Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  I thought about telling them all that I couldn't do it. The trail turned at the saddle, and I could see the narrow track climbing away up the mountain's flank at a much steeper angle. I knew that neither muscle nor prayer would carry nie up it at the two-thirds-of-a-mile-per-hour pace I had sustained so far. Still, I didn't want to prove myself a spoilsport on the first day of the trek; it seemed easier to face a physical impasse than to disappoint the others.

  A hundred yards up the mountain I collapsed. The white trail wavered in front of me, and I couldn't see where to put my feet. Thinking I might be dehydrated, I sat down on a rock to take a drink. When I tried to stand up again, my legs buckled. Susan, who had waited for me, tried to help me up, but my knees seemed unwilling to engage. I don't know how long we waited. The sun slid toward the jagged rim of the mountains, and shadows crept out from behind the white rocks. The world looked slippery, as if I)ali had painted it-the stones, my hands, the water bottle they held seemed to melt at the edges. Susan found some wild fruit that looked like unripe blackberries, and we ate it, not caring that it might be poisonous, so long as it gave us a few free calories.

  Eventually Fernando came hack to look for us. He took my pack and carried it for mae, having left his own pack at the campsite up above. Susan led mme by the hand. I had to stop and rest every five minutes. The stars were coming out as I stumbled into camp. Scott greeted us with cups of hot cocoa, mixed with rum from his "medical supplies" hag. Susan cooked our meager supper of one packet of ramen noodles each. Then we set up our tent and turned in, only to discover that the summer sleeping bags we had packed were far too thin. I lay half awake all night, sick with the thought that I'd already failed, wondering if I'd have the strength to stagger back down the Mountain and catch a bus to Cuzco the next day, or if Fernando would have to carry ►ne.

  As it turned out, I didn't go back to Cuzco. I was fine the next day. I went slowly, but, for the rest of the trip, I had no trouble with the altitude. Hunger and sleeplessness waited in the back of Illy mind until, safely over the Mountains, I had time to appease them. I had found the limits of Illy physical strength, but I had also found that my stubbornness could be applied to more than just late nights in a college library. Somewhere in the cloud forest, on the other side of a 14,11111)-foot pass called Huarmi Huanusca, "the place where the woman died," we sat around a campfire eating our evening's ration of ramen and listening to Scott's Trail stories.

  "We're going to hike the AT. someday. Maybe when we've both finished college," I told him.

  Scott looked at us for a minute, as if calculating the gap between our enthusiasm and our experience. Finally he said, "If you're going to hike, you need trail names" He turned to n)e. "I'm going to call you Isis, because she's a goddess of death and resurrection"

  The name proved prophetic; I collapsed the first day I carried a full pack on the A.T., too. Setting out from Katahdin Stream Campsite, I took the lead, afraid that if I let Susan-or jackrabbit, as she'd decided to call herself-get ahead of me, I wouldn't see her again until Georgia. She was still the strong one, long-legged as her trail name implied.

  Enthusiasm carried me four or five miles past I)aicey fond, and then the fifty-five pounds in my pack caught up with me. After a snack break, Jackrabbit got up first and started walking. I struggled to keep up with her, half running, feeling as though I couldn't breathe properly. It seemed that she never looked back to see it I was still behind her. We'd planned to hike fourteen miles that day, all the way to Hurd Brook Lean-to. I was pretty sure I wouldn't make it. I imagined my sister setting up camp, beginning to worry, while I staggered along in the darkness, miles behind her. This thought brought an enormous wave of self-pity washing over me. I started to cry. Not a good idea-crying made my already labored breathing ten times more difficult.

  At the turn of the trail ahead of me, Jackrabbit had stopped to talk with two hikers. I hurried to catch up, to tell her I wouldn't make it as far as Hurd Brook and wanted to stay at Abol Bridge Campground, some four miles closer. The nun she was talking to turned out to be northbounders: thruhikers who had started in Georgia, now nearly finished with their 2,161)-mile journey. Thin, sun-browned and windburned, one heavily bearded and one with about five days' worth of stubble, they carried packs that seemed hardly big enough to fit one decent picnic. Their glances flickered past us, toward Katahdin, as they spoke. I asked them how far to Abol Bridge Campground.

  "Abol Bridge? You're almost there," the bearded one answered. My shoulders slumped with relief, as far as they could in the complex interlacing of pack straps. I stared hard at the bend in the trail ahead of us, hoping to see the corner of a building through the trees.

  "Yeah," said the other, "it's only a mile, mile and a half, I'd say."

  They wished us a good hike and were gone, vanishing into the forest as easily as deer.

  A whole mile, maybe even a mile and a half to go! Suddenly, the belt of my pack felt like a circle of fire around my hips. The blackflies and mosquitoes that had been swarming around us all day became a furious humming in my skull. I sat down in the middle of the trail.

  "It would be easier to hike if you'd stop crying," Jackrabbit said. I started to sob. With a sigh, she sat down beside me. She opened her water bottle and offered me a drink. I refused to take my headset off, I drank through the mosquito netting. After ten minutes of patient persuasion, jackrabbit convinced me to lift the net up enough to eat a few bites of an energy bar. Then she pulled me to my feet. The last mile to Abol Bridge was just as slow and painful as I expected it to be, but, one step at a time, I made it. Jackrabbit walked beside me all the way.

  Taking a shower at the campground that night, I discovered dark bruises as big as the palms of my hands, one over each of my hipbones, and a wide swath of rash across the small of my hack. There were sores on my shoulders, and the tops of my hands and feet were so thoroughly stippled with mosquito bites that they felt like the skins of cucumbers. Strangely, this physical evidence of the pain I'd been feeling encouraged me.

  So I'm not such a wimp as I thou'ht I was, this afternoon, I said to myself. All these bruises and I still made it this far. Maybe I will get to Georqia.

  It was three full days before I was able to take my mind off my pack weight, but I did keep going. As I walked, I ran through an inventory of all the food and gear I was carrying, telling myself the usefulness of each item in turn. When this didn't help, I went over all the food I'd eaten so far. Half a pound of oatmeal, a quarter pound of peanuts, an enercy bar and some couscous-my pack must be a whole pound lighter than yesterday, I thought. As a last resort, I let my mind dwell on the pound of dark chocolate I had stashed away in the bot tom of my food bag. Whatever else I had to lug along with it, there was at least one pound that was worth the effort.

  jackrabbit

  n the third day out, we camped at Rainbow Spring Campsite, a small clearing in the beech woods set back from the shore of Rainbow Lake. The trees there were still touched with the light green of spring. I could hear the waves lapping the shore as I set my pack down and began searching for twigs to feed the Zip stove.

  A hiker came tip the trail, a tall lanky man with short-cropped red hair and ears that stuck out a bit. His pack Was huge, and he walked with two trekking poles. He had a frank, open face covered with freckles.

  "Hi, I'm Matt," he said.

  "Jackrabbit," I told him. Each time my trail name crossed my lips, it became more familiar, and this time, when I heard my sister say "Isis," it sounded natural.

  "You thru-hiking, Matt?"

  "Yes. At least, that's my plan" A tentative smile.

  "Same for us," Isis said. "We're hoping to hike the whole thing, but we'll see how it goes "

  "I )efinitely going as far as New Hampshire," I said.

  "It's a good section of Trail." Matt slung off his giant green pack.

  "You've done it before?"

  "Yeah, I hiked Maine last September."

  "And you still don't have a trail name?"


  "Many suggestions were bandied about. I'm afraid none stuck"

  "Such as'

  He smiled, and his ears turned pink. "Well, I went to the grocery store in Stratton and I bought a ton of food. They gave me a box to carry it out in, you know, one of those Mason jar boxes. There were a hunch of hikers hanging around on the steps outside the store, and when I came out with this box they all started shouting, 'Ball Jar! Ball Jar!' So for a while I signed that in registers. You know, those notebooks in the shelters. I'd write, 'what's in your jar?"' lie shrugged. "But that didn't last very long."

  I set up the tent, snapping the poles together and feeding them into their nylon sleeves, and we went for a swim in the bracingly cold water. The wind had whipped the surface into six-inch waves, so I didn't stay in long. As I sat on the hank watching Matt and Isis cavort in the lake, another hiker came up beside me.

  "Hi, ['m Ashley," she said. She was about five four, compact and muscular, with dark hair and bright blue eyes.

  "Jackrabbit. Pleased to meet you."

  She dropped her pack and sat down beside me on the rocks. "Are you thru-hiking?"

  "That's the plan. You?"

  "Yup" She grinned widely. "Who are your companions out there?"

  "That's Matt, way out in the waves," I said. "And that's my sister Isis."

  She looked at me more closely. "You're not-are you the ones I saw on Katahdin, barefoot?"

  "Well, unless it was our stunt doubles."

  "And you're thru-hiking? Barefoot?"

  "As far as we get. We figured we'd try to hike Katahdin barefoot, and if we could do that, then we'd try to get through the Wilderness, and if we manage that, well-"

  "But why barefoot?"

  I shrugged. "I like being barefoot. You can feel the trail with all your senses. We grew up hiking this way."

  "Don't you worry about getting cut or anything?"

  "You learn how to step carefully. And it just feels so good, on the forest floor, or in the mud-"

  "Wow. When I first saw you, I thought it was pretty crazy. That's neat, though. I hadn't really thought about how it would feel."

  As the light in the beeches turned golden, we gathered enough wood for a small fire. We sat on logs around the firepit and told stories while Isis cooked a pot of lentils and rice.

  Matt was from Tennessee; he had just received his Masters in geology from the University of Maine. Ashley had just graduated from Virginia Tech with a biology degree. Both of them had already hiked long sections of the AT.

  "The best thing about this trail is how it brings people together," Ashley said. "People from all walks of life come out here, and they're just hikers. It doesn't matter whether they're students, or doctors, or lawyers, or garbage collectors-they're all the same on the Trail."

  Matt, staring into the fire, smiled wistfully. "I don't know. I think the best thing the Trail has done for me is to teach me about change. It's all about flow out here. Impermanence. You meet people and you have a great time, but you know you might never see them again. Nothing lasts."

  We were all quiet for a while. "Do you remember that plaque at the base of Katahdin?" Matt said. "Down by the parking lot?"

  "Yeah, I think so."

  "It says something like, `cities may crumble, towns will come and go, but Katahdin will forever stand, a monument to the people of Maine.' But I can't help thinking that it all depends on the timescale you look at. Katahdin will crumble too, given enough time. Everything changes."

  "Hnim." Ashley smiled. "But we might as well enjoy it while it lasts, don't you think?"

  Isis

  ate in the afternoon of our fourth day, we climbed our first mountain since Katahdin, a 7110-foot rise called Nesuntabunt. At the summit I took out our usual snack of peanuts and sunflower seeds. In the planning stage of our hike, Jackrabbit and I had congratulated each other on the logistical brilliance of choosing nuts and seeds as our luncheon staple, instead of the bagels or crackers favored by most hikers we'd read about. Now, four days into our hike, I would have been happy never to see another peanut, but I still had five pounds of them in my pack and eighty miles to walk to the next grocery store.

  Jackrabbit and I made a half-hearted attempt at the snack mix. After a few minutes I gave up and pulled out an extra ration of granola bars, giving myself the excuse that we had just hiked up a mountain and deserved a treat. I sat on a granite ledge of Nesuntabunt in the midsummer sun, trying to eat the granola bar slowly. It was the closest thing I had to bread. Seven hundred feet down, the surface of Nahmakanta Lake glinted with tiny whitecaps. To the north, Katahdin towered over the forest and lakes like a sphinx reclining on a green and azure cloth. I looked across all the miles we'd hiked, swamps and ledges, gravel roads, spruce woods, and the rough granite spine of the great mountain itself-and then my mind, with all the certainty of a compass needle, snapped back to the subject of bread. Bread: rosen)ary, oatmeal, potato, rye. The texture of a good crust, the smell of sourdough. Bread with butter, bread with cheese. All the way down the mountain, I daydreamed of the foods we didn't have.

  That night, we camped with Matt at Wadleigh Stream Lean-to. It was far too buggy to consider sleeping in the open, three-sided structure, but I sat down to cook supper on the split log that formed a convenient bench across the front of the shelter. I knew from reading about the Trail that there were lean-tos every ten to fifteen miles along it, constructed by the local trail main taining clubs. We'd passed a few of them already, but this was the first one I'd had time to take a close look at. The walls were made of spruce logs about eight inches in diameter, stacked and joined in the manner of a log cabin. Larger logs formed pillars at the ends of my bench, joining it to the two side walls. A gap of about three feet separated my seat from the elevated spruceplank sleeping platform. At the back wall, the corrugated tin roof was only three or four feet above the platform; it rose steeply to a peak just above my head, then ended with a few feet of overhang. Suspended from the roof, just above me, were a half-dozen empty tuna cans. Each one was hung upside down by a string running through a hole in the bottom. A few inches below the can, a stick was tied crosswise to the end of the string. They looked like someone's early attempt to invent bells, with the clappers attached at the wrong angle. Matt was sitting next to me, cooking his supper, so I asked him about them.

  "Those are mouse hangers," he told me. "You hang your food bags from the sticks and mice can't get around the cans"

  "What about bears?"

  "Well, the theory is that most bears around here are too shy to go after your food bag when you're sleeping five feet away from it"

  I privately concluded that I wasn't ready to stake my food bag, or my sleeping self, on such a theory, and planned to keep on hanging my food from tree branches far from my tent at night. But I feigned nonchalance, asking Matt, "If we don't have to worry about hears, what sorts of animals are problems?"

  "Mice, chipmunks, squirrels ... and porcupines, of course, they're a real nuisance, though more for the trail maintainers than for us "

  "Porcupines?"

  "Yes. Do you know what you're sitting on',"

  I jumped up to check if, in my fatigue, I had accidentally sat down in some spilled food or mud from someone's boot. It would be at least a week before I could wash my clothes, and I didn't want to get them grimy any faster than necessary.

  Matt laughed. "I mean the bench. It's called a porcupine trap. Porcupines love salt, you see, and this lean-to has about twenty years' worth of hiker sweat soaked into its floorboards. If porcupines could reach the sleeping platform, they'd gnaw on the edge until there was nothing left of it. They're good climbers, but they're kind of dumb. They smell the salt, climb tip to that log you're sitting on, and try to reach the platform. But its too far for them; they tall down between the log and the platform and have to make their way out through those gaps under the ends of the side walls ""

  By that tine, Jackrabbit had finished setting up the tent and joined us. "Lentils
again?" She sighed. "I'd eat the floor if it tasted anything like bread."

  "Want a cracker?" Matt asked. "I've got plenty." He held out a package of gray, rectangular rye crackers of a kind our mother used to buy for herself. As children, we had derisively called them "cardboard crackers," claiming that they had about as much flavor as the box they came in.

  "Matt, you are a god!" said jackrabbit. She took one cracker, carefully split it down the middle, and handed half to nie. Then we both turned our attention to the pot of lentils, saving our cracker halves for dessert.

  That half-cracker may have been what kept us from getting off the Trail in the middle of the next day. A passing northbounder told us the story:

  "If you turn left at the next logging road," he said, "and walk a quarter of a mile, you come to a dock on a lake, with an air horn hanging oft it. You honk the air horn, and someone comes and picks you up in a boat, and they take you to this place where there's pizza and showers and cold beer!"

  It sounded so much like a hiker's fantasy that we thought he was just teasing us, seeing what he could pull over on the new southbounders. When we reached the logging road, though, we found a business card pinned to a tree, advertising a hunting lodge called White House Landing. At the bottom of the card someone had drawn an arrow pointing left, down the road, and written, "honk the air horn at the dock "" We talked it over for about five minutes-pizza sounded delicious beyond imagining, just then-but Matt's cracker had dispelled enough of our food cravings that neither one of its was thinking with her stomach. Jackrabbit said that she didn't want to fall so far behind our newfound friends. Ashley was probably half a day ahead of us, and we Might not catch tip with her even in Monson if we took the afternoon off. I agreed, adding that it would feel like a bit of a cop-out, stopping for pizza and showers in the middle of the Wilderness, when we'd prepared ourselves for twelve days of continuous hiking. I was exhausted, I didn't like the way I'd started to smell, and even the thought of peanuts turned my stomach-but I wanted to complete this first section of the Trail in the way we'd set out to hike it.