Black Mountain, I stood and waited a long while, and thought about going back, but

eventually turned and struggled on. I had enough small agonies of my own.
Seven miles seems so little, but it's noU believe me. With a pack, even for f t people it is
not easy. You know what it's like when you're at a zoo or an amusement park with a small
child who won't walk another step? You hoist him lightly onto your shoulders and for a
while—for a couple of minutes--itrs actually kind of fun to have him up there, pretending
like you're going to tip him off or cruising his head towards some low projection before
veering off (all being well) at the last instant, But then it starts to get You
feel a twinge in your neck, a tightening between your shoulder bladesj and the sensation
seeps and spreads until it is decidedly uncomfortable, and you announce to little Jimmy
that you're going to have to put him down for a while.
Of course, Jimmy bawls and won't go another step, and your partner gives you that
disdainful, I -should-have-married-the-quarterback look because you haven't gone 400
yards. But, hey, it hurts. Hurts a lot. Believe me, I understand.
OK, now imagine two little Jimmies in a pack on your pack, or, better still, something
inert but weighty. something that doesn't want to be lifted, that makes it abundantly clear
to you as soon as you pick it up that what it wants is to sit heavily on the ground-- say, a
bag of cement or a box of medical textbooks--in any case, forty pounds of profound
heaviness. Imagine the jerk of the pack going on, like the pull of a down elevator. Imagine
walking with that weight for hours, for days, and not along level asphalt paths with
benches and refreshment booths at thoughtful intervals but over a rough trail, full of sharp
rocks and unyielding roots and staggering ascents that transfer enormous amounts of
strain to your pale, shaking thighs. Now tilt your head back until your neck is taut, and f b'
your gaze on a point two miles away. That's your f ist climb. lt rs 4,682 steep feet to the
top, and there are lots more like it. Don't tell me that seven miles is not far. Oh, and here's
the other thing. You don't have to do this. You're not in the army You can quit right now.
Go home. See your fam fly. Sleep in a bed
Or' alternatively/ you poor, sad shmuck, you can walk 2,169 miles through mountains
and wilderness to Maine. And so I trudged along for hours, in a private little world of
weariness and woe, up and over imposing hills, through an endless cocktail party of trees,
all the time thinking: "1 must have done seven miles by now, surely]' But always the
wandering trail ran on,
At 3:30, I climbed some steps carved into granite and found myself on a spacious rock
overlook: the summit of Springer Mountain. I shed my pack and slumped heavily against a
tree, astounded by the scale of my tiredness. The View was lovely--the rolling swell of the
Cohutta Mountains, brushed with a bluish haze the color of cigarette smoke, running
away to a far-off horizon. The sun was already low in the sky. I rested for perhaps ten
minutes, then got up and had a look around. There was a bronze plaque screwed into a
boulder announcing the start of the Appalachian Trail, and nearby on a post was a
wooden box containing a Bic pen on a length of string and a standard spiral notebook, its
pages curled from the damp air. The notebook was the trail register (l had somehow
expected it to be leather bound and funereal) and it was f iled with eager entries, nearly
all written in a youthful hand. There were perhaps twenty-f ive pages of entries since the f
ist of January-eight entries on this day alone. Most were hurried and cheery-- Ù March
2nd. Well, here we are and man it's cold! See y'all on Katahdin! Jáimie and Spud"--but
about a third were
I looked to the woods, too. "Yeah, probably. We've still gotta do it. i
I hoisted my pack and took a backward stagger under the weight (it would be days
before I could do this with anything approaching aplomb), jerked tight the belt, and
trudged off. At the edge of the woods, I glanced back to make sure Katz was following.
Ahead of me spread a vast, stark world of winter-dead trees. I stepped portentously on to
the path, a fragment of the original Appalachian Trail from the days when it passed here
en route from Mount Oglethorpe to Springer,
 The date was March 9, 1996. We were on our way.
The route led down into a wooded valley with a chuckling stream edged with brittle ice,
which the path followed for perhaps half a mile before taking us steeply up into denser
woods. This was, it quickly became evident/ the base of the first big hill, Frosty Mountain,
and it was immediately taxing. The sun was shining and the sky was a hearty blue, but
everything at ground level was brown—brown trees, brown earth, frozen brown leaves-
and the cold was unyielding. I trudged perhaps a hundred feet up the hill, then stopped,
bug-eyed, breathing hard, heart kabooming alarmingly. Katz was already falling behind
and panting even harder. I pressed on.
It was hell. First days on hiking trips always are. I was hopelessly out of shape-
hopelessly. The pack weighed way too much. Way too much. I had never encountered
anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared. Every step was a struggle,
The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there
is always more hill, The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is
that you can almost never see exactly what's to come. Between the curtain of trees at
every side, the ever-receding contour of rising slope before you, and your own plodding
weariness, you gradually lose track of how far you have come. Each time you haul yourself
up to what you think must surely be the crest, you f hd that there is in fact more hill
beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope there
is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more still,
until it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long. Eventually you reach a height
where you can see the tops of the topmost trees, with nothing but clear sky beyond, and
your faltering spirit stirs-- nearly there now!--but this is a pitiless deception. The elusive
summit continually retreats by whatever distance you press forward, so that each time the
canopy parts enough to give a view you are dismayed to see that the topmost trees are as
remote, as unattainable, as before, Still you stagger on, What else can you do?
When, after ages and ages, you nally reach the telltale world of truly high ground,
where the chilled air smells of pine sap and the I don't know exactly when I lost track of
Katz, but it was in the f ist couple of hours„ At first I would wait for him to catch up,
bitching every step of the way and pausing after each three or four shu t fing paces to wipe
his brow and look sourly at his immediate future. It was painful to behold in every way.
Eventually I waited to see him pull into view, just to conf im that he was still coming, that
he wasn't lying on the path palpitating or hadn't thrown down his pack in disgust end gone
looking for Wes Wisson. I would wait and wait, and eventually his shape would appear
among the trees, breathing heavily, moving with incredible slowness, and talking in a loud,
bitter voice to himself. Halfway up the third big hill, the 3,400-foot-high