Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  "Well, it's called the Cliffside, isn't it? There are definitely cliffs here. 'Cross the Shenandoah River, turn left, walk half a mile.' We should be there in ten minutes." I wished I could feel as confident as I sounded.

  Ten minutes went by, fifteen. The shoulder narrowed until there were only a few feet of space between us and the cars whizzing past. Isis stopped. "This is crazy. There is no Cliffside Inn, and if we don't get the hell out of here we are going to be roadkill."

  We turned around. I was numb with exhaustion, anger, defeat, and I let my sister's rage explode around nie. "You wanted to see the boys again. You would risk our lives just to see a bunch of assholes who don't give a shit about us! They were probably laughing when they wrote those fiickiiiq directions." (I knew she was truly angry-I hardly ever heard her swear.) "If I ever let you do something like this again ... Listen, you got us into this mess. 1'm going to get us out. I'm not going back over that bridge."

  I was too tired to argue. Isis took out the map. The sudden glare of her headlamp reflecting on the paper made the night grow blacker around us.

  "The road we saw coming down the cliff back there is the Chestnut Hill Road. About a mile up, it intersects the A.T. If we follow the Trail down we'll find the safe crossing"

  We came to the base of the road in a few minutes. By the light of my sister's headlamp and the passing cars, I could see the road angling steeply up the cliff. My legs felt weak and shaky, and my stomach growled. It had been almost nine hours since my last meal, I realized. The plates of brunch had certainly been substantial, but so had today's mileage. Twenty-three miles of barefoot hiking on the Trail, another mile or so on the road, and at least two more to go. "I need something to eat," I said woodenly.

  Without a word, Isis reached into the top of her pack for a granola bar. She handed it to me, her eyes still flashing with anger, and we began the long uphill grade.

  That night at the Comfort Inn, we discovered it was too late to order pizza. We dumped out our food bags on the carpet, wolfing down the last of our crackers, cookies, and dried fruit. It was not nearly enough to quell the rumblings in my stomach, but I was too tired to look for other food. I was too exhausted to even shower before I slept. I said a silent apology to the maids as I crawled between the clean sheets, hungry, sore, and stinking to high heaven. Behind my closed eyelids, as I fell asleep, I saw my feet following the trail down from the Chestnut Hill Road in the moonlight. Step after step, blue shadow and silver light and the sound of rapids.

  Isis

  he morning after our disastrous attempt to rejoin them, we found Heald, Lash, Black Forest, and Sharkbait at the outfitter's store. In the seconds before they noticed us, I considered turning around and walking out the door. The misanthropic corner of my mind, where memories from junior high ranged themselves beside history lessons like the files of a prosecutor's most incontrovertible case, had almost succeeded in convincing me that the postcard's false directions were intended as a brutal practical joke.

  Lash was the first to notice us; he walked across the store, cheerfully calling out, "I was afraid I wouldn't see you ladies again! I)id you just get into town?"

  I looked away, pretending to examine a shelf of water filters on the wall beside nie. I was afraid of what I might say if I tried to answer.

  "We got in last night," said jackrabbit. "No thanks to you guys." Her voice sounded bantering, scolding, as though she knew it was all a joke, and was just waiting to hear the punchline. "Tell me, boys, what the fiwek are these directions supposed to mean?" She held out the Gone With the Wind postcard.

  Heald took it, and examined the directions he'd written. After a minute he glanced at jackrabbit, who stood with her hands on her hips. "Well shit. You didn't do what this says, did you? These are the directions for northbounders, before the new bridge got built. Don't know what I was thinking."

  "What happened?" Sharkbait asked. "Are you okay?" All the tough-guy swagger was gone from his voice; he sounded like a child whose playmate has just fallen off the jungle lynx.

  Jackrabbit recounted our journey over the half-built bridge and along the freeway's shoulder.

  "Dude, I'm so sorry," murmured Lash. "I shouldn't have pressured you guys to get here last night."

  "It's my fault," Heald said. "Shit. I gave you the wrong directions."

  Black Forest looked away from us, shifting from one foot to the other, and said, "I did not write that card. I do not know these people who wrote it. It is not my fault." Part of me wanted to shove the card in his face and ask if he didn't recognize his own signature; part of me wanted to laugh and forget the whole quarrel.

  "It's all of our faults;" said Sharkbait. "Anything we can do to make up for it?"

  "Sure," said jackrabbit, grinning. "You can take a zero and go out for pizza with us tonight. After all we went through to catch up with you, you had better give us a day of your company before you hike on."

  I found myself agreeing. These guys were our friends, even if we hadn't known any of them for more than a week. Even though they'd written those directions. It would be good to spend a day with them before we all hiked on at our separate paces.

  Late that afternoon, as the walls of mountains on either side of town blocked the sunlight from the gorge, we walked over to the headquarters of the Appalachian Trail Conference. For an organization in charge of several thousand miles of trail and all the associated lands, the ATC had a very unprepossessing national office. The white clapboard-sided building, on a side street near the center of town, housed a small gift shop selling neaps and t-shirts on the ground floor.

  The woman at the counter looked up as we came in. "Hikers!" she said. "Welcome to Harpers Ferry. Are you southbound?"

  Heald, at the head of our group, grunted an affirmative.

  "Excellent! I need to get pictures of you guys for the books," the woman said, taking out a Polaroid camera. "It's a tradition," she explained. "We take photos of all the hikers who come through here every year." She pointed out the thick stacks of leather-hound photo albums on a back table in the shop.

  After our Polaroids were slipped into their plastic sleeves, we leafed through the most recent album. On the early pages came droves of northbounders and a few early southbounders whose navies we recognized from their register entries. Then I spotted Solid and Playfoot standing beside their packs and Tuba Man with his tuba held aloft, grinning like a maniac. Here were the southbound friends we had hiked through the Wilderness with: Matt, freckle-faced and now skeletally thin. Blue Skies and Tenbrooks, arm in arum, laughing. Waterfall grinning at the camera, her hair in two pigtails. Then Blade with his chin up, looking severe. Pages of section hikers and strangers. The Family from the North, huddled together in their warmest clothes. All the children had the same expression: a fierce, almost defiant smile. They were almost three weeks ahead of us now. I wondered whether we would ever see them again.

  I set the hook down on the table, suddenly astonished at the weight of it, the multitude of stories those pages of photos contained.

  After pizza that night, jackrabbit and I checked in at the Cliffside (which turned out to exist after all, albeit on the near side of the river and much more than half a mile out of town). We took our second showers in as many daysah, luxury!-then joined the boys in their room for bourbon and ice cream. We all sat cross-legged on the two beds, holding our spoons and passing around the cartons and the bottle.

  "I saw Mohawk Joe in town this afternoon," said Heald. "He asked nie if there were any bars open. I told him yup, Armory Pub, right down the street. I ain't seen him since. Typical. Guy seems like he fell off a barstool and onto the Trail."

  "I)id I ever tell you about the first time I meet Heald and Mohawk Joe?" Lash asked me. I shook my head.

  "Well, it was a little ways outside of Boiling Springs. Black Forest and I had just started hiking together. just met each other the day before. So we were night-hiking along and we came to a road, and there was this plastic garbage bag in the ditch
with something big and kinda lumpy inside. The bag was ripped open in one place. I couldn't see what was inside it, but there was this blackish stuff that looked a lot like blood oozing out. I asked Black Forest if he thought it was a body in there. He poked it with his hiking pole, and he said it was only a deer. Still, I hiked out of there pretty fast. About a mile down the trail, we started having this really trippy conversation. Black Forest was like, `What would we do if we found a dead body in the woods, and it was still warm? Would we stay together, or would we split up?' I was like, `Dude, we'd stay together. Safety in numbers.' And Black Forest went, `Wrong. We would split up. That way one of us would survive.'

  "So I was still thinking about that conversation when we got to the shelter. The first thing I saw, in the beam of my headlamp, was this plastic shopping bag hanging from a tree branch. It looked like it was dripping blood. Then I looked around the clearing, and I saw this skinny guy with huge biceps wearing jeans, steel-toed boots, and a white t-shirt with the sleeves torn off and the front all smeared with blood. When I turned my headlamp toward him, he got this look on his face like I'd just trespassed on his private property. Right behind him in the shelter was a big bear of a guy in a bloodstained flannel shirt, giving me that same kind of look. And then that doe-" he pointed to Annie, who was sprawled between the beds, snoring. "That dog came around the corner of the shelter, baring her teeth and thrashing around like she was having a seizure." Lash paused and gazed at me and jackrabbit, his huge golden-brown eyes brimming with remembered suffering. "I almost fiiiucd"

  "Where did all the blood come from?" I asked.

  "Me and Mohawk Joe found that dead deer in the bag," said Heald. "It didn't hiss much when Joe poked his knife in the stomach, so we figured the meat was okay. Most of the good cuts were gone. We took the heart and the liver. Grilled 'em up that night. You shoulda had some, Lash. It was real good."

  "Dude, I'm a vegetarian."

  "Huh. You never tried fresh deer liver?"

  Lash looked as though any prolonged description of deer organs might put hint in danger of fainting again, so I decided to change the subject.

  "Anyone want a back rub?"

  Black Forest jumped off the other bed, gleefully exclaiming, "Do I have '111 ass

  "Black Forest! That's not what I was talking about!" I scolded.

  "It is an expression. You do not know this expression? It is a way to say `yes, certainly."'

  "Kind of like 'does a bear shit in the woods?"' asked jackrabbit.

  "Does a bear sheet ... you Americans, you have some good expressions. Also you have some beautiful women, even in the woods. I would stay in your country, if you would put less water in your beer."

  "Have a swig of this," said Sharkbait, passing him the bourbon bottle. "Not much water in this baby."

  Black Forest took the bottle, sniffed at it, and wrinkled his nose. "This is not beer. I will have a hack rub instead." He threw himself down on the bed beside me.

  I gave Black Forest his back rub, then Lash, then Sharkbait. As I lifted illy hands from Sharkbait's shoulders, he asked, "Isis? Would you do me a big favor?" He didn't meet my eyes as he spoke, and his voice had a hesitancy to it, as if he feared that he was asking something shameful, something too personal for our brief acquaintance. My mind skipped through the frightening possibilities. And then I remembered his voice that morning, when he'd asked if we were okay. Sharkbait was a person I could trust.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Stand up"

  I stood at the toot of the bed, facing hint.

  "Back away two steps. Okay. Turn around"

  I turned.

  "Stand on your tippy-toes"

  I lifted my heels from the floor, feeling the muscles of my calves tighten. I held the pose for about thirty seconds, before he spoke again.

  "That's all. Thank you." He sighed, then said very softly, as if to himself, "I always had a bit of a calf fetish, even before the accident."

  jackrabbit

  he first night out of Harpers Ferry, we stayed at the David Lesser Memorial Shelter, a tall, spacious open-fronted building, newly constructed and still smelling of fresh wood. Frost hung around in the shadows; the temperature hadn't climbed much above freezing all day. Lash and Sharkbait huddled in the back of the shelter cooking dinner when we arrived.

  Sharkbait was moaning about the cold. He was bundled inside his sleeping bag, a wool hat pulled down low over his ears, and his voice was muffled by a scarf that covered most of his face. "Two hundred fiuckin' miles. Two-oh-one point six, that is. That's all I got left of this fuckin' trail. Weather keeps up like this, I might just say fuck it and hitch out at the next road"

  "Come on, dude," Lash said. He was wrapped in his sleeping bag, too, and his fluorescent orange fleece hat came down to his eyebrows. "You can't quit, just like that. Think about all the miles you've put behind you already. You can't throw that away."

  Sharkbait lit a cigarette and stared at the floorboards, brooding.

  Black Forest came up the hill behind the shelter, carrying a few full water bottles. "Cold does not scare me. I am a German badass. Sharkbait, you are a badass, too." He noticed us. "The Barefoot Sisters." A small smile glimmered in his eyes. "They are the most badass of all."

  "Thanks, Black Forest," I said with a grin.

  Sharkbait peered out at us from the slit between his scarf and his hat. He shuddered. "Holy shit. You're standing in a patch of fuckin' frost." I looked down-it was true. Ice sparkled on the ground around my bare feet. The calluses on my soles were not as substantial as my sister's, but they were still thick enough to withstand the cold of the ground. "How in hell do you do that?"

  Isis shrugged. "Practice, I guess. You get used to it"

  Sharkbait fell silent. We didn't hear another word of complaint from hire that night.

  I made the long trek down to the spring, three tenths of a mile off the ridgeline. A leaf-filled pool of water, rimmed with fingers of ice, stood at the base of a jumbled rockslide. The filter was slow and cranky in the cold; I wondered how much longer we would be able to use it. I brought back four liters of clean water for the next day's hike and two unfiltered liters for cooking and tea. My hands were numb where the water had splashed them; I rubbed them together inside their gloves as I jogged back up the trail to the shelter.

  Isis made extra tea that night so we could share with the men. "Wild cherry-blackberry," she said. The aroma of summer fruit filled the shelter, incongruous but sweetly welcome against the backdrop of odors: new wood, sweat, a lingering whiff of Lipton dinners, dry leaves, rock, the nose-tingling scent of frost.

  Sharkbait smiled, slightly bemused, as Isis filled his cup. "This swells really good. It smells kind of ... purple. Everything else around us smells brown, and this is purple. Thanks, Isis."

  We watched the stars come out through the trees, glittering like gemstones in the evening sky. When I saw the first one, as usual, I thought of Tuba Man: I wonder u'here you arc. I hope you're okay, hope youre ivarui ciiou~h on a night like this. I wonder il'you cr'er think about rue. Arid I hope that someday, sollichou" I'll see you again. Even as these thoughts crossed my mind, I was aware how ridiculous they were. I I'ishiuon a star That s so seventh-grade.

  Winter clamped down that night. I was glad we had picked up our coldweather sleeping bags-our norther had sent them to us in Boiling Springsand bought warmer liners. Early in the morning, I awoke with a strange sensation on my face. Tiny prickles of cold touched my skin momentarily and disappeared. It was still dark. I found my Photon light and switched it on, shielding the beaus with my hands so it wouldn't disturb the sleepers on either side. Snowflakes danced in the taint blue light.

  In the morning, a few thin strands of wind-blown snow wove themselves wraith-like across the floor of the shelter, but the sky was clear. 1)awn came up golden and pink between the bare branches. Lash, sleeping on my left in his yellow bivy sack, groaned and turned over. In a few minutes he sat up and emerged from the top of his mummy
bag, pushing the folds of his bright orange hat tip out of his eyes.

  "I )ude, I had the craziest dream last night .. " he blinked and stared at the snow that had collected in the corner of the shelter, surprise and wonder in his eyes. "Oh, man. Maybe I wasn't dreaming."

  Black Forest sat up too. His rumpled blond curls stuck out in all directions from under his red hat. His blue eyes were red-rimmed, and he looked grumpy. "Isis, why did you give us tea last night? Three times I got up to piss!"

  "Hey, it was only a cup of water!" she protested.

  "Learn some bladder control, man," I said.

  Lash had a rather smug grin on his face. He took a bottle of something out of his sleeping bag and oonched forward to dump it over the edge of the sleeping platform. "Oh, I was dehydrated!" he murmured to himself.

  "Lash, was that what I think it was?" I asked him, preparing to be scandalized.

  He shrugged, and his sleeping bag amplified the gesture. "Hey, it beats getting up in the middle of the night"

  "That's gross! You sleep with a bottle of. .

  "Your urine is sterile to you," he said, sounding hurt, but with a glint of amusement in his eyes.

  All day, little wisps of snow flickered across the trail, moving before the wind. Winter had arrived, and we were still barefoot. The woods looked dead all around, empty skeleton limbs above us and brown crackling leaves underfoot. The trail had frozen into uneven ridges of soil, and ice patches remained in the shadows of rocks and trees. As long as I kept moving, though, the cold didn't really bother me.

  Toward evening, Isis and I came to Bear's Den Rocks. It was a jumble of boulders, set among jack pines. On one side the ridge fell away sharply, leaving a view of the valley floor below. Winter had reached the low elevations, too. In Pennsylvania we had seen green fields and the occasional leafy tree in the lowlands, but here the fields in the valleys were dry and yellow, and the forests wore the same uniform grayish brown all the way down to the lowest elevations. In a short time, I knew, it would all be pale with snow. We stood at the overlook and watched the sun sink lower over the far ridge.