Halfway to the Sky

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  To Bart

  for the hiking boots for Christmas

  the trek up Springer Mountain

  the freezing Fourth of July night

  in the shelter on Mount Greylock

  the week at muscular dystrophy camp

  and mostly

  for your unwavering belief in me

  and for the life we share

  Thank you

  Remote for detachment,

  narrow for chosen company,

  winding for leisure,

  lonely for contemplation,

  the Trail leads not merely north and south

  but upward to the body, mind and soul of man.

  —Harold Allen

  March 1

  3326 Holston Drive, Bristol, Tennessee

  Miles hiked today: 0 (so far)

  Total miles hiked on the Appalachian Trail: 0

  Weather: bright, mid-50s, very windy

  I went through my pack one more time.

  Sleeping bag, pad, tent, stove. Fuel, food bag, toothbrush, towel. Extra shorts, shirt, tights, fleece jacket, one each. Extra socks, sock liners, underwear, two pairs each. Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap. Maps for the first leg. One small notebook, a few handwritten lists, and a photograph of Springer.

  I tightened the drawstring and lifted the pack carefully onto my shoulders, then fastened it around my hips and across my chest. Fully loaded, the pack weighed 33 pounds on the bathroom scale. Fully dressed, I weighed 115. That was counting my boots, which were nearly a pound apiece.

  It was a Wednesday. I should have been in school. I looked around my room. Pink walls—we painted them when I was seven. Flowered bedspread, the bed neatly made. My soccer ball, the only thing I wished I could take but couldn't, and the trophies and the posters and the dolls. Everything painfully neat, dusted, wiped clean. I looked around and thought, It should not be so easy for a twelve-year-old girl to run away.

  But it was.

  I clicked the door shut and went across the darkened hall and down the stairs. Sometimes our house seemed like a museum, full of stuff but not a place where people actually lived. The kitchen was antiseptic. Mom scrubbed when she couldn't sleep at night. Lately that was most of the time.

  I paused in the foyer and hit the Record button on the answering machine. I cleared my throat. “Look, Mom, it's me, Dani,” I said, in what I hoped was the right sort of voice, half angry, half sulky. I'd picked a fight with her the night before on purpose to give me an excuse to sound like this. As usual, she had left the house before I woke. She worked strange hours these days, and not because she had to, either. Who ever heard of starting at seven in the morning at a bank? “I don't want to live with you anymore, okay?” I said to the machine. Sulk, sulk. “I'm going to Dad's for a while. Maybe forever. So don't call. Bye.”

  I hit the button again, and the little light started blinking. Messages—1. Two nights before, Dad had told me he couldn't see me this weekend because he was going out of town. So when Mom did get around to calling, he wouldn't be there. I figured I'd have a whole week to get away. I didn't think they'd guess where I'd gone. The Appalachian Trail was a legend in our family, but my parents had quit telling the stories about it long ago.

  I went to the front door, opened it, hesitated, went back. Springer's room on the first floor was dark and stale-smelling, the curtains drawn, the hospital bed shrouded with a plain white sheet. Clean vacuuming lines ran up and down the carpet, untouched. No one had stepped inside for weeks. I didn't either. “Hey,” I said softly, “I'm leaving now. I'm doing this for you, too. Okay?”

  It shouldn't be easy for a thirteen-year-old boy to die. But it was.

  I locked the door on my way out.

  The Greyhound depot was in the middle of town, a twenty-minute walk away. I had already bought my ticket to Gainesville, Georgia, and no one asked me questions. I'd thought they would. I'd thought someone would wonder why I was alone, why I was carrying such a heavy pack, why I wasn't in school. There were six other passengers at the Bristol stop. None of them paid any attention to me.

  In a car it would have taken less than five hours to reach Gainesville, but on the bus it took all day. We stopped, and stopped, and stopped again. Once, I got off to pee in a dingy station, but other than that I stayed put with my pack wedged in the space in front my knees. When I got hungry, I ate some of my raisins. I didn't get thirsty or tired. I looked out the window and tried not to think about anything.

  The Appalachian Trail runs 2,167 miles from Georgia to Maine, mostly along the ridgelines of mountains. It's a high-up kind of place. It ends on the top of Mount Katahdin, in Maine, and begins on the top of Springer Mountain, in Georgia. Each year about three thousand people try to hike the whole Trail from beginning to end in a single year. The ones who make it are called thru-hikers.

  My parents had been thru-hikers fourteen years earlier. They met for the first time their first night on the Trail. They got married partway through, and by the time they reached Katahdin, Mom was pregnant with my brother. They named him Springer because he was part of the Trail. When I was born a year later, they named me Katahdin, to match, but everyone calls me Dani. When Springer couldn't walk anymore, my parents put their memories of the Trail away.

  Dad still hiked. He went away by himself for long days every few months in decent weather. “I need an escape, Dani,” he'd tell me. “I need to be alone.” He bought me hiking boots and took me for walks in the park near our house. He taught me some things, but not much.

  Mom never hiked. She never did anything but go to work, take care of Springer, and run three miles every morning while I made breakfast by myself.

  Springer, Springer. I found myself tracing his name on the grimy window with my finger. An old woman sitting across the aisle glared at me. I wiped the window with my sleeve and folded my hands.

  There's a trick to not thinking, and I'd learned it.

  From Gainesville I took a taxi, the way the guidebooks suggested. The driver tried to talk to me, but I shut my eyes and he left me alone. When I opened them, I saw a strange ugly forest, hills that looked different from the ones we had at home. It was evening, and I was hungry.

  “Here we go,” the cabbie said. He swung right and stopped. A big wooden sign read AMICALOLA FALLS STATE PARK.

  “I'm not going through the gates,” he said. “Have to pay a park fee if I do. Drop you here, okay, sis?”

  “Okay.” I paid him, dragged my pack out of the backseat, and watched him drive away. I looked at the park entrance again. I was here. The books all say it takes five million steps to walk the entire Appalachian Trail. I took my first one, breathed deep, and smiled.

  March 1

  Amicalola Falls State
Park Shelter (Georgia)

  Miles hiked today: 1

  Total miles hiked on the Appalachian Trail: 0

  Weather: clear, getting cold

  The man at the park gate waved me through without making me pay. I saw that the sign said two dollars per vehicle, and I guessed that since I was walking I didn't count. I wondered if he would remember me, if someone came looking for me, if there was a search team or something. I hoped not. I was wearing a wool hat, and I pulled it farther down so he couldn't see my face.

  I walked along the road toward the buildings just ahead. Mountains rose up in a half-circle in front of me. I felt like I was walking into the bottom of a bowl. The sun was almost down, and the trees, still bare of leaves, shone golden brown in the fading orange light. The pine trees closer to me were scraggy and wild.

  There were cars in the parking lot, but no people that I could see. The road forked, signs pointing one way to the campground, another to the lodge. The visitors' center was closed, which pleased me; the toilets were locked, which didn't. Behind the building I found a perfect rectangle of lawn, bordered with stone walls and bisected by a sidewalk that led beneath a stone archway to a packed dirt trail.

  The start of the approach trail.

  I had read all about it. Something as grand and difficult as the Appalachian Trail would never start at the bottom of a mountain; it starts at the top, at the very summit of Springer. So the approach trail runs nine miles uphill to that start. The guidebooks all say things like “Don't think the approach trail is any walk in the park,” which is pretty stupid given how much of the Trail really is a walk in some kind of park. But I understood that the approach trail was going to be difficult, and looking at the bottom of it, I could see why. It meandered up through the trees, up to the left, and up, up, up. I had read that of the three thousand people trying to thru-hike in any of the more recent years, over ten percent never made it to the top of Springer. Ten percent never made it to the start.

  Only another ten percent actually made it all the way to Katahdin. But I figured most of them didn't want to get there as badly as I did. Even with the heavy pack holding me back, my legs, my shoulders, my brain all seemed to pull me forward, faster. Away, away.

  But not that night. It was getting dark quickly, and the air was cold and damp. I went through the archway and up the hill a few steps, then left—and there, exactly where the books said it would be, was a shelter. Dark and empty, more good luck.

  The shelter had a roof and three wooden walls, and a screened-in front with a door. Inside, two rows of bunks with wire mesh bottoms stretched from one side of the shelter to the other. Room for eight, more in a pinch. I peed behind a bush just outside the shelter, then went inside, unrolled my sleeping bag across a bottom bunk in the corner, and unloaded most of my gear. I found my stove, my fuel bottle, my water bottles— all full—my pot and my food bag. I set up the stove on the platform in front of the shelter, just the way I'd practiced at home. I reached into my pack for my matches to light it.

  Except that I didn't have matches. My hand closed on the empty film canister I'd meant to fill with matches just as my brain remembered I hadn't done it. I'd had to put most of my gear together at the last minute to keep things secret. We had lots of matches in the kitchen at home. I'd forgotten them.

  I dumped everything out of my food bag. Noodles, soup mixes, hot chocolate. Instant oatmeal, tea. I'd chosen food that was light and wouldn't spoil—and therefore, food that needed to be mixed with water and boiled. I was getting colder, and I wanted something hot. The shelter was awfully dark now, too. I didn't have a flashlight because I didn't think I could afford the batteries, and I didn't want to carry anything I couldn't use.

  Don't panic, I told myself. I didn't. I ate the rest of my raisins and one of my three chocolate bars, and the apple I'd picked up on my way out of the house that morning. I drank some cold water, stirred more water into a packet of instant oatmeal, and made myself eat it even though it tasted like sweet, gritty glue. I used the water in my second bottle to rinse the bowl and spoon, realized I didn't have any water left to brush my teeth, and decided I'd look for water in the morning. There had to be some somewhere.

  By now I was really cold, but I remembered that I was supposed to take some of my clothes off, or else the sweat trapped in them would condense inside my sleeping bag. I took my jacket off and, after some thought, my socks. I put on a clean pair of socks and my second shirt and climbed into my icy sleeping bag. Then I remembered I'd forgotten to hang up my food.

  If you don't hang up your food at night, mice eat it, or worse, bears. I jumped out of my sleeping bag, shivering violently, stuffed all the food I could find into my food bag, and after three tries managed to throw a rope around one of the shelter's rafters and hang the bag from the ceiling. I jumped back into my sleeping bag and lay shivering while I wondered what else I'd forgotten.

  Matches were easy. I could get matches anywhere. I went through a mental list of everything I'd meant to bring, and tried to picture where each item was inside my pack. I thought I'd remembered everything else.

  It was probably only about seven o'clock—I couldn't read my watch in the dark—and I wasn't really sleepy, but I didn't have anything else to do. When I had tried to imagine what life on the Trail would be like, I'd always pictured the shelters crowded with people, happy people, all happy to be hiking the Trail. It had never occurred to me that I'd spend my first night alone. I couldn't see the moon from the inside of the shelter. I wondered if there were stars.

  I was used to waking up alone and getting myself off to school, but I'd never been alone at night before. It was an interesting feeling. After a while I found I didn't mind it. I wasn't scared, not with the Trail so close and the shelter walls around me. Maybe this was how my parents felt, their first night out, before they found each other, before the disasters began. Maybe they had been happy.

  I woke in the night, shivering. My sleeping bag was rated to twenty degrees, but it must have been below that, and I'd been stupid enough to take off my hat. I got up and fumbled in the dark, trying to find it and my fleece jacket. Suddenly I heard a noise almost exactly under my left hand, a rough, low growl that did not sound like a mouse or an insect or anything else I expected in a shelter. I screamed.

  The thing on the bunk rolled over with a swish of nylon and sat up partway and became a man, a hiker, sleeping in his own sleeping bag. He looked up. “Problem?” he asked.

  I put my hands over my mouth. “I thought you were a bear.”

  He seemed to consider this for a moment. “The shelters with closed-in fronts, you'd hear a bear trying to get in,” he said.

  “I didn't hear you come in.” I shivered again, found my jacket, and pulled it on.

  He laughed. “True. But I'm quieter than your average bear. Better with door handles, too.”

  I was beginning to feel really dumb, so I climbed back into my bag. “Sorry,” I said.

  He rolled over in his bag. “No problem. Good night.”

  March 2

  Summit of Springer Mountain (Georgia)

  Miles hiked today: 8

  Total miles hiked on the Appalachian Trail: 0

  Weather: sunny, cold

  In the morning the sound of birds chirping woke me. I sat up and looked around. The sky above the bare trees was a bright, clear blue. Next to me, the other hiker's sleeping bag was empty. I could see him standing far off in the woods, very still with his back toward me. I started to shout, then realized that he was peeing. I looked down. I had to pee, too, quite badly in fact, and though I didn't mind the idea of peeing in the woods, doing it in daylight when there were no leaves on the bushes and a man around and who knew who else was somewhat upsetting. Maybe the visitors' center was open. I checked my watch. Seven A.M. Probably not.

  The man came in whistling cheerfully. “Morning,” he said. “Do I look like a bear in the daylight?”

  He had sandy hair and long ears and a thin nose. His eyes were
blue and very bright, and the skin around his neck seemed to sag a little even though he was quite thin. He was younger than I would have guessed. Older than Springer, but not by much. “You look like a beagle,” I said without thinking.

  He laughed. His eyes twinkled and he had very white teeth. “Well, look out,” he said. “I hear the Smoky Mountains are just jam-packed full of beagles.”

  “Look,” I said, “if I go out there and, um, admire nature, um, like you just did, would you mind not watching?”

  “No problem,” he said. “You could go behind the shelter, but it's kind of in view of the parking lot.”

  I was quick, but by the time I got back he had already rolled his sleeping bag and was ready to leave. It looked like he'd hardly unpacked anything the night before. “So, are you thru-hiking?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  He grinned, then looked away. “Look. I hate to ask, it's kind of personal and all that—to each his own, you know, or her own—but how old are you?”

  “Twelve,” I said. “How old are you?”

  He grinned. “Seventeen. Okay, so I shouldn't have much to say, right? But do your folks know you're out here?”

  “Yes,” I said. The shorter the lie, the better.

  He didn't look like he believed me. “If I was going to lie to you,” I said, “would I have told you I was twelve?”

  He shrugged. “Hey, how do I know, right? The thing is, you look twelve. I wouldn't have believed you if you'd said you were seventeen.”

  I looked him right in the eye. “I wouldn't have believed you if you said you were twelve.”

  Beagle laughed. “Hike your own hike,” I added. That was another phrase from the guidebooks. It meant that everyone came to the Trail for different reasons, and hiked it differently too, some fast, some slow, and so on. It meant other thru-hikers were supposed to respect you, no matter what.

  “Okay,” Beagle said. “Whatever.” He held out his hand. “I'm William Knowlton.”