Walking to Vermont by Christopher S. Wren

Author:Christopher S. Wren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Five

MY COMPANIONS clustered overnight around Upper Goose Pond notwithstanding, the Appalachian Trail does not offer the kind of diversion that draws crowds. Some days on the trail, I met only a couple of hikers, and that was in passing. There were a couple of days when I saw no one.

If the nights turned lonely, my days of solitude seemed a blessing. Sometimes I sang as I walked, belting out childhood hymns or country music oldies. I tried to summon up all the verses about the mother who tells the prison warden that she’s not in his town to stay and will soon be on her way, she’s just here to get her baby out of jail.

I recalled the zeitgeist of the trail in Townes van Zandt’s ballad about Pancho and Lefty, and wearing your skin like iron, your breath as hard as kerosene.

When I left the cabin at Upper Goose Pond, the weather had turned sunny but cool, perfect for walking. Sunlight filtered through the trees, oak and something close to aspen, along the trail. Soggy leaves squished under my feet. Along the trail, some orange fungus blossomed, looking like tie-dyed cauliflowers.

The faint roar of the trucks on the Massachusetts Turnpike over the ridge was now less than a mile away. The turnpike, a major artery connecting New York to New England, had become my psychological point of no return, halfway home on my walk to central Vermont. I hadn’t given much thought to crossing the six-lane turnpike, beyond hoping that I wouldn’t have to sprint.

I was again wearing yesterday’s grubby East Chop Tennis T-shirt, which Herb had brought me from his exclusive country club at Martha’s Vineyard. I had put away my clean T-shirt of the previous evening because the tennis shirt remained so soggy from sweat and rain that wearing it seemed the best way to dry it out. I hung five wet socks on the back of my pack—the sixth had disappeared to wherever socks go—hoping these too would dry in the sun; wearing them wet would only bring more blisters.

I passed two white-haired women and a man on hands and knees, pruning roots protruding from the trail. A cheerful woman, whom I put in her seventies, said they were volunteers from the Berkshires section of the Appalachian Mountain Club. If they were past hiking the Appalachian Trail, they did not consider themselves too old to maintain it.

The trail dropped sharply, revealing through the trees a concrete footbridge about ten feet wide spanning the divided turnpike, with wire mesh running up either side of the overpass. The trail led down the eroded median strip that divided the eastward and westward lanes, and then up over the second set of lanes. A sign put the New York state line at less than fifteen miles to the west.

The reimmersion into civilization lasted just a few minutes before the trail delivered me back to the woods, past sumac and maple trees to Greenwater Pond, a small lake with boats bobbing in front of summer cabins.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.