and some have quit,” he reported. “Vogue is in a hurry-up mode and is up ahead.”

Now that news put a bounce back in my step after some initial apathy. But then I silently chided myself for the hypocrisy of criticizing Hump Master for aggressively pursuing Vogue, and here I was practically “pinkblazing” to catch her. Besides, she had shown no extraordinary interest in me.