The next morning, I walked into the motel room, coffee in hand, and was almost knocked out by the stench.
“Jesus, is this what we smell like to other people?” Then, noticing Erin on the phone, I mouthed, “Oh, sorry….”
I propped the door open as Erin hung up. “Dude, that was my sister, she’s going to meet us in Perrisburg and slack pack us!”
Having Cara visit was the best of both worlds; having the comfort of home combined with someone who understood exactly what we were going through. For sisters born four years apart, Cara and Erin are exceptionally close. Cara had served as a de facto older sister for me, too. On the surface, Cara is sweet, thoughtful, caring. And she is all of those things, but underneath lies a strong, reckless streak that I’ve always envied and tried to emulate. Hiking the AT four years after she had, we were now literally following the path she blazed for us.
But three days later, it was a cheerless bunch of hikers that Cara picked up in a diner parking lot on a country road 26 miles outside of Perrisburg, Virginia. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what happened that left us at what we would remember as one of our lowest points on the trail (so low, in fact, that Erin sent a group text seven years later saying “P day tomorrow… Perrisburg,” to which Pilgrim responded “sigh (repeat indefinitely)”). The first day out of Atkins started with all of us well-rested, clean, upbeat. We spent an hour during lunch lounging in the sun and dipping our feet in a nearby stream. But then, as we finally got back to hiking, Erin mentioned that her knee felt stiff from sitting around so long and was “kinda bothering” her. I could tell, from her labored gait and the tears that sat at the corners of her eyes when we finally reached the shelter that night, “kinda” was an understatement.
“Where’s the water?” I asked an unusually subdued Pilgrim and Sug, who had arrived at the shelter well before we had. See Blue was already laying in his sleeping bag, back turned toward the wall, humming to the Blue Oyster Cult blaring in his headphones.
The first thing we did at the end of each hike was re-fill our usually empty water supply. It was the last chore before we could rest for the night, and we wanted to get it over with as soon as we could. Erin and I both carried a one liter Nalgene bottle that we filled at night for cooking and rehydrating, and a 2-liter Platypus water bag fitted with a drinking tube that clipped on our pack for hands free drinking while hiking (after puncturing her water bag during our hike of the Long Trail, Erin declared that she was going to “buy myself a yellow ‘pus,” a quote Cara and I never let her live down). Shelters are usually built within a tenth of a mile from a water source, which is why Erin and I simultaneously groaned when a woman I’d never seen told us this one was almost a half mile away. The last thing we wanted, at the end of a hard day, was to walk more.
“Have fun!” she yelled after us. I caught Sug’s eyes mid roll.
“I don’t think she means that,” Erin mumbled.
The woman, and her male companion, turned out to be former thru-hikers, usually a welcome addition. People who hike the trail tend to feel an intense connection with it and those who come after them, and were known to be the bearers of all sorts of “trail magic,” from beers left in streams to bags of Little Debbies tied to a high tree branch in the middle of the woods to offers to stay in their homes. These two, however, seemed to revel in discouraging us; telling us every negative detail of their hike several years earlier.
“I got bone spurs so bad, I can barely hike now. You’ll probably get them, too, what with those boots you’re wearing,” the woman said, nodding in my direction.
“Oh, and the bears were so bad our year. I bet they are even worse now.”
And in the morning, as we prepared to leave in the pouring rain, “You better watch that ridge you’re walking today, it’s full of iron and you might get struck by lightning. Two people got struck the year we hiked.”
“I would rather be struck by lightning than stay here,” said See Blue under his breath, taking off his headphones for the first time since we’d arrived.
Though we tried to shake it off, it was as if the wear of the last month had formed a crack, allowing the couple’s negativity to seep in. The rain soaked us through and over the next day both Pilgrim and I came down with wicked sinus infections. We would lay in the shelters, neither of us able to sleep, trying and failing to suppress our coughing and blowing.
On the second day, I woke up unable to breathe out my nose. Thankfully, I found out we would hike past a road crossing with a nearby grocery where I could stock up on decongestant. I was so focused on getting medicine that I nearly passed by a cooler full of sodas in the middle of the trail. I stopped to open the lid, but as I read the note taped to the top, I felt as though I’d been punched in the stomach.
“In memory of Ted “Soleman” Anderson,” the note read in bold letters.
Before I began my hike, in an effort to prepare myself as much as I could while sitting in front of a computer 9 hours a day, I joined an online group of potential AT hikers. People discussed their start dates, the gear they wanted to bring, their hopes and fears about embarking on a five to six month walk in the woods. One of the leaders of the group was a guy who called himself Soleman. Hiking the AT was one of Soleman’s lifelong dreams, and his enthusiasm for the trail was contagious. He lived only a few hours away from Kevin and me in Florida, and we commiserated about trying to get in shape in our flat surroundings. In December, I wrote on the message board that I couldn’t find the lightweight camping pot I was looking for and a few minutes later I received a message from Soleman, “I’ve got two. I’ll send you my extra! No need to send money, just pay it forward.” Ted “Soleman” Anderson had died suddenly at the end of February at age 56, just a week before he was set to begin his thru-hike.
I sat on the cooler for a long time, crying for a kind man I had never met, for his family, and for his unrealized dream.
When Cara picked us up the next day, after walking miles in the cold rain, I felt a relief that only family can bring. I was hopeful that rest and a warm bed would breathe much needed life into our collectively weary bones, and give us all a renewed determination to continue on.
I was wrong.