Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  Isis

  light rain was falling when Bob dropped us off at the trailhead, but the air felt warns. Up to that point, jackrabbit and I had put on our rain jackets for everything from thunderstorms to mist, slowing our pace, if necessary, to keep from sweating inside the extra layers of clothing. Hikers who'd been on the Trail longer than we had-Tenbrooks and all the northbounders we'd met-seemed not to mind getting wet. They'd hike through thunderstorms in shorts and t-shirts, then let their body heat dry their clothes when the rain stopped. I suggested that we try this technique. Jackrabbit agreed enthusiastically, saying that the chill of the rain might encourage us to walk even taster than usual.

  We were perhaps half a mile into the woods when the drizzle became a downpour. I walked faster and faster, trying to keep warm. Soaked and shivering, barreling along at what must have been three miles per hour, I nearly ran into the first in a long line of dayhikers. I glanced up just long enough to mumble a hello, then returned my attention to the trail. At the rate I was going, it took my full concentration to keep from stepping on sharp rocks or the sawn-off ends of roots. As I hurried past the phalanx of bright blue and yellow rain suits, I heard the whispered rumor keeping pace with me. Would you look at that, they're barefoot. Barefoot, oh my God!

  One woman, in the center of the line, looked down at my feet and exclaimed, "Barefoot! You're so brave!"

  "Thanks," I said, not trusting myself to keep the sarcasm out of my voice for more than one syllable. I had just realized why I couldn't walk fast enough to get warns, even though all the northbounders we'd met seemed to have no problem with hiking in wet clothing. I had neglected to consider the influence of boots, wool socks, and silk sock liners on body heat retention. Being called brave, when I was feeling like a total idiot, made me far more uncon)- fortable than the cold stream trickling down the back of my neck or the wet shirt flapping against my ribcage.

  As soon as we'd left the line of dayhikers behind, I threw down my pack, draped my rain jacket across two low branches, and stripped off all my wet clothing under the makeshift roof, not caring that I was standing two feet from the trail. I changed into dry clothes, then pulled down my jacket and put it on over them. Jackrabbit contented herself with putting on a hat; she looked a bit askance at my strip show.

  jackrabbit

  old rain settled in for several days. The ibuprofen had dulled the pain in my hip enough so that I could keep up with Isis, but I felt pretty miserable. I hated the feeling of pruned hands and feet and the utter lack of traction in places where the trail was only mud. Water dripped down my neck, finding a weak seam in my rain gear. We slipped and slid toward the road to Andover, hoping to find a dry place in town to spend the night.

  I rounded a bend in the trail and saw a pile of picked-over white bones lying in the underbrush. They shone dully in the rain. For a moment I feared the worst, but then my mind assembled the skeleton: long shanks, a ribcage like an enormous barrel, a horselike skull. A moose. I burst out laughing.

  "Isis, look at this!"

  "What?" she turned.

  "Remember those nobos at Little Bigelow? They said there was a moose skeleton three days down the trail. I guess this must be it. But we've been walking for, what, nine days? Ten days?"

  "Nine, if you don't count our zero," Isis said after a moment. "And we had a short day out of Stratton. But those hobos must have been going twenty or thirty miles every day!"

  'Iii'enty miles. It seemed an impossibly large number. I didn't even bother to consider the idea of thirty. Our one seventeen-mile day had been daunting enough, and our typical mileage was more like twelve or thirteen. I wondered if, at our pace, we would ever make it to Georgia.

  I had finally bought a watch in Rangeley-it was often impossible to tell the time from the sun on overcast days-and it was all I could do not to glance at the time every thirty seconds on this miserably wet afternoon. In an attempt to make the time pass faster, I tried to put together a silly poem based on the weather. Anglo-Saxon lines seemed to fit best with the oppressive atmosphere. As the day rolled slowly past, an endless stream of dripping trees, the poem took shape:

  It seemed to shorten the interminable gray hours in the woods. In the late afternoon, we came to the South Arm Road, leading into Andover. The town was tiny, hardly more than a crossroads: general store, gas station, church, diner. And three A.T. hostels. We weren't sure where our friends might be staying, so we opted to eat first and ask questions later.

  Addie's Place was the only restaurant in town. We left our packs leaning on the porch, secure in their waterproof covers, and put on our camp shoes to enter the restaurant. It was a tiny place, with a counter at one side and tables along the other. And there, in the back, were all the people we'd been looking for: Waterfall, Matt, Tenbrooks, and Blue Skies, sharing a table with a redhaired man I didn't recognize.

  "Hi there! Glad y'all made it!" Waterfall was halfway through an enormous burger. "Oh, this is Blade. He's a sobo too."

  Blade nodded gravely as we gave our names. His trail name did not seem to fit with his mild appearance. He had a serious, almost scholarly face, with small round glasses and a neatly trimmed reddish beard. "Good to meet you." Traces of a Southern accent lingered in his speech.

  We pulled up two chairs from the counter, and the waitress came over. "Our specials today are the roast beef sub and spaghetti with meat sauce. The sub's pretty good, can't say as Much for the spaghetti. What can I get you

  "I)o you have anything vegetarian?" Isis asked.

  The waitress wrinkled her brow. "I)o you eat chicken%" she ventured.

  Three plates of French fries and onion rings later, the fiercest rumblings of our bellies abated. We shared jokes and stories with the other sobos, glad that we had caught up with them at last. Blade, seated in the corner, said little until I shared the poem I had written that day.

  "I like that," he said. "I studied Anglo-Saxon verse while I was working on my Ph.D. You've done a good job with the form."

  "Oh, thanks. What was your doctorate in?"

  "English. I studied the battle poetry of Tennyson and the heroic code." His voice seemed to grow larger as he said this, filling the room.

  "So are you a professor?"

  "No. I'm an adventurer" There was no hint of braggadocio in his voiceit was merely a statement of fact.

  "What sorts of adventures?" Isis asked.

  "I hiked Denali last fall, and in spring I bicycled across the country with a group. That's where I got my name, actually. One of the guys told nie I cut through the air like a knife blade on a bike. And now I'm hiking the A.T."

  The waitress came around again. "Anybody for pie? Addie just made blueberry, and I know there's peach. I think we got part of an apple one back there too"

  Isis and I both ordered peach. The slices were enormous, each one easily a third of the entire pie. "These are huge!" I said. "Thank you!"

  The waitress shrugged. "Addie said the peach had to go, 'cause this afternoon she was all in a flutter and just about dropped another pie on top of it. See, the crust's all smashed-in"

  "Oh, it looks fine to me. Looks great, in fact" I couldn't see any damage to the crust.

  "Well, she said, 'the peach has gotta go,' and so I told her I'd take care of it" She cleared away the last few plates. "Besides, being vegetarians, you didn't eat hardly anything for supper."

  With our bellies full, we decided to resupply-the Trail lingo for buying groceries-and then join our friends at the ]line Ellis Bed and Breakfast. Blade came with us to the general store.

  "Five or six days to Gorham, I think," Isis said as we leaned our packs against the front steps. It was still raining; puddles in the parking lot overflowed vvith rainbows of oil.

  Breakfast was easy: a carton of powdered milk and a box of Cracklin' Oat Bran. Lunch proved more difficult. Eight-ounce boxes of crackers cost $3.49. 1 was beginning to reconsider the wisdom of shopping in every town, rather than sending mail drops; if a lot of places had grocery sto
res like this, our budget would be shot in no time. While we deliberated, Blade went to the rack of pastries by the checkout counter. He held up a Little Debbie Honey Bun. "My secret weapon." He grinned. "Two ounces, 410 calories. Dollar forty-nine"

  "Excellent!" On the Trail, counting calories quickly took on a different meaning. Our bodies craved energy in any Corm, especially fat and sugar. We were always on the lookout for cheap, packable foods that would provide the most calories for their weight, and health concerns took a backseat.

  "Hey Isis! How about these? Ninety-nine cents apiece, three hundred calories!" I carefully avoided reading the long lists of chemical additives as I filled our shopping basket with five days' worth of Honey Buns, Table Talk pies, and Captain Nemo Frosted Banana Bars.

  "Okay, what about dinners?"

  "There's not much here," Isis said, surveying the shelves. Most of the dinner options were canned or frozen, definitely not packable. We managed to find a family-sized box of instant potatoes and a few packages of Hamburger Helper. Blade stocked up on ramen noodles.

  "Why don't you eat ramen?" he asked. "It's the best Trail food-weighs nothing, costs nothing, tastes okay."

  "I wish we could," I said. "I'm allergic to MSG. It's in all the seasoning packets"

  As we tossed the last few boxes into our basket, Isis surveyed the array of food. "We used to be such health nuts," she said mournfully. "Organic this, organic that, no preservatives, no added anything ... now look at us."

  Blade glanced at our basket. "Lo, how the mighty have fallen!"

  Over breakfast the next morning at Pine Ellis-huge cheese omelets and a bottomless bowl of home fries-we discovered that most of our friends were farther ahead than we had thought.

  "Moody Mountain was really something, wasn't it?" Blue Skies said. "All those metal ladders stuck in the rock-I thought I'd never get down!"

  Tenbrooks nodded. "Yeah, I worried about Molly when I saw that big rock face, but she found a better way down than I did."

  "I don't even remember all this stuff!" I finally said. "I didn't see any ladders or cliffs. We just slid down Old Blue Mountain in the niud, and there was the road."

  Matt put down his fork. "Oh, you came in at the South Arm Road?"

  "Yeah. You guys?"

  Waterfall looked rueful. "We all came in at the East B Hill Road. It's another ten miles down the Trail."

  My spirits fell. After our zero day in Rangeley, we had struggled hard to catch up with the group. Seeing all the familiar faces in Addie's the night before, I thought we had managed to do it.

  The manager of the bed-and-breakfast came in with another bowl of potatoes. She was a large woman with short gray hair and a grandmotherly planner. "Does anyone want to slack today?"

  "Slack?" I asked. It was a new term for me.

  "Slack, you know, slackpack? I'll give you a shuttle to the trailhead, and pick you up at the next road, so you can hike a day without your pack. I've got some daypacks you can borrow for lunch and water"

  Isis and I exchanged a glance. Hiking without packs, we would certainly be able to move faster. Maybe it would help to close the gap between us and our friends. "Sounds good," she said, and I nodded.

  "So that's two for the South Arm Road. Anybody else?"

  Blade spoke up. "I'd like to do that section too. But I will carry my pack."

  Blue Skies gave him a puzzled look. "I3ut that kind of defeats the point of slacking"

  "I set out to do this trail with my full pack, and I will do it." There was a quiet edge to his words, and his normally mild face glowed with intensity.

  "No offense," she said quickly.

  "None taken. When I set a challenge for myself, I don't back down."

  It was a day of steep climbs and knee jarring descents, and I was very glad to be carrying a light pack. It gave me an odd feeling at first, like the sensation of taking off ice skates; I felt like I was floating about four inches above the trail.

  Blade was in extremely good shape. Encumbered with his heavy pack, he still managed to keep up with us. We told him stories from our trip to Peru, and he related a few of his adventures.

  "I want to hear about Denali," I said.

  "Oh, that was quite a trek. I was probably the least experienced person in the group . . "

  "I)id you summit? What was it like up there?"

  "Yes, and it was splendid beyond words. We started our summit push at three in the morning, when the moon was just setting. It was so clear and still. The mountain seemed to glow kind of bluish against the sky with all those stars. We were hiking with headlamps for a long time. Snow squeaks when it's that cold. It made little sounds like Styrofoam under our hoots.

  "We were under a mile from the summit when the wind picked up. It sounded like a freight train coming at us. The woman behind me on the rope just lost it when that wind hit. She started screaming, you know, `we're all going to die out here!' She went back to camp with one of the guides. The rest of us made it to the summit. Later I found out she had been up the mountain three times and never reached the summit"

  His face grew stern and his voice louder. "Mountaineering is about conquering fear and defeating pain. You must have strength and conviction to persevere"

  Isis frowned. "It's about judgment, too, isn't it? What if she knew something you didn't about the wind patterns up there?"

  Blade looked severe. "The rest of us finished. We reached the goal of our quest. Shc did not"

  "There's more to life than finishing quests," Isis said.

  Blade shook his head. "I believe that the Quest is the most important thing life holds." His voice now rung out like a trumpet blast, filling the damp forest around us. "I have decided to live my life according to the Heroic Code"

  "The heroic code?" I asked.

  Blade smiled. "All my life, I have searched for a meaningful way to live. I found it while I was researching for my thesis; I follow the principles that the Knights of the Round Table held. Life's goal is to pursue the Quest and do heroic deeds"

  "But what is the quest f )r? I mean, the Knights of the Round Table were after the Holy Grail. Is that .. "

  Blade's eyes twinkled. "Aha. There's the conundrum. What is the Quest for? The Quest itself is the goal! 'To seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield!"'

  Isis

  t Baldpate Lean-to, the chattering of squirrels woke me in the predawn. This wasn't the first place we'd had to chase squirrels away from our food; in tact, by the last twenty miles of Maine, we'd come to expect the aggravation of tame squirrels, chipmunks, and mice at A.T. shelters. The squirrels at Baldpate were the most insistent I'd seen yet, though. Two of them were clinging to the outside of our food bags, trying to get enough purchase to bite through the slippery nylon. I waved my arms at them and stagewhispered "Shoo!" They didn't budge. I dragged myself up, sleeping bag and all, and flopped toward the edge of the sleeping platform. When I was within an arm's length of them, they jumped down and scampered away to the forest, where they sat in the trees, chattering at me. By the time I'd snuggled back down on my sleeping mat, the squirrels were in the shelter again, jumping from the eaves of the roof to the food bags. I chased them away, then gathered a pile of sticks and pebbles to toss in their general direction whenever they came too close to the shelter. I glanced at jackrabbit's watch: 4:37. It was going to be a long morning.

  At 6:30, jackrabbit woke up. As she stretched and rubbed the sleep from her eyes, I poured out the story of my two hour standoff with the squirrels. Even though everyone in the campsite was waking up, the fearless rodents still scampered around in front of the shelter, chattering at us and each other and pouncing on any food bags left unattended.

  Jackrabbit listened to my complaints, shrugged her shoulders, and picked up one of the pebbles I'd gathered. The squirrel was twenty feet away, running, but she must have hit it in the head. It keeled over and lay stunned for a minute, before staggering off sideways into the underbrush. A group of northbounders cheered. A couple who'd told us
they were just out for the weekend stared at each other in open-mouthed shock.

  "The poor little thing," I heard the woman whisper. "Did you see what that horrid girl did to it? Someone should throw a rock at her head and see how she likes it!"

  A section hiker who'd camped across from the shelter called out, "That's some aim you got, kid. Ever think about joining the army?"

  "No, I'm a pacifist," jackrabbit answered. "At least when it comes to people."

  "Great shot," I said. "Next time I have rodent trouble, I'll just wake you up and let you deal with it."

  She stifled a laugh. "1)'you think I could repeat that? I didn't even mean to hit it."

  We hiked only seven miles that day, setting ourselves up to face the inft- Mous Mahoosuc Notch the next morning instead of trying to tackle it at the end of a long day. Northbounders had regaled us with stories of the Notch, a mile-long jungle gym of house-sized boulders. The three-thousand-foot climb up Old Speck Mountain, our longest ascent since Katahdin, took up nearly half the day's hike. Most of the trail was wooded, but every once in a while we'd conk out on a granite ledge, where a vista of rolling mountains would open before us. Framed below by the dark pink starbursts of sheep laurel blossoms, these mountains curved softly as waves in a calm sea, seen from a cottage with flowers in its window boxes.

  Unlike Saddleback and the Bigelows, Old Speck Mountain had a wooded summit. Our map indicated an "observation platform" down a side trail to our left. Just as we reached the platform, Blade came out of the woods. We shouted to catch his attention, then pretended to defend the tower against him, drawing our arras back and showering him with volleys of imaginary arrows. He held up his pack cover as a shield and charged. When he joined us on the platform, we played at being knights and ladies surveying our dominion. I pointed down at Speck Pond, barely visible through the fringe of trees.

  "See ye not yon fair tarn? There shall I make nay dwelling, in a pavilion of purple silk."

  Jackrabbit laughed; we had often joked about how incongruous our purple tent looked against the greens and browns of the summer forest. She lifted her arm, gesturing dramatically toward the horizon, where a dark smudge of smoke from the Cog Railway hovered over Mount Washington.