Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

  Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  (2009)

  * * *

  * * *

  Lucy and Susan Letcher

  a.k.a. Isis and jackrabbit

  CHAPTER I

  The Wilderness 1

  CHAPTER 2

  Southbounders 33

  CHAPTER 3

  The White Mountains 77

  CHAPTER 4

  Isis Alone 116

  CHAPTER 5

  The Gathering 153

  CHAPTER 6.

  The Rocks of Pennsylvania 185

  CHAPTER 7

  "As Long as It's Fun" 213

  CHAPTER 8

  Boots and Snowshoes 267

  CHAPTER 9

  The Scales 307

  CHAPTER 10

  The Last of the Sobos 339

  CHAPTER 1 1

  "Bye, Never See You Again" 390

  CHAPTER 12

  Sobos on the Wrong Side of the Tracks 428

  jackrabbit

  sudden gust of wind lashed my face with rain and ice crystals. Just ahead of me on the trail, my sister Lucy picked her way through a maze of granite boulders dotted with sparse lichens. I imagined how the two of us would look to a passerby: two tall women in black pants and teal Gore-Tex jackets, wisps of blond hair plastered to the sides of our faces, bulging packs, bare feet. Crazy.

  The low clouds and sleet lifted for a moment, revealing the final climb ahead. Perhaps half a mile and we would be standing on Baxter Peak, the highest point of Mount Katahdin. This would be the fourth time I'd reached that peak. The climb alone had always given me a sense of strength and accomplishment. But this time, the summit of Katahdin would be more than just another Mountain. It would be the beginning of a long pilgrimage through pristine forests, hedgerows, national parks, mosquito-ridden swamps; through towns and cities, over back roads and major highways; into a Superfund site. It would be a journey across the rumpled spine of the eastern mountains and an equally demanding passage across our own interior landscapes. Although I did not know it at the time, my sister and I would devote more than fifteen months of our lives to the Appalachian Trail.

  We stood for a moment before the venerable signpost marking the summit. Scored with graffiti and the constant onslaught of weather, it stands perhaps three feet high, a wooden A-frame painted Forest Service brown with recessed white letters:

  KATAHIDLN 5268 %t. .'V'orther,, Iffmi uls of the Appa larhiot, 7rail

  Below this were a few waypoints: Thoreau Spring, 1.0, Katahdin Stream Camp~rouud, 5.2. At the bottom of the list: Springer Mountain, Georgia, 2160.2. More than two thousand miles. It was simply a number, too large and incomprehensible to have any bearing on me. The farthest I had ever walked in a day was ten miles and that was with a daypack. Now I was contemplating a journey of months, covering thousands of miles. All of a sudden, there on the summit with the clouds screaming past us, it didn't seem like such a great idea.

  I turned to my sister, half-expecting to see the same doubt mirrored in her face. But her eyes were shining, and she smiled with an almost feral intensity. It was a look I would come to know all too well over the next year and a half, and it meant, I am 'oiiim, to do this and no one had better try to stop tile. "We're really doing this," she shouted over the wind's howl and the lashing rain. "We're hiking the Appalachian Trail!"

  And with that, we turned to head down the mountain. We found the first white blaze on a rock near the signpost: a swath of white paint about two by six inches. There was nothing remarkable about it-it was just a streak of pigment on the rocks, worn by the weather-but we both stopped, briefly, to lay a hand on it. We knew that we would be following these blazes from rock to rock, tree to tree, all the way to Georgia.

  The rain picked up as we descended below treeline. The cold stones underfoot gave way to mud that, ankle-deep in places, made a satisfying squish- ploop sound, and the rough roots of spruce and fir stretched across the trail. It was noticeably warmer in the forest, where the trees blocked the wind. Conifers on the high slopes gave way to maple, birch, and beech, their leaves still touched with the delicate yellow-green of spring. Clouds of blackflies crawled into our hair and into the cuffs of our clothing, leaving streaks of blood and lumpy welts wherever they bit.

  As I walked, I thought about the last few weeks before this cold, rainy summer solstice. Ten days earlier, I had earned my diploma from Carleton College in Minnesota, with a double major in music and biology The next day, I had flown to Bangor, Maine, driven an hour to my mother's house on the coast, and started packing. I had played the piano in all my spare time, not knowing when I would get a chance again. In the evenings, I took long walks with my sister; Lucy and I had barely seen each other in the past four years, except for vacations. Now we were planning to spend six months in each other's company.

  We reached the campground just at dusk and pitched our tent under a picnic shelter. Both of us were too exhausted to say much. We lung the sopping-suet jackets and pants over the rafters to drip dry, cooked our supper over a smoky fire, and drifted off to sleep to the sound of rain drumming on the tin roof. My last thought, before I sank into dreaming, was this: at Ieast in, don't hate to ira,rry about u'et hoots in the rnorrtirtt'.

  My whole body groaned with the effort of lifting my full pack in the morning. Besides our regular gear (tent, sleeping bag and liner, sleeping mat, stove, water bottles, med kit, changes of clothing), we were carrying twelve days' worth of food. After Katahdin, the Trail traverses the "Hundred Mile Wilderness," a 1 1 9-mile stretch of remote forests with no access to towns. We wanted to be well-prepared. We'd left most of our gear at the foot of the mountain while we hiked Katahdin, since the steep, broken rocks are hard enough to negotiate even with a daypack.

  I'd thought I was in good shape-in college, I'd been running every morning, and I had just gained my black belt in Tae Kwon I)o. But backpacking was something else. A friend who had finished the Appalachian Trail several years earlier had told nee, "nothing gets you in shape for the Trail, short of putting your pack on and walking.' Davin, she n'as ri,t,ht, I thought grimly as I lurched down the trail.

  We had decided to try hiking barefoot because it was the way we had always walked, since we were kids, in the mountains near our home on the coast of Maine. We loved the sense of connection to the ground that barefoot hiking gave us. Every surface felt different underfoot: granite, shale, pine needles, thick nuul. We didn't ,vant to sacrifice that link with the earth. I was not accustomed to hiking barefoot with so much weight on my back, though. At first, my passage was slow and painstaking. The rough-barked roots, mud, and soft spruce needles felt good underfoot, but sharp rocks and sticks seemed to lurk in unexpected places. The tiny triangular scales of spruce cones stuck into the pads of my feet. I kept my eyes on the trail, for the most part. [ !rrless I get better at this barefoot thin , I thought, I'm taoiu,q to see etcry rock and tree root bctilecu here and Ceori,'ia.

  When I did glance up, the woods had a sort of minimalist beauty, with the hold straight trunks of spruce and pine splitting the middle ground into rectangles of green light. Everywhere the vista was different, but always a variation of the sauce theme: black spruce, red spruce, white pine, balsam fir, red maple, moose maple, paper birch. Mossy boulders, the soft orange of fallen spruce needles, dapples of light and shade. We passed small clear tarns and, in the midday calm, each one bore an inverted green-gold forest, a deep blue reflected sky shot through with small ripples.

  At I)aicey Pond Campsite in Baxter State park, the official checkpoint for hikers starting the Appalachian Trail in Maine, we slung off our packs on the grass beside the ranger station and knocked on
the camouflage-green door. A ranger in khakis and a Smokey the Bear hat handed us two questionnaires and motioned us to sit in the white plastic armchairs in front of his desk.

  "You guys thru-hiking:" We had heard the term before-hiking an entire long-distance trail in one stretch-but all of a sudden it applied to us. Once again I thought of the impossibly large number of miles to Georgia on the sign atop the mountain. I thought of the impossibly heavy packs sitting outside. I grinned-an expression probably not unlike my sister's wild you-can'tstop-me smile of the day before-and answered in the affirmative.

  We filled out the surveys, noting our ages (twenty-two and twenty-five), names and address (our mother's), emergency contacts. For "occupation" I put "student," for lack of a better idea. There was a space at the bottom of the form for "trail name" I knew hikers chose names like CB handles, something to identify themselves in the Trail community. My sister wrote "Isis" in her delicate script, a name she'd earned years earlier on another adventure. I hesitated for a moment, and blocked in "JACKRABBIT" in capitals. It was the only nickname that had ever stuck with me, given by a friend in Tae Kwon Igo. "You jump like jackrabbit," he said in a fake Karate Kid accent, and it became the name I used in our impromptu Saturday sparring classes. It seemed only fitting to carry it with me on this journey, as a reminder of what I had learned and who I had become. It made me feel strong, invincible, in that moment. Susan could have doubts and second thoughts, but jackrabbit was thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail.

  The ranger asked about our plans and our previous wilderness experience. He seemed satisfied with our tales of adventure growing up in the Maine woods and exploring the seashore and lakes. We showed him the med kit, emergency blankets, twelve days' rations. He took the questionnaires and entered our names in a large book. As we left llaicey Pond, he came out on the lawn and wished us luck.

  "I don't say this to many people, but I think you've got what it takes to make it. You guys know what you're doing out there. Just keep your heads about you, keep putting one foot in front of the other; that's about all you gotta do."

  We thanked hint and turned to go.

  "Hey, you guys going barefoot?" We turned and nodded.

  "As long as it's comfortable," Isis said.

  "As long as it's fun," I added.

  I thought the ranger was about to retract his confidence in our ability (and sanity), but he smiled. "There are a few that do that. I don't know how. Well, if it works for you, more power to you."

  We stopped for lunch by a wide, slow stream. Clouds of blackflies settled around us immediately, but I hardly noticed them in my fatigue. The soles of my feet felt hot and dry, a little sore to the touch in places. I took out a small plastic container of moisturizer to rub onto my feet. It was an ointment my sister had made from beeswax, olive oil, and healing herbs, designed to keep our calluses from drying out and cracking. The color and texture of cold pea soup, it looked unappetizing, but had a pleasant scent of fresh herbs and honey. It seemed to work, soothing the dry ache in illy soles.

  Lucy (I couldn't quite get used to "Isis" yet) took our lunch from her food hag: little plastic bags of peanuts, sunflower seeds, and dried fruit. We had read that peanuts and sunflower seeds, in combination, provide a complete protein and a good amount of carbohydrates, and we reasoned that bags of nuts and seeds would take up much less space in our already-burgeoning food bags than a calorically equal amount of crackers and peanut butter. I dug into the bags, oblivious to the residue of beeswax and forest floor that still clung to my hands. This was my first step on the long descent into a general unawareness of filth that long-distance hikers cultivate. The A.T. (as we would quickly learn to call it) is not for the squeamish.

  We spent that night at Abol Bridge Campground. A squat red building near the river housed the general store and campground office. Logging trucks, laden with spruces of pitifully small diameter, idled in the parking lot or roared past, ka-thumping over the railroad ties of the bridge. For $15, we rented a plot of almost-level gravel and a picnic table.

  I felt a little foolish, at first, when I saw the store-why were we carrying twelve days' food? We didn't have a guidebook, and our maps had indicated nothing about accommodations at Abol Bridge. One look at the shelves, though, and I was glad we'd stocked up before we left. The only vegetarian options-and my sister and I are, nominally, vegetarians-were a few cans of wax beans, instant potato flakes, chips and pretzels, a couple boxes of saltines, and some post-dated Wonder Bread. Little that was packable, certainly, and nothing I'd want to survive on for ten days. We bought some fruit juice.

  As dusk fell, we cooked macaroni over our Zip stove. Most camp stoves require fuel, but the Zip stove is a wood-burner. A tiny motor in the bottom turns a battery-driven fan that blows air into the firebox. Once the stove is lit, it will burn almost anything-we sometimes used it to incinerate squeezedout teabags-but it needs constant feeding. In the line of scrubby trees between our campsite and the next, I gathered fallen twigs.

  "I )'you think this is enough, Isis?" The name sounded false and disorienting in the darkening campsite. All of a sudden, I thought about the act of naming and the power it contains. I knew who "Jackrabbit" was: the strong side of inc. The one who had shattered pine boards with powerful kicks and strikes, vanquished opponents in the ring; the one aware and at home inside my body, who understood strength and forbearance, violence and peace. I recognized jackrabbit, but who was Isis?

  "Get a couple more twigs," she said. "The pine burns well; see if you can find more of that" Together, we broke the branches into thumb-sized pieces and fed them into the smoking belly of the stove.

  Isis

  efore I take up the narrative of our Appalachian Trail adventures, let me step back a few years and tell you another story: how I got the name Isis. In more ways than one, my AT. hike began with this earlier journey.

  My trail name comes from my first backpacking trip, a four-day hike through the Andes to Machu Picchu. Scott Grierson, a friend of our family whose appetite for adventure has led him from the A.T. to the Amazon, was hoping to start an ecotourism project in Peru. He had some potential backers for the project-hut they had heard enough stories of his previous journeys in the rain forest to he concerned about liability. Frustrated with the delays in funding, he decided to organize a trip that would prove he could bring ordinary tourists through the Peruvian mountains and jungles alive. He planned a three-week tour that started with the hike to Machu Picchu and concluded with a wild ride down the Uruhamba River on three-foot-wide, half-submerged rafts made of balsa wood. A couple of his hiking buddies signed up immediately, but they hardly qualified as "ordinary tourists." That was where my sister and I came in.

  Susan heard of the trip from Scott's mother, who played with her in a chamber music trio. Susan was seventeen at the time, a star athlete just out of high school, immortal and bored. She jumped at the opportunity to join Scott's expedition and test her championship track-and-field muscles against the Andes.

  I'm not sure why I decided to go along. Susan would tell you that illy older sister instincts kicked in, that I tagged along to try to protect her, but as far as I can recall, I was more worried about keeping up with her. A shy, studious sophomore in college, I had none of her physical advantages. All I had was a deep-rooted stubbornness, which had pulled me through many long nights of essay writing-that, and the knowledge that I had never yet encountered the limits of my body's strength. Of course, I had never really tried.

  We spent two days acclimatizing in the high mountain city of Cuzco. While we sat in cat's sipping a thin, bitter tea that the Incas used to combat altitude sickness, Scott and his friends Karl and Hago regaled us with stories of their earlier travels. Most often, they reminisced about their A.T. hikes. Each of them had hiked the Trail at least once; Scott, who goes by the well-merited trail name of Maineak, had hiked it four times. He described to us the crenellated ridges of the Smokies, arching like narrow suspension bridges between the peaks, and the red a
utumn maples reflected in New England lakes at dawn. His adventures ranged from hiking four miles into town and back to bring pizza to friends at a campfire, to helping police and rangers track down a murderer. Susan and I listened wide-eyed.

  Back at the hotel, our daydreams became plans.

  "We could hike it together," Susan said, "if you wait for inc to finish college "

  "Let's do it!" I told her. "Assuming, of course, that I survive the current adventure"

  The first eight miles of the Inca Trail out of Ollantaytambo led slowly up the side of a long, narrow valley to the saddle where we planned to make camp. All afternoon, I could see the distant furrow in the mountains that marked the campsite. I spun out lily strength, step after step, trying to make it last just that far. Inca porters trotted past us, barefoot or shod in Hip-Hops made from old tires, each lugging a bundle three times his size. Folding chairs and cages full of live chickens hung from their backs. My own pack, which I had painstakingly pared down to thirty-five pounds (by bringing far too little fi0od), felt like it was wearing holes in my hip bones and pulling my shoulder blades down through the soles of my boots.

  Later in the day, the tourists who had hired the porters came sauntering up the trail, carrying only their cameras and water bottles. At that point I didn't have enough energy to waste on feeling jealous. 711ey're a dif 'rent kind of animal, I thought to myself. They laugh and walk upright. I'm the kind of animal that just puts one loot in front of the other, until it gets to the place inhere it can rest.

  When we finally reached the saddle where we had planned to camp, we discovered that all the porters and tourists had already occupied all the clear, level ground. There might have been room to squeeze in a few more tents at the edges, but Scott and his friends didn't want to stay in such a crowded place. Our guide, Fernando, mentioned that he knew of a smaller, much less frequented site about a mile up the mountain. At the rate we'd been moving, we could get there an hour before dark.