You wouldn't even think of the places you can sweat. In your ears, for one—not just trickling through your hair, but right down inside your ears. On the tops of your knees. And right down the middle of your backside, if you know what I mean. All day. I peeled my socks off. My feet felt pickled.
Mom heaved herself up. “I'm going to go soak my head,” she said.
“Ugmph. Me too,” said Vivi.
“I'll be right along,” I said. “I'm going to change my shirt.” I wanted to check out the register while they weren't around. I didn't know if Mom had ever realized there were messages for me. I wasn't going to tell her. Beagle was mine. Even with our quick trip home we were gaining on him; now we were only two days behind. I wondered if he knew how glad I was to read his messages. It was like he was walking with me. Every register, he was there.
I flipped back a page or two. Sure enough. It's the same thing, day after day. Can't wait until Damascus. Good night, Katahdin, wherever you are. I flipped to the end. It's the same Trail, but always different. I love it. Katahdin.
“What's in Damascus?” I asked Mom when she came back.
“Damascus?” she repeated, looking puzzled.
“People are writing about it in the register,” I said. “They make it sound like something special.”
“Oh, must be Trail Days. It's a big weekend festival. Damascus is a town in Virginia, we'll be there in a few days—”
“I know that,” I cut in.
“But Trail Days isn't until the end of May, I think. I'm surprised they're talking about it in the registers already. A lot of thru-hikers go even if they have to hitch a ride to get there. We'll be off the Trail by then.”
I hadn't been angry in days, really I hadn't. But something about the way she said it so casually, We'll be off the Trail by then, made me seethe. “Can we go?” I asked.
Mom said, “I really don't see the point. You going, Vivi?” Vivi shook her head. “Not my scene. I'll be farther on, I'm not turning back for a party.”
I scowled. “You never let me do anything I want,” I said.
Mom sounded stern. “Such as hike right now? Don't be so dramatic. What would you do at Trail Days?”
“You didn't let me go to soccer camp last year.” Sometimes it seemed like all it would take was one little aggravation, and all the hurts from years ago would ooze right up and come out of my mouth. I sounded bratty even to myself, but I couldn't help it.
“That camp cost five hundred dollars—”
“Springer got to go to camp.”
“Dani,” she said. “What's gotten into you? Springer's camp was free, you know that.” I did know it; it was sponsored by the Muscular Dystrophy Association, and it was only for kids with MD. Springer went every year from the time he was diagnosed. “Besides,” she continued, angry herself now, “would you really have taken that week away from him? Or from us?”
It seemed like the only time I really realized how much work it was taking care of Springer, after he was stuck in a wheelchair, was when he was at camp and Mom and Dad didn't have to do it anymore. Bathing him, helping him use the toilet, and getting him dressed and undressed, into his chair and out of it. Dad did most of the personal stuff, after Springer got old enough to be embarrassed about Mom seeing him naked. Every morning and night, it took Dad nearly an hour. Even little things like going to the grocery store were easier without Springer. When he was at camp, the rest of us went out for ice cream in the evenings and went to movies without having to sit in the back where the wheelchairs fit. We were more relaxed.
Springer told me once that camp was the only place he felt normal—the one week every year when no one stared at him because he used a wheelchair, the one week he didn't have to explain his feet or his weakness to anyone. He got to go swimming in a lake at camp and play baseball, and one year he even got to ride a horse. Riding a horse felt like walking, he said. He could remember when his legs moved the same way.
So, no, I wouldn't have taken that week away, not from any of us.
“After he died, that was how I imagined our lives were going to be,” I said. “Like when Springer was at camp.”
“He's not at camp,” Mom said.
“I know that.” I picked at a scab on my leg. “Why didn't you ever let him come to my soccer games?”
Mom looked wary. “I let him,” she said.
“No, you didn't!” I was angry again. “I always wanted him to come, I used to ask him and ask him, and he said you told him no. He said you wouldn't let him.”
Mom sighed. “Should we just cook dinner and have a nice evening, or should we continue this conversation?”
“I'm not hungry,” I said.
“Okay.” She smoothed out her face. “Time to grow up a bit, then, and quit blaming me for everything. Springer didn't want to go to your games, Katahdin. He asked me not to make him, and I couldn't do it. Why would I have kept him away, unless he didn't want to?”
“You did,” I sniffed. “He would have come for me.”
“He was a thirteen-year-old boy in a wheelchair,” Mom snapped. “He hated being stared at. And he loved soccer. You might not be able to remember, but he played Kindersoccer when he was four and five years old. He tried to play when he was six, and he couldn't do it anymore. He couldn't run.”
When he was eight, he was in a wheelchair. I remembered that.
“It broke his heart,” Mom said. “It broke mine. He couldn't stand to watch you play. But I let you play anyway. I never told you not to play; I never even suggested that you shouldn't.
“You can't make him into a saint just because he's dead,” she continued. “He was a good kid and a tough kid and he loved you, and he never would have come to your soccer games. He cussed too much and he didn't always listen and he never was any good at math. He talked back. He was not perfect.”
“Stop it,” I said. “I don't want to talk. I want to eat dinner.”
“You're the one who wants everything out in the open,” Mom said. She looked plenty angry herself, now that she'd worked up steam. “Don't go blaming me for everything. And quit pretending your brother's watching out for you. Quit mooning over this Beagle.”
“I'm not mooning! I'm not pretending!” I threw one of my hiking boots against the wall, and it fell to the floor in a cloud of dust. I threw the other one after it, and then I stomped off into the woods and sat by myself for a while. When I got back, Mom was still sitting in the shelter where I'd left her, and she hadn't started dinner. Vivi hadn't started cooking, either. She was sitting near Mom, equally silent and still.
I cooked, enough for us all.
Later, in the middle of the night, I remembered something. I got out of my tent and poked my head into hers. “I don't blame you for everything,” I said aloud into the quiet darkness. “I don't blame you for Springer.” She didn't reply.
April 19
Damascus, Virginia
Miles hiked today: 12
Total miles hiked on the Appalachian Trail: 454
Weather: clear
The next morning we were quiet and tense with each other. “We're going to walk hard today,” Mom said. “We're going to move.”
We were hiking along a ridgeline in woods. Vivi was up ahead, out of sight; Mom and I were close together. It was an ordinary day. “There are fewer of us now, have you noticed?” Mom said out of nowhere.
“Sure,” I said, thinking she meant Springer.
She sighed. “Thru-hikers. There aren't so many now.”
“Why not?”
“We've walked over four hundred miles. Lots of people don't make it this far. They've dropped out.”
I thought about that as we started to descend. Nobody could blame Trailhead, say, for stopping, but I didn't know about the rest. If Mom would give me the chance, I'd be glad to keep going. “Think it's laziness?” I asked. We caught up with Vivi, who had stopped by a spring and was filtering water.
Mom splashed a tiny bit of water onto her hand and mopped her
face with it. In the heat we didn't waste water; sources were few and far between, and some that were marked on our maps had dried up. “Laziness?” she asked. I nodded. “I don't think that's the right word,” she said.
“Think of it this way,” said Vivi. “If you've made a mistake, is it smarter to keep doing the wrong thing, or stop and do something different?”
Mom asked me, “Why did you want to hike the Appalachian Trail?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“It's long,” I said.
Vivi snorted. Mom waited.
“I wanted to get away from everything,” I said. “But I wanted something to do, I wanted to be able to walk. And I wanted to be far away from people, but not too far so I could get food and everything. And I like mountains.”
Mom took a sip of Vivi's filtered water. “That's a pretty good answer,” she said after a pause. “You were wrong, of course, to run away. No matter what, you shouldn't have done that.”
“I thought you'd never let me. I thought you wouldn't—”
“Well, you were wrong there, too. But at least your reasons for going were good. Though even a person who had a good reason might stop early.”
“Maybe.”
“The world's not black and white,” she said.
“What were your reasons?” I asked.
She took another sip of water and looked away.
“I answered,” I said, my voice rising. “You should, too. It's not fair—”
“The first time I hiked the Trail,” Mom said, interrupting me, “it was because I didn't know what else to do.” Vivi nodded as though she understood. I didn't. “My parents had died,” Mom said, “and I was still adjusting to that. I graduated from college, but I didn't know what I was supposed to do next. I read a magazine article about the Appalachian Trail and I just hightailed it out here. It was early spring—I'd graduated early, winter term—and I was lonely and scared. That hike was a lot different from this one. I made friends at the shelters every night. I went into town with big groups of people. I spent four days at Damascus during Trail Days, having a big party. And I was falling in love with your father.
Mom smiled and shook her head. “Well. It was a lot more of a social thing for me then, that's all I'm saying. The Trail was the same, but I was different. I needed to figure out who I was.”
“Did you?” I asked.
“Partially.”
“Why are you hiking now?”
“To be with you.”
I must have made a face, because she put out her hand and touched my arm. “I figured you might have a good reason,” she said softly. “That was good enough for me.”
That night it got hotter, not cooler. We lay on top of our sleeping bags, alone in the shelter. I wished we'd made better time. I wanted to catch up with Beagle.
On Wednesday we reached Damascus. I was pretty eager to see it, and Vivi said she was, too. We were going to take a zero day, do laundry and get supplies.
We hit an asphalt road and could walk three abreast. Mom said, “They call this the friendliest town on the Trail.”
“Is this where you were married?” I asked.
“Why would you think that?”
“I thought that's what you said.”
“No,” Mom said. “That was Harpers Ferry. Another important Trail town.”
“John Brown?” cut in Vivi. “Started the Civil War?”
“Really?” I said. “I thought it was just famous because of the Trail.”
“Aren't you supposed to be homeschooling?” Vivi teased me.
“If Mom lets us keep going, I'll put an algebra book in my pack and do fifty problems every night,” I promised. I looked at Mom. “But you did get married while you were thru-hiking?”
She shot me a look. “Of course.”
“So you'd known Dad for … ”
She sighed. “A little over two months. Not long enough, but there you are.”
“Was it in a church?”
“Justice of the peace,” Mom said. “The courthouse.” “That doesn't sound very romantic,” I said.
“Oh, I don't know.” She began to smile. “I bought a new white T-shirt to wear for the ceremony—actually three white T-shirts, they came three to a pack. And some new socks and new underwear. And I carried a bouquet of wildflowers that Juniper—she was a thru-hiker with us—picked from the side of the Trail, and Juniper and Wild Cat—he was best man—tied empty tin cans to our backpacks and a sign that said ‘Just Married.' ”
“Tin cans?” I wrinkled my nose.
“You know, like they hang on the backs of cars? When someone gets married, Dani, they hang tin cans off the back bumper of the car that the couple drives away in.”
It was the first I'd heard of it. “What happened to Juniper and Wild Cat?” I asked.
“Juniper, I don't know, she started out in Colorado after the Trail. She was going to run an outfitter's or a hiking service or something, be a ski instructor in the wintertime. I heard from her for a few years afterward. Wild Cat twisted his knee in the Whites and left the Trail; we didn't hear from him again.”
“Like Trailhead,” I said.
“Yep. Bad hiker injury. But this was back before e-mail, remember—you had to write to people, or call them. It was harder to keep in touch.”
I knew the Whites meant the White Mountains in New Hampshire. You hike above the tree line there, where the Trail is nothing but rocks. “Are the Whites hard?”
Mom shrugged. “Sure. But they're also eleven hundred miles away. We don't need to worry about them. Where should we stay tonight? What looks good?”
“A nice bed-and-breakfast with a good dining room,” suggested Vivi.
“A hostel,” I said.
“Maybe a happy compromise—” said Mom.
Up ahead I saw someone on the sidewalk—someone tall and thin and familiar. “Beagle!” I shouted, and ran.
April 21
Deep Gap (Virginia)
Miles hiked today: 16
Total miles hiked on the Appalachian Trail: 481
Weather: hot, humid, horrible
I hate everything. I cannot believe I am still hiking. The worst part: Mom is making me. “I want to quit,” I said this morning.
“Not today,” she answered.
“You said we could quit anytime I wanted. So now I want to quit.” I'd been up half the night crying into Springer's old shirt. “I'm tired of being out here. Nothing changes. I want to go home.”
Mom looked me up and down with a cool expression on her face and said, “No.”
“What do you mean, no?” “We're hiking, Dani. A quick grocery run and that's it. Get your boots on.”
So we hiked. Mom went ahead with Vivi. They waited for me every mile or so. I walked slowly when I was walking and I sat when I wanted to sit and I cried a lot of the time. We still made sixteen miles. I feel like some kind of horrible robot walking machine.
I couldn't believe what had happened in Damascus.
The first thing was, Beagle didn't recognize me. I rushed up to him and threw my arms around him, and he went all stiff and pushed me away the way you would if some complete stranger tackled you in the street. “Whoa!” he said.
“Beagle,” I said. “Beagle, it's me.”
He looked at me hard. The two people with him looked at me, too.
“Katahdin,” I said, my voice fading a little. “You write me notes in the registers.”
“I'm sorry,” he said. He looked bewildered, embarrassed, alarmed. “I don't know what notes you mean.”
“Good night, Katahdin, wherever you are!”
He looked away again, his face turning red. The two guys he was with stared at me. “Oh, right,” he said at last. “You're the kid from the first day. Sure, I remember. But I didn't think you were hiking anymore. Man, I would not have recognized you, either, if you hadn't said something. You must have gotten taller, or—what'd you do, cut your hair?”
I hadn't done an
ything to my hair. Beagle looked different, too, skinnier and dirtier, but I had recognized him. “You write me notes,” I repeated.
He shook his head. He was smiling but the smile didn't seem directed at me, not in any personal way. “Man, I just didn't recognize you,” he said. “I really never expected to see you again. I'm sorry.”
I could tell he expected me to say, “That's okay,” or “No problem,” or something like that. “Come meet my mom again,” I said. “And Vivi. Come have dinner with us.”
He looked at his watch. “We're in kind of a hurry.”
“Well. Okay. See you at the shelters, then.”
He shook his head. “We're headed for the bus station,” he said. “We're out of here.”
“For how long?” I asked. I felt like my feet had grown into the sidewalk, like I couldn't have moved if I'd tried.
“For good,” he said. He sighed. “See, all along, my favorite part of the Trail has been the town stops. And this week I realized, I like being at home better than I like hanging out in some strange Trail town. This was an excellent idea—an excellent idea, but I am completely done.” He grinned at the guys with him. “I guess some people just aren't meant to be thru-hikers.”
“Oh.” I couldn't think of anything to say.
“So, see you. Or, no, I guess I won't. Good luck, then. Like, good luck with whatever.”
He turned and started walking, and his two friends walked with him. “Who was that?” one of them asked, his voice floating back to me. “Your girlfriend? She looks pretty young.” He laughed.
“Just some kid,” Beagle answered. “I bought her breakfast back at Springer. She looked scared to death. She calls herself Katahdin—I can't remember her real name.”
Like, good luck with whatever. She calls herself Katahdin—I can't remember her real name.
I was not scared to death. I was never scared to death. Beagle looked back over his shoulder. He gave me a half-smile that might have been an apology. His other buddy said, “You wrote her notes?” Beagle turned away and kept walking. He left me alone.