A Walk in the Woods

and pull himself to a standing position. The water was up to his chest. He clung to the log
and heaved visibly with the effort of catching his breath and calming himself down. He
had obviously had a fright.
"You all right?" I said.
"Oh, peachy," he replied. "Just peachy. I don't know why they couldn't have put some
crocodiles in here and made a real adventure of it."
I crept on, and an instant later I tumbled in, too. I had a few surreal, slow-motion
moments of observing the world from the unusual perspective of waterline or just below
while my hand reached helplessly for a log that was just beyond my grasp--all this in a
curious bubbly silence--before Katz sloshed to my assistance, firmly grabbed my shirt, and
thrust me back into a world of light and noise and set me on my feet. He was surprisingly
strong.
"Thank you," I gasped.
"Don't mention it."
We waded heavily to the far shore, taking it in turns to stumble and help each other
up, and sloshed up on to the muddy bank trailing strands of half-rotted vegetation and
draining huge volumes of water from our packs. We dumped our loads and sat on the
ground, bedraggled and spent, and stared at the lagoon as if it had just played a terrible
practical joke on us. I could not remember feeling this tired this early in the day anywhere
along the trail. As we sat there, we heard voices, and two young hikers, hippieish and
very fit, emerged from the woods behind us. They nodded hellos and looked appraisingly
at the water.
"Afraid you gotta wade this one," Katz said.
One of the hikers looked at him in a not unkindly way. "This your first time hiking up
here?" he said.
We nodded.
"Well, I don't want to discourage you, but mister you've only just started to get wet."
With that he and his partner hoisted their packs above their heads, wished us luck, and
walked into the water. They waded skillfully across in perhaps thirty seconds--Katz and I
had taken as many minutes--and stepped out on the other side, as if from a foot bath,
put their dry packs back on, gave a small wave, and disappeared.
Katz took a big thoughtful breath--partly sigh, partly just experimenting with the ability
to breathe again. "Bryson, I'm not trying to be negative--I swear to God I'm not--but I'm
not sure I'm cut out for this. Could you lift your pack over your head like that?"
"No."
And on that premonitory note, we strapped up and set squelchily off up Moxie Bald
Mountain.
The Appalachian Trail is the hardest thing I have ever done, and the Maine portion was
the hardest part of the Appalachian Trail, and by a factor I couldn't begin to compute.
Partly it was the heat. Maine, that most moderate of states, was having a killer heat
wave. In the blistering sun, the shadeless granite pavements of Moxie Bald radiated an
ovenlike heat, but even in the woods the air was oppressive and close, as if the trees and
foliage were breathing on us with a hot, vegetative breath. We sweated helplessly,
copiously, and drank unusual quantities of water, but could never stop being thirsty.
Water was sometimes plentiful but more often nonexistent for long stretches so that we