AWOL on the Appalachian Trail

by David Miller

  Back in Cornwall Bridge, I stop at a small store with a couple of gas pumps out front and spend half an hour ogling the food. Before hiking, I had never considered convenience stores places for culinary adventure.

  Leaving Cornwall Bridge the next morning, the weather is wonderful, clear and about seventy-five degrees. There are no significant rocky areas. Large hemlocks dominate the landscape, and often there is soft, pine-needle-covered trail. Midday, I reach Falls Village, Connecticut, a town built along the banks of the rumbling Housatonic River. The trail passes through the residential section of town, so there are no stores or restaurants to visit. I pass pretty homes on quiet, hilly streets. Between Falls Village and Salisbury, the trail is varied, with some hills, some rocks, and some grassy fields.

  Like Falls Village, Salisbury is an idyllic New England community with homes that look like dollhouses with white picket fences. The downtown area has an inn, a few souvenir shops, candy stores, and nice restaurants. It is a town lived in by people who must do their real work elsewhere. My destination is a boarding house run by Maria McCabe, but the only direction that I have is “left from the trail on CT 41,” and a house number. Near downtown there is a house with the right number, but all is dark. I knock on the front door and get no answer. I walk completely around the house looking for a sign. There is no sign, but that is not unusual for places that accommodate hikers. “Let yourself in” is a common policy, so I try the front and side doors.

  I go to an ice cream store downtown for a treat, figuring I will return to the home later. Odwalla walks by as I sit outside with my ice cream cone. He says he is staying at the same boarding house that I am waiting to get into. “I just tried to get in. Were you just there?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  “That place right there?” I ask, pointing to the home where I was just prowling about and testing the doors.

  “That’s not the boarding house. McCabe’s place is a few blocks away.”

  I follow Odwalla back to the right house, and we share a room. I call Juli and finalize plans to meet tomorrow. Weeks ago, she made arrangements to fly to Albany, New York, based on my projection of where I would be at this time. Our plan is to meet at a road intersection eighteen miles from here. Our girls are staying with my parents so Juli and I can hike together.

  In Harpers Ferry there is a three-dimensional map of the entire AT. The midsection of the trail—from West Virginia through Connecticut—has the lowest mountains. The rougher sections are at the ends of the trail, peaking with the Smokies in the south and the Whites in the north. Today I enter Massachusetts, the eleventh state on the trail, and the elevations are ramping up. Bear Mountain, Race Mountain, and Mount Everett are all near twenty-five hundred feet, higher than any mountains in the last 550 miles.

  Bear Mountain has the feel of a mountain much taller. The incline is long, and the descent is steep. Much of the summit area is open, rocky, and weathered. There are krummholtz: stunted evergreens ranging from three to six feet tall. At the bottom of Bear Mountain, the trail runs parallel to Sages Ravine, a powerful, tumbling creek cascading through a rocky ravine. I am tempted by a number of pristine swimming holes, but the water is icy cold.

  Sages Ravine, near the Connecticut-Massachusetts border.

  Race Mountain and Mount Everett are similar to Bear Mountain, having sparse krummholtz scattered among stony peaks. The walk between the peaks is particularly pleasurable since the traverse is made on a high, open ridge. I startle Jerry Springer on this ridge. He is filling a water bottle with harvested blueberries. So far he has about one-third of a quart. Jerry is a thru-hiker who is quick to explain that his trail name comes not from the talk show host, but from combining the first name of his favorite musician (Jerry Garcia) with “Springer” from the mountain where the trail begins. I take multiple breaks along this ridge, picking blueberries, taking photos, and eating lunch, believing that I am ahead of schedule to make my rendezvous with Juli.

  After summiting Mount Everett, the trail stays on the ridge longer than I expect. Suddenly, I feel as though I’ve dawdled too long, and I’m ready to get off this ridge and see Juli again. My progress is slow through a jumble of rocks. The trail begins to descend, then levels off, and then ascends again. I need to go down to the valley where the road passes, but the trail goes through a series of exasperating ups and downs before finally releasing me to the lush vegetation of the valley. A half mile before the road, the trail passes through an overgrown pasture. I can make out the road through the head-high grasses. Ahead, Juli is hustling out onto the trail to meet me. She’s walking just slower than a run, and she lowers her head, trying to hold back tears.

  We drive north to the town of Lee, Massachusetts. The next morning we get a ride back to the trailhead where Juli picked me up.30 It will take us two or three days to hike north to Lee, where we left our car.

  Initially, the trail that we walk together is mild, continuing through pastureland for about four miles before reaching U.S. 7. At the road, there is a nursery that sells a small assortment of snack items. We stop and buy cold drinks, ice cream, and fruit. Juli must be thinking the trail really isn’t as tough as I’ve made it out to be. I’ve already begun to wonder if we will finish our hike to Lee in two days instead of three. It is only thirty-three miles.

  There are advantages to hiking with another person. We only need to carry one tent, one stove, one water filter, and so forth. Even though I carry the bulk of the load, my pack is pounds lighter than it would be if I was alone. Also, we finish chores more quickly. Many tasks, like filtering water, cooking, and setting up a tent, require nearly the same effort for one person as they do for two.

  It is a hot day, but for me it is a reprieve from the heat of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. Gradually we gain elevation and stop to have a nice lunch on June Mountain at a clearing with a view to the north. The trail continues over a series of hills, but the terrain is good—more soil than rock—and the slope is gentle on both the uphill and downhill. Juli walks slower than I do, but I do not imagine that she is struggling. I stay behind and walk at her pace. The longest stretch of uphill trail we encounter is a gain of about eight hundred feet up an unnamed peak. Juli slows and eventually comes to a complete stop, standing still on the trail and leaning forward on her hiking poles. I pull up alongside her and see that she is not only exhausted, but in tears.

  She feels defeated, her legs are sore, it is hot, and bugs are pestering her. She had not said anything to me about the difficulty, hoping that she could come and hike without slowing me down. We have already walked fourteen miles, which is a solid day for any hiker. Even though she is in excellent shape, Juli is fifteen years and three kids removed from her last backpacking experience.

  A few miles later, we break at Mount Wilcox Lean-to. We have been walking at an easy pace, and Juli is in better spirits. We decide to move on. Juli’s legs have stiffened, and now she is feeling pain on the outside of her knee. Her knee hurts more on the downhill sections of trail. I am certain that she’s experiencing the iliotibial band friction syndrome that bothered me the first weeks of my hike.31 It was negligent of me to have her walk so far on her first day, especially since I also had knee pain after walking only eight miles on my first day—eight miles that I didn’t think were very hard at the time. We end our day at Shaker Campsite near dark after twenty-one miles, an absurd distance for anyone’s first day on the AT.

  Shaker Campsite is a small clearing with three tent platforms and a stream nearby. I still have hopes of making this a positive camping experience for Juli. We’ve made lasagna, the best of the freeze-dried meals. Twilight in camp is generally a wonderful part of the day, but this site is overwhelmed with mosquitoes. Juli drenches herself with bug spray. Deet from her hands melts away the measuring lines that are painted on my water bottle. But still the mosquitoes are little deterred. We retreat to the tent.

  Our second day hiking together begins roughly. Juli’s legs are sore from our long day yeste
rday, and the pain on the outside of her knee flares up soon after we get started. About a mile from camp, Juli is ready for a break. Since I am hiking the entire trail, a couple of hot and bug-ridden days are a segue to better times. Juli is only out for a few days, so this is not part of a larger experience; it is simply unpleasant.

  “I don’t know how it’s fun for you to do this,” she says.

  Juli is trying to be a good sport. This is probably the most tactful thing she can think to say given her current circumstance, but still it hurts for me to hear this. I am having the adventure of my life, and I want to share it with her more than anyone else. I want her to experience firsthand the fulfillment that I feel out here. Worse, I worry that she is thinking, You are away from home, from me, for months—to do this? Juli’s sore legs won’t get better with more hiking today, so we get out trail maps to see if there is a way to end this hike sooner. There is a road only two miles away, Main Street in Tyringham, Massachusetts, that also leads into Lee. From there, we hitch a ride back to town.

  We spend the next two days like a normal couple on vacation. We go out to eat, sightsee, shop, and go to a movie. Juli has brought some of my clothes from home, and it is a treat to wear jeans and a cotton shirt after months of wearing the same shorts and polyester shirt.

  Each morning, Juli drops me off on the trail and picks me up a few hours later so I can slack-pack (walk some of the trail without a full pack). Conveniently, there are two road crossings about nine miles apart. Slack-packing at this stage is effortless. Each of my nine-mile walks takes less than three hours. On the first day it rains most of the way, but rain is not such a nuisance when I can change into dry clothes at day’s end.

  At lunchtime after my second day of slack-packing, it is time for Juli to return to the airport. Her visit has been a success after all. She is sincerely happy for me to be hiking the trail. Juli is willing to hike with me again in Maine. We’ll keep it shorter than twenty-one miles.

  Today is August 2, and I have been on the trail for one hundred days. My hike continues over mild ups and downs with few rocks. Even carrying a full pack once again, I cover ground with little effort, mostly daydreaming about the time I just spent with Juli. The trail is damp and spongy. Much of the deadwood is covered with wood ear fungus. Red-spotted newts are abundant. They are smaller than lizards, but slothlike in their movements. I worry about stepping on them. Hmm…no wonder the trail feels spongy.

  Late in the afternoon, the trail deposits me onto Depot Street in the town of Dalton, Massachusetts. The AT passes through the middle of the small town on three different streets. I walk through town and look around before returning to Tom Levardi’s home on Depot Street. Dalton is less spiffy than the other towns I’ve recently seen, but by no means run down. It is a town intended for use by residents rather than visits by tourists. Tom is a bachelor who has accommodated hikers for years. His place is not a hostel. He invites hikers to stay if it is convenient for him, and he does not charge for the favor. From the looks of his home, there are probably few times when it is not convenient. The house looks as if it has been commandeered by deadbeat relatives. More than a dozen hikers are here, a few lounging in front of the television, a few setting up tents outside, a couple laying out sleeping bags on the porch, and one is using Tom’s computer. I sit outside at a picnic table with Dharma Bum, who is now joined on the trail by his girlfriend Suds. The three of us are cooking trail food for dinner. Just as we finish eating, Tom comes outside, offering pies and ice cream. Lion King stops to say hello. He and Dharma Bum are the only hikers staying here that I know.

  At least four of the hikers here are southbound thru-hikers: Fisher King, Squirrel Meat, Snail, and 3-ounce. Snail is not the same Snail that I met in the Smokies. For the past week I have seen a few southbounders daily, and I will continue to see about the same number of them all the way through the next two states. At this time and region it is common for the hikers who started at opposite ends of the trail to meet. Southbounders generally start the trail later, so they have not come as far: Dalton is 1,553 miles from Springer and 619 miles from Katahdin.

  That night, most of the hikers staying at Tom’s walk down to a pool hall and stay until closing at 1:00 a.m. Lion King uses his camera to his best advantage, getting “interviews” from the local women. The bar is filled with coin-operated pool tables. All the hikers congregate around one table and play games of 8-ball as two-man teams, everyone taking turns buying pitchers of beer. The winning team keeps playing. Lion King and I are lucky enough to win a handful of games against the other hikers. Two nonhikers put coins on the table; this is pool hall protocol for getting a turn to play against the winners of the game. Lion King walks around the table to talk with the newcomers, but I can’t hear the conversation in the noisy bar. He returns to tell me, “We’ll be playing for shots of Jagermeister.”

  Pausing to read a shelter register. Strings from the rafters are for hanging food bags. The tuna cans purportedly obstruct mice.

  It’s muggy-humid today, and the incline out of Dalton is harder on me than it should be. The drinks that had seemed like a good idea last night don’t seem so smart in hindsight. The beer is sweating out of me like a shower, and the Jagermeister is playing ping-pong in my head. I traverse nine miles through a pocket of woods between Dalton and Cheshire by lunchtime. The woods are higher and drier than the woods south of Dalton. There are oaks, pines, and some birch trees. It is a fresh, young forest, and the trees are modestly sized, with ample sunlight shining through. The path cuts through stringy, ankle-deep, bright green grass.

  Rain begins to fall when I arrive at Cheshire, so I duck into an ice cream store and sit out a heavy but quickly passing shower. The AT crosses town through a cornfield, and then crosses the highway before heading up Mount Greylock. I stop at a gas station at the road and make a lunch of sodas and junk food.

  At the start of the ascent, Kane-son is adjusting his pack. I wait and hike along with him. Kane-son was in Dalton, exhibiting his mini-crossbow and telling of his plans to supplement meals by hunting small game. He wears cutoff pants, a western shirt with cutoff sleeves, a cowboy hat, and homemade Indian-style moccasin boots. “I have to restitch them at least once a week,” he says. From first appearances Kane-son is eccentric—maybe even dangerous—someone I would have avoided if I had not ended up hiking alongside him. By the end of our jaunt together, I would be happy to have made his acquaintance, and Kane-son would have reason to wish he had not met me.

  Kane-son is in his early twenties, hiking for a few weeks before leaving for the Merchant Marine Academy. His inspiration for hiking some of the AT, and his self-reliant style, came from reading about the life of Eustace Conway in The Last American Man.32 He speaks of reading other books with diverse views on the philosophy of living. Kane-son is willing to express openness, and he seems self-aware enough to know that he is too young to entrench his opinions. He is gathering ideas, trying to find his place. He has most of his life ahead of him and wants to live it in a unique and meaningful way.

  In more practical matters, Kane-son is planning to stay at a shelter tonight but does not carry a guidebook, and so all that he knows is, “It should be around here somewhere.”

  I do have my guidebook, so I try to help. “The Mark Noepal Lean-to is 4.4 miles from Cheshire. We should be there soon,” I say, judging by the time we have spent together hiking. We have been working our way up the most demanding climb since Bear Mountain. Within the next mile, we cross the Jones Nose Trail. This intersection of trails is supposed to occur north of the Mark Noepal Lean-to. Somehow we must have passed the lean-to. I read the guidebook twice to be sure, and even let Kane-son read the page for himself. “I think we missed it,” I tell him.

  Kane-son turns around to backtrack south to the missed shelter. We say our goodbyes, and that would be the last I saw him. Fifteen minutes after our parting, I pass a lean-to. The Mark Noepal Lean-to.

  Still long before reaching the summit, I catch up to Ken
and Marcia. Fog descends abruptly as the three of us walk together toward the summit. We intend to stay at the Bascom Lodge Hostel. Bascom Lodge is a cozy rustic stone retreat on top of Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts. The hostel is in a detached building that is separated into bays, each with roll-up, overhead garage doors, clearly designed to store things other than people. Ken, Marcia, and I set up to sleep in one of these bays, next to a bay full of kitchen supplies.

  I wander back to the lobby of the lodge, where a few hikers are mixing with the drive-in guests. There is a road to the top of the mountain. The lodge is larger than it appears from the front, since a lower floor is buried in the mountain. The land slopes away on the backside, exposing the underground portion of the building. From the balcony at the rear of the lobby, I look down on the mountain falling away downhill. Only the peaks of the evergreens rise above the milky fog, as if they have been submerged in a cauldron of dry ice. It is too chilly to linger. It is only August 3, but it seems as though my summer has come to a close as abruptly as the fog arrived. There would be more hot times on the trail, but they would be ephemeral. From here on, keeping warm would be more of an issue than keeping cool.

  I take my time getting on the trail this morning, knowing that there is a pizza buffet in town six miles down from Mount Greylock and trying to schedule my day accordingly. But the godless people of North Adams have allowed their Pizza Hut to go out of business. I waste more time, making about a mile-and-a-half round trip to eat a consolation lunch at another restaurant and to make phone calls. I get back on the trail at 2:00 p.m., still hoping to do fourteen miles.