Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Walker

  But upon leaving the grocery store I looked across the street and, to my surprise, GI Joe was gone. I would soon find out why. She saw me and yelled out, “Hey, you’re not getting away so easy.”

  Dutifully, I walked back over and into her room. She posed sassily and said, “So what are you afraid of?”

  “How much did this big suite cost you?” I asked. It was an obvious question to someone whose home was her car. An awkward look came over her face.

  “Have you seen the Indian guy who owns this place?” she asked.

  “Can’t say that I have,” I replied.

  “Good,” she said. “He might be a little jealous because he has, you know, a thing for me.”

  Not shocking news. I nodded, “So the price is right, huh?”

  “Yeah,” she said wearily, “but there is just one catch.” I listened in rapt attention. “This guy’s weird,” she said intently. “I mean really weird. The deal is, and this is the third time I’ve stayed here, but, he gets to feel my breast for five minutes. And, God, I never knew five minutes could seem so long until I met this guy.”

  I was unable to find the appropriate reply, so she continued. “And listen to this,” she said in an amazed tone. “The last time when I was staying here I turned to him in the middle of the five minutes and said, ‘Can I ask you a question? Are you dehydrated?’ He looked confused,” she continued, “and said, ‘No, why?’”

  “Because your hands are so cold,” she said cracking up.

  We entered the Bridge Street Cafe to a virtual standing ovation from the tables full of hikers. Sal Paradise and Scavenger were joyfully feasting at the next table after completing a night-time, twenty-two-mile hike into Hot Springs. Scavenger called over, “Skywalker, you’re my hero. How do you do it?”

  But then Tanya stood up on her chair and announced at the top of her lungs, “I hiked the width of the Appalachian Trail three times today.”

  Cheers rained out in her direction, which encouraged her to ramp it up. “Fellow hikers,” she called out. “After dinner I’m leading a group of any and all takers to the world famous Hot Springs Spa.”

  She finally sat down, but then her eccentricities began to morph into lunacies. After hugging the blushing waitress several times and aggressively questioning her about her various proclivities toward both the male and female genders she took to her feet on the chair again. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she shouted out. “Silence, silence,” she barked at an inattentive hiker. “I have a question,” she said firmly when all had been hushed. “Does anybody know the difference between a female thru-hiker and a possum?”

  “There is no difference” a stray male voice in the back blurted out.

  Tanya, luxuriating in her starring role, shouted down all murmurs and blurted out, “The difference is, you might consider eating a possum!” The uproar was deafening as the males let out sounds of ecstasy, while the females looked at each other ashen-faced.

  “But ladies, ladies, shut up everybody. … Ladies,” Tanya shouted. This was beginning to look like her fifteen minutes of fame. “Raise your hands, raise them high, like this, yeah,” she demanded, “if you are a member of the Lorena Bobbit Fan Club.”

  “Remember our motto, male hikers,” she threatened, “if you abuse it, you lose it!”

  Shouts of pandemonium erupted from all quarters of the restaurant, and Sal and Scavenger screamed over, “Skywalker, watch out tonight.”

  Finally, to my great relief, the manager came over to diplomatically inform Tanya she would have to depart. I jumped up apologetically and tried escorting Tanya out as boos rang out over our ejection. At the door she gave a curtain call, screaming out, “Happy hiking,” at which point a voice in the back shot back, “Happy humping, Skywalker.”

  When we finally got outside I immediately announced, “I’m headed back to Elmer’s.”

  “I’ve been to Elmer’s,” she said. “Do you mind if I tag along with you?”

  We got to Elmer’s and I began to introduce Tanya to some guests Elmer was entertaining. She dove into conversation (“I hiked the width of the AT three times”) as I sat over in a corner. Finally, I went upstairs to bed.

  An organic breakfast is served at eight o’clock sharp every morning at Elmer’s. I got down about fifteen minutes late, grabbed the far chair at the end of the crowded table of hikers, and busied myself eating. A few minutes later everybody cleared out, except Elmer.

  “I want you to know,” Elmer opened his speech, “that in the thirty years I’ve been living here and putting up hikers, last night was the single most unpleasant experience I’ve ever had here.” Gnashing his teeth he asked, “What were you thinking? I don’t understand such a thought process; bringing somebody over and letting her run amok.”

  I was hoping to take a “zero (rest) day” and stay another night, and it was quite clear a half-hearted apology wouldn’t suffice. “I completely blew it,” I said plainly. “I’m embarrassed by the whole thing and apologize.”

  This seemed to soften him up a bit because he said, “I guess naivete is no crime.” But then he added, “This woman is a terrible human being. She offered to have sex with one guest, accused a woman of having fake breasts, and called a close friend of mine a pipsqueak.” Finally, his diatribe ended, but it didn’t leave me resentful. He was right, and I was damn lucky he didn’t chuck me out.

  When I walked onto the main street, where hikers were already roaming, I ran into Sal Paradise and Scavenger. “Skywalker,” Scavenger knowingly said. “Congratulations.”

  Sal added: “That girl from last night is looking all over and asking about you.”

  My stomach sank and I mildly replied, “You guys are giving me more credit than I deserve.”

  Scavenger would have none of it. “Skywalker,” he said wryly, “You’re a sandbagger. You always say you can’t handle the cold weather, and the other night you claimed to have no interest in getting laid on the trail. Now here you are—the toast of the town.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered as I went off to find this nut case and try to muzzle her.

  Bear Can ambled up and said, “Skywalker, that girl from the restaurant last night just asked us where you are.” Oh great. Bear Can was on anybody’s list of most attractive females and popular people on the trail.

  Finally, I ran into Tanya near the motel where this whole misadventure had begun. She was standing on a wall wearing a green Mao cap and looking like a street agitator. “Where the heck have you been,” she immediately barked out. “Have you made up your mind whether you want to go to the mineral baths?”

  I filibustered and headed on, deciding to cut my losses. A while later I passed by and her Volkswagen was gone. I never saw her again. Perhaps the poor owner of the motel had experienced a sudden epiphany. Or maybe he was suffering again from hypothermia in his extremities!

  Chapter 7

  It was overdue time for me to mature as a hiker and leave the crises of the first few weeks behind—the unseasonably cold springtime weather had wracked me. And there was another imperative: I had to start covering more miles. It’s a sixty-eight-mile hike over consistently mountainous terrain from Hot Springs, North Carolina to Erwin, Tennessee, the next trail town with few road crossings along the way.

  I was looking left at the mountains when I exited town and was surprised how long I had to remain on the main road because the AT rarely runs on major roads for any appreciable length. After about fifteen minutes of going straight up the highway and not seeing the trail to the left I flagged down a car and asked, “Is this the AT I’m on?”

  “Yeah, yeah, straight up the highway to the bridge,” came the friendly reply.

  I kept on trooping and even began thinking that the rectangular white reflector plates on the guard rails off to the side of the highway were blazes. After all, they were white and rectangular. But after another mile of walking straight uphill into the sun it just didn’t seem possible that this was the trail. So I flagged down another car and su
re enough it stopped immediately. “Excuse me, can you tell me if this is the AT?” I pleaded.

  “Yes, yes, just go up to the bridge. It’s another mile or so.” Finally, after hiking uphill another mile, a bridge came into view. I had been walking straight up this highway for about four miles. At the bridge I finally saw a painted white blaze. My attitude was that whatever the hell had happened, and I honestly didn’t know, I was at least on the trail now and had a long hike ahead.

  I greatly preferred company on the trail, but didn’t have any today. I walked all the way up to the Rich Mountain Fire Tower before noticing there weren’t any blazes, and had to worriedly retrace my steps back down to find where I had missed a turn. At Allen Gap, the fifteen-mile mark for the day, I finally saw another hiker and began chatting with him. He told me about a hostel on a dirt road about one and a half miles up the trail. This lifted my somewhat fragile morale, and I bounded on, planning to stay there. After about a mile I began looking; after one and a half miles I became worried; and after two miles I assumed I had missed it. This kind of thing was disheartening and it contributed to my lingering concerns that I was still somewhat illegitimate as a hiker, with little orientation toward critical aspects of the outdoor lifestyle. But the one thing I did pretty well was walk, and the Little Laurel Shelter finally came into view, 19.6 miles from where I had started.

  Gus, a nice fellow with a handlebar mustache, was there. I had last seen him three nights before at the Roaring Fork Shelter when he offered me some noodles, and he did so again.

  “Boy, Hot Springs is a fabulous trail town, isn’t it?” I remarked.

  “I don’t like towns,” he responded to my surprise. “I stopped at the grocery store passing through town and headed on.”

  “You’re a real hiker, Gus,” I responded. “The rest of us are just pretenders.”

  But actually, my true feelings were different. The AT is well developed at this point, with hiker hostels, re-supply points, and hiker-friendly rural towns, all of which facilitated making friends and finding hiking partners. It is now normal to start off alone with the idea of meeting people along the way. And I knew very few hikers who didn’t look forward—sometimes to the point of craving—to arriving in one of these backwater trail towns after several days out in the wilderness. The current balance seems just right.

  G.I. Joe rolled in at dusk. He, of course, had been an early contender in the Tanya sweepstakes before mysteriously disappearing, either from discouragement or good judgment. “You were wise to cut your losses with that girl the other day,” I ventured. “She ended up being a bad bet.”

  “Oh, I never had the least interest in her,” he said reflexively.

  I didn’t know him well enough to kid him (and he was kind of big), but it sure hadn’t looked that way at the time.

  “Did you go to Iraq?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I just got back,” he replied. “I’m out here getting back on my feet.”

  “By the way,” I said chattily, “the first few miles up that highway today were a nightmare. I didn’t think the AT had any three- or four-mile roadwalks.”

  “What are you talking about?” G.I. Joe asked. “You didn’t walk for miles straight up the highway to get to that bridge?” I asked.

  “No way,” he said. “The trail turned right on the outskirts of Hot Springs and followed the ridgeline for five miles.” Then in disbelief he asked, “You walked up the road?”

  I defensively recounted what had happened.

  “That’s an amazing story,” he said.

  I sat there, glumly trying to decide if this blunder marred my whole dream of being a thru-hiker. However, I had made good mileage that day in spite of getting lost and, for once, didn’t lie shivering throughout the night. I even got something approaching a real night’s sleep.

  It was a good thing I did because the next day I hiked alone from dawn until dusk. The trail ran for a half mile over Blackstack Cliffs, a jagged boulder field along a ridgeline. It was the first “rock scrambling” (having to move on all fours) for a prolonged period of time. All day I had debated whether I could make it to Hogback Ridge Shelter—a hike that included a two thousand-foot climb late in the day. Needless to say, I was elated when the shelter finally came into view. It was a twenty-one and three-tenths-mile day, the longest yet.

  G.I. Joe had arrived there ahead of me and was reunited with three of the people who had tried to purloin our bathroom plan back in the Smokies. On the face of it the four of them were polite, but their body language told a different story. “Well, Skywalker,” G.I. Joe wanted to know, “did you find any more roads to take today.” The others laughed knowingly; it was quite clear the group had been fully briefed on my previous day’s mishap.

  Then more pointedly he asked, “What did you think of Blackstack Cliffs?” His tone was subtly insinuating, and it occurred to me that maybe he had been telling the others that I had “blue-blazed.” Blue-blazing refers to someone who took a blue-blazed side trail around a difficult part. Indeed, Blackstack Cliffs has a bad weather trail to avoid having to scramble over the exposed rocks in high winds and rain. But, I hadn’t taken it, and it bothered me not a little that he might have told the others I had. That might sound like false pride, but it struck straight at the heart of what being a thru-hiker is all about. I resolved then and there that if I managed to make it all the way to Mount Katahdin in northern Maine I would go back to Hot Springs and walk that five-mile section I had inadvertently missed yesterday.

  I was determined to make the paces with this group the next day to show I wasn’t a fraud. It again entailed a dawn-to-dusk hike, and the trail went over Big Bald Mountain at 5,500 feet. The weather was gorgeous for the third straight day, but I was to see this can be a two-edged sword. For the first time on the AT water became an issue. As important as food is to a hiker, water is even more important.

  Everybody was asking about water on this hot, sunny day. But there weren’t any springs or high-altitude sources of water which thru-hikers often drink straight up. We were forced to draw from the least desirable source of water—streams running at the bottom of mountains in the “gaps” or “notches.” This water can be contaminated by either human activity or animal feces. Unlucky users can contract giardia, an intestinal infection that is the bane of long-distance hikers. Stories abounded of hikers sidelined by this malady.

  At the last minute, before beginning in April, I had cast aside my newly purchased filter, which is considered the safest option, in favor of chemical tablets. It saved me one pound. Again, the Warren Doyle influence was at work. Warren, after all, doesn’t use tablets or a filter. But in his class he admitted that he had once contracted giardia, and it had taken him seven years to get rid of it!

  The rule of thumb was that a hiker should leave a water source with two full liters, and to be on high alert anytime you fall below one liter. For the first time since that godawful fourth day on the trail I fell below one liter. I was hot and thirsty, and water dominated my thoughts. I kept crossing dried up streams that showed up in the data book as a water source.

  I passed a man and woman of approximately sixty-five and thirty-five years old, respectively. He had an erect, martial bearing, and trim physique, while she was rather scantily clad. “Have you seen any water?” she gasped.

  “Not hardly,” I said dispirited. “And I’ve been looking.”

  She quickly turned away in disgust before I could elaborate, while the man stood by stoically. I soon learned the man was Seiko, and this was his new girlfriend. Seiko was known for having hiked anywhere from 10,000 to 30,000 miles on the AT, depending on who you talked to. Some even said he lived on the trail.

  “I passed by you at two o’clock asleep in the shelter last night,” he said to my surprise.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said incredulously. “How did you decide to do that?”

  “With the heat and lack of water yesterday night-hiking was a no-brainer,” he responded.

 
It was no surprise that somebody with twenty thousand miles under his belt had a few arrows in his quiver the rest of us didn’t have. It also was worth noting his graceful, confident stride despite his relatively advanced age.

  Finally, the trail dropped down steeply to Spivey Gap, which U.S. Highway 19W ran through. A stream flowed, albeit slowly. I gulped down the remaining half-liter of the water I previously had, and scooped two cloudy liters of water out of this stream. If nothing else appeared I would have to treat this water with chemicals and drink it. But sure enough, up the next mountain was a stream with white rapids tumbling over rocks. I poured out the two cloudy liters and filled up with this presumably higher-quality water.

  The miles weren’t coming easily on this day, and I was tired. On a good day I would stop once every three miles, but on a day like this I found myself stopping every mile for a quick swallow of water and a handful of GORP. Finally, I came up on No Business Knob Shelter which made 61.5 miles in three days. I’m doing better.

  An attractive blondish, reed-thin woman in her late forties was there setting up camp. “Hey, I’m Wrongway Grace,” she said. “I’m directionally challenged.”

  “What is directionally challenged?” I wondered.

  “I have a history of hiking the wrong way,” she said plainly. Her self-deprecating tone made for delightful company, especially after feeling like the odd man out in the previous night’s shelter. Wrongway Grace was about ten years into what was shaping up to be a twenty-year AT section hike. She would have nothing to do with shelters because of an abhorrence of mice and other rodents, and dutifully set up her tent each night. This was in spite of her section hike the previous year when, in Shenandoah National Park, a bear had entered the far end of her tent and snatched her food bag out her backpack. “It was scary,” she said.