by David Miller
The trail, now on a ridge, has changed direction from earlier in the day. Looking at the map, I see that the change is much more severe than I perceived while walking. A ten-mile section of trail is in the shape of a wide, flattened S curve. When the trail finally resumes its northeasterly bearing, I stop for a break at Doc’s Knob Shelter, where I am perplexed to see Andy. He sheepishly admits that he took a blue-blaze trail that lops off one loop of the S, shortening the walk by about five miles. I do my best to help him understand that I don’t condemn blue-blazing. Andy is a great guy to have on the trail, an asset to the trail community. In many ways, he is more wholly taking in the experience than I am as a white-blazer.
The trail leading away from the shelter is a wide straightaway, mildly downhill, lined with rhododendrons. The rhododendrons are blooming pink, like giant bouquets overstuffed with flowers. The path is carpeted with pink petals. Nine beautiful, dreamlike miles pass. From the ridge, a patchwork of fields is visible in the valley below. Then there is the two-mile-long, foot-jamming descent into Pearisburg.
On the downhill, my toes cram forward into the unforgiving toe box of my new boots. I stop, take the boots off, and let my feet breathe. After the break, I walk only a hundred yards before the pain resumes. I try walking backwards, to make my feet slide toward the heel of the boot. I try loosening the bootlaces at the eyelets nearest my toes, hoping that my forefoot would feel less constricted. Tightening the boot laces near the ankle to hold my toes back from the front of the boot doesn’t help. Nothing works; the descent is torture on my feet. The failure to solve my foot problems with $140 boots is a huge disappointment.
The trail enters Pearisburg near the Rendezvous Hotel on Highway 100. I hustle over and get a room, eager to forget my difficulties. I walk down the street to a bar and am thrilled to see other thru-hikers. I see Stretch for the first time since Hot Springs. Jason and Shelton, a couple I met in Damascus, are here. No Pepsi and others come and go as the night wears on.
I wake early, feeling no ill effects from the drinking. I have a plan to get out of these boots. Although there is no outfitter in Pearisburg, there is a car dealer across the street from my motel. Correctly assuming that they rent cars, I get a rental and once again head for Blacksburg. Getting the car was time consuming, and I’m starving. Before leaving town, I pull into a little diner to get breakfast.
Steve O. is sitting at a cleared table with his pack, either not eating or having finished breakfast. Ladies from an adjacent table hand him a few dollars. I had missed out on whatever story earned him the money. A waitress eyes him, probably for the dual transgressions of occupying a table and soliciting customers.
“Awol!” he says, as surprised as I am to meet again.
“Hi, Steve O.”
“Just my luck,” sarcastically runs through my thoughts. I imagine he thinks the same thing without the sarcasm. I wonder if he might ask me to buy him breakfast.
“They’re calling me Elwood now,” he says, as if the choice for changing his trail name was not his. Changing names is not always dubious, but in his case I suspect him of sweeping over his tracks.
“Where are you going?”
“I rented a car, and I’m going to Blacksburg. These boots aren’t working out for me, so I’m looking for new ones.” Normally, I would be more guarded about my plans, but I assume he’s headed back out to the trail. We will be parting ways, and I don’t feel as though I need to concoct a story.
“Great!” he replies. “That’s where I wanted to go.” I’ve shown my hand, and now I’m stuck with him.
Elwood has a different backpack from the one I last saw him using. His clothes are new, too. He tells me of all the things he has been given along the trail. “And when I told her about my son, killed in Iraq, she said ‘Elwood, I want you to have this backpack.’” He continues to the next story, but his words fade from my attention. His reason for going to Blacksburg must have been one of the things I missed. I deduce that he is getting away from a person or situation in Pearisburg. “Where will you go from here?” I ask.
“I can get back on the trail up by Four Pines [a well-known hostel near Catawba, Virginia]. I’ll come back later and do this section.”
In Blacksburg, I pick out lightweight trail shoes, similar to the pair with which I started. Even though it is 5:00 p.m. when I return to Pearisburg, I head back out on the trail. It was only three days ago that I was laid up in Wytheville. The AT parallels Highway 100 for a weed-ridden half mile before returning to the road to cross a river on the auto bridge. Here, I meet thru-hiker Bigfoot, who is coming out of a grocery store at the north end of town. Together we head uphill, back into the woods.
Bigfoot is tall and lanky, just out of college, where he ran cross-country all four years, perfect preparation for the AT. He started May 5 and is the first hiker I’ve met who is this far along having started later than I did. We walk seven miles nonstop while climbing seventeen hundred feet, talking the whole way. My new shoes are definitely an improvement over the boots. I am content to follow him up the trail since I want to reach a shelter before dark. I try not to let on that I am winded keeping up with his pace.
Our ascent levels off, and we enter a cow pasture. Off to the right, just outside of the barbwire, is my destination, Rice Field Shelter. Bigfoot continues to hike, planning to tent a little further along. Hungry Hiker is at the bench in front of the shelter, creating an elaborate sketch in the register. Indiana Slim is asleep and would still be sleeping when I leave the next morning. Andy, Dude, and Gray Matter come in just about dark. They spent the day lounging around town. Andy and Dude brought along thirty-two-ounce White Russians mixed in their water bottles.
Andy scurries into the shelter, convinced one of the cows is chasing him. “Awol, you want a drink?” he offers.
After pouring about eight ounces into my bottle, Dude stops him. “What are you doing?”
“I’m giving Awol a drink,” Andy answers defensively.
“Yeah, but that’s my bottle,” Dude chastises him. “Now give him some of yours.”
This shelter register has a theme; hikers are encouraged to submit jokes. Andy, Dude, and Gray Matter take turns reading the jokes aloud until rain drives everyone to bed. Dude stays awake, sitting at the foot of the shelter reading the register jokes with his headlamp and alcohol, giggling into the night.
It is still raining lightly in the morning. There are no views, and I trudge along dodging mud puddles and watching water gush out of my shoes. By lunchtime, it is a constant, drenching rain. I take a long lunch break at the aptly named Pine Swamp Shelter. While I eat, I am joined by Jason, Shelton, their dog, Mission, and Gray Matter. All of us thirst for a bit of dry time.
This shelter, like many others so far, has the message “SMOKE WEED” scratched on the ceiling in big, bold, charcoal letters. I can’t imagine that nonsmokers are converted by this commandment, or that those who do bring pot are waiting to be told. On cue, another hiker enters the shelter and lights up, offering to all present. I’ve been on the trail less than two months, and already I’ve been asked more than a handful of times if I’d like to share a joint.
We all move ahead four miles to Bailey Gap Shelter to stay for the night. I give some attention to my soggy, prune-wrinkled feet. One broken toenail has come off with my sock. Another toenail is broken at the base of the nail, and I’m trying to dislodge it by flapping it side to side.
“If you get that off,” Jason says, “I’ll take it for my collection.” Soon enough it does come loose, and I hand it over. “The skin still hanging from it is a nice touch.”
We litter the shelter with wet clothes and gear. All shelters have an assortment of pegs and nails, and often there is a web of strings forming makeshift clotheslines. On wet days, there are never enough nails or lines. I drape wet socks over my muddy shoes and stuff them under the shelter floor. Another hiker, Vic, arrives, and five of us are cramped in the small and damp shelter.
My shoes and socks aren�
��t a bit drier in the morning, nor is the sky. Gray Matter is the first one to head out into the drizzle. The rainfall increases. Vic leaves minutes later, and again the rain intensifies. “Rain on the Appalachian Trail is proportional to the number of hikers on the trail,” Jason submits.
I am in a positive mood in spite of the dreary weather. I put on wet footwear and head upstream. I am as strong as I’ve been since leaving Damascus, and I have minimal pain. Dead skin falls off of my once-infected heel in soggy chunks, but the redness is gone. Juli and the girls will be here in three days.
I sit on the platform of War Spur Shelter for a lunch break, with my food bag just inches from me. A huge black snake emerges from inside the shelter, brushing my leg as he slithers between me and my food. I’m too stunned to react. He drops to the ground and proceeds into the woods at an unhurried pace, as if I were inanimate.
A few miles beyond the shelter, near an intersection with a dirt road, the trail passes over a stream on a footbridge. Someone has left cans of beer in the stream. The first thought that pops into my head is “calories,” indicative of how my thoughts on food and drink have changed since starting the hike. After gulping down two cans of calories, I begin a long uphill segment of trail. Mountain laurel crowds the trail with dense green leaves and abundant white blooms.
Gray Matter marches uphill ahead of me, legs like pistons, arms pumping in synch with trekking poles. I envy his youth. For a while I keep up, using his pace, as I did with Bigfoot, to pass difficult miles quickly. But I fall behind. Looking up at him making the climb accentuates the steepness of the trail. In that moment I make the mistake of despairing over the difficulty of the task at hand, rather than just doing it. I opened the check-valve on my gumption and feel my energy drain away. Thoughts are the most effective weapon in the human arsenal. On the upside, it is powerful to realize that goals are reached primarily by establishing the proper state of mind. But if allowed the perspective that our endeavors are propped upon nothing but a notion, we falter.
For most of the day, the trail bounces up and down between twenty-four hundred and thirty-six hundred feet. The fantasy of easy walking in Virginia has not materialized. The rain has subsided, though, and my clothes, even my shoes, have started to dry.
I descend into a grassy pastureland, bisected by a road. Looking ahead to the road, still a mile away, I see a car stop to pick up two hitching hikers. The last fifty yards of pastureland are submerged ankle-deep in water, and my shoes get soaked once again.
A lone cherry tree has more low-hanging fruit than I can eat. Time in the pastureland is all too brief before another long uphill segment. I stop twice to snack, trying to power my way up with a sugar boost. Atop the ridge there are a number of stone piles, mounded up to five feet high. In the late afternoon, the mounds have the eerie appearance of funeral cairns. Sarver Hollow Shelter is off the ridge, reached by a precipitous downhill side trail. The shelter is new and sizeable, with a roof large enough to cover a picnic bench in front.
Soon after I reach the shelter, a thunderstorm erupts. Lightning drops like bombs. Bigfoot arrives in the midst of the storm, barely able to see through his wet and foggy glasses. He is covered in mud. “On this shelter trail my shoe strap broke, and I slid down,” he explains, followed by curses about the steepness of the side trail. His running shoes are secured by Velcro straps instead of laces, and I look down to see the offending strap flopped to the side of his shoe.
Well after dark, we awake to the sounds of two hikers singing in the rain as they approach the shelter. The hikers call themselves Riff and Raff. They are the same two hikers I saw earlier, getting a ride at the road through the pasture.
Early into my morning walk, I nearly jump out of my shoes when I am startled by a sound like a baby’s cry amplified through a foghorn, coming from ten feet away. Lucky for me I used the privy before leaving the shelter. The sound is so unnaturally loud I first suspect a hiker is hiding up a tree to play a joke on me. It is a fawn about two feet tall, waking up scared and bleating for its mother.
A fawn bleating after I startle it.
Near the top of the ridge, the trail passes over large slabs of stone. The trail is slightly off the peak, making the walk precarious on about a forty-degree side-hill slope. I look for cracks in the stone for good footholds. Only small, sparse trees gain purchase in the limited soil, so I have open views to the east. The sky is clear. Another ridge, parallel to the one that I am on, is a few miles away, rising about three thousand feet from the plateau that separates the ridges. The side of the ridge facing me is rippled with valleys, sharply contrasted by the stark midmorning sun, but the top of the ridge is surprisingly level. A trail running along its peak could go on for miles with little elevation change. I hope my ridge is like the one I see in the distance.
Fire pink, a delicate red wildflower, adorns tufts of grass along the sides of the trail. A rusty metal wheelbarrow sits abandoned in the middle of the trail, suggesting backpack replacement. The air is filled with a droning hum, similar to the sound of power lines, of the seventeen-year cicadas. The insects are about two inches long, with transparent wings, a thick black body, and beady red eyes.
Ahead, the trail leads directly into a pond. In the middle of the pond, there is a tree whose trunk is deep in water. Higher on the trunk there is a white blaze. I explore to my right and to my left, looking for any signs of how hikers ahead of me have navigated this mess. Often when there is an obstacle such as this, the best path around it is indicated by the trampled ground on the detour most often used by previous hikers. Here, there is no uniform detour; this flooding must be fairly recent. Current is discernible toward each end of the “pond.” There is a stream under all that water, vastly overflowing its banks because of the daily rainstorms. I take some deadfall and try to drop it across the water, but it floats away with the current. After wasting fifteen minutes searching for dry footing, I’ve already soaked my feet with missteps. I do what I should have done to begin with: march straight ahead through the knee-deep water.
I catch up to Gray Squirrel, another thru-hiker that I have seen almost daily over the past week. Gray Squirrel has the look of an old-timer, lean and leathery with bright white hair and beard. I pass him in a zone of blooming white mountain laurel, where he blends perfectly. Gray Squirrel walks at a slow and steady pace, so all of our meetings on the trail have been like this, me passing him as if he is standing still. The first time I met him, I was sure he’d never catch up. But the next day, I found him ahead of me again. He starts early and walks late into the day. He sleeps in a hammock, so almost anywhere on the trail is an acceptable campsite. I’m more inclined to end my day when I come to a shelter or a town, not necessarily at nightfall. We will continue our tortoise and hare routine until Daleville, when I take a few days off. I will not see the tortoise again after that because I will never catch up to him.
Over the past week I’ve also crossed paths with a young woman hiking southbound as I continue north. Incongruously, we crossed paths going in opposite directions three times. I had the same experience with a young man twice in the same week.
On passing the woman for the third time, I stop to ask how it was that we continued to meet like that. She and her husband are thru-hiking the trail together, and they have their car with them. On most days, one will drop the other off at the south end of the trail to hike north. The driver then drives to a point where a road crosses at the north end of the trail, parks the car, and hikes south. They meet at midday on the trail. The northbound hiker will reach the car at the end of the day, and drive back to the south end of the section to retrieve the partner. Having the car offers them many options; they can camp, sleep in the car, or drive to a nearby town. They carry little more than a water bottle and lunch.
Gray Squirrel on the trail through a thicket of mountain laurel.
My favorite cartoon of those that Hungry Hiker has drawn in shelter registers is the one he titled “Evolution of a Hiker.” The first frame show
s a hiker after two miles, taking long strides and saying, “I can do twenty miles today.” The next frame has the hiker settled into a walk after eight miles, saying, “This is nice.” After twelve miles, the hiker is stooped over, saying, “I’m hungry.” Finally after sixteen miles, the hiker is in a sprawling crawl with the caption, “Shelter…where’s the shelter?”
That’s how I pass many a day, including this one. The last major obstacle of the day is the climb up to Dragons Tooth, which begins after I’ve already hiked eighteen miles. I crawl ahead and rest frequently, not caring how late I’m on the trail today. I take my pack off and sprawl out on a boulder, waiting for energy to return to my body. I see Bigfoot hiking by, so I put my pack on and follow him to the top. We both take a short side trail to Dragons Tooth, a spectacular pointed monolith jutting more than thirty feet high. He climbs the rock, but I’m too tired for the diversion. I want to move on, and I meander back toward the trail. From above, Bigfoot tells me about the views, and how the last bit of climbing was tricky. I can sense a little fear in his voice, so I wait for him.
Bigfoot climbs down without incident, and we walk the rocky trail together. The descent from Dragons Tooth is steep, often made by sliding down rocks on hands and butt. This descent is steeper and longer than the climb up Albert Mountain. From the rocky ridge, we see where we are headed: it is a house in the valley with four tall pine trees out front. Moving specks of people are visible and, unbelievably, we can hear some of the hootin’ and hollerin’ going on below. This registers slight concern with me, curious about what kind of a crowd we are about to join.