AWOL on the Appalachian Trail (24 page)

unchtime after my second day of slack-packing, it is time for Juli to return to the airport. Her visit has been a success after all. She is sincerely happy for me to be hiking the trail. Juli is willing to hike with me again in Maine. We'll keep it shorter than twenty-one miles.

Today is August 2, and I have been on the trail for one hundred days. My hike continues over mild ups and downs with few rocks. Even carrying a full pack once again, I cover ground with little effort, mostly daydreaming about the time I just spent with Juli. The trail is damp and spongy. Much of the deadwood is covered with wood ear fungus. Red-spotted newts are abundant. They are smaller than lizards, but slothlike in their movements. I worry about stepping on them. Hmm...no wonder the trail feels spongy.

Late in the afternoon, the trail deposits me onto Depot Street in the town of Dalton, Massachusetts. The AT passes through the middle of the small town on three different streets. I walk through town and look around before returning to Tom Levardi's home on Depot Street. Dalton is less spiffy than the other towns I've recently seen, but by no means run down. It is a town intended for use by residents rather than visits by tourists. Tom is a bachelor who has accommodated hikers for years. His place is not a hostel. He invites hikers to stay if it is convenient for him, and he does not charge for the favor. From the looks of his home, there are probably few times when it is not convenient. The house looks as if it has been commandeered by deadbeat relatives. More than a dozen hikers are here, a few lounging in front of the television, a few setting up tents outside, a couple laying out sleeping bags on the porch, and one is using Tom's computer. I sit outside at a picnic table with Dharma Bum, who is now joined on the trail by his girlfriend Suds. The three of us are cooking trail food for dinner. Just as we finish eating, Tom comes outside, offering pies and ice cream. Lion King stops to say hello. He and Dharma Bum are the only hikers staying here that I know.

At least four of the hikers here are southbound thru-hikers: Fisher King, Squirrel Meat, Snail, and 3-ounce. Snail is not the same Snail that I met in the Smokies. For the past week I have seen a few southbounders daily, and I will continue to see about the same number of them all the way through the next two states. At this time and region it is common for the hikers who started at opposite ends of the trail to meet. Southbounders generally start the trail later, so they have not come as far: Dalton is 1,553 miles from Springer and 619 miles from Katahdin.

That night, most of the hikers staying at Tom's walk down to a pool hall and stay until closing at 1:00 a.m. Lion King uses his camera to his best advantage, getting "interviews" from the local women. The bar is filled with coin-operated pool tables. All the hikers congregate around one table and play games of 8-ball as two-man teams, everyone taking turns buying pitchers of beer. The winning team keeps playing. Lion King and I are lucky enough to win a handful of games against the other hikers. Two nonhikers put coins on the table; this is pool hall protocol for getting a turn to play against the winners of the game. Lion King walks around the table to talk with the newcomers, but I can't hear the conversation in the noisy bar. He returns to tell me, "We'll be playing for shots of Jagermeister."

Pausing to read a shelter register. Strings from the rafters are for hanging food ba. The tuna cans purportedly obstruct mice.

It's muggy-humid today, and the incline out of Dalton is harder on me than it should be. The drinks that had seemed like a good idea last night don't seem so smart in hindsight. The beer is sweating out of me like a shower, and the Jagermeister is playing ping-pong in my head. I traverse nine miles through a pocket of woods between Dalton and Cheshire by lunchtime. The woods are higher and drier than the woods south of Dalton. There are oaks, pines, and some birch trees. It is a fresh, young forest, and the trees are modestly sized, with ample sunlight shining through. The path cuts through stringy, ankle-deep, bright green grass.

Rain begins to fall when I arrive at Cheshire, so I duck into an ice cream store and sit out a heavy but quickly passing shower. The AT crosses town through a cornfield, and then crosses the highway before heading up Mount Greylock. I stop at a gas station at the road and make a lunch of sodas and junk food.

At the start of the ascent, Kane-son is adjusting his pack. I wait and hike along with him. Kane-son was in Dalton, exhibiting his mini-crossbow and telling of his plans to supplement meals by hunting small game. He wears cutoff pants, a western shirt with cutoff sleeves, a cowboy hat, and homemade Indian-style moccasin boots. "I have to restitch them at least once a week," he says. From first appearances Kane-son is eccentric--maybe even dangerous--someone I would have avoided if I had not ended up hiking alongside him. By the end of our jaunt together, I would be happy to have made his acquaintance, and Kane-son would have reason to wish he had not met me.

Kane-son is in his early twenties, hiking for a few weeks before leaving for the Merchant Marine Academy. His inspiration for hiking some of the AT, and his self-reliant style, came from reading about the life of Eustace Conway in
The Last American Man.
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He speaks of reading other books with diverse views on the philosophy of living. Kane-son is willing to express openness
, and he seems self-aware enough to know that he is too young to entrench his opinions. He is gathering ideas, trying to find his place. He has most of his life ahead of him and wants to live it in a unique and meaningful way.

In more practical matters, Kane-son is planning to stay at a shelter tonight but does not carry a guidebook, and so all that he knows is, "It should be around here somewhere."

I do have my guidebook, so I try to help. "The Mark Noepal Lean-to is 4.4 miles from Cheshire. We should be there soon," I say, judging by the time we have spent together hiking. We have been working our way up the most demanding climb since Bear Mountain. Within the next mile, we cross the Jones Nose Trail. This intersection of trails is supposed to occur
north
of the Mark Noepal Lean-to. Somehow we must have passed the lean-to. I read the guidebook twice to be sure, and even let Kane-son read the page for himself. "I think we missed it," I tell him.

Kane-son turns around to backtrack south to the missed shelter. We say our goodbyes, and that would be the last I saw him. Fifteen minutes after our parting, I pass a lean-to. The Mark Noepal Lean-to.

Still long before reaching the summit, I catch up to Ken and Marcia. Fog descends abruptly as the three of us walk together toward the summit. We intend to stay at the Bascom Lodge Hostel. Bascom Lodge is a cozy rustic stone retreat on top of Mount Grock, the highest point in Massachusetts. The hostel is in a detached building that is separated into bays, each with roll-up, overhead garage doors, clearly designed to store things other than people. Ken, Marcia, and I set up to sleep in one of these bays, next to a bay full of kitchen supplies.

I wander back to the lobby of the lodge, where a few hikers are mixing with the drive-in guests. There is a road to the top of the mountain. The lodge is larger than it appears from the front, since a lower floor is buried in the mountain. The land slopes away on the backside, exposing the underground portion of the building. From the balcony at the rear of the lobby, I look down on the mountain falling away downhill. Only the peaks of the evergreens rise above the milky fog, as if they have been submerged in a cauldron of dry ice. It is too chilly to linger. It is only August 3, but it seems as though my summer has come to a close as abruptly as the fog arrived. There would be more hot times on the trail, but they would be ephemeral. From here on, keeping warm would be more of an issue than keeping cool.

I take my time getting on the trail this morning, knowing that there is a pizza buffet in town six miles down from Mount Greylock and trying to schedule my day accordingly. But the godless people of North Adams have allowed their Pizza Hut to go out of business. I waste more time, making about a mile-and-a-half round trip to eat a consolation lunch at another restaurant and to make phone calls. I get back on the trail at 2:00 p.m., still hoping to do fourteen miles.

On the ground there is a grayish mass the shape of a deflated football. As I pass, a sting on the back of my calf helps me to realize that what I am looking at is a fallen wasp nest. I do a wasp-bite dance ten yards up the trail, where I see a note with a warning: "Watch out for wasps!"

The trail ascends about two thousand feet in four miles from North Adams up to the Vermont border. I'm worn out by the climb, soaked in sweat, probably by rushing up the mountain too fast. I sit and stare at the Massachusetts/Vermont sign, trying to recall why I thought I needed to walk fourteen miles after leaving North Adams. There is also a sign for the Long Trail. The Appalachian Trail and the Long Trail are one and the same for the next 105 miles, and then the trails diverge. The AT turns east to New Hampshire, and the Long Trail continues north through Vermont to the Canadian border.
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By the time I reach the Seth Warner Shelter, I hear the distant rumble
of thunder. I am far short of my fourteen-mile goal, but I decide to end my day of hiking. One hiker is already in the shelter, laying out his sleeping bag. Four others sit cooking dinner at the table directly in front of the shelter. The four of them are all relatively clean and shaven, probably just out for the weekend. "Are you staying in the shelter?" I ask the group of cooking hikers.

"No, we're setting up a tent over there," one of them replies, pointing to a clearing twenty yards away.

Under the conditions--imminent rain--I'm elated to have shelter space. More hikers arrive and fill the small shelter. Just after the day hikers finish their dinner and set up their tent, rain comes down in a deluge. Those of us in the shelter edge away from the leaks dripping from the roof and lie on our bags staring out at the rainfall. Rain can be as mesmerizing as a campfire. It splatters off the table, frees pebbles from the earth, showers the trees, and drums on the roof. Puddles form, and muddy little streams snake donhill.

One of the day hikers sprints up to the shelter and looks inside to assess the free space; there is none. Water pours off the bill of his ball cap. He returns to help his companions, who are trying to raise their collapsed tent. We hear them shouting at each other over the rain, and yet there is laughter mixed with the shouts: "Whose dumb-ass idea was this!"

My clothes are not a drop drier than when I hung them up last night. It is still raining in the morning, and light, misty rain comes like breezes during the day. Everything is wet. I am wet from contact with the underbrush and from sweating in the humid air. The first eight miles of my hike are fairly level, bumping only slightly up and down along the ridge. The spongy wet soil tugs at my shoes.

Privies are much more common here than they are in the south. There is one at every shelter, and they are more uniform. Most have the time-honored outhouse design with four wooden walls, a slant of a roof, and a crescent moon cut into the door. Many have chicken wire wrapped around the bottom three feet of the walls to keep porcupines from eating the wood. The privy at Congdon Shelter is one of these. Poems and jokes are written on the interior walls. Among them is this truism: "Spam is even harder and heavier to carry in your belly than in your pack."

The descent to Vermont Route 9 is a hazardous, steep, and wet field of rocks. There is a concession trailer parked at the trailhead. I plop down in a folding chair and eat three hamburgers. The woman who owns and operates the lunch wagon sits with me and tells me how the rules of operation are ambiguous. Sometimes she is here; sometimes the police come and run her off. I am not much for conversation, sitting idle, enervated by the rain, my mud-soaked shoes, the general filth of my person and all my gear. It is not often that I am so bothered by being "dirty" on this trip. Most of the time I wash myself and my clothes when I have the opportunity, not because I am compelled by discomfort. Now I decide to create the opportunity to get clean. The road where I sit leads into the town of Bennington. I stick out my thumb, and in moments a pickup truck pulls over.