Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail (4 page)

Before we parted ways he said, “Bill, this is a major journey you are about to undertake, and
you don’t appear to be ready
.” When I thanked him for his honesty, he said “It’s not me that’s telling you. It’s the
trail
telling you.”

When I arrived home two days early on Monday afternoon, April 4, my mother laughed knowingly at my vague explanation of what had happened. I then endured another lecture to attempt just a section, culminated with the question, “Why set yourself up for failure?”

I replied softly, “I’m starting this Sunday,” and went upstairs to bed, exhausted.

I still hadn’t ever spent a full night outside and decided to spend the night of Tuesday, April 5, out on my mother’s lawn. Since there weren’t two trees the right distance apart to set up my tarp, I just threw the sleeping bag on the ground, cowboy style, and tried to sleep. After about two or three hours of uneven sleep I woke up cold, with tensed-up neck muscles, and was unable to get back to sleep. At first light the next morning I went back inside and got three or four hours of deep, lusty sleep in my soft, warm bed.

When I woke up I decided I needed a sleeping bag with the “full mummy” feature, to fully envelop my neck and the back of my head. So I called Western Mountaineering and asked if I could switch it out for a full-mummy, seven-foot, down-filled bag. The saleswoman got the manager on the line: Yes, they could finish one called “
the Badger
” in a couple hours and overnight it to me. When it arrived on Thursday, April 7, I tried it out on the rug inside, but had no idea how well I would be able to sleep in it.

The last couple days I spent loading my backpack and agonizing over which items were absolutely necessary and which weighed more than the benefits. I was especially sensitive to my cold nature. Two sets of long johns, a balaklava and stocking cap, a fleece vest, two rain jackets, rain pants, and four pairs of socks made the cut. But also heavily influenced by Warren Doyle’s minimalist philosophy, a stove, a camera, underwear, and even a watch, fell by the wayside. And I would only have the one shirt and pair of pants on me every day. I was “ready.”

part II

“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.”—
Robert Frost

Chapter 2

D
aniel Boone described the southern Appalachians as “so wild and horrored that it is impossible to behold them without terror.”

The southern terminus of the AT is at Springer Mountain, in north Georgia, seventy-six miles south of the North Carolina border. Just getting there can be complicated, as it lies right in the middle of the Chattahoochee Valley National Forest, nowhere near a town of any note. My mother volunteered to drive me to this remote spot. The irony of a seventy-year-old mother dropping her forty-four-year-old son off into the mountains for a six-month journey didn’t elude me. As the formidable north Georgia mountains began to appear in the distance it occurred to me that many hikers from outside the South probably had a different image of Georgia and were in for quite a surprise.

Driving up U.S. Forest Service Road (USFS) 42 our eyes widened as we wound our way up the narrow, steep mountainous, dirt road that dropped off precipitously on the outside. Between “oohs” and “ahs,” my mother renewed her lecture that this should be considered a two-week adventure, and I should be proud to do that much.

Finally, we arrived at the trailhead parking lot, and I was relieved to see several people unloading backpacks. It was about 1 o’clock, and the weather was gorgeous. I asked a couple people where exactly the trail began. The summit of Springer Mountain was nine-tenths of a mile hiking south from the parking lot—the trail then went straight back down through the parking lot and continued north. I decided to hike south up to the starting point without a backpack and come right back down to the parking lot.

At the top of Springer Mountain a “ridge runner” named Glenn was giving an orientation lecture to a group of hikers and asked me to join in. His theme was “low-impact hiking,” which minimizes humans’ effect on the environment. He so belabored the point of digging six-inch “cat holes” to bury our feces and toilet paper that our necks became sore from nodding. It seemed especially ironic that animals have more rights than humans in this regard.

Then he segued to the subject of bears. I listened closely as he spoke in deliberate fashion: “Bears have seven times greater sense of smell than bloodhounds.
It is incumbent on you to hang a ‘bear bag
’ (a food bag suspended out of the reach of bears)
every evening at your chosen campsite
.”

Oops, another task at which I was incompetent and, thus, had been amenable to Warren Doyle’s counsel to just keep my food bag with me at night.

“And one final thing”—Glenn paused for gravity—“there’s a certain amount of glorification attached to thru-hikers. Some start thinking they are the only people on the trail and want to dominate it. All other hikers—day hikers or section hikers—have the same rights as you.” I was too green to have any sort of attitude or a swagger, but would eventually learn the basis for his remarks.

I then went over and signed the register for thru-hikers. I was number 1,093. The obvious question was how many of these hikers would still be headed north come September.

Back in the parking lot I found my mother with some newfound friends. She introduced me to a late-twentyish fellow named Justin, and his girlfriend. Tattoo-covered and bedecked with a headband and long flowing hair, Justin seemed an unlikely friend for my more traditional mother. But they hit it off.

I introduced myself as “Skywalker.” This had seemed like an obvious trail name, given my height and surname of Walker. People often ask me how a thru-hiker gets a trail name. As best I can tell about half choose their own, and the rest get tagged by others. It seemed like a good idea to name myself and not risk picking up some unflattering name such as Snot Rag, Rat Puke, or Puss Gut, three thru-hikers I would meet farther up the trail.

Justin and his girlfriend had a tearful parting and he headed off down the trail. Then a middle-age, upbeat looking fellow passed through the parking lot and stopped to introduce himself as “Scottie Too Lite.” My mother, being partial to resume talk, immediately had all the essentials down. Scottie had worked at IBM in Connecticut for thirty-three years, until a recent corporate restructuring. He would be one of many such victims of corporate downsizing I would meet on the trail. In fact I would soon notice a clear pattern of the trail being heavily populated with people having gone through a major life change such as graduation, divorce, or retirement.

About this time, three attractive girls from Chicago showed up in what appeared to be designer hiking clothing. The oldest one, at about twenty-two, came over and asked a couple questions at which point my mother began to elicit biography information. “I have a certificate for outdoor excellence,” she said. “I’m in charge of safely getting my younger sisters to the finish.”

“Have they hiked before?” my mother asked.

“Barely,” she said rolling her eyes.

“So you’re leading your inexperienced younger sisters almost two thousand, two hundred miles through the mountains to northern Maine?” I asked in disbelief.

“We’ll get there,” she said stoutly. From what I later heard they barely made it to North Carolina.

As hikers streamed through the parking lot and headed north—hopefully to Maine—it was clear I was entering a whole new world. Growing up I had spent nice Sunday afternoons like this at the golf course, before going home for dinner, a shower, and sleep. But here people were spending a nice Sunday afternoon hiking in the mountains, followed by God knows what.

My mother and I hugged as I worried about her trip back down the steep, rugged U.S. Forest Service Road. Looking around at mountains as far as the eye could see she said, “Bill, I’ll have dinner ready for you next Saturday night. Don’t let pride get in the way of good judgment.” And then I departed.

Quickly, I caught up with long-haired Justin. He was adjusting his back pack, which looked to be twice the size of mine. His most visible accoutrement was a bulky dagger sheathed to his side. This was a surprise because I hadn’t even considered bringing a weapon. What more, there seemed a basic assymetry to his strategy. With his impressively muscled physique, Justin should have been able fend off any possible human attackers without any weapon, but this knife couldn’t possibly keep a mauling bear at bay for long. Nonetheless, eager to make my first real trail friend, I followed him along the trail. In a sense this was following a lifelong pattern of standing or walking behind shorter people, and I was to continue it much of the way on the AT.

Justin appeared, unlike me, to be well-schooled in the wilderness and preferred solitude. While solitude is obviously part of the bargain on the AT, this springtime Sunday saw hikers galore all over the trail. Most everyone appeared clean, well decked-out, and upbeat—not a surprise given that it was opening day. It was a scene not to be witnessed again.

Out of a combination of shared camaraderie, curiosity, and insecurity, I was trying to talk a bit with everyone possible. Adding to the buoyant atmosphere was some quite friendly terrain that wound along Stover Creek. In 1958 the trail’s southern terminus had been moved twenty miles north from Mount Oglethorpe because of overdevelopment, and the change seemed fortuitous.

At the 7.6-mile mark Justin and I came to a sign pointing to the Hawk Mountain Shelter. One look over there showed a scene out of Grand Central Station. As a true babe in the woods I was heavily influenced by Warren Doyle’s iconoclastic bias (“people farting, snoring, mice running rampant”) against these nocturnal gathering points. And, given Justin’s solitary instincts, we trudged on.