She smiled. "You know, when I was solo in Vermont, I thought about it. I thought maybe I'd yo-yo by myself, if you didn't want to. We still have that money we were planning to spend on a car so we could drive back after the Trail. Why not walk? Neither of us really has anywhere to go next fall-"
"I was planning to apply to grad school, but I don't really need to start until October-"
"And it'll be spring by the time we reach Georgia. All the nobos will be starting. The weather will get better; we won't have to carry as much"
"And we'll see flowers.- I thought of the pictures I had seen at the Ruck, and especially of the dwarf iris in Spur's photo album. I looked at the bare ground between the trees, strewn with fallen leaves, and I imagined tiny wildflowers pushing their way through the brown husks. Just under the surface, they were waiting.
"You really mean it? You want to yo-yo?"
"Yes."
The fire tower perched on a spur of gray granite that jutted out from the end of the ridge. We caught sight of it through the rhododendron thickets when the mist blew back; an octagonal one-room building of wood and stone with windows on all sides, it reminded me of a lighthouse. A weathered wooden balcony rimmed the structure. From the map, we knew that the land dropped away steeply on three sides, but the fog was so thick that it was impossible to tell.
Badger had been right about the size. The building looked small from the outside, but from the inside, I could see that the single room would fit all of us and our gear with room to spare. Miraculously, all the glass windows were intact. Some of the damp chill crept through the walls, but I knew that when everyone arrived, our body heat would dry the place quickly.
"This is awesome," I said, and my voice echoed, amplified in the small space.
"And great acoustics, too!" Isis exclaimed.
"Let's sing something" I took off my wet boots and set them by the door, then hung my dripping rain gear and pack cover over a rafter by the far wall.
"Oh, I'd love to. But let's wait until everybody's here. You know how the kids like singing."
"Okay."
In a few minutes the Family's front-runners jumped across the gray rocks: John and joy, racing each other. At the last second John held back a little, and Joy scooted through the doorway half a second before her brother.
"I win! Nyah-nyah!" she shouted, sticking out her tongue.
John slumped against the doorway, feigning exhaustion. "I was real close, but you was faster," he said in a mournful tone, but he smiled at me and Isis behind his sister's back.
The rest of the Family, Yurt Man, and Yogi came in a few minutes later. Packs and wet gear lined one wall and festooned the rafters above it, and the rest of the room filled up with foam pads, sleeping bags, and hikers. The open space vanished as everyone claimed a patch of the floor. The inevitable arguments broke out, turning into wrestling matches that threatened more than once to overturn people's cookstoves. Paul and Mary shouted at the children several times, but after brief periods of calm the conflicts escalated again. I thought about the other sobos, wondering where they were, envying the peace and quiet they must be enjoying.
After supper, we lay back in our sleeping bags. The mist had turned to rain, a steady thin drumming on the root. Isis lit the candle lantern and set it on the floor. Its flickering orange light gilded our faces.
"Let's sing something," she said. "How about `Wayfaring Stranger'?'
"Na s," Mary said. "That's so gloomy"
... Wade in the Water'?"
Mary sighed. "Let's sing something new. We've been singing all these old songs for months. Yogi, do you know any songs?"
He shifted his bulk in his sleeping bag. "Yeah, I guess I know a couple. Let's see . . " He sang a few folk songs that no one else knew, and half a verse of "Imagine" Mary wracked her memory for the rest of the words.
I sat back and reflected, watching the little flame in the lantern. I remembered a conversation I'd had in Damascus with Isis, Mary, and Paul. It was late; the children had gone to bed and the streets of Damascus were deserted. We sat in the living room at the Lazy Fox, with the lamps turned down low. We were still shaken by the memory of the blizzard on the Grayson Highlands.
"We'll stay with you guys," Isis had said. "We don't mind slowing clown."
"At least through the Smokies," I added. "That's the last place where we might get really had weather in an exposed spot"
"Are you sure?" Mary said. "I love having you guys around. I know the kids can get to be a bit much, sometimes."
Paul sat back, a thoughtful look in his deep-set eyes. "We appreciate all you done for us out there. I )on't feel like you got to stay, though." The message was clear: i v can take care ol'ourcch'es.
"It's not a matter of feeling like we have to," I said. "I've had a lot of tun hiking with you guys. And besides, there's safety in numbers"
Isis spoke quietly. "I feel like we have to stay together" Paul sat forward and started to say something, but fell silent as she continued. "It's not for you that we have to. It's for us. There were a couple times out on that bald when I was just about ready to give up. I might have just stopped out there and sat down in the snow. But I thought about the kids. I thought, I hale to do this /iv the children. I'm not sure we would have survived without you guys. We need you "
Us. EF . I thought, but I didn't say anything.
"Safety in numbers," Paul said solemnly. "We'll stay together, at least until the Smokiest"
"Maybe we'll finish the Trail together," Mary said. "The Family from the North and the Barefoot Sisters. Wouldn't that be great?"
In the fire tower on Mount Cammerer, Yogi gave up on the Neil Young song he had tried to piece together. It was quiet. I looked around the room, watching the light reflect off the faces I knew and loved, and I felt an immense sadness. Our time with the Family was coming to an end. Isis reached forward and snuffed out the candle lantern.
In the morning, the fog had cleared around us. As I sat up, distant blue mountains came into view, rimming the horizon, wreathed in thin scarves of cloud.
"Y'all have got to see this," Yogi called from the doorway. A breath of chilly, damp air came in with his voice. I pulled on my wind pants and fleece and headed outside.
The view from the balcony was something straight out of a Chinese scroll painting. Under our feet, the end of the ridge dropped precipitously into a blanket of thick fog from the Pigeon River. Little wraiths of mist rose as we watched, vanishing into the overcast sky. In all directions, a sea of mountains rose around us, grayish pink in the foreground with the twigs of beech and maple, fading to blue-green with distance. All the hints of cities, technology, other people, were hidden under the cloud layer; we could have been the last people on earth.
Yogi stared across the mountains. "The last time I came through here, I didn't see nothing but fog for six days," he said.
I grinned. "That's kind of what we had in the Whites. No wonder you didn't like the Smokies too much."
By now, Isis and the Family had roused themselves and joined us on the balcony. The kids leaned over the rails, exclaiming breathlessly.
"Oh, I feel like a fairy-tale princess!" Hope said. "This is my castle!"
"We came all the way from over there,"_Joy announced proudly, pointing to the range of mountains across the cloud-filled valley.
"And a whole lot farther," Joel added.
Mary carne out last, with Faith in tow. "This is so beautiful! It's like a real wilderness."
Only Paul was frowning. "It's beautiful except for that," he said.
"What?" I looked where he was pointing, down at the far end of the valley. It was a moment before I realized what he meant-the thick reddishbrown haze that settled just above the cloud layer, obscuring the distant mountains in places.
"That's probably Gatlinburg, over there," Yuri Man said. "The smog just sticks around."
"Sniaug? Like the dragon in The Hobbit?"John asked with a bit of his earlier trepidation. I hadn't quite been able to convince him that
dragons lived only in storybooks.
"Smog," I said, and tried to explain what it was and where it came front.
John was quiet for a few seconds. "Huh. I bet if more people walked places, like us, there wouldn't be none of that."
The trail led up into the islands of spruce and Frazier fir on the highest ridges. The clouds closed in again, bringing chilly rain. In places, the trail was so narrow it looked like a suspension bridge, dropping off on either side, lined by huge trees like pylons. The way ahead vanished in the blowing mist. We began to see the ravages of acid rain. Every other tree, it seemed, was dead or dying; the gray, weathered poles of standing deadwood dotted the forest around us, the color of the clouds, stark against the green of their living neighbors. Blowdowns crisscrossed the trail.
In an ecology course in college, I had studied the effects of air pollution on the Southern fir forests. The trees, weakened by acid rain and ozone damage, were filling victim to an introduced insect species, the balsam woolly adelgid. It was one thing to read about it, though, in dispassionate scientific journals in a library two thousand miles away, and quite another thing to see it firsthand. I felt as though I was walking through a forest of ghosts.
Tri-Corner Knob Shelter, where we stayed that night, was a low-slung stone building roofed with corrugated tin. Like the other Smokies shelters, it was much larger than a typical A.T. lean-to-there was space for probably twenty hikers. A chain-link fence closed off the front of the shelter to protect the occupants from bears. Inside, the rain made a steady din. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I could see two levels of bunk platforms, with barely enough space to sit up, built into the back wall. A smoke-blackened fireplace took up most of one side wall, with a few large logs scattered near it as seats. The floor in front of the bunks was three inches deep with mud. Looking back through the fence, I could see an expanse of gravel runneled with small streams and a grassy hillside sloping back to the dark evergreen woods. The rain gave fuzzy edges to the scene, blurring the background as dusk settled under the trees.
Isis and I slung off our wet packs and hung them from nails on the rafters, where they wouldn't drip on the bunks. The air inside felt clammy, as though cold was oozing out of the stone walls.
"This'd be a good night for a fire," I said, rubbing my hands together.
"Hey, ladies!" Tim and Lash came through the gate in the bear fence.
"Hi, guys! Where have you been? I thought you'd be miles ahead by now. Take a load off." I indicated the nails for hanging packs, but Tim made a face.
"We weren't planning on staying here," he said. ",Just stopping for a snack."
I looked over at Lash. He shrugged. "Still light out there, man. Got to get some more miles behind us"
"Come on, you guys," I said. "The next shelter's, like, six miles, if you count the side trail. Igo you really want to get there in the dark?"
"Trail's well-marked," Tim said.
I shifted my argument. "But really, what's six miles? Wouldn't it be better to do it in the morning, when it'll be light? Maybe by then the rain will stop" If 1 can get them to stay tonight, maybe I'll have the courage to say the tl►ings I couldn't say in Hot Springs, I thought. I have to try. "Besides, you've got to tell us where you've been all this time. I thought for sure you were ahead of us"
Lash laughed. "Dude, we got hooked up big time. We were hiking with Big Ring and Granny Gear. They have family that owns a restaurant in some little town near here. Granny's Chicken Palace. They invited all of us-ne and Tim, plus Spike and Caveman, too-for this all-you-can-eat buffet. It was outrageous. There was more food on that table than I've seen in the past three months. We ate it all, and then, well, you know that feeling you get when you eat way too much? Like if you move, you're gonna puke? We were all like that. Way past full. So the owner of the restaurant comes out, and she says, `y'all can just sleep in the back room if you want.' She was awesome"
"So you slept at Granny's Chicken Shack?"
Lash gave me a severe look. "Chicken Palace. They fed us breakfast, too. Then they dropped us off, and we staggered on down the trail."
"The others are back there somewhere," Tim said through the last mouthful of his granola bar. "Come on, man, we've got to hit the trail."
"It's getting dark," I said. "Dark and rainy. Muddy."
"We've got headlamps," Tim said, but I could tell he was beginning to give in.
"Hey, if you guys stay here, we can collect wood and have a fire going by the time the Family gets here."
"Six miles; we'll be there in two hours, tops," Tim said to Lash. (This seemed like an incredibly optimistic estimate to me.)
I played my last card. "I might have a Snickers bar in my pack somewhere." In Erwin, we had told the rest of the sobos about the secret significance of Snickers bars.
Tim looked at me for a long moment. "You drive a hard bargain, jackrabbit:" He slung his pack oft and hung it on a nail. Lash sighed and followed suit. In a few minutes, we were out under the darkening trees, looking for firewood.
It was a busy evening in the shelter. Yogi, Yurt Man, and the Family cane as full dark settled, and Spike and Caveman joined us a few minutes later. Isis started a fire. The building, which had seemed so gloomy when we arrived, soon filled up with light and voices. Multicolored raingear was draped over the hear fence, decorating its utilitarian chain-links. Packs hung from every hook i» the rafters. We found plenty of space on the bunks, though the lower level had very little headroom.
Lash and I sat up by the fire late that night, after everyone had gone to bed. The drumming of rain on the roof blended with the small sounds the children made in their sleep. The Harries popped and crackled on the wet wood, and smoke blew down the chimney into the shelter when the wind shifted. We didn't speak for a long time.
"There's something about a fire," he finally said. "You just can't stop watching it. It's like a river or something, you know, how its always changing." He spread his hands in front of the coals to warm them. "Jackrabbit, do you ever think about the purpose of life? Like, why are we here? What does it all mean?"
I almost laughed-it was like a badly written scene in a movie. I could picture the directions in the script: Interior. NiOit. Brooding young intellectuals stare into the Names. But something in Lash's voice called for a serious reply.
"Yeah, I think about it a lot out here," I said. "I wish I had an answer. Sometimes I think there's some great, far-reaching explanation for all of it. Usually I think it's just a big crapshoot. There is no why." I took a stick and stirred the fire. The coals were beginning to die down, glowing a richer red. "But I think maybe that hclievin,E. there's some mystery behind it, hoping there's a reason for the way things happen-maybe that's what makes us human"
Lash looked over at me. In the fading firelight, his eyes shone the color of dark amber. I thought I saw a wellspring of sadness in them, an echo of depression, that flood I have struggled against so many times. He said nothing, and after a moment he turned back to watch the embers.
I'm not in love with him, I thought. I'm in loin with the idea that someone could fill up this emptiness in my life. No one Ivill. No one can. This sadness is somethint, that no one outside me can touch. Strangely, this thought brought a kind of peace. I'ntil I can learn to manage it on my o:en, I'll stay alone. I don't need to drag anyone else down Ivith Ile.
A mouse rustled something in the rafters. The rain continued, a steady din on the metal roof. I yawned. "Got to get an early start tomorrow. Good night, Lash"
The mist cleared a little bit the next day. Occasionally we could see giant cliffs and scarps of dark rock, breathtakingly steep, that swooped toward the valley floor and vanished in a lower layer of clouds. The evergreen forest, with its ranks of dead and dying trees, cloaked the gentler slopes.
At a curve in the path under some giant hemlocks, Isis turned to face nee. "So many people think we're crazy to stay out here. If they could just be here for one second, on this path, in our strong young bodies-they'd unders
tand."
We came to Icewater Springs Shelter late in the day. The wind had picked up, blowing shreds of fog across the clearing in front of the shelter, and the temperature was dropping. Spike and Caveman had rigged a tarp across the entrance, trying to keep the wind out. They lay inside in their sleeping bags.
"Hello, ladies," Caveman said. "Happy Valentine's Day!"
"Oh, I'd forgotten," Isis said. "It is, isn't it?"
"Fourteenth of February."
"Wow. We ought to celebrate. I'm all out of candy, but maybe I have some cookies left."
We unshouldered our packs and changed into warmer clothes against the clinging damp and cold. Isis found half a bag of crumbled Pecan Sandies in her food bag, which we passed around. Spike broke a Hershey bar into pieces. Caveman reached into his food bag and came up with a packet of ramen noodles.
"The greatest delicacy on the Trail!" lie said, making a tragic face when no one wanted any. We all laughed. "I think there might be something else, though ..." He took out a bag of candy hearts inscribed with messages: U R sweet, foxy lady, no Ivay, outta si Pub, be mine. "I know they taste like toothpaste, but it just wouldn't be Valentine's Day without them"
"Aw," Spike said. She turned to us. "Isn't he great? You should read what he wrote in the register. It's so sweet it gave nie the warm fuzzies."
She passed the battered spiral-bound notebook to me. Happy Valentine's Day! Here at Icewater Springs it is chilly and damp. My feet are wet and I smell like something the cat dra Qed in. But there is nowhere on earth I would rather be, because the love of my life is here. Dearest Dana, thank you for hiking the Trail with me. Thank you for sharing your life with me. Thanks /or everything. Love, Jim.
"That is really dear," I said, and to my surprise I was blinking back tears.
Tim and Lash came to the shelter a few minutes later. Lash, with a grill, handed out mini Snickers bars. "Here you go, ladies."
I punched him on the arn►. ".11iui Snickers? Is that all we're worth now?"
"Hey, its the thought that counts, right?" He gave a lascivious smile that looked just like Tim's.
Barefoot Sisters: Southbound Page 53
