For the next day and a half, I left my bunk only to creep downstairs to the bathroom. Mary brought me cup after cup of tea, but I could only keep down a mouthful every few hours. The children's footsteps on the stairs sounded like the charge of a cavalry regiment, and even the thin gray daylight from the bunkroom's single window hurt nay eyes. I drifted in and out of fevered sleep, uncertain of the edges between dreams and reality. Anonymous Badger leaned over me, washing my forehead with a damp cloth. I reached up to touch his face, but the skin changed to wood beneath my fingers-I woke with uiy hand pressed against the bedpost.
By the time my fever lifted, Heald had gone to visit some friends in town, and Lash had left the Trail-whether permanently or only until his hiking companions were no longer contagious, he would not say. The rest of us stayed at Kincora for nine days while the flu ran its course. Those of us who were healthy tended the sick, fed the fire, and ate constantly, trying to gain as much weight as possible before heading back into winter. Bob encouraged us to stay as long as we needed; every day, he and Pat came over, bringing us extra blankets, hooks, and medicine.
Mary took advantage of the hiatus to catch up on homeschooling, drilling the children on spelling and addition. Jackrabbit and I took over the lessons during the three days that Mary and Faith were ill. We tried to make the math component more full by teaching it in the form of algebra. Even seven-yearold joy understood the concept-a number disguised as a letter, and a set of tricks you could use to unmask it-hut none of the children took our lessons seriously. To them, algebra was an elaborate game, like building snowmen or sketching in the margins of registers, a pastime unworthy of the grave attention they gave to waxing their boots or gathering kindling.
In the evenings, I read aloud from a copy of '1 /u' Ho/)bit that Bob had found for nie at a used book store. In contrast to the algebra lessons, this story of danger and adventure on a mountain path seemed perfectly relevant to our own lifestyle. Joy spent whole days pretending to be Bilbo Baggins; she wrapped my green jacket around her shoulders as a cloak and led expeditions out to the woodpile. Hope and John drew maps on which the Roans and the Smokies intersected with the Misty Mountains of Middle-Earth.
For me, the familiar words came to new life as I watched the play of expressions on my listeners' faces. John drew in his breath at the mention of Smaug the Dragon, and joy shivered, nestling closer under my collarbone. A few paragraphs later, though, the children laughed when the phrase "a journey from which some of us ... may never return" caused the book's diminutive hero to collapse in a fit of nerves. Across the room, Mary tried to darn a sock while Faith nursed, but she kept undoing the stitches she had just sewn, her attention caught by the story. When I closed the book after the first night's reading, she sighed, a rueful smile flickering over her face.
"I never read that book before, but I feel just like that hobbit. One day I was canning blueberries for the winter, and the next, I was walking to Georgia with a bedroll tied to my shoulders, trying to keep up with all these tough hikers." She waved a hand toward her husband and children, smiling wryly. "I left twenty pints of blueberries in the cupboard and a garden full of zucchini and scarlet runner beans. A sunny kitchen with a shelf of books. The bed Paul made us out of the trees we cleared for the corn field. I don't know who's living in our house now. I don't think we'll ever go back. But I'd like .. " She glanced at Paul, and her voice trailed away.
Paul looked up from the magazine he'd been reading. "Do you want to go back?" he asked.
"Not to Maine. But I do want a home someday. A place where we can shut the doors on winter."
Nights at Kincora, after everyone else had gone to bed, Badger and jackrabbit and I sat around the coffee table, eating cookies and playing Scrabble. One evening I made the molasses-oatmeal bread that my mother used to bake for our family once a week. By then, half of our group had fallen i11- even Paul, who claimed that this was the first time he'd been sick in ten years. Mary and Faith seemed to be recovering, and John had slept peacefully since three that afternoon, but joy mumbled and cried out in her fever. When I checked on her, she didn't recognize me. Once she called me her mother; an hour later, she thought I was a character out of The Hobbit. The thermometer read a hundred and two degrees, then a hundred and three. I wondered if I should pound on Bob's door, wake him and ask him to take her to the hospi tal. Sleet rattled against the windows; there would be ice on the ten miles of steep curving roads that lay between us and the nearest town. I waited, played Scrabble. joy's temperature held for an hour, then fell half a degree.
I baked bread as a ritual, to bring something wholesome into that house full of sickness. I baked bread to invoke my mother, a woman who would have known what to do, between an ice storm and a child's fever. I followed her recipe from memory: honey and molasses, hot water, salt, oats. Tile rhythm of kneading calmed me, and the smell of the bread rising cleared the sour stench of our fevers from the air. I started late; jackrabbit had gone to bed by the time I brushed milk over the tops of the loaves and turned the oven on. The air seemed to brighten as I worked; I turned around to find that Badger had lit candles in every corner of the room. I lay down beside hint while the bread baked, and he kissed the tips of my fingers one by one.
jackrabbit
fter nine days, the sickness had run its course for all of us. I packed up .quickly that morning, more than ready to be moving again. I'd been ready to go two days ago, before the sledgehammer of the flu came down on me, so it was it simple matter of stowing everything in my pack. For the Family, though, it was hard to get everyones gear taken care of.
"Where's my hairbrush?" Hope shouted down the stairs. The other children joined the retrain.
"Now where are my hoot laces"'
"I can't find my stupid gaiters!"
"Mary, what'd you do with Faith's dolly?" Mary groaned. I )olly had been carefully hidden in the hopes that Faith would forget her, giving Mary a few less ounces to haul around. Paul, unfortunately, hadn't been apprised of the plan.
Faith looked up at the mention of the old rag doll. "Mama, dowwy! Where dowwv'
Bob came in about noon. "Rain's gonna start soon,' he said. "You might wanna think about staying tonight. Outside, the air had a weight and dampness to it, and I could tell he was right. But more than anything, I wanted to hike. I think we all did-too many days of being cooped up, tied down. Our boots were waterproofed, packs ready. Even the children, who usually perked up at the thought of a zero day, looked at their feet and made small noises of dissent.
"Whatever you want," Bob said. "Just thought I'd let you know you're welcome for another night." He smiled at the kids like a proud grandfather and headed hack to his house across the breezeway. I wish I'd said something to thank him. He had opened his hostel for us in the middle of winter, given us shelter, wood for heating; he'd fixed the plumbing for us and tended us through our sickness. He'd put up with us in our lowest moments, carefully sidestepping all the arguments and bickering. We could never repay him for all he'd done, not in money or in deeds, and as I had many times before, I vowed to pass on the kindness when I had the opportunity.
As it was, that was the last I saw of Bob for a long time. We left in the early afternoon for the 5.8 miles to Moreland Gap Shelter. Just as Bob had predicted, the rain began shortly after we left, a steady cold rain halfway between drizzle and downpour. Strangely, I found I didn't mind it. I was so happy to be hiking again, even though the weight of my pack dug painfully into my shoulders and hips, and the cold water soon soaked through my hat and began trickling through my hair. I looked around at the newly visible ground-leaf litter in a thousand rich shades of brown, dark green ferns, the mottled gray stones the color of tree bark. It was the first time in more than a month that I'd seen bare ground, without snow. Everything looked bright and new. I thought back to the summer, hiking in the Whites with Waterfall and her indomitable optimism.
"I love the rain, don't y'all%" she'd asked as we worked our way down another precipitou
s mountainside in the cold August drizzle. "It makes all the colors look brighter somehow. Like the plants are all happier bein' wet."
As my mind wandered back to summer, I heard a shout from Joel up ahead.
"Hey, check this out!" He pointed out a tiny red eft beside the path. The bright red-orange salamander moved at a glacial pace in the cold rain, but it was alive. It was the first sign of spring we'd seen; like a tiny, bright beacon, it signaled hope.
As the afternoon wore on, though, my capacity for optimism was severely strained. After the first few miles, the weight of my pack became more and more intolerable. Eight days' worth of food had been forced into my food bag, threatening to split the seams, and I was also hauling all my winter clothing, spare fuel, and three liters of water (to save the fuel we'd use to purify it). The snowshoes, suddenly superfluous, hung on the outside of my pack, clanking and shifting with every step. Isis later told me that her pack, leaving Kincora, weighed seventy-two pounds. Mine was certainly less than that, since she carried much of our joint gear now, but it still weighed more than I ever want to carry again.
The trail turned sharply up the hill. The twinge in my right hip returned, like a needle driven into the joint. I fell behind the Family. The sounds of the children's happy laughter receding into the woods only served to deepen my despondency. At the top of the first hill, I paused to set my pack down and stretch, hoping to ease the pain in my hip.
Anonymous Badger came over the crest of the hill, thin and wiry, goldenskinned, with the rain in his hair. "Hello, Miss Jackrabbit" His voice was soft with concern.
"Hello, Mr. Badger."
"Are you okay?"
"I-yes-no.
"Miss Rabbit, why are you crying?"
Because I'm afraid-Eve Evalked the razor; edi e on the Grayson Highlands, and Lord knows n'hat it,(-'II find on Roan. Because I feel more and more like deadu'eitht on this expedition, unable to take the physical strain, cut out of the decision-makin.E'. Because I'm lonely. Because my sister chose you first, and I could never get in the way of that.
Instead I said, "This fucking hip. It's killing me"
The next day the cold returned. A light snow fell, streaking the sky with white again, but only a few inches stuck to the ground-not enough for the snowshoes. My pack must have still weighed upwards of sixty-five pounds. The dinner of instant potato flakes we had eaten the night before had hardly lightened my load. I was in a foul mood. Every little dip and rise in the trailand there seenied to be an inordinate number of them-loomed like a New Hampshire notch.
A low-grade sense of dread weighed on me more than my overloaded pack. At Kincora, Bob had warned us about this section of the trail. "Now, I don't want to frighten ya, but I gotta say, when you go through Campbell Hollow, its best to stay on the trail and keep your eyes open. The park service took that land by eminent domain, and the Campbell family didn't take kindly to that. Years ago, just after the government took the land, some hikers found tishhooks strung up above the trail, right at eye level. That didn't happen again, but there's been stories of people setting their dogs on hikers ... We used to have a shelter in the middle of that stretch. Burned to the ground-twice. Like I said, it's been a few years since anything's happened back in there, but I always tell sobos to keep their eyes open, just in case."
For the first few hours of hiking, I stayed alert and nervous. There were signs of humanity everywhere. The edges of all the gravel roads we crossed were festooned with garbage. Once or twice I caught sight of houses between the trees or heard the buzz of a chainsaw in the distance. One hillside had been used as a dump; fifty years' worth of old refrigerators, rusty cans, and auto parts cascaded down from the road, scattered among snowy underbrush.
After a few hours, I let my vigilance relax. The weight of my pack, the pain in my hips and knees, and the necessity of following the white blazes occupied the bulk of my attention. One corner of my mind noticed the spare beauty of the woods in the new snow.
I came to a sapling that had fallen across the path at knee height. I tried to lift one foot over it, straining my muscles and leaning hard on my hiking sticks, but the leg simply refused to obey. My clumsy boot kept catching on the top of the log. I threw my sticks down and cursed vehemently.
I heard footsteps crunching the snow behind me. I whirled around, my paranoia returning in a rush, but it was only John.
"Hi, John," I said with a quiet sigh of relief. Belatedly, I realized he had heard me swearing. "Man, I'm sorry I said that in front of you. You really didn't need to hear that"
"That's okay. It's not like I ain't heard those words before." He lowered his voice as though confessing a secret. "Paul says 'em all the time. We ain't supposed to, though"
"It's not a good habit to get into. I curse more than I ought to. Sometimes it makes me feel better, when nothing else works."
John nodded. "Want to know what I say?"
"Yeah."
"RATS!" His eyes flashed. "Rats, rats, stupid, dumb, piece-a junk, rats! It means the same thing, but Paul and Mary can't get mad at me for it" He gave a satisfied grin. Then he noticed the fallen tree. It was almost up to his waist. "I hate blowdowns. Joy showed me a trick for 'em, though" He sat down on the log and swung his legs over it easily.
I followed suit, a little less gracefully. My heavy pack threatened to throw me off balance. I had to admit, though, that this was easier than trying to step over the log. "Thanks for showing me that move, John. I'm glad you came along."
"Maybe we oughta hike together today. Badger said there was some big open fields coming tip. Like balds. A horse pasture and a cow pasture, he said. I bet there ain't horses out now!"
The snow had picked up by the time we reached the first field. Thick white Hakes filled the air, obscuring the trees at the far edge. I thought I could see the rough outline of pine trees, half a mile away, but I wasn't sure.
John reached up and took a firm grip on my hand. "I don't like this"
The two pastures were poorly blazed, and the snow thickened to a full blizzard. We followed the half-drifted footsteps of Joel and Anonymous Badger, who had gone ahead. I carried my hiking sticks in one hand, holding john's, hand with the other. I repeated to myself, this is only a pasture. This ivill end soon. This is only a pasture ... It was difficult to fight down the images of the Grayson Highlands that came into my head.
130th of us breathed a sigh of relief at the other side. John finally let go of my hand. "Thanks, jackrabbit," he said quietly.
After a e,,,,, miles, we heard the sound of fast traffic coming through the trees. "Route 1 9E," I said. "The shelter's just a half mile on the other side."
-yippee!" John raced down the last steep downhill, sliding in the new snow.
"Hey, wait for nie!" I ran after him, ignoring the protests of my aching hips and knees. With the extra pack weight, each footstep slammed down heavily on the frozen earth.
The trail followed the slushy shoulder of the road for a short ways, with white blazes marked on the telephone poles. Another half mile, and we'll be able to eat and rest. After the stress and worry of the day, my brain felt numb. I heard the hunt of a car approaching and glanced up.
"John! Look out!" I grabbed him by the top of his pack and jumped into the ditch, just in time to avoid the pickup truck that was barreling straight toward us. It swerved at the last minute, the tire tracks slicing through the roadside snow just inches from where our tracks jumped aside. I caught a glimpse of the driver as he passed; there was pure malice in his steely blue eyes.
John looked up, dazed. "He wouldn't have hit us, would he?"
I realized I was shaking. "No, of course not," I said with more conviction than I felt.
"Jackrabbit, why did he do that?"
"I don't know,John" I got to my feet slowly, feeling my body aching. The weight of my pack seemed to double as the adrenaline receded from my limbs. "He probably did it because the government took his land away so people like us could use it"
John was quiet
for a few moments. I helped him brush the snow off his jacket. "The government took our land away, too," he said. "Paul wouldn't pay no taxes. That's why we're hiking. We had to leave. I still don't see why that guy was gonna run us over.
"He probably hates us. He must have been really angry when the park service took his land. Every time he sees a hiker, he probably thinks, `that guy wouldn't be here if this land was still mine."'
John considered for a moment. "I was real mad, too, when the guys came out to our homestead and said we couldn't live there no more. But I wouldn't ever hurt nobody because of that, especially somebody who wasn't there in the first place. That's just stupid."
We climbed back out of the ditch and followed the road to where the trail turned into the woods. When a screen of trees came between us and the asphalt, I finally felt safe.
Isis
few ridges after Campbell Hollow Road, twelve miles into our fifteenmile day, Faith began to cry. I was hiking with Mary. With more first aid training than any of the other members of our group, a relatively high resistance to hypothermia, and a tendency to carry a lot of extra snacks, I felt most useful bringing up the rear. I enjoyed the company of the other slow hikers: Mary daydreaming aloud about the subtropical island where she had first met Paul, Faith cooing and singing to herself in the backpack, and occasionally Hope, John, or Joy skipping down the trail to meet us, out of breath, glowing, bringing news from the others ahead.
Today, though, no one spoke or sang as we slogged through the new wet snow. I could see the muscles in Mary's curved shoulder straining against the pack strap. She took each step slowly, deliberately, as though the snow clinging to her gaiters weighed twenty pounds instead of two. Joy, unable to move as fast as she liked to in the heavy wet snow, had dropped back to hike with us, where the path had been beaten down a little. She slumped along with her head bent, kicking at clumps of snow and fallen branches. I tried to think of a story I could tell to distract her, but the act of imagining anything beyond the swirling snow and dark mesh of branches seemed as difficult as trying to pull open a window in the air and step back through it to Maine in the summertime. My mind pounded out the phrase "once upon a time ... upon a time .. " over and over, in time with my heavy steps, the words sounding more and more nonsensical.
Barefoot Sisters: Southbound Page 46
