Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail

by Bill Walker

  Of course, it was no surprise that romances would be struck up in any endeavor as intense as an AT thru-hike. The same scene played itself out again a couple days later. Smiley had again called out to me from his tent in a chatty mood next to a supine Crucible. The sun and moon of sexual reassurance shone in his face. Fifteen minutes later I caught up with Mayfly, a prim and proper, lanky solo hiker from South Carolina. She had passed their tent, set up five yards off to the side of the AT, while the fireworks were in progress. She related in amazed tones what she had just walked past.

  Don’t ask me how, but Smiley and Crucible made it all the way through Pennsylvania. She then had to get off to return to her job as a school teacher, and, if what I heard was correct, her husband. As they say, the Appalachian Trail is the journey of a lifetime.

  The AT runs 250 miles through Pennsylvania, third only to Virginia and Maine in length. The elevation is low throughout the Allegheny Range, but the footway is infamous. Seemingly endless broken-up boulder fields present themselves to the hiker. It is also reputed to have the meanest rattlesnakes on the trail. What’s more, thru-hikers normally pass through Pennsylvania during high summer, when the bugs and heat are at their worst. Finally, the AT in Pennsylvania includes long stretches without any available water sources.

  Given all that, it comes as no surprise that Pennsylvania is one of the least-favorite states for every thru-hiker. In fact, the two states after it, New York and New Jersey, are also rocky, hot and dry when thru-hikers pass in mid-summer. It all forms a sort of psychological test. And it’s here in Pennsylvania that all the initial excitement and momentum from a long-planned hike completely ebbs and the adventure starts to feel like a real job. Depression sets in and people quit. I tried to look upon these down moments as existential to the entire endeavor.

  The trail in Pennsylvania begins in the Michaux State Forest before emptying out onto checkerboard-like pastures of farmland. Arguably, the first one hundred miles in Pennsylvania are the very easiest on the entire trail.

  Nurse Ratchet, Whitewater, and I, along with a young kid with an independent streak named Break Time, arrived at U.S. Highway 30 after a few days in Maryland and Pennsylvania. Nurse Ratchet had mentioned a particular “problem” that, if not attended to with a special product, would require her to get off the trail. The four of us hitched to the local grocery store to re-supply, but in keeping with most rural stores, its supplies were limited. While waiting in the checkout line I quietly asked a lady where to get this particular product around this area.

  Looking at the four of us, she asked, “Are you hikers?”

  “How did you ever guess?” I responded.

  “I’ve always wanted to hike the AT,” she bubbled. “Can I give you all a ride somewhere?” We jumped into the back of her pickup and she took us to a nearby pharmacy that had everything Nurse Ratchet required. She then took us to a local restaurant and we were obviously effusive in thanking her when she dropped us off.

  As we were wrapping up our meal, Whitewater looked out and said, “Somebody must have left something. That lady is back.” But we all quickly took stock of our backpacks, hiking poles, etc., and nothing was missing.

  “I just got home,” she said when arriving at our table, “and was bragging to my husband about these four AT hikers I met. He told me he wants to cook everybody some steaks and do your laundry.” Even though we had just finished lunch we all looked at each other, laughed hysterically, and got up to put our backpacks back in her pickup.

  Her husband, Mike, an ex-special-ops military guy was as down-to-earth and authentic a fellow as you could ever want to meet. So perhaps, along with rocks, snakes, humidity, and black flies, Pennsylvania turns out authentic people. All things considered, not a bad tradeoff!

  Just as promised they did our laundry and cooked us a full steak dinner. Despite all his adventures overseas in the Special Forces, Mike was wide-eyed and wondrous as he asked one enthusiastic question after another about our journey. They even asked us to stay for the evening, but we were so self-centered we wanted to get back to the trail and eke out a few miles before dark.

  When they dutifully dropped us back at the trailhead where we had gotten off earlier in that day, Mike said, “Could I just ask one thing of you?”

  “Sure, sure,” we all replied.

  “Please,” he pleaded, “just drop us a line when it’s all over letting us know how it all came out,” and handed us a piece of paper with an address.

  “Not only will we do that,” I said, “but we are going to be bragging to everybody about the best trail magic anyone has had so far.”

  We were certainly good for the latter promise (we bragged about it in the register at the Quarry Gap Shelter that night and to anybody within earshot for the next few days), but we weren’t true to the former. We lost the address and never sent them a communique.

  Hike Naked Day is a surprisingly non-controversial several-year-old tradition on the AT. Perhaps that is because it has been such a smashing success. “Nudity is a state of mind,” one hiker infected with the counter-culture mindset stated plainly. In fact, political and social correctness has now set in to the point that many refer to it as “Clothing Optional Day.”

  The standard operating procedure in any male-female hiking tandem on Clothing Optional Day is for the males to hike boldly out front, with ladies meekly and furtively trailing far behind. One male hiker, Dasher, led a coterie of three women in a “clothing impermissible” jaunt through southern Pennsylvania. That night at a shelter he mocked them for self-consciously looking over their shoulders every few seconds. “Wait a minute,” Cutie Pie (one of the three girls) said, “you promised you were going to do nothing but look ahead. How did you know we were looking around?”

  “Because I have eyes in the back of my head,” came back the predictable quip.

  “How was the participation this year?” I asked Grandpa, a veteran trail wag.

  “Better than ever,” he enthused, “but a real gender gap is opening up. I don’t know how we can improve female participation.”

  “Making blindfolds mandatory for males would be a start,” Cutie Pie muttered.

  For their part, Nurse Ratchet and Whitewater are God-fearing, teetotaling Baptists who don’t smoke, drink, cuss, or hike naked. Nor did I participate. Given how much weight I had dropped, my 6’11” skeletal frame might have scared some unsuspecting hiker even more than a bear.

  Pine Grove Furnace State Park marks the halfway point of an AT thru-hike. This was somewhat ironic to me because as a southerner I have most of my life thought of Pennsylvania as a northern state.

  The long-running tradition among AT thru-hikers is to attempt at the halfway point to eat a half-gallon of ice cream in one hour. All day, as we raced at an accelerated pace to get there, the buzz on the trail was about who would attempt to do it. In the shelter register 3.7 miles shy of Pine Grove Furnace State Park appeared the following entries:

  Tom’s Run Shelters—mile 1,081

  5-5-05: To ice cream or not to ice cream. That is the question.—Paparazzi

  5-5-05: Having skipped the Four-State Challenge, and even more inexcusably opted out of Hike Naked Day, I will not be denied the half-gallon challenge.—Skywalker

  A heavy thunderstorm delayed my progress, and upon finally arriving, fifteen or twenty hikers were gathered on the general store porch. As I approached people started shouting, “Skywalker, you’re the man. Yeah, baby, you can do it!” I felt like a Roman Gladiator bracing to do battle. But being so soaked, I felt it necessary to dry myself off in the nearby bathroom. The crowd hissed when I announced this delay.

  But ten minutes later I was back, determined to join the ranks of AT thru-hikers who have met the Half-Gallon Challenge. I put the half-gallon on the counter and paid the decidedly ambitious price of $5.95. No trail angel was this old tycoon. The rules of the Half-Gallon Challenge are that you are allowed an hour to consume the entire thing. After that, comes the tricky part. You had t
o hold it down for another hour before rushing to the conveniently located nearby bathroom.

  Whitewater and Nurse Ratchet had both sailed through with flying colors earlier. Meanwhile, three hundred-plus-pound Not Guilty had proved to be no match for a half-gallon. After about a half-hour it became clear that my 6’11” frame, and now only 180 pounds, was no match either. Whitewater saw me slumped over the carton and said, “Skywalker, what’s the matter?”

  “The sugar’s doing a number on me,” I replied.

  “Poor thing,” Nurse Ratchet ridiculed.

  When I went over to throw the rest of it away Nurse Ratchet said, “Skywalker, you are the biggest wimp in the world.”

  “No,” I replied, “I’m the tallest wimp in the world.” Then I moped over to the hiker register and wrote:

  Pine Grove Furnace State Park—mile 1,087

  5-5-05: UNCLE—Skywalker

  Complaints were rampant as we traipsed through the Cumberland Valley grain fields in broiling sun. But, given my urban background, I found it pretty novel hiking through ripening corn and wheat fields. And there was another thing I liked about it. It was flat as a table top.

  At several points the trail was a narrow corridor through high stalks of corn on both sides.

  “Boy, those farmers sure have been generous to let the trail run straight through their crop like this,” I remarked.

  “Oh no, they hate hikers,” the defense lawyer Not Guilty corrected me. “We’re lucky if they don’t shoot us. The ATC and the local trail maintenance clubs have fought many a legal battle to obtain the right of eminent domain for hikers to pass through here.”

  In fact he turned out to be correct. Originally, the trail ran over hundreds of miles of private property. Fortunately, the ATC and local trail clubs have been able to gin up enough money through private contributions, legislative grants, and the like to narrow to just twenty-nine miles the amount of private property through which the AT passes. And on those twenty-nine miles you have passages that have been carefully designed and negotiated through private farmland and the like.

  After a couple more days the trail finally left the corn and wheat fields and entered the famous fields of Pennsylvania rocks. They aren’t large boulders, but rather small, sharp stumble stones the size of bricks that keep your speed down as you pick from one to the next.

  Whitewater was slightly faster than me, but in normal terrain I generally moved at a slightly quicker pace than Nurse Ratchet. However, in these rock fields, with my head down, I struggled to keep up with them. What’s more, with my head constantly looking down at the rocks I was having trouble following the trail.

  The trail went down Cove Mountain and then right through the streets of Duncannon, Pennsylvania. Once again Nurse Ratchet and Whitewater were ahead of me, and while descending Cove Mountain I wasn’t seeing any blazes. Finally, instead of arriving in the center of town I arrived in what appeared to be the outskirts of the city. Spotting a fellow-human I said,

  “Could you please tell me where the AT is?”

  “You’re on the old AT,” he laughed good-naturedly. “The new AT runs through the downtown area.” So, off I hiked a couple extra miles not so good-naturedly to the town center. I finally saw Whitewater and Nurse Ratchet waiting in front of the Doyle Hotel.

  “Skywalker, did you get lost?” Nurse Ratchet asked.

  “Somehow I ended up on the bloody old AT,” I muttered.

  She laughed and said, “When we took that left turn there on Cove Mountain we predicted you’d go straight.”

  Jesus Christ, I thought. Just when it looked like I was gaining some confidence as a hiker I had missed a critical turn in the trail. Worse yet, they had predicted it and turned out to be right! And to top it off, the well-known local trail angel Mary had been at the bottom of Cove Mountain to deliver trail magic to Whitewater and Nurse Ratchet.

  If I made it all the way to Mount Katahdin I was planning to make up for my 5.5-mile blunder leaving Hot Springs, North Carolina. But I’d be damned if I was going to redo a mile I missed on the new section of the AT in Pennsylvania instead of the three miles I did on the old one.

  Chapter 14

  The Doyle Hotel looks like something out of the 19th century Wild West. It’s one hundred years old and had been one of the original Anheuser-Busch hotels. You enter the hotel through a dilapidated saloon entrance, and make room arrangements with the bartender. The price had recently been raised to $17.50 for a single.

  Walking through the streets of Duncannon, a fiftyish hiker named 49er observed, “This looks like another old company town that was devastated when the U.S. lost the steel business.” Indeed, the main street along the train tracks had nothing much to offer in the way of thriving enterprises. Sadder still, many of the denizens looked as if they had taken to the bottle as consolation.

  “It makes you wonder,” I conceded. “I’ve always been an avid supporter of free trade, but this place shows the grotesque consequences.” In fact, the last twenty years has seen an unprecedented reduction in poverty and hunger in the two largest countries in the world, China and India. But the hard-working members of communities like these in rural Pennsylvania, that had formed the backbone of the American middle-class, had borne the brunt of the pain.

  I hiked out of Duncannon as quickly as possible the next morning after being kept awake by blaring music and revelry all evening. The trail runs for almost a mile on the bridge over the Susquehanna River. Normally, I was morose as the last vestiges of civilization disappeared behind me when leaving a trail town. But, on this occasion with huge trucks flying by on the left and a low rail on the right between me and the river, I was quite glad to arrive at the woods.

  Pine Grove Furnace State Park, fifty miles back, is the official halfway point on the AT. However, Warren Doyle had said the Susquehanna is the real halfway point in terms of time and effort required for a thru-hike because of the greater difficulty in northern New England. Given that it was July 2, and I had started on April 10, I was on schedule to make it, though not with much time to spare.

  The weather forecast was invariably the same on these high–summer days: hot, humid, and with a chance of thunderstorms. Whitewater,

  Nurse Ratchet, and I often tried to predict whether it was going to rain on these days. My forecasting record was appalling, while theirs was merely bad. The irony was that each day we fervently hoped it wouldn’t rain, but rain was absolutely essential.

  Whitewater, Nurse Ratchet, 49er, and I climbed up Stony Mountain to make twenty-one miles for the day. Fortunately, I had carried almost two liters of water up the mountain from the creek below because it was dry as a bone at the top. Some hikers already camped out up there had walked a half mile down the side of the mountain looking for running water, but to no avail. Serendipity prevailed for Whitewater, who was dangerously low on water. A section hiker, who was headed back down the mountain, gave up most of his water to Whitewater. The next morning we all quickly packed up and moved on. The data book showed no water for eight miles, and not even that was a certainty.

  The famous Pennsylvania black flies were beginning to reach full expression. Pesky bugs orbited our faces, and even running didn’t seem to shake them. We were especially amazed at the way they dive-bombed our open eyes, presumably to get at the liquid inside them. Two hands were far too few for defense. Uncharacteristically agitated, Whitewater vented, “I can’t believe it. The same bug has been stalking me for the last three days.”

  “But it wasn’t in the tent with you last night, was it,” I pointed out.

  “No,” he said, “he waits outside of it all night and jumps me first thing in the morning.”

  Nurse Ratchet and I laughed, but he sounded serious. I whispered to her, “He doesn’t really believe that, does he?”

  “Yes, he does,” she said. “He was going on and on about it in the tent last night.” It sounded incredible, but the way bugs had also been stalking and orbiting me for long periods during the day I bega
n to believe it could be possible. And Whitewater stoutly maintained this for hundreds of miles, as it shook his customary composure and good humor.

  Finally, we got to the Rausch Gap Shelter and eagerly sought the spring. We were relieved to see that even a minor trickle was flowing. When Nurse Ratchet disappeared into the woods to relieve herself I said, “Let’s tell her we’re quitting.”

  “If these bugs keep up like this,” Whitewater said, “I just may.” We lay there with our backpacks as headrests as she walked up.

  “Do you want to hear the good news or the bad news?” I asked.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I’ve often wondered whether dropping off the trail is a long, drawn-out decision or happens on the spur-of-themoment. In my case, it’s the latter. Whitewater can speak for himself.”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  “Honey, we’re going back home to Tennessee,” Whitewater drawled. “I’ve had all of these bugs I can take.”

  “Right, let’s go,” she said impatiently. But we weren’t going anywhere.

  “Do you know?” I said dreamily, “a sizable minority of the population never believed humans ever landed on the moon. They think it was all staged.”

  “Maybe it was,” Whitewater said drolly.

  “Well, I think it is the same with this Appalachian Trail. Everybody I’ve seen lately has been miserable or quitting. No way they’re hiking the whole thing.”

  “Ya’ll better not be serious,” Nurse Ratchet said sternly, sounding a bit more concerned.

  Finally, after about thirty minutes of hectoring and deriding us, she said, “Well, you two losers can do what you want. I’m hiking.” With that off she stomped into the distance. Our dark moments of the soul soon passed and we slowly got up, hoisted our packs, and unenthusiastically trudged after her.