AWOL on the Appalachian Trail

by David Miller

  This is Curtis’s job, but clearly he also likes the company of hikers. Tonight he takes a drive to pick up pizzas for me and Matt, the only hikers staying. I choose to sleep in the bunkhouse on the bridge for the unique (and cold) opportunity to sleep over a babbling stream.

  The itch that I felt on the back of my heel yesterday is now a blister the size of an almond. I can hardly believe that such a large blister could form when all I felt was an itch. I pop the blister with a needle, drain clear fluid, and put a bandage over it. I’ve seen blisters come and go already, and I figure my feet get tougher with every callus. They are of no concern.

  The day is perfect for hiking. It is clear and cold enough to wear fleece when I’m not moving and a T-shirt while hiking. I hardly break a sweat. The trail here has a lot of variety and is nicely graded. For miles there are fields of white and pink trillium, mayapples, and purple wildflowers. There are two grassy balds, pine forests, blooming mountain laurel, rhododendron tunnels, and many stream crossings. Set loose, a child would run down the paths, scramble up the rocks, lie on the earth. Grown-ups more often let their minds do the running, scrambling, and lying, but the emotion is shared. It feels good to be here.

  The wind is blowing strong all day and is especially noticeable when going over the larger bald, Max Patch. I stumble across it, fighting the wind like a drunk trying to hold a straight line.

  The trail across Max Patch Bald.

  Walnut Mountain Shelter is a ratty old shelter with a platform that would comfortably fit five or, uncomfortably, fit six. I am number six. Usually I would pass on a crowded shelter, but it is late in the day and I am ready to stop. I try to evaluate the group. Wall Street is snuggled into his bag at one end of the shelter, looking miserable and asking for cold medicine. “Hello, Awol,” he says feebly. His hello is sincere. I recognize friendliness buried under his brusque persona. I am glad that I stayed cordial with him when I had considered him off-putting.

  The other four men are obviously familiar with one another. One of them I take for a day hiker. He has rag-tag gear and a car-camping-sized stove. He introduces himself as Steve O., and says he intends to thru-hike. I am immediately uneasy about Steve O.—not because I have any special powers of perception, but because he would make most people uneasy. He has a hard-living look to him, with leathery skin and worn, yellow teeth. He has an odor that stands out even among thru-hikers. I make my dinner on a log in front of the shelter, minimally unloading my gear. This is a nonverbal way of showing that I’d like to stay. They catch on and start talking amongst themselves about making room for me in the shelter. Three of them crowd to one end, leaving a half-body-width space next to Steve O. Now it is clear to me that they know him, but are not “with” him. Steve O. isn’t budging, so there won’t be room for me. I pack up and move on.

  One of the guys says he heard a radio weatherman forecasting temperatures down to twenty-five degrees in the mountains tonight. It is obvious he feels badly about me moving on from the shelter late on a cold night. The wind makes it seem colder. It tries to blow my tarp away as I try to stake it down. I have found a place to camp a mile from Walnut Mountain Shelter, just off the trail on a cozy bed of pine needles. I sleep warmly in my down mummy bag with the hood string drawn tight, to the sound of my tarp flapping in the wind. I leave only a two-inch circle open around my nose.

  I’ve slept in shelters more often than I have slept under my tarp, and I will continue to do so. But I sleep better in the solitude of my tarp and wake rested, content, and feeling self-sufficient. I put away my gear, sit down to eat, and notice a rabbit chewing leaves just fifteen feet away, not bothered by the noise I made packing. We eat our breakfast together.

  Magic Rat, one of the friendlier guys from Walnut Mountain Shelter, catches up while I am trying to take a photo of myself using a timer on my camera. We walk in tandem the rest of the way to Hot Springs. Both of us are moving at a good clip to get to town for mail drops, food, and errands—typical town stuff. We talk all the way, and the twelve miles pass quickly. Magic Rat apologizes for not having made room in the shelter. He is hiking with two guys and two girls. The girls, Nova and Bear Bait, were not feeling well, so Curtis had given them a ride from Standing Bear Hostel up to Hot Springs, where the group will get together again. Meanwhile, Steve O. has been tagging along, hinting at his need for money, and the guys don’t want to be saddled with a moocher.

  Within a mile of town, when rooftops are first visible through the trees, I feel the return of the ache in my knee. Also, my Achilles tendon is stiff, causing me pain when I flex my ankle. There are steep stone steps descending the last fifty yards to the street. I hobble down them. Magic Rat looks back to see why I’ve fallen off the pace. How suddenly and causelessly these troubles arise.

  Hot Springs is a main-street town. Every restaurant, barbershop, and bar has an address on Bridge Street, the street with a bridge over the French Broad River. The street is marked with white blazes, from the south end of town where we arrived to the north end, where the trail crosses the river and dips back into the woods. Here, the choices of efficiently standardized America are not available. The most popular restaurant has honey-stung chicken on the menu instead of value meal number four.

  There’s a large subset of people with a connection to the trail. It is not uncommon for trail towns to have at least one former thru-hiker who has returned to take up residence. Outfitters, post office workers, and hotel and hostel owners all know and cater to backpackers. A procession of new thru-hikers maintains a transient presence. In towns as small as Hot Springs, add a few dozen hikers, and it seems like they are everywhere. Thru-hikers are easy to spot; they shop wearing rain suits while laundering their trail clothes; they wear sandals exposing feet papier-mached with moleskin and duct tape. Most men make the trip without shaving.

  I’m staying at the Sunnybank Inn, otherwise known as Elmer’s Hostel. The place and the person are legends on the trail. The inn is a Victorian home on the National Register of Historic Places. There are seven bedrooms, one phone, and no TV. Elmer has run this place for over twenty-five years. He is gruff, in his midsixties, with unkempt gray hair and an untucked Oxford shirt. He lets out a puff of air when a hiker asks if there is a computer in the inn. Elmer is proud of his anachronistic ways, yet he is no simpleton. Books are everywhere, and he is more comfortable the deeper the conversation delves.

  On a scale at the outfitter’s store I weigh 157. I weighed 172 when I started the trail and thought I was trim. I assumed I’d lose about ten pounds over the length of the trail, and this thing tells me I’ve lost fifteen pounds in less than three weeks. It is an old scale; it must be here only for show. While I’m still perusing the store, I see a nonhiker family near the scale. The father steps on the scale, so I move close enough to ask him.

  “Is that right?”

  “No,” he says, “ain’t no way I weigh that much!”

  “It reads heavier than you think it should?”

  “Naw, I only wish it was wrong. It’s right on.”

  So 157 it is. That might explain the appetite.

  I have a gourmet vegetarian family-style dinner with Elmer, his helpers Paul and Casey, and five other hikers. Dinner has a communal feel. Elmer explains that each night they come up with a question and circle around the table hearing everyone’s answer. “If you could choose one musical group or artist to eliminate—it would be as if their music never existed—who would you choose?” Paul asks. Much conversation ensues, and we get around to the subject of trail magic.

  Nova, one of the girls from Magic Rat’s group, is a pretty young girl with wavy brown hair and a stellar smile. She has a flower-child demeanor and says “peace out” in place of “goodbye.” “We were on Clingmans Dome,” she tells us, “and kinda wanted to go into Gatlinburg, you know, so I went up to a couple next to their Suburban and asked, um…could we get a ride? They were really great. They gave us a ride into town, and then took us out for a huge steak dinner. They paid for e
verything. It was really great. Then, in the morning, they came to our room and gave us a ride back to the trail. Oh, they bought us breakfast, too. It was so cool.”

  All the while I think of my fruitless experience at Newfound Gap. I tell them I’m feeling sorry for myself for not receiving any trail magic. If only I looked like Nova.

  “You go too fast,” she says.

  Cimarron is rooming with me. Cimarron is small, wiry, sharp, quick to smile, and eighty years old. “You know what people under seven or over seventy have in common?” He then answers himself: “The first thing they tell you is their age.”

  The next morning I’m with a group of hikers waiting for breakfast, and through the window we see Steve O. restocking from the hiker box. It’s a peccadillo to take from a hiker box at a place where you are not staying. No one cares about this, but his presence sets off a discussion about him. Everyone has a Steve O. story. Or more accurately, everyone has an incredible story that they’ve heard from Steve O. He has told people that he hiked the Pacific Coast [sic] Trail. He had all his gear stolen in Mexico. His wife died of cancer and her dying wish was for him to hike the AT. We rationalize the hiker gossip as a safety issue. We want to know who is out in the woods with us.

  Steve O. himself joins the circle of hikers inside. I had not seen him leave the hiker box. He doesn’t appear to have overheard. He’s wearing a green boonie hat, with the side flaps tied up. It’s a flattering look for him, which converts his worn look to a look of ruggedness. He launches into a story of his son being killed in Iraq. Park rangers tracked Steve O. down on the trail to tell him, but they were not able to find him until after the funeral. “There’s no sense in me getting off the trail now to go to Arlington,” he says. “My son’s already buried.” Steve O. tells of his son’s death in graphic detail with the emotional detachment of a reporter. I don’t know what to make of it.

  I’ve decided to take my first zero day here, to give my knee a rest. I ask Elmer about doing work around the inn in lieu of payment for another night. There is a trail term for this, too: “work-for-stay.” Elmer is tentative. He wants to know what kind of work I can do.

  Most people running hostels do it as a business. They are doing thru-hikers a favor by providing lodging cheaper than what is available to anyone else. But recipients of favors tend to develop higher expectations. In many cases, hikers look upon work-for-stay as a nominal amount of busywork for a free night’s stay: another handout. Some hostel owners don’t mind giving up a bed for work that they don’t need done, but other owners rightfully expect the arrangement to be mutually beneficial. This is the undercurrent of my exchange with Elmer.

  He lays out a plan where I will get an hourly rate that I can apply to my bill. I know he is hedging. If I’m not doing anything useful, he’ll be able to say “that’s enough” without committing to the full value of a night’s stay. I’m a worker, and I know how to fix nearly anything in, on, or around a house. I’m glad that he expects something from me, because that means he will appreciate my work.

  By noon I’ve replaced the screens on two doors, planed the front door so it opens more easily, and fixed some wobbly chairs. There are more things to do. Elmer and I rush down to the hardware store for fittings before it closes at noon on Wednesday, as do most other stores and the post office.

  Things are going well. In the afternoon Elmer takes me, Paul, and Casey out to his organic farm, where we plant corn and butternut squash. I get a tour of the property while Paul feeds me every edible plant he can find: sourwood leaves (taste like citrus), cucumber plant (not a cucumber, but roots taste just like it), ramps (really strong onion), and chives. Elmer is building a home for himself on the farm. The walls are made from cords of wood packed in mortar.

  We load a malfunctioning tractor into the bed of Elmer’s small pickup, taking all the bed space where Paul and I had sat on the ride to the farm. So I end up riding back into town sitting in the seat of a tractor in the bed of a pickup, pretending to steer, feeling very much a part of this small town.

  Meanwhile, more hikers have come into town. Crossroads, Snail, and Patience are here. I walk down to Paddler’s Pub in the evening and hear a few calls of “Awol!” from hikers surprised to see me again. Magic Rat and his friends (Nova, Bear Bait, Moss, and Tito) are in the pub, having spent another day in town. “We have a ride to Damascus!” Moss says, in reference to Damascus, Virginia, where a weeklong hiker party called Trail Days is under way. “We can come back here in four days.”

  “Or not,” Nova adds, implying that they could just continue north from Damascus.

  This is a scenario I would see thru-hikers get themselves into, I thought unnecessarily so. It would be anticlimactic to reach Katahdin, then come back and “finish” my thru-hike by walking fifty miles in North Carolina. It would also create travel and planning logistics more difficult than hiking it while I am here. I am skeptical of hikers actually returning to do the mileage, and often the hiker making the claim seemed to be saying as much: “Yeah, I’ll do it later,” they’d say with a wink. Moot point. In my observation, hikers who broke the continuity of their hike were much more likely to go off the trail altogether.

  I am reinforced in my belief that walking a continuous path and sticking with the white blazes is the best way for me to hike. My attitude about this is not rigidity for the sake of principle or unfeeling discipline done out of habitual compliance. More at issue is doing things in a way that enables me to sustain purpose and drive. I will do some things on this hike that will make purists cringe. But if I were to blue-blaze away a chunk of trail, or leave miles to be done “later,” then it would be tempting to pare away even more of the trail, eventually concluding that there is no purpose to it.

  Gumption is the most important thing for a thru-hiker to maintain. Compare rounds of golf, one played while keeping score and one in which you hit a mulligan every time you are unhappy with a shot. In the latter case, being on the golf course loses significance. Rounds that are memorable are the ones that you make count. In a broader context, all rounds of golf are of no consequence, whether score is kept or not. But you are the center of your own universe. You are free to create meaning for yourself.

  When you attempt to capture the highlights without burdening yourself with the tedium, the highlights lose the foundation that elevates them to the status of “highlight.” Analogies abound because a focused attitude defines the quality of all that we do. In playing a game, dieting, or hiking the AT, you benefit most when you commit yourself to it, embrace it.

  Stretch is the most athletic person I’ve met on the trail. He’s two years out of college, where he played soccer. He and I seem to be the ones most concerned about stopping our weight loss, but I can’t match his eating: six pancakes, two bowls of granola, cantaloupe wedges, and probably stuff he snatched from plates on either side of him.

  Fourteen hikers are having breakfast at Elmer’s. One of them comments that he has to stop taking these zero weeks. Hot Springs is a hard town to leave. “Would you consider staying a while longer?” Elmer offers. “I’d like to build a bay window in that farmhouse, and I could use your help. You could stay at the inn, and your knee would get more rest.”

  The offer is tempting, but I’m determined to keep to my fast hiking plan. Before leaving home, I had laid out my plan on a spreadsheet. The plan had me hiking over eighteen miles a day with no zero days, and finishing in 116 days.17 It was a crazy plan. At the time, I had never backpacked, run, or even walked unburdened on flat Florida ground eighteen miles in any single day. Remarkably, upon arriving in Hot Springs on May 13, I am still on schedule.

  Leaving Hot Springs, I see Steve O. on the other side of the street, talking to another hiker. He doesn’t have his pack with him. “Good,” I think to myself. I plan on walking a few long days. I’ll never see him again.

  4

  Hot Springs to Damascus

  From the French Broad River, I follow the trail along switchbacks up to the rocky cli
ffs of Lover’s Leap. At the cliffs, the narrow path bends along a vertical rock wall. There is a view back to the river and the city I have left behind. In Hot Springs I had time to stand at a pay phone in the middle of town and talk with my wife and say hello to my kids. As I look back on the town, I miss this connection to home.

  I take my time at a stream crossing, getting water, eating lunch, and writing a letter to Juli. A young man in sandals and day pack walks by, carrying a butterfly net. He sees that I am writing, nods, and continues on. The trail bends at the stream, so I am able to see him in profile up ahead. He slows, pauses, and slaps the net down over nothing on the side of the trail. It’s best if I stall and let him move on. Now he sits and starts writing. Okay, I can get ahead of him.

  Forgoing the urge to compliment him on the nice batch of dead leaves he snagged, I ask, “What are you looking for?”

  “Oven birds. There is a nest right there,” he says, pointing to where his net landed.

  He shows me a hole about the size that would be made by stabbing the handle of a shovel into the ground. Inside there are three eggs, but no bird. He is a naturalist gathering data on the small, ground-nesting birds. If a bird had been in its nest, it would attempt to fly out and trap itself in the net. This encounter is a tip to be more observant; surely there is much more wildlife I pass without noticing.

  The AT just north of Hot Springs, North Carolina.

  Tenderfoot is one of the few hikers on this section of trail today. She does not come as far as Little Laurel Shelter, so I have it to myself. It’s a lonely transition from the crowd at Hot Springs. Soon after I settle in, an hour-long tempest begins. I cook on the sleeping platform of the shelter, having to back away from the open front to avoid the spray of pounding rain. Lightning shocks the sky with light. I wonder how Tenderfoot is doing out there.