"When did you hike?" I asked.
"Ninety-six."
"Do you ever think about going back out there?"
"Oh, I'd love to. I know we will. We've got to put the kids through college first, though."
"Best of luck."
We settled the tab at Gillie's and headed for the outfitter's store. I bought boots, finally, real leather boots that came up over my ankles. They were Gar- nu)nts, the same brand Isis had bought, and the only kind that actually fit my broad, exceptionally high-arched feet. We also invested in knee-high gaiters to keep the scow out of our boots. The salesman was a guy in his mid-twenties who had thru-hiked northbound in '99. He listened to our stories of Trail life with a wistful expression on his freckled face.
"I miss the Trail;" he said. "Every day I miss it. Sometimes when I'm walking in town somewhere, I'll catch myself looking up, scanning the buildings and telephone poles, and I realize I'm looking for a blaze .. " He looked pensive for a moment and then laughed and returned to a more salesman-like demeanor. "Is there anything else I can get for you?"
"Actually, we were wondering about snowshoes,' Isis said. There was a display of them on the wall beside the hoots. These snowshoes were nothing like the wood-and-rawhide ones I'd used as a child; made from polished aluminum and brightly colored plastic, they looked streamlined and modern. Isis and I had talked about buying them a few times-considering the weather we'd had so far, we knew we might need them before the end of winter. This store had the best selection wed seen yet.
The salesman considered for a moment. "The place where you'll probably run into the most snow is the Grayson Highlands, north of Damascus. That, and the Roan Highlands in Tennessee. Smokies, too, depending on when you get there. I've done some winter hiking in all those areas. It can get pretty rough. Snowshoes might be a good idea "
I had a sudden memory of summer in Maine, everything green and humming with life, my bare feet iu the mud. There had been a time when I had imagined doing the whole Trail barefoot. Here I was, buying not only boots but snowshoes. "What kind would you reconunend%"
"Well, the best ones we have for backpacking are actually out of stock right now. Those ones on the wall are all metal-frame, and they're six, eight, ten pounds a pair. If you're carrying a lot of weight, you want something lighter on your feet. Something like .. " he picked up a catalog from the counter and leafed through it. "Like these." He indicated a pair of snowshoes made from molded red plastic, with small ridges of steel along the edges for traction and crampons under the feet. "MSR Denali model. The pair weighs about four pounds. I use these myself. They've got awesome traction. They're kind of expensive ... I might be able to wrangle you some kind of discount, though."
"Can you ship them to us on the Trail?" I asked.
"Where are your mail drops?" He seemed thrilled to be using hiker terminology again.
"We'll be in Atkins in six days, Damascus a week after that"
"Hmtn. They usually arrive in about ten days. I can send 'em to Damascus. You'll have to go through Grayson without 'em, but you'll have 'em for Roan and the Smokies"
"I guess that's what we'd better do" We arranged for the snowshoes to be shipped, and we left the store poorer but better prepared to face the onslaught of winter. It was strange to walk in boots. On the thick, cushioned soles, I felt like I was floating a little ways above the slushy sidewalks of Blacksburg.
Walrus took us to the grocery store for our resupply, and he and Roots cooked a feast for us that night: pasta with fresh tomato sauce and a big green salad. Isis made French bread and brought out a wheel of Brie she had bought at the market. We sat around the table late into the night, telling stories and reminiscing. More snow fell, white and thick and silent, leaving the landscape outside the windows soft-edged. I felt safe and content, for once, and that evening prepared me to go back out and face winter.
We spent the morning gathering a few last-minute items: lithium batteries for Isis's headlamp, and some cheese and fresh bread for the first few days. It was noon by the time we started hiking. The sun barely skimmed above the trees; our shadows were long and blue across the new snow.
"It's winter solstice," Isis said. "Shortest day of the year"
"That's right. First day of winter. Man, it's felt like winter ever since we left Harpers Ferry. How much worse can it get?"
"You say that every time we leave town, and every time it gets worse. 11
"But we go on anyway. We've been snowed on, sleeted on, iced into a shelter for two days. Every week we get into town, and we say to ourselves, ,that was nasty, but we've come this far; maybe we can make it a little farther' Then we eat a bunch of town food, and we take showers and dry out in a warm room, maybe watch Crocodile Hunter, and we say, `well, it's really not so bad' Then we go back out. I laughed. "Are we crazy or what?"
"Of course we're crazy. We're the Barefoot Sisters."
The trail turned sharply uphill. I remembered the profile neap: a steady, steep two-mile climb. "Isis, I'm going to take a few layers off. This hill keeps going for a ways." I stopped by the side of the trail and unshouldered my pack.
A mischievous glint came into my sister's eyes. "You know the thru-hiker tradition for summer solstice, don't you?"
"It's way too cold to hike naked!" Several northbounders had told me about the custom of hiking an naturale on June 21. I'd never thought it would apply to I )ecember 21 as well.
"Well, we couldn't go totally naked. But maybe on the uphill we could hike topless ..
"What if somebody cones along?"
"loo you see any footprints on this trail?"
"Well, no, but..."
"Union, it'll be fun"
"Okay .. "And that was how we found ourselves hiking out of Pearisburg clad in nothing but wind pants, boots, and gaiters. It was an odd sensation. The effort of climbing kept me just barely warm. Cold air brushed against my ribcage, rushing down my back between my pack straps with every step. It did feel liberating, but I knew I would be mortified if anyone came along. Bein.g caught naked in a temperate season is a bit embarrassing, I thought to myself. Being caught naked in this weather is risking a trip to the loony bin. But the trail was empty; the only footprints were the ones we left behind us. We climbed steadily toward the ridge top, where the level terrain and the cold wind made us put our upper layers back on in short order. By that time I was glad to be wearing a shirt again-my breasts felt like twin lumps of ice. I was doubly glad we had reclothed ourselves when, a few minutes later, we came around a bend in the trail and met a family bundled in winter coats. The youngest child looked to be about seven.
The father carried a large rifle. "Y'all seen any bears?" he asked by way of greeting.
"Nope, sorry." I could tell Isis was trying hard to keep a straight face: none but us.
We spent the night at Doc's Knob Shelter, a small wooden lean-to at the end of the ridge above Pearisburg. The spring was one of the most beautiful I had seen yet; water welled up in a crevice between dark boulders under a hemlock tree. The water seemed to be lit from within, filled with golden sparks, as it caught the last sunlight. Solstice, I thought as I filtered our drinking water. The light is coming back. Spring is somewhere under the earth, waiting.
At my mother's house, we had celebrated the return of the sun every year by burning a brush pile in the backyard-an appropriately Pagan way to mark the Northern Hemisphere's most ancient holiday. We would invite friends and neighbors to drink mulled cider and dance around the bonfire with drums, welcoming back the light.
Isis and I tried to make a bonfire that night at I )oc's Knob, but all the wood we could find was coated with layers of ice and wet, sticky snow. It was all we could do to light the Zip stove, even though its fan blew air onto the coals. We managed to keep the stove burning long enough to cook supper and make our tea. Our attempted bonfire smoldered out the minute illy back was turned. The fire sputtered tip from the wrinkled scraps of paper we used as tinder, refusing to take hold of the kindling. At
twilight I went to look for drier wood, perhaps a standing dead tree or a fallen branch that had stayed above the snow layer. When I returned, not even a hint of smoke rose from the half-charred wood in the firepit. It was the first time in six months, I realized, that we had tried to build a fire and failed.
I lay awake, bundled in my sleeping bag, for a long time. I wondered what this season would bring, and I worried. The worst winter in fourteen years, I remembered Larry saying. And that was before it had officially started.
Isis
e reached Helvey's Mill Shelter at dusk, after nineteen miles of bumpy ridgeline. We'd planned the long day to set us up for an easy fourteen the next day, which would be Christmas Eve. Jackrabbit usually got our water while I cooked, but that night her knee hurt so badly that I offered to make the steep trek down the stream trail. I set off in the gathering dusk with all six of our water bottles in my arms and our filter tucked into an inner pocket of my jacket. Lately, water had become almost as difficult to find as it had been on the dry Pennsylvania ridges. Half of the springs and streams marked on our map were frozen over, or dry, or buried under snow. A few times, we'd even had to melt snow for cooking and drinking. Our water filter became clogged with ice when the temperature dropped too tar below freezing. On particularly cold days, jackrabbit and I had taken to carrying the filter under our shirts, between the hip belt and the chest straps of our packs. At night, we took turns sleeping with it to keep it warm, for which I nicknamed it "I )on Juan:"
I had high hopes for the Helvey's Mill water source. It looked like it would be a half mile hike downhill from the shelter, but the distance hardly mattered given the prospect of open water. On the neap, the thin blue line indicating the stream flowed down a mile of valley before the trail from the shelter intersected it. The curve of ridge looked like enough of a watershed to form a deep, strong-flowing stream, one that wouldn't be likely to have frozen over entirely.
In the time it took me to negotiate the stream trail's half dozen switchbacks, the sky changed from deep blue, with a single evening star hanging unong the pines, to pitch black. The trail ended at a steep rocky bank. To either side of me, an arched tunnel of rhododendron branches curved away into the darkness, floored with jumbled, snow-covered stones. This must he the streambed, I thought, but where's the stream? I searched up and down the banks, but there was no sign of a continuing trail and no sign of water. Finally, I turned off my headlamp, closed my eyes, and held my hands up behind my ears to catch the slightest sound. I turned my head upstream-nothing. Downstream, it was hard to tell whether I heard the faint trickle of water over stone, or whether my wishful mind had invented the sound.
I started downhill, stumbling among the slippery rocks. After a few hundred yards, I put my hands to the backs of my ears again. This time I was certain. I found the pool beneath an overhang of the bank. A semicircular opening in a crust of ice, perhaps two feet in diameter, revealed a ledge of stone covered in a thin sheet of flowing water, half an inch at its deepest point. At the edge of the pool, the water trickled over a seven- or eight-inch drop and disappeared beneath another sheet of ice. I could tell it wasn't deep enough to submerge ])on Juan's intake valve; we'd have to purify it by boiling. I tried to dip a water bottle in the pool, but it was too shallow to get the rim beneath the surface. I stomped on the ice, both above and below the opening, hoping to break it and find deeper water underneath, but I only succeeded in stirring up mud. Once the mud settled, I held a bottle to the edge of the rock. Only a few scant drops trickled into it. In exasperation, I grabbed one of the other bottles and scraped it across the ledge, pushing a wave of water into the open bottle. It worked, though slowly. Most of the water missed the bottle and splashed over my ungloved hand; I had to stop every five minutes and stick my hand in my armpit to thaw my aching fingers. When I staggered up to the shelter, laden with the six full bottles, I found jackrabbit tying our first aid kit to her belt. She looked up, her face ghostly white in the light of my headlamp.
"Are you okay? I was about to go looking for you."
I set down the bottles and flopped on my back on the shelter floor. "I'm okay. But this is the last time I'm trading chores with you!"
For the first few miles of the next day, we played with verses of popular Christmas carols, making them applicable to the Trail.
sang jackrabbit, and I answered,
When I paused, she sang back the rest of the verse.
(Yellow-blazing was a hiker euphemism for skipping part of the Trail by hitchhiking, following the yellow "blazes" of the road.)
I thought for a few minutes and decided to tackle a new song:
On the steeper uphills, when singing took too much of our wind, we talked about what we would do to celebrate Christmas. I'd kept one pair of socks clean so that we could use them as stockings. I'd bought two oranges and a couple packages of fancy chocolates when jackrabbit wasn't looking. By way of gifts, we'd written each other spoofs of some of the long poems we had memorized. Jackrabbit had been working on a hiker version of Poe's "The Raven" since New York, and I'd started writing a take-off on Alfred Noyes's "The Highwayman," starring jackrabbit and Tuba Man, just after the Gathering. It had been quite a challenge to keep them secret for so long. Every time I came up with a clever verse, I wanted to recite it to her, and every time I heard her giggling over her notebook, I was tempted to ask what she'd written. Now, she announced that she'd finished her poem and was coming up with a new one, a spoof of "The Night Before Christmas.-
... TThink about the lines '... and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer,"' she said. "Isn't that a bizarre image?"
She laughed to herself and wouldn't tell me anything more.
After lunch, we didn't talk much. Jackrabbit walked ahead of me, seemingly lost in thought; as the afternoon wore on she moved more and more slowly. I wondered if she was too busy coming up with her new poem to pay attention to our pace-something she usually cared about a lot more than I did. I hesitated to interrupt her versifying, but I wanted to get to the shelter early enough to decorate it for the holiday.
"Hey, jackrabbit," I called.
She answered with the slightest shrug of her shoulders.
"Could we go a little faster? I want to ..
She rounded on me, her face contorted with fury. "I'm walking as fast as I can! My fucking knee is fucking killing me. If you want to go faster, go ahead"
"I'm sorry," I answered. "I didn't know you were in pain, I thought you were just walking slowly because ..
"The only reason I ever walk slowly is because I'm in pain. Go ahead. Go away!"
I strode past her, gripping my hiking sticks so hard my knuckles ached. I didn't know why she'd snapped at me, and for the moment I was too angry to care. Even though I was choking back tears, I stormed up the hillside at a pace that was almost a run. As I neared the top of the hill, a fierce surge of pride broke through my anger. Here I was, running uphill while crying ... as far back as I could remember, I'd been brought to tears easily, and crying usually incapacitated me. This time, it wasn't even slowing me down. I thought of the day we'd started south from Katahdin, when I'd sat down in the middle of the trail, crying, and jackrabbit had to spend ten minutes comforting me before we could go on. For weeks afterward, I'd been so afraid of getting left behind that I'd begged jackrabbit to let me walk ahead of her all the time. She hadn't been entirely happy, staring at my heels all day, but this was, after all, something we'd both anticipated. I was the weak one; some accommodations would have to be made.
Suddenly, I understood why she had lost her temper when I'd asked if she could go faster. Contrary to both our expectations, I had grown strong on the Trail. My body adapted to whatever I asked of it-notches, cold rain, hunger, consecutive twenties-with a minimum of complaint. The most pain I'd experienced had been while breaking in my boots, and that had only lasted for one evening. I remembered the feeling of walking in a nightmare I couldn't wake from; the memory
alone made me shiver. How often had jackrabbit walked in the shadow of such pain? I knew that the same challenges that had strengthened me had injured her, over and over again.
By the time I got to Jenkins Shelter, my indignation had faded, giving way to worry. I shouldn't have left her, even if she told nle to. What if she fell and got injured? I was carrying the first aid kit. I had all the snack food, too, and an extra bottle of water. To stave off my fears, I gathered some pine and hemlock branches and twisted them into a wreath. I hung it under the shelter sign, and then, as an afterthought, tore a strip from the bottom of my red handkerchief and made a bow. Just as I finished, jackrabbit limped into camp.
"That looks nice." She attempted a smile, but it ended up more like a grimace. I noticed heavy blue shadows under her eyes. "Listen, I'm sorry I jumped on you."
"I'll forgive you, just this once," I said, giving her a hug. "It's Christmas Eve."
As I stepped back, I saw her eyes light up with a hint of their old sparkle. "That reminds nme!" she said. "Where's the register? I've finished my Santa poem. I want to write it down before I forget it."
I searched the back corners of the shelter and unearthed a green spiralbound notebook from a pile of Mormon and Jehovah's Witness proselytizing pamphlets. As I handed it to jackrabbit, I caught sight of the names and address on the back cover.
"Pilgrim and Gollum! It's a Pilgrim and Golluin register!"
This time jackrabbit gave me a real smile. "Excellent!"
In most places along the Trail, shelter registers were replaced by hikers. Many carried spare notebooks on spec; if you were lucky enough to find a shelter with a full register, you could replace it with your own. You would then carry the full register to the next town and mail it to the hiker whose address appeared on the back. If your notebook stood up to a season's worth of weather, grime, and rodents, the tattered chronicle of a few hundred hikers' jokes and complaints would eventually arrive in your mailbox.
Barefoot Sisters: Southbound Page 39