Truckin' from the Meat Bar

Truckin', got mah chips cashed in Keep truckin' like the Doo Dah Man Together more or less in line Just keep truckin' on... —Grateful Dead It's hypothermia time It's hypothermia time... —Chuck Cook Trail Register, White Cap, Maine

AMICALOLA Falls. Here it's all over but the walkin'. The blue-blazed approach trail starts and runs seven miles to Springer, where the Appalachian takes over. Katahdin waits only 2,000 miles after that.

Standing on the Forest Service catwalk and leaning out over the falls was another hiker. A professional. He wore green long pants and a matching green long-sleeved, shirt with an AT patch on the arm.

"Hi, where ya headed?" we asked.

Against the roar of falls and wind he hollered back. "Hawk Mountain!"

Hawk Mountain? Jeez, we thought, that's 13 miles. Nobody can walk that far. Dink.

"Where're you guys headed?'

"Maine."

This was April Fools Day, 1973. We were the fat guys.

Later in the morning we strapped on our shiny Kelty packs and stepped out into the barren Georgia hills. With real spring still a month off, only crocuses and rime ice poked through the ground cover of last year's leaves. We had 14 states to go. Georgia to Maine.

So here they are. Come along. Just remember that Trail Rules apply: No skipping.

Georgia

Did you know you can buy such a thing as a meat bar? It weighs three ounces and contains 413 protein and fat calories. Sort of a meat Snickers.

They are somewhat expensive so we only carried them for the first week of our hike, when we were unsure of our exact nutritional needs and whether we'd need more than a first week's supply anyway. Meat bars.

Meat bars are good, but hard to digest.

If you take a meat bar out of its wrapper, say to munch a corner or two, and then stuff it back into your pack, it will break up into clods, into meat bar fragments.

Georgia was a meat bar.

North Carolina

Just north of the Great Smoky Moun- tain National Park, after Davenport Gap. is Snowbird Mountain. On April 27, we went up and over it in a driving 40-degree rain that made it hard to see and even harder to retain body heat. Hypothermia weather.

On the other side of Snowbird, seven of us and an old beagle spent the night at Groundhog Creek Lean-to. There, huddled around Butch's small cooking fire and drinking Bob and Ed's herbal tea, we talked about snowbirds and turkeys.

Snowbirds because nobody had ever seen one and turkeys because Ray Lamb had once told us turkeys are so dumb they drown looking up at the rain.

The next morning there was snow on the ground.

Those were tough times for turkeys.

Tennessee

We were never too sure which state we were in, North Carolina or Tennessee. The trail runs up the border.

It didn't matter much since spring hi. both sides of the line. Dogwood, azalea, and other blossoming things we didn't know the names of appeared to brighter, the green-gray woods. Trees budded and bloomed except on the high, wind) balds where there were no trees at all.

We began to hear the wood thrush. Its call haunted the rain-misted hills.

I live in Boston now, and spring has finally come after a winter of frozen yellow skies and blowing litter.

Sure miss that bird.

Virginia

As far back as Blood Mountain in Georgia we had known that Virginia was a piece of cake. Long flat ridgewalks, places like Shenandoah where they actually mow the trail, 20-mile days no sweat, and so on. People told us. After the gritty fare of Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee, we would have dessert. Virginia.

It was a piece of cake, all right. Right up until we got there.

Ever hear of nettles? How about road walks, poison ivy, no-see-ums, gnats, Three Ridges, or the Tye River? No?

Never mind. In Virginia we lost our baby fat, saw bear and deer, met lots of crazies, even chicks, and finally learned what rhododendron was all about. (Who ever suspected the stuff came with purple flowers?)

Once Campers for Christ told us how 'he Lord would help us in our Walk Through Life. All we wanted was a boost UP Thunder Hill.

Another time Dick Heller borrowed two bucks and a can of sardines from us, then paid us back with a motel room. He told us about two fat guys he had met at the Amicalola catwalk the day he didn't make it to Hawk Mountain.

We met a Dartmouth guy and smoked his dope.

All in Virginia, the 500-mile piece of cake that took a month to eat. The long state.

Long enough for one old woman in the Buchanan laundromat to give us this sound advice: "Maine? You boys are walking to Maine? Well, you better hurry up or you won't get there by dark.

West Virginia

All anybody can say is that if you get to the Potomac, you've stepped on West Virginia a couple of times. That's all.

But don't worry. West Virginia must be just like Virginia only a little more to the left, right?

Maryland

From what we understand, this state is really quite lovely when the sun is out and the fog and drizzle waft their way back across the Mason-Dixor line. Certainly the place is steeped in historical significance. The guidebook says so. There are lots of monuments around.

We couldn't see anything because of the weather, we couldn't hear anything because of the noise.

You see, somewhere in all those mistshrouded woods guys kept chasing each other from tree to tree. Something to do with hats. Gray and blue ones. We never caught a good glimpse of them, but the din was terrific. Metal clanged and clattered as horses leapt over stone walls, and blood-curdling yells rocketed around in the mist. Crazies ran up and down the hills.

Maryland? Just another two-day walk.

Pennsylvania

Through the half-light of Port Clinton's only bar four of us saw clearly what had happened to Pennsylvania. Years and years ago a glacier had come to Penn's Woods and thrown up.

That accounted for the rocks.

As for the gypsy moths, maybe they weren't all that bad. In fact, the worst thing about them wasn't that they ate whole mountainsides, or dropped into your hair from the trees, but that they shat into your tea.

Sure. Natural disaster came easily to Pennsylvania. 1 know, I grew up there. Look at its rocks. Look at its rain. Look at its moths. Look at its hailstorms. Look at its women.

So Ned Barr, John Laming, Mark Furman and I had another round for Penn- sylvania. What is it, we asked as we sipped, that lures grown men across the rockstrewn meat grinder that is the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania? Com- pulsion? Masochism? White Blazes? Fifteen cent drafts at the Port Clinton Hotel?

The next day our boots filled up with water.

Life in the asteroid belt.

New Jersey

Just before we cursed our way across the river into New Jersey's mosquito preserve, Tom and Nubra Watson surprised us at Delaware Water Gap and whisked us away to Montclair for a day off.

One thing led to another and we went to a dating bar.

Guess what? None of the young lasses had ever heard of the Appalachian Trail. When they asked us how much did we make, all we could say was,

"Oh, about 17 miles a day."

But they sure looked good. One es- pecially caught our eye. She wore her...

New Jersey is attached to Pennsylvania.

New York

This is a very strange place to have on an Appalachian Trail.

We met the Falcones, my sister's family, for a day off and a steak cookout.

After that we got lost.

Connecticut

We didn't train much for our trip. Neither of us had backpacked before, and we didn't want to spoil the fun of getting skinny. Besides, it would have been too much work. So towards the end we had go- ing away parties, drank beer, and ate a lot of chili. We're no dummies.

One afternoon, though, we took a hike.

Since we lived in Connecticut at the time, we decided to find the actual trail and allow our dainty feet to get the feel of the real thing for a couple of miles.

We found it where it crosses Route 4 in the western part of the state, parked the car, got out, and mosied on into the woods.

At that moment we lost the trail.

And that was how we practiced for our trip.

Massachusetts

On the right July day, when the air is oven-hot and the haze as thick as smoke, you might just luck out and be invited to sit on Mrs. Hutchinson's porch. There you can chat and sign her book. Well into her nineties, she's spent 53 summers in her gray clapboard house meeting hikers and sorting out their destinies. Her features are spare as flint, her soul proud and loving. Yankee.

While the sun lowered and the glare over the Berkshires lessened, we paid our respects.

Yes, we knew the Englishman, but, no. we didn't know the two girls hiking south. Must have missed them over the weekend.

Yes, all the way from Georgia. That da; from the Mass Pike. No, no plans after.

And more. We talked about an hour with her and she gave us a glimpse of what it was like to live along the trail. How much it meant to her. She told us she was glad we had been to college. It was so important, she said.

Then, before we filled our water bottles and took her picture with the Instamatic, she turned to me and said. "You have nice hair. I like it."

Mrs. Fred. W. Hutchinson, Washington Town Hall.

Vermont

Another porch story. This time Mark and I are sitting in wicker rockers on the ancient porch of the Walloomsac Inn. In front of us the rain drums upon Route 9.

Tired drainpipes harmonize tin and water sounds, clouds blow backwards to the west.

We are waiting and from the back corners of our minds drifts an old Aretha Franklin tune:

Looking out on the mornin' rainI used ta feel so uninspired.

And when I knew I had to faceanother day

Aaaaaw, it made me feel so tired.

Bennington Station. The Georgia-to-Maine train stopped here and Mark got off. The rest of Vermont went by in a hurry.

New Hampshire

Outside Armington Cabin weather and dark lashed each other like twins in combat. Seven years earlier I'd emerged from the AD basement to graduate; one day earlier I'd seen a black bear at Velvet Rocks. Crazy.

Somebody lit the stove. The wood smoke blended with the smell of split cedar and mattress ticking while a tape player lulled the corners of the cabin and our minds with quiet country rock.

I had to ask

1 mean, why don't we just hang around places like this, maybe with some beer, our women and a small hibachi, instead of marching like madmen from one state to the next?

Huh?

But New Hampshire has the Whites, and a week later I got my answer on South Twin's mica-flecked summit. It was the clearest day of the summer and the mountains of five states and Canada were a choppy blue-green sea around us. Cloud shadows skimmed the peaks like fingers running over braille.

"This is why."

And at Pierce Pond, a month later, moon-dazed loons cried the same thing. (Or they might have been crying "Moon is why." They are loons, after all.)

Maine

At Rangeley, Maine, Neill Ross, one of our new-found hiking companions, was told this by a local: "Well, after the first full moon in September you'll have two weeks of bad weather, then two weeks of good weather. The full moon after that, you better hope your ass isn't still in the woods."

Maine was wet and wonderful. We watched the leaves turn, saw moose puckies, and read this in a trail register: "Maine is sinking."

Miriam Younkins joined me in the Whites and we finished together. Seventy miles from the big K, after an especially tough day of looking up at the rain, we skipped to Katahdin and climbed it when the weather broke. After a week off we came back to do that last length of trail and finished going south.

It was the tawny time of the year then, the rime ice was back, and Katahdin s moonscape was snowcapped at our backs.

Indian summer days.

On our last day out we could still see the imposing peak and remember what a fellow hiker had once said about Thoreau's favorite mountain: "Man, I can hardly wait to get to Katahdin. I'm gonna climb it, go home, and eat six pounds of brownies."

On our last night out the moon was full.

John Gantz '66. spent three seasons lastyear backpacking on the AppalachianTrail from one end to the other. Hispartner most of the way was Mark Furmanfrom Avon, Conn., and Boston,Mass. Below are, as the author puts it, afew glimpses of life on the green planet.Hypothermia, incidentally, is exhaustionfrom loss of body heat. Its symptomsinclude giddiness and increasing irrationality.