A Walk in the Woods

struggled up on to the bank, and continued on into the woods without a backward glance,
as if this were the most normal thing in the world.
And so we pressed on to Monson, over hard trail and more rivers, collecting bruises
and scratches and insect bites that turned our backs into relief maps. On the third day,
forest-dazed and grubby, we stepped on to a sunny road, the first since Caratunk, and
followed it on a hot ambulation into the forgotten hamlet of Monson. Near the center of
town was an old clapboard house with a painted wooden cutout of a bearded hiker
standing on the lawn bearing the message "Welcome at Shaw's."
Shaw's is the most famous guesthouse on the AT, partly because it's the last comfort
stop for anyone going into the Hundred Mile Wilderness and the first for anyone coming
out, but also because it's very friendly and a good deal. For $28 each we got a room,
dinner and breakfast, and free use of the shower, laundry, and guest lounge. The place
was run by Keith and Pat Shaw, who started the business more or less by accident twenty
years ago when Keith brought home a hungry hiker off the trail and the hiker passed on
the word of how well he had been treated. Just a few weeks earlier, Keith told me proudly
as we signed in, they had registered their 20,000th hiker.
We had an hour till dinner. Katz borrowed $5--for pop, I presumed--and vanished to his
room. I had a shower, put a load of wash in the machine, and wandered out to the front
lawn, where there were a couple of Adirondack chairs on which I intended to park my
weary butt, smoke my pipe and savor the blissful ease of late afternoon and the pleasant
anticipation of a dinner earned. From a screened window nearby came the sounds of
sizzling food and the clatter of pans. It smelled good, whatever it was.
After a minute, Keith came out and sat with me. He was an old guy, comfortably into
his sixties, with almost no teeth and a body that looked as if it had put up with all kinds of
tough stuff in its day. He was real friendly.
"You didn't try to pet the dog, did ya?" he said.
"No." I had seen it out the window: an ugly, vicious mongrel that was tied up out back
and got stupidly and disproportionately worked up by any noise or movement within a
hundred yards.
"You don't wanna try to pet the dog. Take it from me: you do not wanna pet that dog.
Some hiker petted him last week when I told him not to and it bit him in the balls."
"Really?"
He nodded. "Wouldn't let go neither. You shoulda heard that feller wail."
"Really?"
"Had to hit the damn dog with a rake to get him to let go. Meanest damn dog I ever
seen in my life. You don't wanna get near him, believe me."
"How was the hiker?"
"Well, it didn't exactly make his day, I tell you that." He scratched his neck
contemplatively, as if he were thinking of having a shave one of these days. "Thru-hiker,
he was. Come all the way from Georgia. Long way to come to get your balls nipped."
Then he went off to check on dinner.
Dinner was at a big dining room table that was generously covered in platters of meat,
bowls of mashed potatoes and corn on the cob, a teetering plate of bread, and a tub of
butter. Katz arrived a few moments after me, looking freshly showered and very happy.