Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  "Playfoot!"jackrabbit greeted hint. "I thought you were hiking with Tuba Man!"

  "I was, but I got tired of the long miles," Playfoot answered. "Tuba and Solid go twenty, twenty-five miles a day. I was hurting, so I decided to get off for a while. Take a road trip, do a little trail magic"

  "Well, its great to see you again;"jackrabbit said.

  We set our packs down, and Netta introduced us to the other hikers.

  "This is Ox; he is from Britain." A stocky man with a crew cut nodded in greeting.

  "This is Cutter" She indicated the tall, white-blond man to her right. "He is getting off the Trail for his cousin's wedding soon; maybe Black Forest will go with him"

  Cutter gave Black Forest an encouraging smile. "Come on, man. Free food and beer. How can you refuse?"

  Black Forest, who was sitting in the corner with his eyes half-closed, let out a groan. "Do not talk to nie about beer. After last night I do not want to drink any more beer, ever"

  "There'll be a lot of pretty girls there," Cutter coaxed.

  Black Forest's eyes snapped open. "When do we go?"

  "So, have you tried Yeungling yet?" Playfoot asked us. "It's Pennsylvania's most popular beer, but hardly anyone knows about it outside of the state. Pity."

  "I think we almost might have had some" Jackrabbit told hint about the frozen beer the weekenders had given us.

  "Man, what a tragedy! Well, you can make up for it tonight. Hey, Amy," he called to the bartender. "Could you bring us a couple pitchers of Yeungling?"

  The beer did taste good, light and wheaty, but I switched to water after the first glass. Jackrabbit and I had to cross a four-lane freeway to get back to our hotel; at least one of us had to be clear-headed at the end of the night. Ox wasn't drinking much either, I noticed, and Black Forest was sipping cold coffee out of a foot-high Styrofoam cup. He grimaced and shook his head when the bartender offered him a glass.

  "Ox and Black Forest spent one hundred and seventy dollars here last night," Netta explained. "I am not sure how they did this. I had three beers, which cost two dollars and twenty-five cents in total."

  "Some of it was for the jukebox," Ox protested. "And we had those shots ..

  "Does anybody have an aspirin?" Black Forest asked, from his shadowy corner of the booth.

  "How're things going?" asked the bartender, setting down another foaming pitcher of beer. "This one,., on the house." She beamed at Ox and Black Forest, who answered her with rather sickly smiles.

  "Thanks, Amy! "Jackrabbit said from the other side of the table. "Hey, Isis, pass that over here, if you're not having any."

  The beer kept coming. Not wanting to miss out on calories, I ate a few orders of onion rings and fries, then sat back, full and contented, while the stories swirled around inc. Black Forest was giving Playfoot a morose account of his birthday revelries, and Cutter was trying to talk Ox into joining the hiker delegation at his cousins wedding. Jackrabbit had checked her e-mail in the library that afternoon; she was telling Netta a funny story she'd heard from Waterfall.

  "So our friend is hiking with this guy who keeps hitting on her, and one day he asks her, `so, if you don't like me, who do you like?' She gives him a name, just to shut him up. She says `Shepherd'-that's this guy we net in Hanover. He uses a shepherd's crook for a hiking stick. He was pretty hot, if you ask Inc. So, anyway, this guy asks our friend why she likes Shepherd; what's so great about him? And our friend's pretty sick of the guy by this point, so she says, 'well, I like Shepherd 'cause he's got the biggest stick on the Trail!"'

  "Yeah, that's the ticket," Cutter didn't seem to have heard jackrabbit's story; he was still talking to Ox. He turned to Playfoot. "How 'bout you, man? Want to crash a wedding?"

  "Sorry," he said. "You'll have to count me out. I'm heading back down to Virginia tomorrow, to see if I can find Tuba and Solid again" Playfoot shook his head. "I don't know what it is about those guys; they hike like bats out of hell, and all they talk about is beer and women, but I've never had more tun than I had with them" He paused. All the other conversations had stopped, too.

  "I know what I like about Tuba Man," jackrabbit said, raising her tenth or eleventh glass of beer in a wobbly hand. I reached out a foot, but she was too tar away to kick. "He has the biggest instrument on the Trail," she concluded happily.

  I caught Playfoot's eye. He looked dumbfounded. Don't tell, I mouthed at him across the table, trying to make my expression severe. He gave me a wink and a small nod, as we both broke into laughter.

  "Okay. Okay," I gasped, pushing myself to my feet. "It's getting pretty late. I think jackrabbit and I better get back to our hotel."

  "Whuz the hurry, Isis jackrabbit asked. "There's still half a pitcher of Yeungling here. Can't let it go to waste."

  "I thought you were staying here," said Cutter.

  "No, we're over at the truck stop," I told him.

  "But ... that's across the highway," Playfoot said. "You can't ivalk there."

  "I'm afraid we're going to have to.

  "I've got my jeep here," he answered. "Is anybody sober?"

  "I only had one glass," I told him. "But you'd still need someone to drive it back over here."

  "I will drive," said a voice from the shadows. Black Forest sat up. "I am the soberest German in the room.

  Playfoot led us out to his jeep, parked behind the Doyle. Jackrabbit and I sat in back, and Playfoot got in the passenger's seat. Black Forest turned the key in the ignition. As we pulled out of the parking lot, he flicked on the turn signal. It came off in his hand. He looked at Playfoot.

  "I broke your car," Black Forest said in his usual deadpan tone.

  That wasn't the end of our adventures in the jeep. When we reached the freeway (fortunately not very busy at that time of night), Black Forest missed the on-ramp for the westbound lanes. Instead of going right and looking for a place to turn, he sped up, crossing both eastbound lanes and bouncing over the sidewalk-height divider in the middle of the road.

  As jackrabbit and I climbed out of the backseat at the truck stop, he told us, "I ani not sure my driver's license is valid in your country. I am only twenty-three."

  "I think you're right," Playtoot groaned, his head in his hands. "I think you have to be twenty-five to drive in a foreign country. I've got to say. though, I'd be surprised if your license is valid anywhere"

  "Playfoot, you should not insult nie," Black Forest answered. "I am driving your car."

  Two days past Duncannon, we came to the end of the Pennsylvania ridges. We were on our own again-Netta had already passed us, Cutter and crew had taken off for the wedding, and Playtoot had gone south. It was late afternoon; ahead of us stretched the Cumberland Valley, sixteen miles of level farm fields. A web of highways crisscrossed the fields, with clusters of hotels and fast food restaurants sprouting at their intersections. Here and there, a neat fan of suburban tract houses spread out from a loop of road. It didn't look much like hiker territory. I'd read in my Companion that the Trail had been relocated through the Valley at great expense, so that it followed the few remaining patches of forest instead of the four-lane roads. Still, the Companion warned against drinking any water we found there or trying to find a place to camp in the narrow strips of trees between fields and suburbs.

  Unfortunately, sixteen miles was too far for us to hike in one day over Pennsylvania's stony ground. Ishmael, a hiker we'd met at the Gathering, had offered to slack us through the Boiling Springs area, but I hadn't been able to reach him from Uuncannon. Nothing for it-we hefted our hiking sticks and headed downhill, toward the perils of civilization.

  Two or three miles into the Valley, we found a place to camp beside a stream. It wasn't directly visible from any of the nearby houses, and it was as tar as we could get from a road. We ate a cold supper, so as not to attract attention with the light from our stove. At dusk, we pitched our tent.

  In the morning, we rose before dawn and packed our gear. We were sitting on our packs eating breakfast w
hen I noticed a black-clad man bounding toward us, followed by a large shaggy dog. I froze, niy cereal spoon suspended in midair. He was already abreast of us by the time I noticed that he was wearing a sweat suit, with reflective hands strapped around his ankles. A jogger, not a thief or a murderer fleeing the scene of his crime. He passed us without so much as a nod good morning. The dog, though, turned its head, stuck out its tongue, and slurped the rest of my cereal out of my cup, without so much as breaking its stride.

  "Yech;' I said to jackrabbit, examining the globs of saliva it had left behind. "It's a good thing we're getting to Boiling Springs today: I'm not carrying enough water to wash this off."

  As it turned out, we got to town even sooner than we had hoped. At a bridge over one of the highways, I saw a slender, middle-aged man with dark curly hair climbing up the embankment on the other side of the road. He looked up and waved, grinning.

  "Ishmael?" I called out. "What are you doing here:

  "I just got back from a timber framers' conference in Colorado and found your message on my answering machine. I didn't want to miss you, so I came out to the Trail''

  "Perfect timing;"jackrabbit said.

  "Yeah, it worked out pretty well. Here, throw your packs in the back of the truck. I know this great breakfast place a few miles down the road. After we eat, I'll slack you the rest of the way to Boiling Springs.-

  We spent three days at Ishmael's house, an elegant, spacious log cabin that he'd built at the base of the Blue Ridge. On the first day, we took a zero to celebrate the end of the Pennsylvania rocks-Ishmael told us that the last sixty miles of the state were much smoother than the part we'd hiked. Jackrabbit played Ishmael's grand piano, overjoyed, while I cooked a harvest dinner: tarte a l'oignon, beet salad, carrot salad, and dark rye bread.

  The following day, Ishmael had to return to his construction site. He slacked us over a section between Pine Grove Furnace State Park and Whiskey Spring Road, seven miles south of Boiling Springs. As he'd promised, the footing was much easier than it had been in the rest of Pennsylvania. Instead of tippy rocks, the trail was smooth bare earth in many places. We reached the road in midafternoon, with time to sit down for a snack. Ishmael arrived a few minutes later. As we walked to his truck, I noticed a black plastic bag lying in the ditch. There was something large inside it, something made up of smooth lumps and a few jutting projections. A dead body, I thought.

  "I wonder what's in that bag," said jackrabbit. "The way it's shaped, it's kind of disturbing."

  "Should we look, in case .. " my voice trailed off.

  "It's a deer," Ishmael told us. "Poachers get them, cut off the antlers and the best pieces of meat, and leave them by the road"

  "Why the plastic bag?" jackrabbit asked.

  "I don't know," he answered. "They always do it that way."

  The deer was still there when we came back to the road the next morning.

  "Want venison for dinner?" Ishmael joked. He had gotten a friend to drop us off so that he could slack the last seven miles back to town with us.

  "We could have it for lunch," jackrabbit answered. "It's probably already cooked, from sitting in that black plastic bag in the sun for so long."

  "Seriously, though," Ishmael said, "there's something on the side of this road that you've got to taste. Whiskey Spring. It comes straight out of the mountain; you don't have to treat it at all." He led us over to a metal pipe, hidden behind a ledge. A steady stream of water trickled out of the end, and the three of us took turns filling our bottles under it. I took a sip; it was cold, sweet, and somehow smooth-tasting, like the whiskey it was named for.

  All through the day, Ishmael told us about the history of that stretch of trail and showed us its secret springs, its viewpoints, and its camping spots. We were on his beat, the section where he worked as the principal volunteer maintainer.

  "This place is Center Point Knob," he told us. "It used to be the midpoint of the Trail. There's a famous picture of Earl Shaffer standing in front of that rock."

  Later, as we crossed a field on the outskirts of town, he pointed to a patch of trees at the base of the slope. Railroad tracks stretched across the level field beyond. "Over there behind those cedars is the old hobo camp. Sometimes hikers still camp there, but I wouldn't recommend it. There's a crazy guy who wanders around the tracks, muttering stuff under his breath. I've never gotten close enough to hear what he says, but he always sounds angry."

  As he spoke, we followed the trail closer to the hobo camp. We were only ten feet away front the cedars when a tall, heavy man lumbered out from behind them. He had a short reddish beard and a mop of light brown hair, which was tousled as if he'd just woken up from a nap. He squinted at us from behind small, oval glasses, with an expression that reminded me of a grizzly hear trying to decide what to do about an intruder. While we waited for him to speak, a large red dog burst out of the trees, baring its teeth and thrashing its body hack and forth.

  "Is that your dog?" jackrabbit asked the man.

  He grunted.

  "Is it friendly?"

  "She don't bite."

  "Hi, doggie," jackrabbit said, holding out a tentative hand. The dog thrashed its way over to her and rubbed its back against her legs. From this close, its strange grimace looked more like a smile than a snarl.

  "Her name's Annie," the man said. After a pause, he added, "I'm Heald. Chris Heald."

  While jackrabbit, Ishmael and I were introducing ourselves, two more amen stepped out of the trees. The younger one was obviously a hiker; he wore shorts, a fleece jacket, and a pair of lightweight hiking boots. He had a handsome, angular face, shadowed by a week's growth of beard.

  "Hi, I'm Dave," he said, reaching out to shake Ishmael's hand.

  "Mohawk Joe," said the other. He was tall and wiry, with high cheekbones, jet-black hair, and a fantastically lined face. He was dressed in jeans, work boots, and a ratty white t-shirt. If I hadn't been standing downwind of him, I would never have guessed he was a hiker.

  "Are these guys friends of yours?" Ishmael asked me uncertainly.

  "They are now," I told him. "They're hikers-1 think."

  Ishmael turned to the uien. "Do you guys need to resupply?" he asked. "We were about to head to town for a dinner, and I've got plenty of space in my truck"

  Twenty minutes later, I was crammed in the back of the truck between Mohawk Joe and Annie. Dave was up front with Ishmael, jackrabbit sat on the other side of Mohawk Joe, and Heald lounged along the other side of the truck bed.

  Heald glanced over at us and gave what sounded like a grunt of satisfaction. "Better company tonight," he said, to no one in particular. "Last night it was just me and this nutcase sleeping by the tracks. He kept muttering about his ex-wife's had habits, saving she used to wash her silverware in old bathwater and strain her soup broth through a sock. It was kinda interesting, as monologues go, but I had a hard time getting to sleep with all that noise."

  jackrabbit

  t was hard to leave Ishmael's house. The three days we spent there had been the longest time we stayed in one place since the Gathering, I realized. Still, the Trail was calling. Ishmael told us we were nearly through the infamous Pennsylvania rocks, aside from a few patches that spilled over into Maryland. I was eager to try to put some more barefoot mileage behind us before the snow fell. I knew there were other hikers on the Trail now. Meeting Dave, Heald, and Mohawk Joe, strange as these characters had seemed, had been a boost to my spirits.

  Ishmael dropped us off at the road in the late morning. It looked like something had gotten into the bag of deer guts in the ditch, but none of us felt like investigating too closely. The woods were quiet-the insistent wind that had prowled the ridges between Palmerton and Duncannon had finally died down; only a slight breeze rustled the dry oak leaves. We made good time over the trail. There were fewer patches of the infernal Pennsylvania rocks, and the ones we did run into seemed less tippy and treacherous than their more northerly cousins.

  In the eve
ning we came to the Ironmasters Youth Hostel. A converted Victorian mansion, it loomed against the sunset, tall and imposing with its ranks of high windows. The wide double doors swung open, and we saw a thin young man in a striped hat, smiling broadly. He had tightly curled brown hair, hazel eyes, and a multitude of freckles. "Welcome to Ironmasters. I'm Shawn, the hostel manager."

  We gave our names.

  "The barefoot Sisters! I've heard about you. C'mon in and make yourselves at home. Now, is it true that one of you plays the piano

  livo points in his favor, I thought. He didn't ask the litany of questions, and lie knows soinethin about us besides our preferred footwear. I grinned and nodded. He gestured toward the instrument in the corner of the high-ceilinged room. Two pianos in two days-this was almost too good to believe.

  "I'd love to hear you play."

  "Thanks, Shawn! Let nie get cleaned up first."

  After we had stowed our packs in the bunkroom and taken showers, we changed into fleece pants and marginally clean t-shirts. I sat down at the piano and lost myself in music. Memories came flooding back with the sounds; I pictured my first piano teacher's house, with its darkened rooms and overgrown backyard where cats stalked under the raspberries. I remembered walking there hand in hand with my mother, every Thursday after kindergarten. Later, the living room of my father's house, after the divorce, when it seemed that the strands of music I drew from the black and white keys were the only meaningful thing in the world. Then the practice rooms in college, with their green carpets and dark wood. Watching the sunlight fade outside the warped glass while I worked on the same passage over and over. Standing on stage after my senior recital while friends passed bouquets of bright flowers up to me. Here on the Trail, there were no flowers, no rounds of applause. The rewards were more subtle, but much deeper: trust and companionship. The light between the branches. The taste of water after a day of thirst.