I am sitting on the front porch and dreaming of the woods. My sister is still inside getting ready. We considered delaying our start to avoid the freezing temperatures that awaited us at the top of the falls tonight, but we’d already put off this adventure for two years, our initial plans disrupted by the pandemic and by my sister’s fracturing her foot.
We’d camped in lower temperatures than this, and another cold night in the tent would only serve as a notch in our figurative hiking belts, a groove that read courage, experience, and strength—all things we tried to embody throughout our lives as daughters of Schatzle, and now, as burgeoning outdoorsman.
We’d always picked bad weather for camping, always ended up shivering in a tent or listening to rain pitter-patter across the rainfly, but there were a slew of other outdoor challenges I hadn’t conquered, and where I once feared them, I now craved them—our first camp in the snow, waking in the woods to find our campsite blanketed in an inch of white powder; our first sopping wet night in the tent when rain would gather in low spots before seeping around our feet; and our first wildlife sightings, especially the Eastern Black Bears that roamed Upcountry Georgia.
We had read all the same books years ago that caused a collective stir in people’s hearts and found them, prepared and less so, heading to the trail in droves. Before Cheryl strayed on the Pacific Crest Trail, before the Barefoot Sisters hiked the Appalachian both ways, even back before Bill Bryson took his walk in the woods, Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air had documented his fateful journey to Mount Everest, and Michael Crichton had recounted his climb up Mount Kilimanjaro in Travels. Many years before reading these and others, I was a kid sitting in the woods drawing birds and writing bad poetry about trees.
At first, it was just another of our intangible sister dreams, something we hypothetically posed while imagining lives that belonged to other people. Wouldn’t it be neat if we spent a summer picking oranges in an orchard out west? What if we hiked the Appalachian Trail?
But sis was not one to leave ideas unrealized and began taking small steps that would lead us there, me often thinking about our hiking in a figurative way, while she dragged me on actual real-life backpacking trips, where I spent the weekend in a heightened state of alertness, waiting for a bear or stranger to emerge from the woods and kill us.
The more experienced backpacker between us, my sister had nearly completed hiking the Foothills Trail, twisting and turning itself along the border of North and South Carolina. We’d hiked some of it together, but she had done an awful lot of it alone, so she also held the achievement of solo-backpacking, something I had never done and knew I didn’t have the courage for.
I didn’t know how she’d gathered herself, hiked some distance, set up her tent, and then, just sat in it. In the woods, in the dark.
Throughout years spent dreaming, we grew older, and adapted our spirits to more stable lives, my sister acquiring a sweet husband, a small business, and a cat, and myself raising a beautiful son with his sweet father. These blessings meant that we would need to hike the trail in pieces.
While short sections of trail did not fulfil our initial romantic vision of leaving the world behind to hike over 2,000 miles to Maine, we looked forward to a day when we would stand on the peak of Mount Katahdin at approximately the age of 60, at the rate we needed to go—one or two stints a year only as real life allowed.
In less than ten minutes we would depart, driving two hours south to Hogpen Gap. From there, leaving my sister’s car in the lot, we would continue another 45 minutes or so to Amicalola Falls State Park. And over the coming days, we would traverse the 47 miles between them on foot, our first section of the Appalachian Trail.
With the rise in outdoor adventure tales, the Appalachian Trail experienced a spike in popularity that altered the dynamics of its culture. For all those nomadic spirits who had hiked it 30 years earlier and never left—compelled to open a hostel or provide trail magic—seeking any way to stay connected to the woods and never returning completely to that other world which called on them to be hamsters on a wheel—to these folks, the more crowded trail must have seemed like their secret treasure had been exposed to a world of people who couldn’t appreciate it.
And I shared some of those fears, namely, I didn’t want to find myself marching single file up a mountainside. I wanted to enjoy a place on earth still unencumbered by the urban soundscape of leaf blowers, street traffic, and writhing humanity.
While I knew that many folks, especially the younger sort, sought the escapism of the trail, of partying at shelters and communing with groups of strangers, I was more enamored of the dirt under my feet, pushing myself a little further each day, the stillness and quiet of the woods, and of talking with my sister as we fell asleep, sheltered only by a thin wall of nylon, which squeaked when we shifted in our bags.
I hoped the trail still held the same promise of others we hiked together, nearly alone out there, listening to the birds, to the wind, and to each other.
Of course, I would hear my sister, I knew. Hear her as she talked to herself about a myriad of things as she blew up her sleeping pad, rustled in the tent, boiled water, and as she walked, usually up ahead picking her way nimbly over rocks and roots, looking more like a dancer than a hiker—as I huffed and sweated behind her on the trail.
Her murmurings, drifting disembodied through the air of a quiet wood, probably seemed ghostly when overheard by nearby campers huddled in their tents, but I knew the comfort of her rambling utterances. They often greeted me from far off as I sat and wrote on quiet mornings in camp, signaling that my sister was stirring. They were the impetus for her self-bestowed trail name, “Walkie Talkie,” and she probably had a few animated conversations with herself before settling on it.
I was likely to be dubbed “shorty,” or “deer in the headlights,” so I searched for a name that was more “fake it ‘til you make it,” a name like “standing bear” or one equally misrepresentative of my doubting soul.
I had studied our family’s genealogy for over ten years, and formed a habit of borrowing from those folks who had gone on before me. On a day when my spirit felt delicate and raw, I would channel my fiercer New York ancestors, and on a day when my self-serving ego had made a fool of me, I would attempt to embody the quiet humility of a softer relative.
As Walkie and I prepared for this trek, I wandered up and down trails behind her, thinking more and more of our grandmothers from whom I’d taken so much inspiration during my life. Our Nana was never far from our minds, her constant presence in our adult lives found me speaking to her long after she’d gone and hoping she could still hear me. And our Grandma, whose funeral I had missed, a lady whom I regretted not knowing as well, as she’d lived so far away. The original chutzpah, she played professional softball in the 40s and had been called “the sparkplug of the infield.”
What I really needed was a little of their grace and grit, so, I became “Alvirda Myrtle,” “Myrt” for short, and dedicated myself to hiking the trail in their honor, hoping their spirits would be with me.
As I finished my cigarette and savored my last sip of coffee, the birds were singing. They were not fooled by the intermittent cold; they knew that it was spring despite the boomeranging temperatures.
Walkie Talkie sprang from the house wearing her perpetual smile, “This is it.”
“We’re doing this.” Our fingers clasped for a moment.
And this and so much more, is how my sister and I found ourselves on that April morning, eagerly hugging each other goodbye and pausing to give a “Woot! Woot!” to my sleeping neighbors before heading to our cars which would deliver us two hours from now to the red clay of Georgia and the official start of our adventure in the woods.
Our father believed we could do anything. He paid no attention to titles, degrees, and other trappings of social hierarchy, so embedded in our souls was the secret knowledge lent to us via osmosis—that there was no challenge too big for us, no goal too lofty, and no obstacle too ugly, too crass, too mean.
I realized early on that these teachings were a gift not often bestowed on daughters, particularly those raised in the South. Nearly all my friends, men and women both, were taught different lessons: to know their place; to humbly accept the roles assigned to them in workplaces, in relationships, in life; and to try to learn the lessons hidden in these gifts disguised as obstacles…a wise balance that did not exist in us to temper our boisterous exuberance.
My sister had taken these to their natural conclusion. A petite powerhouse, a tennis player, marathon runner, entrepreneur, actress, teacher, writer, and world traveler, she hadn’t met many obstacles she couldn’t topple, trick, or traipse right over. Her natural talent, wit, and charm were more than sufficient, but paired with her sheer will power, she was an unstoppable force.
For me, it was different—this whole thing had started with a love of literature and solitude. But I’d already found that it’s one thing to read Thoreau’s Walden or soak up Emily Dickinson’s meanderings on a flower, while wrapped in a warm blanket on a sofa, and quite another to eye your dirty fingernails whilst pulling on your last clean pair of socks, all the while contemplating the wolf spider who has scuttled out of sight and is still somewhere in your tent.
Or to lay awake, muscles taut, listening to the eerie stillness of misty woods, and wondering what the hell was creeping up the hillside, snapping twigs under its feet. Everything sounds big in the woods. A beetle, skittering under dry leaves sounds like a bird, and a raccoon sounds like a bear.
Once my sister had asked me “did you ever think you’d be an outdoorsman?”
I had not. I was always the least athletic of our siblings, I erred on the side of clumsiness, and wasn’t a fan of being too uncomfortable—too cold, too hot, too tired, or too dirty.
“I really liked reading the transcendentalists,” I told her. It was the best I had to offer.
I hadn’t inherited any of the natural athleticism of my softball-playing grandmother, Myrt, or that of her coach, whom she’d fallen in love with and married, my grandfather, Donald. Those genes had been distributed solely to my siblings; rather, I spent my life merrily watching and mulling things over, working at a Library in South Carolina, whose populous simultaneously loved the hell out of 50 Shades of Gray and wanted to ban books as innocuous as Teo’s Tutu.
My decade wandering the aisles between shelves of books left me less prepared than my sister for the obstacles presented by the trail.
We would face two challenges right off the bat—the 604 steps up Amicalola Falls, and the freezing temperatures that awaited us at the top. I had been training during break times at work—52 steps to the third floor of the library, and then back down.
Other than that, an awful lot of yoga in my living room.
My sister, on the other hand, played competitive tennis, was part of a weekly running club, and went hiking much more regularly than I. I knew she was better prepared for those zigzagging steps up the falls, and later, for the challenge of Blood Mountain.
I couldn’t even think about that mountain which loomed somewhere in the distance, though not nearly far enough away. Rising to 4,459 feet, Blood Mountain boasted the highest peak that lay along the Appalachian Trail in Georgia. I had seen its nearly vertical scrambles featured in other hikers’ video footage.
My own strategy was that I would head inevitably closer to it each day, while tricking myself into believing it didn’t exist. Then, maybe as we hiked, Walkie would say “wow, Blood Mountain was a beast,” and I would say “oh, is that what we just did? I’m glad that’s over.”
But before Blood Mountain was Sassafras, before Sassafras was Springer, and before Springer, the 604 steps of Amicalola Falls.
For now, I would follow her car south down Highway 17, winding itself into the backwoods of Georgia. Failure or success would find us on the trail, but the trail was where it would have to come looking. It began to snow, just light flurries that hung gently on the windshield before melting away.
When we arrived in the lot, I found my sister’s spirits similarly buoyed by the snow whispering about our ears, just enough to drape itself among the leaves of Hogpen Gap. Our respective spirits bolstered, too, by the trail magic taking place in the gap that morning.
The trail magic wasn’t for us—on this morning, at the very beginning of our adventure—it was for the hikers who had emerged from one side of the woods and gathered in the gap, some of them eating and laughing, some of them wearing 50-yard stares.
We gingerly floated over and around them, snapping a few photos. When you stumble upon someone who is in the midst of their journey, while you are just starting out, you are seeing ghosts of yourselves. We couldn’t ask them about the experience we were about to undertake, and they could not explain it to us.
We had not seen expressions like these on faces we’d met during previous outdoor excursions. This group looked collectively stunned, pulled inward. Just staring at a hotdog or biscuit they held, not contemplating it. Just staring and then, chewing. I found their drab resolve to be in awkward opposition to our gleeful picture-taking.
I wondered what on earth they’d seen that had left their faces so…blank. Whatever
happened to them out there was still waiting out there to happen to us, but I was too amped up to care. Whatever might lay ahead, I wanted it. I wanted to go out into the woods with my sister.
Rocks & Roots 