Chapter 15. Atlantic to Pacific (Appalachian Beginning)

In January of '73 my son and his step-uncle joined me for a desert trip to Big Bend National Park in Texas. We sped along in the uncle's car; he is a plumber but, as Einstein would have been, miscast in the role. A Grand Prix racer or a stunt man he could have played with zest. We broke for a Carlsbad Cavern tour, then prayerfully resumed. Near the park, long-eared jackrabbits did their dance of death in his headlights. Most lived to encore, praise be, as did we all.

After being cautioned at park headquarters against campfires, we wandered afoot up an intermittent desert creek. But the weather proved false and the uncle's feet blistered, so we came out to be amazed by an unprecedented ice storm in Del Rio, Texas.

Then they returned to duty; I continued to Dallas to job-hunt at a mathematics convention while visiting brothers. The academics didn't want me but one brother spotted a Ph.D. want-ad in a local newspaper, unheard of. I got the job with a computer firm and hung up the boots awhile.

But six months later the business suit had become an encasement, an August sun infernally broiled north Texas, and outside my fourteenth-floor office window hawks wheeled in the blue their semaphore of freedom. I gave notice, awkwardly said goodbye to my brothers and their families when the time came, and took a physician friend and his wife to a last ballgame at Arlington Stadium (Vida Blue pitched for Oakland against the Texas Rangers).

In the bus for Washington, D.C., I mused on the journey before me. It was as if I'd always known I would walk across the continent from Atlantic to Pacific, that the Oregon Trail would finish the journey, and that a decision to use 800 miles of Appalachian Trail (which trends as much west as south) to start it could be capstone only, to a pre-existing arch.

At Rock Creek Park in Washington, in view of a famous pagoda-shaped hotel, a modest bronze plaque notes that the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal which ends here had to have an outlet, a watergate, to return its water to the Potomac. Which named the neighborhood which named the hotel. Sixty miles of the towpath of this old canal would provide a route to the Appalachian Trail at Sandy Hook Bridge. At Watergate then, on September 11th in the company of a fisherman friend, I began a 4,000 mile walk to the Pacific.

The friend, a skinny devil who should live forever, walked me of course into the ground before returning to the bosom of his consulting firm. I don't know with whom I had consulted, to start a long walk with blisters. Trying to ignore them I camped one evening under a thick oak. Not thick enough; when rain began I drew a poncho over me that helped some. The rain increased; as dawn broke slowly, I watched a big puddle above me fill.

When the puddle flooded I grabbed up my things and scrambled for the shelter of a nearby toilet where a pencilled sign claimed, from a previous rain, the world's record for john sitting, thirty-six hours. When it was light, not wanting to challenge that record, I packed up and walked in intermittent heavy showers.

Amidst this misery I noticed a crescent-shaped object in the rain at my feet. I kicked. No resistance, must be vegetable. Peeling a little showed a vague custard that smelled sweet. In that rain, death by poisoning didn't seem so grim. I ate it and a second with pleasure. From a large seed or two saved, someone later identified the fruit as pawpaw, related to the tropical custard-apple.

The rain let up but the blisters didn't, despite or because of pain pills taken to keep going. At Sandy Hook, another of my four brothers met me with his family to picnic. But a look at my wracked face was enough. Back home with them I went for foot soaks and recuperation.

It was nearly October when the walk resumed, slower this time. In clear weather I reached a point above the Shenandoah where it flows into the Potomac. Blue sky above, graceful flotilla of canoes below, rain and blisters forgotten, it was a joy to be walking again.

Past old civil war battlefields over a trail sometimes brushy and obscure, I approached Shenandoah Park where my brother and his family were to meet me with their camper for the weekend. Once in a valley I hiked by a cider press where my canteen was filled with sweet autumn, and on a long ridge down to the meeting point I found the year's last iris, perfect in its sunny nook.

Our Indian-summer camp was tranquil, marred only by the bitter radio news that Nixon had fired his attorney general for refusing to fire the special prosecutor. My brother thought that was it , and perhaps it was the turning point for the nation, too.

Before the family left we inspected one of the Appalachian Trail lean-to shelters. In the dark they found it gloomy, not believing what a wonderful home it becomes by campfire. For music you can bring a harmonica.

Walking on, the next trail shelter was filled with Boy Scouts who occupied even the roof ridge, throwing down firecrackers on saint and sinner alike. I am a mild park-inspector but I evicted them from the roof. Later, rangers told me of the new park policy to prevent abuse by prohibiting the use of shelters to everyone, including the trail hikers for whom they were intended. When asked if they had first tried the moderate tactic of posting signs restricting use to Appalachian Trail hikers (which seems effective elsewhere), their reply was that mountain people carry guns.

Actually, picnickers were encouraged to use the shelters. One group cooling their beer in the spring told me how helpful a ranger had been in providing directions. Those discussing the policy didn't seem even to understand the vital role that shelters play in managing a trail. This is to keep most of the trail wild by encouraging camping at the selected sites only. It is only incidentally to get tired hikers in out of the rain.

Shenandoah National Park is one of the most beautiful trail sections, abounding in game and wooded serenity, proving that once-farmed land can revert nearly to pristine nature. But I was saddened by a custodianship that seemed to treat Appalachian Trail hikers as intruders.

At the next Shenandoah shelter I met Paris Walters of New Ark, Pennsylvania. Mr. Walters, in his seventies, loved to hike Shenandoah in the fall. But this time after a few too many with old friends in a tavern, he had slipped and hurt himself walking the entry trail. I helped him up the hill to a lodge where he could telephone his wife.

He said he had invited up this same hill for breakfast the fabulous Grandma Gatewood (who walked the Appalachian Trail three times altogether after raising eleven children in Ohio). It was the first I'd heard of the trail's history, and I listened spellbound.

Another time he met her she had walked from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to see the flowers (azaleas) on Roan Mountain. He asked her what part of the trail she liked best? "Going downhill, sonny", was the answer that got in the papers and tickled Mr. Walters, who was sixty then. Emma Gatewood died the year of my walk. Farther south when I stacked tobacco awhile with a lady planter who had once sheltered Mrs. Gatewood and received a postcard every Christmas, I had to tell her there'd be no more postcards.

Mr. Walters himself had walked the whole trail, reaching the last sections by chartered plane in order to finish soon enough for his account to appear in a memorial volume on the Appalachian Trail. But the cutoff year was changed, which left him out. I urged him to publish his chapter anyway, especially the part about sharing a lean-to with a murderer. The eyes now, that saw what can't be seen, could I have looked into the eyes of that worn man already in his own hell and no longer a danger to others?

Before Roanoke my brother joined me on a weekend for the last time. We were surprised both by how soon with steady plodding a walker can get out of car range, and by how much of the Appalachian Trail lies in Virginia (about five hundred miles, or one quarter of the total.)

A cold snap came, which had me shivering some. One of those nights I stayed in a lodge made of unfamiliar wood. The lodge-keeper said it was chestnut, now rare because blight had stricken the once extensive forests that yielded valuable nuts, timber to split easy and true, and tannin for the leather industry. I learned of intensive research carried on by laboratories to defeat the blight; but more touching, it seems that the forest itself is still striving.

In fact, the old or cut down chestnut tree sends out shoots or suckers which reach a certain size and may even produce a few nuts before blight gets them too. Thus, with so many chances, the chestnut forest may itself evolve a strain resistant to blight, then slowly spread to regain its once proud place in the web of life.

The trail passed over an abandoned farm with black walnut trees; I gathered many, furiously working by firelight to get them hulled before they froze. Adding some odd hickory nuts that seemed halfway in size and shape between pecan and hickory, I sent the heavy box to my sister in Asheville, North Carolina (they'd moved from Florida). I meant to visit at Thanksgiving if close enough by then.

At Pearisburg I stayed with a wonderful old lady who mothered hikers as well as boarding them, Miss Mary good-naturedly complained about her local competitor, the priest who would take us in for the ridiculous price of nothing, and showed me pictures of herself as a winsome young lady who could have married, if she'd had a mind to.

There were few hikers now, but after Pearisburg on the mountain called Angel's Rest I met another. In fog and mist we got to talking of outdoor gear; he mentioned a friend who had an excellent Scottish sleeping bag with only two faults: no zipper, and too warm. Now I hate zippers (they jam, even the best ones, and are quite unnecessary since a sleeping bag is even easier to slip in and out of than a sweater), and winter was coming on.

The price was right too, only fifty dollars, but the bag was in North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We arranged that a third party coming to the mountains would leave it at Elk Park where I would skip to from Marion, Virginia, this being the section I'd already walked in '68. Through so many hands I didn't really expect it to be there but it was, a cozy warm bag for the approaching winter. I sent the fifty dollars, feeling blessed by the trust and caring of their getting it to me.

The trail now led through high border lands between North Carolina and Tennessee. It is generally well marked with white paint-blazes on dark tree trunks. But on the bald mountains of mysterious origin (they may be above or below normal timberline; one theory is that the Indians kept them burned off to encourage deer and elk), the rock cairns used to mark the route are sometimes hidden by grass. Then the path may be obscure.

On one of these balds it rained, and threatened more. I managed not to get lost, but had a strange camp just off the bald in a little patch of timber. The best place I could find to rig my tarp, a big poncho that fitted over the pack by day and–stretched out–served as shelter at night, was deep under a large birch whose exposed roots spread down around me like spider legs. It was snug enough but all night the tree and roots with my roof swayed, swayed in the wind. At first I couldn't sleep, but tiredness took over; then my ship sailed into the night's far reaches.

In late November I started down for Wolf Mountain lodge in off—and—on showers. A half mile away it was on again but I was nearly there; why put back on a poncho for that? One soggy mistake later, knocking on their door, I was kindly offered a dry bed and a line for hanging gear. Next morning the lodge truck was going anyway by a bus station: treat of wheels for footer, and turkey feast thank you with kin.

I couldn't rest long; the Smokies were due for snow. Walking again, I remember a high bridge over the Big Pigeon, but the French Broad has left me (with but reverence for the Colonial namer; there is a English Broad too, and surely somewhere a Finnish Deep). If naming rivers is so much fun, how'd it be to have Adam's job naming everything? Gnu is the top, you could sign your checks: the right honorable Gnostic Gnu.

Then, last settlement before the Smokies, came a country store run by sometime tobacco farmers Jessie and Ruby Groom. (They hated store confinement and later gave it up for the farm after one lease.) I bought noodles and such for a week over the Big Smokies. After watching him skin a squirrel without getting a single hair on the meat, we bargained fiercely for a week's supply of frozen coon and squirrel; his price was a dollar and I knew he should have at least two.

Before closing time neighbor kids collected, giving Jessie odd looks and half-smiles.

Then he did, and what Jessie did, I saw it myself but still don't believe it, was eat razorblades. No, he didn't chew them up, only swallowed them. A country store, between Royal Crown Colas, is no place for necromancy. I don't remember how many. That's like asking a talking dog if he knows any French.

Next morning early, Mr. Groom cut me a dogwood walking stick; I threw away the buckeye cut by mistake. He said buckeye was only wood in the forest good for nothing, rot in a month. But dogwood, that blooms just after redbud, is strong and dependable.

At a ranger station I was assigned lean-tos for specific dates, largely a formality in December. I don't recommend the high winter Smokies unless you also like dark caves. Not that the sun was missing but precious the sight of it and cheerful an evening fire. The wild meat went well in mulligans, although the coon took a while to cook.

Heavy wire doors fronting the lean-tos impressed bear danger on me, but I saw none. Later I heard that the park rangers had lured great numbers of them out of the park during hunting season to be shot. There had been instances of bears chewing on hikers who had died of exposure; it was feared that they might attack humans if not thinned and kept afraid. Actually I was more afraid of wild boars; I didn't see them either, but where they rooted up the snowy hillside looked like wilderness plowing.

On the highway that splits the park the usual tourists left their warm carapaces for a shriek in the snow, quite unaware of dark in the pines and coon for supper. Ice crusted the path up Clingman's Dome Lookout, with not much to be seen on an overcast day that threatened more snow. But it wasn't deep yet; only on one stretch after Russell Meadow could I have gotten lost. I was glad a winter hiking group had kicked steps there, and sorry that the usual white tree-blazes are missing in Smokies National Park.

On one high ridge at noon, luckily near a shelter, I was treated to a violent hailstorm. The stones boomed like cannibals on the corrugated iron roof; I cringed, thinking what they could do to my tarp. But I'd have been under a tree, haven of outdoorsmen. I remembered a time in Colorado when I had raced a storm down to timberline to crouch behind a tree trunk while the wind drove cannibals into drifts on each side of me.

Now I climbed down and up and down again toward Fontana Lake, which gives the southern Smokies a water boundary. Snow fell the last day, and the weather turned very cold; luckily the lean-to was undrifted, dry. That night I put two sticks of butter in the mulligan and wore all my dry clothes to bed. Next day I reached Fontana Dam to learn their temperature had dropped to ten degrees.

In Fontana Village I had the best hamburger of the whole trip, and rested a full day in their lodge. In a way I was finished for the year, as far west as I could get on the Appalachian Trail. But the eastward jog that the trail took next was the only part south of Maryland left unwalked; I decided to try to complete it, despite winter, before my Christmas break.

It was easy enough at first, more fog and mist than snow. Then threatened a storm big enough to worry about. At a notch accessible to car, a passing deputy sheriff offered to bring me back if I'd go with him to Robbinsville for shelter. I did, paying my respects that evening to the grave of Junalaska (the Cherokee chief who saved Andrew Jackson's life at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend).

For this last Stekoah section (it or Mahoosuc Notch in Maine is said to be the steepest and roughest part of all the trail), I promised the sheriff's office to telephone when safe on the other side. They took me back, and I started in deep snow. I met bow hunters a short way in who couldn't believe I'd try to get through that stuff. I hardly believed it myself but meant to push a bit farther before quitting.

Mercifully it thinned; the steepest places had but little snow, the new storm having apparently blown over them. Somewhere I camped and next day trudged happily to the connecting point at Wesser Creek, called the sheriff as promised, and took a roundabout bus to Tennessee for a rest with my other, Christmas sister.

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