Appalachain Trail: Neel's Gap to Max Patch

iv.

The rains blew back in that night, but never reached the deluge proportions of the previous night. By morning, my things had begun to dry out a little. I started out quite sure that I would be running into Tortoise again later on in the day. I wondered how he had fared walking in the dark. It was something that I wouldn’t even consider, for fear that I’d walk off the trail without realizing it and end up lost in the woods.

About mid-day, I passed a sign for a settlers’ cemetery about 0.5 miles off the Trail. I decided to go over and check it out. In the bright afternoon light, much of the loneliness had been scrubbed out. No one visited the place to see the people buried there, but it’d become an attraction for its antiquity. Some kind of boy scout troupe was there, unwrapping sandwiches under a pavilion. I stood there for a moment, trying to concentrate on the crooked gravestones and imagine what life had been like for the bodies lying under the soil. There was too much mirth from the scouts; I could only listen to their conversations and after all the silence of the woods that morning, all their voices were overwhelming.

I caught up with Tortoise in the late afternoon, not too far before the Blue Mountain Shelter. I had been planning on stopping there for the night. It was an 18-mile walk from where I’d started that morning, but as I drew up to the shelter, it felt too early to stop. There was another campsite marked about 4 miles down the trail. The hike didn’t look too bad and Tortoise, as usual, was planning on walking into the night anyway. I decided to keep going.

The impulse to keep going just a little further was my greatest obstacle to overcome while on the Trail. Unless I arrived just before dark, I always wanted to keep walking just a little farther. When I kept going, I almost always ended up feeling rushed, like I had to hurry up and reach my destination before dark and usually without any dinner, this feeling was exaggerated to the point of anxiety. Every time I made the mistake of pushing on, I’d wake up in the morning declaring that I wouldn’t do it again, yet, like any tendency, it was a mistake I was to repeat over and over until I got to Maine.

The difficulty with the Appalachian Trail is that you are going somewhere. Most walks in the woods have no such concrete destination. The purpose is to amble a little, to contemplate, to see, to wonder and then to exit. On the AT, one is walking toward a place that is more than 2,000 miles away. It’s hard not to feel like there’s a quota of miles that needs to be met if one expects to ever reach the end. At the beginning, it feels like the quota needs to be met because one is still so far away; it’s like there’s something to catch up to. Further down the trail, the quota is important because you’re nearing the end and don’t want to stop or slow down too much.

I wasn’t sure how everyone else walked the trail, but I felt like I was passing a lot of people. I didn’t walk particularly fast, but I didn’t stop much and walked from dawn to dusk. When Tortoise and I passed the Blue Mountain Shelter, a guy was standing just off the trail; he’d just finished setting up his tent.

“Where’re you guys headed?” He asked.

“I think we’re going to push to the next campsite. It’s about four miles from here.” I said, looking around at the crowded shelter area, thinking I was glad to not be camping here where I’d be so close to so many other tents.

Our interlocutor asked us where we’d come from that day and when I told him I’d camped just on the other side of Neel’s Gap, he stammered out an incredulous. “No! Already!?” Slightly startled by his incredulousness, I just shrugged my shoulders. He continued. “You can’t do so many miles at the beginning! You’re never going to make it. You’ll wear yourself out.” I told him I felt fine; if anything, I had too much energy at the end of the day. I was finding difficult to relax; it was easier to just keep walking. He continued his rant, saying he’d already hurt a knee pushing for too many miles and that he was now taking it easy until it felt better. For our edification, he also outlined a cautionary tale of a hiker who’d tried to do too many miles at the beginning and ended up in a ditch with a torn ACL or something.

We kept walking, but I felt unnerved; the guy’s warning was hanging over me like some kind of spell. Was I pushing myself too hard? I felt fine, but maybe I wasn’t as in tune with my body as I thought. As we came down the mountain, into a gap, I pulled ahead of Tortoise. It was starting to get dark. The familiar anxious feeling descended with the twilight, only now it was twined with the notion that I might be straining my body beyond the limits of endurance. As I began the climb out of the gap, in the deepening twilight, I started to feel exhausted, but I couldn’t tell if it was psychosomatic, brought on by Mr. Worry up there on Blue Mountain.

I was cheered to find my first article of trail magic, a plastic bag of granola bars with a note from a 2014 thru-hiker named Crush. Buoyed up by the kindness of another, I continued up the hill into the camping area, glad that I’d gone the extra miles. I felt tired and hungry, but fulfilled.

As I approached the camping area, I began to hear a rhythmic banging, like two logs being knocked together. A dog began to bark. I felt like I was walking into someone’s backyard rather than a camping area. I rounded a bend in the trail, the banging sound grew louder and changed into a clearer chopping. Between the trees, I noticed a man. He looked naked. He looked furious, chopping away at something I hoped was a log. With no other option, I kept walking toward him. The sound of barking dogs grew louder.

Just before I reached the man, a white pitbull lunged out from a stand of pine trees. The man dropped his axe and caught the dog. It was a fearsome tableau, still glistening from his exertions, the guy was wearing nothing more than a skimpy pair of athletic shorts. His legs, arms and torso were swollen with juiced-looking muscles. The pitbull strained barking at his leash. The axe, so recently used, was gleaming in the last rays of the sun from where it was buried in a tree. From the west, a storm seemed to be approaching.

I greeted the body builder, half expecting him to growl in reply. He tied up the dog and returned to his labor, chopping at the tree like he owed it some fearsome vendetta. Woodchips sprayed up with each *thwack* like gouts of blood.

I walked into the campsite and saw a huge fire ring, a tarp covering a large pile of wood and several other tarps covering sleeping pads and bags. There were a few other pitbulls tied up, at their bark, several men emerged. None of them wore shirts. They were all top-heavy with muscle, a few of them had mohawks hacked out of their hair. The scene would’ve been terrifying had it not been so confusing.

I tried to feign total indifference, like I saw sweaty hulks out in the woods all the time. “You guys mind if I camp here?” I tried to act like a dad who’s just come home from work and is in no mood for extraneous talk, it was the only defense I could think of.

The barbarians told me they didn’t mind if I camped. I set up at the edge of their encampment, wondering what it’d be like when they came for me in the middle of the night: the sound of the tent ripping, the meaty hands grabbing tufts of my sleeping bag, the ritual fire burning low in the glazed, murderous eyes of the men, the baying of the dogs. I ate quickly and hung my bag. Just before I got into my tent, Tortoise came into the clearing. It was now almost completely dark and the low rumble of a coming storm could be heard in the distance. I waved Tortoise over. He seemed unfazed by the sweaty hulks and their dogs. I tried to get him to stay, thinking we might be safer as a duo, but he was intent on continuing and after he had a cup of tea he was on his way. Leaving me with the macho men who were then opening a bottle of whiskey. I hid in my tent.

The rain came almost as soon as Tortoise left. The hulks stayed out by the fire, passing the whiskey, but they talked in low voices and didn’t seem to be getting too rowdy. I drifted off listening to the popping of the pine boughs in their bonfire and the patter of the rain.

In the morning, I awoke grateful to have slept soundly through the night and still be alive. I packed up quickly and was about to hit the trail when the hulks began to emerge from their tarp lairs. I stopped to wish them a good day, figuring it couldn’t hurt, since I was leaving anyway. They all heartily returned the wish and it was then, I realized they, like everyone else I’d met on the trail, had been good people, despite their terrifying appearances.

Over four months, I never met anyone on or near the trail who wasn’t friendly. The rednecks of Tennessee, the neo-liberals of Vermont, the day-hikers, the trail angels, the maintenance crews, the park rangers and trail runners were all happy just to be out in the woods. They all loved the section of the trail that passed through their communities and they were helpful to the people who hiked it. Even in the communities that were overrun with hikers, such as Damascus, VA or Unionville, NY, the locals didn’t show any signs of the usual locals vs. tourists-style antagonism. This was the most incredible thing about the trail, the aspect I wish everyone could experience, viz. the kindness of strangers. It was only when I had to go into larger towns farther from the Trail that I had to experience the anonymous chaos that we normally live under. The supermarkets and highways terrified me. I noticed that the more people were around, the less eye-contact, the more of a hurry everyone seemed to be in, the more people seemed to be glued to their phones. The people distrusted each other. There was palpable tension between us and them. On and around the Trail, this feeling was thankfully absent. It was beautiful.

V.

That afternoon, I said goodbye to Tortoise. He went into Haiawasee from Dick’s Creek Gap and I continued down the trail. I long nursed the hope that we’d meet up again somewhere down the trail, but it wasn’t to be. Tortoise had to get off the trail in Virginia and go home to British Columbia. For the rest of my walk, apart from a few days when my pace would match with someone else’s, I walked alone. Even after I knew Tortoise had left the trail, I often thought of him and my first few days in the woods.

That night, I camped at the elegantly named Plum Orchard Gap. The following morning, I crossed into North Carolina. The first state line. I wrote this in my notebook:

The joy of life is loving other people

I woke up cold my first morning in North Carolina. I had taken the warmth of Georgia for granted and, in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, the air was a little thinner, the sky had a washed out and watery look. Around the 100 mile mark, I passed an old fire tower. I climbed to the top and a skein of snow began to trouble the view like ripples across a clear pond. In every direction, I saw nothing but green rolling hills. I spoke with another hiker, a few words about the snow and continued down the Trail feeling lonely. The coldness in the air brought my melancholy feelings to the surface. I thought about my family and friends and despaired my situation. My mind tuned into another station, one with less distraction, a clear signal of autumn memories, of cider and donuts and Hallowe’en hayrides.

The snow continued to fall, but it didn’t stick to the ground, just swirled idly in the rhododendron and mountain laurel. All the yellow and red caterpillars I had been seeing all week disappeared back under ground. I walked with my hands buried in my pockets, feeling insulated, secure.

In the late afternoon, the snow slackened and melted out of the sky under the growing strength of the sun, by the time I came down into the gap for Franklin, NC in the late afternoon, it was hard to imagine it had ever been snowing. I was low on food and needed to resupply in town, but it was already late in the day when I reached the road. I found a beautiful campsite, just off the trail, next to a gentle stream in a little green hollow. I didn’t take it because I didn’t like the idea of camping so close to the road and adjoining parking lot. I still wasn’t too sure I trusted people enough to sleep so close to civilization. I kept thinking of a car pulling up at night and a bunch of drunks spilling out, in search of campers to harass. Now I know that such things don’t happen, but back at the beginning of the trail, I had different expectations.

I hiked almost two miles up the other side of the road, knowing I’d have to turn around and walk back in the morning to go into town, but, at least, I reasoned, I’d be far away from the road and any mischievous drunks.

After I got my tent set up, it began to rain softly. I sat in the rain and ate my ramen noodles, looking out into the forest, thinking nothing. I got into my tent as soon as I finished eating; it had begun to get cold again.

I woke with the first rays of the sun piercing the damp and cold forest. Spotlights shone on the leafy carpet, illuminating floating moats of rain, pollen and dust. I walked back down to the road, not bothering to make coffee, figuring I’d be able to get some in town.

It was downhill all the way to the road, and I reached it quickly. It was still early in the morning and I wasn’t sure if this would help or hinder the possibility of a ride. I stood at the edge of the parking area and stuck my thumb out. Trucks passed; each driver looked at me and sped on. I began to feel ridiculous, standing ten miles from town with my backpack at my feet and my red bandanna around my neck. I probably wouldn’t have picked myself up. While I’d been having my unsuccessful fling with hitchhiking, a couple had been packing up their car in the parking lot. The women must’ve felt sorry for me. She asked if I was headed into town. “C’mon,” she said waving. “We’ll give you a ride.” I climbed into the backseat of the crowded car, my massive pack on my lap.

I got dropped off at a laundromat on the edge of town. It was odd to be inside a building after a week in the woods. The lights felt over-bright, the tile under my feet was unnaturally hard, like it pushed back against the soles of my shoes. The radio playing a top-40 station was unbearably loud. I changed into my only clean clothes, Adidas shorts and a thermal shirt—if I didn’t look like a bum before, I certainly did now.

After I finished the laundry, I walked into town. The noise, the color and smells made me feel giddy. I was back in a familiar world, but one I’d grown unaccustomed to. I couldn’t tell if I was happy or unnerved to be back.

I stopped by Indian Mound, tossed my bag down on the grass and called my girlfriend Gina. Back in California, it was three hours earlier—6 AM. She answered groggily after a few rings and I began to pour my loneliness into her ear along with plans to meet in DC, two months down the Trail.

I felt better after the phone call and went to the supermarket to resupply my food and bought way too much, a mistake I would make repeatedly on the Trail. Luckily, I realized the folly of buying canned goods before I got back to the woods and ate my cans of beans while I waited on a ride back.

After another unsuccessful attempt at hitchhiking, I caught a shuttle back to the trailhead for a few bucks and learned that the hardest part of long-distance hiking is coming out of town.

1. It’s depressing—for some reason, leaving the hustle and bustle of even small towns behind almost left me feeling sorrowful as I ducked back into the woods. Even when I felt glad to get away from the all the chaos.
2. It’s always a climb—all the roads into towns are in gaps. Obviously, they put the roads at the lowest elevation. You walk down to them and climb out of them. Imagine that every town in a mountainous area sits in a bowl. Often the sides of those bowls are very steep.
3. The weight—after resupplying, my bag was always twice as heavy. Food made up the bulk of the weight I carried. Because I usually had very little provision left coming into town, my bag was always feather-light, leaving town, I felt like I had a steamer trunk on my back.

In the late afternoon, coming out of Franklin, I only met one person on the trail. The jogger told me he frequently took his daughter into town for gymnastics and, while she practiced, he went out to run on the trail. As we talked, I found myself envying this man and his casual relationship to the Trail. Coming out here, for an hour at a time, I thought, he probably saw it clearer than I did. After all, spending every waking minute in the woods, it was hard to be continually attentive to what was going on around you. I knew that I probably missed a lot, crowded as my mind was with daydreams, especially in the early afternoon, when the whole forest seemed to sleep, the birds went quiet, the chipmunks ceased their skittering and no sound disturbed the stillness.

I climbed into the evening and it started to get cold again, just before dusk, I came to a campsite. A man and his boys had built a fire; I went over and introduced myself before setting up at a nearby spot further down the Trail.

The crisp air and the redolence of smoke in the air, prompted me to build my own fire. The leaves and twigs were damp with the snow and rain that had been falling the last few days, but I was determined to get something going.

I squandered the rest of the daylight trying to turn my smoking pile of damp leaves into a comforting fire. I never got very far and I ended up eating dinner in the dark, with the smell, but without the light and warmth of a campfire.

VI.

They say the first few weeks on the AT are the hardest and, for me, the days without challenges, without strenuous climbs or rain or cold were the longest and most difficult when my mind was free to ramble over the sense of solitude surrounding it.

I woke in the morning to the sound of a gun being fired in the distance. I found myself walking to the irregular cadence of the blasts through the long morning.

I exchanged no more than empty pleasantries with the few other hikers I saw. By the later afternoon, the hike seemed to have become a slog. I walked like a zombie, scarcely noticing the beautiful green world beyond the heavily trod ribbon of the trail.

I planned to stop at a shelter, situated just before another gap, as I came down from the mountain, the air grew warmer and the light seemed clearer. I began to feel cheerful at the thought of other hikers at the shelter. I started to anticipate a nice conversation and a warm meal. My step quickened, I realized I felt hungry and I began to feel a little less sad.

My heart sank again when I saw the shelter down in a gloomy hallow. There was no one there and an early darkness already swirled in the depression. It looked like a miserable place to spend the night, like a ditch or a closet.

The trail began to snake down into the depression and I hoped that I had been mistaken and that the shelter was some other structure, something long-abandoned and deserving of its lonely mien.

After walking awhile, I was relieved to find that I no longer seemed to be heading toward the phantom shelter. The trail rose back into the sunlight and I stopped and talked with a south-bound hiker named Breezy. Her positivity rubbed off on me and when I finally came down to the real shelter, I wasn’t dismayed to find it also empty. I was shortly joined by a middle-aged woman named ‘Frog’ or ‘Frogger.’ After listening to how she’d already after to leave the trail for two weeks due to illness, I felt stupid for even feeling sad; so far, the Trail had been relatively easy for me.

vii.

I went into another gap the next morning where the Natahala Outdoor Center or NOC was. It was Mother’s Day, so I called my mom while drinking the terrible coffee I’d bought in the restaurant (after weeks of making my own, the weak diner stuff they had tasted like rusty water). I called Gina after I talked to my mom and by the time I got back on the trail I was feeling wonderful. The climb coming out of the gap had been exaggerated so much by the people I’d spoken with, that I hardly noticed it.

Not too far into the climb, I met Lefty and his dog Lucy. Lefty was missing an arm and had a pack rigged up to not slip down from his shoulder. We talked for a while and he laughed at how much I’d packed into the outside pockets of my pack. I didn’t tell him that I’d meant to buy the 58-liter size and accidentally ordered the 48. When the thing came in the mail, I’d thought, ‘well, I’ll manage somehow; at least this way I won’t be able to take too much unnecessary stuff.’

Late that afternoon, I began to notice the snakes. Little guys with yellow bands around their throats were constantly gliding out from under my feet. I slowed my pace a little, afraid of stepping on one of them. Until this day, I hadn’t seen a single snake and now I was seeing dozens of them. I came down into another gap on what looked like a very fresh trail. When I hit the road, I found a trail crew packing up their stuff; I guessed that their efforts may have been enough to rouse the snakes: the banging of the rock hammers and all the commotion on an otherwise undisturbed section of woods.

I stopped and talked with the trail crew for a minute. They gave me some leftover fruit they’d brought for their day’s exertions. One guy in particular seemed really interested in talking about the trail with me. We had an amiable chat during which he kept avowing “you’ll make it,” like he was absolutely convinced. It was reassuring.

It was around this time that I began to think about walking the entire trail. No job offers had come and I had begun to think none were forthcoming either. Previously, I hadn’t been very excited about staying in the US. Since 2008, I’d been in my home country about 15 months all together. I had gotten accustomed to living abroad. The idea of staying in the US had a lot of resignation tied up in it for me, it was like making a dull but pragmatic career choice and as long as I still had the option of living abroad, I was going to choose it. But the last stint abroad, in Paraguay, had been a little exhausting and though I signed up to go back ‘out,’ I wasn’t as excited about it as I’d been in the past.

The more time I spent on the trail, seeing a particular aspect of America, the more interested I began to feel in staying. The people around me no longer seemed anonymous and complacent and, on the trail, I felt like I was in something akin to a foreign country, but one I was able to navigate pretty well as long as I stayed within certain parameters—like staying on the trail.

After the NOC, I began to seriously think about staying in the country, about settling down. It started to sound not only possible, but like something I wanted to do. I was still in the running for a job overseas, but I thought when I arrived in the next town, I’d send an e-mail and tell the employer I wasn’t interested.

viii.

On the trail down to the Fontana Dam, I found a prescription bottle filled with weed on the trail. I looked up and saw that someone was about 200 feet ahead of me; I decided to yell out the name on the bottle and see if the kid turned around. He did and when I caught up to him, he was baffled as to how I’d learned his name until I handed him his bottle. Incredulously, his hand shot back to a side pocket on his pack. Fear, then a look of intense relief flooded his features. He thanked me profusely and offered me some of the bottle’s contents. I told him I was ok, but thanked him. We walked together a few hundred yards and caught up with his friend. He told his friend what I’d done as though he were explaining how someone saved his life.

I’m not surprised that people smoke on the Trail, but the sheer amount of it is impressive. I probably encountered someone smoking on average of once a day. Being around all the weed was a temptation. Every day, I felt compelled to walk as far as I could. I enjoyed the trail I saw along the way and I genuinely felt like I was interacting with it, rather than rushing along it. The great thing about hiking is that walking is what you’re supposed to do. It gave me something to be doing when I was feeling sluggish. The weed was a temptation because I knew it would slow me down, make me more observant. I wondered if even just one time would be enough to disrupt my routine, but I knew I probably wouldn’t like it. When it wore off, I knew I’d probably feel more lonely than ever and I didn’t want to start smoking every day, I wanted to confront the solitude and to try to understand it. I’d come out to the woods to spend time alone, smoking alone would be sorta’ like splitting myself in two to have someone to talk to; it seemed like cheating.

I got to the Fontana Dam Shelter around 1 pm. A group of hip-looking hikers from New York were seated around a picnic table drinking beers. They’d been hanging out since the night before at the famously accommodating shelter. They’d ordered a pizza and gone swimming. There was a little town one could take a shuttle to, and they’d gone down there for the beers. I felt like a total curmudgeon, but hanging out, drinking beers and swimming had no appeal for me; I wanted to keep walking, it was already all I wanted to do. The swimming and the beer, those were things I knew, walking over 2,000 miles, I didn’t know what that was like so I was more interested in it than anything else.

I stopped at the Fontana Welcome Center to take a free shower. The shower area totally exposed to the unlockable door. Imagine a highway rest stop with shower heads in the middle of the room, by the sinks, and you have an idea of how exposed this place was. Anyone who opened the door, was going to get a full view of what was going on but I guess the prospect of a warm shower was too great and I stripped everything off and got in.

While there is a good deal of solitude to be found in the woods, the hiker is also, in a way, constantly in public. In the woods, there’s no way to go into a house and shut the door. You’re in constant peril of interruption. Going to the bathroom, changing your clothes, farting, you have to get used to doing all these things in front of people. You lose your modesty and when you go into a town, you find yourself struggling not to belch in front of people and just pee wherever you want. It might seem like being in a tent could substitute for a house, or at least a private room, but it won’t. In a tent, you can hear the smallest noise of the person camped 100 feet from you; you hear them snore, you hear them turn over, you hear the zipper of their tent when they get up to pee, you hear the pee. Most of the day you’re alone and it’s not too hard to find a small spot to camp alone at night, but another hiker could always be just around the corner. You learn to accept the possibility that someone else is constantly around and when you find a place to take a shower, it could be in the middle of a busy street, but you’ll soon find yourself stripping in front of a crowd if it means washing your grimy body.

On the other side of the Fontana Dam, I entered the Smokies and started the climb that led to Clingman’s Dome, the highest point on the trail. The first thing I noticed upon entering the National Park was that there seemed to be a lot less water around. When I found some, I had to settle for a tiny muddy rill; dirt and leaves were suspended in my water bottle, but I had a filter and it was better than nothing.

There was another old fire tower at the top of my climb, about 0.5 miles off the trail. I tossed my pack down and climbed off the trail, up to the tower.

I enjoyed some of the most beautiful views of the trail from the tower. I looked south to see where I’d been earlier that day. I looked down to the dam and the body of water it contained. I thought about the hipsters from New York drinking beers and the kid who dropped his weed. I was glad to be up in the mountains, alone and above everything. This view and feeling were the reasons I’d come out to the Trail.

Returning to the Trail, I came across a couple who were coming back from the camping area to which I was enroute. “There’s a bear just down the trail,” they warned me. “She’s pretty big and she didn’t seem at all perturbed by our presence; just wanted to let you know. She looked to be waking up, kinda’ groggy.” I thanked the couple for letting me know and continued down the Trail cautiously, keeping my hand close to my mace, which, I would later learn, was completely useless against a bear intent on food. On the Trail, were huge piles of bear scat, big pulpy piles that, thankfully, looked like they contained nothing but chewed blackberries. Still their very size was enough to be intimidating.

When I didn’t encounter any bear after about 20 minutes of walking, I figured I must’ve passed it. Despite my fear, I still wanted to see a bear, and I was disappointed that I’d missed my first opportunity, although I was sure there would be others; I’d heard multiple times that there were lots of bears in the Smokies.

When I got into the camping area, I found a group excitedly discussing the marauding bear in the area. The rumors were flying:

“I guess they’ve closed down a bunch of camping areas and shelters.”

“Tore someone’s bag apart!”

“They tried to tranquilize it but it got away!”

“The ones in the Smokies are huge and not afraid of people!”

We had a really great time joking about bear attacks. Every time there was a rustle in the forest, we’d all shout “The Bear!”

In truth, everyone was a little nervous. Since I’d gotten on the trail, I hadn’t seen any warnings about bear activity, but there was a large sign posted at the camping area, warning hikers to hang not only their food bags but their packs as well. Residual food smells, the warning claimed, could be enough to draw the bear. The other hikers and I had a good time joking around the campfire, but I think we were all a little nervous about going back to our tents, alone, imagining the sniffing and growling that we might hear just outside our tents in the middle of the night.

The fear had the positive effect of bringing the group together. Everyone told stories, laughed and joked about the bear together. It was one of my most social nights on the Trail. Although I had a few other nights were I talked to people, it was never again so spontaneous and so well matched, everyone seemed to bring something to the conversation. I felt a little disappointed when everyone started going off to bed, but it had been a long day and I was tired. Despite the talk of the bear, I slept through the night.

ix.

In the morning, I passed a shelter that had been closed due to bear activity. I stopped and looked around, listening for bears, but there didn’t seem to be any around. I tried to make a little more noise than usual, as I hiked, but it’s hard to keep clapping your hands and singing out loud and after a while, I lapsed into silence.

In many places the ground had been torn up, like an animal had been routing around looking for food. The areas that looked picked over were very broad, sometimes lasting for 100s of feet. I assumed this meant bear, but when I talked to someone later in the afternoon, they told me, more likely, it was a wild boar. They say these can be as violent as bear and, after seeing what they were capable of doing to dead trees and the ground, I wasn’t anxious to meet one.

Despite all the warnings, the forest was peaceful. The day was mild—as I climbed in altitude, the temperature lowered. There was more humidity; a light fog was present even in heat of the afternoon. Perhaps it was this solemnity that made the situation at the shelter so disagreeable to me.

I walked nearly all day to reach Derrick Knob shelter, but when I arrived around 4, I was disappointed to find the place overtaken by boisterous young men. When I entered the area and said ‘hey,’ only one guy turned and greeted me, the rest ignored me. They were all practically yelling over each other to be heard. After all the silence of the day (I’d seen almost no one the entire walk) the scene was like a very ugly intrusion. I pulled out my food and started to make my ramen, but, I could hardly stand the braying of these post-adolescents and after a few minutes, I decided to pack it in and head to the next shelter.

As soon as I got back on the trail, I felt better. It rained on and off and, as I continued to climb, I came to a large swath of long, wet grass, blowing in the wind. I stopped to admire the movements of the grass, like seaweed drifting underwater. Up the Trail, I saw a turkey, standing there regarding me before walking calmly back into the woods.

I reached the Siler’s Bald Shelter around dusk. The crowd was older and a doe was grazing near the shelter, totally oblivious to the people there, talking and watching it. I pitched my tent in the tall grass alongside the shelter and was asleep before it was entirely dark.

Just before 5 am, I heard my neighbor’s tent’s zipper open followed by a low rumble of thunder. A storm was coming and since I was already awake, I decided to try to strike camp before the rains started.

I hurriedly dressed in the dark and put everything away before starting on the tent. The rain was already starting to fall through the darkness, it only shone in the pale spotlight of my headlamp, grey streaks on a grey tableau. Just as the rain started to fall hard, I threw everything under the awning of the shelter where I finished putting it all away in relative dryness. I made coffee and sat and listened to the rain fall in the darkness. There was no sunrise, just a gradual lightening of the sky.

The Trail heading up Clingman’s Dome (the highest point on the AT, although it doesn’t feel like it) was like a pine forest in Oregon. Moss swarmed up the red bark of the trees, the trail seethed a teak-colored water through the mud and umbrella-sized ferns sprouted from tangles of dead branches. In this familiar scene, I relaxed to the point of somnambulism. It was like I didn’t have to exert myself to move. I willed it and it happened. Mainly, I just watched the grey and green tangles drip with old rain water just beyond the clearing of the Trail.

Clingman’s Dome was topped with a futurist viewing platform that looked like some dead structure one would find in Kazakhstan or Omsk, a concrete wave terminating in a ufo-shaped dome. I didn’t bother to climb it. The fog was too thick to see more than a few feet. I took a few pictures of the grey summit when two hippies emerged from the fog, eating bags of gummy candies. They told me they were tripping and offered me some of their gummy candy before disappearing back into the fog like giggling ghosts. Back on the trail, the brief emergence into civilization, seemed like a dream. The Trail narrowed, the mist turned to a light rain and dripped from the spiderwebs and lichen-plagued branches.

Gatlinburg was about 9 miles out and in the afternoon, I crossed a parking area for day-hikers coming from this area. I couldn’t believe all the cars and people. It felt like coming out of the jungle into Manaus. I hadn’t seen so many people since I’d left Franklin.

I sat on a low concrete wall at the edge of the parking area and ate a dry pack of ramen since I was getting low on all other food (I still had 14 packs of ramen, though, enough to get me to Hot Springs, I hoped.) I talked to another thru-hiker who, like so many others, I never saw again. I’d been walking for 13 days, the longest I’d ever hiked in my life. It felt like an accomplishment already. I’d crossed a state line and had gone over 100 miles so it came as a terrible blow when I saw the sign upon leaving the parking area saying something truly insidious like 1,972.0 miles to Mt. Katahdin. Almost two weeks in and I’d barely made a dent in the total mileage.

Luckily, the disheartening sign was followed by one of the greatest parts of the trail. I skipped the next shelter in favor of one still 7 miles down. It was later in the afternoon, but I wanted to keep walking. No one else had decided to start this stretch so late in the day and I was alone on a beautiful ridge, the sun setting on my right, the pinnacles of the pines beneath my feet. When the trees opened up, I could see for miles. One side opened up, I walked precariously along the ledge, just above the forest, then that side would close and the other would open up, like the curtain falling on one act to open on another, the scenery the same, but all changed around: another room, another world.

A rockslide had torn away part of the trail and it had been rebuilt, allowing one to look down into the abyss where it had fallen. The trees were gone from this area too and I stood on the ledge looking out over the rolling mountains where the sun set into a magenta cloud. Immediately the temperature fell and it seemed as if the shadows had risen from the forest floor into the sky.

Just before the shelter, I passed a girl going in the opposite direction, she seemed stressed and hurried. I tried to stop her. “I just came from that way, there’s no place to camp for seven miles,” I said. She didn’t stop, but yelled over her shoulder, “That’s ok.” I felt bad knowing that she was going to walk through such a beautiful section of trail in the dark.

I woke up before dawn again to the low rumble of thunder. I tried to ignore it, but it was insistent. A bolt of lightning popped in the sky like a lightbulb flaring before going out. The thunder chewed on the mountains and I decided to get up.

This time, I got everything packed up before any rain fell. I made coffee under the awning of the shelter and watched the lightening flare up in the sky revealing the pine-serrated horizon before fading into darkness. It was before five. I drank my coffee slowly, trying to make it last until dawn. The rain never came.

I set out at first light and hiked through the last section of the Smokies. In the late afternoon, I met a ridgerunner named Chloe. I was impressed that her name tag had an umlaut over the ‘E’ in her name. She told me to be careful. There was a bear just down the trail a ways. I told her I’d like to see him, but from a distance; I had just missed seeing another bear when I came into the Smokies a few days ago. I told her about the bear at the campground. “Yeah,” she responded. “We had to shoot that bear. She pulled a guy out of his tent.” For the rest of the time I was on the trail, this story would resurface with new information attached to it.

--the guy had food in his tent

--the guy had slathered himself in coconut butter before getting in his tent

--the bear that had been shot wasn’t the bear that bit the guy

Etc.

It had started to rain. The storm had come back and the afternoon sky grumbled with thunder. Chloe wanted to be on her way. We parted and walked our different directions into the storm. It didn’t pour, but the rain came down steadily for the rest of the afternoon. The Trail became a trough of mud that I slogged through. The rain made me feel lethargic and I walked without much energy down into the Davenport Gap. I never saw the bear Chloe mentioned.

The Davenport Gap Shelter was down in a hollow just before the end of the Smoky Mountains National Park. It was still raining when I got there around 4. Everything around the shelter was mud. Due to bear activity, the shelter was wrapped up in a cyclone fence, like a terrestrial shark cage. I decided, for the first time on the Trail, not to pitch my tent. Reluctantly, I climbed onto the wooden shelf of the shelter, squeezing in between two older hikers, and resigned myself to the gloom of the afternoon. I closed my eyes.

The rain fell all night. I tried to wait it out a little in the morning, but I got impatient with the shelter and all the muddy packs and bodies knocking around. I took my thermos of coffee and started out into the rain, out of the Smokies. Within seconds, my feet were soaked.

I squelched down out of the mountains, into my second instance of trail magic, a cache of cokes by the road. I drank one despite the fact that it was 8 am and I was still drinking my coffee. It was amazing. Coming out of the gap, I found evidence that the storm had been more severe further down the mountain. Many branches had fallen and some trees had been uprooted and lay across the trail. The rain had stopped, but I had to walk through the wet branches to blaze a path around the recently downed trees.

I didn’t see anyone all morning, but in the afternoon, I suddenly came across a group of about 10 men, many of them dressed in camouflage. I said ‘hi’ and ‘enjoy your hike,’ but they only responded in low grumbles. I passed them, but within a few seconds, I heard a ‘hey!’ like a rifle’s report behind me. I knew they were addressing me. I turned to see a man wearing a purple and yellow ‘East Carolina’ hat approaching me. “Hey, did you see anybody in the direction you came?” he asked me. I told him that apart from two older ladies I saw just a few minutes before, I’d seen no one all day. “Well, hey, do me a favor, huh? If you see anybody up the way you’re going named Mike, tell him we’re looking for him, ok? We got separated somehow coming down from Max Patch.” I told the guy I keep an eye out for his ‘Mike’ and continued on.

I’d heard that Max Patch was a good place to see the sunset, but, apart from that I knew nothing about it. As such, it was amazing climbing to the top of the domed field and seeing the clearest views I’d seen so far on the trail. A parking area wasn’t too far away and there were many day hikers milling around. An elderly couple with a sweet little dog approached me on the trail that was no more than a worn place in the grass. I said ‘hello’ to the happily jumping dog and they asked me if I was out camping in the area. I told them I was hiking the Appalachian Trail and that I’d come from Georgia. The couple seemed both nonplussed and overjoyed to hear this. They’d heard of the AT, but they didn’t know this was part of it. Was I hiking the whole thing? I told them I was and they lit up. It was obvious it was something they were very interested in, although they had no plans to try it themselves. We talked about the trail for a while and, before parting, they asked if they could do anything for me. I was asked this question so often on the trail and it never ceased to be as touching as the first time I heard it. Back in the US, one of the things I had despaired of returning to was the self-absorbed nature of American culture. Everyone with their phones out, never even meeting anyone else’s glance for fear that something may be asked of them, the callous urban character, walking down the street as if surrounded by a forcefield. The people I met on the Trail were nothing like this. They stopped to talk, they asked if they could help, they smiled. It was like being in another country, but one where everyone still spoke my language.

The sun came out and I came down from Max Patch in the late afternoon after letting the wind and the sun pull the dampness of the Smokies out of my clothes.

The shelter was quiet when I arrived and after I set up my tent, I took a place at the picnic table nearby to write for a while. I was a few words in when a thru-hiker named Rabbit showed up. I was happy to put my writing away and talk to her until it started to get dark. When I woke up in the morning, she was gone. Like so many other people I met on the trail, I never saw her again.