like chatting to your mother's friends in the supermarket, so I said: "Oh, yeah? YOU
happy with it?"
"Oh, yeah" was the deeply sincere reply. "Tell you why." He brought it over to show
me its features--its snap pockets, its map pouch, its general miraculous ability to hold
contents. He was particularly proud of a dropdown inner stowage pouch, bulging with
little plastic bottles of vitamins and medicines, with a transparent window built into it. "It
lets you see what you've got in there, without having to undo the zipper," he explained
and looked at me with an expression that invited staggered admiration.
Just at that moment Katz stepped up. He was eating a carrot (nobody could cadge food
like Katz) and was about to ask me something, but when his eye lit on Bob's transparent
pouch, he said: "Hey, look--a pouch with a window. Is that for people who are so stupid
they can't figure out how to get it open?"
"Actually, it's a very useful feature," said Bob in a measured, defensive tone. "It lets
you check the contents without having to undo the zipper."
Katz gave him a genuinely incredulous look. "What--like you're so busy on the trail you
can't spare the three seconds it takes to open a zipper and looked inside?" He turned to
me. "These college kids are willing to trade Pop Tarts for Snickers. What do you think?"
"Well, I actually find it quite useful," Bob said quietly, to himself, but he took his pack
away and bothered us no more. I'm afraid my equipment conversations nearly always
ended up like that somehow, with the talker retiring with hurt feelings and a piece of
formerly prized equipment cradled to his chest. It was never my wish, believe me.
The Smokies went downhill from there. We walked for four days and the rain fell
tirelessly, with an endless, typewriter patter. The trail everywhere became boggy and
slick. Puddles filled every dip and trough. Mud became a feature of our lives. We trudged
through it, stumbled and fell in it, knelt in it, set our packs down in it, left a streak of it on
everything we touched. And always when you moved there was the maddening,
monotonous sound of your nylon going wiss, wiss, wiss until you wanted to take a gun
and shoot it. I didn't see a bear, didn't see a salamander, didn't see foxfire, didn't see
anything actually--just perpetual dribbles and droplets of rain adhering to my glasses.
Each night, we stopped in leaky cow barns and cooked and lived with strangers--
crowds of them, all cold and damp and shuffling, gaunt and half mad from the ceaseless
rain and the cheerlessness of wet hiking. It was awful. And the worse the weather got,
the more crowded the shelters grew. It was spring break at colleges all over the East, and
scores and scores of young people had had the idea to come hiking in the Smokies. The
Smokies shelters are supposed to be for thru-hikers, not casual drop-ins, and words were
sometimes exchanged. It was not like the AT at all. It was worse than awful.
By the third day, Katz and I both had nothing dry and were shivering constantly. We
slopped up to the summit of Clingmans Dome--a high point of the trip, by all accounts,
with views in clear weather to make the heart take wing--and saw nothing, nothing
whatever but the dim shapes of dying trees in a sea of swirling fog.
We were soaked and filthy, desperately needed a launderette, clean, dry clothes, a
square meal, and a Ripley's Believe It or Not Museum. It was time to go to Gatlinburg.
But first we had to get there.