A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to
Georgia. They just can't stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder. In fact, the more
you read about thru-hikers the more you end up being filled with a kind of wonder. Take
Bill Irwin, the blind man. After his hike he said: "I never enjoyed the hiking part. It was
something I felt compelled to do. It wasn't my choice." Or David Horton, the ultra-runner
who set the speed record in 1991. By his own account, he became "a mental and
emotional wreck" and spent most of the period crossing Maine weeping copiously. (Well,
then why do it?) Even good old Earl Shaffer ended up as a recluse in the backwoods of
Pennsylvania. I don't mean to suggest that hiking the AT drives you potty, just that it
takes a certain kind of person to do it.
And how did I feel about giving up the quest when a granny in sneakers, a human
beachball named Woodrow, and over 3,990 others had made it to Katahdin? Well, pretty
good, as a matter of fact. I was still going to hike the Appalachian Trail; I just wasn't
going to hike all of it. Katz and I had already walked half a million steps, if you can believe
it. It didn't seem altogether essential to do the other 4.5 million to get the idea of the
thing.
So we rode to Knoxville with our comical cabdriver, acquired a rental car at the airport,
and found ourselves, shortly after midday, heading north out of Knoxville through a half-
remembered world of busy roads, dangling traffic signals, vast intersections, huge signs,
and acre upon acre of shopping malls, gas stations, discount stores, muffler clinics, car
lots, and all the rest. Even after a day in Gatlinburg, the transition was dazzling. I
remember reading once how some Stone Age Indians from the Brazilian rain forest with
no knowledge or expectation of a world beyond the jungle were taken to Sao Paulo or
Rio, and when they saw what it contained-- the buildings, the cars, the passing airplanes--
and how thoroughly at variance it was with their own simple lives, they wet themselves,
lavishly and in unison. I believe I had some idea how they felt.
It is such a strange contrast. When you're on the AT, the forest is your universe,
infinite and entire. It is all you experience day after day. Eventually it is about all you can
imagine. You are aware, of course, that somewhere over the horizon there are mighty
cities, busy factories, crowded freeways, but here in this part of the country, where woods
drape the landscape for as far as the eye can see, the forest rules. Even the little towns
like Franklin and Hiawassee and even Gatlinburg are just way stations scattered helpfully
through the great cosmos of woods.
But come off the trail, properly off, and drive somewhere, as we did now, and you
realize how magnificently deluded you have been. Here, the mountains and woods were
just backdrop--familiar, known, nearby, but no more consequential or noticed than the
clouds that scudded across their ridgelines. Here the real business was up close and on
top of you: gas stations, WallMarts, Kmarts, Dunkin Donuts, Blockbuster Videos, a
ceaseless unfolding pageant of commercial hideousness.
Even Katz was unnerved by it. "Jeez, it's ugly," he breathed in wonder, as if he had
never witnessed such a thing before. I looked past him, along the line of his shoulder, to
a vast shopping mall with a prairie-sized parking lot, and agreed. It was horrible. And
then, lavishly and in unison, we wet ourselves.
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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