Service with so little funds to do a proper job. When the park had been formed, there had
been money enough to buy only about half of the Schoolhouse Ridge Battlefield above
town (one of the most important if least celebrated of Civil War battle sites) and now a
developer was in the process of building houses and shops on what Fox clearly saw as
hallowed ground. The developer had even started running pipes across National Park land
in the confident--but, as it happened, mistaken--presumption that the Park Service
wouldn't have the will or money to stop him. Fox told me I should go up and look at it. I
said I would.
But first I had a more important pilgrimage to make. Harpers Ferry is the headquarters
of the Appalachian Trail Conference, overseers of the noble footpath to which I had
dedicated my summer. The ATC occupies a modest white house on a steep hill above the
old part of town. I trudged up and went in. The HQ was half office/half shop--the office
portion commendably busy looking, the shop half arrayed with AT guides and keepsakes.
At one end of the public area was a large-scale model of the entire trail, which, had I seen
it before I started, might well have dissuaded me from attempting such an ambitious
undertaking. It was perhaps fifteen feet long and conveyed arrestingly and at a glance
what 2,200 miles of mountains look like: hard. The rest of the public area was filled with
AT goods--T-shirts, postcards, bandannas, books, miscellaneous publications. I chose a
couple of books and some postcards, and was served at the counter by a friendly young
woman named Laurie Potteiger, whose badge described her as an Information Specialist,
and they seem to have chosen the right person, for she was a mine of information.
She told me that the previous year 1,500 prospective thru-hikers had started the trail,
1,200 had made it to Neels Gap (that's a dropout rate of 20 percent in the first week!),
about a third had made it to Harpers Ferry, roughly halfway, and about 300 had reached
Katahdin, a higher success rate than usual. Sixty or so people had successfully hiked the
trail from north to south. This year's crop of thru-hikers had been passing through for the
past month. It was too early to say what the final figure for the year would be, but it
would certainly be higher. It rose, in any case, almost every year.
I asked her about the dangers of the trail, and she told me that in the eight years that
she had worked for the ATC, there had been just two confirmed cases of snakebite,
neither fatal, and one person killed by lightning.
I asked her about the recent murders.
She gave a sympathetic grimace. "It's awful. Everyone's really upset about it, because
trust is such a kind of bedrock part of hiking the AT, you know? I thru-hiked myself in
1987, so I know how much you come to rely on the goodness of strangers. The trail is
really all about that, isn't it? And to have that taken away, well... ." Then, remembering
her position, she gave me a little bit of the official line--a brief, articulate spiel to the
effect that one should never forget that the trail is not insulated from the larger ills of
society but that statistically it remains extremely safe compared with most places in
America. "It's had nine murders since 1937--about the same as you would get in many
small towns." This was correct, but a wee disingenuous. The AT had no murders in its
first thirty-six years and nine in the past twenty-two. Still, her larger point was inarguable.
You are more likely to be murdered in your bed in America than on the AT. Or as an
American friend put it to me much later: "Look, if you draw a two thousand-mile-long line
across the United States at any angle, it's going to pass through nine murder victims."
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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