Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  "Suppertime!" My sister's voice drew nie back to the present. It was almost dark outside. Shawn had turned on a few lamps in the common room of the hostel. A rectangle of brighter light projected from the kitchen, where Isis had set a table for four. "Hiker box stew again," she said, and produced a brimming pot of pasta with parmesan cheese and fresh tomatoes. It looked like enough food to serve four or five hungry hikers.

  "That must've been some hiker box!" I looked over at Shawn, who was stirring a pot of something on the stove.

  He shrugged, grinning. "I work at an organic farm off and on. Last week, when the killing frost came, we had more tomatoes than we knew what to do with. I figured hikers this time of year might like some fresh food"

  "Thanks, man! This is quite a treat." I took a plate from the dish drainer and sat down across from Isis. Shawn sat at the head of the table. Isis dished out pasta for all of us. "Who's the other place for?" I asked.

  "Dave. He's in the shower. He came in while you were playing."

  "Cool" I had been so wrapped up in the music I hadn't even noticed hint at the door.

  He came to the kitchen in a few minutes, still rubbing his short hair with a towel. "Sounded good, jackrabbit."

  "Thanks, Dave"

  "Want some hiker box stew?" Isis asked him.

  He looked a little doubtful, but when he saw the proffered pasta his blue eyes widened. "Yeah, thanks. Awesome.' He grabbed a plate and sat down. After several forkfuls, he gave Isis a puzzled look. "This is great. Why do you call it hiker box stew, anyway?"

  I told the story of the night at the 501 shelter and the frozen beer-"defi- nitely a cold one!"-and Dave and Shawn laughed heartily.

  Dave told us about his adventures with his hiking companions, from Heald trying to hop a freight car in Port Clinton to Mohawk Joe chasing down a woodchuck for his supper. "Those guys are a little strange," he said, and it seemed like the understatement of the evening.

  Shawn related a few of his adventures. He had graduated from college a few years earlier with a degree in studio art and worked on organic farms in France and Italy for a year before returning to the states to run the hostel.

  After supper, Isis brewed a pot of peppermint tea for us to share. It was good to have company for tea again. We hadn't shared it with anyone, I reflected, since we had invited Mary to join us on the ridge outside Palmerton. I wondered what had happened to the Family, and I hoped they were okay in the gathering chill of winter. They seldom signed in registers. In the warm, bright kitchen of Ironmasters Hostel, I asked Shawn if he had seen them.

  "Oh, yes. They came through here a week, maybe ten days ago" He shook his head and smiled. "I've never seen a family that looked so happy together. Those kids were something else."

  "Do you think they'll make it to Georgia?"

  "They'll make it as far as they set their minds to go. Every single one of them has more backbone than about five regular people put together."

  I nodded. "That's what I thought, too. I wish we could have stayed with them longer."

  When we hiked out with Dave the next day, the trail was so smooth and comfortable underfoot that we were able to keep up with him. We stealthcamped together in a clearing among oak trees. Isis had carried out some popcorn from the hiker box as a treat. She wrapped her hand in several layers of handkerchiefs and shook the pot over our campfire for a few minutes. Only a few kernels burned and stuck to the pan; the rest popped up as light and fluffy as if they'd been microwaved. Dave applauded and offered a generous amount of butter from his food bag. We watched the sunset through the gnarled branches. With its infinite, subtle permutations of purple and orange, it was better than any movie.

  In the morning, we sat on the logs around the old fireplace eating our breakfast of instant oatmeal, mixed up cold with a little powdered milk. The sky had become sullen and threatening, and the colors of the forest floor seemed to glow brighter against its gray: the dark kelly green of laurel thickets, the chestnut-colored backdrop of fallen oak leaves, and the light speckled gray of tree trunks. All around came the sound of wind stirring the fallen leaves.

  As we packed up our camp, we heard a rustle of footsteps and the click of trekking poles. Two hikers, trotting along at probably four miles an hour, in the midst of an animated conversation. 77rese guys look like sobos, I thought, but I'II probably never see there again. They'll reach Sprilg~er before I'in haI/ii'ay throng/i IStill, I walked over to the trail to introduce myself.

  "Hallo, jackrabbit"

  "Black Forest?" It was him, all right. A red knit cap covered his blond curls, and he looked even thinner than he had in I)uncannon. But there was no mistaking his deadpan tone and German accent or the sly, mock-innocent look in his enormous blue eyes.

  "Ja. How are you?"

  "Good, good. Man, it's great to see you again. And who's your companion?"

  "Hey, I'm Lash" The other fellow extended a hand. He was probably in his late twenties, tall (about my height), dressed in black Capilene with high gaiters, and wearing a fluorescent orange hat over his dark hair. He had ruddy cheeks and the usual scruffy beard. His pack was probably half the size of mine. The most distinctive thing about hint was the color of his eyes, a startlingly beautiful bronze like an ancient coil).

  "pleased to meet you, Lash," I said.

  "I )ude! Are you one of the Barefoot Sisters?"

  I )ave and Isis came out of the woods, and we made introductions again. We traded stories as Lash and Black Forest leaned on their hiking poles. Lash had started the first of September and traveled fast enough to keep ahead of the winter, though his water bottles had frozen solid on Moosilauke. He and Black Forest had teamed up just south of I)uncannon, while the German was still recovering from his night of drunken revelry.

  I asked about their plans for the immediate future, and Black Forest's eyes lit up. "We are doing the Half-gallon Challenge today and the Maryland Challenge tomorrow. Will you join us,"

  "That's nuts. Maryland's more than forty miles! And besides, we're still twenty-five miles from the border."

  "Miles do not matter to me. I am a German badass."

  "You guys are insane"

  "No, listen. This is how it's gonna work" Lash explained the plan. They would stop for lunch at a pizza place on US 30, perhaps six miles away, and do the Half-gallon Challenge. (This disgusting tradition involves eating an entire half gallon of ice cream in one sitting to commemorate the midpoint of the Trail. Some of the northbounders we'd met in Maine and New Hampshire had bragged about it. I thought southbounders were too smart for that kind of stunt, but Lash and Black Forest were quickly undermining my assumptions about my fellow sobos.) So they would consume a lunch of pizza and hideous amounts of ice cream, and thus fortified they would hike to the border. The following day they would get up at the crack of dawn and hike the entire length of the A.T. in Maryland. (This was another feat I had heard bandied about by nobos.) Lash explained the crackbrained plan in a very reasonable voice, which made it seem all the more surreal.

  I looked over at Dave. He shook his head with a dumbfounded smile. "The only part of it that sounds any good to me is stopping for pizza."

  "Amen to that." Isis, Dave, and I planned to meet the others at the pizza place. They would hike ahead and go down the road to a grocery store to purchase their half gallons.

  "I still don't understand why you guys want to do that," I said. "It's so gross. I mean, think how much ice cream that really is. Just the volume of it alone. Why would you do a thing like that?"

  Lash fixed nle with an inscrutable stare. "Because it's there."

  "Suit yourself. But just don't get one of those weird flavors like Moose Tracks or Cookie Dough. I couldn't even bear to watch that"

  The sky opened up with drizzle as we neared the road to the pizza place. I heard the sound of traffic getting closer, the rush of wind and the wet slushing of wheels turning on the rain-slick road. We put our camp shoes on at the edge of the tarmac and headed for the distant green and
red sign of the pizza parlor.

  Inside, the smell of baking bread and fresh pizza was almost overpowering. We put in our order-one large veggie and two sides of onion rings for Isis and me, one large pepperoni for Dave-and took a seat in one of the yellow plastic booths by the window. Lash and Black Forest came in a moment later, grinning and carrying a grocery bag. They held up their ice cream boxes for our perusal: Lash had Moose Tracks; the German had Cookie Dough. I groaned.

  We demolished our pizza in a short while and turned our attention to spectator sports. The TV in the corner was tuned to ESPN2, a special on trout fishing in the Housatonic. The commentator's voice sparkled on about the joys of fishing in a natural setting, the excitement of feeling the tug on your line, the beauty and majesty of wild trout. Black Forest was unimpressed. "You Americans," he intoned. "You are so weird. You do not even know how weird you are"

  Later the sport changed to women's bowling, which was not nearly so interesting. We began to watch Lash and Black Forest instead. The German slumped on the bench, idly trailing his spoon through the frothy, half-melted ice cream. Occasionally lie would turn up a lump of cookie dough and spoon it into his mouth with a look of high disgust. Lash, meanwhile, kept his spoon moving, but just barely. All the color had drained from his red cheeks, and he looked like one of the living dead.

  Isis and 1, in a moment of mischievousness, went up to the counter and ordered ice cream cones. Lash and Black Forest pointedly looked out the window, where the drizzle had thickened to a steady rain, and continued eating their soupy ice cream. Finally they poured the dregs into their water bottles and drank it through straws. They finished it, though, and held their boxes aloft as proof, with swollen bellies and somewhat nauseated grins.

  "Lash, I am feeling not very good. I am feeling like sheet."

  "Dude, I'm not gonna be able to move"

  We sat in the restaurant for probably another hour, as the rain hammered down outside. Eventually the ice cream eaters could move again, albeit slowly. Some of the color had returned to Lash's cheeks, and Black Forest no longer drooped over the table like a wet noodle. It was late afternoon, though, and Isis and I decided to just head for the next shelter, three miles out.

  "It's a double shelter," Dave said, consulting his Data Book. "There should be plenty of room for all of us ..."

  "We are not stopping. Tomorrow we do Maryland."

  "Yeah, man. Party in Harpers Ferry tomorrow night. See you there, hmm? H.F. is where it's at." Lash held up his hands and made an encouraging face, like a used car salesman trying to get rid of a lemon.

  We tried to argue, but it was no use. The half-gallon challengers were intent on challenging Maryland as well, even though they were still nineteen miles from the border, the rain was pouring down, and night was falling fast. Tliat'c the last I'll see of these guys, I thought once more.

  At the shelter that night, we met Sharkbait. He stood under the eaves just inside the dripline, grinning, smoking a cigarette. He wore a dark blue fleece jacket and shorts. It was hard to guess his age-like most younger men on the Trail, he could have been anywhere from nineteen to thirty-five. He was tall and almost skeletally thin, with close-cropped blond hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a long braided goatee tied with a rubber band. I was about to ask about the trail name when I saw his legs, a bare mass of scar tissue from the knees down. The skin had healed over long ago, but the right calf muscle was completely missing, and the left had an enormous chunk taken out of it. The shins and the remnants of the left calf were rock-hard thru-hiker muscles. I tried not to stare.

  After supper, Dave lit a ring of candles. We shared stories in the soft light, speaking loudly over the drumming of the rain on the tin roof.

  "So you're probably wondering how I got this way." Sharkbait gestured toward his mangled legs and grinned. "I was down in Baja, year after high school. Got drunk one night; thought it'd be a good idea to swim off the docks. So I was out in the water, way out there. This guy yells, `shark!' And next thing I know .. " His speech came in sharp scattershot bursts, and between sentences he paused, looking downward as if lost in his memories. In these moments he looked years younger, and somehow fragile. "I woke up in this hospital with four hundred stitches in my legs." He laughed as if he'd just delivered the punchline.

  Isis and I made sounds of sympathy.

  "God, that's horrible. I guess you were lucky to get away, though"

  "That's awful. It really happened like that?"

  He stopped laughing. "No," he said, and then laughed even louder. "I tell that shit to section hikers and Boy Scouts about forty times a day. Thru hikers, I mostly tell the truth. I got hit by a Volkswagen. A fuckin' van. This friend of mine was driving. I was in a phone booth, talkin' to my girlfriend ... This guy wants to scare inc or something, so he revs the engine, conies up on the booth ... but he's stoned, and the brakes are bad, and ...

  "My girlfriend, she hears this crash over the phone. I was, like, blacked out. She calls 911. Her mom's a nurse on the ambulance. Later on she told nie they were picking up bits of my bones outta the rubble. Pieces this big." He held up a hand, thumb and forefinger maybe three inches apart. "So I spent eight months in the fuckin' hospital with my legs up in the air. They put me back together.

  "And the thing of it is that before that, in high school, I used to be a runner. Used to win meets and shit, and I had these legs ... Girls went crazy over my legs ... But that shit's all in the past. At least I can walk now, you know? At least I didn't buy it in that fuckin' parking lot.

  "My mouuua told inc later, she knew it was gonna happen ... she had this dream where I died. And she prayed every day after that, she said, `God, please spare my son.' And when they called her from the hospital, she knew what they were gonna say. So sometimes I think .. " he looked down at the shelter floor and lowered his voice. "I think I'm alive because my momma prayed for me. But most of the time I don't believe in all that shit."

  The shelter was quiet for a moment, the words hanging in the rain-laden air. Sharkbait's thin face was frozen in remembrance. All of a sudden he came to life again, his face contorting into a tough-guy smile.

  "Can't wait for H.E," he said. "Gonna get driggity-drunk."

  Isis

  y morning, the rain had lightened to drizzle. Sharkbait and Dave took off early, planning to hike a twenty to Devil's Racecourse Shelter in Maryland. Jackrabbit and I entertained the more modest ambition of crossing the Pennsylvania-Maryland border, some fifteen miles away, before nightfall. We expected to be alone for the next few days, but we hoped to catch the guys if they took a zero in Harpers Ferry.

  Six and a half miles into our day, we reached the Tumbling Run Shelters, a pair of tiny brown and white buildings set in the middle of a rhododendron thicket.

  "It's a little early to stop for lunch;"jackrabbit said, glancing at her watch. "Shall we take a look at the register, anyway?"

  "Sure" I checked the shelter to the left of the trail, while jackrabbit headed for the one on the right. No register in the left-hand shelter. As I turned around, I noticed jackrabbit waving excitedly from the front of the other building. With her other hand, she held a finger to her lips.

  "Isis, there are people in here," she whispered. "I think they're asleep."

  I hurried over. A yellow bivy sack lay against one wall, and a red sleeping bag against the other, each filled with the unmistakable bulk of a supine body. The bags were cinched tight at the head; only the tip of a pinkish nose showed at the opening of the red one.

  "Do you think they're okay?" I asked jackrabbit. "Should we wake them up and see?"

  "I don't know." She shook her head slowly. "Who would be sleeping in a shelter on the A.T., in this season, at eleven o'clock in the morning?"

  As if in answer to her question, the red sleeping bag emitted a soft groan. The yellow bivy squirmed around a little, and a brown beard emerged from the top end.

  "Is it morning already?" asked a feeble voice.

  "Lash!" jackrabbit exc
laimed. "Is that you? And Black Forest? I thought you guys would be halfway across Maryland by now."

  The bivy sack answered with a moan. "It was the fog. Our headlamps died, man. Both of them. We thought we were lost in all those rhododendrons, with the fog swirling up in our faces like a hunch of wet ghosts" Lash pushed himself upright and stuck the rest of his head out of his bivy. "I almost cried," he concluded mournfilly.

  "Black Forest?" Jackrabbit poked the end of the red sleeping bag. "Are you awake?"

  "Is it still raining?" his muffled voice responded.

  "Only a little."

  "Do not talk to me. If it is raining, I am not awake"

  We hiked on in high spirits, joking about Lash and Black Forest's Maryland Challenge attempt and making bets as to when they would catch up with us. About a mile down the trail, we reached Antietam Shelter to find that it, too, was occupied. Heald and Mohawk Joe, the rough-looking guys we had met in Boiling Springs, sat side by side at the front of the sleeping platform. Mohawk Joe had an open beer in each hand, and Heald was swigging the last few mouthfuls from a bourbon bottle. His red dog Annie thrashed her way across the clearing to greet us, grinning her toothy grin.

  "Hey, guys! Where's the bar?" jackrabbit asked.

  "nigh' here," said Mohawk Joe. "Drop your packs an' join us "

  "Joe and me hitched into town last night;" Heald explained. In spite of the now-empty bottle in his hand, he looked up at us with a clear and level gaze. "(jot ourselves some drink. Here, have a beer." He pulled two cartons of beer out of a shaded corner of the shelter.

  Jackrabbit's eyes widened. "That's a lot of beer. Are you guys planning to finish it?''

  Heald shook his head. "I'm about ready to hike on, myself. I'm out of bourbon, and I don't drink that other shit. foe's going to stay here and finish it. Unless you girls want to help him out.'

  "Help nie," Mohawk Joe said. He took a bill bottle of brandy out of the corner where the beer had been and waved it in our direction. "You gotta help me. Have sulnma this. Iss the best:"