A Walk in the Woods

trail. In some places, friends of the trail will hike up to shelters with homemade cookies or
platters of fried chicken. It's quite wonderful.
While we were cooking dinner, a young southbound thru-hiker--the first of the season--
arrived. He had hiked twenty-six miles that day and thought he had died and gone to
heaven when he learned that hot dogs were on the menu. Six hot dogs apiece was more
than Katz and Connolly and I could eat, so we each ate four, and a quantity of cookies,
and saved the rest for breakfast. But the young southbounder ate as if he had never
eaten before. He downed six hot dogs, then a can of baby carrots, and gratefully
accepted a dozen or so Oreos, one after the other, and ate them with great savor and
particularity. He told us he had started in Maine in deep snow and had been endlessly
caught in blizzards, but was still averaging twenty-five miles a day. He was only about
five-foot-six, and his pack was enormous. No wonder he had an appetite. He was trying to
hike the trail in three months, mostly by putting in very long days. When we woke in the
morning, dawn was only just leaking in but he had already gone. Where he had slept
there was a brief note thanking us for the food and wishing us luck. We never did learn
his name.
Late the next morning, when I realized that I had considerably outstripped Katz and
Connolly, who were talking and not making particularly good time, I stopped to wait for
them in a broad, ancient-seeming, deeply fetching glade cradled by steep hills, which
gave it a vaguely enchanted, secretive feel. Everything you could ask for in a woodland
setting was here--tall, stately trees broken at intervals by escalators of dusty sunshine,
winding brook, floor of plump ferns, cool air languidly adrift in a lovely green stillness--and
I remember thinking what an exceptionally nice place this would be to camp.
Just over a month later, two young women, Lollie Winans and Julianne Williams,
evidently had the same thought. They pitched their tents somewhere in this tranquil
grove, then hiked the short way through the woods to Skyland Lodge, another commercial
complex, to eat in its restaurant. No one knows exactly what happened, but some person
at Skyland presumably watched them dine, then followed them back to their campsite.
They were found three days later in their tents with their hands bound and their throats
cut. There was no apparent motive. There has never been a suspect. Their deaths will
almost certainly forever be a mystery. Of course I had no idea of this at the time, so when
Katz and Connolly caught up I simply observed to them what an attractive spot it was.
They looked at it and agreed, and then we moved on.
We had lunch with Connolly at Skyland, and then he left us to hitchhike back to his car
at Rockfish Gap and return home. Katz and I bade him farewell and then pushed on, for
that was what we did. We had nearly completed the first part of our adventure, so there
was a certain home-stretch perkiness in our steps. We walked for three days more,
stopping at restaurants when we came to them, and camping in shelters, which once
again we had mostly to ourselves. On our next to last day on the trail, our sixth since
setting off from Rockfish Gap, we were walking along beneath dull skies when there came
an abrupt, cold roaring of wind. Trees danced and swayed, dust and leaves rose up
around us in boisterous swirls, and our jackets and outerwear took on sudden lives of
their own, leaping and flapping about us. There was a roll of thunder and then it began to
rain--a really cold, miserable, penetrating rain. We sheathed ourselves in nylon and
stoically pushed on.