Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  Palmerton reminded me of the college town I'd left, in a way: a quiet place stuck a few years in the past, where all the teenagers' main ambition is to leave town. Groups of them drifted through the park, reeking of perfume and cigarettes. Signs on the light poles downtown read NO CRUISING and NO LOITERING. Many storefronts were dark, and FOR SALE signs sprouted on lawns around town like a new kind of toadstool.

  When the sun dipped below the ridge and cold shadows began to gather in the park, we heard children's voices echoing down the street.

  "The Family's coming!" Isis said, and sure enough we could see their six small silhouettes against the storefronts down the road. The children came running to Meet us, putting on a remarkable burst of speed at the end.

  "Isis! Jackrabbit!"

  We lead the Family to the basement of the borough hall, where there were just enough bunks to go around.

  "You're supposed to sign in at the police station just to let them know who's here," I said, and Paul and Mary grew quiet. "Just show them a driver's license or something; I don't think they check it too closely."

  "I hope they won't come by here tonight," Mary said softly.

  "We don't have any identification," Paul said, his voice tinged with a kind of weary pride.

  "None;"

  "None"

  "Why

  Paul gave the explanation as though he had answered this question thousands of times, and I was reminded of the litany of questions people asked about our feet. His explanation made no more sense to me than ours had made to the incredulous man on Sunrise Mountain, but I listened, fascinated.

  "We do not carry identification because the Bible says, 'thou shalt not bear false witness.' TO carry a piece of paper that says 'I was born on I )ecem- her 4, ]()05,' is to bear false witness against yourself. You are not conscious on the day you're born. "

  I started to protest. "But there are other people present. Your inon) call vouch far it, certainly, and the doctor, and anybody else who was there-"

  "Yes, but you yourself have no idea when you were born. And if you say that you do, or carry a document to that effect, you are committing a falsehood and bearing false witness against yourself."

  "But if you don't have any II)," I said, "I mean, doesn't that make it hard to .. "

  "We are emancipated people," Paul said. "We pay no taxes, we take no money from the government. I went to Washington myself to resign my Social Security number."

  I nodded and fell silent. I was still puzzled by Paul's reasoning, but I had a sense that no amount of discussion would clarify things. Some people just have a different u~orldview, I thought. As long as its not harming anybody, Iguess I just need to accept it. Agree to disagree.

  The Family went to the grocery store and returned shortly, all laden down with bags of food. Paul took out a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter. "Suppertime," he announced, and the kids lined up by the plywood table in the center of the room. He gave each of them two sandwiches, saving the heels for himself and Mary. I was amazed; two sandwiches would be barely a snack for any hiker I knew, and the little ends of the loaf would be nowhere near enough. No wonder Paul and Mary were so thin. Isis looked over at me and we had a wordless conversation.

  "Hey, can we take you guys out to dinner?" she said.

  "We have our dinner," Paul replied, but Mary was watching him with a pleading look in her eyes. He sighed, proud but reconciled.

  Isis and the Family and I took up three tables at the Chinese restaurant across the street. The kids ate and ate, puzzling over the unusual flavors of cashew chicken, sweet and sour pork, egg rolls, and shrimp in lobster sauce. They grew more comfortable with us as the meal progressed. Even joy, who had seemed shy at first, began telling jokes and stories. The whole restaurant rang with our laughter.

  Back at the borough hall, Isis and I were ready to settle in for the night, but the kids were full of energy. They ran up and down the stairs. When Hope and John discovered the gym, they enlisted us for a wild game of tag.

  Joel explained the rules while his brothers and sisters waited impatiently. "See, one person is the Moon and runs around tagging people. If you get tagged then you're frozen, and you have to stay there. One person's the Sun and they unfreeze you.

  "What happens if the Moon tags the Sun?" Isis asked.

  "Then they switch what they are. The Sun turns into the Moon and then-"

  "That's not what happens, Joel, remember?" Hope said, indignant. "The last person that the Sun tagged turns into the Sun, and the last person the Moon tagged turns into the Moon!"

  Joel shrugged. "We always make it up as we go anyway," he said.

  The game of Sun and Moon tag went late into the evening. Isis and I were soon panting and wheezing like old women, but the kids dashed about with their energy undiminished.

  "How many miles did you guys hike today, anyway?" I asked when I caught my breath again.

  "Oh, about seventeen," John said casually.

  "Let's play another game!" Joy shouted, grabbing ny hand and jumping up and down.

  At long last, the tag game came to a close and we returned to the basement. I sat on my bunk and tried to write a letter home, but I kept thinking of the Family. Everything we had heard from the other hikers was true, at some level. I could certainly believe that they had been homesteaders-the quiet determination and steely strength I saw in all of them was something not tempered by the soft life of suburbia. Their interpretation of the Bible was strict and a little strange. Paul had admitted to being a tax resister. But the most apparent thing about the Family, their strongest characteristic, was their love and respect for each other.

  I looked around the room. Hope was sprawled out on the floor, laughing. John brushed his dark hair out of his eyes with one hand, offering the other to Joy to help her up from the ground. Joel was playing catch with Faith, using a crumpled piece of newspaper for a ball. Faith's chubby hands almost closed around it, but it slipped through her grasp time after time and rolled away. Her brother picked it up each time and tossed it gently back to her. And Paul and Mary sat beside each other on one of the bunks, still for once, surveying the scene with a tender, quiet look. Whatever their history, wherever they were going, they were a family.

  Isis

  the hike out of Lehigh Gap was much easier and more pleasant than the hike into it. The south side of the gap didn't seem to have suffered nearly as much from the pollution; instead of a jumble of bare stone, the trail climbed through high yellow grass and even some patches of forest. And this time, we were carrying plenty of water.

  The Family caught up with us a few miles outside of Palmerton. Since we were headed toward the same shelter, we decided to hike together for the afternoon. Hope skipped along beside me, engaged in a cheerful monologue about what kind of horse she wanted and what she might name it. Midnight and Star topped the list, but she liked the sound of Ember. By the way, her favorite color was purple. A black horse would look good with a purple saddle, didn't I think? They should make saddles in more different colors, not just icky brown. If I hadn't known her family's history, I would have thought her a pretty typical ten-year-old girl. All that vanished, however, when we came to a cleared area full of lowbush blueberries.

  "I )o we have time to pick?" she asked Paul.

  "Sure," he answered. "It's only a few more miles to the shelter."

  As soon as they had the go-ahead, all four of the ambulatory children dropped their packs and began to forage. I'd always prided myself on being a fast berry picker, but Hope could have rivaled a grizzly bear. By the time I had one handful ready to eat, she'd cleaned five or six bushes and moved on to the next patch. Paul picked just as feverishly as the children, but he gave most of his berries to Mary, who sat under a pine tree, nursing Faith. After half an hour, he called out, "Okay, let's get moving." Without a word, the children hurried back from their corners of the field, donned their packs, and set off down the trail.

  For the last two miles, I walked with Mary. I a
sked about her life before the Trail. Her soft voice grew wistful as she reminisced about her homestead garden, her kitchen, and her books.

  "It's not too easy to homeschool the kids out here," she said. "They get some practice at math, calculating how far we've gone every time we reach a signpost. But we're all so tired in the evenings, I'm afraid their writing's suffered. They know their wild berries, though. They can build good fires-even Joy-and they know how to read weather changes in the clouds. They all seem to love it out here"

  "l)o you like it?" I asked her.

  "Hiking's the hardest thing I've ever done. Every day, at the end of the day, I feel glad that I've been strong enough for my family, glad that I've had the courage to go on. Sometimes I stand up straight and look at the views; I feel like I'm finally getting used to it, and then I fall. With Faith in my backpack, I have to fall forward, on my knees. But most of all, I miss the company of women"

  As we set up our tent in a clearing behind the shelter on Bake Oven Knob, the four older children stepped out of the darkening woods. They dropped off arniloads of firewood in front of the shelter and stood watching us for a minute. Then Hope stepped forward. "We're all clone setting tip our stuff. What can we do to help you?"

  "You ought to rest," said jackrabbit. "Read the register or something. You just hiked eight miles. You deserve a break"

  "Eight miles is nothing" Joy sounded indignant. "One time, we hiked a twenty-one.

  "We want to help you," said John.

  "Okay," I said. "You can help nme get wood for our Zip stove. I need sticks about as big around as your first finger"

  They scattered among the trees, returning in a few minutes with enough sticks to cook five or six dinners.

  "What size should we break them to?" asked Joel.

  I showed them, and they sat in a semicircle breaking the twigs and sorting them by diameter into neat piles. Like any other group of hikers encountering an unfamiliar item of gear, they were eager to see how the stove worked. They asked all the pertinent questions: how much it weighed, how long the battery lasted, whether it worked with wet wood.

  "It takes longer to boil water than most canister stoves, especially if the wood's wet," I told them. "But it's great not to have to carry fuel. And personally, I love the excuse to build a fire every night."

  "I like building tires," said Joel. "Someday, I'm gonna hike this trail solo. Maybe I'll get one of those, when I do"

  "Supper's ready," Paul's voice called from the shelter. The children jumped up.

  "Just a sec," I said. "Hope, would you take something to your mom for iiie?" I tore a page from my notebook, folded it in half like a card, and wrote on the inside, "Dear Mary, please join us for tea this evening. Love, the Barefoot Sisters" I scrawled a hasty heart on the front and handed it to Hope.

  Mary came over after supper, with Faith on her hip and her camp cup in her hand. She and jackrabbit and I sat in the grass in front of our tent, sipping tea and passing around a pot lid heaped with Pecan Sandies.

  "Cookies! This really is a tea party!" exclaimed Mary. "I used to make cookies every Friday in winter; my favorites were oatmeal chocolate chip. You put in just the tiniest bit of Hour, so they spread out all thin and lacy."

  I, in turn, described my favorite kind of chocolate chip cookies, my mother's recipe including walnuts, sunflower seeds, and whole wheat flour. This led to stories of our mothers and grandmothers, of Ireland and Illinois, the people and the places we came from. Faith nursed for a while, then curled up asleep in Mary's arms. The sight of the two of them made the darkened clearing, with its half-bare trees and tangled hanging vines, seem warm and familiar as a living room.

  Long after dark, I heard a rustle from the direction of the shelter. By the dim glow of our Zip stove's coals, I could see joy standing at the edge of the clearing with her legs apart and her arms crossed. "Is tea over yet?" she asked. "'Cause we built a big fire, and we want you to visit the shelter."

  Sitting on rocks and logs around the firepit, we sang, recited poetry, and told each other stories for hours, long past our usual Trail bedtime. When at last we returned to our tent, jackrabbit and I slept so soundly that we didn't even hear the Family leave in the morning.

  jackrabbit

  lost track of the days we spent in the mountains of Pennsylvania. It was hard to tell where we were from the maps; aside from the gaps, where the trail dropped down a thousand feet or so to cross a river, we followed the flat, featureless tops of ridges just wide enough for a few trees and the occasional clump of brambles. To either side, the valley floor showed between leafless branches. In places freeways uncoiled at the base of the ridge, cars glinting as they rounded the cloverleaf turns, so distant the sound of their passage hardly reached us. Sometimes we saw red barns and silos standing guard over stillgreen fields and the occasional herd of cows dotting a pasture.

  After the Family from the North got ahead of its, we saw hardly anyone in the woods. Sometimes a family of dayhikers or a scout troop passed us, but days would go by without human contact. The incessant wind, sighing in the bare trees and rustling the heaps of fallen leaves, was our only companion when we stealth-camped in tiny clearings beside the trail. Each morning dawned later and colder. Frost often glittered from the trail as we packed up our camp. The rocks continued, sharp, uneven, treacherous stacks that shifted and clattered underfoot, often hidden under drifts of leaves.

  I thought about Tuba Man often. When we came to the Knife Edge, the rock jumbled ridge where he had fallen, I studied the stack of boulders, trying to imagine where he had slipped. I felt a frisson of fear and pity. I imagined him hiking down the mountain, hurt, and then hitchhiking with Solid. The cars rushing past and no one stopping. It I had been there, I thought. if I lrad only been there, to bind up Iiis cuts and let him lean on niy shoulder all the n'ay don'n the mountain. Or maybe I could hai'e sated him in the /first place, callint out a u'arnin, jest in time-don't step there! The thought of Tuba Man became a necessary distraction as the nights lengthened and cold took hold of the land. When the evening star appeared, hung low among the empty branches, I would stare at it and think of him. I was sure that I exaggerated his good looks and kindness in my memory, but it hardly mattered-I was also sure I'd never see him again. I had sent him a casual e-mail from the library in Palmerton, asking him to keep in touch. I doubted that he would even remember me, though, among his many fans.

  One day, we came down into the tiny town of Port Clinton, a few houses and two bars sandwiched between the Schuylkill River, a railroad yard, and a four-lane highway. The town was too small to even have a grocery store. The sound of traffic on the freeway reverberated everywhere in the streets. Willows along the riverbank still bore a few yellow leaves, but the grass on the fields in town was nearly all dry and dead.

  Isis picked up our mail drop while I sat with our packs on the porch of the post office-the lobby of the small building was too cramped to fit both of us and our gear. A shadow fell across the postcard I was writing, and I looked up to see a frail-looking woman in her seventies, wearing a blue housedress and orthopedic shoes.

  "Are you hiking the Trail?" she asked.

  "Yeah."

  "It runs along those ridges, doesn't it?" She pointed one gnarled finger toward the mountain across the river. The sun was low already, and the highest branches of the bare trees were gilded with its horizontal rays.

  "Yeah, we came down right there" I pointed out the trailhead across the railroad yard, and showed her where the AT. switchbacked down the steep end of the ridge.

  She looked off into the trees, wistful. "You know, I've lived here all my life. I was here before the highway went in. I've never been up on those ridges. And now I don't think I ever will. Good luck to you, young one"

  "Thank you," I said gravely. She crossed the street and turned between two rows of houses, disappearing from view. I looked back up at the sunlit ridges, and I wanted more than anything to be back there among the trees. I felt trapped, suffocated
, here among the high houses, the bars, the cracked asphalt and omnipresent traffic sounds.

  Isis came out of the post office with our box of food. It didn't take long to pack it into Ziplocs and divide it between our food bags; we had only sent ourselves three days' worth of meals.

  "Where's our next town stop?" I asked.

  Isis took out the map. "l)uncannon," she said.

  I leaned over her shoulder, looking at the elevation profile along the top of the map. "How far?"

  She frowned. "It should be right here. I know it's here, at the end of this map. Thirty miles. Three days"

  "It's not here, though," I said. "Swatara Gap is not l)uncannon. Are we missing a map? ... wait a second" As the sunlight came through the open mmap, it illuminated something on the back of the paper. I felt a sinking sensation in my chest. All of the other Pennsylvania neaps had been one-sided. It couldn't be ... but there it was, the missing section, thirty-five miles of flat ridgeline. Thirty-five miles for which we had no food.

  It took a while to realize the full extent of the mess we'd gotten into. "There has to be some place to buy food around here," Isis said. The only business open in town, besides the two bars, was a candy store. We spent the last of our cash-they didn't take credit cards-on fudge and chocolatecovered mints, the most caloric-looking things we could find. Thirteen dollars didn't go very far. Isis asked if there was an ATM in town, but the woman at the counter shook her head with a tight-lipped smile.