cooked on a temperamental stove. Now, moreover, there would be all the perils that
come with warmer weather: wild and lively lightning storms, surly rattlesnakes, fever-
inducing ticks, bears with appetites, and, oh, one unpredictable, motiveless, possibly
drifting murderer, since reports of the deaths of the two women killed in Shenandoah
National Park were just making the news.
It was more than a little discouraging. The best I could do was to do, well, the best I
could do. Anyway, I had to try. Everyone in town who knew me (not a huge number,
admittedly, but enough to have me forever dodging into doorways whenever I saw a
familiar face approaching along Main Street) knew that I was trying to hike the AT, which
patently I could not be doing if I was to be seen skulking in town. ("I saw that Bryson
fellow today slipping into Eastman's Pharmacy with a newspaper in front of his face. I
thought he was supposed to be hiking the Appalachian Trail. Anyway, you're right. He is
odd.")
It was clear I had to get back on the trail--properly back on, far from home,
somewhere at least reasonably proximate to northern Virginia--if I was to have any
pretense of hiking the trail with anything approaching completeness. The problem was
that it is almost impossible nearly everywhere along the AT to get on and off the trail
without assistance. I could fly to Washington or Newark or Scranton, or any of several
other places in the region of the trail, but in each case I would still be scores of miles
short of the trail itself. I couldn't ask my dear and patient wife to take two days to drive
me back to Virginia or Pennsylvania, so I decided to drive myself. I would, I figured, park
at a likely looking spot, take a hike up into the hills, hike back to the car, drive on a way,
and repeat the process. I suspected this would turn out to be fairly unsatisfying, possibly
even imbecile (and I was right on both counts), but I couldn't think of a better alternative.
And thus I was to be found, in the first week of June, standing on the banks of the
Shenandoah again, in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, blinking at a grey sky and trying to
pretend that with all my heart this was where I wanted to be.
Harpers Ferry is an interesting place for a number of reasons. First, it is quite pretty.
This is because it is a National Historical Park, so there are no Pizza Huts, McDonald's,
Burger Kings, or even residents, at least in the lower, older part of town. Instead, you get
restored or re-created buildings with plaques and interpretation boards, so it doesn't have
much, or indeed any, real life, but it still has a certain beguiling, polished prettiness. You
can see that it would be a truly nice place to live if only people could be trusted to reside
there without succumbing to the urge to have Pizza Huts and Taco Bells (and personally I
believe they could, for as much as eighteen months), so instead you get a pretend town,
attractively tucked between steep hills at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac
Rivers.
It is a National Historical Park because, of course, it is a historic place. It was at
Harpers Ferry that the abolitionist John Brown decided to liberate America's slaves and set
up a new nation of his own in northwestern Virginia, which was a pretty ambitious
undertaking considering that he had an army of just twenty-one people. To that end, on
October 16, 1859, he and his little group stole into town under cover of darkness,
captured the federal armory without resistance (it was guarded by a single night-
watchman), yet still managed to kill a hapless passerby--who was, ironically, a freed black
slave. When news got out that a federal armory with 100,000 rifles and a great deal of
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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