Appalachia, June 2001

By Roger Sheffer

In the typical hiker’s itinerary for an Appalachian Trail journey, inscribed in a shelter register, the states are reduced to their two-letter postal abbreviations, the borders between them represented by a dash or an arrow, followed by the year:

PA->NJ->NY->CT->MA->VT ’01

The diagram looks rather plain and abstract, but on the ground, in their concrete reality, AT "border crossings" can be rather dramatic.

From my own experience, the most dramatic is the crossing from West Virginia to Maryland, where the trail follows the railroad bridge over the Potomac and then joins the C & O towpath on the other side. Just hiking parallel to the free-flowing river for several miles gives one the feeling of having been somewhere, of a powerful significance; and looking back at the steep point of land where Harpers Ferry is gathered makes one realize that the border crossing for southbounders might be even more dramatic. Indeed, the town is often the finishing point for hikers doing the AT in sections, who have flip-flopped the second part of their thru-hike.

Over the River...
Other river crossings also seem to highlight the moment of transition from one state to another: over the Delaware River from Pennsylvania to New Jersey (where the ankle-busting rocks eventually end), and certainly across the Connecticut River bridge into the lively college town of Hanover, New Hampshire, a landmark highly anticipated by many northbound hikers and celebrated upon arrival. Here is a register entry from the summer of 1993: "Into Hanover on a wing and a foot. Spent the evening last touring the local drinkeries. Maybe here should be called hangover. . . . Unload, reload, resupply and boogie on to Maine! Northward. Signed, Big Bear." Or as a hiker with the trail name of T-bone wrote four years later, "Hanover Today! Hungover Tomorrow!"

Not all border-town visitors behave irresponsibly. Take Adam, for example, who recorded the following in the Robinson Hall register on the Dartmouth College campus: "Today I became a legal resident of Hanover, N.H. I wanted to vote so I went to the town hall, gave them a street address and they gave me a bill for ten dollars and an absentee ballot. I handed in my ballot but the ten bucks isn’t due until December. Who says thru-hikers are apathetic dropouts living on the border of society!" Actually, the thru-hikers themselves sometimes say that.

The crossing between Massachusetts and Vermont is much more remote than the ones mentioned above, far from any road or polling place. And more subtle. There is no river, only the intermittent headwaters of some unnamed branch of Broad Brook. There is no view, no visual perspective. You could hike right through without knowing—if the atmosphere were foggy enough, or the sun had already set, and you were completely focused on your boots and never looked up to see the discreet Vermont welcome sign, which also announces the beginning of the Long Trail.

Quiet Crossing
It’s rarely a bustling place, this border crossing; the two times I’ve stopped there I was completely alone. I did not encounter more than one or two other hikers all day on my approach from the south in early fall. The place was equally desolate on June 21 ("Hiking Naked Day"), when I approached from the north. Evidently, if you want to see a crowd at the Massachusetts-Vermont border, late August is the best time to be there. During a three-day period in August 1999, more than fifty hikers signed the register, the main wave of northbound thru-hikers for that year.

Lacking in physical distinction, no more than a small clearing with a couple of boulders large enough to sit on and a register box fastened to a tree trunk, this border crossing still has great meaning and impact, especially for thru-hikers. It is an emotional threshold that they have anticipated from at least as far away as Pennsylvania. Hikers who have reached the halfway point on their northward journey may be looking for another landmark, a magnet to draw them forward. In a Pennsylvania shelter register, a thru-hiker once wrote, "At this spot, you are but 370 miles from the Glorious Republic of Vermont. At this time, I’ll begin to introduce your benighted minds to the grandeur of where we are going: VERMONT FACT #1: Vermont is very big. If you flatten it out, it’s bigger than Texas! Stay tuned for more info, to be found in registers as we approach the Motherland."

With that kind of buildup, small wonder that hikers get excited when they reach the actual border. In fact, they get downright silly, based on the evidence they typically leave in the MA-VT register. One entry from September 1999 expresses, in a whimsical way, a hiker’s amazement at having made the transition so quickly and easily:

Mom in MA	3:59:31 p.m.
Mom in VT	3:59:32 p.m.
Pretty fast for 47! Glad to have completed another state. On to N.H.

Where's the Ben and Jerry's?
Other entries feed off the mythology of Vermont: that it exudes a continuous flow of maple syrup and premium ice cream, that it is a hikers’ utopia, a rock festival, a Deadhead tour, a place for marginal folk to hide from authorities. "What?" a disappointed northbounder asks, "No Long Trail Ale or B and J’s waiting at the border?" Another northbounder adds, perhaps facetiously, "Hope to meet Ben and Jerry and all the old retired hippies that are supposedly living in VT." I assume that the myth among these hikers is that Ben and Jerry themselves will meet them at the border and spoon-feed them a "Vermonster."

And Pop, a self-conscious throwback to the sixties, says, "Farewell Mass! Hello Green Mt. State! A dozen states and more than a dozen stories. God bless America but not the Government. Hey Ace—congrats for truckin’ here! Keep on Groovin’!" Note the retro language; maybe he’s the real thing.

How about Erik and Suz, who call themselves "heavy packin’ light snackin’ trashgrabbin’ Benny Hippies"? They may just be locals, students, or faculty from Bennington College out on a day-hike.

There is a kind of freedom entailed by crossing the border into the state of Vermont, a feeling of escape, as expressed and celebrated by KD and JD, who claim to be poor and jobless, hiding out from student-loan collectors. It is less of a celebration for Mac ’n’ Cheese, who declares, following an entry by a group of Vermont state foresters, "Maybe if I see those foresters I’ll solicit them for a real job." Some hikers may display a negative attitude about the state they have just left: "Up yours, Mass," and "Mass, Mass, you now see my ass!" But most have experienced a good time in the previous state and praise the trail angels they met in North Adams or Williamstown, the good food, the bars, even the reflexology massage therapist on Water Street.

Life is Sweet...
Whatever the feelings, the hikers’ entries are accompanied by many exclamation points, as in "It’s raining! And I’m in Vermont! Yahoo!" and "Life is sweet when you have happy feet! Hellooo VERMONT!!" and "Somebody pinch me!" and "Yay 12th state, 3-2-Go!!" Yes, there are a fair number of state-counters at this location, even when they don’t quite add up (the total for the entire trail should be fourteen).

One hiker merely parodies an old song: ". . . and another state down, and another state down, and another state bites the dust." Others are more precise about how many states they have bagged. A few southbounders will notch their third or fourth, depending on whether entering or completing the state is what they wish to mark, while northbounders will count twelve (including the new one, Vermont, as if a few feet of it were enough to make the claim) or, with even more optimism, only three left to do. Only! Do they realize how many vertical miles they have left to scale? Didn’t they pay attention to the "Vermont Facts" offered to them back in Pennsylvania? One guy, named Boonie, seems to be measuring his progress in terms of what page of the Data Book he is on: "Page 15 of the Data Book! Wow! That’s a low number. It seems like long ago we were in the 50s and 60s."

Within the 1999–2000 register for this location, I noted two very distinctive entries in which a downside to this northbound progress was highlighted. The first entry, by a hiker nicknamed Mental Game, is a mixture of enthusiasm and sadness that begins with the typical train whistle: "Vermont—Woo-hoo! State 12 for me. Northbound Ho! Agreeing with Moose (the new FBI) that it is sad to be approaching the end. Southbounders, I envy you—you have lots to look forward to! Well, time for a self-portrait, then onto the next shelter. Peace and good luck to all who pass this way." The second, if serious, is much darker: "In honor of state 12 I will be introducing a song I’ve been working on—it’s a serial called ‘The Twelve Days of Cynicism’ and it’s dedicated to Shaft. Here’s day one: ‘On the first day of cynicism the trail has given me—one year of physical therapy.’"

Hiker Hyperbole
Other subjects arise in this border-crossing repository, not directly related to the geography. Hikers get renamed. Hikers get remembered. Advice is given. Absurd claims are made, such as "Georgia to Maine and back in 2 days. MMMM . . . yummy kryptonite. Superman and Superwoman." A financial assessment is made: "I just realized that I’m carrying like four dollars in quarters, nickels, and dimes. The good news is that I have four dollars." Elaborate plans are compressed into a series of letters and numbers: "2KB4Y2K" (or in plain language, "To Katahdin before the year 2000"). A British hiker who claims to be the grandson of Montana Bill, a Wild West Show associate of Buffalo Bill, tries to get genealogical information and gives his email address. A clever hiker named That Guy goes on for pages about his hiking philosophy and that of his partner, Quick Beam. He also chronicles their irreconcilable differences, finishing with "and then when you think it can’t get any worse he’ll yell at you for writing so much in the register and threaten to cut off any appendage you dare pick up a pen with."

This all seems very strange and wonderful to me. How can these people sit still and write so much? The conditions here are terrible. I’m spraying Off with one hand as I turn the register pages with the other. I am swatting deerflies with one hand as I write in my own spiral notebook with the other, smearing the ink with my sweat. Or it is early October and I am shivering, barely able to hold my pen. I almost didn’t make it to the border. I carried only some bottled water and a couple of croissants from a Williamstown deli. My knees hurt. It was only the sign that kept me going, an hour ago—with its white-on-brown arrow pointing left and telling me I had less than a mile and a half to the Vermont border. That seemed doable, and I said out loud, "Yes!" The trail had leveled off pretty much, and I wasn’t bruising my ankles on quite as much marble (sharp points of which had been covered by six inches of dead leaves). Even so, the distance seemed like much more than a mile and a half. The side trail to "Eph Look-out" was closed. That seemed ominous.

I kept thinking, it has to be the next corner. It couldn’t be more than a tenth of a mile. Could the sign have been wrong? Could my map be wrong? And then I saw the box on the tree, and I thought, Will this be like the one I found earlier this year at the summit of Becket Mountain, with an empty notebook, all the pages of which had been torn out? I opened the door and the register fell out. It was full of the previous summer—many pages written on, pictures drawn, the literary tracks of real people (their actual tracks on the ground now covered with dead leaves) who had made it this far. For them, Vermont and New Hampshire and Maine were all one. The mountains did not matter, the stream crossings, the individual rocks or roots that could do them in. Ninety percent of it would be comfortable, however, fairly level and soft and unobstructed. In that dry year, Vermont at least would be a pleasure for them, and their initial enthusiasm might turn out to have been justified. Whoo-hoo!

On Nov. 5, 1999, a southbounder stopped here and wrote, "A beautiful day today. Sunny and warm. This is my last state border before finishing my AT thru-hike near Great Barrington. It’s been a wonderful and very educational experience. I hope that everyone else finds it as rewarding."

—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.