Appalachia, June 2000

To look at these old pictures is to recover the spirit of another time, the enthusiasm or fatigue of hikers most of whom are no longer living. The stick figure of "Ruth" or "Ethel," lying face down in a puddle or curled on her back, evokes a bittersweet feeling. One wonders whether she had a good time, got her second wind, ever went hiking again. Did the artist expect ever to see his or her work again, or was this a time-killer, a practice session, a gift to the mountains?

In one case that I know of, the hiking artist did get another look at his work many years later. On August 23, 1949, two young men from the Juilliard School of Music signed their names and addresses. One of them decided to get artistic: two measures of musical notes, then a stick figure with spiky hair sawing on his violin ("hottest music on Greenleaf"), a couple of creatures to the right, labeled as "mountain rats," screaming, "Yeow!" as if in painful reaction to the music. It's fair to say that this is the only picture of animals I've seen in a register where the animal is the victim instead of the victimizer. The name of one of the musicians looked familiar to me, and his hometown was the same as my mother's. It turned out that they had the same violin teacher. We found this guy on the Internet white pages, in retirement in Arizona; the "would-be conductor from the Juilliard mill of music" enjoyed a long career as an orchestral conductor. He didn't remember drawing the picture, but did remember the hike and was grateful to have a copy of his work.

In the 1990s, hiker art has consisted mainly of "trail logos," stylized designs incorporating hikers' trail names and itineraries. Almost every thru-hiker on the Appalachian Trail will use one; some even have hand-stamps and stickers, which simplify the process of letting the rest of the hiking world know "I was here." To find a trail logo back in the 1920s is another matter, but there it is, on August 28, 1923, in the Carter Notch register, a set of playing cards spread out like a fan — four aces, with the name "Faultless 4" superimposed. One aspect of the trail logo is that it is re-used; a trail logo seen in Virginia will reappear two months later in Vermont. This is not exactly the case with the "Faultless 4," although two years later, same location, two cards from the four reappear: "The Ace of Hearts and the Ace of Clubs — a pair from the Faultless Four of August 28, 1923 — returned to the 'slot.'"

For several years during the late '40s, a creature named "Daid Haid" would make its presence known by signing in at various huts. It was actually just an old human skull which hikers carried around with them. In the Zealand Falls register from 1949, one can find what is probably a trail logo, a picture of a dog pulling a doghouse on wheels, his tail hooked through the door and a window. The hikers' names are written on the side of the doghouse, and the slogan "hitting the road again" appears below. This artwork is too precisely rendered to be a one-time occurrence. I suspect that Jean and Clyde Brown repeated it wherever they registered, although I'll never know, for, as I have discovered in my attempts to research shelter registers along the entire Appalachian Trail, the archiving of these registers is a haphazard affair, dependent on the initiative of individual hikers and caretakers or on the resources of established hiking clubs like the AMC.

The art of the huts, of course, reflects the context — the time period — in which it was created. For example, what looks risquè in a drawing by members of a Montreal hiking club was probably conceived and executed in complete innocence, although they sign off with the phrase "10:15 P.M. and off to raise hell at the Lakes." A drawing that shows a party standing on "Z Cliff" on September 28, 1940 — Tom, Bun, Bud, and Buzz flying kites — is a reflection of that very specific time, with one kite labeled "Uncle Sam, the Winner," the other labeled "Stars and Stripes." Of course, the United States was not yet in the war. A page from just after the war has the fake signatures of Joseph Stalin, Tom Dewey, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, and, of course, Kilroy. A page from the '80s, with detailed pictures of various types of guns (and an American flag), takes a cynical turn with its caption "Kill a Commie for Mommy." And from the same year, in a parody of the Janis Joplin song "Mercedes Benz," a depressed hiker, no longer able to climb the high peaks of the Presidential Range, pleads for rescue by helicopter. The page is ironic, funny, and quite touching, and not in the least bit self-serving — in the way that an actual cell-phone call for rescue would be. That particular piece of art is typical of what the register hounds long for, something that tells the truth in a much more interesting way than a simple cry for help.

Previous: Registers Record Trail Art, Tall Tales

—Roger Sheffer teaches English at Minnesota State University, Mankato. His most recent collection of short fiction, Music of the Inner Lakes, was published in November 1999 by New Rivers Press.