"Yes, sir," I indicated the pack on the backseat. "I just wanted directions and the next
thing I know"--I gave a cheerfully dismayed laugh--"this man's telling me I'm on private
property and he's impounding my car."
"J.D., the man was looking at the hill and asking questions." But J.D. held up another
calming hand.
"Where you hiking?"
I told him.
He nodded. "Well, then you want to go up the road about four miles to Little Gap and
take the right for Danielsville. At the top of the hill you'll see the trail crossing. You can't
miss it."
"Thank you very much."
"Not a problem. You have a good hike, you hear?"
I thanked him again and drove off. In the rearview mirror I noticed with gratification
that he was remonstrating quietly but firmly with Luther--threatening, I very much hoped,
to take away his communication device.
The route went steeply up to a lonesome pass where there was a dirt parking lot. I
parked, found the AT, and walked along it on a high exposed ridge through the most
amazingly devastated terrain. For miles it was either entirely barren or covered in the
spindly trunks of dead trees, a few still weakly standing but most toppled. It brought to
mind a World War I battlefield after heavy shelling. The ground was covered in a gritty
black dust, like iron filings.
The walking was uncommonly easy--the ridge was almost perfectly flat--and the
absence of vegetation provided uninterrupted views. All the other visible hills, including
those facing me across the narrow valley, looked to be in good health, except where they
had been scarred and gouged by quarrying or strip mining, which was regularly. I walked
for a little over an hour until I came to a sudden, absurdly steep descent to Lehigh Gap--
almost a thousand feet straight down. I wasn't at all ready to stop walking--in fact, I was
just getting into my stride--but the idea of going down a thousand feet only to turn
around and come straight back up held zero appeal, and there wasn't any way to double
back without walking miles along a busy highway. That was of course the trouble with
trying to do the AT in day-sized pieces. It was designed for pushing on, ever on, not for
dipping in and out of.
With a sigh, I turned around and trudged back the way I had come, in a mood neatly
suited to the desolate landscape. It was almost four o'clock when I reached the car--much
too late to try an alternative hike elsewhere. The afternoon was as good as shot. I had
driven 350 miles to get to Pennsylvania, had spent four long days in the state, and walked
a net eleven miles of the Appalachian Trail. Never again, I vowed, would I try to hike the
Appalachian Trail with a car.
Once, aeons ago, the Appalachians were of a scale and majesty to rival the Himalayas--
piercing, snow-peaked, pushing breathtakingly through the clouds to heights of four miles
or more. New Hampshire's Mount Washington is still an imposing presence, but the stony
mass that rises from the New England woods today represents, at most, the stubby
bottom one-third of what was ten million years ago.