A Walk in the Woods

knowing that my family waited, that the car was badly parked, that it was nearly rush
hour in Washington), so we parted awkwardly, almost absently, with hasty wishes for a
good flight and promises to meet again in August for the conclusion of our long amble.
When he was gone I felt bad, but then I turned to the car, saw my family, and didn't
think about him again for weeks.
It was the end of May, almost June, before I got back on the trail. I went for a walk in
the woods near our home, with a day pack containing a bottle of water, two peanut
butter sandwiches, a map (for form's sake), and nothing else. It was summer now, so the
woods were a new and different place, alive with green and filled with birdsong and
swarming mosquitoes and pesky blackfly. I walked five miles over low hills through the
woods to the town of Etna, where I sat beside an old cemetery and ate my sandwiches,
then packed up and walked home. I was back before lunch. -It didn't feel right at all.
The next day, I drove to Mount Moosilauke, fifty miles from my home on the southern
edge of the White Mountains. Moosilauke is a wonderful mountain, one of the most
beautiful in New England, with an imposing leonine grandeur, but it is rather in the middle
of nowhere so it doesn't attract a great deal of attention. It belongs to Dartmouth College,
of Hanover, whose famous Outing Club has been looking after it in a commendably
diligent and low-key way since the early years of this century. Dartmouth introduced
downhill skiing to America on Moosilauke, and the first national championships were held
there in 1933. But it was too remote, and soon the sport in New England moved to other
mountains nearer main highways, and Moosilauke returned to a splendid obscurity. Today
you would never guess that it had ever known fame.
I parked in a small dirt parking lot, the only car that day, and set off into the woods.
This time I had water, peanut butter sandwiches, a map, and insect repellent. Mount
Moosilauke is 4,802 feet high, and steep. Without a full pack, I walked straight up it
without stopping--a novel and gratifying experience. The view from the top was
gorgeously panoramic, but it still didn't feel right without Katz, without a full pack. I was
home by 4:00 P.M. This didn't feel right at all. You don't hike the Appalachian Trail and
then go home and cut the grass.
I had been so absorbed for so long with setting up and executing the first part of the
trip that I hadn't actually stopped to consider where I would be at this point. Where I
was, in fact, was companionless, far away from where I had gotten off the trail, and
impossibly adrift from a touchingly optimistic hiking schedule I had drawn up nearly a
year before. This showed me to be somewhere in the region of New Jersey by about now,
blithely striding off up to thirty miles a day.
It was clear that I had to make some adjustments. Even overlooking the large hunk
that Katz and I had left out by jumping from Gatlinburg to Roanoke, and no matter how I
juggled the numbers, it was abundantly evident that I was never going to hike the whole
thing in one season. At my pace, if I returned to the trail at Front Royal where we had left
off and resumed hiking north, I would be lucky to reach central Vermont by winter, 500
miles shy of the trail's northern terminus at Mount Katahdin.
This time, too, there was no small, endearingly innocent pulse of excitement, that keen
and eager frisson that comes with venturing into the unknown with gleaming, untried
equipment. This time I knew exactly what was out there--a lot of long, taxing miles, steep
rocky mountains, hard shelter floors, hot days without showers, unsatisfying meals