The Lost Daughter: A Memoir

by Mary Williams

  When I told him my plan to hike alone through the woods for half a year, he took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and said, “Yer purty. You should carry a gun.” He reached into his pocket to retrieve his business card and pressed it firmly into my palm. “If ya get out dair and find ya need help, just call me. I’ll come gitchu. Ya hear?”

  I was aware of female hikers being murdered on the trail, and friends and loved ones advised me against hiking alone. I wondered again if I was foolishly putting myself in harm’s way. After all, I was a black woman who had chosen to go on a solo hike that would take me through very small, predominately white Southern towns and long, isolated stretches of forest. Maybe there was a damned good reason you rarely saw African Americans hiking the trail. That evening, I sat alone in my room and began to seriously doubt my sanity. But the last thing I wanted to do was go back home with my tail between my legs before I even set foot on the trail. I had difficulty falling asleep that night, and when I did it was fitful.

  Luckily, by the time my alarm clock went off, my courage had returned and I quickly got myself ready for one of the biggest adventures of my life. On the morning of April 7, 2007, I stood at the AT trailhead on Springer Mountain. I hoisted my sixty-pound pack (I wasn’t quite able to give up my books, two canisters of mace, a blank journal as thick as Atlas Shrugged, and other assorted unnecessaries) onto my back and walked down the trail like I owned it.

  The day was clear and cold. I was decked out in three layers of clothing—everything I had. The forest loomed above me, utterly silent, the branches naked. I easily found the first of the thousands of white “blazes”—white rectangles painted onto a tree—that mark the trail, and set off.

  I kept to myself the first few days, except for an overnight stay at the Walasi-Yi Center at Neels Gap, Georgia, located at mile 32. The Walasi-Yi Center is impossible to avoid; in fact, the trail goes through the building. The center is an outdoor store and hostel that employs experienced backpackers to advise hikers on how to reduce their pack weights. I spent most of my two-hour consultation defending what I brought. In the end I begrudgingly agreed to give up one pair of hiking sandals, one of three books, and a bottle of hair conditioner. I packed these items into a FedEx box and shipped them home.

  Some lightweight backpackers manage to get their pack weights down to twelve pounds. Impressive, but there is a cost. It’s not unusual to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of a lightweight backpacker slapping out jumping jacks for warmth, all because he didn’t want to carry a heavier sleeping bag. Fuck that. Long-distance hiking isn’t just a test of physical endurance. It’s a mental game as well. Books, an extra set of clothes and abundant toiletries make me happy. And if you’re not happy, you’re not likely to finish.

  I spent the evening in the Walasi-Yi hiker hostel, sharing a dark, stinky bunk room with about ten guys. The following morning, my fifth day on the trail, I was out the door at six A.M. The temperature remained chilly, and the air was damp. I spent mornings in a shroud of mist thick enough to drench my clothes and pack. I kept warm by marching.

  Fourteen miles later, preparing to eat dinner, I realized that I’d inadvertently packed my camp stove in the FedEx box I’d sent home. This sounds as though it would be hard to do, but it isn’t. Camp stoves are tiny enough to fit into the palm of your hand. Also, I’d stored it in one of the many little nylon sacks into which I’d organized all my various gear (it’s easy to mistake one sack for another). I settled for a peanut-butter bagel. Then, like all good backpackers, I hung my food bag safely out of reach in a nearby tree. I lay in my sleeping bag reading, as rain pattered on the tent. Outside, I heard branches rustling in the tree where I’d hung my food bag. I yelled through my tent to frighten the animal intruder away. It worked . . . for about ten minutes. I yelled again, but was too scared and tired and cold to leave the safety of my tent.

  When dawn broke I crawled out of my tent and into the rain. I was anxious to inspect what was left of my food bag. The animal had kindly left me a bagel, a bag of couscous I’d have a hard time eating given my lack of a camp stove, and some partially gnawed dried apricots.

  I had to make this food last two days, roughly twenty-four miles, until my next resupply. I ate half of my soggy bagel and drank a pint of spring water.

  I headed out at 7:30. At noon I nibbled from the remaining half of my bagel. Hours passed without seeing another hiker. I had envisioned my hike as not only a physical challenge but also a spiritual quest. I wanted to experience a quiet mind, but by noon on the sixth day I found myself wondering how Paris Hilton’s latest romance was holding up. It was humbling to plumb the hidden recesses of my mind and find not a wellspring of wisdom, but a wasteland of pop culture and a Pandora’s box of annoying songs. I hadn’t realized I knew all the words to Madonna’s “Lucky Star.” (I love Madonna, but I’ve just never liked that song.)

  It was nearly dark when I entered the clearing around Low Gap shelter, one of hundreds of shelters along the AT. The shelters are three-sided lean-tos on platforms. They generally sleep about six people. The Low Gap lean-to already held six hikers: all male, all white, all smelling like ass. To my relief, they squeezed together to make room for me. As I settled in, we introduced ourselves using our trail names.

  The tradition of taking a trail name goes back to the early 1970s, and nearly all hikers use one. If you don’t name yourself, someone will name you. I met a guy named Cum Shot (after a crowd gathered to watch him lance an infected boil with explosive results) and a cute sixteen-year-old girl who was christened Trail Bait.

  Wolverine, a friendly thirty-something guy with the belly of a woman six months pregnant, loaned me his camp stove so I could cook my couscous dinner. My new friends couldn’t understand how I’d lost something as vital as a camp stove. I tried to save face by telling them that it was totally out of character. After all, I told them, I’m a National Outdoor Leadership School graduate. They were unimpressed. I ate my couscous in silence.

  After dinner I crawled into my sleeping bag fully dressed to ward off the cold. Three of my other shelter mates were prep-school graduates with the collective trail name of The Hobbits. I told them a friend from home had given me the trail name Rosie, in honor of Rosie Cotton, the only prominent female hobbit in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. They promised to check my progress in the shelter logs. Each shelter has a log: a spiral notebook in which hikers write poems, draw pictures or pass messages. We turned in early because Wolverine and his hiking partner, Hong Kong Phooey, were planning a forty-mile hike in the morning. I lay in the cramped, dark shelter listening to the rain dance on the tin roof. I enjoyed the body heat radiating from my fellow hikers. In the darkness I grinned. I finally felt like I belonged; also, for the first time I was absolutely sure I would complete this hike.

  On April 14, as I crossed the North Carolina border, I noticed the first clear evidence that spring was on its way: budding flowers. Also changing was the terrain. Overnight, Georgia’s rolling hills had transformed into steep rises and knee-biting descents.

  I almost cried (twice) while ascending the North Carolina Grind, a steep, four-mile stretch of trail. My double-digit-mile days were starting to take their toll on my body. I had hyperextended my knee, but that pain was nothing compared to the screaming in my feet caused by an excruciating case of plantar fasciitis, an inflammation of the tissue that connects the heel to the toes.

  The pain was particularly intense in the mornings and at the end of the day. Endorphins pumped through my system when I hiked, but once I unshouldered my pack, my body shut off the drugs. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Experienced hikers assured me the pain was temporary: it should only last for the first three to four months. In my case, I endured this excruciating condition most of my hike and for several months after my hike ended.

  The weather had improved from cold drizzle to cold sunshine when I arrived, on April 19, at the Nantahala Outdoor Center (NOC). Located at mile 134.1, at the bottom of a slick ro
ck gorge, this compound of buildings (including restaurants, an outfitter, a general store, hotels and hostels) is a much-anticipated stop for hikers.

  I was a physical and emotional wreck when I checked in. I’d slept poorly the night before and was weary from the long, bone-jarring hike down from Cold Spring shelter. I assured the receptionist that I didn’t want kayak lessons. Word was that the climb down to the NOC was nothing compared to the steep climb out. I wanted to be well rested.

  I peeled off my filthy gear. I washed all my clothes in the washing machine while I showered. A hot shower after ten days on the trail is, and I do not exaggerate, better than sex.

  On my way back to the bunkhouse, a young woman intercepted me to ask if I was hiking the trail. She walked without a limp, no infected bug bites marred her legs, and she looked well fed. Telltale signs she wasn’t a through-hiker. I told her that I was. Through-hikers are rock stars on the trail. Locals buy us meals, offer us rides and even open their homes to us.

  She was a social worker supervising a group of twenty foster children, all girls, staying at the NOC. She asked me to talk to them about through-hiking.

  I met the girls in a common room with big bay windows that revealed a forested hillside. The girls were tall, short, chunky, thin, black, white, Asian and Hispanic. Each was fiercely beautiful in the way of young girls made to witness the harsher side of life at an early age.

  I told them that I, too, was raised in a dysfunctional home. When I was their age, I was frightened of everything. I couldn’t sleep in a room alone if I didn’t wedge a chair under the doorknob. But I was lucky. I was adopted by people who loved me. I got better and now I was strong enough to go on a six-month hike all by myself.

  I asked how many of them would like to hike the trail one day. They all raised their hands. “Well, since you are all gonna hike the trail, you have to pick a trail name for yourself. It’s best to pick something that will let people know what kind of person you are.” They took turns telling me their trail names: Panther, Waterfall, Moon Dancer, Queenie, Buttercup. Each name provided a clue to the secret selves these girls nurtured. Despite their tough-luck lives, they still had the dreams and ambitions of girls raised under more innocent circumstances. If they were fortunate, they’d be adopted by loving people who could help them realize these dreams.

  Those first thousand miles I endured alone, I suffered from insomnia, excruciating hip pain, several twisted ankles and plantar fasciitis. I scared off a black bear in Shenandoah National Park. I taught myself to safely read and hike at the same time. (The trick is to read only on uphills.) I volunteered on trail maintenance crews and I pushed myself to hike thirty miles in one day.

  I was more than halfway through the AT before I allowed myself to accept hiking partners. I wanted first to prove to myself that I could survive on my own. I met Walker and Mellow a few days after I left Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the AT’s unofficial halfway point. We kept passing each other on the trail, mostly because Walker was faster but had to stop every twenty minutes to pee. I told him that he should get his prostate checked. He said, “Why don’t you check it for me?” They soon invited me to join them.

  Walker was a gangly, balding white guy from Austin, Texas, whose wife had begrudgingly allowed him to attempt his second through-hike. Mellow was an uptight Korean guy from Chicago. They were both in their late thirties. They fought often and had a pretty intense love/hate hiking partnership. Walker hoped my estrogen might cool their hostilities.

  We ended up hiking Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and part of Vermont together. I thought of them as my boys. They were fun to hike with, but I was hiking more on their terms than my own. Before I met them, I was a White Blazer, trail lingo for hikers who rigidly follow the trail and refrain from taking short cuts or skipping sections. While I hiked with the boys (inveterate Yellow Blazers, the opposite of a White Blazer), we skipped about a hundred miles of the trail.

  In Vermont I left them, and briefly left the trail, to attend Troy’s wedding in New York City. It was an intense shock to my system, after 134 days on the trail, to find myself battling my way through throngs of people on the streets of New York.

  At the wedding, I was surprised to learn how much my time on the trail had changed me. I felt like a fish out of water as I watched the celebrity guests looking gorgeous in their designer gowns. Though I was squeaky clean and well dressed, I couldn’t shake my laidback, grungy hiker state of mind. I loved being with my family but I also missed the trail.

  After the wedding, I decided to pick up the trail on Mount Katahdin, in Maine (5,267 feet), and hike back toward Vermont. This is called flip-flopping, and is a great alternative when you find yourself hiking late in the season. I wanted to relax and enjoy my last weeks on the trail. I didn’t want the pressure of hiking long days to reach Mount Katahdin before mid-October, when bad weather closes in.

  But Katahdin, I learned, is tricky to climb no matter the season. The 5.2-mile climb to the summit began uneventfully enough. The first three miles meandered through a dense spruce forest. Birds sang, the sun shone. I passed streams and rivers, and even a cascading waterfall. Then the ground transformed to bare granite, with brutal gains in elevation. Huge boulders blocked the trail. Soon I realized the boulders were the trail. I was nearly rock climbing. The temperature began to drop and the wind picked up. I hadn’t believed the ranger when he told me that the summit had its own weather.

  At the crowded peak, I took my photo with the sign that marks the northern terminus of the AT. I was cold, tired and pissed off. I wasn’t alone. I overheard several novice hikers asking if there was some other way to get down besides on foot.

  At the bottom, I found a shelter and slept like the dead. I woke up refreshed and ready to take on Maine’s hundred-mile wilderness, the most isolated section of the trail.

  Most hikers get through this section in ten days or fewer, but I spent two weeks there. I saw moose every day and slept near glassy ponds. I nearly ran out of food twice, but I met northbound hikers who were happy to feed me.

  It was during this time that I realized, after months of hiking, I’d only seen one other black person on the trail. A bearded, smelly fellow who I believed was a myth until I ran into him eating alone in a McDonald’s during a quick foray into town. We chatted about how unfortunate it was that more people of color didn’t get out to enjoy the great outdoors. After I had finished the trail and was back home, I found myself donating money to organizations whose missions included getting more people of color and women involved in wilderness activities.

  Two weeks was the longest I had gone without access to modern comforts and world news. When I emerged from the wilderness in Monson, Maine, I checked into Shaw’s hiker hostel, cleaned up, ate and planted myself among my fellow hikers on the couch. They were watching the film 300. I had seen it, so I reached for a newspaper. A headline struck me dumb. There was a story about a young African-American woman named Megan Williams. Six people in West Virginia had kidnapped Megan, raped her and tortured her. They held her captive for a month. Finally, the police mounted a rescue. The details were shocking. In addition to sexually assaulting her, the kidnappers forced her to eat dog feces, to drink from a toilet and stabbed her multiple times. She was lucky to be alive.

  In the following weeks I could not forget Megan Williams. I wondered what would make people want to treat another human so cruelly. I also wondered if I were being sent some kind of a message—an African-American woman with the same last name as mine had met the fate I’d cavalierly decided couldn’t befall me. Whenever I got off-trail to resupply, I collected newspapers and searched for coverage of the story. I realized there was another reason Megan’s story affected me so deeply. Megan reminded me of Deborah.

  I could see my sister’s beautiful caramel-colored skin, white teeth and large brown eyes, the spitting image of our handsome father. She was physically perfect except for a mass of melted skin that spread from bel
ow her right buttock to just above the crook of her knee. She got the burn before I was born, when her nightgown caught fire on a space heater. She was never ashamed of her scars, and wore shorts and bathing suits every summer. As a child, she loved to play the trombone. She was a member of the first graduating class of the Black Panther elementary school. When asked by a reporter on graduation day what she had learned, she proudly said, “One of the most important things I have learned . . . is what freedom means.”

  Deborah had been the mother of three children. She spent years as a prostitute and developed an addiction to crack. Through it all, she carried a yellowing, tattered copy of that newspaper article with her quote about freedom. Through years of homelessness, it stayed carefully wrapped in plastic.

  I went online to research the exact circumstances of my sister’s death. I found several newspaper articles. One night she was doing drugs in the hallway of an apartment building. One of the tenants, a nineteen-year-old woman named Stacey Lee, got angry and demanded she leave. When Deborah refused, they fought. Stacey drove Deborah out into the street and pursued her, wielding a kitchen knife. Fifteen bystanders on a nearby corner saw Deborah running toward them. They knocked her to the ground, taunted her, stomped on her, kicked her and hit her in the head with a wine bottle. She lay curled in a fetal position over the grate of a storm drain. Stacey Lee attacked Deborah again while the bystanders cheered her on. To shouts of “Kill her! Kill her!” Lee stabbed my sister three times in the chest, ending her life.

  A street-hardened homicide detective said that he had never, in his long career, witnessed such a callous and cold-hearted slaying.

  Deborah and Megan weighed heavily on my thoughts during the final weeks of my hike. I carried them through the White Mountains and to the peak of Mount Washington. I was more exhausted than I had ever been. I also had a chance to rethink why I’d come out here in the first place.