Barefoot Sisters: Southbound

by Lucy Letcher;Susan Letcher

  He sighed. ",Jackrabbit, you are killing me"

  I glanced at my watch. It was ten already. On the Trail we usually went to bed soon after sunset, 8:30 at the latest. "Time for bed," I said, yawning.

  Black Forest looked hopefil.

  "Your ou'u bed," I said firmly and rolled away from him. He slouched off the bed with a sigh and went out the door, moping.

  A few Minutes later the phone rang. It was Lash. " ftliat did you do to the German?" He sounded outraged.

  "Nothing. Why?"

  He gave an exaggerated sigh. "Black Forest is bouncing up and down on the bed, singing 'Sex Machine"'

  "Oh" I thought fast. The A.T. slogan, which we had heard at the Gathering and seen on Trail signs all along the way, popped into my head. "We weren't doing anything," I said with all the innocence I could muster. "We were just 'seeking fellowship in the wilderness"'

  Over the next few days, Lash and Black Forest took every opportunity to present us with Snickers bars. They would hike fast to get ahead and ambush us at a bend in the trail, candy bars in hand. The exchange rate was pretty poor-after perhaps ten Snickers, I gave each of then) a peck on the cheek.

  Isis

  round Thanksgiving, jackrabbit and I got off the Trail to visit our father's relatives in central Virginia. We both knew that, without Fanny Pack's help slacking, we stood no chance of keeping up with our companions. It seemed fairer to all of us to leave the Trail for a celebration, knowing that they would be far ahead when we returned, than to tag along behind them indefinitely trying to keep up. Netta joined us for Thanksgiving, on the clear understanding that she would be hiking twenty-fives to catch the guys as soon as we got back to the Trail.

  Our Aunt Nancy picked us up at Thornton Gap and took us to her fare) high on the Blue Ridge, where we spent a few days reading, writing letters, eating delicious homegrown food, and helping to store food from the garden. It felt good to exercise the muscles that I didn't use for walking; even shelling dry beans, usually one of my least favorite harvest chores, seemed to loosen the cramps my fingers got from grasping hiking sticks all day.

  The day before Thanksgiving, jackrabbit, Netta, and I went down to our Aunt Katie's house in Lexington. When she found out that we were planning to spend Christmas on the Trail, she made our visit into a double holiday, stacking foil-wrapped boxes of cookies and chocolates at our places at the table. To Netta, both Christmas and Thanksgiving were foreign holidays; watching her unwrap her presents and taste the unfamiliar dishes of the feast brought back some of my earliest memories, from years when each celebration came as a surprise.

  The warm welcome we received from relatives we hadn't seen in years made it even harder to leave their bright, cozy homes for the winter trail. Jackrabbit and I knew that we would be alone for weeks at a time, quite possibly for the rest of our hike. Before we left town, we stocked up on bread from a local bakery and cheese from a gourmet food store to supplement the cookies Aunt Katie had given us, hoping that a luxurious resupply would help to keep our spirits up.

  On a cold, windy afternoon, with patches of sun and shadow racing over the mountainsides, our Uncle Pete dropped us off at the trailhead. Netta walked with us the first three miles, up to an outcropping of boulders called Mary's Rock. A recent forest fire had burned through the undergrowth on this side of the gap; great swaths of blackened ground looked like scabs on the forest floor, and the scorched leaves of mountain laurel rattled in the wind. At the junction of a side trail, a charred concrete signpost, standing in a pile of ashes, proclaimed "No Fires" in blocky white letters. I felt as though I had wandered into a Magritte painting; the sign's confident proclamation seemed to countermand the desolate and neatly sketched reality.

  On steep northern slopes, where the trail lay in day-long shadow, an inch or so of snow covered the ground. My toes tingled as I walked through it, but it felt wonderful, like cool feathers, to my soles. As we traversed a small patch of snow near the top of the ridge, we met a family of dayhikers on their way down. By this time, jackrabbit and I had perfected the trick of greeting dayhikers as soon as we saw them and making eye contact to keep them from noticing our feet. On the smooth, broad trails of Shenandoah, it had worked like a charm.

  "Lovely day for a hike," I called to the mom, who was first in line.

  "It certainly is," she answered.

  "Great views up top. Enjoy!" said the dad, stepping past us.

  Their son, a child of perhaps eight, paused as he came abreast of us and looked straight down at our feet. Children's reactions to our lack of footwear tended to be more original than those of adults, so we stood still, waiting to see if he had any questions.

  After a few seconds, he looked up and asked, "How do you do that?"

  Jackrabbit winked at him. "By magic"

  His eyes lit up and he grinned from ear to ear.

  At Mary's Rock, we shared a final meal with Netta: open-faced sandwiches of rye bread and chevre, sprinkled with salt and caraway seeds.

  "This is delicious," Netta sighed. "If only we had sliced tomatoes, it would be just like a luncheon in Israel." She looked down at the foothills and valleys, where the bare branches of deciduous forests interlocked in a gray mesh, tinged bluish purple in the distance. "I have to go on," she said suddenly. "I have to hike fast, to stop myself from thinking about the trees. At home, trees never lose their leaves. I cannot stop thinking that the forest here is dead.

  She packed up her food bag, gave each of us a hug, and strode away at a pace I would have been hard-put to match even if I'd been wearing shoes.

  Jackrabbit and I packed slowly, then followed Netta's tracks southward through the patchy snow. We waited until we had gotten out of the burned forest to look for a stealth site; a few stars glimmered between blowing clouds by the time we set up our tent.

  In the morning, low, dark clouds filled the sky and a raw wind chased crumpled oak leaves over the forest floor. We huddled in a small hollow in the ground, trying to keep out of the wind while we ate breakfast. We'd slept with our water bottles inside the tent to keep them from freezing; still, the milk I mixed up for my granola was so cold it made the backs of my teeth ache. As we often did on chilly mornings, we left camp still bundled in our wool shirts, sweaters, and rain gear, but this time, neither of us stopped to take off any layers once we got going. The clouds descended lower and lower, until an icy mist beaded our sleeves and hair. At the same time, the sharp gravel under our feet turned slippery, as if we were trying to walk over marbles coated with oil.

  "Ice storm," said jackrabbit.

  "Are you sure?" I asked. The pebbles in the trail looked dark with rain, but I couldn't see any ice on them. I reached down and picked one up; it burned in my palm. I brushed the thumb of my other hand over it. Slippery, painfully cold. The third time I touched it, a thin sheath of ice cracked and slid into my palm.

  "I read an article in the newspaper about a couple of ice storms in the peach orchards in Georgia last March," I said. "The story made it sound like ice storms were unusual that far south"

  "We're not in Georgia yet, sister"

  "I know, but its only November. Even at home, we don't really get snow and ice till mid-December. I'm worried about how much winter we're going to see before we're through"

  "I'm worried about how we're going to hike more than four or five miles today," jackrabbit responded. "I think the body heat in our soles is melting the top layer of ice and making the layer beneath it even more slippery. Kind of like ice skating, only heat instead of pressure. I think we could walk faster if we ..:'

  "Let's try to make it to the shelter, before we decide," I said quickly.

  "Good idea," said jackrabbit. "That way we'll know exactly where we stopped, in case we want to calculate the miles."

  Waybe the sun ►iwill come out before we get there, I thought, and all the ice tail) ►nelt. Instead, the mist thickened until small branches beside the trail were encased in thick translucent rinds, and the beads on our sleeves g
rew into a heavy, brittle armor that crackled as we moved. After four miles and nearly as many hours, we staggered up to the shelter. Five college guys on a weekend trip had holed up there to wait out the storm.

  "Look at that, they're barefoot!" one of them exclaimed. "Are you crazy?"

  "Yeah, I guess we are," sighed jackrabbit, unbuckling her pack.

  "How far have you hiked that way?" asked another guy.

  "Thirteen hundred miles, if you want to believe it," I told him. "But it's over. If we're going to walk any farther in this ice storm, we'll to have to put on shoes."

  "Well, that's the only intelligent thing I've heard you say yet," said the first guy.

  Jackrabbit and I sat down on the edge of the sleeping platform, clasped hands, and looked each other in the eye. "As long as it's comfortable," I said.

  "As long as it's fun," jackrabbit answered.

  We untied our camp sneakers from our packs, slipped them on, and walked back into the storm.

  jackrabbit

  he coating of ice thickened all afternoon. It was almost impossible to make progress, even in shoes. My knee felt better after the Thanksgiving break, but I was acutely aware that one misstep could damage it again. Rocks, trees, fallen leaves, all glittered with a quarter-inch glaze. As dusk fell, we came to the Big Meadows campground. The buildings looked abandoned and dark. On the open ground of the tent sites, blades of grass had a spun-sugar coating of ice. We followed the curving asphalt drive, shuffling along on the slick surface. My canvas sneakers had soaked through long ago, and I tried to ignore the protests of my cold, wet feet.

  "I think this is the ranger station," Isis said. The building was locked up tight and deserted. We stood under the small overhang of the roof and discussed our options.

  "Aren't the campsites supposed to be open?" I asked.

  "Yeah. Tomorrow's supposed to be the last day. I imagine the parkway's closed in this weather, though."

  "What should we do? I mean, we could tent, but with the ice .."

  "No," Isis said. "I don't know if the tent would even stay up with a load of ice on it." This was true, I reflected-our tent was lightweight and good for summer camping, but it wasn't designed for conditions like this. "It's too risky. We've got to find a building somewhere, or a bigger overhang, at least . .

  Inspiration struck. "Isis, back in H.F., Heald told nee a story about an obnoxious nobo . . . no, this is good, trust me. When Heald hiked in '96, there was a guy who everyone detested. One of those ones, you know, who would race to town and sit there drinking beer as everybody came in, and then tell them how slow they were. So one night, up in Maine, he came to a packed shelter after dark. It was raining and cold. This guy said, `You have to make room for me! I don't have a tent!' but nobody would move. So guess what he did?" Isis shook her head, and I grinned. "He slept in the privy!"

  "You mean we should sleep in the bathrooms here?"

  "You got a better idea?"

  "Well, I guess its better than tenting in this stuff." She gestured toward the line of semisolid drips falling from the eaves, inches away.

  We skated across the slick surface of the parking lot and found the bathrooms and laundry room miraculously unlocked. Even better, the lights and heat were still on. From the sloppy, frozen, windy twilight, we stepped into warm, bright, calm air with the faint hum of electricity. The frenetic tapping sound against the roof was the only reminder of the maelstrom we had left. We cracked the ice off our pack covers and sodden rain gear and hung them up over the doors of the dryers. I put the ground cloth down on the slightly grimy red tile floor in front of the washing machines, and we set up our sleeping bags there.

  "What'll we do for dinner?" I said. We were already presuming enough on the Park's hospitality, and I didn't think it would be exactly appropriate to light a fire inside the building. Besides, neither of us wanted to venture back out to gather Zip stove wood.

  Isis grinned. "I have a plan." She went into the bathroom side of the building next door, and I heard the shower running. She returned in a moment with a pot of steaming water. "It's not exactly boiling, but it'll do .. "She mixed in the instant potato flakes, half a packet of dry milk and a few tablespoons of olive oil. "Voila"

  The whole situation seemed surreal to nie. "When we started the Trail, I never thought I'd end up stealth camping in a laundry room," I said, shaking my head. "Or cooking dinner with water from a freakin' shower. You know, I used to be respectable ..

  Isis grinned. "The Trail has changed us, no doubt about it. I imagine we'll do a lot more things we never thought we would before this hike is over."

  As evening wore on, the ominous tapping on the roof outside continued and intensified. Isis rinsed out the pot in the sink and mixed up hot chocolate.

  "I wish there was a register here," I said. I missed reading about the adventures of our friends, far ahead. I wondered where Netta had gotten to, and where Lash and Heald and Black Forest were hunkering down in the storm. At the thought of Black Forest, I felt a touch of-what? Regret? Amusement?

  "What we need now is a trashy novel," I said. "It would be perfect on a night like this."

  "We could write one! The A.T.'s a great setting, don't you think?"

  "Excellent! What should we call it?"

  "It has to be something Trail-related ... like Lust in the Lead-tos or Peaks 0/ Desire ...'

  "I've got it!" I said. "Passions Stealth-/ire!"

  "Perfect! Our main characters are a lobo and a nobo who meet and fall madly in love"

  "MEGA Maid," I said, using the abbreviation for Maine to Georgia that southbounders often appended to their names in registers.

  "And the nobo can be GAME Boy!"-the northbounders' acronym.

  We entertained ourselves for a few hours with the adventures of our protagonists, writing in a miniscule hand on the few sheets of stationery that I carried. We wrote a new verse for "Dig a Hole," too.

  "It ought to be something about the bears," Isis said. "Aren't there supposed to be more bears in this park than anywhere else on the Trail?"

  "I think so. Good thing they're all hibernating right now."

  "Yeah," she said. "It wouldn't be such a bad life, being a bear here ..:' Then her eyes gleamed. "I've got it!"

  "Let's sing the other verses, and then you can do the new one. Don't forget to change the chorus for Pennsylvania .. "

  We sang through our verses for New England and New York, and then the most recent states on our journey:

  I stopped and Isis sang her new verse:

  When 8:30 rolled around, we fell asleep in the back of the room by the washing machines.

  I slept uneasily, plagued by strange dreams. In one, Lash had become an evil renegade ninja whom I was trying to defeat. We had our showdown in an abandoned movie theater. His bronze-colored eyes flashed a challenge from his dark mask as he leapt over the rows of musty folding seats. He attacked relentlessly, and I dodged, blocked, waited for my moment to counterattack. I woke up before the end of the fight. The sleet had changed to rain outside, a calmer sound on the roof.

  I sank back into another dream; a tour bus pulled up outside the laundry room where we lay, and a group of blue-haired old ladies got off, carrying bags of dirty clothes. Seeing us through the windows, they dropped their laundry and waved their arms in consternation. I distinctly heard one of them, a matronly woman in a green dress, yelling, "Call the authorities!" I woke up again. The window was empty-no old ladies after all-but a thin washed-out light was leaching into the sky. Isis stirred beside me.

  We ate our granola and packed up quickly, not wanting to risk discovery if the parkway had reopened. Outside, the temperature had risen enough to melt most of the ice. Mist rose up from the ground. A herd of maybe thirty deer grazed in the empty campground, backlit, their elongated shadows stretching through the mist.

  Wearing shoes gave me a strange feeling of dissociation from the trail. The last time I had worn my shoes on the AT., in New York, the feeling had been one of loss,
disorientation, but now I welcomed the separation. I was tired of stepping carefully over gravel and sharp rocks. Without the strict concentration that barefoot hiking required, my mind wandered freely. I noticed the subtle colors of the woods, a thousand shades of brown and gray, and the shapes of clouds framed by the bare branches.

  As Ion' as it's conilortable. As lon,E as it's lien. Barefoot hiking hadn't been comtortable for a while now, as the temperature dropped and the trail became more and more gravelly. As for fun, there were times when I loved the sensation of floating over rocks, knowing exactly how my feet would land and form themselves to the surfaces. For the most part, though, it felt like a job. It wasn't a question of fill; it was what I did. By the time that ice storm hit, I was ready to stop doing it.

  Wearing shoes, we could travel much faster than we had barefoot, especially on gravel. I was eager to see exactly how fast we could go-maybe we could even catch up to Lash and Black Forest and the rest of the crowd. Isis was not as sanguine about the prospect, but she agreed to try it. On our first day out, we covered more than twenty miles of the smooth gravel trail.

  We came down the side trail to Hightop Hut, a large wooden shelter set in a grove of oak trees, just as the still dipped below the treetops. I glanced at my watch: 4:59. Considering the time we left in the morning, and the lunch break we had taken, we had sustained a 2.5-miles-per-hour pace all day long. Barefoot, we had barely made two Miles an hour. "We're all that and a bag of chips!" I said as I threw my pack down on the sleeping platform of the shelter.

  Isis gave nie a puzzled glance. "I)id you just say, `We are Black Forest's badass chicks'?"

  Since Shenandoah was a national park, we passed more dayhikers than we had seen in a long time. At first I expected everyone we met to comment on our feet, and then I realized that we were wearing shoes just like the rest of them. We discovered that even shod thru-hikers face the same questions over and over, though: Where do you sleep? What do you cat? Igo you carry a gun? YVhat possessed you to do this? Even without our bare feet, we were still a curiosity, a strange fringe element of American culture.