Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  The wind rose, and the thin, eerie shriek of two trees scraping against each other came closer as we climbed. Faith began to fret: "Num-num, Mommy. Num-num"

  "I can't nurse you now, honey," Mary sighed. "We'll get too cold if we stop"

  Faith's voice rose to a sob, and then a wail. Mary offered her a piece of a cracker, some dried fruit, the end of an energy bar. Each offer met with a more indignant scream: "Noooo! Nuuuum-num!" The words blurred into sobs, and the sobs became screams, cut off with a choking sound-but a moment later, the screaming began again, louder than ever, drowning out the wind in the trees.

  I had thought I was exhausted before, but the sound of a child's voice crying, endlessly and without comfort, seemed to drain my resolve as easily as the wind sucked the warmth from my body. I could hardly imagine what Mary must be feeling. When she finally stopped on a narrow, windswept ridge and unbuckled her pack, I hadn't the heart to argue with her. I knew the hazards of standing in the wind, our clothes damp from sweat and snow. Several of the books I'd read in preparation for our hike had mentioned that the greatest risk of hypothermia occurred at temperatures on the edge of freezing, with cold rain or wet snow falling. Jackrabbit and I had joked about this information when I first discovered it ("Yeah, that's because there are a lot more idiots in the woods when it's thirty than when it's thirty below!"), but by now I'd had enough experience with borderline temperatures to take the books' warnings seriously. In case I needed any reminder, my teeth began to chatter before Mary's pack hit the ground.

  Mary knew we were in danger, too. "You go ahead," she told me and joy. "No point in you guys waiting around and freezing." Her shoulders shook as she unzipped the front of her jacket and leaned over Faith.

  "No," I said. "I'll stay with you'

  Joy shrugged her thin shoulders up around her ears and stood still, her back to the wind. Snowflakes clung to her fleece jacket, then piled up, making a drift between her pack and the back of her neck. The thought crossed my mind that I should reach out and brush the snow off so it wouldn't melt and get her hood wet, but before I could lift my arm, another, far more persuasive thought supplanted the impulse. Why I►other? More s►►oi►v ►oill /all as soo► as I bnish that off. I hunched my own shoulders and faced away from the storm. Holding still produced an agreeable sense of calm, a sort of suspension of discomfort. The wet sleeves of nmy wool shirt no longer slapped against the undersides of my arms. After a few minutes, I couldn't feel my feet, which had been aching all afternoon. The prickles of cold, where snowflakes melted on the exposed skin of my face, changed to a curious tingling sensation like the taste of mint.

  A sharp howl broke through my daze; Mary had tried to take her breast away and Faith was sobbing again. Mary sighed and leaned back over the opening in her pack.

  "You guys go on. Really. I don't know how long this is going to take."

  I knew I was too cold, but so was Mary. I couldn't leave her. But joy ... there was no reason joy should have to stand in the snow, shivering. "I'll wait," I told Mary. "But maybe joy should keep moving"

  "Yeah, maybe so" Mary glanced at joy. "Go on ahead, honey. We'll catch up"

  My feet and hands had just returned to life, burning, when we came to the edge of the bald. In a warmer season, it might have been no more than a small pasture, but the blizzard hid the woods on the other side of it and blurred the footprints of our friends ahead. Mary turned and looked at me, her face white as the field beyond her. In my mind's eye, I saw the same image she must have been seeing: Joy crossing the bald alone, perhaps hypothermic, struggling through snowdrifts that would have been up to her thighs in some places. We hurried up the ridge, silent, scanning the blank field for any tracks that wandered off the trail. Near the hill's top, we had a hard time finding blazes. One path led upwards, into a cluster of trees; the other took a sharp right turn, crossed a stile, and descended through another pasture. Tracks of churned snow marked where many people had walked, recently, in both directions. Which was the Trail, and, more importantly, which way had Joy gone?

  I bent over the paths, studying the shapes of the waves and indentations. The ones going uphill seemed a little less clear, a little older. I looked more closely at ones on the other side of the stile; did that narrow, semicircular dip mark a child's heel print? Perhaps, but farther down the field, the track blended with the rest of the footprints and seemed to be covered by other, larger prints.

  A few paces behind me, Mary stopped at the crossroads. She peered up the hill, and then down the pasture, as if, by staring hard enough, she might see through the snow. She dropped her hiking poles and clutched the top step of the stile. She shouted joy's naive three times, the drawn-out "o" divorcing the word from its meaning, making it sound like the wind's wail. She turned and looked at me, her staring blue eyes the only points of color in her face. "God help us. Isis, where is she?"

  I closed my eyes for a second and saw joy walking along a wide, smooth path, hand in hand with Paul. Wishful thinking-no help in that.

  "Down this way," I said, trying to sound confident.

  A hundred yards into the lower pasture, we found a white blaze on the back of a tree trunk, but it wasn't until we reached Route 19E, two miles later, that we could be certain that joy had taken the right trail. Three pairs of tracks crossed the bike lane side by side, so recent that hardly any snow had collected in them. I recognized the prints of Paul's boots in the middle, flanked by Hope's and Joy's. That night, at Apple House Shelter, Paul told us that he had heard Faith crying, and he and Hope had turned around to see if we needed help. Joy had net them only a few minutes after she left us.

  jackrabbit

  ohn and I reached Apple House Shelter a little before dusk. He ran out into the woods to help Joel, who was already gathering firewood. I dropped illy pack at the edge of the shelter. It landed with a resounding thump, and suddenly I noticed how exhausted I was. My back and shoulders ached worse than ever; my legs trembled; the soles of my feet felt as though they had been pumuneled.

  "Quite a day, wasn't it?" Anonymous Badger leaned against the back wall, wrapped in his sleeping bag.

  "Yeah, that was nasty. I've never seen so many PUlls in one stretch of trail." I had heard many northbounders use the term, an abbreviation for "pointless ups and downs" Aside from the Roller Coaster in Virginia, it had never seemed quite as appropriate as it did that day.

  He gave inc an enigmatic smile. "The worst and the best of the Trail, back to hack. Tomorrow we go up into the Roans. The most gorgeous balds on the A.T."

  Balds. I shivered involuntarily.

  "I wish you could see it in spring, though, when the grass is green," Badger said.

  "So do I" I looked out at the trees across from the shelter, a darkening collage of white on white. The snow was diminishing in the uncertain light. Huge soft clumps of flakes spiraled down through the air. I tried to picture spring, a profusion of new leaves and wildflowers rippling out of the snowbound woods, and I found I could not.

  "Jackrabbit, are you afraid?"

  "I try not to be" Badger's directness was unsettling sometimes. I didn't want to admit my fear to anyone, especially not to him.

  "We could hitch out at the road back there and wait for the weather to clear," he said.

  "I'm not going to hitch on that road." I told him what had happened to me and John.

  His forehead wrinkled with concern. "Wow. I never had anything like that happen on either of my hikes. Of course, I've never hitched on 19E."

  "Maybe the snow will stop. Maybe the weather will be better tomorrow." I crossed my fingers and made a wish.

  Paul came to the shelter a few minutes later with Hope and Joy. They stowed their gear in the shelter and cleared the snow out of the firepit. Isis and Mary came in as dusk settled, their indistinct silhouettes traveling up the dark trail. I could hear them singing quietly:

  Mary set her pack down gently and picked Faith up. "Sing more, Mumma? Sing?" the toddler asked.

  "Not n
ow; Mumnma's tired," Mary murmured, and sat down heavily on the edge of the shelter. Joy came running out of the forest across the path, where she'd been gathering firewood. Mary hugged her with one aria, ruffling her honey-colored hair. "Oh, my sweet, sweet girl. How could I have let you run off like that?" She was shaking.

  "I was only on my own for a couple minutes. I didn't get scared on that nasty bald, 'cause I knew God was watchin' me. Remember what you always used to say?"Joy's face grew serious as she recited. "`The Lord is illy shepherd; I shall not want ..."'

  We all unpacked our gear and filled the shelter floor with sleeping bags and foam pads. Even with Lash off the Trail and Heald hiking ahead of us, it was a tight fit. The wind shifted, and snow blew into the front of the shelter. Isis and Badger rigged a tarp to block the doorway and we settled back to cook dinner. Paul built a fire outside-the Family didn't have enough fuel to use their stove every night. The children tumbled out of the shelter, wearing their warmest gear, to look for more firewood. Anonymous Badger lay hack and tucked his head into his mummy bag. "Good night, ladies:"

  "Good night, Badger . . . What'll we have for dinner tonight?" Isis asked inc.

  "Something heavy," I said. "How about this pasta and beans thing?" It was a dinner we hadn't tried before, bowtie noodles and black beans with basil.

  "Sure" She set tip the canister stove on the small area of bare floor at the foot of our foam pads. I ducked under the tarp to fetch a pot of water from the creek behind the shelter. I was grateful for the warm weather and rain of the previous few days; though a few ice fingers had reformed in the slow eddies, the stream was running strong. The surface glittered in the light of my headlamp.

  Isis poured some water into our two-liter pot and began cooking dinner. "This stuff smells kind of funny." She wrinkled her nose. The steaming pot balanced on the tiny three-pronged stove did have a strange and not entirely agreeable odor, but I was too hungry to care. "And it's thickening tip really fast. Is pasta supposed to do that? ... Oh shit"

  It seemed to happen in slow motion. I watched helplessly as the viscous, half cooked dinner slopped toward one side of the pot, unbalancing the stove, and spilled out across the grimy shelter floor. Day tu'o of au eit'ht-day resupply, I thouglit miserably.

  Isis and I exchanged a look of despair. She shut the stove down. We scooped as much of the dinner as we could back into the pot. Then, without looking at each other, we scraped the rest off the shelter floor and ate it, spoon by spoon.

  I thought back to what Isis had said the day we put our shoes on, when an ice storm forced us to sleep in the laundry room at Big Meadows. 'life 'Anil has chilllt'e(1 us, no doubt about it. I inia''Inc ice'!! (!0 a lot more thilt's in, never thoilt'ht in, would, be/ore this hike is throut'h. This was yet another thing I had never imagined myself doing, and it was a good deal less pleasant than bedding down nest to a washing machine. The food tasted musty and stale, as though it had been sitting on a supermarket shelf for years. We ate carefully, spitting out the grit, but the flavor of the shelter floor came through, a rank essence of accumulated sweat and grime. By the time we had recovered as much as we could from the floor, the stuflfin the pot had begun to freeze around the edges.

  "I think we've got enough fuel to heat this up," Isis said.

  "I hope so."

  "Why don't you read the register to me?" She lit the stove again and put the pot back on, keeping a firm hold on it as she stirred.

  "Sure." With Badger asleep and the Family outside around their fire, it was a little like the weeks we had spent by ourselves in the early winter, when the registers had been our main form of entertainment. I leafed through the tattered spiral-bound notebook. "Hey, here's an entry from Waterfall!"

  At the sight of her loopy handwriting, I could clearly picture her smiling face, framed by braided pigtails. She had a way of finding the bright side of everything. I wondered what she would have said about eating off the shelter floor. As I read her entry, though, I began to frown. I hate to say it, but this weather is'ettinc, me down. Today I hiked all the u'ay up to Hump Mountain, at the edge of the balds, and I had to turn around and come hack here. That wind was too much liar me. If it doesn't stop by tomorrow; I think I'll hitch out and call Bob. On a briqhter note, all this snow makes the woods look lovely. Y'all hike safe. Life is goodWater/all.

  "All the way to the balds?" Isis said. "But that's five miles from here! For her to have gone all the way up there, and then turn around and come back .. '

  "There isn't another entry from her. I guess she must have gone on the next day."

  I barely slept that night. Mice scrabbled around in the rafters, and the tarp across the entrance flapped unsteadily in the wind. My body ached. I worried about the coming day: Will the smnv continue? Will the wind die down? Will I be strong enoiuc'h?

  By some miracle, the morning dawned clear and calm. The new, powdery snow clung to the trees and rhododendron branches, dazzlingly bright under a cloudless sky. It was thick enough for snowshoes. I left the shelter ahead of everyone else, my footsteps the first marks on the sparkling white surface. As the sun climbed higher, a small wind came up, dislodging puffs of snow from the trees. The falling powder flashed golden as the sun caught it. In protected hollows, the layers of overlapping snow-covered branches almost blocked out the indigo sky.

  Anonymous Badger caught tip to me in a few minutes and passed. His line of delicate footprints were the only sign of human presence in the white woods. I kept climbing, struggling uphill against the weight of my pack. My hips and knees began to throb, and I focused on my breath, trying to ignore the pain and keep going.

  Abruptly the vista opened out ahead of nie. The trail came to a wide meadow, drifted in with knee-deep snow. Down in the valley, I could just see roads snaking between the snow-covered fields, patches of trees, and clusters of houses. Badger's neat handwriting, in the snow at the edge of the bald, spelled out [1clconic to the Hi'I:Iands ofRoad.

  I shivered as all the worst-case scenarios ran through my head: What if the wind conies lip? What if the snow' comes back? What if u'e all,cet separated out there? In my first few steps into the bald, I walked cautiously, half expecting the weather to break without warning. But the air stayed calm and almost warm. No clouds marred the blue sweep of sky that encircled me. These balds were like an antidote to the Grayson Highlands. The smooth, grassy flanks of Hump Mountain and Little Hunip lay quiet under sparkling snow. The mountains in the distance had an austere beauty, sparse and geometric: long ridges and undulating spurs stacked up, layer after layer fading toward the horizon, black and white under snow. Each step brought a new twist of the mountains into view. I forgot the pain in my hips and knees as I crossed the open fields.

  Toward evening, weariness crept into my limbs. My arms hurt from lifting my hiking sticks out of the knee-deep snow; Illy legs hurt from the added weight of the snowshoes on my feet. As the sun sank to a few degrees above the horizon, gilding the snow and deepening the shadows, I sat down on a rock beside the trail to rest, holding back tears with difficulty. I felt overwhelmed and exhausted, and I didn't know whether I had the strength to make it to the shelter.

  I heard soft footsteps on the trail behind me. It was John. "Hey, little buddy."

  He gave inc a look of disdain. "I'm nobody's little buddy. I am Super John!" He spread his arms and gave an exaggerated bow.

  I smiled and tried to stand up. "Can your superpowers get me to the shelter?"

  "No. But yours can! You've got superpowers too. Come on. Hey, I bet we can see the shelter from the next ridge!"

  I staggered to my feet and followed him. Thats tu'o I owe you, I thought. Sure enough, from the top of the ridge, we spotted the shelter roof reflecting the low sunlight.

  Overnnnultain Shelter was an old tobacco barn, with cracks between the diagonal wallboards to allow the air to flow through. Narrow beams of light came through the slats in the loft, where we set up our sleeping bags. There was space for probably forty hikers there. Isis and B
adger came up after supper to sing songs in the fragile light of the candle lantern, but they retired to the lower level of the shelter for the night. I felt loneliness settle over me, a familiar blanket.

  A wind came up overnight, rattling the walls, and in the early morning the strips of sky visible between the boards were streaked with a thin web of clouds. I stowed my gear quickly, thinking of the miles of balds still ahead of us. Paul and the kids packed quickly too, but Mary lay in her sleeping bag, not moving.

  "Are you okay?" I asked her.

  She groaned. "I feel horrible. It's like the flu all over again."

  Paul put his pack down and sat next to her. "Can you hike?" he asked gently.

  "I don't think so." She was crying softly. "You guys go on. Take the kids over the balds before the weather changes."

  "We can't do that," I said. "What about Faith?"

  "You guys should go, at least, you and Isis and Badger," she said. "Go on while you have the chance"

  "No" Isis had come up to the loft while we were talking, and her voice was forceful when she joined the discussion. "We stay together. Safety in numbers"

  "You don't need to do this for me," Mary said.

  "No. We need to do it for all of us," Isis answered.

  The air warmed up that day, melting the patches of snow in front of the shelter and leaving mud puddles. The children became cheerfully grubby. Joel and I gathered wood for a fire. Badger wrestled with the boys in the field in front of the shelter. Paul helped Mary move to the lower level, where she could get some fresh air. She threw up twice and felt a little better, but still weak.