Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  "Look, how beautiful," I said, and instantly regretted breaking the silence.

  Jackrabbit spoke softly, without turning to face inc.

  "What an) I doing here? Even if I make it to Georgia, I won't have completed the Trail. I should have stayed home-but I felt even more out of place there. We had beautiful weather; we went blackberry picking and harvested all the vegetables from the garden. I haven't been home for the harvest in four years. I missed it so much in college. But all last month, I felt like I was trapped, in limbo, going nowhere. I smiled for our norm's sake and hated it. There was no point to my life. I wanted to die"

  "1)o you still?"

  "Sometimes."

  To my eyes, the curve of the far ridge, the clean shadows of cedars stretching toward us, and each backlit blade of grass burned with a sudden, dazzling clarity. My mind raced forward through all the years I might live, until I felt like an old woman at the edge of death, looking back into a world I was leaving. I felt such love for all that I saw, it seemed that ►uy heart would break for the loss of a single leaf. I didn't dare look at my sister.

  We stopped to eat lunch at the top of a cliff overlooking a lake. The midday sun glazed the yellow rocks and the leaves of the forest, turning toward autunin, far below us. The morning's chill had given way to dull heat, full of the drone of insects. The light seemed to lie on the surface of things the way sunlight lies in a nightmare, coating everything, illuminating nothing. After we'd eaten, I sat still, unwilling to move forward into such an afternoon. I heard jackrabbit get up and walk around in the bushes at the back of the cliff. After a few minutes, she came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder.

  "I have something for you." She proffered a handful of tiny, shriveled blueberries, dried on the bush. "The last of the season," she said with a tentative smile. "Happy birthday."

  jackrabbit

  have struggled against depression for most of my life. It is difficult to write about; all its metaphors have become trite and shopworn. I see depression as an undercurrent in my life, a swift and dark river flowing along beneath my calm surface. The water is cold and deep, the banks slippery, but there is something in its glittering surface and unquiet murmur that invites me closer. To me, depression seems the ultimate form of self-absorption; I become trapped in the refracted rays of my self-awareness. I examine my life in minute detail, and each new detail is a revelation of failure. Losing sight of everything outside my own misery, I begin to wonder how I can justify the existence of something so wretched, so entirely horrible, as myself. Every day I struggle against depression; like a recovering alcoholic or an addict, I can keep my self-destructive urge under control, but I will never be entirely free of its seductive pull.

  On the Trail in fall, after Highlander and Compafero left, some stray arm of that dark, subterranean river had lurched out and captured me in its icy current. The world seemed flat around me, two-dimensional and lifeless. I could see the fall colors glowing on the ridges around us, but their brightness seemed muted. Even the warmth of the sunlight falling on my shoulders felt distant. The question that loomed in my mind-What am I doing here?became more and more an indictment of failure. I had lost the ability to judge myself fairly, and, worse, to judge the impact I was having on Isis. She tried everything to lift me out of my depression-kindness, humor, exasperation, and finally companionable silence. My negativity and gloom must have been terrible for her to bear.

  Somehow, the presence of other people was the only thing that lifted my spirits. I could smile and act perfectly happy for the people who gave us rides to town or the few other hikers we met along the Trail. I couldn't let a stranger see how miserable I was. Also, there was something in the act of reaching out to another person that allowed me to look beyond my depression. This, more than anything, must have been horrible for my sister: to see that other people had the power to do what she could not and make me happy. Ironically, it was because I loved her, because I trusted her, that I let her know how I felt.

  Two days after Isis's birthday, on the last day of September, we found ourselves in one of the strangest sections of the Trail yet: the Bear Mountain Zoo. Throngs of children and their harried-looking parents filled the asphalt walkways. I felt better, momentarily distracted.

  "Why do we always hit state parks on the weekend?" Isis muttered under her breath.

  "Oh, are you thru-hikers? Jimmie! Diane! Come see the thru-hikers!" This was a young mother with a baby in a sling. A pair of older children materialized out of the crowd and hid behind her legs, watching us with wide-eyed stares. "What's it like out there? Have you seen a bear? Do you carry a weapon?"

  A few other families gathered around us as we began answering her questions, and some of the parents fired off questions of their own. "What do you eat? When did you start the Trail? What's in those huge packs?"

  We finally managed to extricate ourselves from the group, and we were heading for a museum building when one of the onlookers gave a shout of surprise. "Look, they're barefoot! Barefoot! Are you crazy?"

  Isis looked back and gave a manic grin. "Uh-huh"

  We ducked inside the darkened interior of the museum before the crowd could catch up with us. I was glad; I was tired of being an exhibit. When lily eyes adjusted, I saw case after case of stuffed birds and mammals. "Look at this. These are all the species that used to live around here. I wonder how many are left."

  "Look at this." Isis pointed at a case with two large gray dovelike birds, looking lifelike on their wooden perches. "Passenger pigeons"

  I had never seen anything but illustrations of them before. I stood in front of their case for a long time, thinking of accounts I had read of passenger pigeon flocks so thick they blocked out the sun. It was disturbing to think how easily that remarkable abundance had been reduced to two moldering relics in a museum. I thought about the endless crowds outside: lily species, co-opting the world with our extraordinary capacity for destruction.

  After the zoo, we headed up Bear Mountain itself. The warm wind carried the odor of dry grasses and oak leaves and the murky green smell of the Hudson, with a hint of iodine this close to the tidewater. The hum of cicadas filled up the woods. The stream of people was undiminished; every few minutes we passed a cluster of dayhikers, and the auto road up the mountain had a steady flow of traffic in both directions.

  At the summit, we paused for a late lunch near the brick observation tower. Among the nattily dressed city people out for the day, we stuck out from the crowd with our grungy clothes and oversized packs. Most of the dayhikers gave us a wide berth, probably due to our rank odor.

  A man in a ranger's uniform came over as we finished our crackers. He didn't seem to mind our hiker fink. "You guys thru-hikers?"

  We nodded, licking the cracker crumbs from our filthy hands.

  "Great! I try to talk to every thru--hiker I find. Someday I'm gonna do the Trail myself. Matter of fact, that's why I took this job" He spoke in a clipped south Jersey accent. "Couple o' months ago I was workin' construction, and I saw this job was openin' up, and I says to myself, Mike, that's what you gotta do. You gotta be out there rangin' parks, 'cause there's no f-" he stopped himself "-freakin' way you'll learn about hikin' when you're welding I-beams together in Jersey." I noticed that he was still wearing his steel-toed construction boots. They looked incongruous with his khaki uniform and Smokey the Bear hat.

  He asked us all the typical questions, and then moved on to the specifics of rain gear, tents vs. tarps, filters vs. iodine, and the best Trail foods.

  "Wow. You've done your homework," Isis said.

  Mike grinned. "Like I said, I talk to everybody. I heard a lotta crazy stories about hikers this year. I met a whole family hikin', kids and everything."

  "The Family from the North!" Isis said. "I heard about them up in Vermont. I hope we'll get to meet them some day."

  "Oh, they're a couple weeks ahead now. Great bunch o' people, though. Mom, dad, five kids. What else? Oh, there was one guy came thro
ugh here with a tuba. I heard that, I said, 'Sh-shucks, I gotta get a picture of that."'

  "Tuba Man! Did you meet him? What's he like?"

  Mike's face fell. "I just missed him. I bought one o' those one-time cameras, you know. Had it all ready for when he came through. That day somebody slipped off a ledge on West Mountain, and I had to go do the rescue and all that sh-stuff, and by the time I came back, the tuba guy was here and gone. Just left a note in the register." He brightened. "Know what else I heard? They say there's a couple o' sisters hikin' the trail barefoot. 'Barefoot,' I says. 'I'll believe that one when I see it"'

  Isis and I exchanged a glance and said nothing. We began packing up our lunch, still chatting with Mike. When we hefted our packs and took up our hiking sticks, still not wearing shoes, Mike made no attempt to restrain his language. "Holy shit! It's You! You're the ones I heard about! Is it really true? How do you do it? What about broken glass and sharp rocks and stuff?" We answered his questions as fast as we could, and he spouted more, obviously fascinated. "Well, shit. I gotta get a picture." Then his face fell again, and he regained a little composure. "You know what? I left the f- freakin' camera in my truck. At the bottom of the mountain"

  We camped that night on the shoulder of West Mountain, just as the sun event down. I felt more peaceful than I had in a long time. At last, I began to notice the beauty of things around me. We set up the tent in the loveliest stealth site we had found yet. It was a tiny meadow of low, tawny grasses under a grove of oaks. A few stands of young birches rimmed the campsite, their leaves golden with fall. On a ledge right next to the meadow, we could see a I8O-degree vista. Bear Mountain, with its observation tower, stood just across from our camp, and the Hudson flowed through the valley beyond, a wide ribbon of bright silver. The rounded shapes of the mountains across the way looked like sleeping animals. Horizontal light picked out the trees on the far ridges, illuminating the fall colors that touched their leaves. Blue shadows collected in the lowlands. There was a slight chill in the air.

  "Check out the firepit," Isis said.

  "We can't have a stealth-fire here! The whole valley will see us!"

  A slow smile spread across her face. "Not with this firepit, sister."

  She pointed to a granite ledge that rose perhaps four feet above the meadow. A circle of blackened stones and a small stack of dry wood lay behind it.

  "Excellent! We could have a bonfire here and nobody would know!"

  As we relaxed by the light of the fire that night, sipping our peppermint tea, I felt myself surfacing from the dark river of my depression. I lay back on the soft grass beside the fire. A wind stirred the birch leaves, sending a few of them drifting toward the ground. I looked up at the stars between the branches. The days were shortening fast and the weather was cooling. All the friends we had known had left us behind or gone elsewhere. My feet were still tender, compared to my sister's, and now I was the one who had trouble keeping up. And yet I knew there Would be moments like this all the way down the Trail: lying beside a fire, watching the stars. Is this worth it? I asked myself. I knew things would get harder, much harder, but right then, just being there was enough.

  In the morning, fog filled the river valley. Mountaintops became islands in a white sea. The early light caught in the dew-covered leaves of the birches, sparkling gold. We ate granola and packed up quickly, watching our breath turn to steam, rubbing our hands together for warmth. October, I reminded myself. It's the_first of October. 1 hat gives us two and a half days to get to Greenwood Lake to meet our hobo friend for the Gathering.

  Isis started out fast to keep warm in the chilly morning air. I could hardly keep up with her on the gravel trail. My feet were most sensitive in the early morning, and today, with the cold, it seemed like I could feel every sharp corner of the pebbles. I decided to walk on the vegetation beside the trail instead. This was much better; soft grasses and moss and-

  "SHIT! Oh shit, oh shit!"

  Isis turned around as I sank down on a rock next to the trail, cradling my foot. "Jackrabbit! Are you all right? What happened?"

  I fought back tears. "I stepped on something sharp. A cut-off root or something. Right on my heel. How could I be so fucking stupid?" The pain was intense.

  "Are you bleeding? Let me see"

  It hadn't broken the skin, but a dark bruise the size of a dime was forming on my left heel. I was terrified for a moment-it was happening again. Just when I had decided it was worthwhile to be back on the Trail. "It's just like the first time, Isis. Why does this happen?" Now my tears were flowing freely.

  Isis was calm and businesslike. "It happened because you weren't paying attention. But it's not like the first one. That was much worse. Rest here a minute. I'll give you some vitamin 1, and we can go on"

  "No." I said, managing to control my tears again. "The reason it got so bad the first time was all that damn ibuprofen. I couldn't feel what I was doing to it"

  "You need to take something to keep the swelling down. And we need to keep hiking if we want to reach Greenwood Lake in time to get to the Gathering."

  I couldn't argue with her logic.

  "Maybe .. "she looked away for a moment, across the mountaintop that glowed golden in the early light. "Maybe you should take some vitamin I and put your camp shoes on"

  I started to protest, but she turned to me fiercely. "This hike is about more than just proving something! You don't need to stay barefoot, damn it!" For an instant, resentment welled up in me. She would stay barefoot, of course. She still had the chance at proving something. I had failed already. Once again, I wondered what I was doing here. I didn't belong here any more. She did. But her face softened, and she said quietly, "Remember what we said to that ranger at I)aicey Pond, way back at the beginning of the Trail? `As long as it's comfortable. As long as it's fun"'

  Wordlessly, I swallowed the two ibuprofen tablets she gave me and untied my ratty old camp sneakers from my pack. With the shoes on, I felt disconnected from the world. Losing contact with the trail was like losing one of my senses; the woods flowed by with a strange unreality, a silent film with no subtitles.

  Isis

  he evening before we planned to get off the Trail for the Gathering, we set up camp in a clearing near the top of a small mountain. Near sunset, a handsome young man came jogging out of the woods. Without other thruhikers passing us, either north- or southbound, I had grown wary of strangers. My first thought was oh no, someone knows where we're joing to be camping tonight. Jackrabbit, delighted to have company, struck up a conversation with him, while I stubbornly continued to collect firewood. As I brought an armload of wood back to camp, I overheard jackrabbit telling the stranger how wonderful the Trail was and how glad she was to have the time to hike it. Is this the same person, I wondered, who told me she inns `fnckinm, sick of this whole fucking hike" when she had to put on shoes a few days ado?

  After he left, she came over to help with the fire.

  "That was a really neat guy," she said, sounding almost as cheerful as when she'd been talking to him. "You should've stopped working and joined us. He said he grew up around here, and he told nie the stories of all those ruins we passed yesterday. You know that old mill canal ..

  As she spoke, my mind drifted. Normally I would have been fascinated by the stories of ruins, but now, all I could think of was how to find more people to spend time with. If we quit the Trail, we'd be surrounded by people, but then no amount of company would cheer jackrabbit. If we skipped ahead to rejoin the other sobos, we'd soon fall behind them again. I hoped that somehow it would be enough to reconnect with our old friends at the Gathering.

  The next day, under a cold, uniformly gray sky, we hiked the last six miles to the town of Greenwood Lake, where we were planning to meet Around the Bend. Jackrabbit, still in shoes, strode faster and faster, until I struggled to keep pace with her. Normally, we warned each other about broken glass in the trail, but that day she walked over glass and sharp stones alike without saying a word to m
e. I might have realized that, wearing shoes, she just didn't notice the glass-but the pain of walking so fast on rough ground brought the past week's frustration to a head. She's read at nie For beiu' barefoot when she has to put on shoes, I told myself. She wants one to fall behind or beg her to slow down. The day before, the thought had crossed my mind that I should offer to put my own shoes on when she put on hers. No, not even offer: just put them on. But now I felt only resentment. Why should I hike her hike? I gritted my teeth, focused on the gravel of the trail with such fierce concentration that my head ached, and kept up.

  jackrabbit

  dilapidated silver station wagon sat in the trailhead parking lot in Greenwood Lake, with a familiar dark-haired man in the driver's seat. He rolled down his window as we came out of the woods. "The Barefoot Bombshells!"

  "Around the Bend!"

  He made a face. "Please, call me Brian. I'm off the Trail now."

  "Okay ... Brian." I made a mental note. "Tell me, how'd you choose the name Around the Bend, anyway?"

  "Oh, some guys I was hiking with gave it to nle, 'cause I hiked so fast. I was always disappearing around the bend"

  I laughed. "Thought it referred to your mental state"

  "My mental state?"

  "You know. Nuts, whacko, bats in the belfry, around the bend . .

  He looked slightly hurt. "I've never heard it used that way before"

  Isis and I laughed together. One of Brian's defining features, I remembered from the time we had spent together in Hanover, was that it was almost impossible to tell when he was serious.

  "I finally figured out the trail name I really want, the day before I finished my hike, but by then it was too late to change it," he said.

  "So what Would you call yourself?'' I asked.

  "Boy Yonder.'

  "I like it"

  "When did you suni►nit Isis asked him.