Wendy was a great friend, a respected nutritionist, and a phenomenal mother. Her daughter Lila was my favorite two-year-old on the planet. But above all, Wendy was family. And after a thousand miles of hiking, I was ready to see some family.
It’s funny how being isolated on the trail had made me feel more connected to friends and family. My off-trail visits felt like aid stations along a race course. They provided the help, encouragement, and rest I needed to make it to Maine.
Wendy was fifteen years older than me, so along with being my cousin, she was also a little like a mom or a cool older sister. And like any good older relative, she wanted to make sure that I was taking care of myself on the trail.
“So what have you been eating?” she asked.
“You wouldn’t approve,” I replied, trying to avoid the lecture that I knew was coming.
“What do you mean I wouldn’t approve? You’re eating fruits and vegetables, right?”
“Honestly, Wendy, I can’t remember the last time I ate something I didn’t have to unwrap.”
Wendy looked at me with wide eyes and an open mouth.
“Let me see your eyes,” she said.
“What?”
“Let me see your eyes.”
Wendy held my chin and stared into my eyes.
“Well, your pupils don’t look cloudy, so that’s good. You’re probably burning off most of the toxins before they can settle into your system.”
Even though my eyes passed her test, Wendy refused to drive home until we had stopped at a grocery store to load up on fresh produce for the weekend, and hiking foods that were healthy, high-energy, and all natural.
For me, the over-stimulation started in the parking lot, where cars beeped and honked and positioned themselves for prime parking spots. I had hiked one thousand miles to this grocery store, and these people got upset if they had to walk one hundred yards to the front door?
I had never been to a Wegmans before, and judging from the outside of the building, it was going to be a memorable trip. Wegmans was the size of Wal-Mart, but it didn’t have a home goods section or clothing, it was just a grocery store—the biggest grocery store that I had ever seen.
I was completely disoriented when I walked inside. It wouldn’t have been so overwhelming if I hadn’t just come from the woods. However, after a month and a half on the trail, it was hard to process the tsunami of scents, sounds, and colors that crashed down on me beyond the automatic doors.
To my left there was a large bakery, a floral department, a hot food buffet, an international food buffet, a salad bar, and a sushi station; to my right was a line of cashiers that extended into the horizon; and in front of me was an olive bar the size of a trail shelter.
I watched men with shopping carts experience road rage in the aisles, I saw grandmothers speeding around the store in a race to be the fastest and most efficient shopper, and I saw petite, well-groomed housewives bicker about who was first in line at the meat counter.
At one point, Wendy sent me on a mission to pick out four ears of corn from a bin overflowing with produce. After I made my selection, I wandered to the opposite end of the display, where Wegmans had provided a large trash receptacle for husking corn. I had peeled back the green shell of one ear when a pint-sized woman in high-heels and designer clothes elbowed in front of me and monopolized direct access to the husking station.
Like animals around a kill, three women hovered around the trash bin, unwilling to relinquish their positions, tearing the husks and silk strands off their corn so frantically that discarded remnants flew through the air. Talk about living in the wild! Lacking the killer instinct, I placed my four unshucked ears in a clear plastic bag and resigned myself to doing the chore at Wendy’s house.
Skulking back to seek my cousin’s protection, I followed Wendy to a section within Wegmans, comparable to the size of an average grocery store, dedicated entirely to organic and all-natural foods. I reluctantly chose my favorite combinations of seeds, nuts, and dried fruit, and hesitantly pointed to which organic rolled-oat bar looked the most appealing.
I was relieved to finally make it safely back to Wendy’s home, where Lila greeted me with a huge hug, followed by, “Jen-Jen, you stinky!”
Her vocabulary had increased since my last visit.
After a long shower, I spent the rest of the afternoon acting out Dora the Explorer with my baby cousin. Dora the Explorer is an animated show that features a young, bilingual adventurer climbing mountains, crossing oceans, and surviving educationally valuable dilemmas with her trusty backpack, map, and monkey sidekick. Lila and I spent hours replicating Dora’s adventures, pretending to hike, camp, and read a map.
I loved Dora. I wanted to be Dora, except I wanted a bear as a sidekick, instead of a monkey. I was now well aware that most people thought it was dangerous for a woman to be in the woods by herself, but obviously they had never watched Dora—or been to Wegmans.
It was important to me that Lila felt that the wilderness was safe, and that it was a place she would want to go. She didn’t have to be a hiker; I didn’t care if she ever hiked the Appalachian Trail. I just didn’t want her to be afraid of the woods. And whether she learned that from Dora or me didn’t matter, as long as she got the message.
For two days, my cousins nourished me with food and love. When it was time to return to the trail, I was sad to leave Wendy and Lila, but I was ready to say good-bye to suburbia. I was ready to leave behind the endless maze of housing developments. I was ready get away from the busy roads where “driving” consisted of accelerating to sixty mph, then braking to a screeching halt. And I was ready to leave a place where everything you could ever want was available for purchase, and return to a place where I was content to carry only the items that I needed.
I was surprised at how close the trail came to the nation’s capitol. Hiking through northern Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland, it was strange to think that I was in the middle of the woods and, at the same time, just an hour’s drive away from the President of the United States.
I was constantly reminded of the region’s historical significance, since the trail frequently opened up into fields where a preserved building, historic monument, plaque, or war memorial was located. I had always loved studying history in school, but on the trail the lessons felt more personal. When the trail passed through Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, I thought about John Brown’s raid that had taken place there. I wondered, if I had been a slave, or if I had been white and lived 150 years ago, whether I would have had the courage to fight against slavery.
Hiking beyond Harper’s Ferry, it occurred to me that only in the past hundred years had walking long distances evolved from necessity to recreation. I was walking because I chose to walk, but I imagined how hard it must have been for slaves escaping the South on the under-ground Railroad who were walking for their freedom—and their lives.
I thought about the Native Americans who used to live here with little to no impact on the land, the originators of “leave no trace” ethics. But because the European settlers wanted to own the land, the Native Americans had been corralled into small territories and forced to walk thousands of miles west.
Passing near Gathland State Park at Crampton’s Gap, I thought of the Civil War soldiers who walked from the North and the South to arrive at nearby South Mountain Battlefield. A plaque by the side of the trail said that six thousand men died at the Battle of South Mountain. Six thousand fathers, husbands, and sons had walked a really long way to get here, never to return home.
Near Boonsboro, Maryland, the trail passes the original Washington Monument. It’s not like the towering phallic obelisk on the Mall in D.C., but a thick stone pillar that looks like a two-story milk bottle. It was built in 1827 by men who would have known Washington or been alive during his presidency, perhaps even by men who had served under him in the Revolutionary War.
I remembered from my American history classes that Benjamin Franklin had given George Washing
ton a walking stick as a gift. I looked down at my yellow mop stick and smiled. How different America would be if sixteen-year-olds received walking sticks instead of cars.
As I traveled farther away from the nation’s capitol, I was grateful that I could walk for pleasure, instead of for my freedom, and that I could carry a mop stick instead of a gun.
In a short stretch, I was reminded how diverse and unique our country is, and how our history is one built on triumph, tragedy, and a lot of walking.
14
ABNORMALITY
PEN MAR PARK, MD/PA, TO
DELAWARE WATER GAP, NJ—260 MILES
The trail passes the half-way point near a quiet state park in southern Pennsylvania, and from there it travels through the scenic farmland of the Cumberland Valley. Then, when you reach Duncannon, everything changes. The trail’s neighboring towns feel mysterious and forgotten, and the path becomes rife with rocks: big rocks, small rocks, sharp rocks, and snake–ridden rocks. It’s as if all the other states collected their rocks and dumped them on the trail in Pennsylvania.
I was both excited and nervous to cross the Mason-Dixon Line. There was a part of me that was apprehensive about leaving the South and walking farther away from my friends and family, but I was also proud to have hiked all the way from Georgia to the mid-Atlantic, and I was looking forward to exploring a different part of the country.
I had hiked several miles into the state of Pennsylvania without seeing anyone. I enjoyed the solitude and the warm spring air that surrounded me. The trail was relatively flat except for some sporadic boulders that lined the sides of the trail. Some of the large rocks were the size of a small house, but most were comparable to a compact car. I was rounding a large rock about the size of an SUV when I was startled by two men on the other side.
I only glanced at them for a split second, but it’s amazing how clearly the image was impressed on my mind.
They were only about five feet away, and one of them was definitely not wearing any clothes. He was an older man with a long yellow beard and a big round belly, but no clothes—not even socks.
The other man had red hair and looked fairly young, with freckles on his face and on his bare chest. He was wearing a pair of shorts (thank God) but no pack. Neither of the men had a backpack or any other gear to suggest that they were hikers.
“I’m sorry!” I gasped, and quickly hiked away, shielding my eyes with my hand.
The two men laughed. It didn’t seem like embarrassed laughter, but laughter at my expense, as if they didn’t care if I was offended. Then the older man shouted out proudly, “Bet you’re gonna write home about this one!”
If only he knew.
I steadily hiked my way through shock and denial, but when I arrived at anger, I wasn’t just mad at the two men, I was mad at myself. why on earth had I felt compelled to say that I was sorry? I didn’t need to apologize!
You say, “I’m sorry,” when you’re at a public restroom and you open a stall door that wasn’t locked properly and there is someone already inside. You say, “I’m sorry,” inside a changing room when you pull back a curtain without realizing that the space was already occupied. But you don’t say, “I’m sorry,” when you pass an old man stark naked and grinning on the side of a national long-distance trail.
I was the one who now felt unsafe and unsure about what was around the next turn. Those guys should have apologized to me!
Later that afternoon, I was walking through the woods when I saw a type of snake I didn’t recognize. It was black, but not consistently black—more of a dark gray, with bands the color of dusk circling its outstretched body. At first I just saw its head lying on top of a fallen tree, but then I traced its body through the leaves and found its tail almost six feet away.
The snake wasn’t just long, but fat too. I don’t know if it had just eaten, but the middle of its body was as big and round as a grapefruit.
I slowly began to pull out my camera, but as soon as I brought my hand in front of my body, the animal sprang into a tight coil. Then, with its tongue flickering and its tail poised, it rattled!
A rattlesnake? The tail was dark and hard to define, but now I could see a narrow honeycomb rattle. I had never seen a rattlesnake in the wild before!
I was already ten feet away from the creature, but I respectfully backed up several more yards before taking a distant photo.
I was becoming a lot more comfortable with snakes, or perhaps just inured to them. And I decided that I liked rattlesnakes the best, because they could communicate their location, their emotion, and whether or not they wanted their picture taken, with a shake of the tail.
Sounds are so important on the trail. When it came to animals, roads, people, and water, I would usually hear them before I saw them. Toward the end of the day, I heard a noise that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. It didn’t sound like a human, more like an animal, but whatever was making the noise was clearly in distress. As the sound grew louder, I became more apprehensive with every step. I don’t know why I kept walking forward, except that I had decided to follow these white blazes wherever they led.
When I finally came out of the forest and into a grove, I saw where the sound was coming from. Twenty yards away, in the middle of the field, a man wearing a black hooded cloak was reaching his stiff arms heavenward. His body looked tense and rigid, and his groans were deep and indecipherable.
My brain said to keep moving, but my eyes and feet remained glued where they were. I was lost somewhere between fear and fascination. Could this man be a monk performing a Gregorian chant or a Wiccan conducting an outdoor ceremony? Did I even want to know what he was doing?
Suddenly the chanting stopped and my spine stiffened. The man’s body remained motionless except for his neck, which he slowly turned in my direction. The way his head turned independently from his torso, it seemed like his neck could screw off his body. Looking in my direction, I knew that he could see me, but I couldn’t see his face under the shadow of his hood. Was there even a face in there?
Like a wizard raising his staff to ward off evil, I raised my mop stick in the air to acknowledge the encounter. Then I put it in my hand closest to the shrouded figure and kept hiking.
The man didn’t acknowledge my presence, but once he identified me, he rotated his head back to the front of his body and began to cry out to the sky in the same possessed groans as before.
Once I was out of sight, I hiked as quickly as possible away from the field. It was already dark, and I had planned on camping soon, but I continued hiking until it was completely dark and then set my tent up far off the trail.
That night in my tent, I felt uneasy. In one day I had seen a naked man, encountered my first rattlesnake, and passed a dark figure moaning to the sky. I was all about adventure, but this was too much for one day. One of the encounters by itself would have been humorous, a good story, but the three of them together left me feeling restless and afraid.
The next day, I still felt uneasy. I was busy looking at the ground and trying to place my feet on rocks that wouldn’t move when I heard laughter coming up the trail. When I discovered the source of the giggling, I thought I was dreaming. Two teenage girls were hiking down the trail in long-sleeved floor-length blue dresses and bonnets.
The rocks didn’t seem to bother them at all. Even though they couldn’t see their feet underneath their flowing skirts, they glided easily down the trail.
The heat didn’t seem to bother them, either. I was in a tank-top and running shorts and I was sweating, but they looked cool and comfortable with everything covered but their faces and hands.
They said hello and smiled as they passed, then continued gliding down the trail, immersed in their lighthearted conversation. The image of their carefree grins stayed with me. It was the most genuine and innocent expression of joy that I had seen since playing Dora the Explorer with Lila.
I guessed the two girls must be Amish. I knew that Pennsylvania had a large Amish population, and I cou
ldn’t think of any other sixteen-year-old girls who would dress that way. They seemed happy and full of life. I wondered what they were talking about. Maybe they were giggling because the boys they liked were just starting to grow out their Amish beards? Or because they were planning to catch one of the plentiful Pennsylvania snakes and play a prank on one of their brothers?
The encounter felt welcome and redemptive, but still seemed completely out of the ordinary. I felt like I must have gotten off the trail somewhere past Maryland and entered an alternate universe. The thruhikers had disappeared, the terrain was different, and I was beginning to expect the unexpected.
The eeriness of Pennsylvania continued when I reached Duncannon. The trail winds right through downtown. I was tired and my feet hurt, but I didn’t stop because Warren Doyle had said that the one town that I shouldn’t stay in if I was hiking alone was Duncannon.
I didn’t know the history of the town, but I did know that there was a hostel/bar in town called The Doyle. It stood out in my memory because Warren had said that he wouldn’t want his daughter to stay there and he didn’t think I should either. I thought it was funny that the one hiker service that warren warned me about bore his last name. But it did make it easy to remember.
I followed the white blazes on telephone poles through a residential neighborhood. The two-story homes and fenced yards that lined the street looked lifeless. The doors were locked, the windows were drawn, and several yards had tall grass and weeds that came up to my knees.
I heard a noise as I passed by a wooden house that looked exposed under a peeling coat of white paint. In the backyard, I saw a rusted swing set; the empty swing swayed back and forth in the breeze and creaked eerily.
The neighboring house had a wraparound porch with several pieces of railing missing, like gaps between teeth. The open slats revealed a wooden porch swing with one end suspended from the ceiling and the other resting on the floorboards. On the other side of the porch sat an elderly man in a rocking chair. His eyes were closed, and he was so still that I couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or dead.
Becoming Odyssa Page 18