The Appalachian Chronicles:
Shades of Gray
Seneca Fox
copyright 2003 by Seneca Fox
The Appalachian Chronicles:
Shades of Gray
copyright 2003 by Seneca Fox
revised and rededicated 2015 by Seneca Fox
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously unless otherwise specified.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Dedicated to my brother. (2003)
Rededicated to my brother,
Brittany and James. (2015)
Contents
Prologue
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Recommended Reading
Prologue
My brother Max and I are beginning our third month of hiking the Appalachian Trail. This is the first thru-hike attempt for Max and the second for me. The beginning was difficult, given that Max weighed far more than he should have when we started. In fact, his urgent need for a change in lifestyle is part of what prompted our attempt.
Max is a recovering electronic-media junkie, just one among the millions of people who have become an unintended consequence of shortsighted ingenuity and affluence. He exhibited all the classic signs, including endless hours in front of a fifteen-hundred-dollar, forty-two-inch wide-screen television that featured three hundred and seventy-two satellite channels, a theater surround-sound system and some kind of computer-interfaced box with an uncountable number of games. He also owned a computer that was complete with Internet access, multiple e-mail addresses, instant messaging, nobody knows how many hand-held video games, and a comfortable couch fronted by a coffee table that was decorated with five remote controls and a continuously refreshed supply of potato chips, sugar-coated nuts and other not-so-nutritious snacks. Like an addict needing more opium to dull his senses, he groped for ever-increasing amounts of electronic stimulation and demonstrated great creativity in the avoidance of physical activity. Given the state of Max’s health and my history as an exercise enthusiast, I would have forever suffered from a do-gooder, guilty conscience if I didn’t try to help him. So here we are, almost nine weeks into a six-month anti-merchandising march to unheralded glory.
In our first seven weeks we experienced enough challenges to make even the most trail-hardened hiker give up. Only days after our adventure began, Max fell on an icy slope, crashed into a tree and suffered a deep bruise on his hip. He was painfully sore, but after two days rest he managed to limp along at a five mile-per-day pace for a while. Unfortunately, that was about a third of what we needed to average to make it all the way to Katahdin, Maine before early September.
Hiking through North Carolina and Tennessee took us longer than expected. Some days we experienced a few thousand feet of elevation change, spending nearly all our time going up and down.
I don’t know which is harder – up or down. Going up with a thirty-five-pound pack on your back is a fast way to breathlessness. There’s an instrument called the Borg scale, which uses numbers ranging from six to twenty to represent the difficulty of one’s physical exertion. An effort equal to a six is about the same as Max experienced while watching his fourth episode of “All in the Family” during a rerun marathon on Tuesday evenings. In my profession we sometimes joke with our clients, especially women, that an effort of twenty is comparable to having a baby. Of course, we we’re just trying to make a point, and somehow I don’t think exercise effort compares well with labor pains, but clients get the picture. When you’re hiking uphill with thirty-five pounds strapped to your back, you can walk very slowly and still work at a solid sixteen or seventeen on the Borg scale. There are a lot of “catch-your-breath” pauses when you’re climbing a mountain.
Hiking down a mountain is in some ways worse. Going down would quickly get out of control if it weren’t for the braking action of your thigh muscles. At first it doesn’t seem so bad, like a nice reprieve from climbing. Then with each step down, over and over again, thigh muscles with Latin names like rectus femoris and vastus lateralis suffer minute tissue damage. The accumulated trauma eventually makes your legs feel like they’ve been pounded with a meat tenderizer. Mercifully, with a little rest, the sensation dissipates after a few days.
The stretch from Erwin to Damascus was tough enough on me, but I’ll never understand how Max did it. He’s got the heart of a lion and I think, with good fortune, we’re going to finish.
A real turning point for us came while we were hiking along the border of Southwest Virginia and West Virginia. The portion of the trail that runs through Virginia constitutes about one quarter of the total distance – more than any other state. Hiking through Virginia is regarded by many thru-hikers as a highlight – a mixture of modest grade changes and shady trails interspersed with views of the beautiful Shenandoah Valley. The day we entered the state, however, it was cold and dreary. Rain fell for six days straight and Max and I were on the brink of giving up. If it hadn’t been for a fellow from West Virginia who picked us up at a trailhead and took us home with him for a few days, we probably would have given up.
The last week or so has been good for hiking. The sun has shone bright each day while temperatures ranged from fifty to sixty degrees. Nighttime temperatures have been no lower than thirty-five. We’ve walked through the Catawba Valley, close to Roanoke, and now we are north of Lynchburg.
I have important memories of this region of the Virginia Mountains. Known as a good place to hunt deer, black bear and wild turkey, several families from my hometown had once owned or rented cabins in the region. In the summertime, the same families would “head for the hills” to escape the oppressive heat and humidity of eastern Virginia. As a young boy, I was fortunate enough to spend some time here with a friend named Carter. His parents owned a cabin on Jennings Creek. On several occasions, typically in the summer, I was invited to spend a week with Carter and his family at the cabin. Those were good times – the long days roaming through the woods and swimming in the creek, the lazy afternoons that ended with mad dashes across the yard to catch fireflies and nights spent telling ghost stories and playing childish pranks on one another. During the dry summers, when the creek was running low we would dam it up, raising the water level enough to create a shallow pool. If we were lucky, we might even corner a lonely trout and spend the afternoon feeding it insects.
Besides the still lingering feeling of great freedom, there are two things I remember most about those visits to Jennings Creek. The first was my introduction to the Appalachian Trail – it happened one afternoon when Carter and I set out to discover the source of Jennings Creek. We’d been hiking upstream for about an hour when we encountered a man sitting next to the creek with his bare feet da
ngling in the water. A large, heavy-looking backpack, hiking stick and his socks and shoes were setting on the bank next to him. Carter and I were still young and uninhibited enough to approach the man without any reservations. When we asked him where he was going, he said, “Maine.” Well, you can imagine how the minds of two preadolescents were energized by the thought of someone hiking “hundreds of thousands of miles” from Virginia to Maine. The man became an instant hero whom we assumed must be some unknown descendant of Meriwether Lewis or William Clark. Immediately, we peppered the weary thru-hiker with questions – all of which he graciously answered. When we finally released him to his journey we returned to the cabin, vowing every step of the way to one-day hike the Appalachian Trail. Ten years later, we did.
The second thing I remember most about the summer days at Jennings Creek began one morning when Carter and I were exploring the woods after a terrible storm passed through the night before. Thinking back, I now believe that a twister accompanied that storm because there was a clear path through a section of the woods where a number of tall oaks, some of them four feet in diameter, had fallen. Carter’s father explained that those trees would have normally withstood the high winds, but on this occasion the ground was saturated from weeks of rain. Standing on the trunk of one of the fallen oaks I was amazed that a tree so big could be so easily toppled and a new understanding of the powerful forces of nature moved me. Unfortunately, when we returned the next year the fallen trees were gone; in fact, most of the woods that we enjoyed exploring were gone – clear-cut by a logging company. Carter and I were devastated when we realized that our summers at Jennings Creek would never be the same. It was a coming of age experience that we felt was forced upon us. That night we took an old white pillowcase and painted a picture of the earth on the center of it. The next day we climbed onto the roof of the cabin and attached our homemade flag to the television antenna. A few days later we left Jennings Creek for the last time.
Many years have passed since those cherished summers. Even so, this part of the Virginia Mountains, as you will soon discover, continues to influence my life in important ways. The story that I’m about to tell begins just a few miles from the Jennings Creek area, near a place called Thunder Hill.