Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  Suddenly I realized that I didn't want the Wilderness to end, either. I didn't want to hear traffic or sleep in a room with four walls, where I might not be awakened by the light of dawn. I didn't want to leave that campfire, where a nian we had met two hours ago shared tea and stories and dried strawberries with us, and walk back to a world where most people were, and would remain, strangers to each other.

  jackrabbit

  sis and I stuffed our sleeping bags into their sacks and began rolling the air out of our inflatable mattresses. Alan had left already. It was a cool morning, and traceries of mist had risen out of the stream.

  "I had such a neat dream last night," Isis said. "I dreamed we walked out to the road, and there was a guy in the parking lot there. He said, 'Hi. I'm Mr. Shaw. Need a ride to town?"' Shaw's Boarding House, the hiker hostel in Monson, was one of the legendary places that Maineak and his hiker friends had described to us at our campfires in the Andes.

  I laughed. "That is a cool dream. It'd be nice if we can get a ride to town-it's like, what, three miles

  "Something like that. And you know what our moni thinks about us trying to hitchhike"

  We finished stowing our gear and set out. With my food bag nearly empty, I hardly noticed the weight of my pack. The trail, strewn with spruce needles, felt cool and soft underfoot. I marveled at how quickly I had become accustomed to walking barefoot with a pack. My feet wrapped themselves around roots and rocks, and I easily shifted my balance to avoid sharp edges. New ridges of muscle had grown above my arches, and all the surfaces of my feet felt alive and aware.

  The woods were the same solid wall of green-spruce, pine, birch and moose maple-and the enormous blanket of the forest smothered sounds. I )istant bird calls came back indistinct and fuzzy. We stopped for a snack by a stream where a handful of damselflies hung in the air, needle-thin insects with turquoise bodies and wide black wings. They flapped slowly above the green water, and their wing beats looked like windows of darkness opening in the air.

  Traffic sounds began to filter through the trees, and we found ourselves in a gravel parking lot by the side of a two-lane highway. As we stepped out into the clearing, away from the shade of interlocking branches, the July sun dazzled our eyes. Cars whizzed past like strange insects. It was another world, a world of metal and heat and speed, cutting through the heart of the forest world we had known for the last eleven days. Part of me wanted to turn and run back into the woods.

  A rust-stained red pickup pulled into the lot, and the driver jumped out. He was a wizened, thin man, probably in his seventies, wearing a John Deere baseball cap. He eyed us critically.

  "You must be the barefoot girls," he said in a brusque Maine accent. "I had another hiker in this morning, said you'd be cousin' along. I'm Keith Shaw. You want a ride to town%"

  Isis

  eith Shaw drove us into Monson without once glancing at the road. ,Jackrabbit, who sat next to him, had his full attention; he regaled her with the thirty-year history of his hunting lodge, including anecdotes about the first few A.T. hikers who'd stayed there, and mouth-watering descriptions of his wife's home cooking. He also took every opportunity to cast aspersion on the Pie Lady, the owner of Monson's other hiker hostel. "Now you can't believe everything you hear about that Pie Lady, but I've got some stories that would-" Every once in a while, jackrabbit interrupted hint, exclaiming, "Mr. Shaw, watch out for that car," or "Mr. Shaw, I think we're in the bike lane.' To which he would reply, "Ayuh. Now I remember one time a few years hack when there was a bear in the backyard ..."

  We checked in at Shaw's Boarding House, took showers, and changed into the only remotely clean clothes we had left: our Gore-Tex rain gear. I happily dumped the last few bags of our peanuts into the "hiker box," an overflowing cardboard box of spare gear and food in the common room of the hostel where hikers could leave extra items and pick tip what they needed. I )ressed in nothing but Gore-Tex, we set out to walk the two blocks to the laundromat. It was a hot, bright day, and I was just about to remark to jackrabbit how absurd we must look, when a young man drove by us and whistled. I looked around to see who he could have whistled at; we were the only human females in sight. Just then, a car full of teenage boys drove by, and they, too, whistled at us.

  "I )anin," said jackrabbit. "Does sweaty Gore-Tex exude some kind of pheromone?"

  "Maybe it's just that it leaves so much to the imagination," I said. "These town kids must think hikers have great bodies, from all the exercise we get. If they could see the bruises and bug bites, they might be a hit less enthusiastic."

  Most of the hikers in town had congregated at the laundrornat, which was also a pizzeria. Blue Skies, talking on the pay phone just outside the door, looked up and waved to us as we passed. Inside the laundry room, we found Matt perched on top of a washing machine, reading a magazine. Nor'easter and Creen were loading their clothes into a dryer. Two lanky, bearded northbounders (or nobos, as we were learning to call them) stood at the kitchen counter, debating whether to split three large pizzas, or just get one pizza each and then go find some ice cream. A young man in a tie-dyed t-shirt and a gray-haired man with a neatly trimmed beard and round glasses sat at a corner table, playing chess with a tiny, fold-up board. Even the hikers I didn't know were easy to distinguish from the locals, a blue-haired sexagenarian, several middle-aged men in plaid flannel shirts, and the sulky anorexic teenager sweeping the floor.

  In our mud-spattered Gore-Tex, we must have been just as easy to recognize. As I was struggling to get the recalcitrant change machine to accept my crumpled dollar, the young man in the tie-dyed t-shirt tapped me on the shoulder. He handed me a crisp new bill.

  "Are you a sobo%" he asked, using the A.T. lingo for southbounder.

  "Yeah," I answered. "How 'bout you?"

  "Yup. My dad and I are hiking together." He waved toward the man who'd been playing chess with him. "I'm 13ugbiter, and he calls himself O.D.-short for Old Dude"

  "I'm Isis." Each time I said the name Isis, I felt it become more my own. In our first few days in the Wilderness, I'd been a little embarrassed to introduce myself as a goddess, even though I was proud of the way I'd earned my trail name. Now, with a hundred and twenty miles behind me and new muscles already changing the shape of lily legs, I felt that I was growing into Isis. Lucy, who'd spent the whole winter sick over the loss of Eric, seemed a distant memory.

  An hour or so later, we sat out on the hack lawn with Blue Skies and Waterfall, eating pizza. Tenbrooks had found a guitar to borrow; he leaned against an oak, his eyes closed and his face tilted toward the sun, serenading us with a wistful, bluesy rendition of "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain." Molly curled beside him, her head on his leg.

  "This pizza sure tastes good," said Waterfall, "but I already miss the Trail. This n)rnin' at breakfast I was thinkin', `I could be up Oil top a mountain right now, watchin' the sun rise. I could've covered three miles by now."'

  "Yeah," said Blue Skies. "I feel out of place here. I was at the post office a few hours ago, picking up my mail drop, and I caught myself thinking, 'what am I doing inside a building, picking up a package for this Ashley person% I'm Blue Skies now. I belong in the woods, moving., oving "'

  As they spoke, they glanced past the lawn, over the surface of the nearby lake, toward the dark fringe of pines on its far shore. Their eyes shone. It was an expression I'd often seen on the faces of nobos, looking north toward Katahdin. As southbounders, we didn't have any such lofty mountain as a goal. I knew that Springer, the Trail's southern terminus, was an inconsequential, wooded peak no higher than the mountains surrounding it. I squinted at the line of trees, across the bright water, and felt my lips curve in an eager smile. '17u 'frail itself is ourgoal, I thought. And uve'II he there tomorrow And the next day, and the day after that, for the next half year of our lives.

  jackrabbit

  ith one final injunction to avoid the Pie Lady at all costs, Keith Shaw dropped us off at the trailhead. His pickup pulled away in a cl
oud of dust, and we crossed the road to where the narrow path led into the woods.

  My feet felt wonderfully alive on the soft moss and decomposing spruce needles of the trail. Their soles tingled with anticipation, glad to he moving again. It was a cool day, and the woods smelled sweet and fresh frou) recent rainfall. Everywhere was the pale green light of spring, filtered through maple and beech leaves still delicate with newness. We forded so many small streams that I lost count. They ranged from rivulets I could almost step across to wide, knee-deep torrents, and all the water was bone-chilling. Each time I stepped out of a stream, my feet and legs felt powerfully aware, reveling in the suddenly warm air.

  Isis walked a little ways ahead of me, as she had since the second day out. She had a fear of being left behind, and on that day she hadn't been able to keep up with my pace. I was not always happy walking in the back, following her pace, but it seemed like a necessary compromise. Most of the time I was so absorbed in the sounds of the forest around inc and the feeling of the trail underfoot that I barely noticed her presence just ahead. We almost always walked within sight of each other, but we seldom talked.

  In midafternoon, under a canopy of second-growth birches as thin as my wrist, Isis stopped so suddenly that I nearly ran into her.

  "What?" I said, slightly annoyed.

  "Shh." She pointed to a bush beside the trail ahead. It took a moment for my mind to focus around what I saw there, and when it did, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Just beside the trail, there was a raccoon, crouching in an odd position. In broad daylight. It hadn't moved when we came into view.

  Before we left for the Trail, a wildlife biologist friend had warned me: "Rabies is on the upswing in the East" Animals acting abnormally-nocturnal creatures out by daylight hours, wild animals that didn't spook or even appear to notice when humans came close-I knew these were danger signs. I tried to remember the symptoms of rabies: first, the hydrophobia, a fear of water and an inability to swallow. Then a rage, in which the animal staggers madly around, foaming at the mouth, biting anything it can get, and lastly a stupor leading to death. It seemed like a bad way to go.

  I looked again at the raccoon up ahead. It still hadn't moved out of the patch of sunlight. Maybe it was in the last stages of the disease, too weak to move. Then again, maybe not. As I watched, the animal roused itself from the crouch and staggered across the trail with a sickly, lurching gait. It was hard to see clearly in the dappled shade, but there seemed to be a white string of drool hanging from its muzzle. The raccoon came to a stop on the other side of the trail, still close to the footpath.

  "Now what?"

  "Maybe if we throw something, you know, not at it but toward it, maybe it'll move" Isis picked up a section of a rotting birch log as she said this, and lobbed it to land in the bushes a few feet from the sick raccoon. The creature didn't stir. She threw another chunk of wood, closer this time, and still it didn't move.

  "Maybe we should just run past it," she said. "It doesn't seem like it can move very fast"

  "Okay, but I'd feel better if I had a staff or something."

  We picked up some maple branches that lay by the trail and quickly peeled off the twigs, making ourselves stout five-foot poles. I could feel adrenaline coursing through my veins, heightening my perceptions. I could see every leaf on every twig, hear all the separate birdsongs and rustlings at once. Balancing the poles in our hands, ready to fend off an attack, we ran past the bush where the raccoon lay. Once again, it didn't move. I caught a glimpse of it as we ran by; its fur was tattered and mangy, and what I had thought was drool was instead a cluster of porcupine needles stuck through its lower lip.

  "Maybe that's why it's sick," Isis said, when we had run a safe distance away and stopped to catch our breath. "You saw the porcupine needles, too, didn't you?"

  "Yes," I said darkly. "But what would possess a raccoon to attack a porcupine in the first place?"

  That night at Horseshoe Canyon Lean-to, we were still a little jumpy. The clouds had come over and the sky threatened rain, casting a palpable gloom over the clearing in front of the shelter. Matt and Blue Skies were already there. They sat on the porcupine trap cooking dinner, the quiet hiss of their stoves providing a backdrop to the watery calls of two wood thrushes in the trees outside. They waved as we walked up the side trail to the shelter.

  "Hey, guys. What's up?"

  We told them about the raccoon, our story coming out in a jumble of incoherent sentences. Matt looked alarmed.

  "How close was this to the shelter?"

  "Oh, come on!" Blue Skies said. "It's not like we're going to hike any farther tonight anyway."

  "And that raccoon wasn't going very far, that's for sure," I added.

  "I remember some stealth sites down by the river, a couple miles from here," Matt offered earnestly, but there were no takers. It was getting darker by the minute outside, and not just with evening; we would have rain that night, without a doubt. Somehow the thought of tenting in the rain, isolated and wet, was much less appealing than staying in the crowded, dry shelter, even with the threat of a rabid raccoon nearby.

  We stepped over the porcupine trap and set our packs down on the shelter floor. Every night the system became a little more streamlined, and it took us less time to "move in": roll out our air mattresses and sleeping bags, put on another layer of warm clothing against the chill of night, take out the stove and pot and that night's food, hang our food bags on the mouse hangers, and stash our empty packs in a corner of the shelter. By now the process was almost automatic.

  As we finished, the little dog Molly came bounding up the trail, her ears flopping.

  "Molly will protect us from that raccoon, won't you, girl," Blue Skies said, as the dog ran up for a pat on the head.

  Tenbrooks came up the side trail a moment later, rubbing his hands together. "Chilly evenin'," he said. "This'd be a good night for a fire, if that rain holds off."

  "Good idea." Isis sprang into action. She unclipped the hatchet from its pouch in her pack, and set off toward a large spruce blowdown back in the woods.

  O.D. and Bugbiter, the two hikers we'd met in the Monson Laundromat, came up the path to the shelter. O.D. was a man in his mid-fifties, with short gray hair and a few days' worth of salt-and-pepper beard on his rounded cheeks. Bugbiter looked about eighteen, a kid with curly blond hair and a slightly bemused smile. He waved as they came in.

  "Glad we got here before the rain," O.D. said.

  Isis came back just then, barefoot and hauling a load of brush and spruce branches. I jumped over the porcupine trap to help break up the wood. As O.D. caught sight of our feet, he laughed with joy.

  "Holy shit! It's you! You're real! Andy-Bugbiter-and I saw your footprints all through the wilderness, and I thought it was a practical joke, you know, somebody with a staff that had a bare footprint on the end or something ... And then when I met you in town, you had shoes on ... But it's really you" He grinned, his twinkling gray eyes flashing from his lined face.

  "Yeah, that's us," Isis said.

  "The barefoot sisters," he said. "The Barefoot Sisters"

  We had chosen our trail names before we started hiking, but here was a name that had truly come to us on the Trail. At the moment he said it, I knew the name would stay with us. Isis and jackrabbit, the Bare/i'ot Sisters.

  O.D. and Bugbiter introduced themselves to Matt and Blue Skies and Tenbrooks.

  "O.D.? There's gotta be a story behind that one," Tenbrooks said.

  "It's 'cause dad's an old dude,' Bugbiter said.

  "Old Dude, Old Duffer, Obviously Deluded ... stands for a lot of things," he said with a wry grin.

  "And what about Bugbiter? What's the story there?"

  "Well, I always get bitten more than anybody else ... So one night in the Wilderness I was lying there, getting eaten alive as usual, and dad goes, `You need a trail name.' So I go, `How about Bugbiter?"' He shrugged eloquently. "I was tired, you know? It made sense at the time."


  Waterfall came up the trail soon after them, and all of us filled up the shelter with damp gear and smelly bodies. It began to drizzle outside, sure enough, but by that time Isis had coaxed the damp spruce branches into flame. The little blaze crackled and sputtered in the firepit but did not go out. Rain made plinking sounds on the fiberglass root and a gentle sort of hissing against the leaves outside.

  We packed into the shelter in our sleeping bags and made room for one more; Alan, the man we had met at Leeman Brook just outside Monson, came in at dusk. The fire was still going, smoky but bright. In his lightcolored clothing, he seemed to glow in flickering orange against the muted blue-gray backdrop of the rainy woods. He walked painstakingly, leaning on his poles, but I caught a glimpse of his wide smile when the coals flared up.

  "I didn't think I'd make it here before dark," he said. "That was a long day for me, considering when I started."

  Various voices rose from the interior of the shelter, offering congratulations. I remembered Alan saying that he'd taken twenty days to get through the Wilderness. I had marveled at his determination, but at the time, I hadn't imagined he would make it much farther. He had seemed too citified, too fastidious and well-mannered, to stay on the Trail very long. Here he was, though, still lugging his pack, and grinning broadly.

  After we had all cooked and eaten supper, we lay in the shelter listening to the rain. The fire was still spluttering on the grate. Isis added some pine branches, which flared up to illuminate the clearing.

  "We ought to tell sonic stories, with a campfire like that." Tenbrooks said.

  "Ooh, I've got a scary one," came a young voice that I recognized as Bugbiter's. "I )id you guys ever hear about the Purple I)olly%"

  "No, no scary stories tonight;" Blue Skies said from next to me. "We had enough of a scare from hearing about that raccoon."

  "How about a song%" Alan said, and sounds of assent came from all around. He began a ribald Scottish ballad. His voice was a startlingly clear and rich tenor, and he rolled the words off his tongue with such joyful abandon that we all rolled with laughter. I silently revised my opinion of him. He was not as prudish as I had imagined, and the depth I had seen in his eyes was not just melancholy. There was more to him than I had seen before. We exploded in applause when he finished.