by Bill Walker
“No, where?” I asked.
“A minute after you passed us a cub ran down the hill between you and us.”
“Did you see the mother anywhere?” I asked.
“No,” he replied, “and we weren’t about to wait for her either.”
So now I had a one-second glimpse of what was apparently a large, but scared bear in southwest Virginia and a near miss of a cub here at the beginning of Shenandoah National Park. Everybody seemed to have great tales to tell on this entrancing subject except me. But I wasn’t envious.
Camel and Bear came along while I was taking a break off one of the Skyline Drive crossings. They were two of the more likeable members of the Sleazebags and I was glad to have their company. As we sat there a car stopped and the driver opened his trunk to offer us a choice of soft drinks. Life wasn’t bad.
We reached the Blackrock Hut at dusk, after what would be the first of a string of twenty-mile days. Because of an estimated six million annual visitors in the park I had perhaps expected something palatial. Instead, the shelters were modest abodes, but the sturdy native rock gave them their own distinction. It was classic CCC Depression-era stone work.
Over to the side were the bear poles we had heard about. After dinner I went over and used one of the heavy iron poles to hoist my food bag up onto one of the rungs, about twelve feet up.
“Quit staring up there, Skywalker,” Bear said noticing my hesitation. “Not even Shaqille O’ Neal or you could reach it; much less a bear.”
But two days later I did find myself in a faceoff with a full-sized adult bear (mentioned earlier). It was the longest thirty seconds of my life. Finally, it slowly turned around and sauntered back up the trail in the direction it had disappeared before. This time I wasn’t so calm and continued my mock two-person dialogue. Skyline Drive was only a few hundred yards away, and I pondered bushwhacking through the ferns to get there. But I would have had to walk right through the bushes where this bear had originally been to get there. Who was to say there weren’t any more bears in there?
After waiting for someone else to come along in either direction, and maintaining the mock dialogue, I very tentatively started down the trail toward the bend where the bear had disappeared out of sight. Just before reaching the bend I stopped and threw some rocks in the direction the bear had gone to alert it that I was coming. Finally, I took a wide turn to get a better view of anything just beyond the bend. Nothing was there, so I hurried up the trail, scanning the shrubbery on both sides as I continued muttering.
Later, I talked to Bear and Camel who had passed this way soon after me. They had come across a bear at virtually this same point. The bear had stood in the middle of the trail on its hind legs, and the dense bushes on both sides of the trail blocked passage. They threw rocks near, but not at, the bear. The bear growled and continued blocking the trail. They then saw two cubs nearby so they realized it was a mother protecting her family. At that point they headed through the fern trees to Skyline Drive, just as I had previously contemplated doing. If you ask me it was rational behavior on the part of both the mama bear, and the two hikers.
I arrived in high spirits at the Hawksbill Mountain Shelter that third evening in “the Shennies” after having done 65.6 miles in three days, and reveled in telling the tale of “my” bear.
“The bear was probably trying to sucker you into dropping your food bag,” Pee Wee said.
“I’ll have to admit,” I replied, “that while it didn’t tear away or look scared, it didn’t look aggressive either.”
“Sounds like it was a good starter bear,” Pee Wee said.
As I trooped through the lush foliage and gentle hills of Shenandoah National Park, bears had now gone from something in the recesses of my mind to front and center. Two nights later I slept at the Gravel Springs Hut, and was stirring around early in the morning when a large black animal appeared climbing through the dense shrubbery in front of the shelter. At first I thought it was the black Labrador of one of the people tented out behind the shelter. But then I saw the prominent snout and wide face and realized it was not a canine, but something much larger. A bear emerged twenty yards in front of me.
Again, besides panic, I felt deceived. With a dog around bears were supposed to stay the hell away. Even though no dog is remotely a match for any half grown bear, the ancient enmity between bears and dogs is well known. And this bear looked in my direction, but it was the second bear in a row that didn’t run or even look afraid of me. So there I was once more, carrying on this mock conversation and waving my hiking pole in the air at a nearby bear. Finally, it slowly turned away from the bear poles and moved back down through the shrubbery from where it had come.
One of the tenters then walked from the tent-sites past the bear poles. “A bear was standing there five minutes ago,” I reported. He froze in his tracks and I quietly took pleasure in seeing another of these “don’t ever worry about bears” hikers tense up when a bear was actually around.
I had been planning to hike out at first light that morning, but quickly changed plans to wait and hike out with the group camped behind the shelter. After being on hair-trigger alert at the mere sound of a pine cone being stepped on or a twig snapping the last few days I greatly enjoyed having company. But my companions took a side trail and I was alone again in Shenandoah National Park with only one mile left. Although I had hiked most of the park alone I became suddenly and irrationally paranoid about bears. The upshot was that I was hurrying, and when the trail went down a rock scale I tumbled headlong down the rocks. Luckily, I braked myself at the last minute to avoid serious injury, but my arms and knees suffered deep bruises.
When the AT exits the northern boundary of Shenandoah National Park it runs for a miserable mile on private property, with a fence along the left side, and dense, high grass on the right, blocking any breeze. All along the way I kept hearing gunshots in the distance. While the owners were probably none too happy to have hikers traipsing along their land I assumed it was probably bears rather than hikers they were shooting at. In a ghoulish way this made me feel more secure.
Ug and I were hiking along the next day and when we heard some heavy rustling in nearby bushes, he playfully said, “Heeeer, kitty, kitty, kitty.”
“Wow, aren’t you brave,” I said impressed.
“No need to worry about these-here bears,” Ug said confidently. “They’ve been hunted and will stay away.”
Some thru-hikers went home for a vacation during the middle of their thru-hikes—often when the trail passed through their home states. But I didn’t want to break the fluency of the journey north, so a two-day break at my sister’s house in northern Virginia was going to be my AT “vacation.”
Since none of our family or close friends had any experience in long-distance hiking, my sister examined me like a museum piece (“He doesn’t smell quite as bad as we had thought.”) while speaking on her cell-phone with my mother. I felt like an Apollo astronaut returning from the moon. She and my mother had decided on a quota of eight pounds for me to gain while at her house. This entailed virtual force-feeding to such an extent that twice I had to go to the bathroom to purge myself.
Of critical importance, my sister took me to the local REI to find a tent, but again I couldn’t fit in any of the one-person tents. Finally, extremely disillusioned, I agreed to a two-person tent. It weighed almost five pounds, but I was desperate to get rid of my tarp. Amazingly, after one thousand miles of use, REI gave me a full refund on my tarp. This tent purchase would prove to be critical in liberating me from the shelters. And it fortified me that if I did make it all the way to northern New England in September, I might be able to handle the cold autumn better than I had the cold spring in the southern Appalachians.
Virginia’s five hundred-mile trek finally ends in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia. I walked over the Shenandoah River Bridge on a brilliant summer day, looking down at the magnificent Shenandoah River flowing by. “The passage of the Patowmac through
the Blue Ridge,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “is perhaps one of the most stupendous scenes in Nature.” He added, “The scene is worth a dozen voyages across the Atlantic.” It was all in stark contrast to my desperate hike down from the heights over Harper’s Ferry in February with the dark closing in.
part III
“North the word had amplitude now.
North trumped all other places.”—William Fiennes
Chapter 13
The AT headquarters in Harpers Ferry was surprisingly unimpressive. But my heart leapt when I walked in and saw Whitewater and Nurse Ratchet. I had repeatedly asked hikers for any information on her fate and had only gotten a vague trickle that they had left the trail due to her illness. “The rumors of my demise are greatly exaggerated,” she exulted in quoting Mark Twain. They recounted how they had indeed gotten off at the road after the shelter where I had last seen them and hitched a ride to a hospital. She had been diagnosed with kidney stones, which the urologist back at the shelter that morning had said with certainty she didn’t have. She was hospitalized for a couple days. Then they had gallantly headed back to the AT and made it all the way here to Harper’s Ferry. Pretty damn impressive. It was that kind of spirit, and not a lush headquarters building, that makes the Appalachian Trail.
The ATC took a photo of everyone, along with the date passing through. I then went outside with Nurse Ratchet and Whitewater to reconstitute our hiking group.
The big news on the trail was of a gruesome raccoon attack on a hiker named Sleeveless at the Pine Knob Shelter in Maryland. She was a mid-fifty-ish New Hampshirite who always wore a sleeveless blouse. Well, that was unfortunate because just as she was finishing her camp chores at dusk a raccoon had suddenly lurched out of the shrubbery and attacked her in front of the shelter. At first she had thought it was a bear and screamed bloody murder. All hell broke loose as three hikers tried desperately to get the rabid raccoon off her. It kept latching itself onto different parts of her arm before somebody finally got it off. One of the other hikers then escorted her through the woods in the dark to the nearest road and there they were able to hitchhike to the hospital. The Pine Knob Shelter had been closed by the ATC because of the blood all over it. It gave me pause when I thought back just a few nights ago to a shelter in Virginia—also in front of dense foliage—that I had foolishly slept in despite warnings of raccoon infestation posted in the shelter.
The AT crosses a footbridge over the Potomac into Maryland and then ascends to Weverton Cliffs. I was halfway up in a hunched climbing position when I heard a familiar voice from the opposite direction say, “Skywalker.” I looked up and saw Warren Doyle’s beaming face.
Warren looked at least thirty pounds lighter than when I’d last seen him three months before on an awful evening on a mountain road in Virginia. This was no surprise given his famously horrific hiking diet (stretches of days eating nothing but Little Debbie cakes because of their high-calorie to low-weight ratio).
Better yet, he had a smiling, pleased look on his face and gave me an effusive, Indian-style handshake. “Hanging in there, are we?” he exclaimed.
“You said the trail was inherently difficult,” I replied, “and you sure weren’t lying.”
“Just stay focused on completing each daily task,” he advised, “and those distant peaks in New England will soon be right in front of your eyes.”
I then introduced him to Whitewater and Nurse Ratchet. “Every time we go up a hill,” Nurse Ratchet said, “Skywalker quotes you: ‘You can never go too slowly up a hill.’”
“Sounds like you’ve learned a lot,” Warren said approvingly.
“I couldn’t have gotten any worse, if you’ll remember,” I said, and we both laughed.
“Warren, have you ever seen anybody hike that had kidney stones?” Whitewater asked.
“One time, about fifteen years ago, and it was one of the best hikes I ever saw,” Warren said enthusiastically.
“My wife has them now,” Whitewater said.
Furrowing his brow Warren replied, “I’ve rarely seen anyone hike the trail in its entire length without some severe pain at some point. But there is pleasure in pain.” He turned to go and remembered to say, “Watch your zero days and stay focused on your daily task, Skywalker. Good luck.”
And then he was off with his sideways waddle that has carried him thirty thousand miles on the Appalachian Trail.
The trail runs along Antietam Creek, scene of the historic Civil War battle. In fact, September 16, 1862, at Antietam was the single bloodiest day in American history. An estimated twenty-five thousand people were killed on just this one day, and that was when the country was only eleven percent of its current population.
Antietam was one of the two times—Gettysburg was the other—that Robert E. Lee’s army crossed the Potomac to seize enemy territory. General George McClellan repulsed Lee’s advance. But then McClellan inexplicably allowed Lee’s army to slip back across the Potomac and regroup to fight other battles. President Lincoln was so aghast at McClellan’s unwillingness to go on the offensive that he famously asked McClellan, “General, if you are not going to use your army, do you mind if I borrow it?” McClellan’s response was unsatisfactory and Lincoln fired him a month later.
One-hundred-forty-three years later, walking through the shadow of history on this hot summer day in the midst of a drought, Antietam Creek was about the only source of running water.
We got to the shelter and anxiously asked about water. A hiker of ample girth named Not Guilty said, “There is a spring down that hill that is flowing very, very grudgingly.” He was very, very correct. I pulled out my filter, which I had picked up at my sister’s house, and thanked my lucky stars for having it. The spring just barely trickled into a modest-sized water puddle, with bugs dancing on top. Without a filter I would have dredged up a potion full of leaves, dirt, and bugs. As it was, after extensive pumping, I had a perfectly clear Nalgene bottle full of water.
We got back to the shelter and began chatting with Not Guilty. “I am a defense attorney in Alaska,” he said. “I’m always pleading ‘not guilty.’” Not Guilty was an ex-college football player, and had weighed almost four hundred pounds when he began his thru-hike in early March. He had lost almost one hundred pounds up to this point and was gaining speed every day as he regained his athletic form.
The Four-State Challenge requires hiking in four states in one twenyfour-hour period. Hikers start on the Virginia-West Virginia line at midnight. After covering five hundred miles in Virginia, The AT is in West Virginia for just 2.4 miles. The trail then enters Maryland for exactly 40.4 miles. Thus, to complete the Four-State Challenge a person must hike exactly 42.8 miles in one twenty-four-hour period.
Smiley and Crucible arrived at the shelter about eight o’clock that evening in their bid to meet the Four-State Challenge. He was a fit, twenty-six-year-old Texan, and she a thirty-one-year-old, ex-pro soccer player from New Jersey. Their body language bespoke two things. They were more than hiking partners, and they were exhausted. They had started hiking at midnight and done thirty-three miles so far. It was 9.2 miles to the Pennsylvania border to complete the challenge. They ate a quick snack and then as darkness closed in dutifully hoisted their packs to try to beat the midnight deadline. My heart went out to them.
“Goodbye,” Not Guilty said. “At your pace we will never see you again.”
“Oh yes you will,” Crucible promised. “We’re taking tomorrow off right where we finish at midnight tonight.”
After nine miles the next day Whitewater, Nurse Ratchet, and I arrived at Penn-Mar Park, which delineates the border between the two states. “I’m surprised Smiley and Crucible aren’t sprawled on the ground somewhere around here,” I said.
“Didn’t you see the no-camping sign?” Nurse Ratchet said.
Soon we were the ones sprawled out taking a break, but as usual Nurse Ratchet cracked the whip. “Pack up,” she snapped. “Let’s push on.” And as usual she got off five minutes befo
re I did. After two-tenths of a mile the trail crossed a train track that had a marker on the other side. It was the Mason-Dixon Line, an imaginary line that symbolizes passage from the South to the North or vice-versa. Mason and Dixon themselves were two surveyors who were contracted in 1763 to settle a border dispute between Pennsylvania and Maryland.
Less than a minute after passing the marker I heard a voice from behind some trees at the top of the hill call out, “Skywalker.” Smiley opened his tent flap with a look that appeared flush with success.
“You made it,” I said expectantly.
“Yeah, it was tough following the trail at night,” he said. “That slowed us down and we didn’t get here until 1:30, so I guess technically we didn’t make it. But it was good enough for us.”
“Congratulations, and to you as well, Crucible,” I said.
“Thanks,” she said demurely. Smiley was in a chatty, celebratory mood, asking where everybody was, etc., while Crucible looked like she didn’t care if she hiked another single day on the AT in her life.
When I headed on and turned the corner Whitewater and Nurse Ratchet were having a good laugh. “Did you hear that couple in the tent up there?” Nurse Ratchet asked giggling. “They must have been on their honeymoon.”
“You’re talking about Smiley and Crucible?” I asked.
“Is that who it was?” she exclaimed excitedly. “We were trying to guess. She was screaming at the top of her lungs.”
“By the time I got there he called down to me and practically wouldn’t let me leave,” I reported. “She looked like she wanted to drop dead, though—after forty-two miles in one day and now Smiley rampaging.”
And it was rich in irony. The Texan and the New-Jerseyite had chosen the Mason-Dixon Line to celebrate and consummate. The people from the two sides sure were getting along better than during the tumultuous events right in this area 143 years before. Finally!