Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail (6 page)

I headed off in the threatening weather. When I turned the first corner water was unexpectedly shooting out of a big rock face, probably due to all the recent rain. I filled up my Nalgene water bottle, and this would prove to be crucial.

The drizzle became steadier as I pushed on, determined. The trail, which had been almost teeming the first few days, was abandoned; I was to see no other hiker the rest of the day. I kept looking for this old forest service road Beeker had mentioned, but had trouble making anything out in the increasingly dense fog. Meanwhile, the trail was winding up and down, but with the elevations increasing for each peak.

On a nine-mile stretch I would normally take at least a couple breaks. But I was reluctant to do so here because of the time constraint and the worsening weather conditions. I did, however, keep swallowing water and chewing on GORP (Good Ol’ Raisins and Peanuts). Meanwhile, I was becoming concerned because I was stopping quite often to urinate, even though my mouth felt dry. My assumption had been that I didn’t need to bring a lot of water out of Low Gap Shelter, which had a stream, because I would be able to find water easily on such a rainy day. However, the water spewing from the rock was the only drinking water I would see, and I was steadily drinking it down. As I later learned, this was misguided, because higher elevations often lack any water sources at all.

I had belatedly put on a rain jacket, when I realized just how drenched and cold I was from the steadily increasing downpour. But now that I had begun chilling it was tough to warm up again—a classic rookie mistake. But what was even more unnerving was that I had started feeling lightheaded, which could have been caused by my having walked as hard and as fast as possible with very few breaks for about seven hours. Or maybe it had something to do with waking up at four o’clock. Or maybe it was all a figment of my imagination.

However, I wasn’t hallucinating about the fundamentals: It was cold and getting colder; I was soaked; the trail was getting muddier by the minute; the visibility was poor and getting worse the higher I climbed; my water supply was running low; the howling winds were adding to my paranoia; and nobody else was on this trail as night approached.

Finally, I saw a wooden post that I hoped would be for Blue Mountain Shelter. But instead it read Brass Town Bald, a name every Georgia school boy knows because it is the highest point in Georgia. This fact contributed to the forbidding feeling that I really was stuck in the mountains, and that I was totally reliant on the remaining energy in my legs to get me out of there in one piece. One of the scant comforts I could honestly conjure up was that I had made out my will before starting the AT.

I kept straining to hear the sound of cars from the road, down at the bottom of the mountain. But every time my hopes were lifted by what seemed like a whirring sound, I would look over to my left and realize that it was just another powerful wind gust sweeping over the mountain. Trees swayed as if they were going to bend in half. I began to wonder if I would ever see another human being.

As I cleared the next rise in the fog, the trail began to flatten.
It’s the summit
. I looked ahead expectantly for a descent that would lead straight to the road. Instead, it was a false summit and the outlines of yet another mountain appeared in front of me. I was exhausted and felt unable to continue.

A friend back home with hiking experience had told me that if immobilized and faced with high winds and rain, I should just take out my tarp and wrap it around me like a burrito. I pulled out my tarp, wrapped it around me, and lay in the middle of the AT. I attempted to relax and breathe deeply, only to be buffeted by cold, slanting, merciless sheets of rain. This wasn’t working. Now all the concerns and paranoia of the last few hours morphed into a full-fledged fear for my life. As cold and soaked as I was, I didn’t think I could survive the night exposed to these elements.

I began envisioning my funeral. In a perverted way I even felt “embarrassed” for my family, that I had so ceremoniously undertaken this long journey only to die the first time the weather turned sour. I had to get out of there quickly and decided to do something that had been at the back of my mind the last couple hours. I would abandon my backpack. I rushed it over to a clump of trees, quickly gulped down some Tylenol from the first aid kit, and grabbed the remaining quarter-liter of water. Then I urinated again for approximately the tenth time since Low Gap Shelter three hours before—a telltale sign of hypothermia.

Then, deciding I was in a dead-even situation and that this was my best chance, I took a deep swallow of my precious remaining water, said a quick prayer for faith, and resolved to walk very slowly up the mountain. Concentrating on each step, I felt a tangible difference without a backpack. This was a relief. Within about 200 or 300 hundred yards I began to make out through the fog yet again what looked like a summit. As it flattened at the top I wondered if I was in for yet another false summit. But then the trail seemed to be descending, and finally it started down steeply. The distant noise of cars from the road 1.4 miles away was now unmistakable. Yes, I considered turning around to retrieve my backpack, but after hours of nagging doubt, followed by fifteen minutes in which I thought I was looking death straight in the eye, I was happy to be apparently out of danger and decided to continue descending to the road. A half hour later, I arrived at Unicoi Gap and Ga. Hwy. 75. The rain had almost stopped and the visibility was much better, but I consoled myself that I had made the right decision to abandon my backpack. The weather was probably still diabolical up on the mountaintop.

It was getting dark and it was a ten-mile hitch east to Helen, Georgia. Furthermore, not many cars were passing. After a few failed thumbs, the thought occurred that, without a backpack, I looked more like a bum than a hiker. With no sleeping bag, shelter, or dry clothes and the nearest town ten miles away, I could be facing a long night. Finally, another car rounded the hill, and I threw up my hands as if in prayer. A thirty-ish, rotund fellow stopped and agreed to take me to Helen. Despite the odd circumstance of my backpack being on the mountain I was positively giddy and had him drop me at the first motel we saw.

That night my relief turned to worry, as I lay awake wondering if a bear or rodents were tearing through my backpack, which contained not only a food bag, but thousands of dollars of equipment as well. At first light I got up and caught a taxi back up the mountain to Unicoi Gap, hoping to retrieve my backpack.

The first thing I saw heading up the trail’s steep ascent was my light blue balaklava, which had obviously fallen out of my rain jacket on the descent. The climb up was steeper than I had remembered, probably because I’d had so much adrenaline pumping the previous day. Finally, I got back up to the summit of Blue Mountain and hurried down southward, remembering that my backpack should be only a few hundred yards down and just off the trail to the left, in the bushes. I spotted it and anxiously checked to see if the contents were intact. They were. That probably wouldn’t have been the case in high summer, but bears weren’t hanging out at the higher elevations yet because the forest was still dormant.

I was jubilant. Justin had said yesterday afternoon at Low Gap Shelter that he might go to Blue Mountain Shelter, which was only about a half mile south of where my backpack had been, so I decided to continue south and check on him. When I got there he was the only person in the shelter, still bundled in his sleeping bag.

“Man, what in the world are you doing here?” he asked. After I filled him in on my mishap, he said, “Wow, that sounds like more than your average hiker bitch. You weren’t lying when you said how new you are at this.”

But then he said, “You might have done the smart thing, not stopping here. I froze my ass off. I don’t know why they built this shelter completely exposed to the wind from the north.”

When I hoisted my backpack to head back down the trail he perked up from his sleeping bag, and called out, “I hope you’re not gonna’ quit.”

Looking back, I said, “No way, man.” As fate would have it this was to be the last time I ever saw him.

One doesn’t just skate away from a “day from hell.” I may well not have been in as much danger as I had feared at the time. I honestly don’t know. But for days I would feel a deep down-to-the-bone weariness and nagging anxiety in the wake of the incident. And wild rumors of my having been carried off the mountain and revived in a hypothermia ward would proliferate among hikers.

Two days later I arrived at Dick’s Creek Gap and hitchhiked easily into Hiawassee, the northernmost town in Georgia. This picturesque mountain village had an indefinable, mysterious quality. One guidebook described it as a place where “everybody is very white, very heavy, and very slow.” Indeed, I didn’t see a single black person in the entire town. This was especially noteworthy in a state in which African-Americans constitute 30 percent of the population.

“What did you guys do around here?” the ever garrulous Vertical Jerry, a real-estate broker from New Jersey kept badgering me. “Did you kill all the blacks?” In fact—being hemmed in on all sides by mountains—little assimilation had taken place, thus occasioning the stereotype of the underbred hillfolk.

Vertical Jerry, Linebacker, and I opted for the local buffet that night. “Skywalker,” Vertical Jerry said, “is there some reason all the locals have a stricken look when you walk by?”

“Yes,” I replied, “they can sense my parents married outside the immediate family.”

Continuing on his theme of southern provincialism, Vertical Jerry announced to nobody in particular, “Ladies and gentlemen, the Deliverance factor is alive and well in this town. Make sure all doors are latched and bolted this evening.”

He, of course, was referring to the infamous movie,
Deliverance
, in which some north Georgia backwoodsmen rampage on some visiting urbanites to the point of their humiliation and doom. The good news is that over the course of traveling fourteen states from south to north many stereotypes would be exploded as hikers entered regions previously unknown to them.

Linebacker continued being very quiet, especially to me. The previous day I had, with the best intentions, goaded him into attempting to make it over Kelly’s Knob and all the way into Hiawassee.

“It shouldn’t be that difficult to make good miles tomorrow,” I said. “The weather forecast is good.”

“You didn’t know what you were talking about yesterday,” he shot back. He then solemnly recounted how after going all out the entire day it had taken him three hours to cover the last two miles in the dark. Apparently, he viewed it all as
his
“day from hell.”

“The car noise from the highway saved me,” he succinctly noted.

“How much do you weigh, man?” Vertical Jerry brazenly asked.

“Three-twenty,” Linebacker stated flatly.

Good gosh
, I thought.
If I had known that I wouldn’t have recommended he try that yesterday
.

Vertical Jerry suggested that the three of us meet out front at seven forty-five in the morning. to catch a ride back to the trail. “Count me in,” Linebacker said. But Linebacker didn’t show up, and we never saw him again. From what I later heard he apparently never made it out of Hiawassee.

Chapter 3

A
t the end of World War I millions of American soldiers poured back into the country. Two trends—urbanization and mass industrialization—dominated the American landscape. However the trauma of the war—
116,000 Americans were killed in one year of fighting while European losses were much worse
—had created a contrarian intellectual philosophy.

One prominent adherent to this contrarian ideology was Benton MacKaye, a patrician New Englander who had received a Master’s in forestry from Harvard. He plainly did not like the way America was moving and saw rapid mechanization and urbanization as hurting mankind. He even spoke of American cities’ tendency to “over-civilize.”

In April of 1921, MacKaye’s wife, a prominent women’s suffragist, hurled herself off a bridge into New York’s East River. Soon after a friend noted that he seemed depressed, and invited him to his estate in the New Jersey Highlands. MacKaye accepted, and it was there he wrote the essay
An Appalachian Trail.

The customary approach to the problem of living relates to work rather than play,” MacKaye wrote. “Can we increase the efficiency of our working time? The new approach,” MacKaye asserted, “reverses this mental process. Can we increase the efficiency of our spare time? Here is an enormous undeveloped power—the spare time of our population.”