by David Miller
When I distance myself, the bear follows her cub. I review the pictures to see what I’ve captured. The last two pictures show nothing but tree limbs and patches of blue, as I had my camera skewed skyward during my frantic retreat. These two bears bring the total count to sixteen. I’m content to have seen a good number of bears, but I am no longer eager to see more.
I’ve definitely seen enough rocks. This day is as rocky as any day in Pennsylvania. About nine miles into the day, I hit the top of a ridge capped with a jumble of stones. “NJ/NY” is painted on a boulder, marking the border. Continuing along the ridge, there are many bulging slabs of stone, some as long as seventy-five yards, like concrete whales surfacing in a sea of shrubbery. I navigate this boulder-strewn ridge for five tiresome miles. Many times I need to pull myself up or lower myself down using my hands. At one juncture, trail builders have made a wooden ladder to manage a sheer rock face. I take a break and lie exhausted on one of the whale backs. I could sleep here, but I open my eyes when I hear Tunnel Vision and his brother Bull pass by. “We were ready to draw white chalk lines around your body.”
Near the intersection of the trail with NY 17A, I spot a new ice cream stand. This more than compensates for my disappointing progress. While I am gulping down a milkshake, a customer offers me a ride to the town of Greenwood Lake. It is a tiny town clustered along the shoreline of the lake that does not draw in many thru-hikers. I stay at an old eight-room motel in a musty room with no phone. But it is cheap, and I am happy to be inside when an early evening thunderstorm rolls through, dense with lightning.
Hitching a ride back to the trail is tougher than most hitches. I stake out a spot where it will be easy for drivers to pull off the road. A steady stream of morning traffic passes without slowing, and then a police car pulls past my withdrawn thumb and coasts to a stop thirty yards beyond. Hitching is illegal in New York, so maybe this is his way of warning me to move on. Or maybe he watches for the reappearance of my offending thumb.
I go knock on his window and ask with affected naiveté, “Is hitching allowed here?” He tells me that hitching is illegal, but if I’m standing behind his car, he wouldn’t be able to see anything. It’s his abstruse way of giving me the go-ahead. Good intentions aside, my hitching is still spoiled because no driver is going to pull over next to the police car. I head down the road, dreading the possibility of a two-mile road walk just to get back to the trail. As soon as I am out of sight of the police car, I start thumbing each car that passes. Only a few pass before I have a ride.
With all I’ve read about the trail, I am surprised by the dearth of accounts about the difficulty of this section. The hills are low, but the trail goes steeply up and down, and there is a rock scramble at the top of many hills. This day is harder than the Roller Coaster in Virginia. Taken together, the last two days have been harder than anything since Tennessee.
New York City is sometimes visible from a few of these summits, but I walk this stretch of southern New York in perpetually overcast skies and intermittent light rain. A United States flag is painted on a slab of rock at one of these overlooks. “Remember 9/11” and a number of similar messages have been scrawled near the flag. The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan took place during the time I was contemplating my hike. The second war in Iraq began less than a month before I quit my job. From a national perspective, this was the most tumultuous era of my lifetime, and I was about to go on leave from the world. These events trivialized my selfish plans and added to my reservations about being away from my family, my job, and the world. There is no objective importance in walking the range of mountains in the Eastern United States. As my departure date neared, my unease faded. The news won’t change because I’m not watching it. I had dismissed those thoughts, and they did not reenter my mind until seeing this memorial. I am doing the right thing.
The trail enters Harriman State Park, and I have a short reprieve from the rocky ups and downs in southern New York. The terrain in the park is grassy and open. Snakes like it here. I pause while a black snake slithers across the trail ahead of me. Snakes have been abundant over the past few weeks, so they no longer take me by surprise. I’ve seen a handful of them already today and hardly give them a second thought. I take note of this one because it is exceptionally large, at least six feet long and as thick as my wrist.
Before my day is done, there are more clusters of boulders. The trail passes though a crevasse in a huge slab of bedrock. The crevasse is chest-deep and barely wide enough for a person. The formation is known as the “lemon squeezer.” My pack scrapes both sides as I squeeze through. A little later, at Fingerboard Shelter, Tunnel Vision tells me he had to carry his pack over his head. Bull and Stretch are also at the shelter, along with a section-hiking father with two young kids.
The father and kids have claimed one end of the Fingerboard Shelter, probably a bit worried about our shabby appearance. Stretch, Tunnel Vision, and Bull are all young men, but trail wear makes them all look older, especially Tunnel Vision with his scars. I am happy that the three of them are still young enough to act like kids. They imitate their favorite animated shows and giggle at their own humor. They are puerile in the best sense of the word, and they make me think better of the world. Tunnel Vision looks up at a wet sock hanging from a rafter overhead and asks, “Is that going to drip on my head all night?”
“Not if you sleep with your mouth open.”
Later he performs a mock distress call: “I’m lost.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m on a mountain surrounded by things that are tall and green…yes, they appear to be trees. I am directly under the sun right…about…hold on…right about…now!”
This shelter is made of stone and planted on a huge slab of smooth rock, giving it a wonderful, earthy feel. Thunderstorms rage much of the night, making for a restless night of sleep. Bats fly in and out of the shelter between bursts of the storm.
Everything is wet the next morning. My shoes get soaked from grass and undergrowth that are wet from last night’s rain. More rock scrambles slow me down. The day is hot and humid, and the trail is demanding. I’m sweating more than I have anywhere on this hike. My clothes look like they would if I had jumped into a swimming pool. I reach the Palisades Parkway and see a road sign, unbelievably stating it is only thirty-four miles by highway to New York City. Four lanes of traffic zoom by at seventy miles per hour. I question my ability to reconcile this speed with my slow-moving world, and I wait for a spacious gap between vehicles before crossing.
Six miles later I reach Bear Mountain, New York. Bear Mountain is the name given to the city, a park, an inn, and a bridge. The park has vast mown lawns and a pond. Dozens of people are out picnicking, strolling the path around the pond, and feeding ducks. The Bear Mountain Inn is a sprawling rustic resort with a fancy restaurant, where the waiters wear white shirts and vests. My sleeveless shirt and shorts are wet rags, but unabashedly I plop down in a booth to eat lunch and dry out in the air-conditioned room. Beyond the inn, the trail passes through the Trailside Museum and Wildlife Center, along the same asphalt path where parents show their children a small assortment of zoo animals. A boy climbing on the Walt Whitman statue asks me, “Why do you have those ski poles?”
Then the AT crosses the Hudson River on the catwalk of the Bear Mountain Bridge, a four-lane suspension bridge. This is the lowest point on the Appalachian Trail: 124 feet above sea level. I carry my pack east over the bridge. Directly below, a tug pushes a barge north up the Hudson.
Stretch, Tunnel Vision, and Bull had told me of their plan to stop here and take a day off to meet friends in New York, so this is the last I will see of them on the trail. Crossroads left the trail in New York to return to work before losing his job. Tipperary is behind; Crash and Patience are hopelessly ahead. I am sobered by my separation from thru-hikers I was most connected with in the southern part of my hike. Where are Ken and Marcia?
In the restaurant my
clothes had dried from soaked to merely damp. Back in the woods, they are quickly drenched once again. A southbound hiker greets me. He is wearing a full sweat suit, hood plastered to his head by a baseball cap, and gloves. He tells me he is out just for the day. A couple of years ago he suffered through Lyme disease, so he hikes in ninety-degree weather wearing stifling attire to ward off ticks.
Bear Mountain Bridge over the Hudson River in New York.
My next stop is the Graymoor Spiritual Life Center. The brothers who live at Graymoor are known for their hospitality towards thru-hikers. They invite hikers to a free meal, but I have arrived after dinner is finished. Odwalla, the hiker I met in Pennsylvania, is here. He thinks that the southern section of New York has been the hardest section of the hike. It is reassuring to have his concurrence about the trail’s difficulty. I’m not alone in my struggles. We lay our sleeping bags out on top of picnic tables under a covered pavilion. Wind-blown rain commences at nightfall. If I was not elevated, I’d be getting wet. Mosquito sorties persist all night long. My body is filmy and sticky from a few sweaty days, and my clothes are damp. Sleeping in the wet clothes no longer dries them because of the humidity. I cannot sleep outside of my bag because of the mosquitoes. I dab smelly repellant on my forehead, neck, and arms because they will bite any piece of exposed flesh.
I wake up with a plan to beeline twelve miles to Canopus Lake Camp to get a shower. That would make me feel better, even though it would be a few more days before I could wash these stinking clothes. I get to the road where the campground is and stick out my thumb to hitch a mile down the road. The first car to pass is a police car. He continues past, ignoring my breach of the law. Two cars later, Margaret DeVries, a youthful sixty-eight-year-old woman, stops to give me a ride. “I just read about thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, and I thought I might meet a hiker,” she says. When I tell her of my plan to clean up at the campground, she offers to take me to her house instead, where I can shower, eat, and do laundry.
Margaret is an interesting lady; she fled Communist Hungary in 1956. She has flown a hang glider and still takes solo kayak trips on the Hudson River (a boat is strapped to the roof of the car in which we are riding). She spends a month each year at a youth hostel in South Beach. Margaret is quick to express her appreciation for life in the United States and her dislike for Communist rule. She tells of returning to Hungary after becoming a U.S. citizen to visit her ailing father. Since the Communists believed that they educated her and she had no right to leave and use her talents elsewhere, she was apprehensive about being detained.
Politicians will always offer to handle education, health care, retirement, and so forth, as if they come at no cost. But there are caveats. If the government is the provider of “free” education, then the government will also decide what is taught and, potentially, how it is used. The fewer responsibilities we have, the less free we are. Communism and democracy differ in this only by a matter of degree. We can vote away freedom as easily as it can be taken away.
“Hike your own hike” is a trail mantra. Thru-hiking seems to work out best when each hiker is attuned to his own interests. Perhaps counterintuitively, this attitude somehow fosters cooperation and generosity. This trail full of hike-your-own-hikers is as nice as any group with whom I’ve ever been associated.
Margaret returns me to the trail at 6:15 p.m. I am uplifted once again by trail magic received at a most opportune moment. Twilight is a wonderful time to be on the trail in this hot season. It is a time when there is a truce between nature and man. The afternoon heat has relented, storms have passed, the wind has died down, and activity is nil. I walk seven buoyant miles to the RPH Shelter, finishing in the dark under the guidance of my headlamp.
North of the RPH Shelter, the trail is much less difficult than it had been in the southern part of the state. There is less rock on the footpath and more packed dirt and grass. The trail rolls over small hills and cuts through pastureland.
A small stream, easy enough to step over, lies across the trail. The land hardly has enough slope to move the water. It is stagnant like a tiny canal, with thick green algae on the bottom. I only have a few sips of water left but skip this opportunity to refill, hoping against reason that I’ll find better water later. Most of the streams these past few days have been similarly unappealing. Getting water in Pennsylvania was a hardship because of the scarcity of streams. In New York there have been streams, but they are the least appealing water sources on the trail.
I descend from the hills to a railroad crossing. The rails are elevated by fill, and a drainage ditch runs parallel to the hump of the fill. A foot of water is in the ditch; it is runoff water with an oily rainbow sheen. A fragment of a Styrofoam cup floats on the water. This sludge is much less appealing than the stream I passed, but now I’ve traveled miles without water and have no choice. I reach the Wiley Shelter at dark after a long and hot twenty-five-mile day. I have seen few hikers on the trail, and there are no other hikers here tonight. The water source for the shelter is a hand pump.
White blazes receding into Connecticut.
Today is a Saturday. I plan to walk only thirteen miles to reach the town of Kent, Connecticut, but I’d like to finish the miles by noon so I can pick up mail. Halfway to Kent, the trail crosses from New York to Connecticut. The trail in Connecticut begins auspiciously with an elegant hemlock forest. I reach the Kent Post Office just minutes before it closes. The town is very nice and manicured, with many shops and restaurants that cater to well-heeled tourists. There are no hotels or hostels, so the only lodging options are expensive bed and breakfast establishments. I make my way to the laundromat so I can get my clothes clean while I ponder my options. Doing laundry is inefficient for a single hiker. Many times I’ve washed a load of clothes containing only a lightweight shirt, shorts, and socks. Now that I’m done with muggy New Jersey and New York, I want to throw everything washable in the machine to exorcise the dirt and sweat and bug spray. The only item I keep out is my rain jacket, which I wear like a skirt, causing me to catch curious glances.
There is a small hotel in Cornwall Bridge about eight miles north of Kent that is less expensive than any place in Kent. I hitch a ride and make arrangements with the motel owner to stay two nights. Tomorrow he will drive me back to the trailhead near Kent, and I will be able to walk the trail from where I left off, back up to Cornwall Bridge. I can leave most of my gear in the room and have an easy walk tomorrow. I need it. Here is my journal entry for the night:
If I had to do it again I wouldn’t. As of today that’s how I feel about this AT hike. I don’t say that because I’m having a bad day. I’m not going to quit, and I’m not disappointed that I am here. Doing this hike is too much hard work, too much pain, too much time away from my family, too many bugs, too much hot weather, too much cold weather, and too much rain.
11
Kent to West Hartford
My day of hiking without a pack from Kent to Cornwall Bridge is a transitional day. It is more like a day off than another day hiking, although I do cover eleven more miles of the Appalachian Trail. I walk an easy pace and pause whenever I have the urge to write, to take photos, or simply to contemplate my thoughts about this trip. The trail is a conduit, humming with memories from the miles behind me and electric with the possibilities still ahead. Despite my recent woes, I am certain that I will complete this hike. Nothing short of a debilitating injury or a dire situation at home would cause me to quit before reaching Katahdin.
My tendency is to stretch my days. Too often I’ll pass up a side trail to a waterfall or overlook. I set an arbitrary goal to reach the next milestone in x number of days, racing to what is ahead at the expense of the present. I do not have an open timeline, but my restlessness is sure to move me along at a good clip. Completing the trail is a foregone conclusion, so I should feel free to enjoy myself. What I need to work on is a better balance of leisure time.
A huge slab of rock juts up from the ground, rising thirty feet at an a
ngle of sixty degrees. Improbably, trees grow clinging to the surface of the rock, roots clinging to fissures in the surface. A flock of Canada geese drift downstream on the Housatonic River. I stop to write at a nondescript location, choosing to sit on a knee-high boulder under a canopy of lime green leaves.
It is easiest to characterize the AT in terms of its most challenging and spectacular features. Most people have experienced the difficulty of steep uphill climbs, rocky terrain, and pestering bugs. Likewise, spectacular overlooks and scenic waterfalls have universal appeal. But I have come to recognize that most of what is memorable and pleasing about my time on the trail is ordinary moments in the outdoors. Simply sitting unhurried in the shade of leaves is an irreplaceable moment. It is a joy in itself to amble through the woods for hours, even when views are limited to the dense trees surrounding me. It is fulfilling to be saturated with the sights, sounds, and smells of the outdoors. My fond recollections of my hike are full of unremarkable moments, like the smell of a dewy morning, the crunch of leaves underfoot, the blaze of a campfire, the soothing trickle of a stream, or rays of sun through a maze of trees.
Humans are creatures with a longer history of living in the outdoors than of living within the confines of concrete and artificial light. We have an atavistic sense of well-being when immersed in the natural world.
I take a break at Stewart Hollow Brook Lean-to and meet Lion King. He is a big bear of a man who is carrying a camera and filming a documentary on thru-hiking the AT.29 He is groggy, struggling with insomnia and an ailing knee. “Why can’t they make more trail like this?” he asks, referring to the five miles of beautiful, nearly level trail paralleling the Housatonic River.