A Walk in the Woods

hitchhike into Hiawassee for dinner and a night in a motel. Plan B was that we would kill
Mary Ellen and take her Pop Tarts.
And so the next day we hiked, really hiked, startling Mary Ellen with our thrusting
strides. There was a motel in Hiawassee--clean sheets! Shower! Color TV!--and a reputed
choice of restaurants. We needed no more incentive than that to perk our step. Katz
flagged in the first hour, and I felt tired too by afternoon, but we pushed determinedly on.
Mary Ellen fell farther and farther off the pace, until she was behind even Katz. It was a
kind of miracle in the hills.
At about four o'clock, tired and overheated and streaked about the face with rivulets of
gritty sweat, I stepped from the woods onto the broad shoulder of U.S. Highway 76, an
asphalt river through the woods, pleased to note that the road was wide and reasonably
important looking. A half mile down the road there was a clearing in the trees and a drive-
-a hint of civilization-- before the road curved away invitingly. Several cars passed as I
stood there.
Katz tumbled from the woods a few minutes later, looking wild of hair and eye, and I
hustled him across the road against his voluble protests that he needed to sit down
immediately. I wanted to try to get a lift before Mary Ellen came along and screwed
things up. I couldn't think how she might, but I knew she would.
"Have you seen her?" I asked anxiously.
"Miles back, sitting on a rock with her boots off rubbing her feet. She looked real tired."
"Good."
Katz sagged onto his pack, grubby and spent, and I stood beside him on the shoulder
with my thumb out, trying to project an image of wholesomeness and respectability,
making private irked tutting noises at every car and pickup that passed. I had not
hitchhiked in twenty-five years, and it was a vaguely humbling experience. Cars shot past
very fast--unbelievably fast to us who now resided in Foot World--and gave us scarcely a
glance. A very few approached more slowly, always occupied by elderly people--little
white heads, just above the window line--who stared at us without sympathy or
expression, as they would at a field of cows. It seemed unlikely that anyone would stop
for us. I wouldn't have stopped for us.
"We're never going to get picked up," Katz announced despondently after cars had
forsaken us for fifteen minutes.
He was right, of course, but it always exasperated me how easily he gave up on things.
"Can't you try to be a little more positive?" I said.
"OK, I'm positive we're never going to get picked up. I mean, look at us." He smelled
his armpits with disgust. "Jesus, I smell like Jeffrey Dahmer's refrigerator."
There is a phenomenon called Trail Magic, known and spoken of with reverence by
everyone who hikes the trail, which holds that often when things look darkest some little
piece of serendipity comes along to put you back on a heavenly plane. Ours was a baby
blue Pontiac Trans Am, which flew past, then screeched to a stop on the shoulder a
hundred yards or so down the road, in a cloud of gravelly dust. It was so far beyond
where we stood that we didn't think it could possibly be for us, but then it jerked into
reverse and came at us, half on the shoulder and half off, moving very fast and a little
wildly. I stood transfixed. The day before, we had been told by a pair of seasoned hikers
that sometimes in the South drivers will swerve at hitchhikers, or run over their packs, for