amble. Shenandoah National Park--101 miles from top to bottom--is famously beautiful,
and I was eager to see it at last. We had, after all, walked a long way to get here.
At Rockfish Gap there is a tollbooth manned by rangers where motorists have to pay an
entrance fee and thru-hikers have to acquire a backcountry hiking permit. The permit
doesn't cost anything (one of the noblest traditions of the Appalachian Trail is that every
inch of it is free) but you have to complete a lengthy form giving your personal details,
your itinerary through the park, and where you plan to camp each night, which is a little
ridiculous because you haven't seen the terrain and don't know what kind of mileage you
might achieve. Appended to the form were the usual copious regulations and warnings of
severe fines and immediate banishment for doing, well, pretty much anything. I filled out
the form the best I could and handed it in at the window to a lady ranger.
"So you're hiking the trail?" she said brightly, if not terribly astutely, accepted the form
without looking at it, banged it severely with rubber stamps, and tore off the part that
would serve as our license to walk on land that, in theory, we owned anyway.
"Well, we're trying," I said.
"I must get up there myself one of these days. I hear it's real nice."
This took me aback. "You've never been on the trail?" But you're a ranger, I wanted to
say.
"No, afraid not," she answered wistfully. "Lived here all my life, but haven't got to it
yet. One day I will."
Katz, mindful of Beulah's husband, was practically dragging me towards the safety of
the woods, but I was curious.
"How long have you been a ranger?" I called back.
"Twelve years in August," she said proudly.
"You ought to give it a try sometime. It's real nice."
"Might get some of that flab off your butt," Katz muttered privately, and stepped into
the woods. I looked at him with interest and surprise--it wasn't like Katz to be so
uncharitable--and put it down to lack of sleep, profound sexual frustration, and a surfeit
of Hardees sausage biscuits.
Shenandoah National Park is a park with problems. More even than the Smokies, it
suffers from a chronic shortage (though a cynic might say a chronic misapplication) of
funds. Several miles of side trails have been closed, and others are deteriorating. If it
weren't that volunteers from the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club maintain 80 percent of
the park's trails, including the whole of the AT through the park, the situation would be
much worse. Mathews Arm Campground, one of the park's main recreational areas, was
closed for lack of funds in 1993 and hasn't been open since. Several other recreation
areas are closed for most of the year. For a time in the 1980s, even the trail shelters (or
huts, as they are known here) were shut. I don't know how they did it--I mean to say,
how exactly do you close a wooden structure with a fifteen-foot-wide opening at the
front?--and still less why, since forbidding hikers from resting for a few hours on a
wooden sleeping platform is hardly going to transform the park's finances. But then
making things difficult for hikers is something of a tradition in the eastern parks. A couple
of months earlier, all the national parks, along with all other nonessential government
departments, had been closed for a couple of weeks during a budget impasse between
President Clinton and Congress. Yet Shenandoah, despite its perennial want of money,
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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