Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  Jackrabbit shook her head. "Thanks for the offer, but we'd better not. We can't drink and hike barefoot."

  "Take some with you," Mohawk Joe offered. "Drink it tonight. I got plenty."

  I glanced at jackrabbit. "Sure. That'd be a treat. Thank you"

  While Heald hefted his pack and walked away down the trail, Mohawk Joe poured half the brandy into my spare Nalgene.

  "I'd like to get to Maryland tonight, but maybe we'd better start looking for a campsite;"jackrabbit said.

  I agreed. Dusk was falling as we hiked down the last ridge before the state line. I knew I didn't have the energy to hike five or six more miles to Devil's Racecourse Shelter, and I didn't want to end up searching for stealth spots in the dark, either.

  "The map showed a stream in the bottom of the valley;" I told jackrabbit. "Maybe we can find a spot there"

  "Either that or we can fill our water bottles there and camp at the next level place."

  When we reached the stream, though, we found an official-looking yellow plastic sign nailed to the bridge. Con till) I il la ted Ii;tter, it read. Do Not Drink. There was no note whether the contaminants were bacteria (which our filter could have handled), viruses (which we could have used our emergency chlorine tablets to treat), or heavy metals or hydrocarbons, which we had no way to remove.

  "I guess we'11 have to go on to the next water source," jackrabbit said. "How far is it?"

  "Let's see ..:' I pulled out the map. "Well, there aren't any springs or streams until Devil's Racecourse, but there's this place called Pen Mar Park right on the other side of the state line. It looks like a sort of a city park, with streets and buildings all around it. It's probably got a fountain, or maybe a restroom where we could get water from the sink"

  "Or maybe there's a gas station or a restaurant on one of the streets," said jackrabbit, brightening. "We'd better hurry, though; its almost dark."

  We didn't stop to take pictures of each other at the state line, as we usually did, and we hardly spared a glance for the brown wooden sign marking the Mason-Dixon Line. By the time we reached the roads near Pen Mar Park, streetlights were flickering on.

  jackrabbit spotted a drinking fountain behind the park restrooms, but when we pressed the button, no water came out. The restroom doors were bolted. In desperation, we headed across the grass toward a decorative fountain, only to find that it had been drained for the season.

  "What about the town?"jackrabbit asked.

  All around the park, the bright rectangles of windows glowed in the dusk. I could picture the people inside the houses, turning on their faucets to fill glasses, pots, and bathtubs with fresh, drinkable water. Who cared that it smelled like chlorine, or that it came, perhaps, from the same watershed as the contaminated stream? What mattered was the unlimited supply of it, right there behind every door. Old ladies were pouring it into bowls for their cats; happy young couples were washing their dinner dishes. I imagined knocking on one of the doors, asking for water. Perhaps the kind people who lived there would take pity on us, or maybe even take an interest in our story and ask us to stay the night.

  Reality check, Isis. jackrabbit and l are no longer sweet blue-eyed girls from a good family, with all the unfair advantages of race, class, and beauty recommending us to the goodwill of strangers. If people ive meet on the Trail like us and trust us, it's because they're just as grubby as we are, or because they've seed so many hikers that the grilse and odor no longer surprise them. I imagined how outlandish we'd look to an ordinary suburban family, stepping out of the darkness with our tall hiking sticks and our mud-stained clothes. We belonged to the woods, the night, and the rain: the very things those house walls had been built to keep out.

  "We'd better go on," I told jackrabbit. "It's been raining so much; I'm sure we'll find water somewhere. A puddle at least." We had filtered water out of puddles before, on mountaintops in Maine and New Hampshire. I'd always felt particularly sanguine about the purity of puddle water; instead of passing through a vast unknown watershed, it fell directly from the sky, touching nothing but the stones that contained it.

  "Maybe we should walk along the street for a ways," jackrabbit suggested. "There might be a gas station."

  I shook my head, remembering my long, dispiriting trek through the streets of Manchester, Vermont, before I found my way to the tutoring center. "1 don't want to get lost in a town at night. In the woods, at least, we can find a place to sleep"

  Sure enough, the ground beyond the park was nice and level, with plenty of places to pitch a tent under the oaks. Half a mile into the woods, we found our water source: a puddle that stretched across the middle of the trail, two inches deep and filled with dead oak leaves. Nothing pure about this water; Heald's boots and Annie's paws must have splashed through it within the hour. I met jackrabbit's eye and shrugged. Nothing our filter couldn't handle.

  Supplied with the two liters I'd filtered from the leafy pool, we made camp at the base of a rockslide a little farther down the trail. The dark water blended well enough with the color of our instant black beans, and we were hungry enough to ignore the slightly bitter flavor. After dinner, we made ourselves cups of cocoa heavily laced with the brandy Mohawk Joe had given us. We went to bed somewhat dehydrated but happy.

  In the morning light, it was much harder to face the water I'd filtered the night before. The tannins in the oak leaves had stained it as brown as strong tea. When we mixed it with our granola, the dry milk turned a foul linty gray. Jackrabbit wrinkled her nose.

  "Maybe we should have mixed our cereal with brandy instead," she said, holding up the remaining quarter liter of alcohol next to a bottle of puddle water. "It's a slightly lighter shade"

  jackrabbit

  e camped that night at Pine Knob Shelter in Maryland, with Lash and Black Forest and a troop of Boy Scouts. The scouts had already taken over the shelter when we arrived, covering the floor with packs, sleeping bags, and spare gear. Lash, who wasn't carrying a tarp or a tent, took offense.

  "These shelters were built for thru-hikers!" he protested to the scoutmaster.

  I thought about telling him off: The shelters are /or anybody,_first corns/first serve, and if you aren't smart enoui li to brim a tent, you should probably count on sleepin,Q out, dude ... But I hadn't known Lash for very long, and I wasn't sure how he would react. Also, I was tired from a long day; finally out of the nasty Pennsylvania rocks, we had hiked seventeen miles, tying our longest day yet. I decided to hold my tongue and let the scoutmaster handle this.

  The man looked at Lash blankly. "There aren't any more thru-hikers."

  "We are thru-hikers. We are here," Black Forest tried to make his voice sound menacing, but it cane out petulant.

  "I talked to the ATC last night," the scoutmaster said. "They told me there weren't any more thru-hikers this late in the season, so we'd be free to use the shelter. You're welcome to join us in here; I'm sure we can make space."

  Grumbling, Lash and Black Forest scooted into one corner of the shelter while the scouts reorganized their things. Isis and I tented, as we had planned all along. I didn't envy the nien; they could probably look forward to a night of fart jokes and twelve-year-olds' ghost stories. I was kind of ashamed of the way they had acted, though, trying to claim the space as their own when the scouts had obviously been there first. I decided they deserved their fate.

  Lash and Black Forest came by our tent in the morning before we were fully awake. "Simpsons season premier tonight at seven, ladies," Lash said. "See you in town"

  Isis grumbled something unintelligible in reply, but I snapped awake. "What do you think?" I whispered. "Do you think we could hike twentythree miles in a day?" I remembered her story of slacking with Scout in Vermont. She could do it, but could I?

  Isis turned over and stretched. "We could try."

  It was still early when we began hiking, with a pale light slanting through the bare trees. We started out with our fleeces on, and it was quite a while before I took mine off. The
path was cold underfoot. I could feel the edges of the gravel and the occasional sharp point poking up through the thickness of my calluses, a dull chilly pain. By now, we had developed an almost uncanny sense of balance, knowing if a rock would shift as soon as a foot touched it, and being able to transfer weight from toe to heel and from side to side without thinking about it. This sense didn't help on gravel, though, where the many small points made it impossible to find a comfortable stepping place.

  In midmorning, we passed a troop of maybe fifty Boy Scouts, with a few harried-looking scout leaders at either end of the line. As I stepped off the path to make room, the tender arch of my foot came down on a blackberry bramble. I clamped ny teeth together to prevent any outburst of language in front of the kids. But as the line of them trooped past, one skinny ten-yearold, safely out of hearing of the adults, took a look at us. "Holy shit! They're fucking barefoot!"

  The trail took us past the ruins of an old confederate farmhouse. Across the next road, a stone building of the same vintage had been fixed up as a restaurant. I glanced at the sign as we crossed the road: "Stony Mountain Inn. Fine I)ining for All. Sunday Brunch 10:30-1" My watch read 111:28. "How about brunch, Isis?"

  We stashed our packs in a corner of the courtyard, made ourselves as presentable as possible, and proceeded to demolish the stacks of eggs, home fries, bread, muffins, pastries, and fresh fruit. An hour and six plates later, I was ready to hit the trail.

  On the far side of the road, we found a Gone with the Wind postcard left on a stump. lthett and Scarlett embraced while Atlanta burned in the background. Among the flames was a crude sketch of a bare footprint. On the back, Heald's blocky capitals spelled out Dear Sistah<, ice are in Hl 'at the Cliffside Inn because they take smelly does. Conic /ind us. Cross the Shenandoah River Bridge, turn left, uvalk a '/2 mile. Lash and Black Forest had signed it, too.

  Isis laughed. "Those boys"

  The sun was higher now, and the cold no longer seeped into my soles from the rocks. The ridges were almost as steep-sided and skinny as those of Pennsylvania, covered with the same reddish-brown carpet of fallen oak leaves, but the patches of tippy, knife-edged rocks were fewer and farther between. Fueled by the plates of brunch we had eaten, we made good time, stopping only to talk to other hikers.

  At the high point of one ridge, a Girl Scout troop practiced their rockclimbing skills on an outcropping of dark stone. We paused to talk to one of the leaders, and she called the troop over. They quizzed us about our hike. Somehow, the familiar questions were much more exciting coming from a group of ten-year-olds than they would he front the average middle :aged dayhiker.

  "How many of you want to hike the Trail someday?" Isis asked, and an enthusiastic chorus of "ine!"s came back. It was heartening; I felt as though what we were doing was actually important, as though it could matter to people besides ourselves. I felt a new lightness in my step as we continued along the trail.

  The sun sank low over the distant mountains, painting the treetops on the ridges gold while the rest of the land sank into purple shadow. The trail was hard to see in the gathering gloom, and I could feel my concentration weakening. Already I had hiked more miles today than ever before. Once or twice I nearly kicked my foot into a rock or stepped down onto something sharp, but I managed to recover at the last moment.

  We could see lights in the valley below winking on as we reached the end of the ridge and began to descend at last. The trail here was dry dust, powdersmooth and silky underfoot, and I let my concentration relax a little bit. We stopped for water. I hit the Indiglo button on my watch, igniting a brief bluegreen flash that suddenly made the night around me several shades darker. "Seven oh-four. The Simpsons is on; I guess the guys will have to tell us how it went."

  "We're still a few miles out, I'm guessing. Didn't Heald say the last part of it is on a canal towpath?"

  "Something like that. Hope it's not gravel." But it was, two miles of it, and my mind went numb with the effort. The moon rose over the river beside us, gleaming silver through the bare trees and reflecting off the turmoil of the water. The canal on the other side of the path gave off a faint stench of rotting weeds and catfish. It would have been beautiful and peaceful, except for the ceaseless pain of the gravel. Each step brought a new stab of awareness somewhere on the soles of my feet. My calluses had never really recovered from the time I'd spent off the Trail. For probably the last mile, I was leaning heavily on my sticks and cursing through my teeth. Isis, walking ahead, seemed not to mind the gravel at all. Her thicker calluses and wider feet carried her over the sharp little stones with no problems.

  At last the trail brought us to a bridge, with the little town of Harpers Ferry nestled on the point beyond at the confluence of two rivers. I remembered the directions on Heald's postcard.

  "Is this the Shenandoah River?"

  "Hang on a sec." Isis switched on her headlamp, its brilliant blue beam slicing through the darkness, and unfolded the map from her waist pouch. "No, this is the Potomac. We have to cross here, go through town-it's kind of confusing here-and then there's another bridge. We go back out the same direction we came in, but on the other side of the river."

  "I didn't see many lights across the river from the towpath ..."

  "I didn't either, but that's where Heald said to go."

  "Okay, let's do it.

  The trail led to a historic park at the head of the island, a small space of grass surrounded by half-ruined stone walls. It was slightly eerie in the moonlight, with the low murmur of rivers gurgling past and the distant whistle of a freight train. A light mist was coming off the water.

  "Now what?" I said, whispering despite myself.

  "I don't know. The Trail's supposed to go through town somewhere in that direction-" she pointed toward a row of silent antebellum houses set on a hill, "-hut I don't see any blazes"

  "Lemme see the map" I took out my Photon light, on a string around my neck, and created a circle of blue-white light. "If we follow this road up and take the third left, that gets us to the bridge. We can walk the white blazes tomorrow before we leave town"

  We sat down on the curb to lace up our camp shoes for the road walk.

  When we reached the Shenandoah River, the moon had retreated behind a low hank of clouds. It was hard to see clearly in the gloom, but there seemed to be two bridges. One was narrow and shabby-looking. A steady stream of cars flowed over it, very close to the edges, and I couldn't see any space for pedestrians. The new bridge was a four-lane concrete affair with a walkway on the near side. Although the traffic wasn't routed over it yet, it looked complete.

  "Solid said something about this at the Gathering, remember? He said there was a new bridge under construction, and the Trail was hard to find here"

  "It'll be easier to find in the morning. Look, are you sure you want to do this, jackrabbit? There's a Comfort Inn right over there .. " Sure enough, I could see the glowing yellow and orange sign just down the road.

  "Yes," I said. "After all the miles we've hiked today, what's another pointfive?" And here was the heart of the matter: "And after all the effort we've put into catching up to these boys, can't we at least spend one more evening with theni before they get ahead of us for good?"

  She sighed. "If you want to. But all I can say is this Cliffside place better be good "

  "It will be"

  We chose the new bridge, with its walkway, because even at this hour the traffic was still roaring past on the other bridge. The moon flashed in and out of the clouds. Its light revealed the pale span of the new bridge stretching out ahead of us, with shoulder-high railings on our left. Through the spaces between railings, we could see the pearly waters swirling at the rivers' confluence, the solid black outlines of the high cliffs on either side. Over us, the indigo sky hung with wisps of silver cloud and a few stars. The moonlight dimmed as a cloud came over.

  About halfway across the bridge, the railings ended. There was only a single cable, knotted to posts every six feet or s
o, between us and the dizzying sweep of the river far below. And then the cable ended.

  We made our way gingerly along the shelf of the walkway, hugging the inside. Isis turned on her headlamp, and I hung back, trying to keep my eyes adjusted to the darkness and feeling my way slowly along. After a few feet, Isis came to a halt. There was a waist-high block of concrete set in the pathway, with maybe a foot of room on the outside. I held all of our hiking sticks while she inched around it, and then passed the bundle of wood to her. As I stepped around the outside of the block, my hands on the bumpy concrete for balance, something on my pack hung up and nearly threw me off balance. I lurched back just in time, acutely aware of the river sounds behind me, the gurgle and roar of rapids.

  On the other side of the block, I paused. "This is insane! What are we doing in a fucking construction site? That block was probably there to keep people from doing what we just did. What if the walkway dead-ends? What if there's a hole in the fucking thing?"

  Just then the moon reemerged from the clouds, revealing the rest of the bridge. We were getting close to the far shore. There were only three more blocks in the pathway, and all of them seemed to be set in a way that would give us more room. I took another deep breath and we started walking.

  The rest of the bridge wasn't as bad. There was plenty of space around the blocks, and (though I constantly tapped with my sticks like a blind person to be sure) the walkway was solid all the way across. On the other side, a set of steps led down and around, under the highway.

  "I wonder if this is the Trail."

  "I don't see any blazes." I had a nagging feeling that something was wrong. I didn't recall seeing anything that looked like a motel from across the water. This didn't really look like the kind of road you would find a motel on, anyway-a roaring four-lane highway, with hardly any shoulder. The cliffs rose up right beside it, and on the other side it dropped off steeply to the river. There were no signs, no buildings, just the silence of the woods and the scream of traffic.