Katz nodded in understanding and stood up. "Ladies and gentlemen," he announced,
"can I have your attention for a minute? Excuse me, Sport, can I have your attention?
We're going to go out and pitch our tents in the rain, so you can have all the space in
here, but my friend here is in his boxer shorts and is afraid of offending the ladies--and
maybe exciting the gentlemen," he added with a brief, sweet leer, "so could you turn your
heads for a minute while he puts his wet clothes back on? Meanwhile, I'll say good-bye
and thank you for allowing us to share a few inches of your space for a little while. It's
been a slice."
Then he jumped down into the rain. I dressed hastily, surrounded by silence and self-
consciously averted gazes, then bounded down with a small, wimpily neutral good-bye.
We pitched our tents about thirty yards away--not an easy or enjoyable process in a
driving rain, believe me--and climbed in. Before we had finished, voices from the shelter
had resumed and were succeeded by peels of triumphant laughter. They were noisy until
dark, then drunkenly noisy until the small hours. I wondered if at any point they would
experience some twinge of charity or remorse and send over a peace offering--a brownie,
perhaps, or a hot dog--but they did not.
When we woke in the morning, the rain had stopped, though the world was still insipid
and dreary, and water was dripping from the trees. We didn't bother with coffee. We just
wanted to get out of there. We broke down our tents and packed away our stuff. Katz
went to get a shirt from the line and reported that our six friends were sleeping heavily.
There were two empty bourbon bottles, he reported in a tone of disdain.
We hefted our packs and set off down the trail. We had walked perhaps 400 yards, out
of sight of the camp, when Katz stopped me.
"You know that woman who said 'Ooh, do we have to share?' and shoved our clothes
to the end of the clothesline?" he asked.
I nodded. Of course I remembered her.
"Well, I'm not real proud of this. I want you to understand that. But when I went to get
my shirt, I noticed her boots were right by the edge of the platform and, well, I did
something kind of bad."
"What?" I tried to imagine, but couldn't.
He opened his hand and there were two suede shoelaces. Then he beamed--a big,
winning beam--and stuck them in his pocket and walked on.
And that was about it for the start of our great adventure. We walked eighteen miles to
Front Royal, where my wife was to pick us up in two days if she managed to find her way
by car from New Hampshire in an unfamiliar country.
I had to go off for a month to do other things--principally, try to persuade people to
buy a book of mine even though it had nothing to do with effortless weight loss, running
with the wolves, thriving in an age of anxiety, or the O.J. Simpson trial. (Even so, it sold
over sixty copies.) Katz was going back to Des Moines, where he had a job offer for the
summer building houses, though he promised to come back in August and hike the
famous and forbidding Hundred Mile Wilderness in Maine with me.
At one point very early in the trip he had talked earnestly of doing the whole trail,
pushing on alone until I was able to rejoin him in June, but when I mentioned this now he
just gave a hollow laugh and invited me to join him in the real world when I felt up to it.