A Walk in the Woods

into the leafy void. The noise came again, nearer. Whatever it was, it was coming my
way! Whimpering quietly but sincerely, I ran a hundred yards, day pack bouncing, glasses
jiggling, then turned, heart stopped, and looked back. A deer, a large buck, handsome
and proud, stepped onto the path, gazed at me for a moment without concern, and
sauntered on. I took a long moment to catch my breath, wiped a river of sweat from my
brow, and felt profoundly discouraged.
Everyone has a supremely low moment somewhere along the AT, usually when the
urge to quit the trail becomes almost overpowering. The irony of my moment was that I
wanted to get back on the trail and didn't know how. I hadn't lost just Katz, my boon
companion, but my whole sense of connectedness to the trail. I had lost my momentum,
my feeling of purpose. In the most literal way I needed to find my feet again. And now on
top of everything else I was quaking as if I had never been out in the woods before. All
the experience I had piled up in the earlier weeks seemed to make it harder rather than
easier to be out on the trail on my own. I hadn't expected this. It didn't seem fair. It
certainly wasn't right. In a glum frame of mind, I returned to the car.
I spent the night near Harrisburg and in the morning drove north and east across the
state on back highways, trying to follow the trail as closely as I could by road, stopping
from time to time where possible to sample the trail but without finding anything remotely
rewarding, so mostly I drove.
Little by little the town names along the way began to take on a frank industrial tone--
Port Carbon, Minersville, Slatedale--and I realized I was entering the strange, half-
forgotten world of Pennsylvania's anthracite region. At Minersville, I turned onto a back
highway and headed through a landscape of overgrown mine tailings and rusting
machinery towards Centralia, the strangest, saddest town I believe I have ever seen.
Eastern Pennsylvania sits on one of the richest coal beds on earth. Almost from the
moment Europeans arrived, they realized there was coal out there in quantities almost
beyond conception. The trouble was, it was virtually all anthracite, a coal so immensely
hard (it is 95 percent carbon) that for a very long time no one could figure out how to get
it to light. It wasn't until 1828 that an enterprising Scot named James Neilson had the
simple but effective idea of injecting heated air rather than cold air into an iron furnace by
means of a bellows. The process became known as a hot blast, and it transformed the
coal industry all over the world (Wales, too, had a lot of anthracite) but especially in the
United States. By the end of the century America was producing 300 million tons of coal a
year, about as much as the rest of the world put together, and the great bulk of it came
from Pennsylvania's anthracite belt.
Meanwhile, to its intense gratification, Pennsylvania had also discovered oil--not only
discovered it but devised ways to make it industrially useful. Petroleum (or rock oil) had
been a curiosity of western Pennsylvania for years. It emerged in seeps along river-banks,
where it was blotted up with blankets to be made into patent medicines esteemed for
their value to cure everything from scrofula to diarrhea. In 1859, a mysterious figure
named Col. Edwin Drake (who wasn't a colonel at all but a retired railway conductor, with
no understanding of geology) developed, from goodness knows where, the belief that oil
could be extracted from the ground via wells. At Titusville, he bored a hole to a depth of
sixty-nine feet and got the world's first gusher. Quickly it was realized that petroleum in
volume not only could be used to bind bowels and banish scabby growths but could be