by Bill Bryson
Well, we were both wrong. The next day started well enough, with a sunny dawn that promised another hot day. It was the first time along the trail that we had woken to warmth, and we enjoyed the novelty of it. We packed up our tents, breakfasted on raisins and Snickers, and set off into the deep woods. By nine o’clock the sun was already high and blazing. Even on hot days, the woods are normally cool, but here the air was heavy and steamy, almost tropical. About two hours after setting off, we came to a lagoon, about two acres in size, I would guess, and filled with papery reeds, fallen trees, and the bleached torsos of dead trees that were still standing. Dragonflies danced across the surface. Beyond, waiting, rose a titanic heap called Moxie Bald Mountain. But what was of immediate note was that the trail ended, abruptly and disconcertingly, at the water’s edge. Katz and I looked at each other — something wrong here surely. For the first time since Georgia, we wondered if we had lost the trail. (God knows what Chicken John would have made of it.) We retraced our steps a considerable distance, perplexedly studied our map and trail guide, tried to find an alternative way around the pond through the dense and lacerating undergrowth, and finally concluded that we were intended to ford it. On the far shore, perhaps eighty yards away, Katz spied a continuation of trail and a white AT blaze. Clearly we had to wade across.
Katz led the way, barefoot and in boxer shorts, using a long stick like a punting pole to try to pick his way across on a jumble of submerged or half submerged logs. I followed in a similar manner but staying far enough back that I didn’t put my weight on logs he was using. They were covered in a slick moss and tended to bob or rotate alarmingly when stepped on. Twice he nearly toppled over. Finally, about twenty-five yards out, he lost it altogether and plunged with wheeling arms and an unhappy wail into the murky water. He went completely under, came up, went under again, and came up flailing and floundering with such wildness that for a few sincerely mortifying moments I thought he was drowning. The weight of his pack was clearly dragging him backwards and keeping him from gaining an upright position or even successfully keeping his head above water. I was about to drop my pack and plunge in to help when he managed to catch hold of a log and pull himself to a standing position. The water was up to his chest. He clung to the log and heaved visibly with the effort of catching his breath and calming himself down. He had obviously had a fright.
“You all right?” I said.
“Oh, peachy,” he replied. “Just peachy. I don’t know why they couldn’t have put some crocodiles in here and made a real adventure of it.”
I crept on, and an instant later I tumbled in, too. I had a few surreal, slow-motion moments of observing the world from the unusual perspective of waterline or just below while my hand reached helplessly for a log that was just beyond my grasp — all this in a curious bubbly silence — before Katz sloshed to my assistance, firmly grabbed my shirt, and thrust me back into a world of light and noise and set me on my feet. He was surprisingly strong.
“Thank you,” I gasped.
“Don’t mention it.”
We waded heavily to the far shore, taking it in turns to stumble and help each other up, and sloshed up on to the muddy bank trailing strands of half-rotted vegetation and draining huge volumes of water from our packs. We dumped our loads and sat on the ground, bedraggled and spent, and stared at the lagoon as if it had just played a terrible practical joke on us. I could not remember feeling this tired this early in the day anywhere along the trail. As we sat there, we heard voices, and two young hikers, hippieish and very fit, emerged from the woods behind us. They nodded hellos and looked appraisingly at the water.
“Afraid you gotta wade this one,” Katz said.
One of the hikers looked at him in a not unkindly way. “This your first time hiking up here?” he said.
We nodded.
“Well, I don’t want to discourage you, but mister you’ve only just started to get wet.”
With that he and his partner hoisted their packs above their heads, wished us luck, and walked into the water. They waded skillfully across in perhaps thirty seconds — Katz and I had taken as many minutes — and stepped out on the other side, as if from a root bath, put their dry packs back on, gave a small wave, and disappeared.
Katz took a big thoughtful breath — partly sigh, partly just experimenting with the ability to breathe again. “Bryson, I’m not trying to be negative — I swear to God I’m not — but I’m not sure I’m cut out for this. Could you lift your pack over your head like that?”
“No.”
And on that premonitory note, we strapped up and set squelchily off up Moxie Bald Mountain.
The Appalachian Trail is the hardest thing I have ever done, and the Maine portion was the hardest part of the Appalachian Trail, and by a factor I couldn’t begin to compute. Partly it was the heat. Maine, that most moderate of states, was having a killer heat wave. In the blistering sun, the shadeless granite pavements of Moxie Bald radiated an ovenlike heat, but even in the woods the air was oppressive and close, as if the trees and foliage were breathing on us with a hot, vegetative breath. We sweated helplessly, copiously, and drank unusual quantities of water, but could never stop being thirsty. Water was sometimes plentiful but more often nonexistent for long stretches so that we were never sure how much we could prudently swallow without leaving ourselves short later on. Even fully stocked, we were short now thanks to Katz’s dumping a bottle. Finally, there were the relentless insects, the unsettling sense of isolation, and the ever-taxing terrain.
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 li
ke 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 pebbles 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 sunny road, the first since Caratunk, and followed it on a hot ambulation into the forgotten hamlet of Monson. Near the center of town was an old clapboard house with a painted wooden cutout of a bearded hiker standing on the lawn bearing the message “Welcome at Shaw’s.”
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, dinner and breakfast, and free use of the shower, laundry, and guest lounge. The place was run by Keith and Pat Shaw, who started the business more or less by accident twenty years ago when Keith brought home a hungry hiker off the trail and the hiker passed on the word of how well he had been treated. Just a few weeks earlier, Keith told me proudly as we signed in, they had registered their 20,000th hiker.
We had an hour till dinner. Katz borrowed $5 — for pop, I presumed — and vanished to his room. I had a shower, put a load of wash in the machine, and wandered out to the front lawn, where there were a couple of Adirondack chairs on which I intended to park my weary butt, smoke my pipe and savor the blissful ease of late afternoon and the pleasant anticipation of a dinner earned. From a screened window nearby came the sounds of sizzling food and the clatter of pans. It smelled good, whatever it was.
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 wanna try to pet the dog. Take it from me: you do not wanna pet that dog. Some hiker petted him last week when I told him not to and it bit him in the balls.”
“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 wanna get near him, believe me.”
“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 dinner.
Dinner was at a big dining room table that was generously covered in platters of meat, bowls of mashed potatoes and corn on the cob, a teetering plate of bread, and a tub of butter. Katz arrived a few moments after me, looking freshly showered and very happy. He seemed unusually, almost exaggeratedly, energized, and gave me an impetuous tickle from behind as he passed, which was out of character.
“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 tanned and fit and also very clean. Katz and I welcomed them with smiles and started to pitch in, then paused and put back the bowls when we realized the couple were mumbling grace. This seemed to go on forever. Then we pitched in again.
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 manner.
“Did you ever feel like giving up?”
The girl thought for a moment. “No,” she said simply.
“Really?” I found this amazing. “Did you never think, ‘Jeez, this is too much. I don’t know that I want to go through with this’?”
She thought again, with an air of encroaching panic. These were obviously questions that had never penetrated her skull.
Her partner came to her rescue. “We had a couple of low moments in the early phases,” he said, “but we put our faith in the Lord and His will prevailed.”
“Praise Jesus,” whispered the girl, almost inaudibly.
“Ah,” I said, and made a mental note to lock my door when I went to bed.
“And God bless Allah for the mashed potatoes!” said Katz happily and reached for the bowl for the third time.
After dinner, Katz and I strolled to a general store up the road get supplies for the Hundred Mile Wilderness, which we would start in the morning. He seemed odd in the grocery store — cheerful enough, but distracted and restless. We were supposed to be stocking up for ten days in the wilds — a fairly serious business — but he seemed unwilling to focus, and kept wandering off or picking up inappropriate things like chili sauce and can openers.
“Hey, let’s get a six-pack,” he said suddenly, in a party voice.
“Come on, Stephen, get serious,” I said. I was looking at cheeses.
“I am serious.”
“Do you want cheddar or Colby?”
“Whatever.” He wandered off to the beer cooler and came back carrying a six-pack of Budweiser.
“Hey, whaddaya say to a six-pack, bud — a six-pack of Bud, bud?” He nudged me in the ribs to emphasize the joke.
I pulled away from the nudge in distraction. “Come on, Stephen, stop dicking around.” I had moved on to the candy bars and cookies and was trying to figure out what might last us ten days without melting into a disgusting ooze or bouncing into a bag of crumbs. “Do you want Snickers or do you want to try something different?” I asked.
“I want Budweiser.” He grinned, then, seeing this had passed me by, adopted a sudden, solemn, jokeless tone. “Please, Bryson, can I borrow” — he looked at the price — “four dollars and seventy-nine cents? I’m broke.”
“Stephen, I don’t know what’s come over you. Put the beer back. Anyway, what happened to that five dollars I gave you?”
“Spent it.”
“What on?” And then it occurred to me. “You’ve been drinking already, haven’t you?”
“No,” he said robustly, as if dismissing a preposterous and possibly slanderous allegation.
But he was drunk — or at least half drunk. “You have,” I said in amazement.
He sighed and rolled his eyes slightly. “Two quarts of Michelob. Big deal.”
“You’ve been drinking.” I was appalled. “When did you start drinking again?”
“In Des Moines. Just a little. You know, a couple of beers afte
r work. Nothing to get in a panic about.”
“Stephen, you know you can’t drink.”
He didn’t want to hear this. He looked like a fourteen-year-old who had just been told to clean his room. “I don’t need a lecture, Bryson.”
“I’m not going to buy you beer,” I said evenly.
He grinned as if I were being unaccountably priggish. “Just a six-pack. Come on.”
“No!”
I was furious, livid — more furious than I had been about anything in years. I couldn’t believe he was drinking again. It seemed such a deep, foolish betrayal of everything — of himself, me, what we were doing out here.
Katz was still wearing half a grin, but it didn’t belong to his emotions any longer. “So you’re not going to buy me a couple of lousy beers after all I’ve done for you?”
This seemed a low blow. “No.”
“Then fuck you,” he said and turned on his heel and walked out.
Chapter 20
Well, that rather colored things, as you can imagine. We never said another word about it. It just hung there. At breakfast, we exchanged good mornings, more or less as normal, but didn’t speak beyond that. Afterwards, as we waited by Keith’s van for a promised lift to the trailhead, we stood in an awkward silence, like adversaries in a property dispute waiting to be summoned into the judge’s chambers.
At the edge of the woods when we alighted there was a sign announcing that this was the start of the Hundred Mile Wilderness, with a long, soberly phrased warning to the effect that what lay beyond was not like other stretches of the trail, and that you shouldn’t proceed if you didn’t have at least ten days’ worth of food and weren’t feeling like the people in a Patagonia ad.
It gave the woods a more ominous, brooding feel. They were unquestionably different from woods further south — darker, more shadowy, inclining more to black than green. There were different trees, too — more conifers at low levels and many more birches — and scattered through the undergrowth were large, rounded black boulders, like sleeping animals, which lent the still recesses a certain eeriness. When Walt Disney made a motion picture of Bambi, his artists based their images on the Great North Woods of Maine, but this was palpably not a Disney forest of roomy glades and cuddlesome creatures. This brought to mind the woods in the Wizard of Oz, where the trees have ugly faces and malign intent and every step seems a gamble. This was a woods for looming bears, dangling snakes, wolves with laser-red eyes, strange noises, sudden terrors — a place of “standing night,” as Thoreau neatly and nervously put it.