Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  "Ben and Jerry's!"

  "White Mountains!"

  "Woo-hoo!" The other two picked up their packs and bounded after Woodsman, laughing and shouting. As their voices faded in the distance, a wave of loneliness washed over me. Would the rest of my Trail friendships be this brief? All the lobos I knew-and all the other sobos of 2000, if they had any fear of winter-were at least ten days ahead of nie. From now on, the only fellow hikers I could hope to encounter were nobos, who I'd talk with for an evening at most, before we went our opposite ways.

  By the time I finished eating and packed up my gear, a fine drizzle was falling, darkening the trunks of oaks and hemlocks. I sang out loud as I walked, trying to cheer myself up. The songs sounded hollow, though, without their harmony parts; my lone voice seemed too thin to fill the space between the trees.

  A few miles into the morning, I reached West Hartford, Vermont: cracked asphalt streets meandering down to an iron-gray river, small clapboard houses with goats fenced in the yards, and a highway with no exit ramps sweeping around the outskirts of the town. Out in the open, I felt the drizzle soaking into my clothing, so I stopped in the shelter of a crumbling cement wall to get out my Gore-Tex jacket. When I stood up again, I saw a group of hobos, three men and a woman, walking up the hill toward me.

  "That looks like one of the Barefoot Sisters!" exclaimed the woman.

  "Check out her feet! They're for real!" said the gray-haired man to her right.

  "What, you didn't believe Waterfall? Of course they're for real," said a nian with black curls and round rosy cheeks, who was standing at the front of the group. "['in Gilligan," he told me.

  I'd never seen the show his name came from, but the man certainly fit Waterfall's descriptions of the sitcom character she'd had a crush on as a teenager. Short, dark, and cute. I struggled to hold back laughter. "Hi, I'm Isis," I said. "You guys know Waterfall?"

  "Know her?" said Gilligan. "I proposed to her two weeks ago."

  "Wow. How long had you known each other?" I asked.

  "About thirty seconds. I introduced myself, and she said, `Gilligan, my darling! We meet at last! I've loved you since I was, oh, about twelve years old!' Well, it sounded to me like we were destined for each other, so I dropped down on one knee in the trail. I asked her to marry nie and hike northbound and change her trail name to Mary Ann."

  "What did she say?"

  He hung his head, sighing. "She didn't want to change her name. So much for destiny."

  Before we parted, I asked them what the Trail was like ahead and whether they had any recommendations about places to stay in Vermont.

  "Go to Dan Quinn's, on Vermont 12," said Gilligan. "That guy rocks. We stopped in around noon yesterday, just to see if there was a register in the barn, and next thing we knew, Dan was ordering us pizza for lunch."

  I remembered that Waterfall had mentioned Dan Quinn-she'd heard from friends that he had a piano. Before we split up, she and jackrabbit had looked forward to playing it together.

  "You should definitely stop for breakfast at the West Hartford General Store," said the woman, who'd introduced herself as Candy Lady. "It's right on the Trail, just a few blocks farther"

  "A breakfast place right on the Trail?" I asked. "Sounds great. Any more advice you guys can offer?

  "Just one thing," said Doc, the older man. "Are you carrying any shoes? Good. You'll have to put them on when you reach Pennsylvania."

  In the maple woods a mile or so past West Hartford, the rain began in earnest. Ick. I'm goinq to get uwet, I thought, as the first fat drops slapped down on the leaves overhead. I pulled the hood of my rain jacket tighter, laughing at myself. "Ick. Oh bother. Dear, dear, dear. " Why am I so prim, even when I'm talking to myself? Jackrabbit mould shout "Fuck the rain!" and glower as though her Frown could turn the clouds back.

  I tried it, but I couldn't muster enough anger to sound convincing. I was still comfortably sated with the home fries, eggs, and milkshake I'd had for my second breakfast and cheered by the messages friends had left us in the General Store's register. Besides, I kind of liked the rustle of raindrops hitting the leaves. The air smelled clean, sharp with tannins. A bluish mist hovered under the trees, and rose in ragged spires from the valleys. Birches at the edge of a field tossed their contorted white limbs in the air like dancers. I wonder why I ever disliked rain, I thought as I waded through the waist-high grass. Was I just taking jackrabbit's feelings_jier my own?

  In spite of my discovery that I didn't mind rain, I was reluctant to set up my tent in it. I stopped early for the night at Thistle Hill Shelter. When I got to the shelter, at four in the afternoon, it was almost empty. As the evening wore on, though, more and more grumpy, bedraggled nobos crowded in. It had been a long time since I'd noticed the reek of other hikers, but the damp, close air seemed to concentrate the odors of unwashed bodies and rotting boots. I ended up in the corner next to a scrawny eighteen-year-old boy, who spent the evening courting nee with much more enthusiasm than wit. By morning, I was glad to see that the sky had cleared.

  I hiked another short day to VT 12, stopping every few hours to graze on the blackberries that clustered along fence lines and overran untended fields. Late in the afternoon, I gathered a Nalgene-full and brought it with me to Ilan Quinn's. I hoped he would let me use his kitchen, along with enough flour, butter, and sugar to bake a pie.

  As I walked up to the three-story clapboard farmhouse, with beds of white lilies at the edge of its neatly mown lawn, I reassessed my chances of using the kitchen. Here was someone who seemed to be pretty well-todo, who probably thought of hikers as a favorite charity project. The fact that he gave us pizza and let us sleep in his barn didn't necessarily mean that he wanted a smelly stranger inside his house. I thought of the bored, super-cil- ious students who had shuffled us back and forth between their trat houses in Hanover. To the people along the Trail who offered hikers free or inexpensive lodging, we must seem like an endless river of wants and needs. A ride to town? A ride to the hospital? A shower? A piano? May I use your kitchen, please?

  In the vegetable garden beside the barn, a stocky, darkly tanned man with curly brown hair pulled weeds, pausing every once in a while to wipe his forehead with a dusty bandana.

  "Hi," I said to him. "Is this Dan Quinn's place?"

  "It sure is." He leaned over the split-rail fence, holding out a large, calloused hand. "Welcome. I'm Dan"

  "I'm Isis. 1, um, I brought some blackberries, and I hoped I could make VOL] a pie." I held out the Nalgene by way of explanation.

  He raised his eyebrows. "You want to cook for me?"

  "Uni, well ... yes."

  "I've been taking in hikers for five years," he said slowly, "and no one's ever offered to cook for me. Now, don't get inc wrong, hikers have done a lot of great things for Inc. They helped me dig this garden and convert the old woodshed into a studio for my girlfriend. Just a few days ago, a hiker mowed the lawn for Inc. But nobody's ever offered to hake inc a pie" He leaned his shovel against the barn and walked around the end of the fence. "Come on over to the house. You probably want to get cleaned up, and then I'll show you the kitchen."

  I washed my hair in the outdoor shower that I)an had set up for hikers, a wooden platform under his deck screened from the yard by a couple of scraps of tarp. Sunlight streamed through the deck's wooden slats, making the hot water sparkle. After I dried off and put on my cleanest clothes, l)an gave nee a tour of the house, starting with the kitchen and ending with the guest rooms and studies on the second floor. He was a carpenter, he told me, and he'd made a specialty of restoring old buildings. He was still working on his own house; the kitchen, gleaming with hardwood, copper, and slate, had been his latest project. I )own the hall was the den, followed by a living room nearly filled with an enormous grand piano. I thought how delighted jackrabbit would have been to see it; I could picture the rare smile, unselfconscious as a child's, that would have lighted her eves. I felt a pang of some sharp emotion-guilt, pity, or perhaps sim
ply longing for the music she Would have played. Ii'liat an, I doing here? I asked myself. 1171y ani 1 here, and she isn't?

  Upstairs, Dan led me through the library, the study, and two guest bedrooms.

  "Take your pick of the guest rooms," he said as we finished the tour.

  "I don't want to put you to any trouble," I told him. "I'll be fine staying in the barn."

  "In the barn? You can't stay in the barn. If you're going to cook for me, that makes you family. Please treat my house as your own."

  "All this for one pie that I haven't even made yet?" I asked. "I wish I had the time and ingredients to cook you a meal, at least."

  "Take a zero tomorrow. We can go shopping in the morning, and I'll buy whatever you need"

  I started to explain that I couldn't afford a zero; I was already weeks behind the southbound crowd.

  "How far do you hike in a day?" Dan asked me.

  "I've been going really slowly," I admitted. "Nine or ten miles"

  "So ... take tomorrow off, and I'll slack you a twenty the day after that. You won't lose any time."

  I thought for a moment. The longest day I'd hiked was a seventeen. In the gentle, rolling hills of Vermont, though, a twenty shouldn't be too hard. Especially without a pack.

  "It actually looks more like twenty-one," Dan said, glancing down the map I was studying. "But you've got plenty of time. Even if you go only two and a half miles an hour, you'll be back at the house by six-thirty. I'll have dinner waiting for you"

  It was ten in the morning when Dan dropped me off at the Inn at Long Trail. After a quiet day of bread-baking, working in the garden, and writing, I felt more than ready to slack my first twenty-one. I'd packed one of my favorite picnic lunches: peanut butter, banana, and honey sandwiches on challah. My weather karma from the Whites seemed to be paying off, the sky was cloudless and the morning cool still lingered under the trees. Except for a steep thousand-foot rise in the fourth mile, the elevation profile looked painless: four or five small hills, followed by a long level stretch, and a gradual fivemile descent to VT 12.

  To complete my good fortune, I had a hiking partner for the day: a fellow southbounder named Scout. She had arrived at Dan's farm the previous afternoon after hiking a twenty-two from Hanover. Dan, who felt sorry for me when he heard how I'd lost jackrabbit, had put Scout up in his other guest room and encouraged the two of us to hike together. The slack from the lull to VT 12 would be a short day by her standards, but she agreed to keep i ne company for at least that long.

  For the first few miles, we chatted as we walked. Scout told me there were still a few lobos behind me. She'd tried to hike with a couple of them, but they were all too slow.

  "There was one guy I would have liked to stay with-for a day or two, anyway. A real gentle, philosophical man, thin as a rail, with a beautiful singing voice. But he was creeping along-twelve, fifteen miles a day. You can't change your pace that much, just to stay with someone. It's like changing your whole personality to try to make a relationship work. You end up resenting the person for holding you back, even though it was your choice to stay."

  Scout shook her head, her thick, honey-colored braid bobbing back and forth between her shoulder blades. The gesture reminded me of jackrabbit, and I felt a twinge of guilt. In the past few days, I'd discovered the joys of hiking solo. I could take a zero guilt-tree, I had time to read all the registers, and I'd found that my mood wasn't ruled by the weather. I wondered what jackrabbit would have done differently, if she'd hiked alone. perhaps she would have gone ultralight and kept up with the other sobos. Perhaps she would have worn shoes. How much had the plans and choices we'd made together held her back?

  Scout's voice broke through my musings. "This must be that steep section we were looking at on the elevation profile."

  I looked up. Scout was only a few paces ahead of nie, but already, the backs of her knees were at eye level.

  "Reminds nie of Moody Mountain back in Maine;" I answered, starting up the incline behind her.

  "Moody? Oh yeah, Moody. Right before Andover. I came down it in a thunderstorm. Felt like I was water-skiing, only downhill. It was great!"

  We both fell silent, struggling to keep our footing on the slick, dusty trail. It grew steeper and steeper as we climbed, until I could imagine the top of the mountain curving over us like the crest of a breaking wave. Unlike the steep granite cliffs in Maine and the Whites, this slope offered no handholds. I envied Scout her hiking poles; once she got used to the dust, she charged uphill almost as fast as she'd been walking on level ground. I clenched my hands into fists and swung my arms in time to my steps, pushing myself forward with imaginary poles. Breathe in, breathe out. Only a little_fiarther ... and a little /nrther after that. Ignoring the stitch in Illy side, I managed to keep up.

  None of the other hills were quite so steep. but that ascent was only the first in a series of small mountains and deep, narrow valleys that resembled the elevation profile about as closely as a grizzly resembles a teddy bear. In some places, the trail plunged straight down a mountainside; in others, it was so heavily switch-backed that I felt as if we were running a treadmill, turning and turning and going nowhere. We stopped for lunch at Stony Brook Shelter, only eight miles from our starting point, according to the map. Scout checked her watch.

  "It's almost two o'clock, Isis. I can't believe we've been going only two miles an hour."

  "Jackrabbit and I usually make two with packs on, and you've been walking a lot faster than I'm used to," I answered. "There must be something wrong with the map"

  "I wish I'd checked my Data Book this morning," Scout said, dropping her fanny pack on the shelter floor and flopping down beside it. "I've hiked thirties where I was less tired out at lunch."

  We ate quickly and set out again, trying to walk even faster than before. Sunset caught us near Winturi Shelter, still five miles from VT 12. Five smooth, downhill miles, according to the elevation profile. It wasn't much more accurate than it had been earlier in day, but the trail's wild undulations did seem to subside a little in this final stretch. Scout and I flew. Our paces lengthened into a kind of lope, quiet and purposeful as the stride of coyotes tracking down a deer. I spared a thought for my bare feet, pale blurs gliding over the hard-packed earth. If there were thorns or sharp rocks in my path, I wouldn't see them or feel them in time to lessen the impact-ny hike would be over in an instant and I'd be home with my sister, figuring out something less crazy to do in the next four months. I didn't feel crazy, though, running barefoot into the dusk. I felt like it was the most natural thing in the world: my taut, dry soles pushing off from the ground, my leg muscles aching but obedient, the darkness slowly seeping through the trees.

  The first stars were coming out by the time we reached the meadow above Dan's house. The orange squares of lit windows in the valley beckoned us.

  "Eight o'clock." Scout's eyes sparkled in the light of her watch. "We made it from Winturi Shelter in just over an hour"

  "That's, what-four miles an hour?" I asked.

  "Five, if your map's right."

  "In that case, it was probably seven or eight." I held up my hand for a high five. "Congratulations. Let's go see what Dan's made for supper"

  The next muorning, I)an dropped us off at the Iron again, this time with all of our gear. After hugs goodbye, Scout set out at a pace that seemed undiminished by the full pack she carried. I was still trying to pull the awkward weight of my own pack into balance, tugging at one after another of its umpteen straps, when she turned a corner of the trail and vanished from sight. Cinching my waist belt as tight as it would go, I followed her into the woods at my usual amble. No hurry. No point in pretending I could catch up with her. The muscles in my legs and feet felt stiff from the previous day's marathon; even without my pack, I would have been hard pressed to hike another twenty.

  Plodding up the trail, slowly working the tension out of my calves, I felt lonelier than I had since Hanover. Though we'd talked about the difficulty o
f hiking with partners, Scout's company had reminded inc of the good things about it-the shared victories, the games and conversations weaving through the miles, and even the ways in which we tested each other's strength. At the moment, the hundred daily compromises jackrabbit and I had made and the way our moods had swung around each other like tether balls seemed little enough to suffer for the comfort of seeing a familiar face every morning.

  A few miles beyond the Inn, I found myself in a young hardwood forest with an understory of moose maple. Here and there, fallen trees fanned their slender, straight limbs across the forest floor. Bending down to remove a branch from the trail, I noticed that it was the perfect size to make a hiking staff. I cut off the ends with my pocketknife saw and tried walking with it for a while. It seemed to help; I could move a little faster, swinging the staff along beside me, and it took some of the pressure off my tired legs. Leaning on it threw inc off balance, though. My pack lurched dangerously, loosening its web of straps. I decided I needed a pole for my left hand, too.

  Finding a second, matching staff proved a good deal more challenging than cutting the first had been. I checked a dozen dead maples before I found a limb that was neither green nor rotting, with a straight section five feet long and an inch in diameter. Once I had chosen a second branch, I sat down on a rock and carved the tops of them into snakes' heads-symbols of transformation, of shedding illy old skin. The project pushed my loneliness to the back of my mind, replacing it with the slightly guilty pleasure of doing things my own way. I knew that jackrabbit, counting our miles against the onset of winter, would never have agreed to spend two hours carving in the middle of the day.

  Beyond the valley of moose maples, the trail curved along the western slope of Killington Mountain, through fir woods carpeted with moss and stands of white birches surrounded by waist-high ferns. At first I watched my feet, trying to keep them out of the way of my new hiking sticks. As soon as I settled into the rhythm, though, I found it hard to believe that I'd hiked so far on legs alone. My stride seemed to double in length; the gentle uphill felt like level ground. See, I told an imaginary jackrabbit, I spent two hours gettinc7 hikiiiq sticks, and it was worth it. I could almost hear her answering, Well, you didn't have to carve them.