A Walk in the Woods (33 page)

“It was heavy.”

“Of course it’s heavy. Water’s always heavy. But it is also kind of vital, wouldn’t you say?”

He gave me a helpless look. “I just had to get rid of some weight. I was desperate.”

“No, you were stupid.”

“Yeah, that too,” he agreed.

“Stephen, I wish you wouldn’t do these things.”

“I know,” he said and looked sincerely repentant.

While he finished putting up his tent, I went off to filter water for the morning. Baker Stream was really a river—broad, clear, and shallow—and very beautiful in the glow of a summery evening, with a backdrop of overhanging trees and the last rays of sunlight sparkling its surface. As I knelt by the water, I became curiously aware of something—some thing—in the woods beyond my left shoulder, which caused me to straighten up and peer through the clutter of foliage at the water’s edge. Goodness knows what impelled me to look because I couldn’t have heard anything over the musical tumult of water, but there about fifteen feet away in the dusky undergrowth, staring at me with a baleful expression,
was a moose—full grown and female, or so I presumed since it had no antlers. It had evidently been on its way to the water for a drink when it was brought up short by my presence and now clearly was undecided what to do next.

It is an extraordinary experience to find yourself face-to-face in the woods with a wild animal that is very much larger than you. You know these things are out there, of course, but you never expect at any particular moment to encounter one, certainly not up close—and this one was close enough that I could see the haze of flealike insects floating in circles about its head. We stared at each other for a good minute, neither of us sure what to do. There was a certain obvious and gratifying tang of adventure in this, but also something much more low-key and elemental—a kind of respectful mutual acknowledgment that comes with sustained eye contact. It was this that was unexpectedly thrilling—the sense that there was in some small measure a salute in our cautious mutual appraisal. I was smitten.

I had recently read to my dismay that they have started hunting moose again in New England. Goodness knows why anyone would want to shoot an animal as harmless and retiring as the moose, but thousands of people do—so many, in fact, that states now hold lotteries to decide who gets a permit. Maine in 1996 received 82,000 applications for just 1,500 permits. Over 12,000 outof-staters happily parted with a nonrefundable $20 just to be allowed to take part in the draw.

Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old. That’s all there is to it. Without doubt, the moose is the most improbable, endearingly hopeless creature ever to live in the wilds. Every bit of it—its spindly legs, its chronically puzzled expression, its comical oven-mitt antlers—looks like some droll evolutionary joke. It is wondrously ungainly: it runs as if its legs have never been introduced to each other. Above all, what distinguishes the moose is its almost boundless lack of intelligence. If you are driving down a highway and a moose steps from the woods ahead of you, he will stare at you for a long minute (moose are notoriously
shortsighted), then abruptly try to run away from you, legs flailing in eight directions at once. Never mind that there are several thousand square miles of forest on either side of the highway. The moose does not think of this. Clueless as to what exactly is going on, he runs halfway to New Brunswick before his peculiar gait inadvertently steers him back into the woods, where he immediately stops and takes on a startled expression that says, “Hey—woods. Now how the heck did I get here?” Moose are so monumentally muddle-headed, in fact, that when they hear a car or truck approaching they will often bolt
out
of the woods and onto the highway in the curious hope that this will bring them to safety.

Amazingly, given the moose’s lack of cunning and peculiarly-blunted survival instincts, it is one of the longest-surviving creatures in North America. Mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, wolves, caribou, wild horses, and even camels all once thrived in eastern North America alongside the moose but gradually stumbled into extinction, while the moose just plodded on. It hasn’t always been so. At the turn of this century, it was estimated that there were no more than a dozen moose in New Hampshire and probably none at all in Vermont. Today New Hampshire has an estimated 5,000 moose, Vermont 1,000, and Maine anywhere up to 30,000. It is because of these robust and growing numbers that hunting has been reintroduced as a way of keeping them from getting out of hand. There are, however, two problems with this that I can think of. First, the numbers are really just guesses. Moose clearly don’t line up for censuses. Some naturalists think the population may have been overstated by as much as 20 percent, which means that the moose aren’t being so much culled as slaughtered. No less pertinent is that there is just something deeply and unquestionably wrong about killing an animal that is so sweetly and dopily unassuming as a moose. I could have slain this one with a slingshot, with a rock or stick—with a folded newspaper, I’d almost bet—and all it wanted was a drink of water. You might as well hunt cows.

Stealthily, so as not to alarm it, I crept off to get Katz. When we returned, the moose had advanced to the water and was drinking
about twenty-five feet upstream. “Wow,” Katz breathed. He was thrilled, too, I was pleased to note. The moose looked up at us, decided we meant her no harm, and went back to drinking. We watched her for perhaps five minutes, but the mosquitoes were chewing us up, so we withdrew and returned to our camp feeling considerably elated. It seemed a confirmation—we
were
in the wilderness now—and a gratifying, totally commensurate reward for a day of hard toil.

We ate a dinner of Slim Jims, raisins, and Snickers and retired to our tents to escape the endless assault of mosquitoes. As we lay there, Katz said, quite brightly, “Hard day today. I’m beat.” It was unlike him to be chatty at tent time.

I grunted in agreement.

“I’d forgotten how hard it is.”

“Yeah, me, too.”

“First days are always hard, though, aren’t they?”

“Yeah.”

He gave a settling-down sigh and yawned melodiously. “It’ll be better tomorrow,” he said, still yawning. By this he meant, I supposed, that he wouldn’t fling anything foolish away. “Well, good night,” he added.

I stared in surprise at the wall of my tent in the direction from which his voice had come. In all the weeks of camping together, it was the first time he had wished me a good night.

“Good night,” I said.

I rolled over on my side. He was right, of course. First days are always bad. Tomorrow would be better. We were both asleep in minutes.

Well, we were both wrong. The next day started well enough, with a sunny dawn that promised another hot day. It was the first time along the trail that we had woken to warmth, and we enjoyed the novelty of it. We packed up our tents, breakfasted on raisins and Snickers, and set off into the deep woods. By nine o’clock the sun was already high and blazing. Even on hot days, the woods are normally cool, but here the air was heavy and steamy, almost tropical. About two hours after setting off, we came to a lagoon,
about two acres in size, I would guess, and filled with papery reeds, fallen trees, and the bleached torsos of dead trees that were still standing. Dragonflies danced across the surface. Beyond, waiting, rose a titanic heap called Moxie Bald Mountain. But what was of immediate note was that the trail ended, abruptly and disconcertingly, at the water’s edge. Katz and I looked at each other—something wrong here surely. For the first time since Georgia, we wondered if we had lost the trail. (God knows what Chicken John would have made of it.) We retraced our steps a considerable distance, perplexedly studied our map and trail guide, tried to find an alternative way around the pond through the dense and lacerating undergrowth, and finally concluded that we were intended to ford it. On the far shore, perhaps eighty yards away, Katz spied a continuation of trail and a white AT blaze. Clearly we had to wade across.

Katz led the way, barefoot and in boxer shorts, using a long stick like a punting pole to try to pick his way across on a jumble of submerged or half submerged logs. I followed in a similar manner but staying far enough back that I didn’t put my weight on logs he was using. They were covered in a slick moss and tended to bob or rotate alarmingly when stepped on. Twice he nearly toppled over. Finally, about twenty-five yards out, he lost it altogether and plunged with wheeling arms and an unhappy wail into the murky water. He went completely under, came up, went under again, and came up flailing and floundering with such wildness that for a few sincerely mortifying moments I thought he was drowning. The weight of his pack was clearly dragging him backwards and keeping him from gaining an upright position or even successfully keeping his head above water. I was about to drop my pack and plunge in to help when he managed to catch hold of a log and pull himself to a standing position. The water was up to his chest. He clung to the log and heaved visibly with the effort of catching his breath and calming himself down. He had obviously had a fright.

“You all right?” I said.

“Oh, peachy,” he replied. “Just peachy. I don’t know why they
couldn’t have put some crocodiles in here and made a real adventure of it.”

I crept on, and an instant later I tumbled in, too. I had a few surreal, slow-motion moments of observing the world from the unusual perspective of waterline or just below while my hand reached helplessly for a log that was just beyond my grasp—all this in a curious bubbly silence—before Katz sloshed to my assistance, firmly grabbed my shirt, and thrust me back into a world of light and noise and set me on my feet. He was surprisingly strong.

“Thank you,” I gasped.

“Don’t mention it.”

We waded heavily to the far shore, taking it in turns to stumble and help each other up, and sloshed up on to the muddy bank trailing strands of half-rotted vegetation and draining huge volumes of water from our packs. We dumped our loads and sat on the ground, bedraggled and spent, and stared at the lagoon as if it had just played a terrible practical joke on us. I could not remember feeling this tired this early in the day anywhere along the trail. As we sat there, we heard voices, and two young hikers, hippieish and very fit, emerged from the woods behind us. They nodded hellos and looked appraisingly at the water.

“Afraid you gotta wade this one,” Katz said.

One of the hikers looked at him in a not unkindly way. “This your first time hiking up here?” he said.

We nodded.

“Well, I don’t want to discourage you, but mister you’ve only just
started
to get wet.”

With that he and his partner hoisted their packs above their heads, wished us luck, and walked into the water. They waded skillfully across in perhaps thirty seconds—Katz and I had taken as many minutes—and stepped out on the other side, as if from a foot bath, put their dry packs back on, gave a small wave, and disappeared.

Katz took a big thoughtful breath—partly sigh, partly just experimenting with the ability to breathe again. “Bryson, I’m not
trying to be negative—I swear to God I’m not—but I’m not sure I’m cut out for this. Could you lift your pack over your head like that?”

“No.”

And on that premonitory note, we strapped up and set squelchily off up Moxie Bald Mountain.

The Appalachian Trail is the hardest thing I have ever done, and the Maine portion was the hardest part of the Appalachian Trail, and by a factor I couldn’t begin to compute. Partly it was the heat. Maine, that most moderate of states, was having a killer heat wave. In the blistering sun, the shadeless granite pavements of Moxie Bald radiated an ovenlike heat, but even in the woods the air was oppressive and close, as if the trees and foliage were breathing on us with a hot, vegetative breath. We sweated helplessly, copiously, and drank unusual quantities of water, but could never stop being thirsty. Water was sometimes plentiful but more often nonexistent for long stretches so that we were never sure how much we could prudently swallow without leaving ourselves short later on. Even fully stocked, we were short now thanks to Katz’s dumping a bottle. Finally, there were the relentless insects, the unsettling sense of isolation, and the ever-taxing terrain.

Katz responded to this in a way that I had never seen from him. He showed a kind of fixated resolve, as if the only way to deal with this problem was to bull through it and get it over with.

The next morning we came very early to the first of several rivers we would have to ford. It was called Bald Mountain Stream, but in fact it was a river—broad, lively, strewn with boulders. It was exceedingly fetching—it glittered with dancing spangles in the early morning sun and was gorgeously clear—but the current seemed strong and there was no telling from the shore how deep it might be in the middle. Several large streams in the area, my
Appalachian Trail Guide to Maine
noted blithely, “can be difficult or dangerous to cross in high water.” I decided not to share this with Katz.

We took off our shoes and socks, rolled up our pants, and stepped gingerly out into the frigid water. The stones on the bottom were all shapes and sizes—flat, egg-shaped, domed—very hard on the feet, and covered with a filmy green slime that was ludicrously slippery. I hadn’t gone three steps when my feet skated and I fell painfully on my ass. I struggled halfway to my feet but slipped and fell again; struggled up, staggered sideways a yard or two, and pitched helplessly forward, breaking my fall with my hands and ending up in the water doggie style. As I landed, my pack slid forward and my boots, tied to its frame by their laces, were hurled into a kind of contained orbit; they came around the side of the pack in a long, rather pretty trajectory, and came to a halt against my head, then plunked into the water, where they dangled in the current. As I crouched there, breathing evenly and telling myself that one day this would be a memory, two young guys—clones almost of the two we had seen the day before—strode past with confident, splashing steps, packs above their heads.