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Amazingly, given the moose’s lack of cu
Stealthily, so as not to alarm it, I crept off to get Katz. When we returned, the moose had advanced to the water and was drinking about twenty-five feet upstream. “Wow,” Katz breathed. He was thrilled, too, I was pleased to note. The moose looked up at us, decided we meant her no harm, and went back to drinking. We watched her for perhaps five minutes, but the mosquitoes were chewing us up, so we withdrew and returned to our camp feeling considerably elated. It seemed a confirmation-we were in the wilderness now-and a gratifying, totally commensurate reward for a day of hard toil.
We ate a di
I grunted in agreement.
“I’d forgotten how hard it is.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“First days are always hard, though, aren’t they?”
“Yeah.”
He gave a settling-down sigh and yawned melodiously. “It’ll be better tomorrow,” he said, still yawning. By this he meant, I supposed, that he wouldn’t fling anything foolish away. “Well, good night,” he added.
I stared in surprise at the wall of my tent in the direction from which his voice had come. In all the weeks of camping together, it was the first time he had wished me a good night.
“Good night,” I said.
I rolled over on my side. He was right, of course. First days are always bad. Tomorrow would be better. We were both asleep in minutes.
Well, we were both wrong. The next day started well enough, with a su
Katz led the way, barefoot and in boxer shorts, using a long stick like a punting pole to try to pick his way across on a jumble of submerged or half submerged logs. I followed in a similar ma
“You all right?” I said.
“Oh, peachy,” he replied. “Just peachy. I don’t know why they couldn’t have put some crocodiles in here and made a real adventure of it.”
I crept on, and an instant later I tumbled in, too. I had a few surreal, slow-motion moments of observing the world from the unusual perspective of waterline or just below while my hand reached helplessly for a log that was just beyond my grasp-all this in a curious bubbly silence-before Katz sloshed to my assistance, firmly grabbed my shirt, and thrust me back into a world of light and noise and set me on my feet. He was surprisingly strong.
“Thank you,” I gasped.
“Don’t mention it.”
We waded heavily to the far shore, taking it in turns to stumble and help each other up, and sloshed up on to the muddy bank trailing strands of half-rotted vegetation and draining huge volumes of water from our packs. We dumped our loads and sat on the ground, bedraggled and spent, and stared at the lagoon as if it had just played a terrible practical joke on us. I could not remember feeling this tired this early in the day anywhere along the trail. As we sat there, we heard voices, and two young hikers, hippieish and very fit, emerged from the woods behind us. They nodded hellos and looked appraisingly at the water.
“Afraid you gotta wade this one,” Katz said.
One of the hikers looked at him in a not unkindly way. “This your first time hiking up here?” he said.
We nodded.
“Well, I don’t want to discourage you, but mister you’ve only just started to get wet.”
With that he and his partner hoisted their packs above their heads, wished us luck, and walked into the water. They waded skillfully across in perhaps thirty seconds-Katz and I had taken as many minutes-and stepped out on the other side, as if from a root bath, put their dry packs back on, gave a small wave, and disappeared.
Katz took a big thoughtful breath-partly sigh, partly just experimenting with the ability to breathe again. “Bryson, I’m not trying to be negative-I swear to God I’m not-but I’m not sure I’m cut out for this. Could you lift your pack over your head like that?”
“No.”
And on that premonitory note, we strapped up and set squelchily off up Moxie Bald Mountain.
The Appalachian Trail is the hardest thing I have ever done, and the Maine portion was the hardest part of the Appalachian Trail, and by a factor I couldn’t begin to compute. Partly it was the heat. Maine, that most moderate of states, was having a killer heat wave. In the blistering sun, the shadeless granite pavements of Moxie Bald radiated an ovenlike heat, but even in the woods the air was oppressive and close, as if the trees and foliage were breathing on us with a hot, vegetative breath. We sweated helplessly, copiously, and drank unusual quantities of water, but could never stop being thirsty. Water was sometimes plentiful but more often nonexistent for long stretches so that we were never sure how much we could prudently swallow without leaving ourselves short later on. Even fully stocked, we were short now thanks to Katz’s dumping a bottle. Finally, there were the relentless insects, the unsettling sense of isolation, and the ever-taxing terrain.