Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  "We'll think of it as an adventure," Isis said as we headed up the ridge. "We can pretend we're on a quest or something" Over the next few days, she was mostly silent and stoic, bearing her burden. Maybe the quest idea worked for her. As for nee, I soon discovered that I would rather hike injured than hike hungry. I became short-tempered and hostile. My powers of concentration failed; I tripped and stumbled constantly, and once the edge of a rock cut the tender skin in the arch of my right foot. The gnawing emptiness in the pit of my stomach was the only thing that occupied my mind for more than a few minutes. A packet of oatmeal in the morning, a handful of crackers at noon, and a meager serving of pasta or potatoes at night hardly touched the surface of my hunger.

  On the way out of a gap, somewhere between Port Clinton and Duncannon, we got lost. The A.T. ran along a smooth grassy track with forests on one side and an old field on the other. A hint of midday warmth lingered in the dry grasses, where a few crickets scraped their monotonous, rusty song.

  "I haven't seen a blaze in ages," Isis said. She took out the map and frowned at it.

  "I think it turns into the woods soon . . . Wait! Are those blazes up there?"

  A narrow trail turned off the main track and headed up into the maple and hemlock forest. The trunk of a tall sugar maple bore a few indistinct white marks, just about the right size for A.T. blazes. We followed the trail for perhaps half an hour. It started out as a narrow but worn track, marked with faded blazes. As we proceeded deeper into the woods, it became indistinct, scarcely more than a game trail. The white blazes faded out, and the traces of the trail took a sharp turn uphill. Still, we followed it. The sun had sunk below the next ridge, and the chill seemed to rise out of the lifeless ground.

  At last, we came to a small stream. There was no sign of a trail on the far bank. It was more than I could take. "What are we doing here? We're hungry, we're cold, we're lost. Fuck this! Fuck this whole damn trail!" I sat down by the stream bank, sobbing, pounding my fists into the ground. Dimly, at the back of my mind, I was aware that this was not helping our situation.

  "You girls okay?" It was a gruff male voice. Shit, I thought.Just u'hat I need. Somebody to watch inc hit bottom. I looked up to see a hunter in full camo gear and a blaze orange vest, carrying a large gun.

  "We're fine," Isis assured him. "1)o you know if this is the Appalachian Trail?"

  "Appalachian Trail." He considered for a moment. "Runs along the next ridge over. Don't know how you ended up here."

  "Thanks," Isis said, and the hunter melted back into the woods. I collected myself gradually, still cursing.

  Back where the trail had turned into the woods, we examined the blazes closely. The paint was chipped and faded, barely more than a stain on the gray bark. "Look at this, Isis," I said. "It looks like these blazes used to be painted over with a darker color." Sure enough, a few flecks of grayish paint still covered the white in places.

  "Notch this!" Isis swore. "This must have been an old relo." We'd seen a few other places where the trail had been relocated, but generally the right direction was much more clearly marked. We stayed on the flat, grassy trail beside the field, hoping that this path, at least, would lead us in the right direction. My stomach rumbled loudly, my limbs felt weak, and my temper was ready to snap at the slightest provocation. We didn't find another blaze for almost half a mile.

  One consolation on these cold, hungry days was our pot of tea at night. For a few minutes after my half liter of hot water, I would feel full and content. We always had enough water, often more than enough-we weren't going to make that mistake again. Isis carried a few flavors of herbal tea: peppermint, blackberry, chamomile, Red Zinger. After supper, when the wind rustled the dry leaves along the ridge tops and the lights in the valleys began to emerge from the gloom, I collected another handful of twigs for the Zip stove. Huddled in our fleece jackets and long underwear, we tried to find a place out of the wind to sit and drink our tea.

  One night, Isis laughed to herself as she added teabags to the pot.

  "What?" I said, slightly annoyed. Everything bothered me: the cold, the endless wind, my grumbling belly. What bothered me most at that moment, though, was seeing Isis happy. It made me feel inferior, diminished. 1fI ►iwere a better person I mould be lau hint too, but instead Fin ►►►opint, I thought.

  "Oh, I was just thinking about a chapter in Lord of the Rinis, where Sam and Frodo are heading into Mordor, and Sam thinks to himself, `it was the hour of the day when civilized people would be having tea."'

  "Civilized people would have eaten more than half a cup of instant potatoes!"

  "Yes, but think of it this way; at least we don't have malevolent supernatural forces on our tails."

  "The consequences of our own stupid mistakes are had enough."

  She sighed. "Do you have to be so negative?"

  "I can't help it! I'm fucking hungry!"

  "Please don't use that language with nee"

  "You sound just like our mother"

  "I'll take that as a compliment" She leveled her stare at me for a moment, and then brightened as though remembering a secret. "You know what, though? The 501 Shelter is coming up!"

  "Hmph. What's so great about a shelter?"

  "Anonymous Badger told me about it at the Gathering. It's a huge shelter, all enclosed like a barn, right by the road. There's a caretaker who lets you use his phone. You can call for pizza and get it delivered!"

  "Pizza .. " I sighed.

  "If we are where I think we are, we should get there tomorrow."

  The next day the trail underfoot was littered with tiny sharp rocks. The frost, which now lingered well into the morning, made them seem twice as painful. My belly growled insistently, as it had since we left Port Clinton, but now I cheered myself with thoughts of pizza. Mozzarella, juicy tomato sauce, substantial crust, onions, broccoli, olives, mushrooms ... I held the image in my head and ignored the gnawing hunger and the cold. Tonight, I knew, we'd he in a shelter with tour walls, out of the wind, eating a full meal at last.

  It must have been a weekend-we saw more people on the Trail that day than we had seen all week. Two middle-aged men stopped to talk to us while we filtered water from a stream. The one in front did most of the talking and his companion held back, watching us.

  "You guys thru-hiking?"

  "Yeah"

  "Oh, I've always dreamed about it!"

  "You ought to do it, then," I said. "It's a free country. All you've gotta do is save up some money, get six months off, and walk."

  He shook his head and sighed ruefully. "It's the time off that's the problem. Me and my buddy here, we teach high school. I teach English, he does chemistry. We hike as much as we can in the summers, but we can't get more than those three months off."

  "You could always hike it in sections, a couple hundred miles at a time. We've met a lot of people doing that."

  "It's hard to get away from the wife and kids. Maybe when they're older ..." He caught sight of our feet. "Are you hiking barefoot? Barefoot, in Pennsylvania?"

  We nodded.

  "I)id you come all the way from Maine? Barefoot?"

  We nodded again, and Isis held up one of her splendidly callused feet for inspection.

  "Well, my hat's off to you! Boy, this'll be part of my campfire stories for years. I'll tell the grandkids about you. When I have grandkids, that is .. "

  Finally his companion spoke up. "Would you like a beer?"

  "That would he awesome. Thanks" The can felt numbingly cold under my fingers, and wisps of steam rose from the metal.

  "It might be a little cold." The chemistry teacher grinned gleefully. "I'm packing them on dry ice"

  "Wow. We'll save it for tonight, I guess-might be thawed out by then. Thanks again."

  As evening drew on, we finally heard traffic: PA 5(11. We quickened our footsteps and I licked my lips in anticipation: real food!

  The shelter was a converted studio, built of dark wood, across the lawn from the caretaker'
s one-story home. We unlatched the door and stepped inside. The final rays of the sun streamed through a hexagonal skylight in the center of the roof. For a shelter with four walls, it was not as cozy as we'd hoped. The ever-present wind worked its way through cracks in the walls and floor, and the persistent chill of a day in the shadows hung in the corners. We looked around: mouse hangers dangling from the ceiling, sturdy wooden bunks, metal trash can, shelves of magazines and ragged old registers, a hiker box picked through to the dregs, a table scattered with candle stubs and the detritus of old feasts. Red and white printed mends, napkins, stray spots of pizza grease reflecting the last sunlight like coins from a lost treasure.

  We laid down our packs, hung the food bags, and set out our sleeping bags on the most sheltered bunks. Isis emptied our trash hag into the metal barrel. With the preliminary chores done, we salivated over the menus: pizza, subs, salad, all manner of tried appetizers. It didn't take long to choose. We'd get a pizza priniavera for tonight-white pizza with broccoli and onionsplus a (reek salad and onion rings, and two eggplant parmigiana subs for tomorrow. It would be our first fi►11 meal in three days.

  I rubbed moisturizer on my feet, put my camp shoes on, and went out to look for twigs and water so we could boil a pot of tea with supper. Isis went to the caretaker's house to ask if we could use the phone.

  I was drawing a pot of water from the spigot on the side of the shelter when she returned, her face set like stone. "They don't take credit cards at the pizza place, and we don't have any cash left;" she said in a small voice.

  I wish 1 could say I reacted in a sympathetic way, but my temper took over and I let loose a string of expletives instead. The visions of a scrumptious, tilling dinner vanished as the last slice of the orange sun sank below the horizon. The leafless skeletons of oak trees, silhouetted in the purpling sky, seemed to be mocking us as they tossed their arms in the rising wind.

  "Now what I growled between my teeth, but the answer was obvious. I slouched off to gather more twigs for the stove as Isis wordlessly unpacked dinner from my food hag. As a consolation prize, she chose the pasta and not the internal potatoes. Then I remembered the beer that the weekenders had given us-at least we'd have something to drink with supper.

  We crouched outside the corner of the shelter to cook, not wanting to risk a spark on the tinder-dry wooden floor. The wind ripped past, stirring the dry leaves oil the ground and wicking our body heat away, even through layers of clothing. It took Several tries to get the stove going; eventually, a cruntpled- up pizza menu with its cargo of grease did the trick. The meager pot of noodles bubbled and steamed as Isis fed the tire. I sat just upwind, breaking the wood into thumb-sized pieces. Neither of us spoke much, lost as we were in dreams of unattainable pizza.

  Inside the shelter, Isis scraped the last of our olive oil (now a gelatinous solid) out of its bottle with a debarked twig, and mixed it with the noodles and a half-packet of dry pesto. The scent of basil lifted into the cold air. We lit a few candles. In their flickering light the shelter was transformed. Even though my stomach still growled, and the wind whined like a hungry dog around the eaves, everything seemed warmer and softer. As I sat back in the chair I thought, yes, use are lucky indeed. We divided up the pot of pasta, and I opened the beer.

  "Damn it!" Half the beer gushed out over the table in a foamy rush, and the other half (mostly water, I guess) sat in the can, still frozen. We drank the little that we could get and savored the few bites of angel hair.

  I got up from the table after dinner, and my stomach gave a huge empty rumble. "I can't take this any more!" I shouted. "Why can't we fucking get enough to eat, just for once?" Isis sighed and stared at me for a moment. I waited for another comment about my language. And then, as often happens between us, we had the same thought at the same time. We both glanced toward the hiker box, and our eyes met. We smiled.

  In a moment, we were laying out the contents of the box on the pizza-stained table. There were the ubiquitous bags of unidentified white powders, a Ziploc of instant rice with a suspicious ragged hole in the lower corner, sugar-free Kool-Aid, a very postdated tube of Squeeze Parkay, and a nearly-empty jar of Jiff. A mysterious dehydrated substance resembling jerky. Near the bottom, though, there was more promise. A couple baggier of grains, which we tentatively identified as millet and quinoa, and two Instant Breakfasts.

  Isis took her headlamp and fetched a pot of water, and I found more firewood by the dim light of the Photon. We huddled outside the door, sheltering the stove from the blasts of wind, but our mood had changed from glum to triumphant. We had faced down adversity together, once again. As we do sometimes to cheer each other up, we began exchanging lines of doggerel:

  "It was late one night down at 501, and we were running low on cash-"

  "We were glad for four walls around us, and a place to put our trash, but we couldn't order pizza . .

  .. so we were feeling blue, till we had the bright idea of making Hiker Box Stew!"

  We had a name for our concoction, and the list of ingredients grew more and more outlandish as our rhyming went on. In reality, the stew was a sweet pudding with the grains, Instant Breakfasts, dry milk, sugar, and cinnamon and nututeg from Isis's stash of spices. We'd managed to salvage a bit of the instant rice from the top of the mouse-chewed bag, checking it carefully for pasties and finding it clean.

  Isis tried a tentative spoonful. "It's, well ... it's like rice pudding, except with not much rice, and no raisins, and no eggs .. " It was certainly unusual, but our hunger made it delicious. We'd made enough to fill our two-liter pot, and we ate half of it, saving the rest for breakfast. At last, our bellies were full.

  In the gleam of the many candle stubs, the feeling of satisfaction returned, and this time nothing marred it. We decided to transcribe our silly poem for the register:

  It took me a long time to get to sleep that night. Even bundled in my fleece jacket, long underwear, hat, and gloves, I was barely warn) enough inside my sleeping bag. The cold wind came up through the cracks in the floor and rattled the windows. I felt peaceful, though. With enough food in my stomach, I could finally see things in a more rational light. I realized how incredibly selfish I'd been. At the shelter that evening, I had been angry at Isis for not double-checking the map or stopping by the ATM on the way out of Palmerton, angry at the pizza place for not taking our credit card, angry at the weekenders for packing their beer on dry ice, angry at the caretaker for not taking pity on us and driving us into town. As I hunkered down in my sleeping bag, trying to keep the cold air from coming in the top, I wondered what had possessed nie to feel that way. How could I have blamed the very people who are helping me-my sister, friend and companion, the weekenders who kindly shared their beer, and the caretaker, who provided this shelter for us?

  The world doesn't exist to do my biddint., I thought. I can't assume that just because I'm a thru-hiker everybody will lay out the red carpet for me.

  Isis

  t had been months since we'd hiked with anyone besides the Family, and .that encounter, with the gypsy-camp atmosphere of our night of singing and their silent disappearance in the dawn, seemed more like a dream than a memory. I was sure that jackrabbit and I were the last of the southbounders, hiking into winter alone. One afternoon, though, a woman in a colorful knit cap stopped beside the stream where we were filtering water. Her grungy pack, nominally a dark shade of pink, looked far too well-used to belong to a casual weekend hiker.

  I jumped to my feet and held out my hand. "Hi, I'm Isis."

  "Then you must be jackrabbit," said the woman, glancing at my sister with bright brown eyes, lively as a bird's. "I am Netta. Or Almond Tree, if you prefer. Netta means `small tree' in my native Hebrew. The blossoming almond is my favorite tree."

  "Are you-are you a sobo?" I asked. When she answered that she was, I could barely restrain myself from hugging her.

  "So we're not the last?" asked jackrabbit.

  "Not at all!" Netta laughed. "There are many of
us. Dave, Heald, Sharkbait, Mohawk Joe. And Black Forest. He is from Germany. He is ... well, you will meet him very soon"

  As if on cue, a slender young nian with a halo of light blond curls sauntered down the trail. He carne to an abrupt halt when he caught sight of us. Up close, I noticed that he was trying to grow a beard without much success. The sparse facial hair, combined with his fine bone structure and wide blue eyes, gave him the look of a high school kid cultivating Kurt Cobain-esque grange. He held out his hand and addressed us in a clipped accent that reminded me of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  "You must be the Barefoot Sisters. I am Black Forest. Today is my birthday. At the next road, I will hitch into town to drink beer. Some beautiful women, such as yourselves, would be welcome to join me"

  After going to so much trouble to ration our food, hitching into town a day early seemed like a cop-out. The Hiker Box Stew had given us muchneeded extra calories. Besides, we hoped that by staying on the Trail an extra day and getting ahead of them in trail miles, we'd be able to keep up with our new friends a bit longer. We left them waiting at the road, promising to see them in town the next day, and hiked up the last ridge.

  We came down into Duncannon the next afternoon, crossing the wide brown Susquehanna River on a highway bridge. After securing a room at the truck stop at the edge of town, we walked perhaps a mile to Dun call 11 oil's business district to meet our friends at the Doyle Hotel. The Companion) had described the Doyle as one of the "great Anheuser-Busch Hotels," the height of elegance when it was built in the late 1890s, but never renovated since. That assessment seemed to sum the place up-the room Netta showed us had two ratty mattresses lying on the floor, a bare bulb dangling from the wreckage of an antique brass fixture, and a garden of mildew spreading across the walls. I was glad that jackrabbit and I had opted to stay at the clean, inexpensive truck stop motel.

  Unlike the rest of the building, the I)oyle's barroom had been lavishly refurbished. Bronze and varnish reflected the subdued light. After our supper at the local pizza place, we returned to share a drink with our new friends. We found Netta and Black Forest sharing a booth with three other hikers. I thought I recognized the round-faced man on Netta's left, but I was surprised to see him so tar north on the Trail.