by Bill Bryson
One by one the hotels closed down, became derelict, or, more often, burned to the ground (often, miraculously, almost the only thing to survive was the insurance policy), and their grounds slowly returned to forest. Once one could have seen perhaps twenty large hotels from the summit. Today there is just one, the Mount Washington, still imposing and festive with its perky red roof but inescapably forlorn in its solitary grandeur. (And even it has staggered along the edge of bankruptcy from time to time.) Elsewhere across the spacious valley far below, where once had proudly stood the Fabyan, the Mount Pleasant, the Crawford House, and many others, today there were only forest, highways, and motels.
From beginning to end the great age of the resort hotels in the White Mountains lasted just fifty years. Once again, I offer you the Appalachian Trail as a symbol of venerability. And with that in mind, I went off to find my friend Bill and complete our walk.
Chapter 19
“I’ve had a brilliant idea,” said Stephen Katz. We were in the living room of my house in Hanover. It was two weeks later. We were leaving for Maine in the morning.
“Oh yeah?” I said, trying not to sound too wary, for ideas are not Katz’s strongest suit.
“You know how awful it is carrying a full pack?”
I nodded. Of course I did.
“Well, I was thinking about it the other day. In fact I’ve been thinking about it a lot because to tell you the truth, Bryson, the idea of putting that pack on again filled me with” — he lowered his voice a tone — “fucking dread.” He nodded with solemnity and repeated the two key words. “And then I had a great idea. An alternative. Close your eyes.”
“What for?”
“I want to surprise you.”
I hate having to close my eyes for a surprise, always have, but I did it.
I could hear him rooting in his army surplus duffel bag. “‘Who carries a lot of weight all the time?’” he continued. “That was the question I asked myself. ‘Who carries a lot of weight day in and day out?’ Hey, don’t look yet. And then it occurred to me.” He was silent a moment, as if making some crucial adjustment that would assure a perfect impression. “OK, now you can look.”
I uncovered my eyes. Katz, beaming immoderately, was wearing a Des Moines Register newspaper delivery bag — the kind of bright yellow pouch that paperboys traditionally sling over their shoulders before climbing on their bikes and riding off to do their rounds.
“You can’t be serious,” I said quietly.
“Never been more serious in my life, my old mountain friend. I brought you one too.” He handed me one from his duffel bag, still pristinely folded and in a transparent wrapper.
“Stephen, you can’t walk across the Maine wilderness with a newspaper delivery bag.”
“Why not? It’s comfortable, it’s capacious, it’s waterproof — near enough — and it weighs all of about four ounces. It is the Perfect Hiking Accessory. Let me ask you this. When was the last time you saw a paperboy with a hernia?” He gave a small, smug nod, as if he had stumped me with that one.
I made some tentative, preparatory shapes with my mouth prior to saying something, but Katz raced on before I could get a thought in order.
“Now here’s the plan,” he continued. “We cut our load down to the bare minimum — no stoves, no gas bottles, no noodles, no coffee, no tents, no stuff sacks, no sleeping bags. We hike and camp like mountain men. Did Daniel Boone have a three-season fiberfill sleeping bag? I don’t think so. All we take is cold food, water bottles, maybe one change of clothes. I figure we can get the load down to five pounds. And” — he waggled his hand delightedly in the empty newspaper bag — “we put it all in here.” His expression begged me to drape him with plaudits.
“Have you given any thought to how ridiculous you would look?”
“Yup. Don’t care.”
“Have you considered what a source of uncontained mirth you would be to every person you met between here and Katahdin?”
“Don’t give the tiniest shit.”
“Well, has it occurred to you what a ranger would say if he found you setting off into the Hundred Mile Wilderness with a newspaper delivery bag? Do you know they have the power to detain anyone they think is not mentally or physically fit?” This was actually a lie, but it brought a promising hint of frown to his brow. “Also, has it occurred to you that maybe the reason paperboys don’t get hernias is that they only carry the bag for an hour or so a day — that maybe it might not be so comfortable lugging it for ten hours at a stretch over mountains — that maybe it would bang endlessly against your legs and rub your shoulders raw? Look how it’s chafing against your neck already.”
His eyes slid stealthily down to the strap. The one positive thing about Katz and his notions was that it was never very hard to talk him out of them. He took the bag off over his head. “OK,” he agreed, “screw the bags. But we pack light.”
I was happy with that. In fact, it seemed a perfectly sensible proposal. We packed more than Katz wanted — I insisted on sleeping bags, warm clothes, and our tents on the grounds that this could be a good deal more demanding than Katz appreciated — but I agreed to leave behind the stove, gas bottles, and pots and pans. We would eat cold stuff — principally Snickers, raisins, and an indestructible type of salami product called Slim Jims. It wouldn’t kill us for a fortnight. Besides, I couldn’t face another bowl of noodles. Altogether we saved perhaps five pounds of weight each — hardly anything really — but Katz seemed disproportionately happy. It wasn’t often he got his way, even in part.
And so the next day, my wife drove us deep into the boundless woods of northern Maine for our trek through the Hundred Mile Wilderness. Maine is deceptive. It is the twelfth smallest state, but it has more uninhabited forest — ten million acres — than any other state but Alaska. In photographs it looks serene and beckoning, parklike even, with hundreds of cool, deep lakes and hazy, tranquil miles of undulating mountains. Only Katahdin, with its rocky upper slopes and startling muscularity, offers anything that looks faintly intimidating. In fact, it is all hard.
The trail maintainers in Maine have a certain hale devotion to seeking out the rockiest climbs and most forbidding slopes, and of these Maine has a breathtaking plenitude. In its 283 miles, the Appalachian Trail in Maine presents the northbound hiker with almost 100,000 feet of climb, the equivalent of three Everests. And at the heart of it all lies the famous Hundred Mile Wilderness — 99.7 miles of boreal forest trail without a store, house, telephone, or paved road, running from the village of Monson to a public campground at Abol Bridge, a few miles below Katahdin. It is the remotest section of the entire AT. If something goes wrong in the Hundred Mile Wilderness, you are on your own. You could die of an infected blood blister out there.
It takes a week to ten days for most people to cross this notorious expanse. Because we had two weeks, we had my wife drop us at Caratunk, a remote community on the Kennebec River, thirty-eight miles short of Monson and the official start of the wilderness. We would have three days of limbering up and a chance to resupply at Monson before plunging irreversibly into the deepest woods. I had already done a little hiking to the west around Rangeley and Flagstaff Lakes, in the week before Katz came, as a kind of reconnoiter, so I felt as if I knew the terrain. Even so, it was a shock.
It was the first time in almost four months that I had hoisted a pack with a full load. I couldn’t believe the weight, couldn’t believe that there had ever been a time when I could believe the weight. The strain was immediate and discouraging. But at least I had been hiking. Katz, it was quickly evident, was starting from square one — actually, several score pancake breakfasts to the wrong side of square one. From Caratunk it was a long, gently upward haul of five miles to a big lake called Pleasant Pond, hardly taxing at all, but I noticed right away that he was moving with incredible deliberativeness, breathing very hard, and wearing a kind of shocked “Where am I?” expression.
All he would utter was “Man!” in an amazed to
ne when I asked him how he was, and a single heartfelt “Fuhhhhhhhhck” — breathy and protracted, like the noise of a plumped cushion when someone sits on it — when he let his pack fall from his back at the first rest stop after forty-five minutes. It was a muggy afternoon and Katz was a river of sweat. He took a water bottle and downed nearly half of it. Then he looked at me with quietly desperate eyes, put his pack back on, and wordlessly returned to his duty.
Pleasant Pond was a vacation spot — we could hear the happy shrieks of children splashing and swimming perhaps a hundred yards away — though we couldn’t see anything of the lake through the trees. Indeed without their gaiety we wouldn’t have known it was there, a sobering reminder of how suffocating the woods can be. Beyond rose Middle Mountain, just 2,500 feet high but acutely angled and an entirely different experience on a hot day with a cumbersome pack sagging down on tender shoulders. I plodded joylessly on to the top of the mountain. Katz was soon far behind and moving with shuffling slowness.
It was after six o’clock when I reached the base of the mountain on the other side and found a decent campsite beside a grassy, little-used logging road at a place called Baker Stream. I waited a few minutes for Katz, then put up my tent. When he still hadn’t come after twenty minutes, I went looking for him. He was almost an hour behind me when I finally found him, and his expression was glassy-eyed.
I took his pack from him and sighed at the not entirely unexpected discovery that it was light.
“What’s happened to your pack?”
“Aw, I threw some stuff,” he said unhappily.
“What?”
“Oh, clothes and stuff.” He seemed uncertain whether to be ashamed or belligerent. He decided to try belligerence. “That stupid sweater for one thing.” We had disputed mildly over the need for woolens.
“But it could get cold. It’s very changeable in the mountains.”
“Yeah, right. It’s August, Bryson. I don’t know if you noticed.”
There didn’t seem much point in trying to reason with him. When we reached the camp and he was putting up his tent I looked into his pack. He had thrown away nearly all his spare clothes and, it appeared, a good deal of the food.
“Where’s the peanuts?” I said. “Where’s all your Slim Jims?”
“We didn’t need all that shit. It’s only three days to Monson.”
“Most of that food was for the Hundred Mile Wilderness, Stephen. We don’t know what kind of supplies there’ll be in Monson.”
“Oh.” He looked struck and contrite. “I thought it was a lot for three days.”
I looked despairingly in the pack and then looked around.
“Where’s your other water bottle?”
He looked at me sheepishly. “I threw it.”
“You threw a water bottle?” This was truly staggering. If there is one thing you need on the trail in August, it is lots of water.
“It was heavy.”
“Of course it’s heavy. Water’s always heavy. But it is also kind of vital, wouldn’t you say?”
He gave me a helpless look. “I just had to get rid of some weight. I was desperate.”
“No, you were stupid.”
“Yeah, that too,” he agreed.
“Stephen, I wish you wouldn’t do these things.”
“I know,” he said and looked sincerely repentant.
While he finished putting up his tent, I went off to filter water for the morning. Baker Stream was really a river — broad, clear, and shallow — and very beautiful in the glow of a summery evening, with a backdrop of overhanging trees and the last rays of sunlight sparkling its surface. As I knelt by the water, I became curiously aware of something — some thing — in the woods beyond my left shoulder, which caused me to straighten up and peer through the clutter of foliage at the water’s edge. Goodness knows what impelled me to look because I couldn’t have heard anything over the musical tumult of water, but there about fifteen feet away in the dusky undergrowth, staring at me with a baleful expression, was a moose — full grown and female, or so I presumed since it had no antlers. It had evidently been on its way to the water for a drink when it was brought up short by my presence and now clearly was undecided what to do next.
It is an extraordinary experience to find yourself face-to-face in the woods with a wild animal that is very much larger than you. You know these things are out there, of course, but you never expect at any particular moment to encounter one, certainly not up close — and this one was close enough that I could see the haze of flealike insects floating in circles about its head. We stared at each other for a good minute, neither of us sure what to do. There was a certain obvious and gratifying tang of adventure in this, but also something much more low-key and elemental — a kind of respectful mutual acknowledgment that comes with sustained eye contact. It was this that was unexpectedly thrilling — the sense that there was in some small measure a salute in our cautious mutual appraisal. I was smitten.
I had recently read to my dismay that they have started hunting moose again in New England. Goodness knows why anyone would want to shoot an animal as harmless and retiring as the moose, but thousands of people do — so many, in fact, that states now hold lotteries to decide who gets a permit. Maine in 1996 received 82,000 applications for just 1,500 permits. Over 12,000 out-of-staters happily parted with a nonrefundable $20 just to be allowed to take part in the draw.
Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That’s all there is to it. Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it — its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers — looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other. Above all, what distinguishes the moose is its almost boundless lack of intelligence. If you are driving down a highway and a moose steps from the woods ahead of you, he will stare at you for a long minute (moose are notoriously shortsighted), then abruptly try to run away from you, legs flailing in eight directions at once. Never mind that there are several thousand square miles of forest on either side of the highway. The moose does not think of this. Clueless as to what exactly is going on, he runs halfway to New Brunswick before his peculiar gait inadvertently steers him back into the woods, where he immediately stops and takes on a startled expression that says, “Hey — woods. Now how the heck did I get here?” Moose are so monumentally muddle-headed, in fact, that when they hear a car or truck approaching they will often bolt out of the woods and onto the highway in the curious hope that this will bring them to safety.
Amazingly, given the moose’s lack of cunning and peculiarly blunted survival instincts, it is one of the longest-surviving creatures in North America. Mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, wolves, caribou, wild horses, and even camels all once thrived in eastern North America alongside the moose but gradually stumbled into extinction, while the moose just plodded on. It hasn’t always been so. At the turn of this century, it was estimated that there were no more than a dozen moose in New Hampshire and probably none at all in Vermont. Today New Hampshire has an estimated 5,000 moose, Vermont 1,000, and Maine anywhere up to 30,000. It is because of these robust and growing numbers that hunting has been reintroduced as a way of keeping them from getting out of hand. There are, however, two problems with this that I can think of. First, the numbers are really just guesses. Moose clearly don’t line up for censuses. Some naturalists think the population may have been overstated by as much as 20 percent, which means that the moose aren’t being so much culled as slaughtered. No less pertinent is that there is just something deeply and unquestionably wrong about killing an animal that is so sweetly and dopily unassuming as a moose. I could have slain this one with a slingshot, with a rock or stick — with a folded newspaper, I’d almost bet — and all it wanted was a drink of water. You might as well hunt cows.
/>
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 dinner of Slim Jims, raisins, and Snickers and retired to our tents to escape the endless assault of mosquitoes. As we lay there, Katz said, quite brightly, “Hard day today. I’m beat.” It was unlike him to be chatty at tent time.
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.