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Katz responded to this in a way that I had never seen from him. He showed a kind of fixated resolve, as if the only way to deal with this problem was to bull through it and get it over with.
The next morning we came very early to the first of several rivers we would have to ford. It was called Bald Mountain Stream, but in fact it was a river-broad, lively, strewn with boulders. It was exceedingly fetching-it glittered with dancing spangles in the early morning sun and was gorgeously clear-but the current seemed strong and there was no telling from the shore how deep it might be in the middle. Several large streams in the area, my Appalachian Trail Guide to Maine noted blithely, “can be difficult or dangerous to cross in high water.” I decided not to share this with Katz.
We took off our shoes and socks, rolled up our pants, and stepped gingerly out into the frigid water. The stones on the bottom were all shapes and sizes-flat, egg-shaped, domed-very hard on the feet, and covered with a filmy green slime that was ludicrously slippery. I hadn’t gone three steps when my feet skated and I fell painfully on my ass. I struggled halfway to my feet but slipped and fell again; struggled up, staggered sideways a yard or two, and pitched helplessly forward, breaking my fall with my hands and ending up in the water doggie style. As I landed, my pack slid forward and my boots, tied to its frame by their laces, were hurled into a kind of contained orbit; they came around the side of the pack in a long, rather pretty trajectory, and came to a halt against my head, then plunked into the water, where they dangled in the current. As I crouched there, breathing evenly and telling myself that one day this would be a memory, two young guys-clones almost of the two we had seen the day before-strode past with confident, splashing steps, packs above their heads.
“Fall down?” said one brightly.
“No, I just wanted a closer look at the water.” You moronic fit twit.
I went back to the riverbank, pulled on my soaked boots, and discovered that it was infinitely easier crossing with them on. I got a tolerable grip and the rocks didn’t hurt as they had on my bare feet. I crossed cautiously, alarmed at the force of the current in the center-each time I lifted a leg the current tried to reposition it downstream, as if it belonged to a gateleg table-but the water was never more than about three feet deep, and I reached the other side without falling.
Katz, meantime, had discovered a way across using boulders as stepping stones but ended up stranded on the edge of a noisy torrent of what looked like deep water. He stood there covered with frowns. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how he had gotten up there-his boulder seemed isolated in an expanse of dangerously streaming water from all sides, and clearly he didn’t Know what to do now. He tried to ease himself into the silvery current and wade the last ten yards to shore but was instantly whisked away like a feather. For the second time in two days I sincerely thought he was drowning-he was certainly helpless-but the current carried him to a shallow bar of gleaming pebble twenty feet farther on, where he came up sputtering on his hands and knees, struggled up on to the bank, and continued on into the woods without a backward glance, as if this were the most normal thing in the world.
And so we pressed on to Monson, over hard trail and more rivers, collecting bruises and scratches and insect bites that turned our backs into relief maps. On the third day, forest-dazed and grubby, we stepped on to a su
Shaw’s is the most famous guesthouse on the AT, partly because it’s the last comfort stop for anyone going into the Hundred Mile Wilderness and the first for anyone coming out, but also because it’s very friendly and a good deal. For $28 each we got a room, di
We had an hour till di
After a minute, Keith came out and sat with me. He was an old guy, comfortably into his sixties, with almost no teeth and a body that looked as if it had put up with all kinds of tough stuff in its day. He was real friendly.
“You didn’t try to pet the dog, did ya?” he said.
“No.” I had seen it out the window: an ugly, vicious mongrel that was tied up out back and got stupidly and disproportionately worked up by any noise or movement within a hundred yards.
“You don’t wa
“Really?”
He nodded. “Wouldn’t let go neither. You shoulda heard that feller wail.”
“Really?”
“Had to hit the damn dog with a rake to get him to let go. Meanest damn dog I ever seen in my life. You don’t wa
“How was the hiker?”
“Well, it didn’t exactly make his day, I tell you that.” He scratched his neck contemplatively, as if he were thinking of having a shave one of these days. “Thru-hiker, he was. Come all the way from Georgia. Long way to come to get your balls nipped.” Then he went off to check on di
Di
“You all right?” I said.
“Never been better, my old mountain companion, never been better.”
We were joined by two others, a sweetly hesitant and wholesome-looking young couple, both ta
The food was terrific. Keith acted as waiter and was most insistent that we eat plenty. “Dog’ll eat it if you don’t,” he said. I was happy to let the dog starve.
The young couple were thru-hikers, from Indiana. They had started at Springer on the 28th of March-a date that seemed impossibly snow-flecked and distant now in the full heat of an August evening-and had hiked continuously for 141 days. They had completed 2,045.5 miles. They had 114.9 miles to go.
“So you’ve nearly done it, huh?” I said, a trifle inanely but just trying to make conversation.
“Yes,” said the girl. She said it slowly, as two syllables, as if it hadn’t previously occurred to her. There was something serenely mindless in her ma
“Did you ever feel like giving up?”
The girl thought for a moment. “No,” she said simply.