Claudia Brenner, who also happened to be lesbians, excited the attention of a disturbed
young man with a rifle, who shot them eight times from a distance as they made love in a
leafy clearing beside the trail. Wight was killed. Brenner, seriously wounded, managed to
stumble down the mountain to a road and was rescued by some passing teenagers in a
pickup truck. The murderer was swiftly caught and convicted.
The next year, a young man and woman were killed by a drifter at a shelter just a few
miles to the north, which rather gave Pennsylvania a bad reputation for a while, but then
there were no murders anywhere along the AT for seven years until the recent deaths of
the two young women in Shenandoah National Park. Their deaths brought the official
murder toll to nine--quite a large number for any footpath, no matter how you look at it--
though in fact there probably have been more. Between 1946 and 1950 three people
vanished while hiking through one small area of Vermont, but they aren't included in the
tally; whether because it happened so long ago or because it was never conclusively
proved they were murdered I couldn't say. I was also told by an acquaintance in New
England of an older couple who were killed by a deranged axe murderer in Maine
sometime in the 1970s, but again it doesn't appear in any records because, evidently,
they were on a side trail when they were attacked.
Overnight I had read Eight Bullets, Brenner's account of the murder of her friend, so I
was generally acquainted with the circumstances, but I intentionally left the book in the
car, as it seemed a little morbid to go looking for a death site nearly a decade after the
event. I wasn't remotely spooked by the murder, but even so I felt a vague, low-grade
unease at being alone in a silent woods so far from home. I missed Katz, missed his
puffing and bitching and unflappable fearlessness, hated the thought that I could sit
waiting on a rock till the end of time and he would never come. The woods were in full
chlorophyll-choked glory now, which made them seem even more pressing and secretive.
Often, I couldn't see five feet into the dense foliage on either side of the path. If I did
happen on a bear, I would be quite helpless. No Katz would come along after a minute to
smack it on the snout for me and say, "Jesus, Bryson, you cause me a lot of trouble." No
one at all would come to share the excitement, it appeared. There didn't seem to be
another person within fifty miles. I pushed on, filled with mild disquiet, feeling like
someone swimming too far from shore.
It was 3.5 miles to the top of Piney Mountain. At the summit, I stood uncertainly,
unable to decide whether to go on a little farther or turn back and perhaps try somewhere
else. I couldn't help feeling a kind of helpless and dispiriting pointlessness in what I was
doing. I had known for some time that I was not going to complete the AT, but only now
was it dawning on me how foolish and futile it was to dabble in it in this way. It hardly
mattered whether I went on two miles or five miles or twelve miles. If I walked twelve
miles instead of, say, five, what would it gain me after all? Certainly not any sight or
experience or sensation that I hadn't had a thousand times already. That was the trouble
with the AT--it was all one immensely long place, and there was more of it, infinitely more
of it, than I could ever conquer. It wasn't that I wanted to quit. Quite the contrary. I was
happy to walk, keen to walk. I just wanted to know what I was doing out here.
As I stood in this state of indecision, there was a dry crack of wood and a careless
disturbance of undergrowth perhaps fifty feet into the woods--something good-sized and
unseen. I stopped everything--moving, breathing, thinking--and stood on tiptoe peering
sean pound
(Sean Pound)
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