A Walk in the Woods

Katz needed bootlaces, so we went to an outfitter's, and while he was off in the
footwear section I had an idle shuffle around. Pinned to a wall was a map showing the
whole of the Appalachian Trail on its long march through fourteen states, but with the
eastern seaboard rotated to give the AT the appearance of having a due north--south
orientation, allowing the mapmaker to fit the trail into an orderly rectangle, about six
inches wide and four feet high. I looked at it with a polite, almost proprietorial interest--it
was the first time since leaving New Hampshire that I had considered the trail in its
entirety--and then inclined closer, with bigger eyes and slightly parted lips. Of the four
feet of trail map before me, reaching approximately from my knees to the top of my head,
we had done the bottom two inches.
I went and got Katz and brought him back with me, pulling on a pinch of shirtsleeve.
"What?" he said. "What?"
I showed him the map. "Yeah, what?" Katz didn't like mysteries.
"Look at the map, and then look at the part we've walked."
He looked, then looked again. I watched closely as the expression drained from his
face. "Jesus," he breathed at last. He turned to me, full of astonishment. "We've done
nothing."
We went and got a cup of coffee and sat for some time in a kind of dumbfounded
silence. All that we had experienced and done-- all the effort and toil, the aches, the
damp, the mountains, the horrible stodgy noodles, the blizzards, the dreary evenings with
Mary Ellen, the endless, wearying, doggedly accumulated miles-- all that came to two
inches. My hair had grown more than that.
One thing was obvious. We were never going to walk to Maine.
In a way, it was liberating. If we couldn't walk the whole trail, we also didn't have to,
which was a novel thought that grew more attractive the more we considered it. We had
been released from our obligations. A whole dimension of drudgery--the tedious, mad,
really quite pointless business of stepping over every inch of rocky ground between
Georgia and Maine--had been removed. We could enjoy ourselves.
So the next morning, after breakfast, we spread our maps across my motel room bed
and studied the possibilities that were suddenly opened to us. In the end we decided to
return to the trail not at Newfound Gap, where we had left it, but a little farther on at a
place called Spivey Gap, near Ernestville. This would take us beyond the Smokies--with its
crowded shelters and stifling regulations--and put us back in a world where we could
please ourselves. I got out the Yellow Pages and looked up cab companies. There were
three in Gatlinburg. I called the first one.
"How much would it be to take two of us to Ernestville?" I inquired.
"Dunno," came the reply.
This threw me slightly. "Well, how much do you think it would be?"
"Dunno."
"But it's just down the road."
There was a considerable silence and then the voice said: "Yup."
"Haven't you ever taken anybody there before?"
"Nope."
"Well, it looks to me on my map like it's about twenty miles. Would you say that's
about right?"