"Oh, come on. They're not that hard"
"No, seriously. I really did." I couldn't see any fragments of enamel in illy hand, but running my tongue across my teeth, I felt a small divot taken out of lily left front incisor.
Isis's forehead wrinkled with concern. "How bad is it?"
"Well, it doesn't hurt, but the edge is pretty sharp ... ow! I think I just cut lily lip"
My sister frowned. "Maybe we should get off at the next road and try to find a dentist." We hadn't been planning to stop in the next town, Catasvba- we had just left Troutville, carrying enough food for the ninety-mile stretch to Pearisburg.
"Is there anywhere to stay in Catawba?" I asked.
"The Conihanion said there are a couple bed-and-breakfasts"
"Can we afford to stay there
She sighed. "Call we afford not to?"
By the time we reached the road, drops of not quite rain pattered down out of the sky, sticking to every surface. We paused only long enough to glance at the trailhead register.
"Hey, Sharkbait finished!" I told Isis.
"What has he got to say?"
I read his scrawled message. "Heald, Luh, Black Forest, .v'etta, Barefoot Sisters-nice knonwin ya. I am so out of here. I)ecember ninth. Looks like he finished just in time, right before that nasty ice storm that caught us at Cove Mountain."
"Speaking of ice, we'd better get going"
"Yeah."
We slid and skated down the road to the Crosstrails Bed and Breakfast, a short ways off the Trail, only to find a board reading "closed for the season" hung beneath the sign in front of the tall white building. While we stood there deliberating, a dark-haired woman opened the front door. "Hi there! Y'all must be freezing in this weather. Come on in"
With my grubby pack and sweaty clothes, I felt entirely out of place in the spotless white-carpeted living room. Hand-crocheted doilies were draped over the antique wooden end tables by the brocaded sofa. In the corner stood a twelve-foot spruce, decorated with red and white bows-suddenly I remembered that Christmas was less than two weeks away.
"We're not actually taking guests right now," the owner told us. "But I know a couple in town who just opened a B and B. Let me give them a call. Would y'all like some tea or anything while you wait?"
"Thank you so much" Even after so many months on the Trail, I was continually amazed by people's generosity. There we were, reeking, dressed in ratty clothing, and she treated us with as much consideration as if we had arrived in a chauffeured limousine. I hoped that someday, on the Trail or beyond it, I would have a chance to repay the kindness that so many people had shown.
Dave, the owner of the Down Home Bed and Breakfast, arrived in his pickup a few minutes later. He was a tall round-faced man with short gray hair. "Good thing y'all came in when you did! A few more minutes and these roads would be iced over."
Dave and his wife Lucy welcomed us like family, even sharing their dinner with us. We ate bowl after bowl of broccoli soup and told stories about our hike as the ice built up outside. I tried to imagine where we would be if we had stayed on the Trail. The next shelter was more than seven miles from the road; we would have had to night-hike in the freezing rain or set up our tent and hope it held. The sharp edge of my broken tooth was disconcerting when I ran my tongue over it, and the inside of my lip was cut in several places. When I considered where we would be right now if it hadn't happened, though, I was almost glad I had chipped a tooth. Dave called his dentist and set up an appointment for nie at noon the next day.
In the morning, a dazzling coat of ice transformed the tree limbs to crystal chandeliers. When the roads were clear enough, Dave took us into Chris- tiansburg, the nearest large town. We picked up some extra groceries, in case we got caught by another ice store) between here and Pearisburg, and Isis bought a pair of real hiking boots. I held oft, my sneakers had worked well so far, and I didn't feel like spending anything more than I had to in this town. I worried about the cost of the dentist appointment. The last time I had any dental work done, it had cost me hundreds of dollars. Even routine cleanings were $HII or $9II where I had lived before the Trail. As it turned out, I shouldn't have worried; the dentist ground the sharp edge off my tooth in less than five Minutes and handed inc a bill for $35.
By the time we left Catawba, the ice had melted almost completely in the warm, bright afternoon sun. The A.T. led along steep ledges of gray stone, with an almost vertical drop-off on one side, up to the abrupt scarp of rock known as Dragon's Tooth. This ','odd have beer totally impassible in an ice storm, in the dark, I realized, and I shivered at the thought. I ran my tongue over illy front teeth. I could still feel the chip, though the edges were no longer sharp.
Isis
n the ridges beyond the Dragon's Tooth, the sun flashed in and out of ragged, bruise-colored clouds. The hare trunks of oaks and the dark green crowns of pines caught the light and stood out in sharp relief against the glowering sky.
My new boots felt wonderful compared with the neoprene socks and sandals I'd been wearing for the past week. Inside the neoprene, my feet had sweat constantly. By the end of a day they'd become wrinkled and clammy; by the end of the week they had started to smell had. Cocooned in wool socks and hoots, my feet felt warm and dry. The inch of boot sole between them and the trail gave me a curious but pleasant sense of levitation. Only an occasional twinge where the boot tongues pressed against the front of lily ankles reminded me that I was breaking in new footwear.
At Pickle Branch Shelter that night, jackrabbit studied the neaps while I gathered firewood. When I sat down to light the stove, she leaned over, her eyes gleaming, and pointed to the altitude profile of the stretch of trail we'd covered that afternoon.
"Look at this! We hiked twelve miles today, starting at two o'clock. If we can do that, we should have no trouble hiking this .. "she pulled the next map forward, and her finger skimmed along the profile. "..twenty-three!" she finished, triumphantly, her fingertip resting above the words Laurel Creek Shelter.
"Twenty-three? That's the most we've ever done in a day."
"I know! Now that you've got boots, we can start moving fast"
"It might be easier to wait until I've broken them in a little."
She frowned. "Are they giving you blisters?"
"Well, no ..
Her voice took on a note of mild exasperation. "Look, we've got two choices tomorrow. We pull the twenty-three to Laurel Creek, or ..." her finger moved to the words Sarver'c Cabin. "Or we hike a measly sixteen miles and stay in a ruined cabin half a mile off the trail, downhill, which is supposed to be mouse-infested and haunted.'
"Haunted? That could he fun. Okay, okay. I was just kidding. Twentythree it is."
We packed our gear by the light of our headlamps in the morning and left in the blue-gray murk of half-light. Shadows crouched under the pines like large nocturnal animals retreating from the sunrise. As we reached the top of the ridge, the sun lit the pine trunks with a brief orange flare, then vanished into the belly of a low cloud. We hiked down the last mile of that ridge and up the next. Under the heavy cloud, the forest around me seemed drained of all but its most somber hues. I ran through all the poems I'd memorized, letting my mind dwell on the lines that evoked color. Blood-red were his spurs in the L'olden noon; wine-red was his velvet coat, I repeated to myself, trying to picture the dramatic end of "The Highwayman.' But it seemed that color had faded from my imagination as it had vanished from the landscape; the scene I called to mind had the flickering, dusty quality of a badly preserved film.
Near the top of the third ridge, Sinking Creek Mountain, we huddled behind a pile of boulders and ate a hurried lunch. A scrawny brown-and-black striped hound, fitted with a radio collar, came trotting out of the woods as we packed up to leave. When she spotted us, she put her tail between her legs, backed away a pace, and started haying.
"Oh, hush. We're not bears, even if we do smell like them," I told her. "Go on, go back to your people. Shoo.'
&n
bsp; She did hush, but she refused to go away. When we started to hike, the hound tagged along behind us. Every once in a while, jackrabbit would turn around and try to chase her off. The dog cowered, staying well out of reach, but as soon as we started walking again, she stood up and followed. After a while, she trotted past us and started to lead us down the trail, looking over her shoulder every few minutes to check that we were still there.
The first drifts of mist caught in tree branches high over our heads. It wasn't until we came to a stretch of bare ledges that we realized another ice storm had started. The dog found footing in small cracks and tufts of grass, but jackrabbit and I could scarcely keep our balance on the slanted stone. Our pace slowed to a crawl. The sky was darkening with night as well as storm by the time we reached the Sarver's Cabin side trail. We paused in the shelter of an enormous fallen log.
"What do you want to do?" asked jackrabbit.
"We have to get this dog somewhere. We don't have any food for her, and she looks like she's starving. Let's go on."
"Good. That's just what I was thinking." She consulted the map. "Looks like there's a road in the next valley. Maybe we'll find a farmhouse or something."
I )own in the valley, the ice-mist changed to a light rain, but a series of farm fields fenced with barbed wire posed us a new problem. The stiles, set up to help hikers get over the fences, ottered no footholds for the dog; jackrabbit had to lure her close with a handful of goldfish crackers, then pick her up and pass her over the fence to Mee. The dog wasn't very happy about this procedure; after the second fence, she followed a good distance behind us, and when we reached the third stile, she turned and ran away. We waited, but she didn't return. We were almost ten miles from the place where she'd started following us, and as tar as we knew, she was trapped inside the fenced field.
"Here, dog! Please come back, dog," I called into the night.
"The road's close," jackrabbit said. "Maybe we can find a house and tell the people there's a lost dog in this field."
"I guess so" I sighed. "I wanted to get her to some place where she could get some rest and food."
"We've got to get us to some place where we can rest and eat," said jackrabbit. "We still have three miles to go before the shelter, and I'M) pretty tired."
As soon as I thought about it, I realized that I, too, was exhausted. My shoulders ached, and my feet felt bruised and swollen, especially in the places beneath the boot tongues. I turned and headed slowly down the trail. Five minutes later, the dog rejoined us, her sleek coat covered with mud; she Must have found a gap under the fence to wriggle through. I lured her over with the rest of the goldfish and some water poured into my camp cup. While she ate, I tied a length of string to her collar. She accepted the makeshift leash with resignation and trotted along beside me, her head hanging.
In fifteen minutes, we came to the road. Luck was with us; just around a corner, the bright, warm lights of a house glowed through the drizzle. It turned out to be a tiny building, set in a yard full of rusting cars. Strips of peeling paint dangled from the walls, and a few mossy shingles looked like they were about to fall off the roof, but Christmas lights blazed from two small bushes beside the door. I stood in the road for a minute, just looking, letting my eyes drink in the dazzling colors.
Jackrabbit waited in the driveway, holding the dog, while I went up and knocked. A small, muscular woman opened the door a crack, stared at me for a moment, then opened it a bit farther. Over her shoulder, I caught a glimpse of twelve or fifteen people, ranging in age from two to eighty, clustered around a television set. One of the young girls held a lap dog. Good, I thought, they have do, ~ food.
"Well?" asked the woman at the door.
"My sister and I found a lost bear hound. We're hiking the Appalachian Trail, so ..:'
"It ain't mine. All my huntin' dogs are in the backyard."
"We were wondering if you could help us return it to the owner?"
"Has it got a collar?" I nodded. The woman opened the door the rest of the way and motioned to jackrabbit. "Bring it here."
She inspected the tag on its collar, and her voice softened, as though finding the address there had finally convinced her that we weren't trying to play some nasty trick on her. "Oh, sure. Jim Somers. I know him. Lives just the next gap over. I'll get this dog back to him." "
"Could you-if you have any dog food-feed her something? I think she's really hungry."
... Course I'll feed her." She turned and hollered back into the room. "Bobby! Get some dog food, and get this hound out to the pen" Then she looked back at me, her eyes narrowed with suspicion as they had been when she first opened the door. "Anything else?"
"No, thank you, ma'am," I answered and retreated to the driveway. As jackrabbit and I turned the corner of the road, I glanced over my shoulder and saw her still standing behind the half-open door, her arms crossed, watching us.
"That was strange," I said. "She kept looking at me as though she thought I was some kind of burglar."
Jackrabbit stopped under a streetlight and looked me up and down. "Well," she said, "you can't see yourself, so you'll have to use inc as your nmirror"
I looked at her. Mud streaked her skin and clothing, and strands of wet hair, escaped from her braid, clung to the sides of her face. Her eyes caught the Hash of my headlamp, bright in the Murky shadows beneath the brim of her hat. A long stripe of dried blood ran down her right forearm; she must have scratched it on one of the barbed wire fences. Framed between her heavy hiking sticks, she looked even taller than her six-two, and the thick sleeves of her wool shirt, pushed back to the elbows, made tier biceps look as powerful as her hiker calves.
"Wow," I said. "You look dangerous"
"Thanks," she answered. "So do you"
I may have looked tough, but I didn't feel it. Without the dog to worry about, Illy mind settled, with a vengeance, on Illy ankles. Only the task of finding our path through the dark fields distracted me from the pain of breaking in Illy new boots. In some places, finding the trail wasn't easy. The posts with white blazes on them were set Much farther apart than the beams of our headlamps could reach; in pastures, I had to distinguish the A.T. from dozens of crisscrossing cow paths. At the edge of one hayfield, I followed a beaten trail up a steep embankment, only to find that it fanned out into a half dozen faint animal tracks that disappeared into the underbrush.
"Are we lost?-jackrabbit asked, scowling.
"We're off the Trail. I must have lost it at the toot of the hill"
Sure enough, the A.T. made a sharp, right-angle turn at the base of the hill. As soon as we found it again, jackrabbit took the lead. I limped along behind her, my ankles throbbing as though I'd been walking in iron shackles instead of boots. My shoulders, too, burned under the pack straps, and every muscle in my arms and legs ached. I tried to drag scraps of poetry and bright days from my memory, but every thought turned ugly under the influence of pain; the smoke of a campfire changed to clouds of burning ash, leeches swarmed under the surface of a pond, someone's arms hugging nee became binding ropes. Dimly, I could see jackrabbit striding up the trail in front of Inc. the top of her hat just showing above her pack cover, but at the same time, I walked in a nightmare forest, where the tree branches scratching my legs turned into clawed arms reaching out to trip me. How tar did we have to go? Four miles? Six? It felt as though we'd hiked tens of miles, from one night into the next, since we'd passed the road and the house with Christmas lights.
Just when my conviction that Laurel Creek Shelter did not exist had grown to a certainty we arrived. Jackrabbit threw down her pack and checked her watch.
"We done good, sister," she said. "It's only nine-thirty."
We woke to a cold, steady rain.
"Brrr! Nasty weather," jackrabbit muttered, jumping back into her sleeping bag after a visit to the privy. "Five hundred feet up, I bet this is one hell of an ice storm."
I pulled out the map and checked our elevation on the altitude profile. Only 2,700 fe
et here at the shelter, but the next mile of hiking would take us to 3,700 feet. "It looks like we're stuck here," I said, trying not to betray how cheerful the prospect made Inc. I knew jackrabbit would chafe at the delay, but for myself, a full day of rest for my ankles, with unlimited hot tea, singing, and reading out loud, sounded like heaven.
We spent the day in our sleeping bags, venturing out only to gather firewood or get water from the stream. Foreseeing the possibility of getting stuck in ice storms, we had picked up The Monkey Wrench Gang at a used book store in Christiansburg. All morning, we took turns reading aloud. Our imaginations wandered the golden canyons of the southwest, where grubby, inarticulate, and spectacularly resourceful George Hayduke waged war on the corporate interests of four states with his rag-tag band of comrades. After lunch, too hoarse to read, we brewed ourselves a pot of tea and added a chapter to Passions Stealth-/ire. A niouse showed up in midafternoon and spent hours performing increasingly dramatic stunts in an attempt to reach our food bags. After we watched him make a daring leap onto the nnouse hanger nearest the wall, setting it swinging like a trapeze toward the one where our food bags hung, jackrabbit dubbed him Hayduke.
By the next morning, the ice storm had descended to our altitude. Black ice glazed the rocks around the shelter; just getting a pot of water to make tea became an adventure. Sitting still felt much less comfortable than it had the day before, partly because our muscles had stiffened painfully from the forced inactivity, and partly because the air was so cold that we didn't want to take our arms outside of the sleeping bags to read. We settled for watching the antics of Hayduke the mouse, telling stories, and brewing tea to keep our minds off our hunger. We were almost forty Trail miles from the town of Pearisburg, with a scant two days worth of food left. I remembered an ice storm in Maine that had lasted a week. I wondered what we'd do if this one settled in for that long. Slide and stumble back down to the road and beg the woman who'd taken the dog to help us again? Eat tree bark?
Barefoot Sisters: Southbound Page 37
