Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  "Whenever there are hikers in town, the doors are open," he told us.

  Mount Rogers Outfitters had the best selection of hiking gear I'd seen anywhere since the I )artmouth Co-op in Hanover. We perused the selection of tarps, sleeping bag liners, down vests, and thermal undershirts, trying to decide what we wanted to add to our already bulging packs. The shelves of new gear held my attention for a few minutes, before the wave of exhaustion I'd been holding at bay for the past day and a half washed over me. I sat down on a bench and closed my eyes.

  The image of relentless snow swirled across the backs of my eyelids. I saw Hope clinging to my hand, looking up at Fite with heartbreaking confidence as we stumbled along what was perhaps the trail, perhaps the track of a pony lost from the herd. I could feel the wind burning my face, then numbing it, but I couldn't reach up to tighten my hood. If I did, I'd have to let go of either my hiking sticks or Hope's hand. Beside mte, jackrabbit tried to shelter Joy front the wind. Ten feet in front of us, the dint outline of Joel pushed through a snowdrift as high as his shoulders, then reached hack to help John. Netta and Lash, breaking trail, had vanished into the white blur up ahead. Paul and Mary, with Faith, were somewhere far behind us; I hadn't seen them for hours.

  The snow piled deeper and deeper, filling in Lash and Netta's tracks until we had only the taint edges of footprints to follow. We had to walk single file now; I let Hope walk behind me, out of the wind, but I glanced back every few seconds to make sure she was still there. Jackrabbit went ahead to help Joel break the trail. Joy tried to catch up to her, plowing doggedly through the fine snow, which rose to her knees even where jackrabbit had trampled it down. Perhaps half an hour after jackrabbit disappeared into the blizzard, Joy stumbled and went down on her knees. She got to her feet slowly and turned to face me. The tears froze to her skin as they fell; I could barely hear her howl above the wind. Instinctively, I reached out my arms to her, dropping illy hiking sticks. I picked her up, pack and all. I don't know how much strength I've qot left, I thought, as her small arms tightened around the back of my neck. Half a niile'_c worth? Five hundred yards? Please Ict it he enough.

  Netta was shaking my shoulder. "Are you okay?" she asked.

  I was sitting on a bench in the back of the outfitter's store, sobbing and shivering.

  "We're all okay, aren't we?" I asked her, between sobs. "I mean, we made it. I don't know why I'm so frightened now. Now that it's over."

  "You need some rest. Come on, let's go to the bed-and-breakfast." She helped me to my feet, and I tottered the two blocks to the inn, leaning on her arm.

  By that evening, I had recovered enough to help figure out what to do about supper. It was New Year's Eve, so all the restaurants in town were closed, as were all the markets except the tiny convenience store by the gas station. I borrowed Ginny's phone book and started calling pizza delivery places in the nearest city, Abingdon, thirteen miles away.

  "Hi, I'd like to order some pizzas, and I was wondering if you could deliver as far as Damascus?"

  "Damascus? We only deliver within a three-mile radius." Click.

  By the time I dialed the seventh and last number, I was starting to contemplate a supper of chips and granola bars.

  "Hi ... uni, I know this sounds crazy, but is there any possible way that you could deliver six pizzas to Damascus?"

  "Let nee ask the manager"

  This was further than I'd gotten with any of the other places. I held my breath. A minute later, I was handing the phone to Ginny so she could give directions to the driver.

  While we waited for the pizza, jackrabbit went on a foray to the gas station to see if they had any champagne.

  "Get the most expensive thing they have," I told her. "I want to celebrate."

  She returned with a bottle of Black Uog Merlot. "Seven ninety-nine!" she announced proudly. "The other wine there was four bucks a bottle."

  The grown-ups among us stayed up late, finishing off the pizza, sipping our Black I )og, and watching reruns of Crocodile Hunter. Finally, afraid that I'd fill asleep on Ginny's sofa, I got up, stretched, and headed for the stairs. At the bottom step, I turned around to say good night to Paul and Mary.

  "Good night;' Mary answered.

  Paul looked up at me. "Good night," he said, and then asked, "are you going to stay on the Trail,"

  "I haven't started thinking about that yet. Are you?"

  "I don't know," lie said, sounding hesitant for the first time since I'd known him. He glanced at Mary, who sat rigid, intent on his words. "I'd like to, but maybe it's the wrong thing to do, with the children so young. I guess we'll decide tontorro,.v."

  jackrabbit

  he night we came into town, the sense of unreality that I had felt in the rescuer's truck continued. I felt as though I was slightly outside of my body, watching myself, as I ate pizza in the beautifully appointed dining room of the Lazy Fox, where gold-rimmed china plates glinted from glass-fronted cases in the corners. I went with Lash to the only grocery open in town, to buy a bottle of wine to celebrate-it was, after all, New Year's Eve. I watched myself talking, laughing, walking in the empty streets of the small town. Part of my mind was still in the mountains, lost in the snow and struggling to find the traces of a trail.

  Back at the inn, I went into the bathroom to take a shower. A small framed painting on the wall showed a scene of sand dunes at the edge of the ocean. When my eyes passed over it, the white sand turned into heaps of glittering snow, shifting, moving as I watched. I could hear the roar of the wind, eddying down out of the picture and flooding into the room. I hugged myself, wrapping lily arms around my ribcage, and turned the picture to face the wall. Undressing, I found gray patches of frostnip on my upper thighs. Several toes had turned an ugly purple. From the swollen, tender feeling of lily ears and cheeks, I knew they must have been damaged, too. The warm water of the shower fell on me but did not touch the cold inside me.

  Later that night, when the lamps in the wooden hallways were turned down low and almost everyone slept, Lash and I stayed up in the living room. We sat on the brocaded couch, finishing the wine.

  "We ought to celebrate," Lash said. "Come on; Ginny said we could put some music on. Quietly, I mean, 'cause everybody's sleeping ..

  We looked through the stack of CDs on the table beside the stereo. "This," I said.

  Lash looked doubtful. "The Tallis Scholars? I've never even heard of them. What are they, some kind of punk band?"

  "Just listen."

  He started to protest, but the music came on. One voice, and then a choir, the rich harmonic tapestry of Gregorio Allegri's Miserere. The sounds hung in the dark air, glorious and unrelenting, four centuries old. I closed my eyes. I could feel the threads of music reaching down through time, weaving into each other, weaving me back into the world. I followed that music out of the mountains; out of the cold and endless night, out of paralyzing fear, I followed the river of sound and it brought me back to myself.

  We didn't speak until the music ended. "You were right," Lash said quietly.

  Then my tears started, silent, melting the last of the ice inside me. A clock struck somewhere. We counted the twelve booming chimes.

  "Hey, it's 2001," Lash said. "Happy New Year."

  Isis

  woke to sunlight streaming through lacy curtains, and the most wonderful blend of scents wafting up the stairs: coffee brewing, bacon frying, apples baking. I lay still for a few minutes, relishing the warmth of the blankets and the softness of clean sheets against my skin. Mercifully, I could not remember any dreams.

  In the dining room, I found Ginny setting a pan full of apple dumplings in the last free space on the table. Platters of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, sliced fruit, banana bread and fresh biscuits, vats of gravy, apricot compote, and cheese grits (the real thing, a far cry from the flavorless gruel we'd been eating on the Trail), tiny glass dishes of apple butter and preserves, and pitchers full of orange juice, milk, and coffee covered every inch of the hardwood dini
ng table. Mary sat near one end of the laden table, sipping a steaming cup of coffee, her thin face transfigured by a beatific smile. Faith, still half asleep, snuggled in the curve of her arm, cooing "Mum-nma ... Mum-ma" As I sank into a chair across from Mary, Paul led the other children into the room. Hope came in skipping. She grabbed the back of the chair next to me and bounced up and down on her tiptoes, staring at the food.

  "Gosh, is this for us?"

  Joy, in equally high spirits, grabbed a bleary-eyed jackrabbit, who had just come downstairs, pulling her over to the table and wrestling the chair beside her away from John. "I'm sittin' with jackrabbit, 'cause she's my favorite hiker in the world!"

  After a few hours, the children tired of eating and went into the living room to watch it movie. Paul, Mary, Netta, Lash, jackrabbit and I sat around the table until noon, gradually emptying the platters of the feast. As I worked my way through the last apple dumpling, Paul repeated the question he'd asked the night before.

  "So, are you going to stay on the Trail?"

  I felt jackrabbit shiver beside me. "Maybe," she said. "After that .. she didn't finish her sentence.

  "I think I will go home," said Netta. "I do not like this winter hiking enough to spend all my money on gear for it."

  Lash looked at her as if hurt and a little surprised. Then he glanced at me and jackrabbit, Mary and Paul. "Whatever you guys do, man. We should stick together."

  "We don't need to decide yet," I said. "We could buy some new gearenough to keep us from freezing at night-and ask Damascus Dave for a shuttle back to Elk Garden. It's two days into town from there. One night in the woods. We could decide whether to keep hiking once we got back to town."

  "I guess so," said jackrabbit.

  Paul looked at Mary. "Faith and I are staying here," she told him. Paul's eyes flashed. I held my breath, waiting. Mary continued, her voice calm and gentle as ever. "I need to gain some weight. But when you get back from Elk Garden, if you still want to go on, IT go with you."

  Jackrabbit and I checked the post office for our snowshoes, but they hadn't arrived yet. We had better luck at Mount Rogers Outfitters, where we and our companions spent most of the afternoon sorting through shelves of zero-degree sleeping bags, four-season tents, and ultralight down jackets, trying to decide what we could afford, and what we could live without. Lash and jackrabbit both bought compasses, and I got a tarp that we could tie over the entrances of shelters to keep the snow out. Instead of new sleeping bags, we bought warmer liners and an extra layer of silk long underwear. Jackrabbit and I also bought a canister stove. Our Zip stove became dangerously inefficient at low temperatures; the night we'd spent at Thomas Knob, I had stayed up for two hours, trying to melt some snow for us to drink the next morning. By the time I had half a liter of water, I was so hypothermic that I'd decided that it would be a good idea to fill the other half of the bottle with snow, take it to bed with me, and let my body heat melt it overnight. (As it turned out, I didn't even have enough body heat to warm it-in the morning, the bottle had still been full of icy slush.)

  Paul bought a few new pairs of socks for Mary and some warm, lightweight sleeping bag liners for the children. That evening, we sat in a circle on Ginny's living room floor, helping Mary cut an extra-long liner in half and sew it into two small liners for Faith and Joy. Ginny brought us mugs of cocoa, and lien passed around a bowl of Christmas candies. The snowflakes drifting past the windows looked as harmless and pretty as the glitter on a holiday card. Sitting in the warn, lamplit room, it was easy to forget the blizzard we'd come through to get there, and the five-foot-high snow drifts, dry or frozen springs, and subzero temperatures we were preparing to face again.

  After another sumptuous breakfast at the Lazy Fox, Damascus Dave and his friends Jeff and Steve drove us back to Elk Garden. As I stepped out of Jeff's pickup, a cold wind stung the raw patches where frost-damaged skin had peeled off my cheeks. I fought the urge to jump back into the truck and stay there until I was safe in Damascus again. Instead, I pulled on my new balaclava and knelt down to help joy, who was having trouble tightening her pack straps. Hope came over and watched inc for a moment.

  "Mom usually does that," she said, in a subdued voice.

  We headed into the woods, Paul and jackrabbit breaking trail in the kneedeep snow. Netta, who had decided to hike the Elk Garden to Damascus section with us before leaving the Trail, brought up the rear along with nee, Hope, and Joy. (Heald, along with Mary and Faith, had opted to stay in town.) Lash hiked just behind Paul, with Joel and John trotting along in his wake. Scraps of their conversation drifted back to me; it sounded as though Lash was instructing the boys in the fine art of flirtation.

  "When a girl starts laughing at everything you say, even if it isn't a joke, that's when you know she's into you."

  "I guess Hope likes you, then," came John's high voice.

  "Yeah, nian. It's a bummer. I'm hikin' with all these pretty girls, and the only one who likes nee is ten years old!"

  "I wish there was a girl illy age on the Trail," I heard Joel say, just before they got out of earshot.

  I expected Hope to react to Lash and John's comments with indignation, but she said nothing. She was walking just ahead of me, and I noticed her thin shoulders shaking in her pack straps.

  "Hope, what's wrong%" I asked.

  She turned around, her eyes streaming. "I miss my niom," she sobbed. I knelt down in the snow. Hope buried her face in my shoulder. Netta stood beside her, patting her arm and murmuring something soothing in Hebrew. Joy walked a few paces up the trail, then turned to face us, hands on her hips and her eyes narrowed with frustration. Her expression reminded me of my own little sister, Susan-now-jackrabbit, at times in our childhood when she'd had to wait for me to get through a fit of tears. After a minute, Hope lifted her head and spoke.

  "Mary and me, we never been apart for this long since I was four. That's when I lived with my dad for a month, but his wife didn't feed me nothin', so Mary came and took me away again." She paused, as sobs overcame her again. "I shouldn'ta come. I knew I'd miss Mary. When I was going to leave, she told me that she'd be with me in my heart, even if she was still in town. But she can't do that, can she? Be two places at one time? She's in town with Faithie. She ain't here"

  "Close your eyes," I told her. "Can you picture your mom?" She nodded, the beginnings of a smile curving the corners of her mouth, though tears still trickled out from under her eyelids. "What would she say, if she were here now?"

  "She'd say I gotta be a big girl and help the others," Hope said, opening her eyes. "She'd say we oughta start hiking now, so we can get to the shelter before dark" She stepped back, squaring her shoulders. "Let's go."

  A mile or so later, we caught up with the others in an orchard on the side of Whitetop Mountain. Though sunlight gleamed on the polished white surfaces, a brisk wind blew swirling clouds of snow through the gnarled apple branches. As I stepped out of the shelter of the woods, a haze of snow engulfed me, and my limbs prickled with adrenaline. Where is the trail? I can't see the others. Snow is filling their f otsteps, faster than I can walk. My knees buckled; I fought back a wave of nausea. Then the snow blew past, and once more a sparkling field stretched before me under a placid blue sky. Not twenty yards away, Lash and jackrabbit pushed their way through a five-foot-deep snowdrift, while Paul waited to help the small children through it.

  We plowed through another mile of deep drifts, Netta and I taking our turns with the others breaking trail, then slogged steadily downhill for four miles to Lost Mountain Shelter. The snow grew shallower as we descended; only half a foot of it covered the ground around the shelter. Jackrabbit had gotten there before us; as I walked into the clearing, she and Lash came up the spring trail, empty water bottles clattering at their belts.

  "Frozen?" I asked. Jackrabbit nodded.

  I slipped out of my pack and stood up. It felt as though the snowdrifts on Whitetop had barely put a dent in the energy I'd accumulated during our zero in Dam
ascus. If we decide to quit the Trail, what will I do_fior exercise? I thought. Get a job as a construction worker and spend all my free time at agym?

  "There was an open stream by the road about a mile back," I said. "Anyone want to join me for an expedition?"

  Jackrabbit wrinkled her nose. "I wouldn't drink from that stream. It's probably full of road runoff"

  "Good point. Let's see what there is in the other direction."

  I took out the neap. "Looks like the trail crosses another stream in about half a mile. Shall we look for it?"

  Jackrabbit, Lash, and I collected water bottles from everyone and set out to look for the stream. We jogged through the monochromatic forest, around curve after curve of the ridge. We passed several dry streambeds before we found one that contained a thin trickle, frozen solid.

  "Notch this," muttered jackrabbit, poking at the ice with a stick. "I guess we'll find out how well our new stove melts snow."

  Paul had already started melting snow by the time we got hack. As soon as we had put on our sweaters and jackets, he offered us cups of hot water mixed with powdered milk. Jackrabbit and I set up our new canister stove as we drank, and Paul gave us some water to put in the bottom of the pan. The stove worked even faster than I'd hoped. In fifteen minutes, we were pouring the first pot of boiling water into Hope and Joy's Nalgenes, and in less than an hour, we'd filled our own hot water bottles, cooked supper, and made tea for everyone. As I snuggled into my warm sleeping bag, wedged between joy and jackrabbit, I found myself hoping that we would stay on the Trail. Just as I had become accustomed to the constant exercise the A.T. provided, I had grown used to the winter rituals of survival-putting on all our outer layers as soon as we reached the shelter, so that our arms stuck out like the limbs of overstuffed dolls; looking for water and melting snow when we didn't find any; comforting each other at night with tea and songs. A little technology in the form of a new stove was useful, but I wouldn't know what to do with my evenings if I could get hot water out of a tap whenever I wanted it. Most of all, I would miss the way our simple, vital work bound us as a community, how deeply we depended on each other and how carefully all of us-in spite of our diverse backgrounds and profound religious differences-upheld that trust.