scattered through the undergrowth were large, rounded black boulders, like sleeping
animals, which lent the still recesses a certain eerieness. When Walt Disney made a
motion picture of Bambi, his artists based their images on the Great North Woods of
Maine, but this was palpably not a Disney forest of roomy glades and cuddlesome
creatures. This brought to mind the woods in the Wizard of Oz, where the trees have ugly
faces and malign intent and every step seems a gamble. This was a woods for looming
bears, dangling snakes, wolves with laser-red eyes, strange noises, sudden terrors--a
place of "standing night," as Thoreau neatly and nervously put it.
As ever, the trail was well blazed, but in places almost overgrown, with ferns and other
low foliage all but meeting in the middle over the path, reducing the visible trail to a razor
line along the forest floor. Since only 10 percent of thru-hikers make it this far, and it is
too distant for most day hikers, the trail in Maine is much more thinly used, and so the
foliage encroaches. Above all, what set the trail apart was the terrain. In profile, the
topography of the AT over the eighteen-mile section from Monson to Barren Mountain
looks reasonably undemanding, rolling along at a more or less steady 1,200 feet with just
a few steep rises and falls. In fact, it was hell.
Within half an hour we had come to a wall of rock, the first of many, perhaps 400 feet
high. The trail ran up its face along a slight depression, like an elevator shaft. It was as
near perpendicular as a slope can get without actually being a rock climb. Slowly and
laboriously we picked our way between and over boulders, using our hands as much as
our feet. Combined with our exertion, the cloying heat was almost unbearable. I found I
had to stop every ten or twelve yards to draw breath and wipe burning sweat from my
eyes. I was swimming in heat, bathed in heat, swaddled in it. I drank three-quarters of a
bottle of water on the way up and used much of the rest to wet a bandanna and try to
cool my throbbing head. I felt dangerously overheated and faint. I began to rest more
frequently and for longer periods, to try to cool down a little, but each time I set off again
the heat came flooding back. I had never had to work so hard or so tiringly to clear an
Appalachian impediment, and this was just the first of a series.
The top of the climb brought several hundred yards of bare, gently sloping granite, like
walking along a whale's back. From each summit the panorama was sensational--for as
far as the eye could see nothing but heavy green woods, denim-blue lakes, and lonely,
undulant mountains. Many of the lakes were immense, and nearly all of them had
probably never felt so much as a human toe. There was a certain captivating sense of
having penetrated into a secret corner of the world, but in the murderous sun it was
impossible to linger.
Then came a difficult and unnerving descent down a rocky cliff face on the other side,
a short walk through a dark, waterless valley, and delivery to the foot of another wall of
rock. And so the day went, with monumental climbs and the hope of water over the next
hill the principal thing drawing us on. Katz was soon out of water altogether. I gave him a
drink of mine and he accepted it gratefully, with a look that asked for a truce. There was,
however, still a kind of odor between us, an unhappy sense that things had changed and
would not be the same again.
It was my fault. I pushed on farther and longer than we would have normally, and
without consulting him, unsubtly punishing him for having unbalanced the equilibrium that
had existed between us, and Katz bore it silently as his due. We did fourteen miles, an
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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