A Walk in the Woods (36 page)

Oh, and by the way, the loons are disappearing everywhere because their lakes are dying from acid rain.

I had a rotten night, of course, and was up before five and back on the trail at first light. I continued on north in the direction I guessed Katz had gone, but with the nagging thought that I was plunging ever farther into the Hundred Mile Wilderness—not perhaps the best direction to go if he was somewhere nearby and in trouble. There was a certain incidental disquiet at the thought that I was on my own in the middle of nowhere—a disquiet briefly but vividly heightened when I stumbled in my haste on the return descent to the deep, nameless valley and came within a trice of falling fifty long feet, with a messy bounce at the bottom. I hoped I was doing the right thing.

Even flat out it would take me three days, perhaps four, to reach Abol Bridge and the campground. By the time I alerted authorities, Katz would have been missing for four or five days. On the other hand, if I turned now and went back the way we had come, I could be in Monson by the following afternoon. What I really needed was to meet somebody coming south who could tell me if they had seen Katz, but there was no one out on the trail. I looked at my watch. Of course there wasn’t. It was only a little after six in the morning. There was a shelter at Chairback Gap, six miles farther on. I would reach it by eight or so. With luck, there might still be someone there. I pressed on with more care and a queasy uncertainty.

I clambered back over the pinnacle of Fourth Mountain—much harder with a pack—and into another wooded valley beyond. Four miles after leaving Cloud Pond, I came to a tiny stream, barely worthy of the term—really just a slick of moist mud. Speared to a branch beside the trail, in an intentionally prominent place, was an empty pack of Old Gold cigarettes. Katz didn’t smoke much, but
he always carried a pack of Old Golds. In the mud by a fallen log were three cigarette butts. He had obviously waited here. So he was alive and hadn’t left the trail, and clearly had come this way. I felt immeasurably better. At least I was going in the right direction. As long as he stuck to the trail, I was bound eventually to overtake him.

I found him four hours after setting off, sitting on a rock by the turnoff for West Chairback Pond, head inclined to the sun as if working on his tan. He was extensively scratched and muddy, and wildly bedraggled, but otherwise looked OK. He was of course delighted to see me.

“Bryson, you old mountain man, you’re a welcome sight. Where have you been?”

“I was wondering the same of you.”

“Guess I missed the last watering hole?”

I nodded.

He nodded, too. “Knew I had, of course. Soon as I got down to the bottom of that big cliff, I thought, ‘Shit, this can’t be right.’”

“Why didn’t you come back?”

“I don’t know. I got it in mind somehow that you must have pushed on. I was real thirsty. I think I might have been a little confused—a little addled, as you might say. I was real thirsty.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well, I pushed on and kept thinking I had to come to water sooner or later, and eventually I came to a mud slick—”

“Where you left the cigarette pack?”

“You saw it? I’m so proud. Yeah, well, I soaked up some water there with my bandanna, because I remembered that’s what Fess Parker did once on the
Davy Crockett
show.”

“How very enterprising.”

He accepted the compliment with a nod. “That took about an hour, and then I waited another hour for you and had a couple of smokes, and then it was getting dark so I put my tent up, ate a Slim Jim, and went to bed. Then this morning I sponged up a little more water with my bandanna and I came on here. There’s a real
nice pond just down there, so I thought I’d wait here where there was water and hope that you’d come along eventually. I didn’t think you’d leave me up here on purpose, but you’re such a walking
daydream
I could just imagine you getting all the way to Katahdin before you noticed I wasn’t with you.” He put on an exaggerated accent. “‘Oh, I say,
delightful
view—don’t you agree, Stephen? Stephen…? Stephen…? Now where the
deuce
has he got to?’” He gave me a familiar smile. “So I’m real glad to see you.”

“How’d you get so scratched up?”

He looked at his arm, which was covered in a zigzag of dried blood. “Oh that? It’s nothing.”

“What do you mean it’s nothing? It looks like you’ve been doing surgery on yourself.”

“Well, I didn’t want to alarm you, but I also got kind of lost.”

“How?”

“Oh, between losing you and coming upon the mud slick, I tried to get to a lake I saw from the mountain.”

“Stephen, you didn’t.”

“Well, I was real thirsty, you know, and it didn’t look too far. So I plunged off into the woods. Not real smart, right?”

“No.”

“Yeah, well, I learned that real fast because I hadn’t gone more than half a mile before I was totally lost. I mean totally lost. It’s weird, you know, because you’re thinking all you’ve got to do is go downhill to the water and come back the same way, and that shouldn’t be too tough as long as you pay attention. But the thing is, Bryson, there’s nothing to pay attention
to
out there. It’s just one big woods. So when I realized I didn’t have the faintest idea where I was I thought, ‘OK, well, I got lost by going downhill, so I’d better go back up.’ But suddenly there’s a
lot
of uphills, and a lot of downhills too, and it’s real confusing. So I went up and up and up until I
knew
I’d gone a lot farther than I’d come, and then I thought, ‘Well, Stephen, you stupid piece of shit’—’cause I was getting a little cross with myself by this time, to tell you the truth—I
thought, ‘you must have gone too far, you jackass,’ so I want back down a ways, and
that
didn’t work, so then I tried going sideways for a while and—well, you get the picture.”

“You should never leave the trail, Stephen.”

“Oh, now there’s a timely piece of advice, Bryson. Thank you so much. That’s like telling somebody who’s died in a crash, ‘Drive safely now.’”

“Sorry.”

“Forget it. I think maybe I’m still a little, you know, unsettled. I thought I was done for. Lost, no water—and you with the chocolate chip cookies.”

“So how did you get back to the trail?”

“It was a miracle, I swear to God. Just when I was about to lie down and give myself to the wolves and bobcats, I look up and there’s a white blaze on a tree and I look down and I’m
standing
on the AT. At the mudslick, as a matter of fact. I sat down and had three smokes one after the other, just to calm myself down, and then I thought, ‘Shit, I bet Bryson’s walked by here while I’ve been blundering around in the woods, and he’ll never come back because he’s already checked this section of trail.’ And then I began to worry that I never would see you again. So I really
was
glad when you turned up. To tell you the truth, I’ve never been so glad to see another person in my whole life, and that includes some naked women.”

There was something in his look.

“You want to go home?” I asked.

He thought for a moment. “Yeah. I do.”

“Me, too.”

So we decided to leave the endless trail and stop pretending we were mountain men because we weren’t. At the bottom of Chairback Mountain, four miles farther on, there was a dirt logging road. We didn’t know where it went other than that it must go somewhere. An arrow on the edge of my map pointed south to Katahdin Iron Works, site of an improbable nineteenth-century factory in the woods and now a state historical monument. According to my Trail Guide there was public parking at the old iron
works, so there must be a road out. At the bottom of the mountain, we watered up at a brook that ran past, and then started off along the logging road. We hadn’t been walking more than three or four minutes when there was a noise in the near distance. We turned to see a cloud of dust heading our way led by an ancient pickup truck moving at great speed. As it approached I instinctively put my thumb out, and to my astonishment it stopped about fifty feet past us.

We ran up to the driver’s window. There were two guys in the cab, both in hardhats and dirty from work—loggers obviously.

“Where you going?” asked the driver.

“Anywhere,” I said. “Anywhere but here.”

S
o we didn’t see Katahdin. We didn’t even see Katahdin Iron Works, except as a glimpsed blur because we shot past it at about seventy miles an hour on the bounciest, most terrifyingly hasty ride I ever hope to have in the back of a pickup truck on a dirt road.

We held on for dear life in the open back, lifting our feet to let chainsaws and other destructive-looking implements slide past—first this way, then that—while the driver propelled us through the flying woods with reckless zest, bouncing over potholes with such vigor as to throw us inches into the air, and negotiating curves as if in startled afterthought. In consequence we alighted at the little community of Milo, twenty miles to the south, on unsteady legs and blinking at the suddenness with which our circumstances had changed. One moment we had been in the heart of wilderness, facing at least a two-day hike to civilization; now we were in the forecourt of a gas station on the edge of a remote little town. We watched the pickup truck depart, then took our bearings.

“You want to get a Coke?” I said to Katz. There was a machine by the gas station door.

He considered for a moment. “No,” he said. “Maybe later.”

It was unlike Katz not to fall upon soft drinks and junk food with exuberant lust when the opportunity presented itself, but I believe I understood. There is always a measure of shock when you leave the trail and find yourself parachuted into a world of comfort and choice, but it was different this time. This time it was permanent. We were hanging up our hiking boots. From now on, there would
always
be Coke, and soft beds and showers and whatever else we wanted. There was no urgency now. It was a strangely subduing notion.

Milo had no motel, but we were directed to a place called Bishop’s Boarding-house, a large old white house on a handsome street of elegant trees, wide lawns, substantial old houses—the kind of homes where the garages were originally carriage houses with quarters upstairs for the servants.

We were received with warmth and bustling kindliness by the proprietor, Joan Bishop, a cheery, snowy-haired lady with a hearty Down East accent who came to the door wringing floury hands on an apron and waved us and our grubby packs into the spotless interior without a flicker of dismay.

The house smelled wholesomely of fresh-baked pastry, garden tomatoes, and air undisturbed by fans or air-conditioners—old-fashioned summer smells. She called us “you boys” and acted as if she had been expecting us for days, possibly years.

“Goodness me, just look at you boys!” she clucked in astonishment and delight. “You look as if you’ve been wrestling bears!”

I suppose we must have looked a sight. Katz was liberally covered in blood from his fraught stumble through the woods, and there was tiredness all over us, even in our eyes.

“Now you boys go up and get yourselves cleaned up and come down to the porch and I’ll have a nice jug of iced tea waiting for you. Or would you rather lemonade? Never mind, I’ll make both. Now go on!” And off she bustled.

“Thanks, Mom,” we muttered in dazzled and grateful unison.

Katz was instantly transformed—so much so that he felt perhaps a trifle too much at home. I was wearily taking some things
from my pack when he suddenly appeared in my room without knocking and hastily shut the door behind him, looking flummoxed. Only a towel, clutched not quite adequately around his waist, preserved his hefty modesty.

“Little old lady,” he said in amazement.

“Pardon?”

“Little old lady in the hallway,” he said again. “It is a guest house, Stephen.”

“Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that,” he said. He peeked out the door and disappeared without elaboration.

When we had showered and changed, we joined Mrs. Bishop on the screened porch, where we slumped heavily and gratefully in the big old porch chairs, legs thrust out, the way you do when it’s hot and you’re tired. I was hoping that Mrs. Bishop would tell us that she was forever putting up hikers who had been foiled by the Hundred Mile Wilderness, but in fact we were the first she could recall in that category.

“I read in the paper the other day that a man from Portland hiked Katahdin to celebrate his seventy-eighth birthday,” she said conversationally.

That made me feel immensely better, as you can imagine.

“I expect I’ll be ready to try again by then,” Katz said, running a finger along the line of scratch on his forearm.

“Well, it’ll still be there, boys, when you’re ready for it,” she said. She was right, of course.

We dined in town at a popular restaurant called Angie’s and afterwards, with the evening warm and congenial, went for a stroll. Milo was a sweetly hopeless town—commercially forlorn, far from anywhere and barely alive, but curiously likeable. It had some nice residential streets and an impressive fire station. Perhaps it was just that it was our last night away from home. Anyway, it seemed to suit us.

“So do you feel bad about leaving the trail?” Katz asked after a time.

I thought for a moment, unsure. I had come to realize that I
didn’t have any feelings towards the AT that weren’t confused and contradictory. I was weary of the trail, but still strangely in its thrall; found the endless slog tedious but irresistible; grew tired of the boundless woods but admired their boundlessness; enjoyed the escape from civilization and ached for its comforts. I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off. “I don’t know,” I said. “Yes and no, I guess. What about you?”

He nodded. “Yes and no.”

We walked along for some minutes, lost in small thoughts.

“Anyway, we did it,” Katz said at last, looking up. He noted my quizzical expression. “Hiked Maine, I mean.”