A Walk in the Woods

We walked the last six miles together, but we didn't talk much after that. I was doing a
nineteen-mile day, the longest I would do anywhere on the trail, and even though the
grade was generally easy and I was carrying a light pack, I was real tired by late
afternoon. John seemed content to have someone to follow, and in any case he had his
hands full scrutinizing the trees.
It was after six when we reached Dalton. John had the name of a man on Depot Street
who let hikers camp in his backyard and use his shower, so I went with him to a gas
station while he asked directions. When we emerged, he started off in precisely the wrong
direction.
"It's that way, John," I said.
"Of course it is," he agreed. "And the name's Bernard, by the way. I don't know where
they got that Chicken John from."
I nodded and told him I would look for him the next day, but I never did see him
again.
I spent the night in a motel and the next day hiked on to Cheshire. It was only nine
miles over easy terrain, but the blackfly made it a torment. I have never seen a scientific
name for these tiny, vile, winged specks, so I don't know what they are other than a
hovering mass that goes with you wherever you go and are forever in your ears and
mouth and nostrils. Human sweat transports them to a realm of orgasmic ecstasy, and
insect repellent only seems to excite them further. They are particularly relentless when
you stop to rest or take a drink--so relentless that eventually you don't stop to rest and
you drink while moving, and then spit out a tongueful of them. It's a kind of living hell. So
it was with some relief that I stepped from their woodland realm in early afternoon and
strolled into the sunny, dozing straggle that was the little community of Cheshire.
Cheshire had a free hostel for hikers in a church on the main street (Massachusetts
people do a lot for hikers, it seems; elsewhere I had seen houses with signs inviting
people to help themselves to water or pick apples from trees), but I didn't feel like a night
in a bunkhouse, still less a long afternoon sitting around with nothing to do, so I pushed
on to Adams, four miles away up a baking highway, but with at least the prospect of a
night in a motel and a choice of restaurants.
Adams had just one motel, a dumpy place on the edge of town. I took a room and
passed the rest of the afternoon strolling around, idly looking in store windows and
browsing through boxes of books in a thrift shop (though of course there was nothing but
Reader's Digest volumes and those strange books you see only in thrift shops, with titles
like Home Drainage Encyclopedia: Volume One and Nod If You Can Hear Me: Living with a
Human Vegetable) and afterwards wandered out into the country to look at Mount
Greylock, my destination for the next day. Greylock is the highest eminence in
Massachusetts and the first hill over 3,000 feet since Virginia for northbound hikers. It's
just 3,491 feet to the top, but, surrounded as it is by much smaller hills, it looks
considerably bigger. It has in any case a certain imposing majesty that beckons. I was
looking forward to it.
And so, early the next morning, before the day's heat had a chance to get properly
under way (a scorcher was forecast), I stopped in town for a can of pop and a sandwich
for my lunch, and then set off on a wandering dirt road towards the Gould Trail, a side
trail leading steeply up to the AT and on to Greylock.