A Walk in the Woods (29 page)

Out of the woods, it was sweltering. It was two miles along a road totally without shade and so hot I could feel the heat through the soles of my boots. When at last I reached Williamstown, a sign on a bank announced a temperature of 97. No wonder I was hot. I crossed the street and stepped into a Burger King, our rendezvous point. If there is a greater reason for being grateful to live in the twentieth century than the joy of stepping from the dog’s breath air of a really hot summer’s day into the crisp, clean, surgical chill of an air-conditioned establishment, then I really cannot think of it.

I bought a bucket-sized Coke and sat in a booth by the window, feeling very pleased. I had done seventeen miles over a reasonably challenging mountain in hot weather. I was grubby, sweat streaked, comprehensively bushed, and rank enough to turn heads. I was a walker again.

In 1850, New England was 70 percent open farmland and 30 percent woods. Today the proportions are exactly reversed. Probably no area in the developed world has undergone a more profound
change in just a century or so, at least not in a contrary direction to the normal course of progress.

If you were going to be a farmer, you could hardly choose a worse place than New England. (Well, the middle of Lake Erie maybe, but you know what I mean.) The soil is rocky, the terrain steep, and the weather so bad that people take actual pride in it. A year in Vermont, according to an old saw, is “nine months of winter followed by three months of very poor sledding.”

But until the middle of the nineteenth century, farmers survived in New England because they had proximity to the coastal cities like Boston and Portland and because, I suppose, they didn’t know any better. Then two things happened: the invention of the McCormick reaper (which was ideally suited to the big, rolling farms of the Midwest but no good at all for the cramped, stony fields of New England) and the development of the railroads, which allowed the Midwestern farmers to get their produce to the East in a timely fashion. The New England farmers couldn’t compete, and so they became Midwestern farmers, too. By 1860, nearly half of Vermont-born people—200,000 out of 450,000—were living elsewhere.

In 1840, during the presidential election campaign, Daniel Webster gave an address to 20,000 people on Stratton Mountain in Vermont. Had he tried the same thing twenty years later (which admittedly would have been a good trick, as he had died in the meantime) he would have been lucky to get an audience of fifty. Today Stratton Mountain is pretty much all forest, though if you look carefully you can still see old cellar holes and the straggly remnants of apple orchards clinging glumly to life in the shady understory beneath younger, more assertive birches, maples, and hickories. Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled-looking woods—a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.

And so I walked up Stratton Mountain on an overcast, mercifully cool June day. It was four steep miles to the summit at just under 4,000 feet. For a little over a hundred miles through Vermont
the AT coexists with the Long Trail, which threads its way up and over the biggest and most famous peaks of the Green Mountains all the way to Canada. The Long Trail is actually older than the AT—it was opened in 1921, the year the AT was proposed—and I’m told that there are Long Trail devotees even yet who look down on the AT as a rather vulgar and overambitious upstart. In any case, Stratton Mountain is usually cited as the spiritual birthplace of both trails, for it was here that James P. Taylor and Benton MacKaye claimed to have received the inspiration that led to the creation of their wilderness ways—Taylor in 1909, MacKaye sometime afterwards.

Stratton was a perfectly fine mountain, with good views across to several other well-known peaks—Equinox, Ascutney, Snow, and Monadnock—but I couldn’t say that it was a summit that would have inspired me to grab a hatchet and start clearing a route to Georgia or Quebec. Perhaps it was just the dull, heavy skies and bleak light, which gave everything a flat, washed-out feel. Eight or nine other people were scattered around the summit, including one youngish, rather pudgy man on his own in a very new and expensive-looking windcheater. He had some kind of handheld electronic device with which he was taking mysterious readings of the sky or landscape.

He noticed me watching and said, in a tone that suggested he was hoping someone would take an interest, “It’s an Enviro Monitor.”

“Oh, yes?” I responded politely.

“Measures eighty values—temperature, UV index, dew point, you name it.” He tilted the screen so I could see it. “That’s heat stress.” It was some meaningless number that ended in two decimal places. “It does solar radiation,” he went on, “barometric pressure, wind chill, rainfall, humidity—ambient and active—even estimated burn time adjusted for skin type.”

“Does it bake cookies?” I asked.

He didn’t like this. “There are times when it could save your life, believe me,” he said, a little stoutly. I tried to imagine a
situation in which I might find myself dangerously imperiled by a rising dew point and could not. But I didn’t want to upset the man, so I said: “What’s that?” and pointed at a blinking figure in the upper lefthand corner of the screen.

“Ah, I’m not sure what that is. But this—”he stabbed the console of buttons—“now this is solar radiation.” It was another meaningless figure, to three decimal places. “It’s very low today,” he said, and angled the machine to take another reading. “Yeah, very low today.” Somehow I knew this already. In fact, although I couldn’t attest any of it to three decimal places, I had a pretty good notion of the weather conditions generally, on account of I was out in them. The interesting thing about the man was that he had no pack, and so no waterproofs, and was wearing shorts and sneakers. If the weather did swiftly deteriorate, and in New England it most assuredly can, he would probably die, but at least he had a machine that would tell him when and let him know his final dew point.

I hate all this technology on the trail. Some AT hikers, I had read, now carry laptop computers and modems, so that they can file daily reports to their family and friends. And now increasingly you find people with electronic gizmos like the Enviro Monitor or wearing sensors attached by wires to their pulse points so that they look as if they’ve come to the trail straight from some sleep clinic.

In 1996 the
Wall Street Journal
ran a splendid article on the nuisance of satellite navigation devices, cellphones, and other such appliances in the wilderness. All this high-tech equipment, it appears, is drawing up into the mountains people who perhaps shouldn’t be there. At Baxter State Park in Maine, the
Journal
reported, one hiker called up a National Guard Unit and asked them to send a helicopter to airlift him off Mount Katahdin because he was tired. On Mount Washington, meanwhile, “two very demanding women,” according to an official there, called the mountain patrol HQ and said they couldn’t manage the last mile and a half to the summit even though there were still four hours of daylight left. They asked for a rescue team to come and carry them back to their car. The request was refused. A few minutes later,
they called again and demanded in that case that a rescue team bring them some flashlights. That request was refused also. A few days later, another hiker called and requested a helicopter because he was a day behind schedule and was afraid he would miss an important business meeting. The article also described several people who had got lost with satellite navigation devices. They were able to report their positions as 36.2 degrees north by 17.48 degrees west or whatever but unfortunately didn’t have the faintest idea what that meant, as they hadn’t brought maps or compasses or, evidently, brains. My new friend on Stratton, I believe, could have joined their club. I asked him whether he felt it was safe for me to make a descent with solar radiation showing 18.574.

“Oh, yeah,” he said quite earnestly. “Solar radiationwise, today is very low risk.”

“Thank goodness,” I said, quite earnestly, too, and took my leave of him and the mountain.

And so I proceeded across Vermont in a series of pleasant day hikes, without anything electronic but with some very nice packed lunches that my wife made for me each night before retiring and left on the top shelf in the fridge. Despite my earlier vow not to hike with the car, I found it rather suited me here—indeed, completely suited me. I could hike all day and be home for dinner. I could sleep in my own bed and each day set off in clean, dry clothes and with a fresh packed lunch. It was nearly perfect.

And so for a happy three weeks I commuted to the mountains. Each morning I would rise at dawn, put my lunch in my pack, and drive over the Connecticut River to Vermont. I would park the car and walk up a big mountain or across a series of rolling green hills. At some point in the day when it pleased me, usually about 11:00
A.M.
, I would sit on a rock or a log, take out my packed lunch, and examine the contents. I would go, as appropriate, “Peanut butter cookies! My favorite!” or “Oh, hum, luncheon meat again,” and eat in a zestful chewy silence, thinking of all the mountaintops I had sat on with Katz where we would have killed for this. Then I
would pack up everything very neatly, drop it in my pack, and hike again till it was time to clock off and go home. And so passed late June and the first part of July.

I did Stratton Mountain and Bromley Mountain, Prospect Rock and Spruce Peak, Baker Peak and Griffith Lake, White Rocks Mountain, Button Hill, Killington Peak, Gifford Woods State Park, Quimby Mountain, Thistle Hill, and finally concluded with a gentle eleven-mile amble from West Hartford to Norwich. This took me past Happy Hill Cabin, the oldest shelter on the AT and possibly the most sweetly picturesque (soon afterwards it was torn down by some foolishly unsentimental trail officials), and the town of Norwich, which is notable principally for being the town that inspired the “Bob Newhart Show” on television (the one where he ran an inn and all the locals were charmingly imbecilic) and for being the home of the great Alden Partridge, of whom no one has ever heard.

Partridge was born in Norwich in 1785 and was a demon walker—possibly the first person on the whole planet who walked long distances for the simple pleasure of it. In 1814, he became superintendent of West Point at the unprecedentedly youthful age of thirty, then had some kind of falling out there, and moved back to Norwich and set up a rival institution, the American Literary, Scientific, and Military Academy. There he coined the term
physical education
and took his appalled young charges on brisk rambles of thirty-five or forty miles over the neighboring mountains. In between times he went off on more ambitious hikes of his own. On a typical trip he strode 110 miles over the mountains from Norwich to Williamstown, Massachusetts (essentially the route I had just completed in gentle stages), trotted up Mount Greylock, and came back home the same way. The trip there and back took him just four days—and this at a time, remember, when there were no maintained footpaths or helpful blazes. He did this sort of thing with virtually every peak in New England. There ought to be a plaque to him somewhere in Norwich to inspire the few hardy hikers still heading north at this point, but sadly there is none.

From Norwich it is about a mile to the Connecticut River and a
pleasant, unassuming 1930s bridge leading to the state of New Hampshire and the town of Hanover on the opposite bank. The road that led from Norwich to Hanover was once a leafy, gently sinuous two-lane affair—the sort of tranquil, alluring byway you would hope to find connecting two old New England towns a mile apart. Then some highway official or other decided that what would be a really good idea would be to build a big, fast road between the two towns. That way, people could drive the one mile from Norwich to Hanover perhaps as much as eight seconds faster and not have to suffer paroxysms of anguish if somebody ahead wanted to turn onto a side road, because now there would be turning lanes everywhere, big enough for a truck pulling a titan missile to maneuver through without rolling over a curb or disrupting the vital flow of traffic.

So they built a broad, straight highway, six lanes wide in places, with concrete dividers down the middle and outsized sodium street lamps that light the night sky for miles around. Unfortunately, this had the effect of making the bridge into a bottleneck where the road narrowed back to two lanes. Sometimes two cars would arrive simultaneously at the bridge and one of them would have to give way (well, imagine!), so, as I write, they are replacing that uselessly attractive old bridge with something much grander and in keeping with the Age of Concrete. For good measure they are widening the street that leads up a short hill to the center of Hanover and its handsome, historic green. Of course, that means chopping down trees all along the street and drastically foreshortening most of the front yards with concrete retaining walls, and even a highway official would have to admit that the result is not exactly a picture, not something you would want to put on a calendar called “Beautiful New England,” but it will shave a further four seconds off that daunting trek from Norwich, and that’s the main thing.

All this is of some significance to me partly because I live in Hanover but mostly, I believe, because I live in the late twentieth century. Luckily I have a good imagination, so as I strode from
Norwich to Hanover, I imagined not a lively mini-expressway but a country lane shaded with trees, bounded with hedges and wildflowers, and graced with a stately line of modestly scaled lampposts, from each of which was suspended, upside down, a highway official, and I felt much better.

O
f all the catastrophic fates that can befall you in the out-of-doors, perhaps none is more eerily unpredictable than hypothermia. There is scarcely an instance of hypothermic death that isn’t in some measure mysterious and improbable. Consider a small story related by David Quammen in his book
Natural Acts
.