Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  I spent most of my time in the Panarchy library. The room had an ambience of opulent squalor. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves bore rows of ancient leather-bound books, their gilded titles reflecting the dingy light from a high window. More recent volumes, mainly paperbacks, occupied the lowest shelves, and a stack of Hi,Oi Times magazines spilled over a corner of the ruined Persian carpet. I sat on the green crushed-velvet sofa, gingerly positioning myself between unidentifiable stains, with my foot elevated on the coffee table (it was some dark tropical wood, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and marred with countless circular stains from beer mugs). The big orange plastic bottle of ibuprofen, now half-full, was propped on the table next to my notebook. I wrote a few letters and made a stab at reading Anna Karenina.

  One evening, Isis came in with a visitor. He was a man in his sixties, small and wiry, with long white hair and a beard down to the middle of his chest. His eyes sparkled with an inner light.

  "I'm Nimblewill Nomad," he said. "It's such a pleasure to meet you, jackrabbit. Your sister told me a lot about you."

  "Good to meet you," I said, leaning forward from the couch to shake his hand. "Are you thru-hiking, Nomad?"

  He took a seat in a damaged velvet armchair across the room. When he smiled, his eyes gleamed even brighter. "I'm hiking the Eastern Continental Trail, from Cape Gaspe in Quebec down to Key West"

  I whistled. "Quite a trek."

  "I hiked it northbound a few years ago."

  "Oh, Waterfall told us about you! It's a real honor to meet you!" I remembered now-Waterfall had mentioned him several times. He had been a doctor until his retirement a few years ago. Then, with almost no backpacking experience, he had decided to hike from Florida to Canada. Overcoming numerous setbacks and injuries, he had completed his trek and become something of a hero in the Trail world.

  "The Trail made a new man of me" Nimblewill Nomad leaned forward in the chair, his eyes closed. His voice had the spellbinding intensity of a story teller's. "I used to be a very different person from the one you see before you now. I was jealous, and petty, and small-minded. Every step on that hike, I left all that behind me. I became a wanderer, a Nomad" He spoke about the freedom of the Trail and the open road, occasionally pausing to recite his poetry, written in the style of Robert Service. His slightly archaic speech and his formidable appearance made him seem like a character from a legend. Isis and I listened closely to his stories.

  "But enough of my adventures!" he finally said. "Tell me about yours, my friends!"

  Stories were a kind of currency out here, I realized again. The Trail community, always in motion, was held together by the thin fabric of stories. In the library that evening, I felt the tenuous connection linking us to Waterfall, now miles ahead, and to the rest of the Trail world. I felt such gratitude.

  We told a few stories: the day we met Starman; the night of Tenbrooks's birthday party, when he divided the "cake" for everyone in the shelter; the moose skeleton the nobos had told us about. I recounted my adventure in Mahoosuc Notch, getting stuck under a boulder, and recited the poem I had written in the rain outside Andover.

  "Wonderful, wonderful!" Nimblewill Nomad beamed. "We are of the same tribe, you and I. You will go far."

  I sighed. "Not with my foot like this."

  His forehead wrinkled with concern. "Your sister told inc about that, jackrabbit. I'm so sorry." He was silent a moment. "Things happen for a reason. Sometimes it may be hard to see the reason. Maybe there's something else you need to do right now."

  I sighed. "I can't imagine getting off, after we've come four hundred miles"

  "It's not getting any better," Isis said quietly, and I had to admit it was true. Almost two weeks had passed, and the swelling had hardly gone down. I could walk now, hobbling along, but it was still difficult to bear any weight.

  "You can always come back to the Trail," Nomad said. He looked straight at me, his eyes shining and intense. "The Trail will be here. You have to consider what's best for you ... But let me tell you another story: did you hear about the Tuba Man?" It was a welcome distraction. I didn't want to think about my foot anymore, or what I would do if I left the Trail now.

  "Tuba Man?" Isis said. "I just heard rumors. Weird stuff. Is he real?"

  "Oh, yes," Nomad said with a sparkling grin. "I saw him in town just this afternoon. He carries a tuba in his pack"

  "A full-sized tuba?" I couldn't believe it. He nodded. "Those things must weigh, like, twenty pounds!"

  "Actually thirty-five, he told nie, counting the mouthpiece and the music he carries."

  "What does he do with his other gear?" Isis asked.

  "Oh, it was stuffed in and around the tuba. He had his sleeping bag and a " jar of peanut butter in the bell."

  "Does lie play it?" I asked.

  I didn't get to hear it, but they say he plays quite well." Nimblewill Nomad chuckled. "I hope so, if he's going to lug the thing all the way to Georgia."

  "He's THRU-hiking?" I was incredulous. "Thru-hiking with a TUBA? I thought he must be a section hiker or something. This guy must be totally nuts!" Privately, I hoped I would get to meet him.

  Nomad smiled. "People say the same thing about you two"

  A few days later, as afternoon shadows lengthened on the grimy wood floors of Panarchy, I sat in the library reading. Most of the people who came through the door were kind, offering sympathy or an amusing conversation. Still, sometimes I wished I could just disappear. A few people seemed to be there just to gawk, or worse, to gloat over the downfall of the Barefoot Sisters.

  I was reaching down to adjust my ice pack when one of these characters came in. He was a prototypical northbounder, slim, bearded, dressed in a ratty tank top and shorts.

  "So, you're one of the Barefoot Sisters."

  "Jackrabbit," I said, extending a hand.

  He didn't give his name or bother to shake my hand. "I heard you hurt your ankle. That's so unfortunate, isn't it? But given, I mean, the way you hiked and all ..." He let his words drift off with a self-congratulatory smile.

  "It's not my ankle. And really, I don't think being barefoot had much to do with it. I've seen people in boots get worse-"

  "Well, if you got an ankle injury, what you want to do is take lots of ibuprofen-"

  "It's not lily ankle." I indicated the large ibuprofen bottle sitting next to my foot, but he seemed to be on a roll.

  "Take lots of ibuprofen, and get some ice on it-" here I pointed wordlessly at the ice pack on my foot-"and make sure to get some rest. Yeah, rest and ice and vitamin 1. That's so unfortunate .. "

  I was sick of his smug voice and useless advice, and I shot hint a look of pure poison. Finally, something reached him. "Well, listen, um, Barefoot Sister, it's been really nice to meet you " I kept the glare going while he backed toward the door. "Well, 1, um, hope that ankle gets better soon ... remember what I said, rest, ice, vitamin I ..:'

  I opened Anna Karenina, which I was beginning to hate, and in my mind Vronsky took on the features of the smug northbounder. What the hell does she Irallt Irith a marl like that, I thought. It's not i►'orth it, Aiina;,,'et out obit Irhile you still ran ... but the book moved on its inexorable course toward tragedy, and the day waned outside, and my foot still wouldn't hear much weight.

  As the sun set, I leaned on Isis's arni and hobbled down to the edge of town, where the concrete highway bridge stretched across the Connecticut River. The fierce sky, orange and red and black, glimmered inverted in the water. The bridge had three concrete pylons with balls of stone set on their tops. In the harsh light, they looked like the monuments of a lost empire. We walked out to the central post. I laid my hand on the polished square of granite set in the cement and let my fingers trace the letters: I 'T / NH. The last state line I would cross on the A.T. for a long time. I took one step to the other side, for ceremony, and then we turned around and I limped hack to town, lily sister supporting half my weight. It was the twelfth of August. On the sixteenth, our ►nother drove out to Hanover
and took me home to the coast of Maine.

  Isis

  he preparations for jackrabbit's departure didn't leave me much time to worry about what I'd be doing after she went home. I sorted through our belongings, making sure that the water filter, stove, and cooking pot went into my pack. I transferred some money from my savings account and bought myself a solo tent at the Dartmouth outfitter's store. I also bought a candle lantern, for light and comfort in the long nights of the coming fall. I shopped for my resupply and packed it into Ziplocs, a task that was reassuring, now, in its familiarity. In midafternoon our mom showed up, bringing wine and cheese for a farewell picnic and a tin of homemade cookies to top off my bulging food bag.

  It wasn't until the car pulled out of Panarchy's driveway, carrying away my hiking partner of six weeks and our two-person tent, that I realized just what I had gotten myself into. I was going to be hiking alone. Outside of a few nervous moments at the beginning of our hike, when I'd worried that my more athletic sister would leave me in the dust, I had never considered the possibility. From the first time we talked about hiking the A.T., in a camp in the Andes with Maineak, I'd thought of the trip as something we'd do together, as sisters and as friends.

  Jackrabbit was my reason for being on the Trail. Walking through rain and sleet, eating food I'd gotten sick of weeks before, and falling behind our other companions seemed much easier to bear when I had a hiking partner who could spin our tribulations into verses of mock-epic poetry. Besides, jackrabbit was my protector. To all the friends from home who worried about two girls going into the woods alone, who asked if we were bringing guns and whistles and cans of pepper spray, I had explained, "My sister's a black belt in Tae Kwon Igo." Even when she was injured and grouchy, her presence gave me the comfort of feeling useful; caring for her kept my mind off my own fears.

  I packed slowly, pausing every few minutes to make myself a cup of tea, eat another snack, walk out on the porch to check the weather. Those clouds ol'er the rifer loot' pretty dark. Maybe they're thunderclouds. Maybe I should stay here one dote ru;cht. But I'd long since worn out my welcome at the fiat houses, explaining jackrabbit's injury to an endless series of Dartmouth students, whose reactions ranged from mild concern to boredom to disdain as I begged them to let us stay beyond the usual two-night limit. With jackrabbit gone, I didn't have an excuse to trespass on their hospitality any longer.

  Resisting the urge to dump my new tent out on the floor one more time and make sure that all its components were accounted for, I wedged it into the left corner of my backpack. My food bag went in next to it, followed by my sweater and rain gear. I hefted my pack; it felt surprisingly light. I glanced around the basement one more time: sweaty stone walls, red lightbulbs dangling over the built-in bar, a few copies of High Times scattered among the sunken mattresses on the floor. Nothing of mine left there.

  IT iterlall's hiki,n solo, I reminded myself as I started up the stairs. And she's doin,h./ine. In her last e-mail, she'd told us that she was hiking with a couple named Firebreather and Fall Girl, who routinely hiked twenty- and even twenty-five-mile days. "I've finally hit my stride!" she'd written. Noll I'll never catch up u'th her, I thought bitterly.

  Outside, the clouds had thickened, covering all but the westernmost edge of the sky. I headed down the road that I'd walked so often before, going to the student union to listen to jackrabbit jam with Waterfall on the piano, or, later, lugging our gear back and forth between Alpha Theta and Panarchy. Two short blocks, a left turn, and I was on the Trail again. White blazes painted on telephone poles marked the path to the river, to the next state. And beyond that-all the way to Georgia, if I followed it that far. A flicker of excitement broke through my fear. What mountains waited for nee? What lakes and rivers farther south? What new friends would I meet along the way?

  Beyond the bridge, the trail followed a four-lane highway-not an auspicious start to the new state. All my dawdling at ('anarchy had put ute in Vermont just in time for evening rush hour. Cars moved past hardly taster than I was walking, tilling the air with noise and exhaust tunics. The cab of a van pulled abreast of me, and a woman's voice hollered out the window.

  "Hey, hiker, want some bread?"

  Probably a tourist on ber Ivay home from vacation, trying to get rid of a stale halfloaf of Wander Bread, I thought. But the politeness my mother had drilled into me, combined with a new hiker instinct to eat anything I could lay my hands on, compelled me to accept. I turned and smiled at her.

  "Sure, I'd love some"

  I caught a brief glimpse of a young woman with a light brown ponytail giving me the thumbs-up, before the truck moved ahead of me. As it passed, I noticed the logo stenciled on its side. Red Hen Baking Company-the local bakery that jackrabbit and I had decided was our favorite, after two weeks of sampling every kind of bread the Hanover Co-op had to offer. A hundred yards down the road, the woman pulled over, set a paper bag on the sidewalk, then hopped into the truck and drove off, before I had a chance to catch up and thank her.

  At the top of a long steep hill behind the village of Norfolk, Vermont, the trail finally left the pavement. I walked a mile or so into the woods before stopping in a stand of white pines to eat my bread. A doe walked past upslope of me. The sky had begun clearing; her coat blazed red-gold in a patch of sunlight. She glanced in my direction, flicked her tail back and forth, then bent her neck to nibble a few shoots of grass from the forest floor. I wished jackrabbit could have been there-but even as the thought crossed nay mind, I realized that the deer would never have come so close to the two of us together. We would have been practicing the poems we'd memorized, joking about the way the weather had changed for the better as soon as we got out of New Hampshire-we might not have noticed the deer, even if she had walked by. I smiled to myself. Companionship on the Trail had its pleasuresbut so did solitude.

  At Happy Hill Shelter, four miles past Norwich, I found the register full of messages from our friends ahead. Waterfall had invented a new Extreme Hiking Maneuver. "Today, Murphy helped me to perfect my form in the challenging Roundtop Root-ski," she wrote. "It's when you slide down a root and land on a body part other than your feet!" Nor'easter and Creen had left us a few lines of verse:

  In the cartoon sketched beneath the rhyme, Nor'easter was holding a sign that read, "JAC;KRA1313IT: We hope you are feeling back 100%!" I copied their drawing as best I could, so I could send it to my sister.

  The light was fading, and I was just about to go set up Illy tent, when I heard the tramp of boots coming down the shelter trail. A tall hiker with a busily beard strode into the clearing.

  "Hey, you must be one of the barefoot girls! I'm Woodsman," he greeted me. "I met a bunch of lobos that told me to keep an eye out for you. Is your sister okay, the one that broke her ankle in the Whites?"

  "She didn't break anything. She just got a bruise, but it's bad enough that she had to get off the Trail for a while."

  "Where'd she get off?" lie asked.

  "In Hanover. Today."

  "Man, that sucks. You must really miss her"

  Two more grungy, bearded mien walked out of the woods, the reek of sweat and well-used gear drifting ahead of them. Woodsman looked up and waved.

  "Hey, guys!" he called out. "There's one of the Barefoot Sisters here, and her sister just got off the Trail, so we have to cheer her up!"

  The men dropped their packs, grinning.

  "I can stand on my head and whistle the theme from 'Cheers,"' one of them offered.

  "Don't know how I can top that," said the other, shaking his head. "Let's see, um ... I can balance a spoon on my nose!"

  I stood up to greet them, laughing. If anyone had asked me, earlier in the day, what scared me most about the prospect of hiking solo, I probably would have answered, strange men in the woods at night. Here I was, four hours later, preparing to camp next to three men I had never net before. And I didn't feel remotely threatened by the situation. Of course I didn't-they were hikers, part of my tribe.

>   Later that night, I spread out my sleeping bag in my narrow, angular solo tent and lay back, watching a few stars flicker through the clear plastic window in its fly. I love this tent, I thought. I love this trail. Bread, ivildlile, friendly hobos, a rnessatJe from 1Gaiter/all. Stars between the branches overhead. Best of all, though, was the feeling of strength and confidence I'd gained in my first day alone. I had faced my fears, and they had vanished. I could hardly wait to see what the next day brought. Even if I was walking toward quagmires and scree slopes, I felt eager to test myself against them. For the first time, I realized that I wanted to continue the Trail-to finish the Trail-no matter what lay between me and Springer. Even if I hiked it all alone.

  I woke to dark clouds hanging over the treetops.

  "You're about to Lind out why we call this state Vermud," Woodsman told me at breakfast. The other two nobos, who were sitting at the front of the shelter lacing up their boots, nodded and scowled.

  "We've had nothing but rain for the past two weeks, all the way through Mosquitochusetts and Vermud," Woodsman continued. "God, I'm so glad I'll be in New Hampshire today. One of the prettiest states on the Trail, from what I've heard"

  I decided not to debunk the myths he'd heard about New Hampshire. Anyway, there was always a chance that he'd have good weather there. "Mud's kinda fun when you're hiking barefoot," I told him, wiggling my toes.

  "Yeah, I guess it would be" He laughed.

  "The state you're gonna hate is Pennsylvania," said the guy who could balance a spoon on his nose. "Tore illy boots all to hell."

  His companion winced, eyeing my feet. "Holy crap. Pennsylvania barefoot. Let's not even go there."

  "There's no way in hell I'd go back to Pennsylvania, barefoot or not," Woodsman said. He leapt to his feet and hefted his small pack. "Race you guys to Hanover," lie challenged his friends. "Cold beer and Prat houses, here we come!"