by David Miller
I reach Knot Maul Branch Shelter at 4:30 p.m. It is a full house, and the water source is far from the shelter. Crash is laying out his sleeping pad. I tell him of my plan to head for Chestnut Knob Shelter, another nine miles north. I will be in for a twenty-three-mile day, long under any circumstances, but particularly so since I wasn’t on the trail until noon today. Late in the afternoon, I reach an extensive, somewhat open ridge, feeling as though I should be near the shelter but never getting there. Heel pain is excruciating now, even on uphill steps. It was a poor decision for me to push on. Wind-blown clouds limit visibility and dump a steady rain on me. The grassy top of the ridge has just enough trees to avoid being called a bald. Ghostly looking trees stand back from the trail, obscured by the foggy mist. Wet, windy, high, and exposed is a good recipe for hypothermia, and I feel increasingly chilled, despite the sweaty effort of walking.
A spring-fed puddle is off to the left. I recall from the guidebook that this must be the water source for my still-unseen shelter. As much as I desire to reach cover, I know I need water to cook, and I won’t want to come back later. I take off my pack and balance it in an upright position on the long, wet grass since there are no trees in the vicinity. In the brief moment of pulling back my pack cover to get out a water bottle and filter, rain dampens the upper contents of my pack. I pump a bottle of water with numb hands and a shivering body. When done, I turn to see that my pack has toppled, spilling more gear onto the wet ground. Frustrated, I stuff it all in the pack, losing all pretense of keeping anything dry.
I am lucky that there is room in the shelter, more so since it is a rare, fully enclosed, concrete shelter. A half hour later, Crash arrives. I am flattered that he was inspired by me to extend his day. His entrance makes me think of this shelter as an Arctic outpost, where the weary, bundled traveler opens the door and enters with a burst of howling cold wind. Then the wind slams the door behind him and there is silence and safety.
The pain in my heel is agonizing when I walk out to pee in the morning. For the past few days, my heel pain has intensified as the day wore on, so I don’t like the way this day has begun.
After spending considerable time cleaning and rebandaging my heel, I decide I need to get off the trail and see a doctor about this problem. All but one of the other hikers head out while I’m looking over the guidebooks for the next easy access to town. The last remaining hiker is a young man who was asleep in the bunk above mine when I arrived last night. To my knowledge, he had not stirred in the twelve hours since that time. Now he has retrieved a cigarette and lit up without leaving his bag. The smoke pervades this small enclosed building, but I say nothing.
The best choice for getting off the trail is at road U.S. 52, which leads into the town of Bland, Virginia. This road crossing is twenty-two miles away, a daunting prospect considering how I feel at the moment. At first, there is a rocky but manageable descent from the shelter, then a climb back up Garden Mountain. On the climb, the smoker-hiker passes me. I step aside and finally say hello. He flies by without a word. On the downside of the mountain, I come upon him and another thru-hiker. His friend had camped by the road last night. The two of them look over a map, scheming to hitch out on this little-traveled road. Smoker-hiker remains reticent, but his gregarious friend explains the plan. “If we can just figure out which way to walk, [right or left on the road], someone will eventually come along and give us a ride.”
“How will you get back here?” I ask, only getting laughter for a response. Of course they don’t intend to hitch back out on a dirt road. There are plenty of well-traveled access points further up the trail.
In the middle part of my day, the trail is an obstacle course of mud, blow-downs, and a bunch of stream crossings. Actually, I believe it is only one stream that the trail planners crossed back and forth a dozen times. On the home stretch to civilization, the AT follows a gravel road, where I pass hiker “Dirt Nap” playing his guitar. He indeed looks like a man woken from a nap on the ground. Gear jangles from his pack as he strolls along. Given the width of the road, I’m free to walk alongside, pass, or walk backwards diagonally in front of him, as a dog might explore perspectives of a walking companion. His words have the wispy, deliberate tone you would use to induce hypnosis. We speak about his guitar, music. On other topics he is vague.
“When did you start the trail?” I ask.
Dirt Nap responds, “I don’t know.”
Surely he knows when he started hiking, but giving a concrete answer would undermine his enigmatic persona. The appropriate response here would be, “Awesome.” “Awesome” is a sweeping adjective used by the younger generation. In this context, “awesome” is equivalent to the “far out” of the older generation. If I say “awesome,” it would mean, “It’s cool that you are so much at one with nature that you have lost your sense of time and self. Far out.” Semantics aside, I’m in a bit of a snippy mood, and I don’t want to let Dirt Nap off easy.
I test his ability to be creatively evasive with, “Where did you stay last night?”
He’s taken aback, stumbling over my breach of protocol. “I…I don’t remember.”
When I get to U.S. 52, the first car I see pulls over and the driver gives me a ride to the Big Walker Motel in Bland, Virginia. Smoker-hiker and his friend are here, telling me of their success in hitching out from the dirt road, even though they had chosen the wrong direction to walk. Steve O. is here, too.
“Hi, Steve,” I say.
“Awol—I thought that was you I saw in Atkins,” he responds.
In the midst of our greetings, it dawns on me that he shouldn’t be here yet. It was only yesterday that I left Atkins, and Steve O. was just settling in. How is it that he is here one day later? Actually, it is almost as improbable for me to be here. He saw me at noon yesterday, and here I am forty-four miles further north the next evening. For all he knows, I am a kindred spirit in taking a less literal approach to thru-hiking.
The incongruity has dawned on him as well, and he explains, “These guys I’m with, they’ve hiked that part already. Those miles are trash. I’m not gonna let it bother me. Hell, I’ll be walking two thousand miles—nobody cares about a few miles.”
The name Bland is apropos for this town. Scanning the phone book, I see few businesses. My choices for medical care are just a couple of private practices, and it is now Saturday morning. I have poked into the bulging infection on my left heel, as I did in Erwin, but now instead of clear fluid, a sickly yellow puss seeps out. Indecisive about what to do next, I talk on the phone with Juli and then with my parents. They encourage me to walk into an emergency room for medical care, a thought that never dawned on me. I think of hospitals as places for people who are seriously ill. The nearby town of Wytheville has a hospital. There is also a rental car agency that will shuttle me to Wytheville if I rent a car.
I lie on my stomach while the doctor and his assistant have a go at my heel. They cut and squeeze with much success. They whisper to themselves, not to keep me from hearing, but because they are concentrating.
“Look at all that,” he says, referring to the puss they’ve extracted. He makes another cut.
“There is another pocket over here.” He squeezes to the extent of his strength, then regrips and squeezes again. I know just how he feels, on the cusp of accomplishing a total purge. In spite of the pain, I want him to do this. I want the infection gone. I am silent, but my leg tension breaks the doctor’s focus.
“Oh, sorry,” he says, as if suddenly aware that the heel in his grip is attached to a person.
The doctor sends me away with antibiotics, bandaging tape, and gauze, and he reprimands me for continuing to walk with my foot in this condition.
“You should not hike until you’ve finished the antibiotics. The real problem for you will be the wound. Even if it has started to heal when you hike again, it will be very easy to reopen the injury.”
The antibiotics will last a week. I can’t take a week off. In my mind, I’ve alread
y cut the doctor’s suggestion back to four days, maybe even three. His other, more worrisome sentences ring true. This infection stemmed from a blister that I popped twelve days ago in Erwin. I thought it was on track to heal, and then the infection appeared. How can I prevent this weakened area from becoming a perennial problem?
From being on the trail, and from my prior reading about thru-hiking, I know that this is how a hike ends. It only takes one injury that won’t go away, and I’ve already dodged a handful of injuries that had hike-ending potential. Also, taking multiple days off will break the momentum that I had. I will have the distraction of nursing a sore foot. Will I maintain the motivation to continue? Even if my heel ceases to be a problem, I’ve come to expect that there will be another injury or pain to take its place. I feel like my chances of finishing the hike are fifty-fifty. My assessment of the situation is objective. I’m not unmotivated at the moment. I won’t really know how my head or my heel will react until I hit the trail again.
Assumption, even about your own state of mind, without immediacy of action is guesswork. During the yearlong planning of my hike, I mostly felt positive anticipation about the things I would be doing and places I’d be seeing, just like anyone does looking over vacation brochures. As my departure date grew near, worries about leaving work mounted. For at least four months I would be a spender with no earnings. Then came the day I actually walked away from my desk and turned in my badge. It was really happening. I felt like a truant, having broken free in midday, midweek. Instead of looking forward to 5:00 p.m., I was looking forward to adventure. The doubts I had about voluntary unemployment were washed away by the tide of excitement. It wasn’t until then that unadulterated emotion escaped and I was certain of my decision.
I’m determined to do all that I can to get myself back on the trail with the best chance of staying the course. I find a motel in Wytheville willing to put me up for half price for taking a room with poor TV reception and agreeing to stay at least three nights. I buy Epsom salts and soak my foot for fifteen minutes three times a day. I wear camp clogs all the while, keeping the area free from friction or confinement.
I drive a car for the first time in over a month, taking my rental car north to an outfitter in Blacksburg, Virginia, to buy boots. Heel blistering occurs on my trailing foot during the walking motion, when my heel lifts off the ground but my shoe resists bending like my foot does. I reason that boots can be attached snugly at the ankle, alleviating some of the heel friction.
I purchase molefoam, a thicker version of the popular blister-protecting material called moleskin. Molefoam comes in patches about the size of an index card, about one-eighth of an inch thick, and has one adhesive side. It is applied by custom cutting a donut shaped piece and pasting it to your foot with the hole over the blister. The molefoam around the blister absorbs impact and friction that would otherwise befall the blister.
During my stay in town, I never tire of eating large meals at restaurants. Four days of bingeing hardly adds back any of the weight I had lost. I watch the movie Finding Nemo at the Millwald Theater, the oldest continuously operating movie house in Virginia, open since 1928.
I try my hand at trail magic and anonymously leave a cooler where I got off the trail near Bland. I want to see hikers, but no one passes in the half hour that I wait. When I retrieve the empty cooler later in the day, I see that Tipperary left a note of thanks.
The next day I head for a trail crossing further south, on a road I remember crossing before reaching Atkins. I navigate the back roads, pairing a road map that doesn’t show the trail with a trail map that doesn’t show the roads. I gain a better understanding of the effort others go through to meet hikers at trailheads. From the city of Marion, Virginia, I head up a tiny road that is supposed to cross the trail.
A short way out of town, two hikers are walking the road, still far from the trail. I’m not expecting them, and they are just as surprised to see a car. Not many hikers go into Marion because the trail leads directly into Atkins less than twenty miles away. The hikers are a couple in their midfifties. They are dressed alike in blue shorts, white shirts, and white Gilligan hats. The woman turns and backpedals, waving superfluously to get my attention. Her feet slide down a grassy shoulder of the road, and she falls forward onto her hands. Both have short black hair peppered with gray. I can’t help my impressions. They look too clean, too civil, and they’ve come off the trail at an inconvenient road to go into a town no hiker visits. They must not know what they are doing. On the remainder of my hike, I would see much more of them and learn how wrong my impressions were. For now, they introduce themselves as Ken and Marcia.
6
Bland to Daleville
The break did not make me feel like quitting. If anything, having the injury and time off added to my motivation. I had my hard times and expect balance to be restored. I now know that I have the drive to finish the hike and realize that I must take better care of myself to make it happen. I averaged twenty miles per day in the twelve days of hiking from Erwin to Bland. I no longer want to push to make miles. My self-imposed four-month schedule is sure to be extended.
It’s raining. Not too bad really, and it clears up by noon. The trail feels different, more organic than the trail I left four days ago. The ground has rich, dark, wormy soil. Kudzu and its kin are covering the floor of the forest with green runners. I see three sizable black snakes at separate locations.
The cuts made by the doctor have not closed completely, but they are not bleeding. My heel does not hurt when I walk. I’m not used to hiking with shoes that come over the ankles, so I feel constrained by my new boots. Even though they are no higher than the average hiking boot, it feels like I am walking in ski boots. After a couple of miles, I start experiencing discomfort, especially when going downhill. On the downslope, the top of my boots put painful pressure on my Achilles tendons. Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing how shoes or boots will work until you try them out. After using them, they are difficult or impossible to return, and usually you are a day or more away from being able to swap them out. If I stick with my current plan, I would reach Daleville in a little more than a week, where I could visit another outfitter. After about eight miles the pressure on my Achilles tendon is unbearable. I cut a line an inch and a half vertically down the back of each boot to loosen the “collar” around my leg.
At 3:00 p.m. I arrive at Jenny Knob Shelter. Boot alterations alleviated the stress on the back of my leg, and I never felt any irritation on my heel. At the shelter, I take off the bandage and see that there is no bleeding or undue redness. The day thus far was a success.
Two section hikers are in the shelter, and more thru-hikers come in after me. Andy is a thru-hiker I’m seeing for the first time. His clothes and gear give the impression he is traveling on a limited budget. He is young and from California. My short twelve-mile walk is exactly what I need to be doing while I’m nursing my heel and coming back up to speed on the trail. Andy packs up and continues down the trail. Rain clouds have dissipated, and I can see blue sky through the treetops. I get restless. The weather is perfect and I feel fine. Indecision paralyzes me until 5:00 p.m., then I get up and go. Six miles from Jenny Knob Shelter I’m ready to stop, but now I’m too close to a road. Head-high brush near Kimberling Creek laps across the trail. When I push them aside, thorns snag my shirt and cut thin red lines into my arms and shoulders. I’m wearing down and wish I had not left the shelter. My first day back and I’ve already made a bad decision and walked another twenty-mile day.
Darkness is falling, and I finally find a clearing in which to camp. It’s on the side trail leading to Dismal Falls. Andy comes back from the falls and sets up his tent in the same clearing. Andy is good company; he is talkative, gregarious, and agreeable. He had met some locals having a party on the other side of the falls, and he had rock-hopped across to join them.
Dismal Falls is a short, wide cascade. Water drops only ten feet over a concave arc of rock. The creek is
running low, exposing broad slabs of rock on the unused portion of the streambed. Our little clearing among saplings, with the din of the falls, is calm and comforting.
I return to the falls in the morning to get water and see a few of the locals asleep on the slabs of rock, one of them less than an arm’s length from the falls. Andy is still in his tent when I leave. Before lunchtime I reach Wapiti Shelter, the location where two hikers were murdered in 1981.21 The shelter faces away from the trail, as if embarrassed by its past. It is a worn, old-looking shelter. Inscriptions are on the walls and in the shelter register, some mourning the victims, some expressing outrage that the murderer was set free in 1996. It is a sad place to be, and I don’t stay long. Sad, but not spooky; visiting this site does not change my visceral feeling that the trail is safe.
The trail passes through a zone in which all the trees are saplings, no taller than a dozen feet high. Their young leaves are a luminous light green. Undergrowth is dense here, still getting a share of sunlight that they will be deprived of when the trees mature. The effect is that of having a wall of green on either side of the trail, like a corridor through an oversized cornfield. A deer is in the corridor, less than twenty yards ahead of me, also walking north. He looks over his shoulder at me and then lazily jogs ahead on the trail until he is out of sight. I catch up and see him grazing on trailside shrubbery. Again, he only goes far enough to lose sight of me. On my third sighting, he grows impatient and leaves the trail for cover of the saplings. An hour later, the trees are taller and sparser, so I have clear vision of three deer galloping on a path that will bring them closer to me as they cut across the trail. They don’t alter course even though they must be aware of my presence. I have a fleeting feeling of being disrespected since they show no fear of me—then I think better of it, content to believe that I am somehow passing through their woods with a nonthreatening demeanor.