Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail (38 page)

In Maine we were running into piles of moose scat along the trail seemingly every five minutes. And given the fact that they are vegetarians, it made one wonder at the enormous extent of their plant diet.

I was not surprised one day to come upon a couple moose, nibbling at some plants. One was smaller than the other so I tread carefully, assuming it was a mother-daughter tandem. But since moose are vegetarians, with no interest in human foods, there was none of the trickery or gamesmanship associated with bear-human encounters.

Those two moose had the gentlest dispositions of any creatures I’ve ever seen. However, they seem to be in the grips of a lifelong lassitude and ennui (except, of course, during mating season!). The smaller animals, on the other hand, ranging from bugs and mice to raccoons, are often raring to go on the attack. Bears, which are low to the ground, but impressively wide, seemed to be in the middle.

It’s no radical theory to postulate that bigger and taller humans have to guard against being excessively laid-back and unassertive. Shorter people, on the other hand, are notoriously more aggressive. What I was witnessing there in the wilderness showed this tendency wasn’t just human nature, but the natural order of all living things. When I spouted my highly unscientific theory to Swinger at the campsite that evening, he replied with amusement, “Thank you, Professor Skywalker Darwin.”

Fred Flintstone, a fifty-eight-year-old ex-military serviceman from New York, and Steady Eddie, a sixty-eight-year-old from Minnesota, had been paired up since North Carolina. That, in fact, was where I had passed them. I had never expected either of them to make it this far, but they had combined great discipline with an innovative transportation arrangements to facilitate slackpacking.

However, this strategy became inoperative in New Hampshire and Maine, which were so isolated, with infrequent road crossings. They made up for it with great determination. Each morning they would be on the trail by seven o’clock and they took few breaks until reaching their daily destination. Steady Eddie would then quickly eat and get straight into his sleeping bag, where he stayed approximately thirteen hours per day. He spent the remaining eleven hours walking. This was in keeping with Thomas Edison’s philosophy that “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

Fred Flintstone, on the other hand, was more garrulous. His military-like daytime discipline waned dramatically when it came to evening campsite conversation. At the Poplar Ridge Lean-To, on a cool, stormy fall night in the Maine wilderness, Fred Flintstone found the perfect audience to relive the late 1960s, when he was a serviceman in steamy, humid South Vietnam. And it was the steamy nightlife he remembered so fondly. “We’d go to downtown Saigon for a steam-blow and a bath job,” he said.

“Didn’t you say that backwards?” Swinger asked confused.

“No, goddammit,” Fred Flintstone said insistently. “That’s what we called it, and that’s what it was.” “I always wondered why the U.S. stayed in Vietnam so long,” I said.

“And get this,” he enthused, “this one named Coop-Coop, with green teeth, said I was the biggest tipper in the whole damn American army.”

As the old saying goes, there is no fool quite like an old fool. It began to look like this might go on all night until Swinger finally said, “We’ve got some big climbs ahead tomorrow. I don’t have any military training, and need some sleep.”

I stayed on Swinger’s heels the next day for a hellish eleven miles over jagged terrain, until we finally came to the Sugarloaf Mountain Side Trail. “There’s a summit house up there where hikers can sleep,” he said.

“And get this,” he added in an awestruck tone, “you can see Mount Katahdin up there sometimes.” My feet were pleading for mercy and there was no campsite nearby, so I followed him straight up the face of this steep, rocky side trail.

Sugarloaf Mountain is Maine’s second-highest mountain and biggest ski resort. We located a bubbling crystal clear, mountain spring on the way up, and finally arrived at what looked like a perfect cone peak. Fortunately, we quickly spotted the summit house and hurried over in what were almost unbearable wind gusts. The mood inside was glum as powerful gusts of wind mixed with a U-Boat silence.

“Hey, come look at this,” one hiker said, “That must be Katahdin.” A whole panorama of mountains lay before us, and indeed a distant peak silhouetted in the far distance seemed to distinguish itself as we stood there silently at dusk. It was a tantalizing glimpse, even if I wasn’t entirely convinced that it was Mount Katahdin (“The Greatest Mountain”), still 180 miles away, that we were ogling.

Fred Flintstone and Steady Eddie arrived, but the frigid conditions inside strongly discouraged any repeat of Fred Fintstone’s epic tales. The howling wind tore at the windowpanes, which made sleep difficult. I set up my tent behind a wall to gain some protection from the cold draft, but the fierce wind shook at the window panes all night. We were all up at first light the following morning, and my tent was soaked from the condensation created by warmer air colliding with cold air. We filed out silently, and I was quite happy to get back below tree line.

A couple days later the trail ascended three thousand feet on the Bigelow Range. Colonel Bigelow had been part of Benedict Arnold’s expedition that attacked the British along this route during the revolutionary war. This was, of course, during Benedict Arnold’s good ol’ days as a red-blooded American patriot. Had they succeeded in this attack Canada might today be part of the United States.

My emotions were mixed. The whole AT had started off as an intense shout of freedom, and it had been anything but a disappointment. But at some point a person’s appetite for the new begins to flag, and I had just about reached it. A profound fatigue greater than could be remedied by a mere good night’s sleep was setting in. At this point I just wanted to make it all the way.

That night I was alone, and had to hike a half-mile off the trail in tricky terrain to find a suitably un-rocky campsite. I tried to hang a bear line, but ended up failing miserably. This meant keeping my food in the tent with me all evening, never a soothing prospect. But my biggest worry turned out not to be hungry bears, but high winds. The wind howled and shook the forest all evening as branches fell off trees, bouncing off other branches lower down. I lay cowering in my tent, completely exposed to a tree blow-down, of which I noticed there had been many.

Inevitably, I began the next day in low spirits. But then I arrived at the bottom of Little Bigelow Mountain. This was the end of Warren Doyle’s Section Three of the AT, which he had labeled as the toughest of the four sections. That was good news. Better yet, as I followed the trail down a dirt road in isolated, central Maine I noticed a big camper with a picnic table set up on a side road. I gnash my teeth now trying to remember his name, but he was a member of the well-known “Billville Hiking Club.” He invited me over for a picnic.

“How many hamburgers would you like?” he asked heartily. “I’ll cook ‘em on my grill for you.”

“One would be great,” I said.

“One,” he said surprised. “I’ve never had a hiker eat just one.”

Even though I had just eaten lunch 1.5 miles back, the burger had a heartiness and flavor that few besides thru-hikers and animals could appreciate. And there was just something about trail food that never quite hit the spot (“like the soup made from the shadow of a crow that starved to death”). After I devoured that burger and meekly asked for a second, he replied, “There you go, and try some of this other stuff, please.” Sure enough, the table was decked out with pasta salad, desserts, candy bars, and soft drinks. He even had Advil, aspirin, and toilet paper for hikers to take. Soon, Stitch, the Joy Machine, and Foamer arrived with ineffable looks at what lay before them.

I finally headed off with a renewed vigor that, honest to God, lasted for a full day and a half.

Everybody was in buoyant spirits at the shelter that early autumn evening, and most went swimming in the nearby lake. The hot topic at the Lean-To was Warren Doyle’s entry in the trail register from a couple weeks before.

West Carry Pond Lean-To—mile 1,911

9-01-05: Five Myths
—
Warren Doyle

1. Iraq has weapons of mass destruction
   .
   
2. Saddam was connected to 9-11
   .
   
3. Bull moose like to become intimate with female hikers during their menstrual cycles
   .
   
4. Masturbation leads to blindness
   .
   
5. The Kennebec River is unfordable at all times
   .
   

“That’s the most entertaining journal entry I’ve read in two thousand miles,” I exclaimed.

But fully imbued with the anti-Doyle trendiness pervading the younger hikers, Stitch spoke for the group, “That guy is nuts.” And looking at me he added, “You’re crazy to listen to a word he says.”

“Get a life, Stitch,” I responded.

Below the five myths Warren had gone on to list ten steps for fording the Kennebec River, all of which we had discussed in his class. A woman had died several years back attempting to ford the Kennebec, and there had been several other near drownings. Finally, the ATC, whether for humanitarian or liability reasons, had decided to provide a ferry with a blaze painted on it to carry hikers across the river. But the fiercely independent Doyle had said, “Remember, if you take the canoe, you haven’t hiked the entire trail.” The woman who drowned had had her backpack strapped on tightly, and was unable to remove it as she was swept up by the current. Warren had demonstrated to our class how to carry our backpacks with straps loosened while fording.

I had been thinking about doing it for some time. But the first step Warren had listed was to be at the shore by seven o’clock, when you’re fresh and the water from upstream hasn’t been released yet. The largest dam in the Northeast is a few miles up the Kennebec from where the AT crosses it, and water is released at irregular intervals. After each release the water levels and current increase rapidly. But we were thirteen and-a-half miles away from the Kennebec that evening, which meant we wouldn’t arrive at the shores of the Kennebec until two or three o’clock the following afternoon at best.

The trail was abuzz the next day as we approached the river. Unfortunately, my statement in support of Doyle’s journal entry and remarks to the effect that I might consider trying it under the right circumstances, had been turned into bold claims that I would.

At the lean-to, 3.5 miles before the Kennebec, was the following entry:

Pierce Pond Lean-To—mile 1,921

9-16-05: High Noon
.
meets the Kennebec.
—
The Riddler