A Walk in the Woods (18 page)

And then something happens to make you realize how much—how immeasurably much—you want to revisit the real world. On our sixth night, after a long day in uncharacteristically dense woods, we emerged towards evening at a small grassy clearing on a high bluff with a long, sensational, unobstructed view to the north and west. The sun was just falling behind the distant blue-gray Allegheny ridge, and the country between—a plain of broad, orderly farms, each with a clump of trees and a farmhouse—was just at that point where it was beginning to drain of color. But the feature that made us gawk was a town—a real town, the first we had seen in a week—that stood perhaps six or seven miles to the north. From where we stood we could just make out what were clearly the large, brightly lit and colored signs of roadside restaurants and big motels. I don’t think I have ever seen anything that looked half so beautiful, a quarter so tantalizing. I would almost swear to you I could smell the aroma of grilling steaks wafting up to us on the evening air. We stared at it for ages, as if it were something we had read about in books but had never expected to see.

“Waynesboro,” I said to Katz at last.

He nodded solemnly. “How far?”

I pulled out my map and had a look. “About eight miles by trail.”

He nodded solemnly again. “Good,” he said. It was, I realized,
the longest conversation we had had in two or three days, but there was no need to say anything more. We had been a week on the trail and were going to town the next day. That was self-evident. We would hike eight miles, get a room, have a shower, phone home, do laundry, eat dinner, buy groceries, watch TV, sleep in a bed, eat breakfast, return to the trail. All this was known and obvious. Everything we did was known and obvious. It was wonderful really.

So we pitched our tents and fixed noodles with the last of our water, then sat side by side on a log, eating in silence, facing Waynesboro. A full moon rose in the pale evening sky and glowed with a rich white inner light that brought to mind, but perfectly, the creamy inside of an Oreo cookie. (Eventually on the trail everything reminds you of food.) After a long period of silence, I turned to Katz and asked him abruptly, in a tone that was hopeful rather than accusatory, “Do you know how to make
anything
besides noodles?” I had been thinking, I guess, about resupplying the next day.

He thought about this for a good while. “French toast,” he said at last, and grew silent for a long period before inclining his head towards me very slightly and saying: “You?”

“No,” I said at length. “Nothing.”

Katz considered the implications of this, looked for a moment as if he might say something, then shook his head stoically, and returned to his dinner.

N
ow here’s a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days—that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls—adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That’s ridiculous.

When my family and I moved to the States, one of the things we wanted was to live in a traditional small town—the sort of place where Jimmy Stewart would be the mayor, the Hardy Boys would deliver your groceries, and Deanna Durbin would forever be singing at an open window. Perfect little towns are not easy to find, of course, but Hanover, where we settled, comes close. It is a small, typical New England college town, pleasant, sedate, and compact, full of old trees and sunny steeples. It has a broad green, an old-fashioned Main Street, a handsome campus with a settled and
venerable air, and leafy residential streets. Nearly everyone in town is within a level, easy stroll of the post office, library, and stores.

But here’s the thing: hardly anyone, as far as I can tell, walks anywhere for anything. I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn’t walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. “Because I have a program for the treadmill,” she explained. “It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.” It hadn’t occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.

At least in Hanover she could walk if she wanted to. In many places in America now, it is not actually possible to be a pedestrian, even if you want to be. I had this brought home to me the next day in Waynesboro, after we had gotten a room and treated ourselves to an extravagant late breakfast. I left Katz at a laundromat (he loved doing laundry, for some reason—loved to read the tattered magazines and experience the miracle of stiff, disgusting clothes emerging from big machines fluffed and sweet smelling) and set off to find some insect repellent for us.

Waynesboro had a traditional, vaguely pleasant central business district covering five or six square blocks, but, as so often these days, most retail businesses had moved out to shopping centers on the periphery, leaving little but a sprinkling of banks, insurance offices, and dusty thrift stores or secondhand shops in what presumably was once a thriving downtown. Lots of shops were dark and bare; nowhere could I find a store at which to get insect repellent. A man outside the post office sugested I try Kmart.

“Where’s your car?” he said, preparatory to giving directions.

“I don’t have a car.”

That stopped him. “Really? It’s over a mile, I’m afraid.”

“That’s OK.”

He gave his head a little dubious shake, as if disowning responsibility
for what he was about to tell me. “Well, then what you want to do is go up Broad Street, take a right at the Burger King, and keep on going. But, you know, when I think about it, it’s
well
over a mile—maybe a mile and a half, mile and three-quarters. You walking back as well?”

“Yeah.”

Another shake. “Long way.”

“I’ll take emergency provisions.”

If he realized this was a joke he didn’t show it. “Well, good luck to you,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“You know, there’s a cab company around the corner,” he offered helpfully as an afterthought.

“I actually prefer to walk,” I explained.

He nodded uncertainly. “Well, good luck to you,” he said again.

So I walked. It was a warm afternoon, and it felt wonderful—you can’t believe how wonderful—to be at large without a pack, bouncy and unburdened. With a pack you walk at a tilt, hunched and pressed forward, your eyes on the ground. You trudge; it is all you can do. Without, you are liberated. You walk erect. You look around. You spring. You saunter. You amble.

Or at least you do for four blocks. Then you come to a mad junction at Burger King and discover that the new six-lane road to Kmart is long, straight, very busy, and entirely without facilities for pedestrians—no sidewalks, no pedestrian crossings, no central refuges, no buttons to push for a
WALK
signal at lively intersections. I walked through gas station and motel forecourts and across restaurant parking lots, clambered over concrete barriers, crossed lawns, and pushed through neglected ranks of privet or honeysuckle at property boundaries. At bridges over creeks and culverts—and goodness me how developers love a culvert—I had no choice but to walk on the road, pressed against the dusty railings and causing less attentive cars to swerve to avoid me. Four times I was honked at for having the temerity to proceed through town without benefit of metal. One bridge was so patently dangerous
that I hesitated at it. The creek it crossed was only a reedy trickle, narrow enough to step across, so I decided to go that way. I slid and scampered down the bank, found myself in a hidden zone of sucking grey mud, pitched over twice, hauled myself up the other side, pitched over again, and emerged at length streaked and speckled with mud and extravagantly decorated with burrs. When I finally reached the Kmart Plaza I discovered that I was on the wrong side of the road and had to dash through six lanes of hostile traffic. By the time I crossed the parking lot and stepped into the air-conditioned, Muzak-happy world of Kmart I was as grubby as if I had been on the trail, and trembling all over.

The Kmart, it turned out, didn’t stock insect repellent.

So I turned around and set off back to town, but this time, in a burst of madness I don’t even want to go into, I headed home cross country, over farm fields and through a zone of light industry. I tore my jeans on barbed wire and got muddier still. When finally I got back to town, I found Katz sitting in the sun on a metal chair on the motel lawn, freshly showered, dressed in newly laundered attire, and looking intensely happy in a way that only a hiker can look when he is in a town, at ease. Technically, he was waxing his boots, but really he was just sitting watching the world go by and dreamily enjoying the sunshine. He greeted me warmly. Katz was always a new man in town.

“Good lord, look at you!” he cried, delighted at my grubbiness. “What have you been doing? You’re
filthy.”
He looked me up and down admiringly, then said in a more solemn tone: “You haven’t been screwing hogs again, have you, Bryson?”

“Ha ha ha.”

“They’re not clean animals, you know, no matter how attractive they may look after a month on the trail. And don’t forget we’re not in Tennessee anymore. It’s probably not even legal here—at least not without a note from the vet.” He patted the chair beside him, beaming all over, happy with his quips. “Come and sit down and tell me all about it. So what was her name—Bossy?” He leaned closely and confidentially. “Did she squeal a lot?”

I sat in the chair. “You’re only jealous.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I’m not. I made a friend of my own today. At the laundromat. Her name’s Beulah.”

“Beulah? You’re joking.”

“I may wish I was, but it’s a fact.”

“Nobody’s named Beulah.”

“Well, she is. And real nice, too. Not real smart, but real nice, with cute little dimples just here.” He poked his cheeks to show me where. “And she has a terrific body.”

“Oh, yes?”

He nodded. “Of course,” he added judiciously, “it’s buried under 220 pounds of wobbling fat. Fortunately I don’t mind size in a woman as long as, you know, you don’t have to remove a wall or anything to get her out of the house.” He gave his boot a thoughtful swipe.

“So how did you meet her?”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, sitting forward keenly, as if this was a story worth telling, “she asked me to come and look at her panties.”

I nodded. “Of course.”

“They’d got caught in the washing machine agitator,” he explained.

“And was she wearing them at the time? You said she wasn’t real smart.”

“No, she was washing them and the elastic got stuck in the spindle thing and she asked me to come and help extract them. Big panties,” he added thoughtfully, and fell into a brief reverie at the memory of it, then continued:. “I got ’em out, but they were shredded all to hell, so I said, kind of droll like, ‘Well, miss, I sure hope you’ve got another pair, because these are shredded all to hell.’”

“Oh, Stephen, the wit.”

“It’ll do for Waynesboro, believe me. And
she
said—now here’s the thing, my grubby, hog-humping friend—
she
said, ‘Well, wouldn’t
you
like to know, honey.’” He made his eyebrows bounce. “I’m meeting her at seven outside the fire station.”

“What, she keeps her spare underpants there?”

He gave me an exasperated look. “No, it’s just a place to meet. We’re going to Pappa John’s Pizza for dinner. And then, with any luck, we’ll do what you’ve been doing all day. Only I won’t have to climb a fence and lure her with alfalfa. Well, I hope not anyway. Hey, look at this,” he said, and reached down to a paper bag at his feet. He brought out a pair of pink female underwear that could fairly be called capacious. “I thought I’d give them to her. As a kind of joke, you understand.”

“In a restaurant? Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Discreetly, you know.”

I held up the underpants with outstretched arms. They really were quite arrestingly jumbo-sized. “If she doesn’t like them, you can always use them as a ground sheet. Are these—I have to ask—are these this big as part of the joke or——”

“Oh, she’s a big woman,” Katz said, and bounced his eyebrows again happily. He put the pants neatly, reverently back in the bag.
“Big
woman.”

So I dined alone at a place called the Coffee Mill Restaurant. It felt a little odd to be without Katz after so many days of constant companionship, but agreeable as well, for the same reason. I was eating a steak dinner, my book propped against a sugar shaker, entirely content, when I glanced up to find Katz stalking towards me across the restaurant, looking alarmed and furtive.

“Thank God I found you,” he said, and took a seat opposite me in the booth. He was sweating freely. “There’s some guy looking for me.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Beulah’s husband.”

“Beulah has a husband?”

“I know. It’s a miracle. There can’t be more than two people on the planet who’d be willing to sleep with her and here we are both in the same town.”

This was all going too fast for me. “I don’t understand. What happened?”

“I was standing outside the fire station, you know, like we’d
agreed, and a red pickup truck screeches to a stop and this guy gets out looking real angry and saying he’s Beulah’s old man and he wants to talk to me.”

“So what did you do?”

“I ran. What do you think?”

“And he didn’t catch you?”

“He weighed about 600 pounds. He wasn’t exactly the sprinting type. More the shoot-your-balls-off type. He’s been cruising around for a half hour looking for me. I’ve been running through backyards and crashing into clotheslines and all kinds of shit. I ended up with some other guy chasing me because he thought I was a prowler. What the hell am I supposed to do now, Bryson?”