Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  We were halfway around the mountain before any of us noticed what was wrong. Waterfall paused and pulled out her map. She frowned at the paper. "Y'all, aren't we supposed to go over this mountain, not around it?"

  I looked up and down the trail: no white blazes in sight. We hiked back the way we'd come; sure enough, at the Cog tracks, we'd been in such a hurry to escape the conductor's coal that we'd gone in the wrong direction. As soon as we started toward the peak, the clouds closed over us. The higher we climbed, the darker they grew. Soon a thin, driving rain began to fall.

  "No matter what the map says, I'm not so sure we should go over this mountain. It doesn't seem to like us," I said.

  Jackrabbit grimaced. "Yeah, I get the same feeling."

  "It's me," said Waterfall glumly. "This happens every time I go campin' or get to a mountain peak. Y'all remember that hailstorm in the Bigelows? I was on West Peak when it started. On my prep hike for the A.T., I nearly drowned in a flash flood. And one time, when there was a drought in Georgia, a friend of mine who lives down there asked me to camp in her backyard. It worked; there was a storm that night and the drought ended. That's one of the reasons for my name. I make water fall from the sky. I'm sorry, y'all. I shouldn't have come with you"

  She looked terribly despondent, with rain dripping off the ends of her blond pigtails. I cast about for anything I might say to cheer her.

  "It's not you," I said. "The weather in the Whites is notoriously had. You can't take the blame for it. It's controlled by-by Murphy, the guy who made up Murphy's Law. You know, `anything that can go wrong, will go wrong"'

  "Yeah," said jackrabbit, catching on. "The Evil Poltergeist Murphy. He was the only poltergeist in history clever enough to get himself elected to Congress. But he blew it when he wrote that law. Too controversial"

  "So how'd he end up controllin' the weather in a beautiful place like this?" Waterfall gestured toward the few feet of rockslide that were all we had for a view at that moment.

  We were a hundred yards from the peak when the sky turned to water. I've never seen anything like it, even in Southern thunderstorms where the pent-up heat of August afternoons crackles through the clouds, loosing a deluge. It felt as though someone had turned on an enormous faucet over my head; I could scarcely breathe. On either side of me, I saw Waterfall and jackrabbit struggling through the same wall of water. After what seemed like hours, we reached the observatory at the peak and flung ourselves under a corner of the roof.

  "You were right," gasped Waterfall. "That wasn't me. I've brought on some pretty bad weather in my life, but I don't have the keys to Niagara"

  "Notch Murphy!" said jackrabbit.

  After losing so much time at Madison Hut, we avoided doing any more work-for-stays in the Whites, but we couldn't escape Murphy. Drizzle and cold fog soaked our clothes and wrinkled the skin of our hands and feet as if we'd spent too long in the bathtub. The hordes of dayhikers who crowded the peaks began to plague us also. All they ever wanted to talk about was our feet, and they all asked the same four or five questions. Nine out of ten began the conversation by exclaiming, "Barefoot! Are you crazy?" The other one out of ten, thinking himself very clever, asked sarcastically, "Have you forgotten something?" Some wanted to poke the soles of our feet, others wanted to take pictures. Most of them ignored Waterfall outright, but a few snidely asked her why she was wearing boots.

  "Probably for the same reason you are," she'd quip with her habitual good humor, but I could see that her smile didn't reach her eyes.

  On the day we hiked down from Mount Washington, we must have crossed paths with fifty or sixty dayhikers: five "Have you forgotten sonme- thing?"s, and so many people skeptical about our sanity that we lost count. Early in the day, a man had asked to take a photo of us, and then, when we all posed with our arms around each other's shoulders, he'd peered suspiciously over his camera and asked Waterfall what she was doing in the picture. Jackrabbit and I stood there with our mouths hanging open, too shocked to tell him off. He must've gotten a picture in which we looked as stupid as all the dayhikers seemed to think we were.

  By the late afternoon, jackrabbit and I sighed aloud each time a human form appeared in the fog ahead of us, and even Waterfall had stopped trying to get in a "Hi, how are you?" before the questions about our feet started. We had just reached treeline, and we were looking forward to finding ourselves a stealth site soon, when we ran into a family of four: father, mother, and two sullen-looking teens, all dressed as if they'd stepped out of the pages of an outdoor apparel catalog. The father, in the lead, assailed us with the usual questions.

  "Barefoot! Are you crazy? Doesn't it hurt? Why are you doing that to yourselves? Are you some kind of religious martyrs or something?"

  We gave him the usual answers.

  "We do this because it's comfortable for us. I stub my toes every once in a while, but that hurts for a few minutes and heals in a few days. I've seen hikers with boots whose blisters lasted for weeks. I guess there is something religious about walking barefoot-being in touch with the earth-hut not martyrdom, kind of the opposite. And yes, we are crazy."

  With this last pronouncement, jackrabbit gave him a grin that must have more than satisfied his curiosity on that point. "Er, well, okay," he muttered and walked off down the trail. His family followed, and as the second teenager shoved past us, she carelessly kicked the hiking stick on which Waterfall was balancing most of her weight. The girl didn't even stop to apologize.

  Jackrabbit helped Waterfall to her feet, and we all sat down on a nearby ledge.

  "Y'all know I have trouble with my balance," Waterfall said as she got to her feet. "I fall down all the time anyway. But when a person makes me fall .."Her voice trailed off. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

  I leaned over and gave her a one-armed hug, then reached into the top of my pack and pulled out the extra-dark bar of French chocolate that my moni had sent us in Gorham. Mustering all the poise and authority I could, I announced, "This is a situation that calls for chocolate"

  The chocolate, a cozy stealth site, and a few chapters of Harry P(wer put us all in better humor; still, niy faith in human kindness was at a pretty low ebb when we stopped to check the register at Mizpah Hut the next morning. We were flipping through the heavy, leather-hound torte, hoping to find some message from our friends ahead, when a shadow fell across the page. I looked up to see a smiling young man in an AMC apron, holding out a tray with three enormous slices of carrot cake.

  "Would you like some cake?" he asked.

  "I'm sorry, I don't have any money," I told hinm.

  His eyes widened a little behind his glasses. "I'm not selling it. I'm giving it to you. You don't need money."

  He put the tray down and backed away a few steps, as though offering food to a shy and potentially dangerous aninial.

  "Thank you, this is a real treat," said Waterfall, reaching for a slice.

  "Thanks," I mumbled, through a mouthful of cake.

  "Yeah, thanks," said jackrabbit, "this is awesome!"

  The words of gratitude seemed to encourage the young man; he stepped forward again, then sat down on the bench across from us.

  "Sav, are you the sisters I heard about, the ones who hike barefoot?" he asked.

  "Yeah, that's us,' said jackrabbit, tipping her head toward me.

  "Wow. How does it feel?"

  "Great," she answered. "Every stretch of trail has a different texture; spruce needles feel soft and a little springy like a carpet, moss is even softer, like walking on feathers, and the granite backs of mountains-when the sun warms them, it feels like you're walking on the scales of sleeping dragons"

  "That sounds wonderful. Maybe I should try it" He turned toward Watertal. "Are you thru-hiking too? Southbound? Cool. I've heard that people who go southbound tend to be the more experienced hikers-you have to know what you're doing if you start with the Hundred Mile Wilderness. Did anything on the trail surprise you?"

  "I've been plannin' this h
ike for ten ),,ears," she answered, "collectin' the gear I needed, readin' people's trail journals on the Internet, goin' on short backpackin'trips on sty weeks off from work. Every day when I wake up I'm surprised to be here, doin' what I've alhvays dreamed of.

  jackrabbit

  s we descended into Crawford Notch, we traded stories to keep our spirits up. The fog and rain continued, and it was chilly on the high slopes. My foot still hurt. The insistent pain of the first day had given way to a dull ache that occupied a distant corner of my brain. My knees worried me more-they were beginning to feel as though they contained tiny grains of sand. I tried not to think about what kind of damage these nonstop notches were doing. My hip was painful, too. I stretched every morning before leaving the tent, and it seemed to help for a while.

  "Did y'all ever watch Gilligan's Islanid?" Waterfall asked.

  "No, we never had TV growing up," Isis said.

  I grabbed a spruce tree and lowered myself down to the next ledge of crumbly brown rock in a modified Piscataquis Pirouette. "Explains why we're not fit for muggle society."

  "Y'all missed out!" She giggled. "I used to have a thing for Gilligan. When I was about five, I was convinced I'd marry him when I grew up!"

  "I used to have a thing for Captain Kirk," Isis said, a bit sheepishly. "Our Aunt Nancy has a whole bunch of Star Trek tapes, and she used to let us watch them when we visited. The old Star Trek, you know, the classic series."

  "Oh, that was such a great show!" Waterfall sat down on a rock momentarily, doing a Nesuntabunt Five-wheel Drive.

  "I think my favorite thing about it was the sets." Isis turned around to scramble backwards down a steep pitch of rock. "You could tell that everything was made of paper macho and tinfoil. It was so ... so campy."

  "Yeah, and you always kind of knew what was going to happen," I said. "Like, Captain Kirk falls in love with a beautiful woman, and you just know she'll be dead before the episode is over. Or if one of the crew people, what do you call them ..

  "Redshirts."

  "Thanks, Isis. If a redshirt beams down to a planet without any of the main characters, you know something bad is going to happen"

  Our talking made the steep, knee-grinding descent go by faster. My legs shook from effort, and my hip hurt, but I was still so glad to be on the Trail. The air felt warmer down in the valley. Just before the final descent the clouds lifted a little, giving us a view of a deciduous forest in high summer green and the bottom of a cliff face across the way. The clouds still cut off the walls of the notch above us; it was impossible to tell how far we had come down or how far we would have to ascend the next day. It was strange to see the bright green of the leaves-on the ridges everything had been gray with mist, sub dued and colorless. It had been so cold up there I had half expected to descend into autumn, although it was just the end ofJuly.

  Where the trail crossed the Saco River, we saw a young hiker filtering water. He had a kind-looking heart-shaped face and close-cropped blond hair, and he wore a red shirt the exact color of the old Star Trek crew uniforms. My first thought was this: A redshirt beamed doinu! fIi''re about to be blasted into smithereens! I controlled my impulse to run and managed to call a greeting without laughing out loud.

  "Hi. I'm Solid," he said. He had a sweet lopsided smile. I thought up a quick mnemonic device to remember his name: He'_s /ilterinq seater. Liquid, Solid.

  We gave our names.

  "Southbound?" Isis asked. From the general grubbiness of his pack and clothing and the sculptured muscles of his legs, it was evident that he was thru-hiking.

  He nodded.

  "When did you start?" I asked, as I slung my pack off. I could use a rest, I thought, and what better way to spend it than talkisg to a cute snuy? A southbound cute.'uy.

  "Fourth ofJuly," he said. My spirits sank a little as I calculated exactly how fast he was hiking. Sure, he was cute, but at that pace he wasn't going to stick around for long.

  "Man, you're flying!" I said. "You must have been in pretty good shape starting the Trail."

  He nodded. "Yeah. I just graduated from West Point.

  Waterfall frowned. "I thought you had to go right into the service from West Point. How'd you get time to hike?"

  Solid looked pensive for a moment, a shadow of regret in his hazel eyes. "Medical discharge. I can't serve in the Army-I have diabetes."

  "When did you find out Isis asked.

  "Senior year, just before graduation"

  "That must have been tough," Waterfall said.

  "Yeah." He shrugged. "I'd always planned on being a career ot}icer."

  Isis made appropriate sounds of commiseration.

  "And now, well, I'm trying to find some other path in life. I like the Trail. I have a lot of time to think out here"

  "How do you manage with diabetes on the Trail? I thought insulin had to be refrigerated." Inwardly, I kicked myself for asking a question like that: 7cch Sergeant jackrabbit steers the conversation hack to the mundane physical plane.

  "I'm not actually taking insulin," he said. "If I get enough exercise and eat well, I can manage my blood sugar levels pretty well without it."

  "Cool." I fell silent, reflecting on how much "enough exercise" would have to be. Isis and I had been hiking for almost six weeks, while Solid had hiked for only four. He would have to be averaging almost fifteen miles a day. I couldn't imagine keeping up that pace even for a day in this kind of terrain. I wanted to spend more time with him, though, and I could tell that Isis and Waterfall did too.

  "We have to pick up a mail drop at the hostel here," I said. "D'you want to join us there for the evening?"

  "No, thanks." He screwed the lid onto his water bottle and put the filter away. "I like to stay out of towns when I can"

  "I'd rather be in the woods myself," I said with real regret. "Take care, and good luck, Solid."

  "You guys take care, too. It was good to meet you."

  At the road, we stood for a long time in the gritty spray of passing cars, thumbing. Most of the traffic seemed to be SUVs and expensive minivans, and no one stopped. Through the tinted windows, we could just see the drivers' expressions of disdain.

  "Notch!" I swore. "Maybe we should just walk to the notchin' hostel."

  Waterfall consulted her Data Book. "It's four miles down," she said. "But there's a state park about a mile from here. We might have better luck hitchin' there."

  We started walking, and in a few minutes we heard the gravel crunch behind us. It was an old silver Chevy pickup, emblazoned with bumper stickers. The laden gun rack behind the driver made me nervous, but I relaxed a bit when I recognized the A.T. symbol plastered in the cab window.

  "Going to the hostel?" the driver called. He was in his late fifties, with thinning gray hair and ice-blue eyes.

  "Yeah, thanks!"

  "I gotta warn you, place is more expensive than it oughta be. Hikers been telling me"

  "We have to pick up a mail drop there," Isis said.

  "Huh. Climb in, then"

  In the back of the truck, we hunkered down behind the cab and held a shouted conversation over the sound of wind and the rush of tires on the wet road.

  "How expensive do you think it'll be?" I yelled over to Waterfall. She carried the Iiiru-Hikers' Companion, a book with detailed information on lodging and services in towns, so she was our main source for this sort of information.

  "The Companion said $16 a night," she shouted back. This seemed reasonable-most of the hostels we had visited had charged $12 to $15.

  "Not had for a bunk and a shower," Isis called. "And we don't have much of a choice. It's too late to just pick up our mail drop and hike out"

  Half her words were drowned out in the roar of passing trucks, but we understood and nodded. I felt hopeless, powerless, drained of energy The constant wet and grayness was dragging me down. My knees ached, my hip sent a spark of pain through me whenever the truck lilt a bump. I reached down to touch my bruised foot. It felt hot and tender under my finger
s. lily body's /ollinc. apart, I thoil~ht. Can my soil) and spirit 1)c fir behind?

  The pickup stopped outside a squat white building with vinyl siding. Two smaller white cabins stood nearby in the half-dead lawn, with the edge of the spruce forest beyond them just visible through the tog. We jumped out of the truck and thanked the driver. He sped off in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

  When I saw the sign proclaiming "Crawford Notch Hostel," I had to laugh. I felt almost embarrassed to read it; I realized that "notch" had become a four-letter word in my vocabulary, and it was as though the sign said "Crawford Shit Hostel." Inside, there was a sparsely furnished common room with framed pictures of jagged mountains and a doorway leading into a kitchen/dining room area. Across from the entrance, a thin dark-haired man sat behind a desk covered with tourist pamphlets.

  "Welcome to Crawford Notch," he said. (It was all I could do not to laugh out loud at the word "notch") "What can I do for you?"

  "We have to pick up a mail drop," Isis said.

  "Very well. Name?"

  We gave our real names. They sounded strange and false to my ears. For an instant, I imagined what it would be like to leave the Trail, to go back to the world where I was Susan, not jackrabbit. I thought of warm, dry rooms out of the rain, of pianos and books and fresh food. The pain of my injuries gnawed at me, but at the thought of leaving the Trail, a larger pain welled up: the threat of failure. I had set out to hike the AT., and I planned to do my utmost to finish it. The image of Blade flashed across my mind. Is this heroic? Alit I doint' a great deed just by staying out here in the cold raid, beatuit' myself up? Or is this lust like eating it Stomper: a neat trick, but rather gross and meaningless?

  "Will you be staying the night?" the man asked.

  "Yeah."

  "You're in luck! There are three spaces left in Cabin Two. That's $20 apiece. Igo you want showers?"