Chapter 19. Northern Appalachian Trail

After a rest, still brooding about retracing the Marco Polo route, I left China Lake for a trip across the Great Basin high desert to Idaho. Great Basin in spring would be cold, like the Gobi in Asia. This trip would be short, with rides accepted when offered, since the Idahoans were expecting me by Easter.

North on the highway I walked long enough to get tired before a car of kids gave a lift. One of them offered gum and asked if Vegas was fun. I dozed until I heard the driver yell, "They're behind!"; then the car roared as he punched the pedal. No use, "they" blocked us in a minute; and the pavement filled with a squadron of blue. As our hands went up, a kid said, "The hitchhiker wasn't with us", but that made no nevermind to the police who cuffed us all cruelly tight. Into a cell then, this time not as a guest, until they could check that indeed I wasn't of a feather.

Do you know that in jail one begins to feel like a criminal even if he's done nothing? Confirmation didn't really take long, two or three hours. On being released, I didn't ask for a night's lodging.

As I left, the police gave a Kafka-esque piece of paper to prove I'd never been arrested. Better, my pack and walking stick were returned. I feared the latter might end up in some grim gallery of confiscated lethalities. At this safe distance I recommend a few hours in jail to all solid citizens, as providing a journey into differentness that can't be achieved by imagination alone.

A spring snow came to high Bridgeport before the pass into Nevada. On a white street at midnight I posted the letter to Peking asking for permission to retrace Marco Polo's silk road across China. It felt like a good decision.

In Nevada from a half frozen brook I had watercress, surprised at its hardiness. When the wind blew it was wintry indeed on the high desert; I could believe the arctic nature of Gobi winters. It was good to quit walking and take the bus from Winnemucca in order to reach Boise by Easter. I carried a lily.

There was of course a dinner for the wilderness equipment makers who'd furnished the house on my back; with the lawyer and his wife I typed a collection of poems while waiting to hear from the Chinese. We read White's The Once and Future King and fed bread to the ducks on their favorite pond.

Then I rented a room, read more books, and watched the ginkgos leaf out on capitol grounds. Is it too obvious for an oriental tree to have delicate fan-shaped leaves? Thought extinct, this fossil after rediscovery in remote China has been replanted in city square and private yard by tree lovers determined that it not be lost again.

The equipment makers' logo had a lightning stroke, KAZAK. It was the name of their malamute. If you went to see them at, say, midnight, you were in for an unusual treat. This was their hour of cake and whimsy. He'd start with an innocent mix, then add chocolate chips and pecans, and reasons and citron, and chocolate chips and walnuts, and perhaps pomegranate.

This was a cake that couldn't fall; it was already there. Spank the hero into an oven then, and talk with the aroma around your sentences. Out was no anticlimax; cool it just enough not to burn your tongue and before the chocolatl has forgotten ins molten state.

Once I went cakeless long enough for a hike along the spectacular Middle Fork of the Salmon, where I nearly lost the black-oak staff. At Jack's Creek the river was deep over the trail. Trying to go around I managed some mossy cliffs with difficulty before accepting defeat higher up. On return however, the cliffs were slippery-wet from a shower.

At one very bad place, needing both hands, I tried to throw the stick clear but missed, and saw it vanish down raging Jack's Creek. I concentrated on saving myself. I got down, after sweating blood, and as I gratefully laid my pack on the trail, there out in the white water retrievably wedged against a rock was old friend black-oak!

Back in Boise there was still no return letter from Peking. Late summer now, I gave up on the inscrutable Chinese and took a bus for Maine to have a fall hike finishing the Appalachian Trail.

To Mount Bigelow I headed, where once the fall snows had chased me off the trail, Kingfield and Carrabasset the closest towns. I said hello in the Red Ram Inn, my welcome that stormy night; then, after buying supplies at the nearby store, I light-footed into the kingdom of silvery birch.

At the first lean-to I looked for the cookpot that had been left hanging up as a parting present, not realizing then that the best gift for next-comers is a clean shelter. Someone had wisely removed it for me. On the way to Horn Ponds I met two young hikers with satisfied expressions. They'd gotten and roasted a spruce grouse, called fool hen, which sometimes obligingly looks you over till you can knock it over.

At the twin lean-tos I teased other youngsters about the straight up and down trails in Maine, compared to switchbacked trails in the West. "We don't pussyfoot around in Maine", was the answer. The Appalachian Trail in this state does have a remote wildness, its people a frontier directness that seems more akin to Idaho than to the populous East. There is stark poverty in Maine, also. It is Washington County, where blueberries are picked, that has the lowest per capita income in the U.S., not some black county in Mississippi.

In Stratton I resupplied, making use of that excellent Maine custom of having postal vans double as rural busses to save ten miles walking on pavement. Back on trail the friendly advice from other hikers was, "Avoid Crocker Cirque relocation, it's a bummer", which suited me fine since then the old Sugarloaf Mountain shelter could be used.

On Sugarloaf's summit a couple inquired after their friend Ernie, who was setting a new trail record for oldest man—eighty-six—to complete the entire route from Georgia to Maine. I hadn't seen him but was glad to hear of him again (we'd met in California before I went to Death Valley).

At another lean-to I met a gaunt Marine with terminal illness who was spending his precious time walking the trail. It seemed he was going too fast and hurting himself, but he said the only symptoms were headaches, for which he had medicine.

At the next shelter a cheerful man announced that his two hiking buddies had quit him, making a surplus of groceries that required help in consuming. With the Scouts he'd learned cooking, their long suit, and he proceeded to offer blueberry muffins and eggs coddled in orange peel like a chef at the Waldorf-Astoria. I imagined one could see the Marine filling out, as I also trenched myself nobly.

On Old Speck it stormed; at the crowded shelter two old-timers were expertly dousing wood with gasoline to get a fire going. I helped them under the tarp but there wasn't enough oil in Arabia to light that wood. We got a fire finally only by my carving a thick limb down to dry shavings. As I ate my mulligan they were tossing steaks onto the coals. I learned another thing at this lean-to: when a dog comes in out of the rain he gives a great shake, showering best friend and worst enemy alike.

At the end of Maine is a mile-long jumble of boulders called Mahoosuc Notch. I tunnelled through and scrambled over them, grateful that the rain was past and that they had dried. I lost the oak stick down a deep hole, but wriggled down to retrieve it. If the Salmon River couldn't have it, neither could Maine!

In New Hampshire I resupplied at Gorham. On trail again there were many pilgrims among the colored leaves. We watched the year's sunset as it poised on branches against the sky, as it cascaded its dancers down, as it piled in abandon before us. It makes you run; your feet have to swim in the brilliant river.

My work of the week was to get over the White Mountains' Presidential Ridge without a storm. Mount Washington has the world's highest recorded wind velocity, 230 m.p.h., and many shorts-clad tourists have fatally ignored the signs that warn:

I began with a detour up through the Great Gulf Wilderness to use one of its free lean-tos. The shelter was crowded with hikers who hadn't reserved a place, but they found room for one who had.

Next day, steeply climbing to Madison Hut, first of several high lodges reachable only by foot, I marveled at the hut-boys who carry one to two hundred pound loads of supplies up the same grades. Then the great ridge went well, the weather holding until Washington itself which was in storm. I hurried down from the summit to Lake of the Clouds Hut, gladly accepting shelter there. At first they said they couldn't feed me, then found plenty of leftovers.

In the morning, rain and wind; but since it was mostly downhill to get out, I started. Bad! However, I didn't get lost. Soaked even under a poncho I paid an exorbitant sum in the valley below to sleep at an inn where once President Harding had laid his head. A manger would have been as dry but none were to be found.

Back on the trail there was sunshine, then more rain. I began to meet many tired end-to-enders up the long way from Georgia. Mount Guyot Lean-to was crowded but they made me welcome, the resident ranger asking me to cook supper in her tent on a stove rather than search for wood. Farther on I resupplied at the nearby town of North Woodstock, after having a haircut by a barber who told how he'd walked across eastern Europe escaping the Germans.

Mount Moosilauke had long views, its shelter miserable but dry. Now in the trail registers there began to appear exuberant entries: Thayer Hall or bust; eat at Thayer and live! At Dartmouth College in Hanover, Thayer lived up to its reputation; the meals were banquets.

Shelter was a different story, no hostel and inns very expensive, reducing the hiker to begging door to door among fraternity houses. I was lucky; students met on the trail had me invited into a guest suite at one of their dormitories. From lean-to to luxury, thanks to their noblesse .

Before crossing the Connecticut River into Vermont I rode in a postal truck to Enfield Center to visit Bert and Jill Gilbert, hikers who had met and married on the Appalachian Trail, while he was completing a third and she a first complete walk from Georgia to Maine. The mountain dulcimer he had crafted for her; they heartily recommended Limmer boots (made in nearby Intervale) for me, and asked eager questions about the Pacific Crest Trail. He lent me precious maps of the Appalachian Trail ahead (I resist guidebook prose, and it's hard to buy maps separately).

Across the Connecticut the Trail runs west until it merges with Vermont's famous Long Trail, north-south from the Canadian border to Massachusetts. The Long Trail is well supplied with shelters; at Pico Camp I relived in dream an incident in California that had infuriated me, made me see red. I got so mad again in the dream that I woke up—to the most beautiful of crimson sunrises. Not realizing before that the subconscious could so excellently pun, I gained real respect for this stranger who shares my head.

Near Killington came a ski lodge that offered the hiker a bunk, bath, and all the breakfast he could eat for $4.50. In the morning after doing my best, I learned the trail record for number of pancakes put away was held by a wisp of a girl. Climbing steep hills does create prodigious appetites.

At Manchester Center I took a full rest day, seeing Luis Buñuel's Dreams of Liberty that evening in their filmhouse. Regaining the trail by a wilderness path I saw a porcupine hung upside down on a limb, like a sloth. Did he dream of liberty?

Before Mount Greylock in Massachusetts there was a recently built lean-to with welcome wooden floor (the few shelters in this state were usually poor affairs; to see their dirt floors crowded with hikers peering out red-eyed from a smoky fire was to gain a new definition of shanty Irish). At the summit was a grand lodge for the motorized rich where I was content to warm my hands by the fire, since a cold rain had begun to fall outside.

In Dalton I stayed with the Woods of South Street. Many townspeople contrive not to notice a hiker; their eyes seek cover like startled deer. But this family greets the passing backpacker, "Are you thirsty? Come in and rest awhile!" And the especially tired one is offered a bunk for the night on their porch.

They told of a girl months ahead who had stayed with them in the rain, that her trail mainstay was very nutritious bread specially baked and mailed by her mother. Here was Loaf-Nancy's entry in the porch notebook, full of wonder that in the wide, wet world she had found such warmth. Will at some other far lean-to now she be untying the wrapper, to break her bread for supper?

After a hostel at Jug End (the name is our hilarious adaptation of the German die Jugend , for youth or youth camp), I walked in rain to the Connecticut line, then on to Salisbury where I declined expensive lodging in favor of the guest house in a nearby community. These guest houses, often just a room or two rented out by elderly ladies to stretch their income, are a boon to hikers. At four or five dollars a night, sometimes with a big breakfast thrown in, we get a welcome rest from rain and camping.

Then came several good lean-to shelters through Connecticut before Kent, where I got mail and resupplied, staying in an unusually expensive but elegant guest house.

Close to a road in New York I heard enough shots for a gang war. After yelling my neutrality and getting neither answer nor ceasefire, I fled from civilization back into the jungle. As the trail nears Hudson River there is a hospitable monastery that I passed up, having heard from other hikers that it might have a depressing number of drunks getting straightened out. From Bear Mountain Bridge, no toll then, one climbs in Harriman Park a peak that offers a distant view of New York City, its turrets shining in the East.

Over in New Jersey, not noted for wildness, I saw more deer than on any other part of the Appalachian Trail. It rained hard; since there were about thirty Boy Scouts ahead of me for the next lean-to, I left the trail to seek a barn. An Indian on the porch of his home and curio shop offered a couch instead. He told of an eagle dream he'd had before a big gathering and cookout, and how when the people had come together, on that day the eagle actually was seen, close to their camp.

At the boundary with Pennsylvania is Delaware Water Gap, where a river has apparently performed the remarkable feat of cutting a pass through hills. The geological Sherlocks tell us, however, that it is quite elementary: the Delaware River was there first and just kept pace, eroding out its bed as the land gradually rose. The nearby town is friendly to hikers, with cheery words for all and a health food store to boot. But I was glad Pennsylvania and Maryland were all I had left to walk; the November wind was brisk on my legs.

Our minds crave pattern, and create antipodes. What river whistles through all the other passes from Maine to Georgia? Wind Gap, Pennsylvania, is twenty-five miles south; it has lodging but the groceries are a mile and a half down.

Nearing Port Clinton, thinking about its hotel and the grand old man who'd recommended it in the Shenandoah as he told me stories of Grandma Gatewood, I met an elder and lad hiking up the trail. "You look a lot like Paris Walters?" It was, he didn't know me (I'd shaved the beard off since); we had a good talk and in parting he gave me some of his prized treat, roasted macadamias.

While in the pleasant hotel, two other hikers asked me to visit when near Harrisburg. A few days later at trailhead there was a note repeating the invitation. Swallows and pigeons swirled about the Susquehanna Bridge as I walked over to call them. It was a welcome break, good rest in good company.

They took me to Hershey, Pennsylvania to see the chocolate works, and orphan boys' home. I saw no elves mixing and stifled myself from asking if Willy Wonka was on the board of directors. If a walker saved his pennies to buy a chocolate share, would then every munch be a double profit?

The orphanage has somber paintings of boys who made good because of Mr. Hershey's kindness. It breathes the air of a lost age, when missionaries saved Hawaii and girls were never orphaned. (Once I marveled to my sister that this firm was the best and had no advertising. She said Mr. Hershey needed no commercials since he gave so much to the church. Now his company shouts too; I'm sorry the divine relationship was interrupted.)

Back on the trail, Thanksgiving approached. I bought cake from a little store, and made my feast of it in the St. Anthony Wilderness. Now I never saw other hikers, only a few hunters to find me if I got hurt. Very alert, they always saw me first; I hadn't the least fear of being shot. Some of them asked me to sign a petition pleading for Pennsylvania's governor to help save a stretch of Appalachian Trail from urban development. They need it as much as we do, since there are few wild places left in which to stalk.

In Maryland there came an ice storm, the trees in pale crisis. When sun and wind relieved them, my path filled with chips—like hiking in a refrigerator. Then some hill was last and the trail reached Sandy Hook Bridge over the Potomac, where I had joined it the fall I came out from Washington along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath. This completed my first hike of the Appalachian Trail. It was mid-December of 1975.

At nearby Harper's Ferry is the Trail Conference headquarters; I met their officers and one of them offered a lift to Washington, D.C. where I visited a friend from the trail. This merry white-beard had filled our rainbound lean-to with Irish song. I met his Italian wife, and asked her to make him do Killarney again.

While in the city I toured the Smithsonian with its great stone of native copper, worn smooth by the worship of Indians and touch of countless tourists. I like to think that we off duty Christians were continuing the worship.

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