A Walk In The Woods

Chapter 13

And that was about it for the start of our great adventure. We walked eighteen miles to Front Royal, where my wife was to pick us up in two days if she managed to find her way by car from New Hampshire in an unfamiliar country.

I had to go off for a month to do other things-principally, try to persuade people to buy a book of mine even though it had nothing to do with effortless weight loss, running with the wolves, thriving in an age of anxiety, or the O.J. Simpson trial. (Even so, it sold over sixty copies.) Katz was going back to Des Moines, where he had a job offer for the summer building houses, though he promised to come back in August and hike the famous and forbidding Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine with me.

At one point very early in the trip he had talked earnestly of doing the whole trail, pushing on alone until I was able to rejoin him in June, but when I mentioned this now he just gave a hollow laugh and invited me to join him in the real world when I felt up to it.

“To tell you the truth, I’m amazed we’ve come this far,” he said, and I agreed. We had hiked 500 miles, a million and a quarter steps, since setting off from Amicalola. We had grounds to be proud. We were real hikers now. We had shit in the woods and slept with bears. We had become, we would forever be, mountain men.

Eighteen miles was a heroic distance for us, but we were filthy and trail-weary and more than ready for a town, and so we plodded on. We reached Front Royal about seven, dead tired, and went to the first motel we came to. It was arrestingly dire, but cheap. The bed sagged, the TV picture jumped as if it were being mercilessly goosed by an electronic component, and my door didn’t lock. It pretended to lock, but if you pushed on it from outside with a finger, it popped open. This perplexed me for a moment until I realized that no one could possibly want any of my possessions, so I just pulled it shut and went off to find Katz and go to dinner. We ate at a steakhouse down the street and retired happily to our televisions and beds.

In the morning, I went early to Kmart and bought two complete new sets of clothes-socks, underwear, blue jeans, sneakers, handkerchiefs, and the two liveliest shirts I could find (one with boats and anchors, the other with a famous-monuments-of-Europe motif). I returned to the motel, presented Katz with half-he couldn’t have been more thrilled-then went to my room and put on my new attire. We met in the motel parking lot ten minutes later, looking crisp and stylish, and exchanged many flattering comments. With a day to kill, we went for breakfast, had an idle, contented saunter through the modest central business district, poked around in thrift shops for something to do, found a camping store where I bought a replacement hiking stick exactly like the one I had lost, had lunch, and in the afternoon decided naturally to go for a walk. It was, after all, what we did.

We found some railroad tracks, which followed the stately curves of the Shenandoah River. There is nothing more agreeable, more pleasantly summery, than to stroll along railroad tracks in a new shirt. We walked without haste or particular purpose, mountain men on holiday, chatting seamlessly about nothing in particular, stepping aside from time to time to let a freight train lumber past and generally enjoying the abundant sunshine, the beckoning, infinite gleam of silver track, and the simple pleasure of moving forward on legs that felt tireless. We walked almost till sunset. It was a perfect way to finish.

The following morning we went to breakfast, and then came the three hours of fidgety torture of standing at the edge of a motel drive watching traffic for a particular car filled with beaming, excited, much-missed faces. For weeks and weeks I had tried not to visit that shadowy ache where thoughts of my family lay, but now that they were nearly here-now that I could let my thoughts run free-the anticipation was nearly unbearable.

Well, you can imagine, I’m sure, the joyous reunion scene when they finally arrived-the exuberant hugs, the scatter-gun chatter, the tumble of needlessly but delightfully detailed information about the problems of finding the right interstate exit and correct motel, the impressed appraisal of dad’s new body, the less impressed appraisal of his new shirt, the sudden remembering to include Katz (bashfully grinning on the margins) in the celebrations, the tousling of hair, the whole transcendantly happy business of being rejoined.

We took Katz to National Airport in Washington, where he was booked on a late afternoon flight to Des Moines. At the airport, I realized we were already in different universes (he in a “Where do I go to check in?” sort of distraction, I in the distraction of knowing that my family waited, that the car was badly parked, that it was nearly rush hour in Washington), so we parted awkwardly, almost absently, with hasty wishes for a good flight and promises to meet again in August for the conclusion of our long amble. When he was gone I felt bad, but then I turned to the car, saw my family, and didn’t think about him again for weeks.

It was the end of May, almost June, before I got back on the trail. I went for a walk in the woods near our home, with a day pack containing a bottle of water, two peanut butter sandwiches, a map (for form’s sake), and nothing else. It was summer now, so the woods were a new and different place, alive with green and filled with birdsong and swarming mosquitoes and pesky blackfly. I walked five miles over low hills through the woods to the town of Etna, where I sat beside an old cemetery and ate my sandwiches, then packed up and walked home. I was back before lunch. It didn’t feel right at all.

The next day, I drove to Mount Moosilauke, fifty miles from my home on the southern edge of the White Mountains. Moosilauke is a wonderful mountain, one of the most beautiful in New England, with an imposing leonine grandeur, but it is rather in the middle of nowhere so it doesn’t attract a great deal of attention. It belongs to Dartmouth College, of Hanover, whose famous Outing Club has been looking after it in a commendably diligent and low-key way since the early years of this century. Dartmouth introduced downhill skiing to America on Moosilauke, and the first national championships were held there in 1933. But it was too remote, and soon the sport in New England moved to other mountains nearer main highways, and Moosilauke returned to a splendid obscurity. Today you would never guess that it had ever known fame.

I parked in a small dirt parking lot, the only car that day, and set off into the woods. This time I had water, peanut butter sandwiches, a map, and insect repellent. Mount Moosilauke is 4,802 feet high, and steep. Without a full pack, I walked straight up it without stopping-a novel and gratifying experience. The view from the top was gorgeously panoramic, but it still didn’t feel right without Katz, without a full pack. I was home by 4:00P.M. This didn’t feel right at all. You don’t hike the Appalachian Trail and then go home and cut the grass.

I had been so absorbed for so long with setting up and executing the first part of the trip that I hadn’t actually stopped to consider where I would be at this point. Where I was, in fact, was companionless, far away from where I had gotten off the trail, and impossibly adrift from a touchingly optimistic hiking schedule I had drawn up nearly a year before. This showed me to be somewhere in the region of New Jersey by about now, blithely striding off up to thirty miles a day.

It was clear that I had to make some adjustments. Even overlooking the large hunk that Katz and I had left out by jumping from Gatlinburg to Roanoke, and no matter how I juggled the numbers, it was abundantly evident that I was never going to hike the whole thing in one season. At my pace, if I returned to the trail at Front Royal where we had left off and resumed hiking north, I would be lucky to reach central Vermont by winter, 500 miles shy of the trail’s northern terminus at Mount Katahdin.

This time, too, there was no small, endearingly innocent pulse of excitement, that keen and eager frisson that comes with venturing into the unknown with gleaming, untried equipment. This time I knew exactly what was out there-a lot of long, taxing miles, steep rocky mountains, hard shelter floors, hot days without showers, unsatisfying meals cooked on a temperamental stove. Now, moreover, there would be all the perils that come with warmer weather: wild and lively lightning storms, surly rattlesnakes, fever-inducing ticks, bears with appetites, and, oh, one unpredictable, motiveless, possibly drifting murderer, since reports of the deaths of the two women killed in Shenandoah National Park were just making the news.

It was more than a little discouraging. The best I could do was to do, well, the best I could do. Anyway, I had to try. Everyone in town who knew me (not a huge number, admittedly, but enough to have me forever dodging into doorways whenever I saw a familiar face approaching along Main Street) knew that I was trying to hike the AT, which patently I could not be doing if I was to be seen skulking in town. (“I saw that Bryson fellow today slipping into Eastman’s Pharmacy with a newspaper in front of his face. I thought he was supposed to be hiking the Appalachian Trail. Anyway, you’re right. He is odd.”)

It was clear I had to get back on the trail-properly back on, far from home, somewhere at least reasonably proximate to northern Virginia -if I was to have any pretense of hiking the trail with anything approaching completeness. The problem was that it is almost impossible nearly everywhere along the AT to get on and off the trail without assistance. I could fly to Washington or Newark or Scranton, or any of several other places in the region of the trail, but in each case I would still be scores of miles short of the trail itself. I couldn’t ask my dear and patient wife to take two days to drive me back to Virginia or Pennsylvania, so I decided to drive myself. I would, I figured, park at a likely looking spot, take a hike up into the hills, hike back to the car, drive on a way, and repeat the process. I suspected this would turn out to be fairly unsatisfying, possibly even imbecile (and I was right on both counts), but I couldn’t think of a better alternative.

And thus I was to be found, in the first week of June, standing on the banks of the Shenandoah again, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, blinking at a grey sky and trying to pretend that with all my heart this was where I wanted to be.

Harpers Ferry is an interesting place for a number of reasons. First, it is quite pretty. This is because it is a National Historical Park, so there are no Pizza Huts, McDonald’s, Burger Kings, or even residents, at least in the lower, older part of town. Instead, you get restored or re-created buildings with plaques and interpretation boards, so it doesn’t have much, or indeed any, real life, but it still has a certain beguiling, polished prettiness. You can see that it would be a truly nice place to live if only people could be trusted to reside there without succumbing to the urge to have Pizza Huts and Taco Bells (and personally I believe they could, for as much as eighteen months), so instead you get a pretend town, attractively tucked between steep hills at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers.

It is a National Historical Park because, of course, it is a historic place. It was at Harpers Ferry that the abolitionist John Brown decided to liberate America’s slaves and set up a new nation of his own in northwestern Virginia, which was a pretty ambitious undertaking considering that he had an army of just twenty-one people. To that end, on October 16, 1859, he and his little group stole into town under cover of darkness, captured the federal armory without resistance (it was guarded by a single night-watchman), yet still managed to kill a hapless passerby-who was, ironically, a freed black slave. When news got out that a federal armory with 100,000 rifles and a great deal of ammunition was in the hands of a small band of lunatics, the president, James Buchanan, dispatched Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee (at that time still a loyal Union soldier, of course) to sort things out. It took Lee and his men less than three minutes of fighting to overcome the hapless rebellion. Brown was captured alive, swiftly tried, and sentenced to be hanged a month hence.

One of the soldiers sent to oversee the hanging was Thomas J. Jackson-soon to become famous as Stonewall Jackson-and one of the eager onlookers in the crowd was John Wilkes Booth. So the capture of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry served as quite a neat overture for all that followed. Meanwhile, in the wake of Brown’s little adventure, all hell was breaking loose. Northern abolitionists like Ralph Waldo Emerson made Brown a martyr, and Southern loyalists got up in arms, quite literally, at the idea that this might be the start of a trend. Before you knew it, the nation was at war.

Harpers Ferry remained at the center of things throughout the exuberantly bloody conflict that followed. Gettysburg was just thirty miles to the north, Manassas a similar distance to the south, and Antietam (where, it is worth noting, twice as many men died in one day as the total American losses in the War of 1812, Mexican War, and Spanish-American War combined) was just ten miles away. Harpers Ferry itself changed hands eight times during the war, though the record in this regard belongs to Winchester, Virginia, a few miles south, which managed to be captured and recaptured seventy-five times.

These days, Harpers Ferry passes its time accommodating tourists and cleaning up after floods. With two temperamental rivers at its feet and a natural funnel of bluffs before and behind, it is forever being inundated. There had been a bad flood in the town six months before, and the park’s staff was still busy mopping out repainting, and carrying furnishings, artifacts, and displays down from upstairs storage rooms. (Three months after my visit, they would have to take everything back up again.) At one of the houses, two of the rangers came out the door and down the walk and nodded smiles at me as they passed. Both of them, I noticed, were packing sidearms. Goodness knows what the world is coming to when park rangers carry service revolvers.

I had a poke around the town, but nearly every building I went to had a locked door and a notice saying“CLOSED FOR FLOOD REPAIRS.” Then I went and looked at the spot where the two rivers flow together. There was an Appalachian Trail notice board there. Although it had been only about ten days since the two women were murdered in Shenandoah National Park, there was already a small poster appealing for information. It had color photographs of them both. They were clearly photos taken by the women themselves along the trail, in hiking gear, looking happy and healthy, radiant even. It was hard to look at them, knowing their doom. It occurred to me, with a small inward start, that had the two women lived they would very probably be arriving in Harpers Ferry just about now, that instead of standing here looking at a poster of them I could be chatting with them-or indeed, given a slight alteration of luck and fate, that it could be them looking at a poster of me and Katz looking trail-happy and confident.

In one of the few houses open I found a friendly, well-informed, happily unarmed ranger named David Fox, who seemed surprised and pleased to have a visitor. He bobbed up instantly from his stool when I came in and was clearly eager to answer any questions. We got to talking about preservation, and he mentioned how hard it was for the Park Service with so little funds to do a proper job. When the park had been formed, there had been money enough to buy only about half of the Schoolhouse Ridge Battlefield above town (one of the most important if least celebrated of Civil War battle sites) and now a developer was in the process of building houses and shops on what Fox clearly saw as hallowed ground. The developer had even started running pipes across National park land in the confident-but, as it happened, mistaken-presumption that the Park Service wouldn’t have the will or money to stop him. Fox told me I should go up and look at it. I said I would.

But first I had a more important pilgrimage to make. Harpers Ferry is the headquarters of the Appalachian Trail Conference, overseers of the noble footpath to which I had dedicated my summer. The ATC occupies a modest white house on a steep hill above the old part of town. I trudged up and went in. The HQ was half office/half shop-the office portion commendably busy looking, the shop half arrayed with AT guides and keepsakes. At one end of the public area was a large-scale model of the entire trail, which, had I seen it before I started, might well have dissuaded me from attempting such an ambitious undertaking. It was perhaps fifteen feet long and conveyed arrestingly and at a glance what 2,200 miles of mountains look like: hard. The rest of the public area was filled with AT goods-T-shirts, postcards, bandannas, books, miscellaneous publications. I chose a couple of books and some postcards, and was served at the counter by a friendly young woman named Laurie Potteiger, whose badge described her as an Information Specialist, and they seem to have chosen the right person, for she was a mine of information.

She told me that the previous year 1,500 prospective thru-hikers had started the trail, 1,200 had made it to Neels Gap (that’s a dropout rate of 20 percent in the first week!), about a third had made it to Harpers Ferry, roughly halfway, and about 300 had reached Katahdin, a higher success rate than usual. Sixty or so people had successfully hiked the trail from north to south. This year’s crop of thru-hikers had been passing through for the past month. It was too early to say what the final figure for the year would be, but it would certainly be higher. It rose, in any case, almost every year.

I asked her about the dangers of the trail, and she told me that in the eight years that she had worked for the ATC, there had been just two confirmed cases of snakebite, neither fatal, and one person killed by lightning.

I asked her about the recent murders.

She gave a sympathetic grimace. “It’s awful. Everyone’s really upset about it, because trust is such a kind of bedrock part Of hiking the AT, you know? I thru-hiked myself in 1987, so I know how much you come to rely on the goodness of strangers. The trail is really all about that, isn’t it? And to have that taken away, well…” Then, remembering her position, she gave me a little bit of the official line-a brief, articulate spiel to the effect that one should never forget that the trail is not insulated from the larger ills of society but that statistically it remains extremely safe compared with most places in America. “It’s had nine murders since 1937-about the same as you would get in many small towns.” This was correct, but a wee disingenuous. The AT had no murders in its first thirty-six years and nine in the past twenty-two. Still, her larger point was inarguable. You are more likely to be murdered in your bed in America than on the AT. Or as an American friend put it to me much later: “Look, if you draw a two thousand-mile-long line across the United States at any angle, it’s going to pass through nine murder victims.”

“If you’re interested, there’s a book about one of the murders,” she said and reached below the counter. She rooted for a moment in a box and brought out a paperback called Eight Bullets, which she passed to me for examination. It was about two hikers who were shot in Pennsylvania in 1988. “We don’t keep it out because, you know, it’s kind of upsetting, especially now,” she said apologetically.

I bought it, and as she handed me my change I mentioned to her the thought that if the women in Shenandoah had survived they would be passing through about now. “Yeah,” she said, “I’d thought about that.”

It was drizzling when I stepped back outside. I went up to Schoolhouse Ridge to have a look at the battlefield. It was a large, parklike hilltop with a wandering path lined at intervals with information boards describing charges and last-ditch stands and other confused, noisy action. The battle for Harpers Ferry was the finest moment for Stonewall Jackson (he who had last come to town to hang John Brown) because it was here, through some deft maneuvering and a bit of luck, that he managed to capture 12,500 Union troops, more American soldiers than would be captured in a single action until Bataan and Corregidor in World War II.

Now Stonewall Jackson is a man worth taking an interest in. Few people in history have achieved greater fame in a shorter period with less useful activity in the brainbox than Gen. Thomas J. Jackson. His idiosyncrasies were legendary. He was hopelessly, but inventively, hypochondriacal. One of his more engaging physiological beliefs was that one arm was bigger than the other, and in consequence he always walked and rode with that arm raised, so that his blood would drain into his body. He was a champion sleeper. More than once he fell asleep at the dinner table with food in his mouth. At the Battle of White Oak Swamp, his lieutenants found it all but impossible to rouse him and lifted him, insensible, on to his horse, where he continued to slumber while shells exploded around him. He took obsessive zeal in recording captured goods and would defend them at all costs. His list of matériel liberated from the Union Army during the 1862 Shenandoah campaign included “six handkerchiefs, two and three quarter dozen neckties, and one bottle of red ink.” He drove his superiors and fellow officers to fury, partly by repeatedly disobeying instructions and partly by his paranoid habit of refusing to divulge his strategies, such as they were, to anyone. One officer under his command was ordered to withdraw from the town of Gordonsville, where he was on the brink of a signal victory, and march on the double to Staunton. Arriving in Staunton, he found fresh orders to go at once to Mount Crawford. There he was told to return to Gordonsville.

It was largely because of his habit of marching troops all over the Shenandoah Valley in an illogical and inexplicable fashion that Jackson earned a reputation among bewildered enemy officers for wiliness. His ineradicable fame rests almost entirely on the fact that he had a couple of small but inspiring victories when elsewhere Southern troops were being slaughtered and routed and by dint of having the best nickname any soldier has ever enjoyed. He was unquestionably brave, but in fact it is altogether possible that he was given that nickname not for gallantry and daring but for standing inert, like a stone wall, when a charge was called for. Gen Barnard Bee, who gave him the name at the First Battle of Manassas, was killed before the day was out, so the matter will remain forever unresolvable.

His victory at Harpers Ferry, the greatest triumph for the Confederacy in the Civil War, was almost entirely because for once he followed the instructions of Robert E. Lee. It sealed his fame. A few months later he was accidentally shot by his own troops at the Battle of chancellorsville and died eight days later. The war was barely half over. He was just thirty-nine.

Jackson spent much of the war in and around the Blue Ridge Mountains, camping in and marching through the very woods and high gaps through which Katz and I had lately passed, so I was interested to see the scene of his greatest triumph, though really I was curious to learn if the developer had done anything up there worth getting indignant about.

In the rain and dying light, I couldn’t see any sign of new houses, certainly not on or near the sacred ground. So I followed the path around the undulating field, reading the information boards with dutiful attention, trying to be absorbed by the fact that Captain Poague’s battery had stood just here and Colonel Grigsby’s troops were arrayed over there, but being considerably less successful than one might hope when one is growing slowly soaked in the process. I didn’t have the necessary energy to imagine the noise and smoke and carnage. Besides, I had had enough death for one day, so I tramped back to the car and pushed on.

Chapter 14

In the morning, I drove to Pennsylvania, thirty miles or so to the north. The Appalachian Trail runs for 230 miles in a northeasterly arc across the state, like the broad end of a slice of pie. I never met a hiker with a good word to say about the trail in Pennsylvania. It is, as someone told a National Geographic reporter in 1987, the place “where boots go to die.” During the last ice age it experienced what geologists call a periglacial climate-a zone at the edge of an ice sheet characterized by frequent freeze-thaw cycles that fractured the rock. The result is mile upon mile of jagged, oddly angled slabs of stone strewn about in wobbly piles known to science as felsenmeer (literally, “sea of rocks”). These require constant attentiveness if you are not to twist an ankle or sprawl on your face-not a pleasant experience with fifty pounds of momentum on your back. Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail, and the most unreliable water sources, particularly in high summer. The really beautiful Appalachian ranges in Pennsylvania -Nittany and Jacks and Tussey-stand to the north and west. For various practical historical reasons, the AT goes nowhere near them. It traverses no notable eminences at all in Pennsylvania, offers no particularly memorable vistas, visits no national parks or forests, and overlooks the state’s considerable history. In consequence, the AT is essentially just the central part of a very long, taxing haul connecting the South and New England. It is little wonder that most people dislike it.

Oh, and it also has the very worst maps ever produced for hikers anywhere. The six sheets-maps is really much too strong a word for them-produced for Pennsylvania by a body called the Keystone Trails Association are small, monochrome, appallingly printed, inadequately keyed, and astoundingly vague-in short, useless: comically useless, heartbreakingly useless, dangerously useless. No one should be sent into a wilderness with maps this bad.

I had this brought home to me with a certain weep-inducing force as I stood in a parking lot in a place called Caledonia State Park looking at a section of map that was simply a blurred smear of whorls, like a poorly taken thumbprint. A single contour line was interrupted by a printed number in microscopic type. The number said either “ 1800” or “1200”-it wasn’t possible to tell-but it didn’t actually matter because there was no scale indicated anywhere, nothing to denote the height interval from one contour line to the next, or whether the packed bands of lines indicated a steep climb or precipitous descent. Not one single thing-not one single thing-within the entire park and for some miles around was inscribed. From where I stood, I could be fifty feet or two miles from the Appalachian Trail, in any direction. There was simply no telling.

Foolishly, I had not looked at these maps before setting off from home. I had packed in a hurry, simply noted that I had the correct set, and stuck them in my pack. I looked through them all now with a sense of dismay, as you might a series of compromising pictures of a loved one. I had known all along that I was never going to walk across Pennsylvania-I had neither the time nor the spirit for it just now-but I had thought I might find some nice circular walks that would give me something of the challenging flavor of the state without making me endlessly retrace my steps. It was clear now, looking through the complete set, that not only were there no circular hikes to be had, but it was going to be the next thing to pure luck any time I stumbled on the trail at all.

Sighing, I put the maps away and set off through the park on foot looking for the familiar white blazes of the AT. It was a pleasant park in a wooded valley, quite empty on this fine morning. I walked for perhaps an hour along a network of winding paths through trees and over wooden footbridges, but I failed to find the AT, so I returned to the car and pushed on, along a lonely highway through the dense flying leaves of Michaux State Forest and on to Pine Grove Furnace State Park, a large recreation area built around a nineteenth-century stone kiln, now a picturesque ruin, from which it takes its name. The park had snack huts, picnic tables, and a lake with a swimming area, but all were shut and there wasn’t a soul about. On the edge of the picnic area was a big dumpster with a sturdy metal lid that had been severely-arrestingly-mangled and dented and half wrenched from its hinges, presumably by a bear trying to get at park garbage. I examined it with the deepest respect; I hadn’t realized black bears were quite that strong.

Here at least the AT blazes were prominent. They led around the lake and up through steep woods to the summit of Piney Mountain, which wasn’t indicated on the map and isn’t really a mountain since it barely rises to 1,500 feet. Still, it was challenging enough on a hot summer’s day. Just outside the park there is a board marking the traditional, but entirely notional, midpoint of the Appalachian Trail, with 1,080.2 indicated miles of hiking in either direction. (Since no one can say exactly how long the AT is, the real midpoint could be anywhere within fifty miles or so; in any case, it would change from year to year because of reroutings.) Two-thirds of thru-hikers never see it anyway, because they have dropped out by this point. It must actually be quite a depressing moment-to have slogged through a mountainous wilderness for ten or eleven weeks and to realize that for all that effort you are still but halfway there.

It was also around here that one of the trail’s more notorious murders took place, the one at the heart of the book Eight Bullets, which I had bought at ATC headquarters the day before. The story is simply told. In May 1988, two young hikers, Rebecca Wight and Claudia Brenner, who also happened to be lesbians, excited the attention of a disturbed young man with a rifle, who shot them eight times from a distance as they made love in a leafy clearing beside the trail. Wight was killed. Brenner, seriously wounded, managed to stumble down the mountain to a road and was rescued by some passing teenagers in a pickup truck. The murderer was swiftly caught and convicted.

The next year, a young man and woman were killed by a drifter at a shelter just a few miles to the north, which rather gave Pennsylvania a bad reputation for a while, but then there were no murders anywhere along the AT for seven years until the recent deaths of the two young women in Shenandoah National Park. Their deaths brought the official murder toll to nine-quite a large number for any footpath, no matter how you look at it-though in fact there probably have been more. Between 1946 and 1950 three people vanished while hiking through one small area of Vermont, but they aren’t included in the tally; whether because it happened so long ago or because it was never conclusively proved they were murdered I couldn’t say. I was also told by an acquaintance in New England of an older couple who were killed by a deranged axe murderer in Maine sometime in the 1970s, but again it doesn’t appear in any records because, evidently, they were on a side trail when they were attacked.

Overnight I had read Eight Bullets, Brenner’s account of the murder of her friend, so I was generally acquainted with the circumstances, but I intentionally left the book in the car, as it seemed a little morbid to go looking for a death site nearly a decade after the event. I wasn’t remotely spooked by the murder, but even so I felt a vague, low-grade unease at being alone in a silent woods so far from home. I missed Katz, missed his puffing and bitching and unflappable fearlessness, hated the thought that I could sit waiting on a rock till the end of time and he would never come. The woods were in full chlorophyll-choked glory now, which made them seem even more pressing and secretive. Often, I couldn’t see five feet into the dense foliage on either side of the path. If I did happen on a bear, I would be quite helpless. No Katz would come along after a minute to smack it on the snout for me and say, “Jesus, Bryson, you cause me a lot of trouble.” No one at all would come to share the excitement, it appeared. There didn’t seem to be another person within fifty miles. I pushed on, filled with mild disquiet, feeling like someone swimming too far from shore.

It was 3.5 miles to the top of Piney Mountain. At the summit, I stood uncertainly, unable to decide whether to go on a little farther or turn back and perhaps try somewhere else. I couldn’t help feeling a kind of helpless and dispiriting pointlessness in what I was doing. I had known for some time that I was not going to complete the AT, but only now was it dawning on me how foolish and futile it was to dabble in it in this way. It hardly mattered whether I went on two miles or five miles or twelve miles. If I walked twelve miles instead of, say, five, what would it gain me after all? Certainly not any sight or experience or sensation that I hadn’t had a thousand times already. That was the trouble with the AT-it was all one immensely long place, and there was more of it, infinitely more of it, than I could ever conquer. It wasn’t that I wanted to quit. Quite the contrary. I was happy to walk, keen to walk. I just wanted to know what I was doing out here.

As I stood in this state of indecision, there was a dry crack of wood and a careless disturbance of undergrowth perhaps fifty feet into the woods-something good-sized and unseen. I stopped everything-moving, breathing, thinking-and stood on tiptoe peering into the leafy void. The noise came again, nearer. Whatever it was, it was coming my way! Whimpering quietly but sincerely, I ran a hundred yards, day pack bouncing, glasses jiggling, then turned, heart stopped, and looked back. A deer, a large buck, handsome and proud, stepped onto the path, gazed at me for a moment without concern, and sauntered on. I took a long moment to catch my breath, wiped a river of sweat from my brow, and felt profoundly discouraged.

Everyone has a supremely low moment somewhere along the AT, usually when the urge to quit the trail becomes almost overpowering. The irony of my moment was that I wanted to get back on the trail and didn’t know how. I hadn’t lost just Katz, my boon companion, but my whole sense of connectedness to the trail. I had lost my momentum, my feeling of purpose. In the most literal way I needed to find my feet again. And now on top of everything else I was quaking as if I had never been out in the woods before. All the experience I had piled up in the earlier weeks seemed to make it harder rather than easier to be out on the trail on my own. I hadn’t expected this. It didn’t seem fair. It certainly wasn’t right. In a glum frame of mind, I returned to the car.

I spent the night near Harrisburg and in the morning drove north and east across the state on back highways, trying to follow the trail as closely as I could by road, stopping from time to time where possible to sample the trail but without finding anything remotely rewarding, so mostly I drove.

Little by little the town names along the way began to take on a frank industrial tone-Port Carbon, Minersville, Slatedale-and I realized I was entering the strange, half-forgotten world of Pennsylvania ’s anthracite region. At Minersville, I turned onto a back highway and headed through a landscape of overgrown mine tailings and rusting machinery towards Centralia, the strangest, saddest town I believe I have ever seen.

Eastern Pennsylvania sits on one of the richest coal beds on earth. Almost from the moment Europeans arrived, they realized there was coal out there in quantities almost beyond conception. The trouble was, it was virtually all anthracite, a coal so immensely hard (it is 95 percent carbon) that for a very long time no one could figure out how to get it to light. It wasn’t until 1828 that an enterprising Scot named James Neilson had the simple but effective idea of injecting heated air rather than cold air into an iron furnace by means of a bellows. The process became known as a hot blast, and it transformed the coal industry all over the world (Wales, too, had a lot of anthracite) but especially in the United States. By the end of the century America was producing 300 million tons of coal a year, about as much as the rest of the world put together, and the great bulk of it came from Pennsylvania ’s anthracite belt.

Meanwhile, to its intense gratification, Pennsylvania had also discovered oil-not only discovered it but devised ways to make it industrially useful. Petroleum (or rock oil) had been a curiosity of western Pennsylvania for years. It emerged in seeps along riverbanks, where it was blotted up with blankets to be made into patent medicines esteemed for their value to cure everything from scrofula to diarrhea. In 1859, a mysterious figure named Col. Edwin Drake (who wasn’t a colonel at all but a retired railway conductor, with no understanding of geology) developed, from goodness knows where, the belief that oil could be extracted from the ground via wells. At Titusville, he bored a hole to a depth of sixty-nine feet and got the world’s first gusher. Quickly it was realized that petroleum in volume not only could be used to bind bowels and banish scabby growths but could be refined into lucrative products like paraffin and kerosene. Western Pennsylvania boomed inordinately. In three months, as John McPhee notes in In Suspect Terrain, the endearingly named Pithole City went from a population of zero to 15,000, and other towns throughout the region sprang up- Oil City, Petroleum Center, Red Hot. John Wilkes Booth came and lost his savings, then went off to kill a president, but others stayed and made a fortune.

For one lively half century Pennsylvania had a virtual monopoly on one of the most valuable products in the world, oil, and an overwhelmingly dominant role in the production of a second, coal. Because of the proximity of rich supplies of fuel, the state became e center of big, fuel-intensive industries like steelmaking and chemicals. Lots of people became colossally rich.

But not the mineworkers. Mining has of course always been a wretched line of work everywhere, but nowhere more so than in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thanks to immigration, miners were infinitely expendable. When the Welsh got belligerent, you brought in Irish. When they failed to satisfy, you brought in Italians or Poles or Hungarians. Workers were paid by the ton, which both enouraged them to hack out coal with reckless haste and meant that any labor they expended making their environment safer or more comfortable went uncompensated. Mine shafts were bored through the earth like holes through Swiss cheese, often destabilizing whole valleys. In 1846 at Carbondale almost fifty acres of mine shafts collapsed simultaneously without warning, claiming hundreds of lives. Explosions and flash fires were common. Between 1870 and the outbreak of the First World War, 50,000 people died in American mines.

The great irony of anthracite is that, tough as it is to light, once you get it lit it’s nearly impossible to put out. Stories of uncontrolled mine fires are legion in eastern Pennsylvania. One fire at Lehigh started in 1850 and didn’t burn itself out until the Great Depression-eighty years after it started.

And thus we come to Centralia. For a century, Centralia was a sturdy little pit community. However difficult life may have been for the early miners, by the second half of the twentieth century Centralia was a reasonably prosperous, snug, hardworking town with a population approaching 2,000. It had a thriving business district, with banks and a post office and the normal range of shops and small department stores, a high school, four churches, an Odd Fellows Club, a town hall-in short, a typical, pleasant, contentedly anonymous small American town.

Unfortunately, it also sat on twenty-four million tons of anthracite. In 1962, a fire in a dump on the edge of town ignited a coal seam. The fire department poured thousands of gallons of water on the fire, but each time they seemed to have it extinguished it came back, like those trick birthday candles that go out for a moment and then spontaneously reignite. And then, very slowly, the fire began to eat its way along the subterranean seams. Smoke began to rise eerily from the ground over a wide area, like steam off a lake at dawn. On Highway 61, the pavement grew warm to the touch, then began to crack and settle, rendering the road unusable. The smoking zone passed under the highway and fanned out through a neighboring woodland and up towards St. Ignatius Catholic church on a knoll above the town.

The U.S. Bureau of Mines brought in experts, who proposed any number of possible remedies-digging a deep trench through the town, deflecting the course of the fire with explosives, flushing the whole thing out hydraulically-but the cheapest proposal would have cost at least $20 million, with no guarantee that it would work, and in any case no one was empowered to spend that kind of money. So the fire slowly burned on.

In 1979, the owner of a gas station near the center of town found that the temperature in his underground tanks was registering 172°F. Sensors sunk into the earth showed that the temperature thirteen feet under the tanks was almost 1,000°. Elsewhere, people were discovering that their cellar walls and floors were hot to the touch. By now smoke was seeping from the ground all over town, and people were beginning to grow nauseated and faint from the increased levels of carbon dioxide in their homes. In 1981, a twelve-year-old boy was playing in his grandmother’s backyard when a plume of smoke appeared in front of him. As he stared at it, the ground suddenly opened around him. He clung to tree roots until someone heard his calls and hauled him out. The hole was found to be eighty feet deep. Within days, similar cave-ins were appearing all over town. It was about then that people started getting serious about the fire.

The federal government came up with $42 million to evacuate the town. As people moved out, their houses were bulldozed and the rubble was neatly, fastidiously cleared away until there were almost no buildings remaining. So today Centralia isn’t really even a ghost town. It’s just a big open space with a grid of empty streets still surreally furnished with stop signs and fire hydrants. Every thirty feet or so there is a neat, paved driveway going fifteen or twenty yards to nowhere. There are still a few houses scattered around-all of them modest, narrow, wood-framed structures stabilized with brick buttresses-and a couple of buildings in what was once the central business district.

I parked outside a building with a faded sign that said, rather grandly, “CENTRALIA MINE FIRE PROJECT OFFICE OF THE COLUMBIA REDEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY.” The building was boarded and all but falling down. Next door was another, in better shape, called Speed Stop Car Parts, overlooking a neatly groomed park with an American flag on a pole. The shop appeared to be still in business but the interior was darkened and there was no one around. There was no one anywhere, come to that-no passing traffic, not a sound but the lazy clank of a metal ring knocking against the flagpole. Here and there in the vacant lots were metal cylinders, like oil drums, that had been fixed in the ground and were silently venting smoke.

Up a slight slope, across an expanse of vacant lots, a modern church, quite large, stood in a lazy pall of white smoke-St. Ignatius, I assumed. I walked up. The church looked sound and usable-the windows were not boarded and there were no KEEP OUT signs-but it was locked, and there was no board announcing services or anything even to indicate its name or denomination. All around it, smoke was hovering wispily off the ground, and just behind it, great volumes of smoke were billowing from the earth over a large area. I walked over and found myself on the lip of a vast cauldron, perhaps an acre in extent, which was emitting thick, cloudlike, pure white smoke-the kind of smoke you get from burning tires or old blankets. It was impossible to tell through the stew of smoke how deep the hole was. The ground felt warm and was loosely covered in a fine ash.

I walked back to the front of the church. A heavy metal crash barrier stood across the old road and a new highway curved off down a hillside away from the town. I stepped around the barrier and walked down old Highway 61. Clumps of weedy grass poked through the surface here and there, but it still looked like a serviceable road. All around on both sides for a considerable distance the land smoked broodingly, like the aftermath of a forest fire. About fifty yards along, a jagged crack appeared down the center of the highway and quickly grew into a severe gash several inches across, emitting still more smoke. In places, the road on one side of the gash had subsided a foot or more, or slumped into a shallow, bowl-shaped depression. From time to time I peered into the crack but couldn’t gauge anything of its depth for the swirling smoke, which proved to be disagreeably acrid and sulphurous when the breeze pushed it over me.

I walked along for some minutes, gravely examining the scar as if I were some kind of official inspector of highways, before I spread my gaze more generally and it dawned on me that I was in the middle-very much in the middle-of an extensively smoking landscape, on possibly no more than a skin of asphalt, above a fire that had been burning out of control for thirty-four years-not, I’m bound to say, the smartest place in North America to position oneself. Perhaps it was no more than a literally heated imagination, but the ground suddenly seemed distinctly spongy and resilient, as if I were walking across a mattress. I retreated in haste to the car.

It seemed odd on reflection that I, or any other severely foolish person, could drive in and have a look around a place as patently dangerous and unstable as Centralia, and yet there was nothing to stop anyone from venturing anywhere. What was odder still was that the evacuation of Centralia was not total. Those who wanted to stay and live with the possibility of having their houses fall into the earth were allowed to remain, and a few had evidently so chosen. I got back in the car and drove up to a lone house in the center of town. The house, painted a pale green, was eerily neat and well maintained. A vase of artificial flowers and other modest decorative knicknacks stood on a windowsill, and there was a bed of marigolds by the freshly painted stoop. But there was no car in the drive, and no one answered the bell.

Several of the other houses proved on closer inspection to be unoccupied. Two were boarded and had “DANGER-KEEP OUT” notices tacked to them. Five or six others, including a clutch of three on the far side of the central park, were still evidently lived in-one, amazingly, even had children’s toys in the yard (who on earth would keep children in a place like this?)-but there was no answer at any of the bells I tried. Everyone was either at work or, for all I knew, lying dead on the kitchen floor. At one house I knocked at I thought I saw a curtain move, but I couldn’t be sure. Who knows how crazy these people might be after three decades of living on top of an inferno and breathing head-lightening quantities of CO2, or how weary they might have grown of outsiders cheerfully poking around and treating their town as a curious diversion? I was privately relieved that no one answered my knocks because I couldn’t for the life of me think what my opening question would be.

It was well past lunchtime, so I drove the five miles or so to Mt. Carmel, the nearest town. Mt. Carmel was mildly startling after Centralia -a busy little town, nicely old-fashioned, with traffic on Main Street and sidewalks full of shoppers and other townsfolk going about their business. I had lunch at the Academy Luncheonette and Sporting Goods Store (possibly the only place in America where you can gaze at jockstraps while eating a tuna salad sandwich) and was intending then to push on in search of the AT, but on the way back to the car I passed a public library and impulsively popped in to ask if they had any information on Centralia.

They did-three fat files bulging with newspaper and magazine clippings, most dating from 1979-1981, when Centralia briefly attracted national attention, particularly after the little boy, one Todd Dombowski, was nearly swallowed by the earth in his granny’s backyard.

There was also, poignantly now, a slender, hardbound history of Centralia, prepared to mark the town’s centenary just before the outbreak of the fire. It was full of photographs showing a bustling town not at all unlike the one that stood just outside the library door, but with the difference of thirty-some years. I had forgotten just how distant the 1960s have grown. All the men in the photographs wore hats; the women and girls were in billowy skirts. All, of course, were happily unaware that their pleasant, anonymous town was quite doomed. It was nearly impossible to connect the busy place in the photographs to the empty space from which I had just come.

As I put the things back in their folders, a clipping fluttered to the floor. It was an article from Newsweek. Someone had underlined a short paragraph towards the end of the article and put three exclamation marks in the margin. It was a quote from a mine fire authority observing that if the rate of burning held steady, there was enough coal under Centralia to burn for a thousand years.

It happened that a few miles beyond Centralia there was another scene of arresting devastation that I had heard about and was keen to investigate-a mountainside in the Lehigh Valley that had been so lavishly polluted by a zinc mill that it had been entirely stripped of vegetation. I had heard about it from John Connolly, who recalled it as being near Palmerton, so I drove there the following morning. Palmerton was a good-sized town, grimy and industrial but not without its finer points-a couple of solid turn-of-the-century civic buildings that gave it an air of consequence, a dignified central square, and a business district that was clearly depressed but gamely clinging to life. The background was dominated everywhere by big, prisonlike factories, all of which appeared to be shut. At one end of town, I spotted what I had come to find-a steep, broad eminence, perhaps 1,500 feet high and several miles long, which was almost entirely naked of vegetation. There was a parking lot beside the road and a factory a hundred yards or so beyond. I pulled into the lot and got out to gawk-it truly was a sight.

As I stood there, some fat guy in a uniform stepped out of a security booth and waddled towards me looking cross and officious.

“The hell you think you’re doing?” he barked.

“Pardon me?” I replied, taken aback, and then: “I’m looking at that hill.”

“You can’t do that.”

“I can’t look at a hill?”

“Not here you can’t. This is private property.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“Well, it’s private-like the sign says.” He indicated a post that was in fact signless and looked momentarily struck. “Well, it’s private,” he added.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” I said again, not appreciating yet how keenly this man took his responsibilities. I was still marveling at the hill. “That’s an amazing sight, isn’t it?” I said.

“What is?”

“That mountain. There isn’t a scrap of vegetation on it.”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m not paid to look at hillsides.”

“Well, you should look sometime. I think you’d be surprised. So is that the zinc factory then?” I said, with a nod at the complex of buildings over his left shoulder.

He regarded me suspiciously. “What do you want to know for?”

I returned his stare. “I’m out of zinc,” I replied.

He gave me a sideways look as if to say “Oh, a wise guy, huh?” and said suddenly, decisively, “I think maybe I’d better take your name.” With difficulty he extracted a notebook and a stubby pencil from a back pocket.

“What, because I asked you if that was a zinc factory?”

“Because you’re trespassing on private property.”

“I didn’t know I was trespassing. You don’t even have a sign up.”

He had his pencil poised. “Name?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Sir, you are trespassing on private property. Now are you gonna tell me your name?”

“No.”

We went through a little back and forth along these lines for a minute. At last he shook his head regretfully and said, “Play it your way then.” He dragged out some communication device, pulled up an antenna, and got it to operate. Too late I realized that for all his air of exasperation this was a moment he had dreamed of during many long, uneventful shifts in his little glass booth.

“J.D.?” he said into the receiver. “Luther here. You got the clamps? I got an infractor in Lot A.”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m impounding your vehicle.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I only pulled off the road for a minute. Look, I’m going, OK?”

I got in the car, started the engine, and made to go forward, but he blocked the way. I leaned from the window. “Excuse me,” I called, but he didn’t move. He just stood with his back to me and his arms crossed, conspicuously disregarding me. I tooted the horn lightly, but he was not to be shifted. I put my head out the window and said, “All right, I’ll tell you my name then.”

“It’s too late for that.”

“Oh, for God sake,” I muttered and then, out the window, “Please?” and then, whinily, “Come on, buddy, please?” but he had set a course and was not to be deflected. I leaned out once more. “Tell me, did they specify ‘asshole’ on the job description, or did you take a course?” Then I breathed a very bad word and sat and steamed.

Thirty seconds later a car pulled up and a man in sunglasses got out. He was wearing the same kind of uniform as the first guy but was ten or fifteen years older and a whole lot trimmer. He had the bearing of a drill sergeant.

“Problem here?” he said, looking from one to the other of us.

“Perhaps you can help me,” I said in a tone of sweet reason. “I’m looking for the Appalachian Trail. This gentleman here tells me I’m trespassing.”

“He was looking at the hill, J.D.,” the fat guy protested a little hotly, but J.D. raised a palm to still him, then turned to me.

“You a hiker?”

“Yes, sir,” I indicated the pack on the backseat. “I just wanted directions and the next thing I know”-I gave a cheerfully dismayed laugh-“this man’s telling me I’m on private property and he’s impounding my car.”

“J.D., the man was looking at the hill and asking questions.” But J.D. held up another calming hand.

“Where you hiking?”

I told him.

He nodded. “Well, then you want to go up the road about four miles to Little Gap and take the right for Danielsville. At the top of the hill you’ll see the trail crossing. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Not a problem. You have a good hike, you hear?”

I thanked him again and drove off. In the rearview mirror I noticed with gratification that he was remonstrating quietly but firmly with Luther-threatening, I very much hoped, to take away his communication device.

The route went steeply up to a lonesome pass where there was a dirt parking lot. I parked, found the AT, and walked along it on a high exposed ridge through the most amazingly devastated terrain. For miles it was either entirely barren or covered in the spindly trunks of dead trees, a few still weakly standing but most toppled. It brought to mind a World War I battlefield after heavy shelling. The ground was covered in a gritty black dust, like iron filings.

The walking was uncommonly easy-the ridge was almost perfectly flat-and the absence of vegetation provided uninterrupted views. All the other visible hills, including those facing me across the narrow valley, looked to be in good health, except where they had been scarred and gouged by quarrying or strip mining, which was regularly. I walked for a little over an hour until I came to a sudden, absurdly steep descent to Lehigh Gap-almost a thousand feet straight down. I wasn’t at all ready to stop walking-in fact, I was just getting into my stride-but the idea of going down a thousand feet only to turn around and come straight back up held zero appeal, and there wasn’t any way to double back without walking miles along a busy highway. That was of course the trouble with trying to do the AT in day-sized pieces. It was designed for pushing on, ever on, not for dipping in and out of.

With a sigh, I turned around and trudged back the way I had come, in a mood neatly suited to the desolate landscape. It was almost four o’clock when I reached the car-much too late to try an alternative hike elsewhere. The afternoon was as good as shot. I had driven 350 miles to get to Pennsylvania, had spent four long days in the state, and walked a net eleven miles of the Appalachian Trail. Never again, I vowed, would I try to hike the Appalachian Trail with a car.

Chapter 15

Once, aeons ago, the Appalachians were of a scale and majesty to rival the Himalayas-piercing, snow-peaked, pushing breathtakingly through the clouds to heights of four miles or more. New Hampshire’s Mount Washington is still an imposing presence, but the stony mass that rises from the New England woods today represents, at most, the stubby bottom one-third of what was ten million years ago.

That the Appalachian Mountains present so much more modest an aspect today is because they have had so much time in which to wear away. The Appalachians are immensely old-older than the oceans and continents (at least in their present configurations), far, far older than most other mountain chains, older indeed than almost all other landscape features on earth. When simple plants colonized the land and the first creatures crawled gasping from the sea, the Appalachians were there to greet them.

Something over a billion years ago, the continents of earth were a single mass called Pangaea surrounded by the lonely Panthalassan Sea. Then some unexplained turmoil within the earth’s mantle caused the land to break apart and drift off as vast asymmetrical chunks. From time to time over the ages since-three times at least-the continents have held a kind of grand reunion, floating back to some central spot and bumping together with slow but crushing force. It was during the third of these collisions, starting about 470 million years ago, that the Appalachians were first pushed up (like a rucked carpet, as the analogy nearly always has it). Four hundred seventy million years is a span pretty well beyond grasping, but if you can imagine flying backwards through time at the rate of one year per second, it would take you about sixteen years to cover such a period. It’s a long time.

The continents didn’t just move in and out from each other in some kind of grand slow-motion square dance but spun in lazy circles, changed their orientation, went on cruises to the tropics and poles, made friends with smaller landmasses and brought them home. Florida once belonged to Africa. A corner of Staten Island is, geologically, part of Europe. The seaboard from New England up to Canada appears to have originated in Morocco. Parts of Greenland, Ireland, Scotland, and Scandinavia have the same rocks as the eastern United States-are, in effect, ruptured outposts of the Appalachians. There are even suggestions that mountains as far south as the Shackleton Range in Antarctica may be fragments of the Appalachian family.

The Appalachians were formed in three long phases (or orogenies, as geologists like to call them) known as the Taconic, Acadian, and Alleghenian. The first two were essentially responsible for the northern Appalachians, the third for the central and southern Appalachians. As the continents bumped and nudged, sometimes one continental plate would slide over another, pushing ocean floor before it, reworking the landscape for 150 miles or more inland. At other times it would plunge beneath, stirring up the mantle and resulting in long spells of volcanic activity and earthquakes. Sometimes the collisions would interleave layers of rock like shuffled playing cards.

It is tempting to think of this as some kind of giant continentsized car crash, but of course it happened with imperceptible slowness. The proto-Atlantic Ocean (sometimes more romantically called Iapetus), which filled the void between continents during one of the early splits, looks in most textbook illustrations like a transitory puddle-there in Fig. 9A, vanished in Fig. 9B, as if the sun had come out for a day or so and dried it up-yet it existed far longer, hundreds of millions of years longer, than our own Atlantic has. So it was with the formation of mountains. If you were to travel back to one of the mountain-building phases of the Appalachians, you wouldn’t be aware of anything geologically grand going on, any more than we are sensible now that India is plowing into Asia like a runaway truck into a snowbank, pushing the Himalayas up by a millimeter or so a year.

And as soon as the mountains were built, they began, just as ineluctably, to wear away. For all their seeming permanence, mountains are exceedingly transitory features. In Meditations at 10,000 Feet, writer and geologist James Trefil calculates that a typical mountain stream will carry away about 1,000 cubic feet of mountain in a year, mostly in the form of sand granules and other suspended particles. That is equivalent to the capacity of an average-sized dump truck-clearly not much at all. Imagine a dump truck arriving once each year at the base of a mountain, filling up with a single load, and driving off, not to reappear for another twelve months. At such a rate it seems impossible that it could ever cart away a mountain, but in fact given sufficient time that is precisely what would happen. Assuming a mountain 5,000 feet high with 500,000 million cubic feet of mass-roughly the size of Mount Washington-a single stream would level it in about 500 million years.

Of course most mountains have several streams and moreover are exposed to a vast range of other reductive factors, from the infinitesimal acidic secretions of lichen (tiny but relentless!) to the grinding scrape of ice sheets, so most mountains vanish very much more quickly-in a couple of hundred million years, say. Right now the Appalachians are shrinking on average by 0.03 millimeters per year. They have gone through this cycle at least twice, possibly more-rising to awesome heights, eroding away to nothingness, rising again, each time recycling their component materials in a dazzlingly confused and complex geology.

The detail of all this is theory, you understand. Very little of it is more than generally agreed upon. Some scientists believe the Appalachians experienced a fourth, earlier mountain-building episode, called the Grenville Orogeny, and that there may have been others earlier still. Likewise, Pangaea may have split and reformed not three times but a dozen times, or perhaps a score of times. On top of all this, there are a number of lapses in the theory, chief of which is that there is little direct evidence of continental collisions, which is odd, even inexplicable, if you accept that at least three continents rubbed together with enormous force for a period of at least 150 million years. There ought to be a suture, a layer of scar tissue, stretching up the eastern seaboard of the United States. There isn’t.

I am no geologist. Show me an unusual piece of greywacke or a handsome chunk of gabbro and I will regard it with respect and listen politely to what you have to say, but it won’t actually mean anything to me. If you tell me that once it was seafloor ooze and that through some incredible sustained process it was thrust deep into the earth, baked and squeezed for millions of years, then popped back to the surface, which is what accounts for its magnificent striations, its shiny vitreous crystals, and flaky biotate mica, I will say, “Goodness!” and “Is that a fact!” but I can’t pretend that anything actual will be going on behind my game expression.

Just occasionally am I permitted an appreciative glimpse into the wonder that is geology, and such a place is the Delaware Water Gap. There, above the serene Delaware River, stands Kittatinny Mountain, a wall of rock 1,300 feet high, consisting of resistant quartzite (or so it says here) that was exposed when the river cut a passage through softer rock on its quiet, steady progress to the sea. The result in effect is a cross-section of mountain, which is not a view you get every day, or indeed anywhere else along the Appalachian Trail that I am aware of. And here it is particularly impressive because the exposed quartzite is arrayed in long, wavery bands that lie at such an improbably canted angle-about 45 degrees-as to suggest to even the dullest imagination that something very big, geologically speaking, happened here.

It is a very fine view. A century or so ago people compared it to the Rhine and even (a little ambitiously, I’m bound to say) the Alps. The artist George Innes came and made a famous painting called “Delaware Water Gap.” It shows the river rolling lazily between meadowy fields dotted with trees and farms, against a distant backdrop of sere hills, notched with aV where the river passes through. It looks like a piece of Yorkshire or Cumbria transplanted to the American continent. In the 1850s, a plush 250room hotel called Kittatinny House rose on the banks of the river and was such a success that others soon followed. For a generation after the Civil War, the Delaware Water Gap was the place to be in summer. Then, as is always the way with these things, the White Mountains came into fashion, then Niagara Falls, then the Catskills, then the Disneys. Now almost no one comes to the Water Gap to stay. People still pass through in large numbers, but they park in a turnout, have a brief appreciative gaze, then get back in their cars and drive off.

Today, alas, you have to squint, and pretty hard at that, to get any notion of the tranquil beauty that attracted Innes. The Water Gap is not only the nearest thing to spectacle in eastern Pennsylvania but also the only usable breach in the Appalachians in the area of the Poconos. In consequence, its narrow shelf of land is packed with state and local roads, a railway line, and an interstate highway with a long, unimaginative concrete bridge carrying streams of humming trucks and cars between Pennsylvania and New Jersey-the whole suggesting, as McPhee neatly put it in In Suspect Terrain, “a convergence of tubes leading to a patient in intensive care.”

Still, Kittatinny Mountain, towering above the river on the New Jersey side, is a compelling sight, and you can’t look at it (at least I couldn’t, at least not this day) without wanting to walk up it and see what is there. I parked at an information center at its base and set off into the welcoming green woods. It was a gorgeous morning-dewy and cool but with the kind of sunshine and sluggish air that promises a lot of heat later on-and I was early enough that I could get almost a full day’s walk in. I had to get the car home to New Hampshire by the following day, but I was determined to get at least one decent walk in, to salvage something from the catastrophe that was this trip, and luckily I seemed to have chosen well. I was in the midst of several thousand acres of exquisitely pretty woodlands shared jointly by Worthington State Forest and the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. The path was well maintained and just steep enough to feel like healthful exercise rather than some kind of obsessive torture.

And here was a final, joyful bonus: I had excellent maps. I was now in the cartographically thoughtful hands of the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, whose maps are richly printed in four colors, with green for woodland, blue for water, red for trails, and black for lettering. They are clearly and generously labeled and sensibly scaled (1:36,000), and they include in full all connecting roads and side trails. It is as if they want you to know where you are and to take pleasure in knowing it.

I can’t tell you what a satisfaction it is to be able to say, “Ah! Dunnfield Creek, I see,” and, “So that must be Shawnee Island down there.” If all the AT maps were anything as good as this, I would have enjoyed the experience appreciably more-say, 25 percent more. It occurred to me now that a great part of my mindless indifference to my surroundings earlier on was simply that I didn’t know where I was, couldn’t know where I was. Now at last I could take my bearings, perceive my future, feel as if I was somehow in touch with a changing and knowable landscape.

And so I walked five thoroughly agreeable miles up Kittatinny to Sunfish Pond, a very comely forty-one-acre pond surrounded by woods. Along the way, I encountered just two other people-both day hikers-and I thought again what a stretch it is to suggest that the Appalachian Trail is too crowded. Something like thirty million people live within two hours’ drive of the Water Gap-New York was just seventy miles to the east, Philadelphia a little bit more to the south-and it was a flawless summer’s day, yet the whole of this majestic woods belonged to just three of us.

For northbound hikers Sunfish Pond is something of a glorious novelty, since nowhere south of here will you find a body of water on a mountaintop. It is in fact the first glacial feature northbound hikers come across. During the last ice age, this was about as far as the ice sheets got. The farthest advance in New Jersey was about ten miles south of the Water Gap, though even here, where the climate would let it go no farther, it was still at least 2,000 feet thick.

Imagine it-a wall of ice nearly half a mile high, and beyond it for tens of thousands of square miles nothing but more ice, broken only by the peaks of a very few of the loftiest mountains. What a sight that must have been. And here is a thing that most of us fail to appreciate: we are still in an ice age, only now we experience it for just part of the year. Snow and ice and cold are not really typical features of earth. Taking the long view, Antarctica is actually a jungle. (It’s just having a chilly spell.) At the very peak of the last ice age 20,000 years ago, 30 percent of the earth was under ice. Today 10 percent still is. There have been at least a dozen ice ages in the last two million years, each lasting about 100,000 years. The most recent intrusion, called the Wisconsinian ice sheet, spread down from the polar regions over much of Europe and North America, growing to depths of up to two miles and advancing at a rate of up to 400 feet a year. As it soaked up the earth’s free water, sea levels fell by 450 feet. Then, about 10,000 years ago, not abruptly exactly but near enough, it began to melt back. No one knows why. What it left in its wake was a landscape utterly transformed. It dumped Long Island, Cape Cod, Nantucket, and most of Martha’s Vineyard where previously there had just been sea, and it gouged out the Great Lakes, Hudson Bay, and little Sunfish Pond, among much else. Every foot of the landscape from here on north would be scored and scarred with reminders of glaciation-scattered boulders called erratics, drumlins, eskers, high tarns, cirques. I was entering a new world.

No one knows much of anything about the earth’s many ice ages-why they came, why they stopped, when they may return. One interesting theory, given our present-day concerns with global warming, is that the ice ages were caused not by falling temperatures but by warming ones. Warm weather would increase precipitation, which would increase cloud cover, which would lead to less snow melt at higher elevations. You don’t need a great deal of bad weather to get an ice age. As Gwen Schultz notes in Ice Age Lost, “It is not necessarily the amount of snow that causes ice sheets, but the fact that snow, however little, lasts.” In terms of precipitation, she observes, Antarctica “is the driest large area on Earth, drier overall than any large desert.”

Here’s another interesting thought. If glaciers started reforming, they have a great deal more water now to draw on-Hudson Bay, the Great Lakes, the hundreds of thousands of lakes of Canada, none of which existed to fuel the last ice sheet-so they would grow very much quicker. And if they did start to advance again, what exactly would we do? Blast them with TNT or maybe nuclear warheads? Well, doubtless we would, but consider this. In 1964, the largest earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Alaska with 200,000 megatons of concentrated might, the equivalent of 2,000 nuclear bombs. Almost 3,000 miles away in Texas, water sloshed out of swimming pools. A street in Anchorage fell twenty feet. The quake devastated 24,000 square miles of wilderness, much of it glaciated. And what effect did all this might have on Alaska’s glaciers? None.

Just beyond the pond was a side trail, the Garvey Springs Trail, which descended very steeply to an old paved road along the river, just below a spot called Tocks Island and which would take me in a lazy loop back towards the visitor center where I had left the car. It was four miles and the day was growing warm, but the road was shaded and quiet-I saw only three cars in an hour or so-so it was a pleasant stroll, with restful views of the river across overgrown meadows.

By American standards, the Delaware is not a particularly imposing waterway, but it has one almost unique characteristic. It is nearly last significant undammed river in the United States. Now this might seem an inestimable virtue-a river that runs as nature planned it. However, one consequence of its unregulated nature is that the Delaware regularly floods. In 1955, as Frank Dale notes in his excellent book Delaware Diary, there was a flood that even now is remembered as “the Big One.” In August of that year-ironically at the height of one of the most severe droughts in decades-two hurricanes hit North Carolina one after the other, disrupting and enlivening weather all up and down the East Coast. The first dumped ten inches of rain in two days on the Delaware River Valley. Six days later the valley received ten inches in less than twenty-four hours. At a place called Camp Davis, a holiday complex, forty-six people, mostly women and children, took refuge from the rising flood waters in the camp’s main building. As the waters rose, they fled first upstairs and then into the attic, but to no avail. Sometime in the night a thirty-foot wall of water came roaring through the valley and swept the house away. Amazingly, nine people survived.

Elsewhere, bridges were being brushed aside and riverside towns inundated. Before the day was out, the Delaware River would rise forty-three feet. By the time the waters finally receded, 400 people were dead and the whole of the Delaware Valley was devastated.

Into this gooey mess stepped the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with a plan to build a dam at Tocks Island, very near where I was walking now. The dam, according to the Corps’ plan, would not only tame the river but allow the creation of a new national park, at the heart of which would be a recreational lake almost forty miles long. Eight thousand residents were moved out. It was all done very clumsily. One of the people evicted was blind. Several farmers had only parts of their land bought, so that they ended up with farmland but no house or a farmhouse but no land. A woman whose family had farmed the same land since the eighteenth century was carried from her house kicking and bellowing, to the delight of newspaper photographers and film crews.

The thing about the Army Corps of Engineers is that they don’t build things very well. A dam across the Missouri River in Nebraska silted up so disastrously that a noisome ooze began to pour into the town of Niobrara, eventually forcing its permanent abandonment. Then a Corps dam in Idaho failed. Fortunately it was in a thinly populated area and there was some warning. Even so, several small towns were washed away and eleven people lost their lives. But these were relatively small dams. Tocks Dam would have held one of the largest artificial reservoirs in the world, with forty miles of water behind it. Four substantial cities-Trenton, Camden, Wilmington, and Philadelphia-and scores of smaller communities stood downstream. A disaster on the Delaware would truly be a disaster.

And here was the nimble Army Corps of Engineers planning to hold back 250 billion gallons of water with notoriously unstable glacial till. Besides that there were all kinds of environmental worries-that salinity levels below the dam would rise catastrophically, for example, devastating the ecology lower down, not least the valuable oyster beds of Delaware Bay.

In 1992, after years of growing protests that spread far beyond the Delaware Valley, the dam plan was finally put on hold, but by this time whole villages and farms had been bulldozed. A quiet, remote, very beautiful farming valley that had not changed a great deal in 200 years was lost forever. “One beneficial result of the [canceled] project,” notes the Appalachian Trail Guide to New York and New Jersey, “was that the land acquired by the federal government for the national recreation area has provided the Trail with a Protected corridor.”

To tell you the truth I was getting a little wearied of this. I know the Appalachian Trail is supposed to be a wilderness experience, and I accept that there are countless places where it would be a tragedy for it to be otherwise, but sometimes, as here, the ATC seems to be positively phobic about human contact. Personally, I would have been pleased to be walking now through hamlets and past farms rather than through some silent “protected corridor.”

Doubtless it is all to do with our historic impulse to tame and exploit the wilderness, but America’s attitude to nature is, from all sides, very strange if you ask me. I couldn’t help comparing my experience now with an experience I’d had three or four years earlier in Luxembourg when I went hiking with my son for a magazine assignment. Luxembourg is a much more delightfui place to hike than you might think. It has lots of woods but also castles and farms and steepled villages and winding river valleys-the whole, as it were, European package. The footpaths we followed spent a lot of time in the woods but also emerged at obliging intervals to take us along sunny back roads and over stiles and through farm fields and hamlets. We were always able at some point each day to call in at a bakery or post office, to hear the tinkle of shop bells and eavesdrop on conversations we couldn’t understand. Each night we slept in an inn and ate in a restaurant with other people. We experienced the whole of Luxembourg, not just its trees. It was wonderful, and it was wonderful because the whole charmingly diminutive package was seamlessly and effortlessly integrated.

In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition-either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit-that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn’t all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and tilled fields.

I would have much preferred it if the AT guidebook had said: “Thanks to the Conference’s efforts, farming has been restored to the Delaware River Valley, and the footpath rerouted to incorporate sixteen miles of riverside walking because, let’s face it, you can get too much of trees sometimes.”

Still, we must look on the bright side. If the Army Corps of Engineers had had its foolish way, I’d have been swimming back to my car now, and I was grateful at least to be spared that.

Anyway, it was time to do some real hiking again.

Chapter 16

In 1983, a man walking in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts just off the Appalachian Trail saw-or at least swears he saw-a mountain lion cross his path, which was a little unsettling and even more unexpected since mountain lions hadn’t been seen in the northeastern United States since 1903, when the last one was shot in New York State.

Soon, however, sightings were being reported all over New England. A man driving a back road of Vermont saw two cubs playing at the roadside. A pair of hikers saw a mother and two cubs cross a meadow in New Hampshire. Every year there were half a dozen or more reports in similar vein, all by credible witnesses. In the late winter of 1994 a farmer in Vermont was walking across his property, taking some seed to a bird feeder, when he saw what appeared to be three mountain lions about seventy feet away. He stared dumbstruck for a minute or two-for mountain lions are swift, fierce creatures, and here were three of them looking at him with calm regard-then hightailed it to a phone and called a state wildlife biologist. The animals were gone by the time the biologist arrived, but he found some fresh scat, which he dutifully bagged up and dispatched to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Laboratory. The lab report came back that it was indeed the scat of Felis concolor, the eastern mountain lion, also variously and respectfully known as the panther, cougar, puma, and, especially in New England, catamount.

All this was of some interest to me, for I was hiking in about the same spot as that initial mountain lion sighting. I was back on the trail with a new keenness and determination, and a new plan. I was going to hike New England, or at least as much of it as I could knock off until Katz returned in seven weeks to walk with me through Maine’s Hundred Mile Wilderness. There are almost 700 miles of gorgeously mountainous Appalachian Trail in New England-about a third of the AT’s total trail length-enough to keep me occupied till August. To that end, I had my obliging wife drive me to southwestern Massachusetts and drop me on the trail near Stockbridge for a three-day amble through the Berkshires. Thus it was that I was to be found, on a hot morning in mid-June, laboring sweatily up a steep but modest eminence called Becket Mountain, in a haze of repellent-resistant blackflies, and patting my pocket from time to time to check that my knife was still there.

I didn’t really expect to encounter a mountain lion, but only the day before I had read an article in the Boston Globe about how western mountain lions (which indubitably are not extinct) had recently taken to stalking and killing hikers and joggers in the California woods, and even the odd poor soul standing at a backyard barbecue in an apron and funny hat. It seemed a kind of omen.

It’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that mountain lions could have survived undetected in New England. Bobcats-admittedly much smaller creatures than mountain lions-are known to exist in considerable numbers and yet are so shy and furtive that you would never guess their existence. Many forest rangers go whole careers without seeing one. And there is certainly ample room in the eastern woods for large cats to roam undisturbed. Massachusetts alone has 250,000 acres of woodland, 100,000 of it in the comely Berkshires. From where I was now, I could, given the will and a more or less infinite supply of noodles, walk all the way to Cape chidley in northern Quebec, 1,800 miles away on the icy Labrador Sea, and scarcely ever have to leave the cover of trees. Even so, it is unlikely that a large cat could survive in sufficient numbers to breed not just in one area but evidently all over New England and escape notice for nine decades. Still, there was that scat. Whatever it was, it excreted like a mountain lion.

The most plausible explanation was that any lions out there-if lions they were-were released pets, bought in haste and later regretted. It would be just my luck, of course, to be savaged by an animal with a flea collar and a medical history. I imagined lying on my back, being extravagently ravaged, inclining my head slightly to read a dangling silver tag that said: “My name is Mr. Bojangles. If found please call Tanya and Vinny at 924- 4667.”

Like most large animals (and a good many small ones), the eastern mountain lion was wiped out because it was deemed to be a nuisance. Until the 1940s, many eastern states had well-publicized “varmint campaigns,” often run by state conservation departments, that awarded points to hunters for every predatory creature they killed, which was just about every creature there was-hawks, owls, kingfishers, eagles, and virtually any type of large mammal. West Virginia gave an annual college scholarship to the student who killed the most animals; other states freely distributed bounties and other cash rewards. Rationality didn’t often come into it. Pennsylvania one year paid out $90,000 in bounties for the killing of 130,000 owls and hawks to save the state’s farmers a slightly less than whopping $1,875 in estimated livestock losses. (It is not very often, after all, that an owl carries off a cow.)

As late as 1890, New York State paid bounties on 107 mountain lions, but within a decade they were virtually all gone. (The very last wild eastern mountain lion was killed in the Smokies in the 1920s.) The timberwolf and woodland caribou also disappeared from their last Appalachian fastnesses in the first years of this century, and the black bear very nearly followed them. In 1900, the bear population of New Hampshire-now over 3,000-had fallen to just fifty.

There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical ten-square-mile block of eastern American forest holds almost 300,000 mammals-220,000 mice and other small rodents, 63,500 squirrels and chipmunks, 470 deer, 30 foxes, and 5 black bears.

The real loser in the eastern forests has been the songbird. One of the most striking losses was the Carolina parakeet, a lovely, innocuous bird whose numbers in the wild were possibly exceeded only by the unbelievably numerous passenger pigeon. (When the first pilgrims came to America there were an estimated nine billion passenger pigeons-more than twice the number of all birds found in America today.) Both were hunted out of existence-the passenger pigeon for pig feed and the simple joy of blasting volumes of birds from the sky with blind ease, the Carolina parakeet because it ate farmers’ fruit and had a striking plumage that made a lovely ladies’ hat. In 1914, the last surviving members of each species died within weeks of each other in captivity.

A similar unhappy fate awaited the delightful Bachman’s warbler. Always rare, it was said to have one of the loveliest songs of all birds. For years it escaped detection, but in 1939, two birders, operating independently in different places, coincidentally saw a Bachman’s warbler within two days of each other. Both shot the birds (nice work, boys!), and that, it appears, was that for the Bachman’s warbler. But there are almost certainly others that disappeared before anyone much noticed. John James Audubon painted three species of bird-the small-headed flycatcher, the carbonated warbler, and the Blue Mountain warbler-that have not been seen by anyone since. The same is true of Townsend’s bunting, of which there is one stuffed specimen in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

Between the 1940s and 1980s, the populations of migratory songbirds fell by 50 percent in the eastern United States (in large part because of loss of breeding sites and other vital wintering habitats in Latin America) and by some estimates are continuing to fall by 3 percent or so a year. Seventy percent of all eastern bird species have seen population declines since the 1960s.

These days, the woods are a pretty quiet place.

Late in the afternoon, I stepped from the trees onto what appeared to be a disused logging road. In the center of the road stood an older guy with a pack and a curiously bewildered look, as if he had just woken from a trance and found himself unaccountably in this place. He had, I noticed, a haze of blackflies of his own.

“Which way’s the trail go, do you suppose?” he asked me. It was an odd question because the trail clearly and obviously continued on the other side. There was a three-foot gap in the trees directly opposite and, in case there was any possible doubt, a white blaze painted on a stout oak.

I swatted the air before my face for the twelve thousandth time that day and nodded at the opening. “Just there, I’d say.”

“Oh, yes,” he answered. “Of course.”

We set off into the woods together and chatted a little about where we had come from that day, where we were headed, and so on. He was a thru-hiker-the first I had seen this far north-and like me was making for Dalton. He had an odd, puzzled look all the time and regarded the trees in a peculiar way, running his gaze slowly up and down their lengths over and over again, as if he had never seen anything like them before.

“So what’s your name?” I asked him.

“Well, they call me chicken John.”

“chicken John!” chicken John was famous. I was quite excited. Some people on the trail take on an almost mythic status because of their idiosyncrasies. Early in the trip Katz and I kept hearing about kid who had equipment so high-tech that no one had ever seen anything like it. One of his possessions was a self-erecting tent. Apparently, he would carefully open a stuff sack and it would fly out, like joke snakes from a can. He also had a satellite navigation system, and goodness knows what else. The trouble was that his pack weighed about ninety-five pounds. He dropped out before he got to Virginia, so we never did see him. Woodrow Murphy, the walking fat man, had achieved this sort of fame the year before. Mary Ellen would doubtless have attracted a measure of it if she had not dropped out. chicken John had it now-though I couldn’t for the life of me recall why. It had been months before, way back in Georgia, that I had first heard of him.

“So why do they call you chicken John?” I asked.

“You know, I don’t honestly know,” he said as if he had been wondering that himself for some time.

“When did you start your hike?”

“January 27th.”

“January 27th?” I said in small astonishment and did a quick private calculation on my fingers. “That’s almost five months.”

“Don’t I know it,” he said with a kind of happy ruefulness.

He had been walking for the better part of half a year, and he was still only three-quarters of the way to Katahdin.

“What kind of”-I didn’t know quite how to put this-“what kind of miles are you doing, John?”

“Oh, ‘bout fourteen or fifteen if all goes well. Trouble is”-he slid me a sheepish look-“I get lost a lot.”

That was it. chicken John was forever losing the trail and ending up in the most improbable places. Goodness knows how anyone could manage to lose the Appalachian Trail. It is the most clearly defined, well-blazed footpath imaginable. Usually it is the only thing in the woods that isn’t woods. If you can distinguish between trees and a long open corridor through the trees you will have no trouble finding your way along the AT. Where there might be any doubt at all-where a side trail enters or where the AT crosses a road-there are always blazes. Yet people do get lost. The famous Grandma Gatewood, for instance, was forever knocking on doors and asking where the heck she was.

I asked him what was the most lost he had ever been.

“Thirty-seven miles,” he said almost proudly. “I got off the trail on Blood Mountain in Georgia-still don’t know how exactly-and spent three days in the woods before I came to a highway. I thought I was a goner that time. I ended up in Tallulah Falls-even got my picture in the paper. The police gave me a ride back to the trail the next day, and pointed me the right way. They were real nice.”

“Is it true you once walked three days in the wrong direction?”

He nodded happily. “Two and a half days to be precise. Luckily, I came to a town on the third day, and I said to a feller, ‘Excuse me, young feller, where is this?’ and he said, ‘Why, it’s Damascus, Virginia, sir,’ and I thought, well, that’s mighty strange because I was in a place with the very same name just three days ago. And then I recognized the fire station.”

“How on earth do you-” I decided to rephrase the question. “How does it happen, John, exactly?”

“Well, if I knew that, I wouldn’t do it, I suppose,” he said with a kind of chuckle. “All I know is that from time to time I end up a long way from where I want to be. But it makes life interesting, you know. I’ve met a lot of nice people, had a lot of free meals. Excuse me,” he said abruptly, “you sure we’re going the right way?”

“Positive.”

He nodded. “I’d hate to get lost today. There’s a restaurant in Dalton.” I understood this perfectly. If you’re going to get lost, you don’t want to do it on a restaurant day.

We walked the last six miles together, but we didn’t talk much after that. I was doing a nineteen-mile day, the longest I would do anywhere on the trail, and even though the grade was generally easy and I was carrying a light pack, I was real tired by late afternoon. John seemed content to have someone to follow, and in any case he had his hands full scrutinizing the trees.

It was after six when we reached Dalton. John had the name of man on Depot Street who let hikers camp in his backyard and use his shower, so I went with him to a gas station while he asked directions. When we emerged, he started off in precisely the wrong direction.

“It’s that way, John,” I said.

“Of course it is,” he agreed. “And the name’s Bernard, by the way. I don’t know where they got that chicken John from.”

I nodded and told him I would look for him the next day, but I never did see him again.

I spent the night in a motel and the next day hiked on to cheshire. It was only nine miles over easy terrain, but the blackfly made it a torment. I have never seen a scientific name for these tiny, vile, winged specks, so I don’t know what they are other than a hovering mass that goes with you wherever you go and are forever in your ears and mouth and nostrils. Human sweat transports them to a realm of orgasmic ecstasy, and insect repellent only seems to excite them further. They are particularly relentless when you stop to rest or take a drink-so relentless that eventually you don’t stop to rest and you drink while moving, and then spit out a tongueful of them. It’s a kind of living hell. So it was with some relief that I stepped from their woodland realm in early afternoon and strolled into the sunny, dozing straggle that was the little community of cheshire.

cheshire had a free hostel for hikers in a church on the main street (Massachusetts people do a lot for hikers, it seems; elsewhere I had seen houses with signs inviting people to help themselves to water or pick apples from trees), but I didn’t feel like a night in a bunkhouse, still less a long afternoon sitting around with nothing to do, so I pushed on to Adams, four miles away up a baking highway, but with at least the prospect of a night in a motel and a choice of restaurants.

Adams had just one motel, a dumpy place on the edge of town. I took a room and passed the rest of the afternoon strolling around, idly looking in store windows and browsing through boxes or books in a thrift shop (though of course there was nothing but Reader’s Digest volumes and those strange books you see only in thrift shops, with titles like Home Drainage Encyclopedia: Volume One and Nod If You Can Hear Me: Living with a Human Vegetable) and afterwards wandered out into the country to look at Mount Greylock, my destination for the next day. Greylock is the highest eminence in Massachusetts and the first hill over 3,000 feet since Virginia for northbound hikers. It’s just 3,491 feet to the top, but, surrounded as it is by much smaller hills, it looks considerably bigger. It has in any case a certain imposing majesty that beckons. I was looking forward to it.

And so, early the next morning, before the day’s heat had a chance to get properly under way (a scorcher was forecast), I stopped in town for a can of pop and a sandwich for my lunch, and then set off on a wandering dirt road towards the Gould Trail, a side trail leading steeply up to the AT and on to Greylock.

Greylock is certainly the most literary of Appalachian mountains. Herman Melville, living on a farm called Arrowhead on its western side, stared at it from his study window while he wrote Moby-Dick, and, according to Maggie Stier and Ron McAdow in their excellent Into the Mountains, a history of New England’s peaks, claimed that its profile reminded him of a whale. When the book was finished, he and a group of friends hiked to the top and partied there till dawn. Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edith Wharton also lived nearby and set works there, and there was scarcely a literary figure associated with New England from the 1850s to 1920s who didn’t at some time hike or ride up to admire the view.

Ironically, at the height of its fame, Greylock lacked much of the green-cloaked majesty it enjoys today. Its sides were mangy with the scars of logging, and the lower slopes were pitted with slate and marble quarries. Big, ramshackle sheds and sawhouses poked into every view. All that healed and grew over, but then in the 1960s, with the enthusiastic support of state officials in Boston, plans were drawn up to turn Greylock into a ski resort, with an aerial tram, a network of chairlifts, and a summit complex consisting of a hotel, shops, and restaurants (all in soaring 1960s Jetsons-style architecture) but luckily nothing ever came of it. Today Greylock sits on 11,600 acres of preserved land. It’s a beauty.

The hike to the top was steep, hot, and seemingly endless, but Worth the effort. The open, sunny, fresh-aired summit of Greylock is crowned with a large, handsome stone building called Bascom Lodge, built in the 1930s by the tireless cadres of the Civilian Conservation Corps. It now offers a restaurant and overnight accommodation to hikers. Also on the summit is a wonderful, wildly incongruous lighthouse (Greylock is 140 miles from the sea), which serves as the Massachusetts memorial for soldiers killed in the First World War. It was originally planned to stand in Boston Harbor but for some reason ended up here.

I ate my lunch, treated myself to a pee and a wash in the lodge, and then hurried on, for I still had eight miles to go and had a rendezvous arranged with my wife at four in Williamstown. For the next three miles, the walk was mostly along a lofty ridgeline connecting Greylock to Mount Williams. The views were sensational, across lazy hills to the Adirondacks half a dozen miles to the west, but it was really hot. Even up here the air was heavy and listless. And then it was a very steep descent-3,000 feet in three miles-through dense, cool green woods to a back road that led through exquisitely pretty open countryside.

Out of the woods, it was sweltering. It was two miles along a road totally without shade and so hot I could feel the heat through the soles of my boots. When at last I reached Williamstown, a sign on a bank announced a temperature of 97. No wonder I was hot. I crossed the street and stepped into a Burger King, our rendezvous point. If there is a greater reason for being grateful to live in the twentieth century than the joy of stepping from the dog’s breath air of a really hot summer’s day into the crisp, clean, surgical chill of an air-conditioned establishment, then I really cannot think of it.

I bought a bucket-sized Coke and sat in a booth by the window, feeling very pleased. I had done seventeen miles over a reasonably challenging mountain in hot weather. I was grubby, sweat streaked, comprehensively bushed, and rank enough to turn heads. I was a walker again.

In 1850, New England was 70 percent open farmland and 30 percent woods. Today the proportions are exactly reversed. Probably no area in the developed world has undergone a more profound change in just a century or so, at least not in a contrary direction to the normal course of progress.

If you were going to be a farmer, you could hardly choose a worse place than New England. (Well, the middle of Lake Erie maybe, but you know what I mean.) The soil is rocky, the terrain steep, and the weather so bad that people take actual pride in it. A year in Vermont, according to an old saw, is “nine months of winter followed by three months of very poor sledding.”

But until the middle of the nineteenth century, farmers survived in New England because they had proximity to the coastal cities like Boston and Portland and because, I suppose, they didn’t know any better. Then two things happened: the invention of the McCormick reaper (which was ideally suited to the big, rolling farms of the Midwest but no good at all for the cramped, stony fields of New England) and the development of the railroads, which allowed the Midwestern farmers to get their produce to the East in a timely fashion. The New England farmers couldn’t compete, and so they became Midwestern farmers, too. By 1860, nearly half of Vermont-born people-200,000 out of 450,000-were living elsewhere.

In 1840, during the presidential election campaign, Daniel Webster gave an address to 20,000 people on Stratton Mountain in Vermont. Had he tried the same thing twenty years later (which admittedly would have been a good trick, as he had died in the meantime) he would have been lucky to get an audience of fifty. Today Stratton Mountain is pretty much all forest, though if you look carefully you can still see old cellar holes and the straggly remnants of apple orchards clinging glumly to life in the shady understory beneath younger, more assertive birches, maples, and hickories. Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled-looking woods-a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.

And so I walked up Stratton Mountain on an overcast, mercifully cool June day. It was four steep miles to the summit at just under 4,000 feet. For a little over a hundred miles through Vermont the AT coexists with the Long Trail, which threads its way up and over the biggest and most famous peaks of the Green Mountains all the way to Canada. The Long Trail is actually older than the AT-it was opened in 1921, the year the AT was proposed-and I’m told that there are Long Trail devotees even yet who look down on the AT as a rather vulgar and overambitious upstart. In any case, Stratton Mountain is usually cited as the spiritual birthplace of both trails, for it was here that James p. Taylor and Benton MacKaye claimed to have received the inspiration that led to the creation of their wilderness ways-Taylor in 1909, MacKaye sometime afterwards.

Stratton was a perfectly fine mountain, with good views across to several other well-known peaks-Equinox, Ascutney, Snow, and Monadnock-but I couldn’t say that it was a summit that would have inspired me to grab a hatchet and start clearing a route to Georgia or Quebec. Perhaps it was just the dull, heavy skies and bleak light, which gave everything a flat, washed-out feel. Eight or nine other people were scattered around the summit, including one youngish, rather pudgy man on his own in a very new and expensive-looking windcheater. He had some kind of handheld electronic device with which he was taking mysterious readings of the sky or landscape.

He noticed me watching and said, in a tone that suggested he was hoping someone would take an interest, “It’s an Enviro Monitor.”

“Oh, yes?” I responded politely.

“Measures eighty values-temperature, UV index, dew point, you name it.” He tilted the screen so I could see it. “That’s heat stress.” It was some meaningless number that ended in two decimal places. “It does solar radiation,” he went on, “barometric pressure, wind chill, rainfall, humidity-ambient and active-even estimated burn time adjusted for skin type.”

“Does it bake cookies?” I asked.

He didn’t like this. “There are times when it could save your life, believe me,” he said, a little stoutly. I tried to imagine a situation in which I might find myself dangerously imperiled by a rising dew point and could not. But I didn’t want to upset the man, so I said: “What’s that?” and pointed at a blinking figure in the upper lefthand corner of the screen.

“Ah, I’m not sure what that is. But this-“he stabbed the console of buttons-“now this is solar radiation.” It was another meaningless figure, to three decimal places. “It’s very low today,” he said, and angled the machine to take another reading. “Yeah, very low today.” Somehow I knew this already. In fact, although I couldn’t attest any of it to three decimal places, I had a pretty good notion of the weather conditions generally, on account of I was out in them. The interesting thing about the man was that he had no pack, and so no waterproofs, and was wearing shorts and sneakers. If the weather did swiftly deteriorate, and in New England it most assuredly can, he would probably die, but at least he had a machine that would tell him when and let him know his final dew point.

I hate all this technology on the trail. Some AT hikers, I had read, now carry laptop computers and modems, so that they can file daily reports to their family and friends. And now increasingly you find people with electronic gizmos like the Enviro Monitor or wearing sensors attached by wires to their pulse points so that they look as if they’ve come to the trail straight from some sleep clinic.

In 1996 the Wall Street Journal ran a splendid article on the nuisance of satellite navigation devices, cellphones, and other such appliances in the wilderness. All this high-tech equipment, it appears, is drawing up into the mountains people who perhaps shouldn’t be there. At Baxter State Park in Maine, the Journal reported, one hiker called up a National Guard Unit and asked them to send a helicopter to airlift him off Mount Katahdin because he was tired. On Mount Washington, meanwhile, “two very demanding women,” according to an official there, called the mountain patrol HQ and said they couldn’t manage the last mile and a half to the summit even though there were still four hours of daylight left. They asked for a rescue team to come and carry them back to their car. The request was refused. A few minutes later, they called again and demanded in that case that a rescue team bring them some flashlights. That request was refused also. A few days later, another hiker called and requested a helicopter because he was a day behind schedule and was afraid he would miss an important business meeting. The article also described several people who had got lost with satellite navigation devices. They were able to report their positions as 36.2 degrees north by 17.48 degrees west or whatever but unfortunately didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant, as they hadn’t brought maps or compasses or, evidently, brains. My new friend on Stratton, I believe, could have joined their club. I asked him whether he felt it was safe for me to make a descent with solar radiation showing 18.574.

“Oh, yeah,” he said quite earnestly. “Solar radiationwise, today is very low risk.”

“Thank goodness,” I said, quite earnestly, too, and took my leave of him and the mountain.

And so I proceeded across Vermont in a series of pleasant day hikes, without anything electronic but with some very nice packed lunches that my wife made for me each night before retiring and left on the top shelf in the fridge. Despite my earlier vow not to hike with the car, I found it rather suited me here-indeed, completely suited me. I could hike all day and be home for dinner. I could sleep in my own bed and each day set off in clean, dry clothes and with a fresh packed lunch. It was nearly perfect.

And so for a happy three weeks I commuted to the mountains. Each morning I would rise at dawn, put my lunch in my pack, and drive over the Connecticut River to Vermont. I would park the car and walk up a big mountain or across a series of rolling green hills. At some point in the day when it pleased me, usually about 11:00A.M., I would sit on a rock or a log, take out my packed lunch, and examine the contents. I would go, as appropriate, “Peanut butter cookies! My favorite!” or “Oh, hum, luncheon meat again,” and eat in a zestful chewy silence, thinking of all the mountaintops had sat on with Katz where we would have killed for this. Then I would pack up everything very neatly, drop it in my pack, and hike again till it was time to clock off and go home. And so passed late June and the first part of July.

I did Stratton Mountain and Bromley Mountain, Prospect Rock and Spruce Peak, Baker Peak and Griffith Lake, White Rocks Mountain, Button Hill, Killington Peak, Gifford Woods State Park, Quimby Mountain, Thistle Hill, and finally concluded with a gentle eleven-mile amble from West Hartford to Norwich. This took me past Happy Hill Cabin, the oldest shelter on the AT and possibly the most sweetly picturesque (soon afterwards it was torn down by some foolishly unsentimental trail officials), and the town of Norwich, which is notable principally for being the town that inspired the “Bob Newhart Show” on television (the one where he ran an inn and all the locals were charmingly imbecilic) and for being the home of the great Alden Partridge, of whom no one has ever heard.

Partridge was born in Norwich in 1755 and was a demon walker-possibly the first person on the whole planet who walked long distances for the simple pleasure of it. In 1785, he became superintendent of West Point at the unprecedentedly youthful age of thirty, then had some kind of falling out there, and moved back to Norwich and set up a rival institution, the American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy. There he coined the term physical education and took his appalled young charges on brisk rambles of thirty-five or forty miles over the neighboring mountains. In between times he went off on more ambitious hikes of his own. On a typical trip he strode 110 miles over the mountains from Norwich to Williamstown, Massachusetts (essentially the route I had just completed in gentle stages), trotted up Mount Greylock, and came back home the same way. The trip there and back took him just four days-and this at a time, remember, when there were no maintained footpaths or helpful blazes. He did this sort of thing with virtually every peak in New England. There ought to be a plaque to him somewhere in Norwich to inspire the few hardy hikers still heading north at this point, but sadly there is none.

From Norwich it is about a mile to the Connecticut River and a pleasant, unassuming 1930s bridge leading to the state of New Hampshire and the town of Hanover on the opposite bank. The road that led from Norwich to Hanover was once a leafy, gently sinuous two-lane affair-the sort of tranquil, alluring byway you would hope to find connecting two old New England towns a mile apart. Then some highway official or other decided that what would be a really good idea would be to build a big, fast road between the two towns. That way, people could drive the one mile from Norwich to Hanover perhaps as much as eight seconds faster and not have to suffer paroxysms of anguish if somebody ahead wanted to turn onto a side road, because now there would be turning lanes everywhere, big enough for a truck pulling a titan missile to maneuver through without rolling over a curb or disrupting the vital flow of traffic.

So they built a broad, straight highway, six lanes wide in places, with concrete dividers down the middle and outsized sodium street lamps that light the night sky for miles around. Unfortunately, this had the effect of making the bridge into a bottleneck where the road narrowed back to two lanes. Sometimes two cars would arrive simultaneously at the bridge and one of them would have to give way (well, imagine!), so, as I write, they are replacing that uselessly attractive old bridge with something much grander and in keeping with the Age of Concrete. For good measure they are widening the street that leads up a short hill to the center of Hanover and its handsome, historic green. Of course, that means chopping down trees all along the street and drastically foreshortening most of the front yards with concrete retaining walls, and even a highway official would have to admit that the result is not exactly a picture, not something you would want to put on a calendar called “Beautiful New England,” but it will shave a further four seconds off that daunting trek from Norwich, and that’s the main thing.

All this is of some significance to me partly because I live in Hanover but mostly, I believe, because I live in the late twentieth century. Luckily I have a good imagination, so as I strode from Norwich to Hanover, I imagined not a lively mini-expressway but country lane shaded with trees, bounded with hedges and wildflowers, and graced with a stately line of modestly scaled lampposts, from each of which was suspended, upside down, a highway official, and I felt much better.

Chapter 17

Of all the catastrophic fates that can befall you in the out-of-doors, perhaps none is more eerily unpredictable than hypothermia. There is scarcely an instance of hypothermic death that isn’t in some measure mysterious and improbable. Consider a small story related by David Quammen in his book Natural Acts.

In the late summer of 1982, four youths and two men were on a canoeing holiday in Banff National Park when they failed to return to their base camp at the end of the day. The next morning, a search party went out looking for them. They found the missing canoeists floating dead in their life jackets in a lake. All were faceup and composed. Nothing about them indicated distress or panic. One of the men was still wearing his hat and glasses. Their canoes, drifting nearby, were sound, and the weather overnight had been calm and mild. For some unknowable reason, the six had carefully left their canoes and lowered themselves fully dressed into the cold water of the lake, where they had peacefully perished. In the words of a member of the search party, it was “like they had just gone to sleep.” In a sense, they had.

Popular impressions to the contrary, relatively few victims of hypothermia die in extreme conditions, stumbling through blizzards or fighting the bite of arctic winds. To begin with, relatively few people go out in that kind of weather, and those that do are generally prepared. Most victims of hypothermia die in a much more dopey kind of way, in temperate seasons and with the air temperature nowhere near freezing. Typically, they are caught by an unforeseen change of conditions or combination of changes-a sudden drop in temperature, a cold pelting rain, the realization that they are lost-for which they are emotionally or physically underequipped. Nearly always, they compound the problem by doing something foolhardy-leaving a well-marked path in search of a shortcut, blundering deeper into the woods when they would have been better off staying put, fording streams that get them only wetter and colder.

Such was the unfortunate fate of Richard Salinas, who in 1990 went hiking with a friend in Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina. Caught by fading light, they headed back to their car but somehow became separated. Salinas was an experienced hiker and all he had to do was follow a well-defined trail down a mountain to a parking lot. He never made it. Three days later, his jacket and knapsack were found abandoned, miles into the woods. His body was discovered two months later, snagged on branches in the little Linville River. As far as anyone can surmise, he had left the trail in search of a shortcut, got lost, plunged deep into the woods, panicked, and plunged deeper still, until at last hypothermia fatally robbed him of his senses.

Hypothermia is a gradual and insidious sort of trauma. It overtakes you literally by degrees as your body temperature falls and your natural responses grow sluggish and disordered. In such a state, Salinas had abandoned his possessions and soon after made the desperate and irrational decision to try to cross the rain-swollen river, which in normal circumstances he would have realized could take him only farther away from his goal. On the night he got lost, the weather was dry and the temperature in the 40s. Had he kept his jacket and stayed out of the water, he would have had an uncomfortably chilly night and a story to tell. Instead, he died.

A person suffering hypothermia experiences several progressive stages, beginning, as you would expect, with mild and then increasingly violent shivering as the body tries to warm itself with muscular contractions, proceeding on to profound weariness, heaviness of movement, a distorted sense of time and distance, and increasingly helpless confusion resulting in a tendency to make imprudent or illogical decisions and a failure to observe the obvious. Gradually the sufferer grows thoroughly disoriented and subject to increasingly dangerous hallucinations-including the decidedly cruel misconception that he is not freezing but burning up. Many victims tear off clothing, fling away their gloves, or crawl out of their sleeping bags. The annals of trail deaths are full of stories of hikers found half naked lying in snowbanks just outside their tents. When this stage is reached, shivering ceases as the body just gives up and apathy takes over. The heart rate falls and brain waves begin to look like a drive across the prairies. By this time, even if the victim is found, the shock of revival may be more than his body can bear.

This was neatly illustrated by an incident reported in the January 1997 issue of Outside magazine. In 1980, according to the article, sixteen Danish seamen issued a Mayday call, donned life jackets, and jumped into the North Sea as their vessel sank beneath them. There they bobbed for ninety minutes before a rescue ship was able to lift them from the water. Even in summer, the North Sea is so perishingly cold that it can kill a person immersed in it in as little as thirty minutes, so the survival of all sixteen men was cause for some jubilation. They were wrapped in blankets and guided below, where they were given a hot drink and abruptly dropped dead-all sixteen of them.

But enough of arresting anecdotes. Let’s toy with this fascinating malady ourselves.

I was in New Hampshire now, which pleased me, because we had recently moved to the state, so I was naturally interested explore it. Vermont and New Hampshire are so snugly proximate and so similiar in size, climate, accent, and livelihood (principally, skiing and tourism) that they are often bracketed as twins, but in fact they have quite different characters. Vermont is Volvos and antique shops and country inns with cutely contrived names like Quail Hollow Lodge and Fiddlehead Farm Inn. New Hampshire is guys in hunting caps and pickup trucks with license plates bearing the feisty slogan “Live Free or Die.” The landscape, too, differs crucially. Vermont’s mountains are comparatively soft and rolling, and its profusion of dairy farms gives it a more welcoming and inhabited feel. New Hampshire is one big forest. Of the state’s 9,304 square miles of territory, some 85 percent-an area somewhat larger than Wales-is woods, and nearly all the rest is either lakes or above treeline. So apart from the very occasional town or ski resort, New Hampshire is primarily, sometimes rather dauntingly, wilderness. And its hills are loftier, craggier, more difficult and forbidding than Vermont’s.

In the Thru-Hiker’s Handbook (the one indispensable guide to the AT, I might just say here), the great Dan “Wingfoot” Bruce notes that when the northbound hiker leaves Vermont he has completed 80 percent of the miles but just 50 percent of the effort. The New Hampshire portion alone, running 162 miles through the White Mountains, has thirty-five peaks higher than 3,000 feet. New Hampshire is hard.

I had heard so much about the ardors and dangers of the White Mountains that I was mildly uneasy about venturing into them alone-not terrified exactly, but prepared to be if I heard just one more bear-chase story-so you may conceive my quiet joy when a friend and neighbor named Bill Abdu offered to accompany me on some day hikes. Bill is a very nice fellow, amiable and full of knowledge, experienced on mountain trails, and with the inestimable bonus that he is a gifted orthopedic surgeon-just what you want in a dangerous wilderness. I didn’t suppose he’d be able to do much useful surgery up there, but if I fell and broke my back at least I’d know the Latin names for what was wrong with me.

We decided to start with Mount Lafayette, and to that end set off by car one clear July dawn and drove the two hours to Franconia Notch State Park (a “notch” in New Hampshire parlance is a mountain pass), a famous beauty spot at repose beneath commanding summits in the heart of the 700,000-acre White Mountain National Forest. Lafayette is 5,249 feet of steep, heartless granite. An 1870s account, quoted in Into the Mountains, observes: “Mt. Lafayette is…a true alp, with peaks and crags on which lightnings play, its sides brown with scars and deep with gorges.” All true. It’s a beast. Only nearby Mount Washington exceeds it for both heft and popularity as a hiking destination in the White Mountains.

From the valley floor, we had 3,700 feet of climb, 2,000 feet of it in the first two miles, and three smaller peaks en route-Mount Liberty, Little Haystack, and Mount Lincoln-but it was a splendid morning, with mild but abundant sunshine and that invigorating, minty-clean air you get only in northern mountains. It had the makings of a flawless day. We walked for perhaps three hours, talking little because of the steepness of the climb but enjoying being out and keeping a good pace.

Every guidebook, every experienced hiker, every signboard beside every trailhead parking lot warns you that the weather in the White Mountains can change in an instant. Stories of campers who go for a stroll along sunny heights in shorts and sneakers only to find themselves, three or fours hours later, stumbling to unhappy deaths in freezing fog are the stuff of every campfire, but they are also true. It happened to us when we were a few hundred feet shy of the summit of Little Haystack Mountain. The sunshine abruptly vanished, and from out of nowhere a swirling mist rolled into the trees. With it came a sudden fall in temperature, as if we had stepped into a cold store. Within minutes the forest was settled in a great foggy stillness, chill and damp. Timberline in the White Mountains occurs as low as 4,800 feet, about half the height in most other ranges, because the weather is so much more severe, and I began to see why. As we emerged from a zone of krummholz, the stunted trees that mark the last gasp of forest at treeline, and stepped on to the barren roof of Little Haystack, we were met by a stiff, sudden wind-the kind that would snatch a hat from your head and fling it a hundred yards before you could raise a hand-which the mountain had deflected over us on the sheltered western slopes but which here was flying unopposed across the open summit. We stopped in the lee of some boulders to put on waterproofs, for the extra warmth as much anything, for I was already quite damp from the sweat of effort and the moist air-a clearly foolish state to be in with the temperature falling and the wind whisking away any body heat. I opened my pack, rooted through the contents, and then looked up with that confounded expression that comes with the discovery of a reversal. I didn’t have my waterproofs. I rooted again, but there was hardly anything in the pack-a map, a light sweater, a water bottle, and a packed lunch. I thought for a moment and with a small inward sigh remembered pulling the waterproofs out some days before and spreading them out in the basement to air. I hadn’t remembered to put them back.

Bill, tightening a drawstring on his windcheater hood, looked over. “Something wrong?”

I told him. He made a grave expression. “Do you want to turn back?”

“Oh, no.” I genuinely didn’t want to. Besides, it wasn’t that bad. There wasn’t any rain and I was only a little chilly. I put the sweater on and felt immediately better. Together we looked at his map. We had done almost all the height, and it was only a mile and a half along a ridgeline to Lafayette, at which point we would descend steeply 1,200 feet to Greenleaf Hut, a mountain lodge with a cafeteria. If I did need to warm up, we would reach the hut a lot faster than if we went five miles back down the mountain to the car.

“You sure you don’t want to turn back?”

“No,” I insisted. “We’ll be there in half an hour.”

So we set off again into the galloping wind and depthless gray murk. We cleared Mount Lincoln, at 5,100 feet, then descended slightly to a very narrow ridgeline. Visibility was no more than fifteen feet and the winds were razor sharp. Air temperature falls by about 2.5°F with every thousand feet of elevation, so it would have been chillier at this height anyway, but now it was positively uncomfortable. I watched with alarm as my sweater accumulated hundreds of tiny beads of moisture, which gradually began to penetrate the fabric and join the dampness of the shirt beneath. Before we had gone a quarter of a mile the sweater was wet through and hanging heavily on my arms and shoulders.

To make things worse, I was wearing blue jeans. Everyone will tell you that blue jeans are the most foolish item of clothing you can wear on a hike. I had contrarily become something of a devotee of them because they are tough and give good protection against thorns, ticks, insects, and poison ivy-perfect for the woods. However, I freely concede that they are completely useless in cold and wet. The cotton sweater was something I had packed as a formality, as you might pack antisnake bite medicine or splints. It was July, for goodness sake. I hadn’t expected to need any kind of outerwear beyond possibly my trusty waterproofs, which of course I didn’t have either. In short, I was dangerously misattired and all but asking to suffer and die. I certainly suffered.

I was lucky to escape with that. The wind was whooshing along noisily and steadily at a brisk twenty-five miles an hour, but gusting to at least double that, and from ever-shifting directions. At times, when the wind was head on, we would take two steps forward and one back. When it came from an angle, it gave us a stiff shove towards the edge of the ridge. There was no telling in the fog how far the fall would be on either side, but it looked awfully steep, and we were after all a mile up in the clouds. If conditions had deteriorated just a little-if the fog had completely obscured our footing or the gusts had gathered just enough bump to knock a grown man over-we would have been pinned down up there, with me pretty well soaked through. Forty minutes before, we had been whistling in sunshine. I understood now how people die in the White Mountains even in summer.

As it was, I was in a state of mild distress. I was shivering foolishly and feeling oddly lightheaded. The ridge seemed to run on forever, and there was no guessing in the milky void how long it would be till the form of Lafayette would rise to meet us. I glanced at my watch-it was two minutes to eleven; just right for lunch when and if we ever got to the godforsaken lodge-and took some comfort from the thought that at least I still had my wits about me. Or at least I felt as if I did. Presumably, a confused person would be too addled to recognize that he was confused. Ergo, if you know that you are not confused then you are not confused. Unless, it suddenly occurred to me-and here was an arresting notion- unlesspersuading yourself that you are not confused is merely a cruel, early symptom of confusion. Or even an advanced symptom. Who could tell? For all I knew I could be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state characterized by the fear on the part of the sufferer that he may be stumbling into some kind of helpless preconfusional state. That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.

I glanced at my watch again and discovered with horror that it was still only two minutes to eleven. My sense of time was going! I might not be able to reliably assess my faltering brain, but here was proof on my wrist. How long would it be till I was dancing around half naked and trying to beat out flames, or seized with the brilliant notion that the best way out of this mess would be to glide to the valley floor on a magic, invisible parachute? I whimpered a little and scooted on, waited a good full minute and stole a glance at my watch again. Still two minutes to eleven! I was definitely in trouble.

Bill, who seemed serenely impervious to cold and of course had no idea that we were doing anything but proceeding along a high ridge in an unseasonal breeze, looked back from time to time to ask how I was doing.

“Great!” I’d say, for I was too embarrassed to admit that I was in fact losing my mind preparatory to stepping over the edge with a private smile and a cry of “See you on the other side, old friend!” I don’t suppose he had ever lost a patient on a mountaintop, and I didn’t wish to alarm him. Besides, I wasn’t entirely convinced I Was losing my grip, just severely uncomfortable.

I’ve no idea how long it took us to reach the windy summit of Lafayette other than that it was a double eternity. A hundred years ago there was a hotel on this bleak, forbidding spot, and its wind-worn foundations are still a landmark-I have seen it in photographs-but I have no recollection of it now. My focus was entirely on descending on the side trail to Greenleaf Hut. It led through a vast talus field and then, a mile or so farther on, into woods. Almost as soon as we left the summit, the wind dropped, and within 500 feet the world was quite calm, eerily so, and the dense fog was nothing more than straggly, drifting shreds. Suddenly we could see the world below and how high up we were, which was a considerable distance, though all the nearby summits were wreathed in clouds. To my surprise and gratification, I felt much better. I stood up straight, with a sense of novelty, and realized that I had been walking in a severe hunch for some time. Yes, I definitely felt much better: hardly cold at all and agreeably clearheaded.

“Well, that wasn’t so bad,” I said to Bill with a mountain man chuckle and pressed on to the hut.

Greenleaf Hut is one of ten picturesque and, in this case, wonderfully handy stone lodges built and maintained in the White Mountains by the venerable Appalachian Mountain Club. The AMC, founded over 120 years ago, is not only the oldest hiking club in America but the oldest conservation group of any type. It charges a decidedly ambitious $50 a night for a bunk, dinner, and breakfast and consequently is widely known to thru-hikers as the Appalachian Money Club. Still, to its considerable credit, the AMC maintains 1,400 miles of trails in the Whites, runs an excellent visitor center at Pinkham Notch, publishes worthwhile books, and lets you come into its huts to use the toilets, get water, or just warm up, which is what we gratefully did now.

We purchased cups of warming coffee and took them to a set of long tables, where we sat with a sprinkling of other steamy hikers and ate our packed lunches. The lodge was very congenial in a basic and rustic sort of way, with a high ceiling and plenty of room to move around. When we’d finished, I was beginning to stiffen up, so I got up to move around and looked in on one of the two dormitories. It was a large room, packed with built-in bunks stacked four high. It was clean and airy, but startlingly basic, and presumably would be like an army barracks at night when it was full of hikers and their equipment. It didn’t look remotely appealing to me. Benton MacKaye had nothing to do with these huts, but they were absolutely in accord with his vision-spare, rustic, wholesomely communal-and I realized with a kind of dull shock that if his dreams of a string of trailside hostels had been realized this is precisely how they would have been. My fantasy of a relaxed and cosy refuge with a porchful of rockers would actually have been rather more like a spell at boot camp (and an expensive one at that, if the AMC’s fees were anything to go by).

I did a quick calculation. Assuming $50 as the standard price, it would have cost the average thru-hiker somewhere between $6,000 and $7,500 to stay in a lodge each night along the trail. Clearly, it would never have worked. Perhaps it was better that things were as they were.

The sun was shining weakly when we emerged from the hut and set off back down the mountain on a side trail to Franconia Notch, and as we descended it gathered strength until we were back in a nice July day, with the air lazy and mild and the trees fetchingly speckled with sunlight and birdsong. By the time we reached the car, in late afternoon, I was almost completely dry, and my passing fright on Lafayette-now basking in hearty sunshine against a backdrop of vivid blue sky-seemed a remote memory.

As we climbed in, I glanced at my watch. It said two minutes to eleven. I gave it a shake and watched with interest as the second hand kicked back into motion.

Chapter 18

On the afternoon of April 12, 1934, Salvatore Pagliuca, a meteorologist at the summit weather observatory on Mount Washington, had an experience no one else has had before or since.

Mount Washington sometimes gets a little gusty, to put it mildly, and this was a particularly breezy day. In the previous twenty-four hours the wind speed had not fallen below 107 miles an hour, and often gusted much higher. When it came time for Pagliuca to take the afternoon readings, the wind was so strong that he tied a rope around his waist and had two colleagues take hold of the other end. As it was, the men had difficulty just getting the weather station door open and needed all their strength to keep Pagliuca from becoming a kind of human kite. How he managed to reach his weather instruments and take readings is not known, nor are his words when he finally tumbled back in, though “Jeeeeeeeesus!” would seem an apt possibility.

What is certain is that Pagliuca had just experienced a surface wind speed of 231 miles an hour. Nothing approaching that velocity has ever been recorded elsewhere.

In The Worst Weather on Earth: A History of the Mt. Washington Observatory, William Lowell Putnam drily notes: “There may be worse weather, from time to time, at some forbidding place on Planet Earth, but it has yet to be reliably recorded.” Among the Mount Washington weather station’s many other records are: most weather instruments destroyed, most wind in twenty-four hours (nearly 3,100 miles of it), and lowest windchill (a combination of 100-mph winds and a temperature of- 47°F, a severity unmatched even in Antarctica).

Washington owes its curiously extreme weather not so much to height or latitude, though both are factors, as to its position at the precise point where high altitude weather systems from Canada and the Great Lakes pile into moist, comparatively warm air from the Atlantic or southern United States. In consequence, it receives 246 inches of snow a year and snowpacks of twenty feet. In one memorable storm in 1969, 98 inches of snow (that’s eight feet) fell on the summit in three days. Wind is a particular feature; on average it blows at hurricane force (over 75 mph) on two winter days in three and on 40 percent of days overall. Because of the length and bitterness of its winters, the average mean annual temperature at the summit is a meager 27°F. The summer average is 52°F-a good 25 degrees lower than at its base. It is a brutal mountain, and yet people go up there-or at least try to-even in winter.

In Into the Mountains, Maggie Stier and Ron McAdow record how two University of New Hampshire students, Derek Tinkham and Jeremy Haas, decided to hike the entire Presidential Range-seven summits, including Washington, all named for U.S. presidents-in January 1994. Although they were experienced winter hikers and were well equipped, they couldn’t have imagined what they were letting themselves in for. On their second night, the winds rose to ninety miles an hour and the temperature plummeted to-32°F. I have experienced-25°F in calm conditions and can tell you that even well wrapped and with the benefit of residual heat from indoors it becomes distinctly uncomfortable within a couple of minutes. Somehow the two survived the night, but the next day Tinkham announced he could go no farther. Haas helped him into a sleeping bag, then stumbled on to the weather observatory a little over two miles away. He just made it, though he was gravely frostbitten. His friend was found the next day, “half out of his sleeping bag and frozen solid.”

Scores of others have perished in far less taxing conditions on Washington. One of the earliest and most famous deaths was that of a young woman named Lizzie Bourne who in 1855, not long after Mount Washington began to attract tourists, decided to amble up in the company of two male companions on a summery September afternoon. As you will have guessed already, the weather turned, and they found themselves lost in fog. Somehow they got separated. The men made it after nightfall to a hotel on the summit. Lizzie was found the next day just 150 feet from the front door, but quite dead.

Altogether, 122 people have lost their lives on Washington. Until recently, when it was overtaken by Mount Denali in Alaska, it was the most murderous mountain in North America. So when the fearless Dr. Abdu and I pulled up at its base a few days later for the second of our grand ascents, I had brought enough backup clothes to cross the Arctic-waterproofs, woollen sweater, jacket, gloves, spare trousers, and long underwear. Never again would I be chilled at height.

Washington, the highest peak north of the Smokies and east of the Rockies at a solidly respectable 6,288 feet, gets few clear days, and this was a clear day, so the crowds were out in force. I counted over seventy cars at the Pinkham Notch Visitor Center lot at 8:10 in the morning when we arrived, and more pouring in every minute. Mount Washington is the most popular summit in the White Mountains, and the Tuckerman Ravine Trail, our chosen route, is the most popular trail up. Some 60,000 hikers a year take to the Tuckerman route, though a good many of them get a lift to the top of the mountain and walk down, so the figures are perhaps a trifle skewed. In any case, it was no more than moderately busy on a good, hot, blue-skied, gorgeously promising morning in late July.

The walk up was much easier than I had dared hope. Even now, I could not quite get used to the novelty of walking big hills without a large pack. It makes such a difference. I won’t say we bounded up, but considering that we had almost 4,500 feet of climb in a little over three miles, we walked at a pretty steady clip. It took us two hours and forty minutes (Bill’s hiking guide to the White Mountains suggested a walking time of four hours and fifteen minutes), so we were pretty proud.

There may be more demanding and exciting summits to reach along the Appalachian Trail than Mount Washington but none can be more startling. You labor up the last steep stretch of rocky slope to what is after all a considerable eminence and pop your head over the edge, and there you are greeted by, of all things, a vast, terraced parking lot, full of automobiles gleaming hotly in the sun. Beyond stands a scattered complex of buildings among which move crowds of people in shorts and baseball caps. It has the air of a world’s fair bizarrely transferred to a mountaintop. You get so used along the AT to sharing summits with only a few other people, all of whom have worked as hard as you to get there, that this was positively dazzling. On Washington, visitors can arrive by car on a winding toll road or on a cog railway from the other side, and hundreds of people-hundreds and hundeds of them, it seemed-had availed themselves of these options. They were everywhere, basking in the sunshine, draped over the railings on the viewing terraces, wandering between various shops and food places. I felt for some minutes like a visitor from another planet. I loved it. It was a nightmare, of course, and a desecration of the highest mountain in the northeast, but I was delighted it existed in one place. It made the rest of the trail seem perfect.

The epicenter of activity was a monstrously ugly concrete building, the Summit Information Center, with big windows, broad viewing platforms, and an exceedingly lively cafeteria. Just inside the door was a large list of all the people who had died on the mountain and the causes, beginning with one Frederick Strickland of Bridlington, Yorkshire, who lost his way while hiking in an October storm in 1849, and ran on through a quite breathtaking array of mishaps before concluding with the deaths of two hikers in an avalanche just three months earlier. Already six people had died on Washington’s slopes in 1996, with the year barely half over-quite a sobering statistic-and there was plenty of room on the board for more.

In the basement was a small museum with displays on Washington’s climate, geology, and distinctive plant life, but what particularly captivated me was a comical short video called “Breakfast of champions,” which I presume the meteorologists had made for their own amusement. It was filmed with a fixed camera on one of the summit terraces and showed a man sitting at a table, as if at an open-air restaurant, during one of its famous blows. While the man holds down the table with his arms, a waiter approaches against the wind with great and obvious difficulty, like someone wingwalking at 30,000 feet. He tries to pour the customer a bowl of cereal, and it all flies horizontally from the box. Then he adds milk, but this goes the same way (mostly over the customer-a particularly gratifying moment). Then the bowl flies away and the silverware, as I recall, and then the table starts to go, and then the film ends. It was so good I watched it twice, then went off to find Bill so he could see it. I couldn’t spot him in the restless throngs, so I went outside on to the viewing platform and watched the cog railway train chuffing up the mountain, pouring out clouds of black smoke as it went. It stopped at the summit station and hundreds of more happy tourists tumbled off.

Tourism goes back a long way on Mount Washington. As early as 1852 there was a restaurant at the summit and the proprietors were serving about a hundred meals a day. In 1853, a small stone hotel called Tip-Top House was built atop the mountain and was a huge and immediate success. Then in 1869 a local entrepreneur named Sylvester March built the cog railway, the first in the world. Everyone thought he was mad and that even if he succeeded in building the railway, which was doubtful, there wouldn’t be any demand for it. In fact, as the disgorging throngs below me demonstrated now, people haven’t tired of it yet.

Five years after the railway opened the old Tip-Top was succeeded by a much grander Summit House Hotel, and that was followed by a forty-foot-tower with a multicolored searchlight, which could be seen all over New England and far out to sea. By late in the century a daily newspaper was being published on the summit as a summer novelty and American Express had opened a branch office.

Meanwhile back at ground level, things were also booming. The modern tourist industry, in the sense of people traveling en masse to a congenial spot and finding lots of diversions awaiting them when they got there, is essentially a White Mountains invention. Massive hotels, with up to 250 rooms, sprang up in every glen. Built in a jaunty domestic style, like cottages blown up to the scale of hospitals or sanitoria, these were exceedingly ornate and elaborate structures, among the largest and most complicated ever built of wood, with wandering rooflines robustly punctuated with towers and turrets and every other mark of architectural busyness the Victorian mind could devise. They had winter gardens and salons, dining rooms that could seat 200, and porches like the promenade decks of ocean liners from which guests could drink in the wholesome air and survey nature’s craggy splendor.

The finer hotels were very fine indeed. The Profile House at Franconia Notch had its own private railway line to Bethlehem Junction eight miles away; its grounds held twenty-one cottages, each with up to twelve bedrooms. The Maplewood had its own casino. Guests at the Crawford House could choose among nine daily newspapers from New York and Boston, shipped in specially. Whatever was new and exciting-elevators, gas lighting, swimming pools, golf courses-the White Mountain hotels were in the vanguard. By the 1890s, there were 200 hotels scattered through the White Mountains. There has never been a collection of hotels of comparable grandeur anywhere, certainly not in a mountain setting. Now, however, they are virtually all gone.

In 1902, the grandest of them all, the Mount Washington Hotel, opened at Bretton Woods, in an open, meadowy setting against the backdrop of the Presidential Range. Built in a commanding style described optimistically by the architect as “Spanish Renaissance,” it was the pinnacle of grace and opulence, with 2,600 acres of cultivated grounds, 235 guest rooms, and every detail of finery that heaps of money could buy. For the plasterwork alone, the developers brought in 250 Italian artisans. But already it was something of an anachronism.

Fashion was moving on. American vacationers were discovering the seaside. The White Mountain hotels were a little too dull, a little too remote and expensive, for modern tastes. Worse, they had begun to attract the wrong sort of people-parvenus from Boston and New York. Finally, and above all, there was the automobile. The hotels were built on the assumption that visitors would come for two weeks at least, but the car gave them a fickle mobility. In the 1924 edition of New England Highways and Byways from a Motor Car, the author gushed about the unrivaled splendor of the White Mountains-the tumbling cataracts of Franconia, the alabaster might of Washington, the secret charm of little towns like Lincoln and Bethlehem-and strongly encouraged visitors to give the mountains a full day and night. America was entering the age not just of the automobile but of the retarded attention span.

One by one the hotels closed down, became derelict, or, more often, burned to the ground (often, miraculously, almost the only thing to survive was the insurance policy), and their grounds slowly returned to forest. Once one could have seen perhaps twenty large hotels from the summit. Today there is just one, the Mount Washington, still imposing and festive with its perky red roof but inescapably forlorn in its solitary grandeur. (And even it has staggered along the edge of bankruptcy from time to time.) Elsewhere across the spacious valley far below, where once had proudly stood the Fabyan, the Mount Pleasant, the Crawford House, and many others, today there were only forest, highways, and motels.

From beginning to end the great age of the resort hotels in the White Mountains lasted just fifty years. Once again, I offer you the Appalachian Trail as a symbol of venerability. And with that in mind, I went off to find my friend Bill and complete our walk.

Chapter 19

“I’ve had a brilliant idea,” said Stephen Katz. We were in the living room of my house in Hanover. It was two weeks later. We were leaving for Maine in the morning.

“Oh yeah?” I said, trying not to sound too wary, for ideas are not Katz’s strongest suit.

“You know how awful it is carrying a full pack?”

I nodded. Of course I did.

“Well, I was thinking about it the other day. In fact I’ve been thinking about it a lot because to tell you the truth, Bryson, the idea of putting that pack on again filled me with”-he lowered his voice a tone-“fucking dread.” He nodded with solemnity and repeated the two key words. “And then I had a great idea. An alternative. Close your eyes.”

“What for?”

“I want to surprise you.”

I hate having to close my eyes for a surprise, always have, but I did it.

I could hear him rooting in his army surplus duffel bag. “‘Who carries a lot of weight all the time?’” he continued. “That was the question I asked myself. ‘Who carries a lot of weight day in and day out?’ Hey, don’t look yet. And then it occurred to me.” He was silent a moment, as if making some crucial adjustment that would assure a perfect impression. “OK, now you can look.”

I uncovered my eyes. Katz, beaming immoderately, was wearing a Des Moines Register newspaper delivery bag-the kind of bright yellow pouch that paperboys traditionally sling over their shoulders before climbing on their bikes and riding off to do their rounds.

“You can’t be serious,” I said quietly.

“Never been more serious in my life, my old mountain friend. I brought you one too.” He handed me one from his duffel bag, still pristinely folded and in a transparent wrapper.

“Stephen, you can’t walk across the Maine wilderness with a newspaper delivery bag.”

“Why not? It’s comfortable, it’s capacious, it’s waterproof-near enough-and it weighs all of about four ounces. It is the Perfect Hiking Accessory. Let me ask you this. When was the last time you saw a paperboy with a hernia?” He gave a small, smug nod, as if he had stumped me with that one.

I made some tentative, preparatory shapes with my mouth prior to saying something, but Katz raced on before I could get a thought in order.

“Now here’s the plan,” he continued. “We cut our load down to the bare minimum-no stoves, no gas bottles, no noodles, no coffee, no tents, no stuff sacks, no sleeping bags. We hike and camp like mountain men. Did Daniel Boone have a three-season fiberfill sleeping bag? I don’t think so. All we take is cold food, water bottles, maybe one change of clothes. I figure we can get the load down to five pounds. And”-he waggled his hand delightedly in the empty newspaper bag-“we put it all in here.” His expression begged me to drape him with plaudits.

“Have you given any thought to how ridiculous you would look?”

“Yup. Don’t care.”

“Have you considered what a source of uncontained mirth you would be to every person you met between here and Katahdin?”

“Don’t give the tiniest shit.”

“Well, has it occurred to you what a ranger would say if he found you setting off into the Hundred Mile Wilderness with a newspaper delivery bag? Do you know they have the power to detain anyone they think is not mentally or physically fit?” This Was actually a lie, but it brought a promising hint of frown to his brow. “Also, has it occurred to you that maybe the reason paperboys don’t get hernias is that they only carry the bag for an hour or so a day-that maybe it might not be so comfortable lugging it for ten hours at a stretch over mountains-that maybe it would bang endlessly against your legs and rub your shoulders raw? Look how it’s chafing against your neck already.”

His eyes slid stealthily down to the strap. The one positive thing about Katz and his notions was that it was never very hard to talk him out of them. He took the bag off over his head. “OK,” he agreed, “screw the bags. But we pack light.”

I was happy with that. In fact, it seemed a perfectly sensible proposal. We packed more than Katz wanted-I insisted on sleeping bags, warm clothes, and our tents on the grounds that this could be a good deal more demanding than Katz appreciated-but I agreed to leave behind the stove, gas bottles, and pots and pans. We would eat cold stuff-principally Snickers, raisins, and an indestructible type of salami product called Slim Jims. It wouldn’t kill us for a fortnight. Besides, I couldn’t face another bowl of noodles. Altogether we saved perhaps five pounds of weight each-hardly anything really-but Katz seemed disproportionately happy. It wasn’t often he got his way, even in part.

And so the next day, my wife drove us deep into the boundless woods of northern Maine for our trek through the Hundred Mile Wilderness. Maine is deceptive. It is the twelfth smallest state, but it has more uninhabited forest-ten million acres-than any other state but Alaska. In photographs it looks serene and beckoning, parklike even, with hundreds of cool, deep lakes and hazy, tranquil miles of undulating mountains. Only Katahdin, with its rocky upper slopes and startling muscularity, offers anything that looks faintly intimidating. In fact, it is all hard.

The trail maintainers in Maine have a certain hale devotion to seeking out the rockiest climbs and most forbidding slopes, and of these Maine has a breathtaking plenitude. In its 283 miles, the Appalachian Trail in Maine presents the northbound hiker with almost 100,000 feet of climb, the equivalent of three Everests. And at the heart of it all lies the famous Hundred Mile Wilderness-99.7 miles of boreal forest trail without a store, house, telephone, or paved road, running from the village of Monson to a public campground at Abol Bridge, a few miles below Katahdin. It is the remotest section of the entire AT. If something goes wrong in the Hundred Mile Wilderness, you are on your own. You could die of an infected blood blister out there.

It takes a week to ten days for most people to cross this notorious expanse. Because we had two weeks, we had my wife drop us at Caratunk, a remote community on the Kennebec River, thirty-eight miles short of Monson and the official start of the wilderness. We would have three days of limbering up and a chance to resupply at Monson before plunging irreversibly into the deepest woods. I had already done a little hiking to the west around Rangeley and Flagstaff Lakes, in the week before Katz came, as a kind of reconnoiter, so I felt as if I knew the terrain. Even so, it was a shock.

It was the first time in almost four months that I had hoisted a pack with a full load. I couldn’t believe the weight, couldn’t believe that there had ever been a time when I could believe the weight. The strain was immediate and discouraging. But at least I had been hiking. Katz, it was quickly evident, was starting from square one-actually, several score pancake breakfasts to the wrong side of square one. From Caratunk it was a long, gently upward haul of five miles to a big lake called Pleasant Pond, hardly taxing at all, but I noticed right away that he was moving with incredible deliberativeness, breathing very hard, and wearing a kind of shocked. “Where am I?” expression.

All he would utter was “Man!” in an amazed tone when I asked him how he was, and a single heartfelt “Fuhhhhhhhhck”-breathy and protracted, like the noise of a plumped cushion when someone sits on it-when he let his pack fall from his back at the first rest stop after forty-five minutes. It was a muggy afternoon and Katz was a river of sweat. He took a water bottle and downed nearly half of it. Then he looked at me with quietly desperate eyes, put his pack back on, and wordlessly returned to his duty.

Pleasant Pond was a vacation spot-We could hear the happy shrieks of children splashing and swimming perhaps a hundred yards away-though we couldn’t see anything of the lake through the trees. Indeed without their gaiety we wouldn’t have known it was there, a sobering reminder of how suffocating the woods can be. Beyond rose Middle Mountain, just 2,500 feet high but acutely angled and an entirely different experience on a hot day with a cumbersome pack sagging down on tender shoulders. I plodded joylessly on to the top of the mountain. Katz was soon far behind and moving with shuffling slowness.

It was after six o’clock when I reached the base of the mountain on the other side and found a decent campsite beside a grassy, little-used logging road at a place called Baker Stream. I waited a few minutes for Katz, then put up my tent. When he still hadn’t come after twenty minutes, I went looking for him. He was almost an hour behind me when I finally found him, and his expression was glassy-eyed.

I took his pack from him and sighed at the not entirely unexpected discovery that it was light.

“What’s happened to your pack?”

“Aw, I threw some stuff,” he said unhappily.

“What?”

“Oh, clothes and stuff.” He seemed uncertain whether to be ashamed or belligerent. He decided to try belligerence. “That stupid sweater for one thing.” We had disputed mildly over the need for woolens.

“But it could get cold. It’s very changeable in the mountains.”

“Yeah, right. It’s August, Bryson. I don’t know if you noticed.”

There didn’t seem much point in trying to reason with him When we reached the camp and he was putting up his tent I looked into his pack. He had thrown away nearly all his spare clothes and, it appeared, a good deal of the food.

“Where’s the peanuts?” I said. “Where’s all your Slim Jims?”

“We didn’t need all that shit. It’s only three days to Monson.”

“Most of that food was for the Hundred Mile Wilderness, Stephen. We don’t know what kind of supplies there’ll be in Monson.”

“Oh.” He looked struck and contrite. “I thought it was a lot for three days.”

I looked despairingly in the pack and then looked around.

“Where’s your other water bottle?”

He looked at me sheepishly. “I threw it.”

“You threw a water bottle?” This was truly staggering. If there is one thing you need on the trail in August, it is lots of water.

“It was heavy.”

“Of course it’s heavy. Water’s always heavy. But it is also kind of vital, wouldn’t you say?”

He gave me a helpless look. “I just had to get rid of some weight. I was desperate.”

“No, you were stupid.”

“Yeah, that too,” he agreed.

“Stephen, I wish you wouldn’t do these things.”

“I know,” he said and looked sincerely repentant.

While he finished putting up his tent, I went off to filter water for the morning. Baker Stream was really a river-broad, clear, and shallow-and very beautiful in the glow of a summery evening, with a backdrop of overhanging trees and the last rays of sunlight sparkling its surface. As I knelt by the water, I became curiously aware of something-some thing-in the woods beyond my left shoulder, which caused me to straighten up and peer through the clutter of foliage at the water’s edge. Goodness knows what impelled me to look because I couldn’t have heard anything over the musical tumult of water, but there about fifteen feet away in the dusky undergrowth, staring at me with a baleful expression, was a moose-full grown and female, or so I presumed since it had no antlers. It had evidently been on its way to the water for a drink When it was brought up short by my presence and now clearly was undecided what to do next.

It is an extraordinary experience to find yourself face-to-face in the woods with a wild animal that is very much larger than you. You know these things are out there, of course, but you never expect at any particular moment to encounter one, certainly not up close-and this one was close enough that I could see the haze of flealike insects floating in circles about its head. We stared at each other for a good minute, neither of us sure what to do. There was a certain obvious and gratifying tang of adventure in this, but also something much more low-key and elemental-a kind of respectful mutual acknowledgment that comes with sustained eye contact. It was this that was unexpectedly thrilling-the sense that there was in some small measure a salute in our cautious mutual appraisal. I was smitten.

I had recently read to my dismay that they have started hunting moose again in New England. Goodness knows why anyone would want to shoot an animal as harmless and retiring as the moose, but thousands of people do-so many, in fact, that states now hold lotteries to decide who gets a permit. Maine in 1996 received 82,000 applications for just 1,500 permits. Over 12,000 out-of-staters happily parted with a nonrefundable $20 just to be allowed to take part in the draw.

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That’s all there is to it. Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it-its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers-looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other. Above all, what distinguishes the moose is its almost boundless lack of intelligence. If you are driving down a highway and a moose steps from the woods ahead of you, he will stare at you for a long minute (moose are notoriously shortsighted), then abruptly try to run away from you, legs flailing in eight directions at once. Never mind that there are several thousand square miles of forest on either side of the highway. The moose does not think of this. Clueless as to what exactly is going on, he runs halfway to New Brunswick before his peculiar gait inadvertently steers him back into the woods, where he immediately stops and takes on a startled expression that says, “He-woods. Now how the heck did I get here?” Moose are so monumentally muddle-headed, in fact, that when they hear a car or truck approaching they will often bolt out of the woods and onto the highway in the curious hope that this will bring them to safety.

Amazingly, given the moose’s lack of cunning and peculiarly blunted survival instincts, it is one of the longest-surviving creatures in North America. Mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, wolves, caribou, wild horses, and even camels all once thrived in eastern North America alongside the moose but gradually stumbled into extinction, while the moose just plodded on. It hasn’t always been so. At the turn of this century, it was estimated that there were no more than a dozen moose in New Hampshire and probably none at all in Vermont. Today New Hampshire has an estimated 5,000 moose, Vermont 1,000, and Maine anywhere up to 30,000. It is because of these robust and growing numbers that hunting has been reintroduced as a way of keeping them from getting out of hand. There are, however, two problems with this that I can think of. First, the numbers are really just guesses. Moose clearly don’t line up for censuses. Some naturalists think the population may have been overstated by as much as 20 percent, which means that the moose aren’t being so much culled as slaughtered. No less pertinent is that there is just something deeply and unquestionably wrong about killing an animal that is so sweetly and dopily unassuming as a moose. I could have slain this one with a slingshot, with a rock or stick-with a folded newspaper, I’d almost bet-and all it wanted was a drink of water. You might as well hunt cows.

Stealthily, so as not to alarm it, I crept off to get Katz. When we returned, the moose had advanced to the water and was drinking about twenty-five feet upstream. “Wow,” Katz breathed. He was thrilled, too, I was pleased to note. The moose looked up at us, decided we meant her no harm, and went back to drinking. We watched her for perhaps five minutes, but the mosquitoes were chewing us up, so we withdrew and returned to our camp feeling considerably elated. It seemed a confirmation-we were in the wilderness now-and a gratifying, totally commensurate reward for a day of hard toil.

We ate a dinner of Slim Jims, raisins, and Snickers and retired to our tents to escape the endless assault of mosquitoes. As we lay there, Katz said, quite brightly, “Hard day today. I’m beat.” It was unlike him to be chatty at tent time.

I grunted in agreement.

“I’d forgotten how hard it is.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“First days are always hard, though, aren’t they?”

“Yeah.”

He gave a settling-down sigh and yawned melodiously. “It’ll be better tomorrow,” he said, still yawning. By this he meant, I supposed, that he wouldn’t fling anything foolish away. “Well, good night,” he added.

I stared in surprise at the wall of my tent in the direction from which his voice had come. In all the weeks of camping together, it was the first time he had wished me a good night.

“Good night,” I said.

I rolled over on my side. He was right, of course. First days are always bad. Tomorrow would be better. We were both asleep in minutes.

Well, we were both wrong. The next day started well enough, with a sunny dawn that promised another hot day. It was the first time along the trail that we had woken to warmth, and we enjoyed the novelty of it. We packed up our tents, breakfasted on raisins arid Snickers, and set off into the deep woods. By nine o’clock the sun was already high and blazing. Even on hot days, the woods are normally cool, but here the air was heavy and steamy, almost tropical. About two hours after setting off, we came to a lagoon, about two acres in size, I would guess, and filled with papery reeds, fallen trees, and the bleached torsos of dead trees that were still standing. Dragonflies danced across the surface. Beyond, waiting, rose a titanic heap called Moxie Bald Mountain. But what was of immediate note was that the trail ended, abruptly and disconcertingly, at the water’s edge. Katz and I looked at each other-something wrong here surely. For the first time since Georgia, we wondered if we had lost the trail. (God knows what chicken John would have made of it.) We retraced our steps a considerable distance, perplexedly studied our map and trail guide, tried to find an alternative way around the pond through the dense and lacerating undergrowth, and finally concluded that we were intended to ford it. On the far shore, perhaps eighty yards away, Katz spied a continuation of trail and a white AT blaze. Clearly we had to wade across.

Katz led the way, barefoot and in boxer shorts, using a long stick like a punting pole to try to pick his way across on a jumble of submerged or half submerged logs. I followed in a similar manner but staying far enough back that I didn’t put my weight on logs he was using. They were covered in a slick moss and tended to bob or rotate alarmingly when stepped on. Twice he nearly toppled over. Finally, about twenty-five yards out, he lost it altogether and plunged with wheeling arms and an unhappy wail into the murky water. He went completely under, came up, went under again, and came up flailing and floundering with such wildness that for a few sincerely mortifying moments I thought he was drowning. The weight of his pack was clearly dragging him backwards and keeping him from gaining an upright position or even successfully keeping his head above water. I was about to drop my pack and plunge in to help when he managed to catch hold of a log and pull himself to a standing position. The water was up to his chest. He clung to the log and heaved visibly with the effort of catching his breath and calming himself down. He had obviously had a fright.

“You all right?” I said.

“Oh, peachy,” he replied. “Just peachy. I don’t know why they couldn’t have put some crocodiles in here and made a real adventure of it.”

I crept on, and an instant later I tumbled in, too. I had a few surreal, slow-motion moments of observing the world from the unusual perspective of waterline or just below while my hand reached helplessly for a log that was just beyond my grasp-all this in a curious bubbly silence-before Katz sloshed to my assistance, firmly grabbed my shirt, and thrust me back into a world of light and noise and set me on my feet. He was surprisingly strong.

“Thank you,” I gasped.

“Don’t mention it.”

We waded heavily to the far shore, taking it in turns to stumble and help each other up, and sloshed up on to the muddy bank trailing strands of half-rotted vegetation and draining huge volumes of water from our packs. We dumped our loads and sat on the ground, bedraggled and spent, and stared at the lagoon as if it had just played a terrible practical joke on us. I could not remember feeling this tired this early in the day anywhere along the trail. As we sat there, we heard voices, and two young hikers, hippieish and very fit, emerged from the woods behind us. They nodded hellos and looked appraisingly at the water.

“Afraid you gotta wade this one,” Katz said.

One of the hikers looked at him in a not unkindly way. “This your first time hiking up here?” he said.

We nodded.

“Well, I don’t want to discourage you, but mister you’ve only just started to get wet.”

With that he and his partner hoisted their packs above their heads, wished us luck, and walked into the water. They waded skillfully across in perhaps thirty seconds-Katz and I had taken as many minutes-and stepped out on the other side, as if from a root bath, put their dry packs back on, gave a small wave, and disappeared.

Katz took a big thoughtful breath-partly sigh, partly just experimenting with the ability to breathe again. “Bryson, I’m not trying to be negative-I swear to God I’m not-but I’m not sure I’m cut out for this. Could you lift your pack over your head like that?”

“No.”

And on that premonitory note, we strapped up and set squelchily off up Moxie Bald Mountain.

The Appalachian Trail is the hardest thing I have ever done, and the Maine portion was the hardest part of the Appalachian Trail, and by a factor I couldn’t begin to compute. Partly it was the heat. Maine, that most moderate of states, was having a killer heat wave. In the blistering sun, the shadeless granite pavements of Moxie Bald radiated an ovenlike heat, but even in the woods the air was oppressive and close, as if the trees and foliage were breathing on us with a hot, vegetative breath. We sweated helplessly, copiously, and drank unusual quantities of water, but could never stop being thirsty. Water was sometimes plentiful but more often nonexistent for long stretches so that we were never sure how much we could prudently swallow without leaving ourselves short later on. Even fully stocked, we were short now thanks to Katz’s dumping a bottle. Finally, there were the relentless insects, the unsettling sense of isolation, and the ever-taxing terrain.

Katz responded to this in a way that I had never seen from him. He showed a kind of fixated resolve, as if the only way to deal with this problem was to bull through it and get it over with.

The next morning we came very early to the first of several rivers we would have to ford. It was called Bald Mountain Stream, but in fact it was a river-broad, lively, strewn with boulders. It was exceedingly fetching-it glittered with dancing spangles in the early morning sun and was gorgeously clear-but the current seemed strong and there was no telling from the shore how deep it might be in the middle. Several large streams in the area, my Appalachian Trail Guide to Maine noted blithely, “can be difficult or dangerous to cross in high water.” I decided not to share this with Katz.

We took off our shoes and socks, rolled up our pants, and stepped gingerly out into the frigid water. The stones on the bottom were all shapes and sizes-flat, egg-shaped, domed-very hard on the feet, and covered with a filmy green slime that was ludicrously slippery. I hadn’t gone three steps when my feet skated and I fell painfully on my ass. I struggled halfway to my feet but slipped and fell again; struggled up, staggered sideways a yard or two, and pitched helplessly forward, breaking my fall with my hands and ending up in the water doggie style. As I landed, my pack slid forward and my boots, tied to its frame by their laces, were hurled into a kind of contained orbit; they came around the side of the pack in a long, rather pretty trajectory, and came to a halt against my head, then plunked into the water, where they dangled in the current. As I crouched there, breathing evenly and telling myself that one day this would be a memory, two young guys-clones almost of the two we had seen the day before-strode past with confident, splashing steps, packs above their heads.

“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 pebble 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 or 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 or 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. The 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 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 linking 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.

Chapter 20

Well, 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.

Even then we had no prospect of real comfort. Katahdin is in Baxter State Park, which takes a certain hearty pride in its devotion to ruggedness and deprivation. There are no restaurants and lodges, no gift shops and hamburger stands, not even any paved roads or public phones. The park itself is in the middle of nowhere, a two-day hike from Millinocket, the nearest town. It could be ten or eleven days before we had a proper meal or slept in a bed. It seemed a long way off.

In the morning we silently forded the stream-we were getting pretty good at it now-and started up the long, slow climb to the roof of the Barren-chairback Range, fifteen miles of ragged summits that we had to cross before descending to a more tranquil spell in the valley of the Pleasant River. The map showed just three tarns in those mountains, remnant glacial ponds, all off the trail, but otherwise no indication of water at all. With less than four liters between us and the day already warm, the long haul between water sources promised to be at the very least uncomfortable.

Barren Mountain was a strenuous slog, much of it straight up and all of it hot, though we seemed to be getting stronger. Even Katz was moving with a comparative lightness. Even so, it took us nearly all morning to hike the four and a half miles up. I reached the top some time ahead of Katz. The summit was sun-warmed granite, hot to the touch, but there was a wisp of breeze-the first in days-and I found a shady spot beneath a disused fire tower. It was the first time in what seemed like weeks that I had sat anywhere in relative comfort. I leaned back and felt as if I could sleep for a month. Katz arrived ten minutes later, puffing hard but pleased to be at the top. He took a seat on a boulder beside mine. I had about two inches of water left, and passed him the bottle. He took a very modest sip and made to hand it back.

“Go on,” I said, “you must be thirsty.”

“Thanks.” He took a slightly less modest sip and put the bottle down. He sat for a minute, then got out a Snickers, broke it in two and extended half to me. It was a somewhat odd thing to do because I had Snickers of my own and he knew that, but he had nothing else to give.

“Thanks,” I said.

He gnawed off a bite of Snickers, ate for a minute and said from out of nowhere: “Girlfriend and boyfriend are talking. The girlfriend says to the boyfriend, ‘Jimmy, how do you spell pedophilia?’ The boyfriend looks at her in amazement. ‘Gosh, honey,’ he says ‘that’s an awfully big word for an eight-year-old.’”

I laughed.

“I’m sorry about the other night,” Katz said.

“Me too.”

“I just got a little…I don’t know.”

“I know.”

“It’s kind of hard for me sometimes,” he went on. “I try, Bryson, I really do, but-” He stopped there and shrugged reflectively, a little helplessly. “There’s just this kind of hole in my life where drinking used to be.” He was staring at the view-the usual verdant infinity of woods and lakes, shimmering slightly in a heat haze. There was something in his gaze-a miles-away fixedness-that made me think for a minute that he had stopped altogether, but he went on. “When I went back to Des Moines after Virginia and got that job building houses, at the end of the day all the crew would go off to this tavern across the street. They’d always invite me, but I’d say”-he lifted two hands and put on a deep, righteous voice-“‘No, boys, I’m reformed.’ And I’d go home to my little apartment and heat a TV dinner, and feel all virtuous, like I’m supposed to. But really, you know, when you do that night after night it’s kind of hard to persuade yourself you’re leading a rich and thrilling existence. I mean, if you had a Fun-o-Meter, the needle wouldn’t exactly be jumping into the orgasmic zone because you’ve got your own TV dinner. You know what I’m saying?”

He glanced over, to see me nod.

“So anyway one day after work, they invited me for about the hundredth time and I thought, ‘Oh, what the hell. No law that says I can’t go in a tavern like anybody else.’ So I went and had a Diet Coke and it was OK. I mean, it was nice just to be out. But you know how good a beer is at the end of a long day. And there was this jerk named Dwayne who kept saying, ‘Go on, have a beer. You know you want one. One little beer’s not gonna hurt ya. You haven’t had a drink for three years. You can handle it.’” He looked at me again. “You know?”

I nodded.

“Caught me when I was vulnerable. You know, when I was still breathing,” Katz said with a thin, ironic smile, then went on: “I never had more than three, I swear to God. I know what you’re going to say-believe me, everybody’s said it already. I know I can’t drink. I know I can’t have just a couple of beers like a normal person, that pretty soon the number will creep up and up and spin out of control. I know that. But-” He stopped there again, shaking his head. “But I love to drink. I can’t help it. I mean, I love it, Bryson-love the taste, love that buzz you get when you’ve had a couple, love the smell and feel of taverns. I miss dirty jokes and the click of pool balls in the background, and that kind of bluish, underlit glow of a bar at night.” He was quiet again for a minute, lost in a little reverie for a lifetime’s drinking. “And I can’t have it anymore. I know that.” He breathed out heavily through his nostrils. “It’s just that. It’s just that sometimes all I see ahead of me is TV dinners-a sort of endless line of them dancing towards me like in a cartoon. You ever eat TV dinners?”

“Not for years and years.”

“Well, they’re shit, believe me. And, I don’t know, it’s just kind of hard…” He trailed off. “Actually, it’s real hard.” He looked at me, on the edge of emotion, his expression frank and humble. “Makes me kind of an asshole sometimes,” he said quietly.

I gave him a small smile. “Makes you more of an asshole,” I said.

He snorted a laugh. “Yeah, I guess.”

I reached over and gave him a stupidly affectionate jab on the shoulder. He received it with a flicker of appreciation.

“And do you know what the fuck of it is?” he said in a sudden pull-yourself-together voice. “I could kill for a TV dinner right now. I really could.” We laughed.

“Hungry Man Turkey Dinner with plastic giblets and 40-weight gravy. Hmmmm-mmmm. I’d leave your scrawny ass up here for just a sniff of that.” Then he brushed at a corner of eye, said, “Hoo, fuck,” and went to have a pee over the cliff edge.

I watched him go, looking old and tired, and wondered for a minute what on earth we were doing up here. We weren’t boys any more.

I looked at the map. We were practically out of water, but it was less than a mile to Cloud Pond, where we could refill. We split the last half inch, and I told Katz I would go on ahead to the pond, filter the water, and have it waiting for him when he arrived.

It was an easy twenty-minute walk along a grassy ridgeline. Cloud Pond was down a steep side trail, about a quarter of a mile off the AT. I left my pack propped against a big rock at the trailside and went with our water bottles and the filter down to the pond edge and filled up.

It took me perhaps twenty minutes to walk down, fill the three bottles, and walk back, so when I returned to the AT it had been about forty minutes since I had seen Katz. Even if he had tarried on the mountaintop, and even allowing for his modest walking speed, he should have reached here by now. Besides, it was an easy walk and I knew he was thirsty, so it was odd that he wasn’t more prompt. I waited fifteen minutes and then twenty and twenty-five, and finally I left my pack and went back to look for him. It was well over an hour since I had seen him when I reached the mountaintop, and he wasn’t there. I stood confounded on the spot where we had last been together. His stuff was gone. He had obviously moved on, but if he wasn’t on Barren Mountain and wasn’t at Cloud Pond and was nowhere in between, then where was he? The only possible explanations were that he had gone back the other way, which was out of the question-Katz would never have left me without explanation-never-or that he had somehow fallen off the ridgeline. It was an absurd notion-there wasn’t anything remotely challenging or dangerous about the ridgeline-but you never know. John Connolly had told us weeks before of a friend of his who had fainted in heat and tumbled a few feet off a safe, level trail; he had lain unnoticed for hours in blazing sunshine and slowly baked to death. All the way back to the Cloud Pond turnoff I carefully surveyed the trail-edge brush for signs of disturbance and peered at intervals over the lip of the ridge, fearful of seeing Katz spread-eagled on a rock. I called his name several times, and got nothing in return but my own fading voice.

By the time I reached the turnoff it had been nearly two hours since I had seen him. This was becoming worryingly inexplicable. The only remaining possibility was that he had walked past the turnoff while I was down at the pond filtering water, but this seemed manifestly improbable. There was a prominent arrowed sign by the trail saying “Cloud Pond” and my pack had been clearly visible beside the trail. Even if he had somehow failed to notice these things, he knew that Cloud Pond was only a mile from Barren Mountain. When you have hiked the AT as much as we had, you get so you can judge a mile with considerable accuracy. He couldn’t have gone too far beyond without realizing his mistake and coming back. This just didn’t make sense.

All I knew was that Katz was alone in a wilderness with no water, no map, no clear idea of what terrain lay ahead, presumably no idea of what had become of me, and a worrying lack of sense. If there was ever one person who would decide while lost on the AT to leave the trail and try for a short cut, it was Katz. I began to feel extremely uneasy. I left a note on my pack and went off down the trail. A half mile farther on, the trail descended very steeply, almost perpendicularly, more than 600 feet to a high, nameless valley. He had to have realized by this point, surely, that he had gone wrong. I had told him Cloud Pond was a level stroll.

Calling his name at intervals, I picked my way slowly along the path down the cliff face, fearing the worst at the bottom-for this was a precipice one could easily fall down, especially with a big ungainly pack and a preoccupied mind-but there was no sign of him. I followed the trail two miles through the valley and up on to the summit of a high pinnacle called Fourth Mountain. The view from the top was expansive in every direction; the wilderness had never looked so big. I called his name long and hard, and got nothing in return.

It was getting on to late afternoon by this time. He had been at least four hours without water. I had no idea how long a person could survive without water in this heat, but I knew from experience that you couldn’t go for more than half an hour without experiencing considerable discomfort. It occurred to me with a sinking feeling that he might have seen another pond-there were half a dozen to choose from scattered across the valley 2,000 feet below-and decided in his perplexity that perhaps that was it, and tried to reach it cross-country. Even if he wasn’t confused, he might simply have been driven by thirst to try to reach one of those ponds. They looked wonderfully cool and refreshing. The nearest was only about two miles away, but there was no trail to it and it was down a perilous slope through the woods. Once you were in the woods and bereft of bearings, you could easily miss it by a mile. Conversely, you could be within fifty yards of it and not know, as we had seen at Pleasant Pond a few days before. And once you were lost in these immense woods, you would die. It was as simple as that. No one could save you. No helicopter could spot you through the cover of trees. No rescue teams could find you. None, I suspected, would even try. There would be bears down there, too-bears that had possibly never seen a human. All the possibilities made my head hurt.

I hiked back to the Cloud Pond turnoff, hoping more than anything I had hoped for in a long time that he would be sitting on the pack, and that there would be some amusing, unconsidered explanation-that we had kept just missing each other, like in a stage farce: him waiting bewildered at my pack, then going off to look for me; me arriving a moment later, waiting in puzzlement and going off-but I knew he wouldn’t be there, and he wasn’t. It was nearly dusk when I got back. I wrote a fresh note and left it under a rock in the middle of the AT, just in case, hoisted my pack, and went down to the pond, where there was a shelter.

The irony was that this was the nicest campsite I experienced anywhere along the AT, and it was the one place I camped without Katz. Cloud Pond was a couple of hundred acres of exquisitely peaceful water surrounded by dark coniferous forest, the treetops pointy black silhouettes against a pale blue evening sky. The shelter, which I had to myself, was on a level area thirty or forty yards back from the pond and slightly above it. It was practically new and spotless. There was a privy nearby. It was nearly perfect. I dumped my stuff on the wooden sleeping platform and went down to the water’s edge to filter water, so I wouldn’t have to do it in the morning, then stripped to my boxers and waded a couple of feet into the dark water to have a wash with a bandanna. If Katz had been there, I’d have had a swim. I tried not to think about him-certainly not to visualize him lost and bewildered. There was, after all, nothing I could do now.

Instead, I sat on a rock and watched the sunset. The pond was almost painfully beautiful. The long rays of the setting sun made the water shimmer golden. Offshore, two loons cruised, as if out for a spin after supper. I watched them for a long time, and thought about something I had seen on a BBC nature program some time before.

Loons, according to the program, are not social creatures. But towards the end of summer, just before they fly back to the North Atlantic, where they pass the winter bobbing on stormy waves, they host a series of get-togethers. A dozen or more loons from all the neighboring ponds fly in, and they all swim around together for a couple of hours for no discernible reason other than the pleasure of being together. The host loon leads the guests on a proud but low-key tour of his territory-first to his favorite little cove, say, then perhaps over to an interesting fallen log, then on to a patch of lily pads. “This is where I like to fish in the mornings,” he seems to be saying. “And here’s where we’re thinking of moving our nesting site next year.” All the other loons follow him around with diligence and polite interest. No one knows why they do this (but then no one knows why one human being would want to show another his converted bathroom) or how they arrange their rendezvous, but they all show up each night at the right lake at the right time as certainly as if they had been sent a card that said: “We’re Having a Party!” I think that’s wonderful. I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t kept thinking of Katz stumbling and gasping and searching for a lake by moonlight.

Oh, and by the way, the loons are disappearing everywhere because their lakes are dying from acid rain.

I had a rotten night, of course, and was up before five and back on the trail at first light. I continued on north in the direction I guessed Katz had gone, but with the nagging thought that I was plunging ever farther into the Hundred Mile Wilderness-not perhaps the best direction to go if he was somewhere nearby and in trouble. There was a certain incidental disquiet at the thought that I was on my own in the middle of nowhere-a disquiet briefly but vividly heightened when I stumbled in my haste on the return descent to the deep, nameless valley and came within a trice of falling fifty long feet, with a messy bounce at the bottom. I hoped I was doing the right thing.

Even flat out it would take me three days, perhaps four, to reach Abol Bridge and the campground. By the time I alerted authorities, Katz would have been missing for four or five days. On the other hand, if I turned now and went back the way we had come, I could be in Monson by the following afternoon. What I really needed was to meet somebody coming south who could tell me if they had seen Katz, but there was no one out on the trail. I looked at my watch. Of course there wasn’t. It was only a little after six in the morning. There was a shelter at chairback Gap, six miles farther on. I would reach it by eight or so. With luck, there might still be someone there. I pressed on with more care and a queasy uncertainty.

I clambered back over the pinnacle of Fourth Mountain-much harder with a pack-and into another wooded valley beyond. Four miles after leaving Cloud Pond, I came to a tiny stream, barely worthy of the term-really just a slick of moist mud. Speared to a branch beside the trail, in an intentionally prominent place, was an empty pack of Old Gold cigarettes. Katz didn’t smoke much, but he always carried a pack of Old Golds. In the mud by a fallen log were three cigarette butts. He had obviously waited here. So he was alive and hadn’t left the trail, and clearly had come this way. I felt immeasurably better. At least I was going in the right direction. As long as he stuck to the trail, I was bound eventually to overtake him.

I found him four hours after setting off, sitting on a rock by the turnoff for West chairback Pond, head inclined to the sun as if working on his tan. He was extensively scratched and muddy, and wildly bedraggled, but otherwise looked OK. He was of course delighted to see me.

“Bryson, you old mountain man, you’re a welcome sight. Where have you been?”

“I was wondering the same of you.”

“Guess I missed the last watering hole?”

I nodded.

He nodded, too. “Knew I had, of course. Soon as I got down to the bottom of that big cliff, I thought, ‘Shit, this can’t be right.’”

“Why didn’t you come back?”

“I don’t know. I got it in mind somehow that you must have pushed on. I was real thirsty. I think I might have been a little confused-a little addled, as you might say. I was real thirsty.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, I pushed on and kept thinking I had to come to water sooner or later, and eventually I came to a mud slick-”

“Where you left the cigarette pack?”

“You saw it? I’m so proud. Yeah, well, I soaked up some water there with my bandanna, because I remembered that’s what Fess Parker did once on the Davy Crockett show.”

“How very enterprising.”

He accepted the compliment with a nod. “That took about an hour, and then I waited another hour for you and had a couple of smokes, and then it was getting dark so I put my tent up, ate a Slim Jim, and went to bed. Then this morning I sponged up a little more water with my bandanna and I came on here. There’s a real nice pond just down there, so I thought I’d wait here where there was water and hope that you’d come along eventually. I didn’t think you’d leave me up here on purpose, but you’re such a walking day dream I could just imagine you getting all the way to Katahdin before you noticed I wasn’t with you.” He put on an exaggerated accent. “‘Oh, I say, delightful view-don’t you agree, Stephen? Stephen…? Stephen…? Now where the deuce has he got to?’” He gave me a familiar smile. “So I’m real glad to see you.”

“How’d you get so scratched up?”

He looked at his arm, which was covered in a zigzag of dried blood. “Oh that? It’s nothing.”

“What do you mean it’s nothing? It looks like you’ve been doing surgery on yourself.”

“Well, I didn’t want to alarm you, but I also got kind of lost.”

“How?”

“Oh, between losing you and coming upon the mud slick, I tried to get to a lake I saw from the mountain.”

“Stephen, you didn’t.”

“Well, I was real thirsty, you know, and it didn’t look too far. So I plunged off into the woods. Not real smart, right?”

“No.”

“Yeah, well, I learned that real fast because I hadn’t gone more than half a mile before I was totally lost. I mean totally lost. It’s weird, you know, because you’re thinking all you’ve got to do is go downhill to the water and come back the same way, and that shouldn’t be too tough as long as you pay attention. But the thing is, Bryson, there’s nothing to pay attention to out there. It’s just one big woods. So when I realized I didn’t have the faintest idea where I was I thought, ‘OK, well, I got lost by going downhill, so I’d better go back up.’ But suddenly there’s a lot of uphills, and a lot of downhills too, and it’s real confusing. So I went up and up and up until I knew I’d gone a lot farther than I’d come, and then I thought, ‘Well, Stephen, you stupid piece of shit’-’cause I was getting a little cross with myself by this time, to tell you the truth-I thought, ‘you must have gone too far, you jackass,’ so I want back down a ways, and that didn’t work, so then I tried going sideways for a while and-well, you get the picture.”

“You should never leave the trail, Stephen.”

“Oh, now there’s a timely piece of advice, Bryson. Thank you so much. That’s like telling somebody who’s died in a crash, ‘Drive safely now.’”

“Sorry.”

“Forget it. I think maybe I’m still a little, you know, unsettled. I thought I was done for. Lost, no water-and you with the chocolate chip cookies.”

“So how did you get back to the trail?”

“It was a miracle, I swear to God. Just when I was about to lie down and give myself to the wolves and bobcats, I look up and there’s a white blaze on a tree and I look down and I’m standing on the AT. At the mudslick, as a matter of fact. I sat down and had three smokes one after the other, just to calm myself down, and then I thought, ‘Shit, I bet Bryson’s walked by here while I’ve been blundering around in the woods, and he’ll never come back because he’s already checked this section of trail.’ And then I began to worry that I never would see you again. So I really was glad when you turned up. To tell you the truth, I’ve never been so glad to see another person in my whole life, and that includes some naked women.”

There was something in his look.

“You want to go home?” I asked.

He thought for a moment. “Yeah. I do.”

“Me, too.”

So we decided to leave the endless trail and stop pretending we were mountain men because we weren’t. At the bottom of chairback Mountain, four miles farther on, there was a dirt logging road. We didn’t know where it went other than that it must go somewhere. An arrow on the edge of my map pointed south to Katahdin Iron Works, site of an improbable nineteenth-century factory in the woods and now a state historical monument. According to my Trail Guide there was public parking at the old iron works, so there must be a road out. At the bottom of the mountain, we watered up at a brook that ran past, and then started off along the logging road. We hadn’t been walking more than three or four minutes when there was a noise in the near distance. We turned to see a cloud of dust heading our way led by an ancient pickup truck moving at great speed. As it approached I instinctively put my thumb out, and to my astonishment it stopped about fifty feet past us.

We ran up to the driver’s window. There were two guys in the cab, both in hardhats and dirty from work-loggers obviously.

“Where you going?” asked the driver.

“Anywhere,” I said. “Anywhere but here.”

Chapter 21

So we didn’t see Katahdin. We didn’t even see Katahdin Iron Works, except as a glimpsed blur because we shot past it at about seventy miles an hour on the bounciest, most terrifyingly hasty ride I ever hope to have in the back of a pickup truck on a dirt road.

We held on for dear life in the open back, lifting our feet to let chainsaws and other destructive-looking implements slide past-first this way, then that-while the driver propelled us through the flying woods with reckless zest, bouncing over potholes with such vigor as to throw us inches into the air, and negotiating curves as if in startled afterthought. In consequence we alighted at the little community of Milo, twenty miles to the south, on unsteady legs and blinking at the suddenness with which our circumstances had changed. One moment we had been in the heart of wilderness, facing at least a two-day hike to civilization; now we were in the forecourt of a gas station on the edge of a remote little town. We watched the pickup truck depart, then took our bearings.

“You want to get a Coke?” I said to Katz. There was a machine by the gas station door.

He considered for a moment. “No,” he said. “Maybe later.”

It was unlike Katz not to fall upon soft drinks and junk food with exuberant lust when the opportunity presented itself, but I believe I understood. There is always a measure of shock when you leave the trail and find yourself parachuted into a world of comfort and choice, but it was different this time. This time it was permanent. We were hanging up our hiking boots. From now on, there would always be Coke, and soft beds and showers and whatever else we wanted. There was no urgency now. It was a strangely subduing notion.

Milo had no motel, but we were directed to a place called Bishop’s Boarding-house, a large old white house on a handsome street of elegant trees, wide lawns, substantial old houses-the kind of homes where the garages were originally carriage houses with quarters upstairs for the servants.

We were received with warmth and bustling kindliness by the proprietor, Joan Bishop, a cheery, snowy-haired lady with a hearty Down East accent who came to the door wringing floury hands on an apron and waved us and our grubby packs into the spotless interior without a flicker of dismay.

The house smelled wholesomely of fresh-baked pastry, garden tomatoes, and air undisturbed by fans or air-conditioners-old-fashioned summer smells. She called us “you boys” and acted as if she had been expecting us for days, possibly years.

“Goodness me, just look at you boys!” she clucked in astonishment and delight. “You look as if you’ve been wrestling bears!”

I suppose we must have looked a sight. Katz was liberally covered in blood from his fraught stumble through the woods, and there was tiredness all over us, even in our eyes.

“Now you boys go up and get yourselves cleaned up and come down to the porch and I’ll have a nice jug of iced tea waiting for you. Or would you rather lemonade? Never mind, I’ll make both. Now go on!” And off she bustled.

“Thanks, Mom,” we muttered in dazzled and grateful unison.

Katz was instantly transformed-so much so that he felt perhaps a trifle too much at home. I was wearily taking some things from my pack when he suddenly appeared in my room without knocking and hastily shut the door behind him, looking flummoxed. Only a towel, clutched not quite adequately around his waist, preserved his hefty modesty.

“Little old lady,” he said in amazement.

“Pardon?”

“Little old lady in the hallway,” he said again.

“It is a guest house, Stephen.”

“Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. He peeked out the door and disappeared without elaboration.

When we had showered and changed, we joined Mrs. Bishop on the screened porch, where we slumped heavily and gratefully in the big old porch chairs, legs thrust out, the way you do when it’s hot and you’re tired. I was hoping that Mrs. Bishop would tell us that she was forever putting up hikers who had been foiled by the Hundred Mile Wilderness, but in fact we were the first she could recall in that category.

“I read in the paper the other day that a man from Portland hiked Katahdin to celebrate his seventy-eighth birthday,” she said conversationally.

That made me feel immensely better, as you can imagine.

“I expect I’ll be ready to try again by then,” Katz said, running a finger along the line of scratch on his forearm.

“Well, it’ll still be there, boys, when you’re ready for it,” she said. She was right, of course.

We dined in town at a popular restaurant called Angie’s and afterwards, with the evening warm and congenial, went for a stroll. Milo was a sweetly hopeless town-commercially forlorn, far from anywhere and barely alive, but curiously likeable. It had some nice residential streets and an impressive fire station. Perhaps it was just that it was our last night away from home. Anyway, it seemed to suit us.

“So do you feel bad about leaving the trail?” Katz asked after a time.

I thought for a moment, unsure. I had come to realize that I didn’t have any feelings towards the AT that weren’t confused and contradictory. I was weary of the trail, but still strangely in its thrall; found the endless slog tedious but irresistible; grew tired of the boundless woods but admired their boundlessness; enjoyed the escape from civilization and ached for its comforts. I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off. “I don’t know,” I said. “Yes and no, I guess. What about you?”

He nodded. “Yes and no.”

We walked along for some minutes, lost in small thoughts.

“Anyway, we did it,” Katz said at last, looking up. He noted my quizzical expression. “Hiked Maine, I mean.”

I looked at him. “Stephen, we didn’t even see Mount Katahdin.”

He dismissed this as a petty quibble. “Another mountain,” he said. “How many do you need to see, Bryson?”

I snorted a small laugh. “Well, that’s one way of looking at it.”

“It’s the only way of looking at it,” Katz went on and quite earnestly. “As far as I’m concerned, I hiked the Appalachian Trail. I hiked it in snow and I hiked it in heat. I hiked it in the South and I hiked in the North. I hiked it till my feet bled. I hiked the Appalachian Trail, Bryson.”

“We missed out a lot of it, you know.”

“Details,” Katz sniffed.

I shrugged, not unhappily. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right,” he said, as if he were seldom otherwise.

We had reached the edge of town, by the little gas station/ grocery store where the lumberjacks had dropped us. It was still open.

“So what do you say to some cream soda?” Katz said brightly.“I’ll buy.”

I looked at him with deepened interest. “You don’t have any money.”

“I know. I’ll buy it with your money.”

I grinned and handed him a five-dollar bill from my wallet.

“‘X-Files’ tonight,” Katz said happily-very happily-and disappeared into the store. I watched him go, shaking my head, and wondered how he always knew.

So that is how it ended for me and Katz-with a six-pack of cream soda in Milo, Maine.

Katz returned to Des Moines to a small apartment, a job in construction, and a life of devoted sobriety. He calls from time to time and talks about coming out to try the Hundred Mile Wilderness again, though I don’t suppose he ever will.

I continued to hike, on and off, through the rest of summer and into fall. In mid-October, at the height of the foliage season, I went for what proved to be a final walk, a return visit to Killington Peak in Vermont, on one of those glorious days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and crisp, tangy perfection and the air so clear that you feel as if you could reach out and ping it with a finger. Even the colors were crisp: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in every sharp shade that nature can bestow. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a forest becomes individual; where formerly had sprawled a seamless cloak of green there now stood a million bright colors.

I hiked with enthusiasm and vigor, buoyed by fresh air and splendor. From the roof of Killington there was a 360-degree panorama over nearly the whole of New England and on to Quebec as far as the distant bluish nubbin of Mont Royal. Almost every peak of consequence in New England-Washington, Lafayette, Greylock, Monadnock, Ascutney, Moosilauke-stood etched in fine relief and looked ten times closer than it actually was. It was so beautiful I cannot tell you. That this boundless vista represented but a fragment of the Appalachians’ full sweep, that under my feet there lay a free and exquisitely maintained trail running for 2,200 miles through hills and woods of equal grandeur, was a thought almost too overpowering to hold. I don’t recall a moment in my life when I was more acutely aware of how providence has favored the land to which I was born. It seemed a perfect place to stop.

I would have had to anyway. Autumn is fleeting in New England. Within days of my walk up Killington, winter began blowing in; the hiking season was clearly at an end. One Sunday soon afterwards, I sat down at the kitchen table with my trail log and a calculator and at last totted up the miles I had done. I checked the numbers through twice, then looked up with an expression not unlike the one Katz and I had shared months before in Gatlinburg when we realized we were never going to hike the Appalachian Trail.

I had done 870 miles, considerably less than half the AT. All that effort and sweat and disgusting grubbiness, all those endless plodding days, the nights on hard ground-all that added up to just 39.5 percent of the trail. Goodness knows how anyone ever completes the whole thing. I am filled with admiration and incredulity for those who see it through. But hey and excuse me, 870 is still a lot of miles-from New York to chicago, indeed somewhat beyond. If I had hiked that against almost any other measure, we would all be feeling pretty proud of me now.

I still quite often go for walks on the trail near my home, especially if I am stuck on something I am working on. Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment, the amazing complex delicacy of the woods, the casual ease with which elemental things come together to form a composition that is-whatever the season, wherever I put my besotted gaze-perfect. Not just very fine or splendid, but perfect, unimprovable. You don’t have to walk miles up mountains to achieve this, don’t have to plod through blizzards, slip sputtering in mud, wade chest-deep through water, hike day after day to the edge of your limits-but believe me, it helps.

I have regrets, of course. I regret that I didn’t do Katahdin (though I will, I promise you, I will). I regret that I never saw a bear or wolf or followed the padding retreat of a giant hellbender salamander, never shooed away a bobcat or sidestepped a rattlesnake, never flushed a startled boar. I wish that just once I had truly stared death in the face (briefly, with a written assurance of survival). But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods. I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn’t know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.

Best of all, these days when I see a mountain, I look at it slowly and appraisingly, with a narrow, confident gaze and eyes of chipped granite.

We didn’t walk 2,200 miles, it’s true, but here’s the thing: we tried. So Katz was right after all, and I don’t care what anybody says. We hiked the Appalachian Trail.