A Walk in the Woods (9 page)

Then, with as much pride as if I had baked them myself, I brought out a little surprise—two packets of Hostess cupcakes.

Katz’s face lit up like the birthday boy in a Norman Rockwell painting.

“Oh, wow!”

“They didn’t have any Little Debbies,” I apologized.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey.” He was lost for greater eloquence. Katz loved cakes.

We ate three of the cupcakes between us and left the last one on the log, where we could admire it, for later. We were lying there, propped against logs, burping, smoking, feeling rested and content, talking for once—in short, acting much as I had envisioned it in my more optimistic moments back home—when Katz let out a low groan. I followed his gaze to find Mary Ellen striding briskly down the trail towards us from the wrong direction.

“I
wondered
where you guys had got to,” she scolded. “You know, you are like
really
slow. We could’ve done another four miles by now easy. I can see I’m going to have to keep my eyes on you from now say, is that a Hostess cupcake?” Before I could speak or Katz could seize a log with which to smite her dead, she said, “Well, I don’t mind if I do,” and ate it in two bites. It would be some days before Katz smiled again.

“S
o what’s your star sign?” said Mary Ellen.

“Cunnilingus,” Katz answered and looked profoundly unhappy.

She looked at him. “I don’t know that one.” She made an I’ll—be-darned frown and said, “I thought I knew them all. Mine’s Libra.” She turned to me. “What’s yours?”

“I don’t know.” I tried to think of something. “Necrophilia.”

“I don’t know that one either. Say, are you guys putting me on?”

“Yeah.”

It was two nights later. We were camped at a lofty spot called Indian Grave Gap, between two brooding summits—the one tiring to recollect, the other dispiriting to behold. We had hiked twenty-two miles in two days—a highly respectable distance for us—but a distinct listlessness and sense of anticlimax, a kind of midmountain lassitude, had set in. We spent our days doing precisely what we had done on previous days and would continue to do on future days, over the same sorts of hills, along the same wandering track,
through the same endless woods. The trees were so thick that we hardly ever got views, and when we did get views it was of infinite hills covered in more trees. I was discouraged to note that I was grubby again already and barking for white bread. And then of course there was the constant, prattling, awesomely brainless presence of Mary Ellen.

“When’s your birthday?” she said to me.

“December 8.”

“That’s Virgo.”

“No, actually it’s Sagittarius.”

“Whatever.” And then abruptly: “Jeez, you guys stink.”

“Well, uh, we’ve been walking.”

“Me, I don’t sweat. Never have. Don’t dream either.”

“Everybody dreams,” Katz said.

“Well, I don’t.”

“Except people of extremely low intelligence. It’s a scientific fact.”

Mary Ellen regarded him expressionlessly for a moment, then said abruptly, to neither of us in particular: “Do you ever have that dream where you’re like at school and you look down and like you haven’t got any clothes on?” She shuddered. “I hate that one.”

“I thought you didn’t dream,” said Katz.

She stared at him for a very long moment, as if trying to remember where she had encountered him before. “And falling,” she went on, unperturbed. “I hate that one, too. Like when you fall into a hole and just fall and fall.” She gave a brief shiver and then noisily unblocked her ears.

Katz watched her with idle interest. “I know a guy who did that once,” he said, “and one of his eyes popped out.”

She looked at him doubtfully.

“It rolled right across the living room floor and his dog ate it. Isn’t that right, Bryson?”

I nodded.

“You’re making that up.”

“I’m not. It rolled right across the floor and before anybody could do anything, the dog gobbled it down in one bite.”

I confirmed it for her with another nod.

She considered this for a minute. “So what’d your friend do about his eye hole? Did he have to get a glass eye or something?”

“Well, he wanted to, but his family was kind of poor, you know, so what he did was he got a Ping-Pong ball and painted an eye on it and he used that.”

“Ugh,” said Mary Ellen softly.

“So I wouldn’t go blowing out your ear holes any more.”

She considered again. “Yeah, maybe you’re right,” she said at length, and blew out her ear holes.

In our few private moments, when Mary Ellen went off to tinkle in distant shrubs, Katz and I had formed a secret pact that we would hike fourteen miles on the morrow to a place called Dicks Creek Gap, where there was a highway to the town of Hiawassee, eleven miles to the north. We would hike to the gap if it killed us, and then try to hitchhike into Hiawassee for dinner and a night in a motel. Plan B was that we would kill Mary Ellen and take her Pop Tarts.

And so the next day we hiked, really hiked, startling Mary Ellen with our thrusting strides. There was a motel in Hiawassee—clean sheets! shower! color TV!—and a reputed choice of restaurants. We needed no more incentive than that to perk our step. Katz flagged in the first hour, and I felt tired too by afternoon, but we pushed determinedly on. Mary Ellen fell farther and farther off the pace, until she was behind even Katz. It was a kind of miracle in the hills.

At about four o’clock, tired and overheated and streaked about the face with rivulets of gritty sweat, I stepped from the woods onto the broad shoulder of U.S. Highway 76, an asphalt river through the woods, pleased to note that the road was wide and reasonably important looking. A half mile down the road there was a clearing in the trees and a drive—a hint of civilization—before the road curved away invitingly. Several cars passed as I stood there.

Katz tumbled from the woods a few minutes later, looking wild
of hair and eye, and I hustled him across the road against his voluble protests that he needed to sit down
immediately
. I wanted to try to get a lift before Mary Ellen came along and screwed things up. I couldn’t think how she might, but I knew she would.

“Have you seen her?” I asked anxiously.

“Miles back, sitting on a rock with her boots off rubbing her feet. She looked real tired.”

“Good.”

Katz sagged onto his pack, grubby and spent, and I stood beside him on the shoulder with my thumb out, trying to project an image of wholesomeness and respectability, making private irked tutting noises at every car and pickup that passed. I had not hitchhiked in twenty-five years, and it was a vaguely humbling experience. Cars shot past very fast—unbelievably fast to us who now resided in Foot World—and gave us scarcely a glance. A very few approached more slowly, always occupied by elderly people—little white heads, just above the window line—who stared at us without sympathy or expression, as they would at a field of cows. It seemed unlikely that anyone would stop for us. I wouldn’t have stopped for us.

“We’re never going to get picked up,” Katz announced despondently after cars had forsaken us for fifteen minutes.

He was right, of course, but it always exasperated me how easily he gave up on things. “Can’t you try to be a little more positive?” I said.

“OK, I’m positive we’re never going to get picked up. I mean, look at us.” He smelled his armpits with disgust. “Jesus, I smell like Jeffrey Dahmer’s refrigerator.”

There is a phenomenon called Trail Magic, known and spoken of with reverence by everyone who hikes the trail, which holds that often when things look darkest some little piece of serendipity comes along to put you back on a heavenly plane. Ours was a baby blue Pontiac Trans Am, which flew past, then screeched to a stop on the shoulder a hundred yards or so down the road, in a cloud of gravelly dust. It was so far beyond where we stood that we didn’t
think it could possibly be for us, but then it jerked into reverse and came at us, half on the shoulder and half off, moving very fast and a little wildly. I stood transfixed. The day before, we had been told by a pair of seasoned hikers that sometimes in the South drivers will swerve at AT hitchhikers, or run over their packs, for purposes of hilarity, and I supposed this was one of those moments. I was about to fly for cover, and even Katz was halfway to his feet, when it stopped just before us, with a rock and another cloud of dust, and a youthful female head popped out the passenger side window.

“Yew boys wunna rod?” she called.

“Yes, ma’am, we sure do,” we said, putting on our best behavior.

We hastened to the car with our packs and bowed down at the window to find a very handsome, very happy, very drunk young couple, who didn’t look to be more than eighteen or nineteen years old. The woman was carefully topping up two plastic cups from a three-quarters empty bottle of Wild Turkey. “Hi!” she said. “Hop in.”

We hesitated. The car was packed nearly solid with stuff—suitcases, boxes, assorted black plastic bags, hangerloads of clothes. It was a small car to begin with and there was barely room for them.

“Darren, why’nt you make some room for these gentlemen,” the young woman ordered and then added for us: “This yere’s Darren.”

Darren got out, grinned a hello, opened the trunk, and stared blankly at it while the perception slowly spread through his brain that it was also packed solid. He was so drunk that I thought for a moment he might fall asleep on his feet, but he snapped to and found some rope and quite deftly tied our packs on the roof. Then, ignoring the vigorous advice and instructions of his partner, he tossed stuff around in the back until he had somehow created a small cavity into which Katz and 1 climbed, puffing out apologies and expressions of the sincerest gratitude.

Her name was Donna, and they were on their way to some desperate-sounding community—Turkey Balls Falls or Coon Slick
or someplace—another fifty miles up the road, but they were pleased to drop us in Hiawassee, if they didn’t kill us all first. Darren drove at 127 miles an hour with one finger on the wheel, his head bouncing to the rhythm of some internal song, while Donna twirled in her seat to talk to us. She was stunningly pretty, entrancingly pretty.

“Y’all have to excuse us. We’re celebrating.” She held up her plastic cup as if in toast.

“What’re you celebrating?” asked Katz.

“We’re gittin married tomorrah,” she announced proudly.

“No kidding,” said Katz. “Congratulations.”

“Yup. Darren yere’s gonna make a honest woman outta me.” She tousled his hair, then impulsively lunged over and gave the side of his head a kiss, which became lingering, then probing, then frankly lascivious, and concluded, as a kind of bonus, by shooting her hand into a surprising place—or at least so we surmised because Darren abruptly banged his head on the ceiling and took us on a brief but exciting detour into a lane of oncoming traffic. Then she turned to us with a dreamy, unabashed leer, as if to say, “Who’s next?” It looked, we reflected later, as if Darren might have his hands full, though we additionally concluded that it would probably be worth it.

“Hey, have a drink,” she offered suddenly, seizing the bottle round the neck and looking for spare cups on the floor.

“Oh, no thanks,” Katz said, but looked tempted.

“G’won,”
she encouraged.

Katz held up a palm. “I’m reformed.”

“Yew
are?
Well, good for you. Have a drink then.”

“No really.”

“How ‘bout yew?” she said to me.

“Oh, no thanks.” I couldn’t have freed my pinned arms even if I had wanted a drink. They dangled before me like tyrannosaur limbs.

“Yer
not reformed, are ya?”

“Well, kind of.” I had decided, for purposes of solidarity, to forswear alcohol for the duration.

She looked at us. “You guys like Mormons or something?”

“No, just hikers.”

She nodded thoughtfully, satisfied with that, and had a drink. Then she made Darren jump again.

They dropped us at Mull’s Motel in Hiawassee, an old-fashioned, nondescript, patently nonchain establishment on a bend in the road near the center of town. We thanked them profusely, went through a little song-and-dance of trying to give them gas money, which they stoutly refused, and watched as Darren returned to the busy road as if fired from a rocket launcher. I believe I saw him bang his head again as they disappeared over a small rise.

And then we were alone with our packs in an empty motel parking lot in a dusty, forgotten, queer-looking little town in northern Georgia. The word that clings to every hiker’s thoughts in north Georgia is
Deliverance
, the 1970 novel by James Dickey that was made into a Hollywood movie. It concerns, as you may recall, four middle-aged men from Atlanta who go on a weekend canoeing trip down the fictional Cahulawasee River (but based on the real, nearby Chattooga) and find themselves severely out of their element. “Every family I’ve ever met up here has at least one relative in the penitentiary,” a character in the book remarks forebodingly as they drive up. “Some of them are in for making liquor or running it, but most of them are in for murder. They don’t think a whole lot about killing people up here.” And so of course it proves, as our urban foursome find themselves variously buggered, murdered, and hunted by a brace of demented backwoodsmen.

Early in the book Dickey has his characters stop for directions in some “sleepy and hookwormy and ugly” town, which for all I know could have been Hiawassee. What is certainly true is that the book was set in this part of the state, and the movie was filmed in the area. The famous banjo-plucking albino who played “Dueling Banjos” in the movie still apparently lives in Clayton, just down the road.

Dickey’s book, as you might expect, attracted heated criticism in
the state when it was published (one observer called it “the most demeaning characterization of southern highlanders in modern literature,” which, if anything, was an understatement), but in fact it must be said that people have been appalled by northern Georgians for 150 years. One nineteenth-century chronicler described the region’s inhabitants as “tall, thin, cadaverous-looking animals, as melancholy and lazy as boiled cod-fish,” and others freely employed words like “depraved,” “rude,” “uncivilized,” and “backward” to describe the reclusive, underbred folk of Georgia’s deep, dark woods and desperate townships. Dickey, who was himself a Georgian and knew the area well, swore that his book was a faithful description.