A Walk in the Woods (16 page)

When news of Shaffer’s hike leaked out, it attracted a good deal of attention—newspapers came to interview him, the
National Geographic
ran a long article—and the AT underwent a modest revival. But hiking has always been a marginal pursuit in America, and within a few years the AT was once more largely forgotten except among a few diehards and eccentrics. In the early 1960s a plan was put forward to extend the Blue Ridge Parkway, a scenic highway, south from the Smokies by building over the southern portion of the AT. That plan failed (on grounds of cost, not because of any particular outcry), but elsewhere the trail was nibbled away or reduced to a rutted, muddy track through zones of commerce. In 1958, as we’ve seen, twenty miles were lopped off the
southern end from Mount Oglethorpe to Springer Mountain. By the mid-1960s it looked to any prudent observer as if the AT would survive only as scattered fragments—in the Smokies and Shenandoah National Park, from Vermont across to Maine, as forlorn relic strands in the odd state park, but otherwise buried under shopping malls and housing developments. Much of the trail crossed private lands, and new owners often revoked informal rights-of-way agreements, forcing confused and hasty relocations onto busy highways or other public roads—hardly the tranquil wildnerness experience envisioned by Benton MacKaye. Once again, the AT looked doomed.

Then, in a timely piece of fortuitousness, America got a secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, who actually liked hiking. Under his direction, a National Trails System Act was passed in 1968. The law was ambitious and far-reaching—and largely never realized. It envisioned 25,000 miles of new hiking trails across America, most of which were never built. However, it did produce the Pacific Crest Trail and secured the future of the AT by making it a de facto national park. It also provided funds—$170 million since 1978—for the purchase of private lands to provide a wilderness buffer alongside it. Now nearly all the trail passes through protected wilderness. Just twenty-one miles of it—less than 1 percent of the total—are on public roads, mostly on bridges and where it passes through towns.

In the half century since Shaffer’s hike, about 4,000 others have repeated the feat. There are two kinds of end-to-end hikers—those who do it in a single season, known as “thru-hikers,” and those who do it in chunks, known as “section hikers.” The record for the longest section hike is forty-six years. The Appalachian Trail Conference doesn’t recognize speed records, on the grounds that that isn’t in the spirit of the enterprise, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. In the 1980s a man named Ward Leonard, carrying a full pack and with no support crew, hiked the trail in sixty days—an incredible feat when you consider that it would take you about five days to drive an equivalent distance. In May 1991, an “ultra-runner” named David Horton and an endurance hiker named Scott
Grierson set off within two days of each other. Horton had a network of support crews waiting at road crossings and other strategic points and so needed to carry nothing but a bottle of water. Each evening he was taken by car to a motel or private home. He averaged 38.3 miles a day, with ten or eleven hours of running. Grierson, meanwhile, merely walked, but he did so for as much as eighteen hours a day. Horton finally overtook Grierson in New Hampshire on the thirty-ninth day, reaching his goal in fifty-two days, nine hours. Grierson came in a couple of days later.

All kinds of people have completed thru-hikes. One man hiked it in his eighties. Another did it on crutches. A blind man named Bill Irwin hiked the trail with a seeing-eye dog, falling down an estimated 5,000 times in the process. Probably the most famous, certainly the most written about, of all thru-hikers was Emma “Grandma” Gatewood, who successfully hiked the trail twice in her late sixties despite being eccentric, poorly equipped, and a danger to herself. (She was forever getting lost.) My own favorite, however, is a guy named Woodrow Murphy from Pepperell, Massachusetts, who did a thru-hike in the summer of 1995. I would have liked him anyway, just for being called Woodrow, but I especially admired him when I read that he weighed 350 pounds and was doing the hike to lose weight. In his first week on the trail, he managed just five miles a day, but he persevered, and by August, when he reached his home state, he was up to a dozen miles a day. He had lost fifty-three pounds (a trifle, all things considered) and at last report was considering doing it all over again the following year.

A signficant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can’t stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder. In fact, the more you read about thru-hikers the more you end up being filled with a kind of wonder. Take Bill Irwin, the blind man. After his hike he said: “I never enjoyed the hiking part. It was something I felt compelled to do. It wasn’t my choice.” Or David Horton, the ultra-runner who set the speed record in 1991. By his own account, he became “a mental and emotional wreck” and spent most of the period crossing Maine
weeping copiously. (Well, then why
do
it?) Even good old Earl Shaffer ended up as a recluse in the backwoods of Pennsylvania. I don’t mean to suggest that hiking the AT drives you potty, just that it takes a certain kind of person to do it.

And how did I feel about giving up the quest when a granny in sneakers, a human beachball named Woodrow, and over 3,990 others had made it to Katahdin? Well, pretty good, as a matter of fact. I was still going to hike the Appalachian Trail; I just wasn’t going to hike all of it. Katz and I had already walked half a million steps, if you can believe it. It didn’t seem altogether essential to do the other 4.5 million to get the idea of the thing.

So we rode to Knoxville with our comical cabdriver, acquired a rental car at the airport, and found ourselves, shortly after midday, heading north out of Knoxville through a half-remembered world of busy roads, dangling traffic signals, vast intersections, huge signs, and acre upon acre of shopping malls, gas stations, discount stores, muffler clinics, car lots, and all the rest. Even after a day in Gatlinburg, the transition was dazzling. I remember reading once how some Stone Age Indians from the Brazilian rain forest with no knowledge or expectation of a world beyond the jungle were taken to Sao Paulo or Rio, and when they saw what it contained—the buildings, the cars, the passing airplanes—and how thoroughly at variance it was with their own simple lives, they wet themselves, lavishly and in unison. I believe I had some idea how they felt.

It is such a strange contrast. When you’re on the AT, the forest is your universe, infinite and entire. It is all you experience day after day. Eventually it is about all you can imagine. You are aware, of course, that somewhere over the horizon there are mighty cities, busy factories, crowded freeways, but here in this part of the country, where woods drape the landscape for as far as the eye can see, the forest rules. Even the little towns like Franklin and Hiawassee and even Gatlinburg are just way stations scattered helpfully through the great cosmos of woods.

But come off the trail, properly off, and drive somewhere, as we did now, and you realize how magnificently deluded you have been. Here, the mountains and woods were just backdrop—familiar,
known, nearby, but no more consequential or noticed than the clouds that scudded across their ridgelines. Here the real business was up close and on top of you: gas stations, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, Dunkin Donuts, Blockbuster Videos, a ceaseless unfolding pageant of commercial hideousness.

Even Katz was unnerved by it. “Jeez, it’s ugly,” he breathed in wonder, as if he had never witnessed such a thing before. I looked past him, along the line of his shoulder, to a vast shopping mall with a prairie-sized parking lot, and agreed. It was horrible. And then, lavishly and in unison, we wet ourselves.

T
here is a painting by Asher Brown Durand called “Kindred Spirits,” which is often reproduced in books when the subject turns to the American landscape in the nineteenth century. Painted in 1849, it shows two men standing on a rock ledge in the Catskills in one of those sublime lost world settings that look as if they would take an expedition to reach, though the two figures in the painting are dressed, incongruously, as if for the office, in long coats and plump cravats. Below them, in a shadowy chasm, a stream dashes through a jumble of boulders. Beyond, glimpsed through a canopy of leaves, is a long view of gorgeously forbidding blue mountains. To right and left, jostling into frame, are disorderly ranks of trees, which immediately vanish into consuming darkness.

I can’t tell you how much I would like to step into that view. The scene is so manifestly untamed, so full of an impenetrable beyond, as to present a clearly foolhardy temptation. You would die out there for sure—shredded by a cougar or thudded with a tomahawk or just left to wander to a stumbling, confounded death. You can see that at a glance. But never mind. Already you are
studying the foreground for a way down to the stream over the steep rocks and wondering if that notch ahead will get you through to the neighboring valley. Farewell, my friends. Destiny calls. Don’t wait supper.

Nothing like that view exists now, of course. Perhaps it never did. Who knows how much license these romantic johnnies took with their stabbing paintbrushes? Who, after all, is going to struggle with an easel and campstool and box of paints to some difficult overlook, on a hot July afternoon, in a wilderness filled with danger, and not paint something exquisite and grand?

But even if the preindustrialized Appalachians were only half as wild and dramatic as in the paintings of Durand and others like him, they must have been something to behold. It is hard to imagine now how little known, how full of possibility, the world beyond the eastern seaboard once was. When Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark into the wilderness, he confidently expected them to find woolly mammoths and mastodons. Had dinosaurs been known, he would almost certainly have asked them to bring him home a triceratops.

The first people to venture deep into the woods from the East (the Indians, of course, had got there perhaps as much as 20,000 years before them) weren’t looking for prehistoric creatures or passages to the West or new lands to settle. They were looking for plants. America’s botanical possibilities excited Europeans inordinately, and there was both glory and money to be made out in the woods. The eastern woods teemed with flora unknown to the Old World, and there was a huge eagerness, from scientists and amateur enthusiasts alike, to get a piece of it. Imagine if tomorrow a spaceship found a jungle growing beneath the gassy clouds of Venus. Think what Bill Gates, say, would pay for some tendriled, purply lobed piece of Venusian exotica to put in a pot in his greenhouse. That was the rhododendron in the eighteenth century—and the camellia, the hydrangea, the wild cherry, the rudbeckia, the azalea, the aster, the ostrich fern, the catalpa, the spice bush, the Venus flytrap, the Virginia creeper, the euphorbia. These and hundreds more were collected in the American woods,
shipped across the ocean to England and France and Russia, and received with greedy keenness and trembling fingers.

It started with John Bartram (actually, it started with tobacco, but in a scientific sense it started with John Bartram), a Pennsylvania Quaker, born in 1699, who grew interested in botany after reading a book on the subject and began sending seeds and cuttings to a fellow Quaker in London. Encouraged to seek out more, he embarked on increasingly ambitious journeys into the wilderness, sometimes traveling over a thousand miles through the rugged mountains. Though he was entirely self-taught, never learned Latin, and had scant understanding of Linnaean classifications, he was a prize plant collector, with an uncanny knack for finding and recognizing unknown species. Of the 800 plants discovered in America in the colonial period, Bartram was responsible for about a quarter. His son William found many more.

Before the century was out, the eastern woods were fairly crawling with botanists—Peter Kalm, Lars Yungstroem, Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz, John Fraser, André Michaux, Thomas Nuttall, John Lyon, and others pretty much beyond counting. There were so many people out there, hunting so competetively, that it is often not possible to say with any precision who discovered what. Depending on which source you consult, Fraser found either 44 new plants or 215, or something in between. One of his uncontested discoveries was the fragrant southern balsam, the Fraser fir, so characteristic of the high ranges of North Carolina and Tennessee, but it bears his name only because he scrambled to the top of Clingmans Dome just ahead of his keen rival Michaux.

These people covered astonishing sweeps, for considerable periods. One of the younger Bartram’s expeditions lasted over five years and plunged him so deeply into the woods that he was long given up for lost; when he emerged, he discovered that America had been at war with Britain for a year and he had lost his patrons. Michaux’s voyages took him from Florida to Hudson’s Bay; the heroic Nuttall ventured as far as the shores of Lake Superior, going much of the way on foot for want of funds.

They often collected in prodigious, not to say rapacious, quantities. Lyon pulled 3,600
Magnolia macrophylla
saplings from a single hillside, and thousands of plants more, including a pretty red thing that left him in a fevered delirium and covered “almost in one continued blister all over” his body; he had found, it turned out, poison sumac. In 1765, John Bartram discovered a particularly lovely camellia,
Franklinia altamaha;
already rare, it was hunted to extinction in just twenty-five years. Today it survives only in cultivation—thanks entirely to Bartram. Rafinesque-Schmaltz, meanwhile, spent seven years wandering through the Appalachians, didn’t discover much, but brought in 50,000 seeds and cuttings.

How they managed it is a wonder. Every plant had to be recorded and identified, its seeds collected or a cutting taken; if the latter, it had to be potted up in stiff paper or sailcloth, kept watered and tended, and somehow transported through a trackless wilderness to civilization. The privations and perils were constant and exhausting. Bears, snakes, and panthers abounded. Michaux’s son was severely mauled on one expedition when a bear charged him from the trees. (Black bears seem to have been notably more ferocious in former times; nearly every journal has accounts of sudden, unprovoked attacks. It seems altogether likely that eastern bears have become more retiring because they have learned to associate humans with guns.) Indians, too, were commonly hostile—though just as often bemused at finding European gentlemen carefully collecting and taking away plants that grew in natural abundance—and then there were all the diseases of the woods, like malaria and yellow fever. “I can’t find one [friend] that will bear the fatigue to accompany me in my peregrinations,” John Bartram complained wearily in a letter to his English patron. Hardly surprising.