A sign announced that this was no ordinary footpath but the celebratedAppalachian Trail. Running more than 2,100 miles along America's easternseaboard, through the serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT isthe granddaddy of long hikes. From Georgia to Maine, it wanders acrossfourteen states, through plump, comely hills whose very names—Blue Ridge,Smokies, Cumberlands, Green Mountains, White Mountains—seem aninvitation to amble. Who could say the words "Great Smoky Mountains" or"Shenandoah Valley" and not feel an urge, as the naturalist John Muir once putit, to "throw a loaf of bread and a pound of tea in an old sack and jump over theback fence"?
And here it was, quite unexpectedly, meandering in a dangerously beguilingfashion through the pleasant New England community in which I had justsettled. It seemed such an extraordinary notion—that I could set off from homeand walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn the other way andclamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to the fabled prow of MountKatahdin, floating in forest 450 miles to the north in a wilderness few have seen.A little voice in my head said: "Sounds neat! Let's do it!"
I formed a number of rationalizations. It would get me fit after years ofwaddlesome sloth. It would be an interesting and reflective way to reacquaintmyself with the scale and beauty of my native land after nearly twenty years ofliving abroad. It would be useful (I wasn't quite sure in what way, but I was surenonetheless) to learn to fend for myself in the wilderness. When guys incamouflage pants and hunting hats sat around in the Four Aces Diner talkingabout fearsome things done out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel likesuch a cupcake. I wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able togaze at a far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manlysniff, "Yeah, I've shit in the woods."
And there was a more compelling reason to go. The Appalachians are thehome of one of the world's great hardwood forests—the expansive relic of therichest, most diversified sweep of woodland ever to grace the temperate world—and that forest is in trouble. If he global temperature rises by 4°C over the nextfifty years, as is evidently possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England could become savanna. Already trees are dying infrightening numbers. The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately hemlocksand flowery dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountainashes, and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a timeto experience this singular wilderness, it was now.
So I decided to do it. More rashly, I announced my intention—told friendsand neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common knowledgeamong those who knew me. Then I bought some books and talked to people whohad done the trail in whole or in part and came gradually to realize that this wasway beyond—way beyond—anything I had attempted before.
Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story involving a guilelessacquaintance who had gone off hiking the trail with high hopes and new bootsand come stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached to his head ordripping blood from an armless sleeve and whispering in a hoarse voice,"Bear!"before sinking into a troubled unconsciousness.
The woods were full of peril—rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nestsof copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbilliesdestabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations ofprofoundly unbiblical sex; rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels;merciless fire ants and ravening blackfly; poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak,and poison salamanders; even a scattering of moose lethally deranged by aparasitic worm that burrows a nest in their brains and befuddles them intochasing hapless hikers through remote, sunny meadows and into glacial lakes.
Literally unimaginable things could happen to you out there. I heard of aman who had stepped from his tent for a midnight pee and was swooped upon bya short-sighted hoot owl—the last he saw of his scalp it was dangling fromtalons prettily silhouetted against a harvest moon—and of a young woman whowas woken by a tickle across her belly and peered into her sleeping bag to find acopperhead bunking down in the warmth between her legs. I heard four separatestories (always related with a chuckle) of campers and bears sharing tents for afew confused and lively moments; stories of people abruptly vaporized("tweren't nothing left of him but a scorch mark") by body-sized bolts oflightning when caught in sudden storms on high ridgelines; of tents crushedbeneath falling trees, or eased off precipices on ballbearings of beaded rain andsent paragliding on to distant valley floors, or swept away by the watery wall ofa flash flood; of hikers beyond counting whose last experience was of tremblingearth and the befuddled thought "Now what the——?"
It required only a little light reading in adventure books and almost no
imagination to envision circumstances in which I would find myself caught in atightening circle of hunger-emboldened wolves, staggering and shreddingclothes under an onslaught of pincered fire ants, or dumbly transfixed by thesight of enlivened undergrowth advancing towards me, like a torpedo throughwater, before being bowled backwards by a sofa-sized boar with cold beadyeyes, a piercing squeal, and a slaverous, chomping appetite for pink, plump, citysoftened flesh.
Then there were all the diseases one is vulnerable to in the woods—giardiasis, eastern equine encephalitis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lymedisease, ehrlichiosis, schistosomiasis, brucellosis, and shigellosis, to offer but asampling. Eastern equine encephalitis, caused by the prick of a mosquito, attacksthe brain and central nervous system. If you're lucky you can hope to spend therest of your life propped in a chair with a bib around your neck, but generally itwill kill you. There is no known cure. No less arresting is Lyme disease, whichcomes from the bite of a tiny deer tick. If undetected, it can lie dormant in thehuman body for years before erupting in a positive fiesta of maladies. This is adisease for the person who wants to experience it all. The symptoms include, butare not limited to, headaches, fatigue, fever, chills, shortness of breath, dizziness,shooting pains in the extremities, cardiac irregularities, facial paralysis, musclespasms, severe mental impairment, loss of control of body functions, and—hardly surprising, really—chronic depression.
Then there is the little-known family of organisms called hantaviruses,which swarm in the micro-haze above the feces of mice and rats and arehoovered into the human respiratory system by anyone unlucky enough to stick abreathing orifice near them—by lying down, say, on a sleeping platform overwhich infected mice have recently scampered. In 1993 a single outbreak ofhantavirus killed thirty-two people in the southwestern United States, and thefollowing year the disease claimed its first victim on the AT when a hikercontracted it after sleeping in a "rodent-infested shelter." (All AT shelters arerodent infested.) Among viruses, only rabies, ebola, and HIV are more certainlylethal. Again, there is no treatment.
Finally, this being America, there is the constant possibility of murder. Atleast nine hikers (the actual number depends on which source you consult andhow you define a hiker) have been murdered along the trail since 1974. Twoyoung women would die while I was out there.
For various practical reasons, principally to do with the long, punishingwinters of northern New England, there are only so many available months tohike the trail each year. If you start at the northern end, at Mount Katahdin inMaine, you must wait for the snows to clear in late May or June. If, on the otherhand, you start in Georgia and head north, you must time it to finish before mid .
October, when the snows blow back in. Most people hike from south to northwith spring, ideally keeping one step ahead of the worst of the hot weather andthe more irksome and infectious of insects. My intention was to start in the southin early March. I put aside six weeks for the first leg.
The precise length of the Appalachian Trail is a matter of interestinguncertainty. The U.S. National Park Service, which constantly distinguishesitself in a variety of ways, manages in a single leaflet to give the length of thetrail as 2,155 miles and 2,200 miles. The officialAppalachian Trail Guides, a setof eleven books each dealing with a particular state or section, variously give thelength as 2,144 miles, 2,147 miles, 2,159 miles, and "more than 2,150 miles."The Appalachian Trail Conference, the governing body, in 1993 put the traillength at exactly 2,146.7 miles, then changed for a couple of years to a hesitantlyvague "more than 2,150 miles," but has recently returned to confident precisionwith a length of 2,160.2 miles. In 1993, three people rolled a measuring wheelalong its entire length and came up with a distance of 2,164.9 miles. At about thesame time, a careful measure based on a full set of U.S. Geological Survey mapsput the distance at 2,118.3 miles.
What is certain is that it is a long way, and from either end it is not easy.The peaks of the Appalachian Trail are not particularly formidable as mountainsgo—the highest, Clingmans Dome in Tennessee, tops out at a little under 6,700feet—but they are big enough and they go on and on. There are more than 350peaks over 5,000 feet along the AT, and perhaps a thousand more in the vicinity.Altogether, it takes about five months, and five million steps, to walk the trailfrom end to end.
And of course on the AT you must lug on your back everything you need. Itmay seem obvious, but it came as a small shock to me to realize that this wasn'tgoing to be even remotely like an amble through the English Cotswolds or LakeDistrict, where you head off for the day with a haversack containing a packedlunch and a hiking map and at day's end retire from the hills to a convivial innfor a hot bath, a hearty meal, and a soft bed. Here you sleep outdoors and cookyour own food. Few people manage to carry less than forty pounds, and whenyou're hauling that kind of weight, believe me, never for a moment does itescape your notice. It is one thing to walk 2,000 miles, quite another to walk2,000 miles with a wardrobe on your back.
My first inkling of just how daunting an undertaking it was to be camewhen I went to our local outfitters, the Dartmouth Co-Op, to purchaseequipment. My son had just gotten an after-school job there, so I was under strictinstructions of good behavior. Specifically, I was not to say or do anythingstupid, try on anything that would require me to expose my stomach, say "Are you shitting me?" when informed of the price of a product, be conspicuouslyinattentive when a sales assistant was explaining the correct maintenance oraftercare of a product, and above all don anything inappropriate, like a woman'sski hat, in an attempt to amuse.
I was told to ask for Dave Mengle because he had walked large parts of thetrail himself and was something of an encyclopedia of outdoor knowledge. Akindly and deferential sort of fellow, Mengle could talk for perhaps four dayssolid, with interest, about any aspect of hiking equipment.
I have never been so simultaneously impressed and bewildered. We spent awhole afternoon going through his stock. He would say things to me like: "Nowthis has a 70-denier high-density abrasion-resistant fly with a ripstop weave. Onthe other hand, and I'll be frank with you here"—and he would lean to me andreduce his voice to a low, candid tone, as if disclosing that it had once beenarrested in a public toilet with a sailor—"the seams are lap felled rather than biastaped and the vestibule is a little cramped."
I think because I mentioned that I had done a bit of hiking in England, heassumed some measure of competence on my part. I didn't wish to alarm ordisappoint him, so when he asked me questions like "What's your view oncarbon fiber stays?" I would shake my head with a rueful chuckle, in recognitionof the famous variability of views on this perennially thorny issue, and say, "Youknow, Dave, I've never been able to make up my mind on that one—what doyou think?"
Together we discussed and gravely considered the relative merits of sidecompression straps, spindrift collars, crampon patches, load transferdifferentials, air-flow channels, webbing loops, and something called theoccipital cutout ratio. We went through that with every item. Even an aluminumcookset offered considerations of weight, compactness, thermal dynamics, andgeneral utility that could occupy a mind for hours. In between there was lots ofdiscussion about hiking generally, mostly to do with hazards like rockfalls, bearencounters, cookstove explosions, and snakebites, which he described with acertain misty-eyed fondness before coming back to the topic at hand.
With everything, he talked a lot about weight. It seemed to me a trifleoverfastidious to choose one sleeping bag over another because it weighed threeounces less, but as equipment piled up around us I began to appreciate howounces accumulate into pounds. I hadn't expected to buy so much—I alreadyowned hiking boots, a Swiss army knife, and a plastic map pouch that you weararound your neck on a piece of string, so I had felt I was pretty well there—butthe more I talked to Dave the more I realized that I was shopping for anexpedition.
The two big shocks were how expensive everything was—each time Davedodged into the storeroom or went off to confirm a denier rating, I stole looks atprice tags and was invariably appalled—and how every piece of equipmentappeared to require some further piece of equipment. If you bought a sleepingbag, then you needed a stuff sack for it. The stuff sack cost $29. I found this anincreasingly difficult concept to warm to.
When, after much solemn consideration, I settled on a backpack—a veryexpensive Gregory, top-of-the-range, no-point-in-stinting-here sort of thing—hesaid, "Now what kind of straps do you want with that?"
"I beg your pardon?" I said, and recognized at once that I was on the brinkof a dangerous condition known as retail burnout. No more now would I blithelysay, "Better give me half a dozen of those, Dave. Oh, and I'll take eight of these—what the heck, make it a dozen. You only live once, eh?" The mound ofprovisions that a minute ago had looked so pleasingly abundant and exciting—all new! all mine!—suddenly seemed burdensome and extravagant.
"Straps," Dave explained. "You know, to tie on your sleeping bag and lashthings down."
"It doesn't come with straps?" I said in a new, level tone.
"Oh, no." He surveyed a wall of products and touched a finger to his nose."You'll need a raincover too, of course."
I blinked. "A raincover? Why?".
"To keep out the rain."
"The backpack's not rainproof?"
He grimaced as if making an exceptionally delicate distinction. "Well, not ahundred percent…."
This was extraordinary to me. "Really? Did it not occur to the manufacturerthat people might want to take their packs outdoors from time to time? Perhapseven go camping with them. How much is this pack anyway?"
"Two hundred and fifty dollars."
"Two hundred and fifty dollars! Are you shi——," I paused and put on anew voice. "Are you saying, Dave, that I pay $250 for a pack and it doesn't havestraps and it isn't waterproof?"
He nodded.
"Does it have a bottom in it?"
Mengle smiled uneasily. It was not in his nature to grow critical or weary inthe rich, promising world of camping equipment. "The straps come in a choiceof six colors," he offered helpfully.
I ended up with enough equipment to bring full employment to a vale of
sherpas—a three-season tent, self-inflating sleeping pad, nested pots and pans,collapsible eating utensils, plastic dish and cup, complicated pump-action waterpurifier, stuff sacks in a rainbow of colors, seam sealer, patching kit, sleepingbag, bungee cords, water bottles, waterproof poncho, waterproof matches, packcover, a rather nifty compass/thermometer keyring, a little collapsible stove thatlooked frankly like trouble, gas bottle and spare gas bottle, a hands-freeflashlight that you wore on your head like a miner's lamp (this I liked verymuch), a big knife for killing bears and hillbillies, insulated long johns andundershirts, four bandannas, and lots of other stuff, for some of which I had togo back again and ask what it was for exactly. I drew the line at buying adesigner groundcloth for $59.95, knowing I could acquire a lawn tarp at Kmartfor $5. I also said no to a first-aid kit, sewing kit, anti-snake-bite kit, $12emergency whistle, and small orange plastic shovel for burying one's poop, onthe grounds that these were unnecessary, too expensive, or invited ridicule. Theorange spade in particular seemed to shout: "Greenhorn! Sissy! Make way forMr. Buttercup!"
Then, just to get it all over and done with at once, I went next door to theDartmouth Bookstore and bought books—The Thru-Hiker's Handbook, Walkingthe Appalachian Trail,several books on wildlife and the natural sciences, ageological history of the Appalachian Trail by the exquisitely named V. Collinschew, and the complete, aforementioned set of official Appalachian TrailGuides, consisting of eleven small paperback books and fifty-nine maps indifferent sizes, styles, and scales covering the whole trail from SpringerMountain to Mount Katahdin and ambitiously priced at $233.45 the set. On theway out I noticed a volume called Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance,opened it up at random, found the sentence "This is a clear example of thegeneral type of incident in which a black bear sees a person and decides to try tokill and eat him," and tossed that into the shopping basket, too.
I took all this home and carried it down to the basement in several trips.There was such a lot, nearly all of it technologically unfamiliar to me, whichmade it both exciting and daunting, but mostly daunting. I put the hands-freeflashlight on my head, for the heck of it, and pulled the tent from its plasticpackaging and erected it on the floor. I unfurled the self-inflating sleeping padand pushed it inside and followed that with my fluffy new sleeping bag. Then Icrawled in and lay there for quite a long time trying out for size the expensive,confined, strangely new-smelling, entirely novel space that was soon to be myhome away from home. I tried to imagine myself lying not in a basement besidethe reassuring, cozily domesticated roar of the furnace, but rather outside, in ahigh mountain pass, listening to wind and tree noise, the lonely howl of doglikecreatures, the hoarse whisper of a Georgia mountain accent saying: "Hey, Virgil,there's one over here. Y'all remember the rope?" But I couldn't really.
I hadn't been in a space like this since I stopped making dens with blanketsand card tables at about the age of nine. It was really quite snug and, once yougot used to the smell, which I naively presumed would dissipate with time, andthe fact that the fabric gave everything inside a sickly greenish pallor, like theglow off a radar screen, it was not so bad. A little claustrophobic perhaps, a littleodd smelling, but cozy and sturdy even so.
This wouldn't be so bad, I told myself. But secretly I knew that I was quite wrong.