AT hikers do not know the meaning of “rocks” until they have hiked Pennsylvania. Brick and cinder block sized rocks jut up from the ground at every conceivable angle side by side for hundreds of yards making it impossible to land a level step. Quite appropriately an older hiker’s handbook identified these long stretches as Rocky I, I, III, etc., and a standing joke among AT hikers holds that the Pennsylvania trail maintainers spend the winters sharpening these rocks to make the pathway even more difficult. My hiking partner Karen and I even saw a rock poking from a tree trunk three feet above the ground as if to say, “We even grow rocks here!” Many a thru hiker mourns their first pair of boots biting not the dust but the rocks in Pennsylvania.
Karen and I knew AT rocks and had tackled Pennsylvania rocks together before this particular hike. On our first backpacking trip we discovered that both of us had yet to cover the same 180 miles of northern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York in our quest to complete the entire trail. It occurred to us that as college professors with the same fall and spring break schedules, we could hike that portion by meeting on our breaks to day hike—“slack pack”—about 45 miles each time and do it all in four trips. The sections lay conveniently more or less halfway between our respective homes, hers in Boston and mine in Charlottesville. By the time we rendezvoused for this particular adventure, we had already hiked a rocky portion in Pennsylvania the preceding spring and the massive boulders in New Hampshire and Maine that summer. Returning to Pennsylvania in the fall, we were primed to pick up where we had left off with the goal of ending 15 miles shy of the New Jersey state line which we would cross on our next trip.
We met on a Thursday night in Palmerton, Pennsylvania, a town in former coal country, situated for our purposes near the middle of our hike. With help from an AT hikers’ guide, we found a hostel reminiscent of an old-style boarding house. Stairs led from the street level up to the rooms, and though we shared a hall bathroom with two other guests, our room had plenty of space, a big bed, a beautiful vanity, and a sizeable side table—deluxe by hiker standards. We quickly made ourselves comfortable, caught up by talking about our children, our semesters, then turned to our hike by reviewing the map and inventorying our daypacks. The weather looked promising for the weekend with no rain forecast until later on the third day.
In the morning Karen and I rose at 5:30am. We had plenty of time to prepare ourselves and drive to the trailheads. We left one car at the northern end, Bake Oven Knob Road, which we located with help from a detailed road map, and left the other car at the southern end, Hawk Mountain Road, where we set foot on the trail. The day started with such a heavy fog that two miles on when we passed the intersection to the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, we could barely see the large sign. We delighted anyway knowing that we walked in such close proximity to the first sanctuary for the protection of birds of prey. About a mile later we passed “Dan’s Pulpit,” a rocky outcrop named in honor of a man who held Sunday services there and founded one of the mountain clubs that maintained the trail. I tried the outcrop for size as a pulpit of my own. Karen and I laughed because it fit so well. Although we faced no extensive rocky places, we traversed several hundred-yard lengths of such tread way, enough to make us shift our hiking gait into something more akin to rock hopping across a creek. Most of the trek met us with a mixture of old forest and logging roads stitched together by the narrower hiking trails. It made for pleasant hiking especially after the fog lifted.
Throughout the day, there weighed on me the untimely death the previous week of a high school friend who had died from liver cancer. John and I had grown up in Nashville and gone to the Peabody Demonstration School which became the University School of Nashville in our junior year when its parent institution, Peabody College for Teachers, no longer needed a lab for piloting new teaching techniques and curricula. Our school had the reputation as the liberal, “alternative” high school in Nashville: racially integrated before desegregation, no enforced study halls, no enforced dress code (even adults joked that our uniform was jeans and a tee-shirt), and religious integration with no unspoken quotas limiting the numbers of Jews. We had such a high percentage of Jews in our student body that on the High Holy Days many of our teachers turned their classes into extended study periods. John numbered among the observant.
John and I had known each other since our freshman year, often taking the same classes because we had aspirations for medical school, a path he pursued but I did not. We also took orchestra, he as a cellist and me as a violist, and our dedication to music led us both into the Nashville Youth Symphony. In our free periods at school we frequently wound up studying together. A shared sense of mischief that twinkled in his blue eyes bound us together with several other friends. When our chemistry teacher, an excellent photographer who had no tolerance for sickly sweet baby pictures, went so far as to stick such a picture on a blackboard and write the word “perversion” next to it, we secretly signed him up as a pregnant “her” for a nine-month gift subscription to the magazine American Baby filled with such photographs, and we made sure it was delivered to his school mailbox for all of his colleagues to see. In our senior year John and I were among the handful of students who enrolled in classes at Vanderbilt University when we needed courses our school did not offer. Furthermore, we appreciated each other’s religious convictions. I learned from John not only about his Jewish practices but also about his commitment which arose, in part, from both of his parents having fled Germany as refugees. John’s death had the touch of tragic irony because as an oncologist he succumbed to the same disease he fought so hard with his patients.
I wanted to do something more to honor John than simply send a monetary memorial gift to our school. I recalled that there is a special Jewish prayer said when a person dies, and I thought that perhaps I could pray it with John in mind. I talked about the prayer with one of my colleagues who is a rabbi, and she kindly gave it to me in translation from the Hebrew, pointing out that although it is referred to as the “Mourner’s Kaddish,” nothing in the prayer mentions death, the deceased, or technically the word “God.” As I pored over the prayerI noticed that from the opening sentence, “Glorified and sanctified be [God’s] great name throughout the world which he has created according to his will,” to the declaration of God’s transcendence, “beyond the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world,” to the final petition, “May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us and for all Israel…,” the Kaddish celebrated God’s holiness and implied a great “not yet,” anticipating a time when holiness and completeness of existence would characterize life on earth as it already did in eternity. I realized John’s death stirred in me gratitude to God for John and an awareness of the “not yet” that death presents so acutely.
As I hiked my mind turned to John and the Kaddish. That Karen and I hiked in a place known for its unusual number of rocks struck me as somewhat non-coincidental, because in Jewish tradition mourners place rocks on a loved one’s grave as a sign of remembrance. On this hike underfoot and around me were an abundance of these signs. John was bound as solidly and intensely in my memory as the firmness and sharpness of those rocks. When I thought more about saying the Kaddish, I wondered if I as a Christian was wrongly appropriating a Jewish prayer. If I prayed the Kaddish as a gentile would I be doing the exact opposite of what I intended, disrespecting John and his faith instead of honoring him? Early that afternoon, it occurred to me that perhaps I could pray the Kaddish with Karen because Karen is Jewish and it was Friday. In a matter of hours we would be celebrating Shabbat, welcoming the Sabbath as we always did whenever we hiked or backpacked on a Friday. We could say the Kaddish in the context of Shabbat as would happen in a Sabbath service. I did not want to spring this on Karen, so I told her about John and asked her to consider whether it would be ok for us to make the Kaddish part of our Shabbat. I told her that just in case it was ok, I had brought along the prayer in English translation. Karen expressed a ready willingness, but I encouraged her not to rush because I did not want her to violate her conscience or do anything that would be an affront to her faith. The rest of the day we enjoyed blue skies, huffed and puffed up the steep ascents, breathed more freely on the descents, talked, and walked in silence as we clipped off the miles.
That evening when we returned to our room we moved into our Friday evening routine of supper, Shabbat, and planning for the next day. We had decided to keep supper easy, what Karen called a “no fuss meal.” We pulled out a backpacking stove and fuel, boiled water, and prepared a backpacker’s instant meal for two that cooked in its own bag. Shabbat followed. Karen had brought a small challah bread, candles, and wine. She lit the candles, circled her arms over the candles, covered her eyes with her hands, and intoned the Hebrew blessing. Then she looked at me and asked if I would like to say the Kaddish. I nodded yes and said the prayer. Momentarily lost in memories of John, I am not sure what followed and how much time passed until Karen proclaimed, “Shabbat shalom!” And we danced around the room singing, “Shabbat shalom! Shabbat shalom! Shabbat, Shabbat, Shabbat—Shabbat shalom!” At the end we hugged and I said, “Thank you,” simultaneously grateful to have memorialized John and celebrated the fullness of life itself in the Sabbath, the climax of creation, with such a friend as Karen. The other guests in the hostel might have wondered what kind of a hike we had that day to be carrying on in such a way.
We then turned to our map and trail guide because one problem about the rest of the trip remained unresolved: how to divide our remaining twenty-nine miles of hiking given where the trailheads were and our desire for a shorter third day in order to get a jump on our five- to six-hour trips home. A wild idea hit me—we could hike twenty miles the next day! This would leave eight rather than fourteen or fifteen for day three. The map showed a relatively level elevation profile over the twenty mile distance; the guide book described hospitable, rockless terrain except for the last mile of a steep descent down cliffs; and that day we had already maintained a pace slightly better than two miles per hour including breaks. With about ten hours of sun, twenty miles could be covered before dark. Karen and I agreed that if we started half an hour before dawn and hiked north to south, leaving us the famous cliffs at the end when the weather was cooler, it was possible. We risked having to go down the cliffs with headlamps if we ran out of daylight, but we stood to gain more light for driving home the next day. As crazy as twenty miles sounded, we decided to do it.
We arose well before daybreak. I ate my long-distance hiking breakfast of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a doughnut, and a banana, and washed it down with and a liter of lime Gatorade. Karen had her power breakfast, too. We shouldered our daypacks, left our hostel, drove our cars through the pitch dark to the southern trailhead not far away and, after leaving one car there, drove the other car north to Wind Gap. According to plan we started hiking with our headlamps lighting the way until first light appeared and our eyes adjusted.
A number of miles later at mid-morning, we came upon a weather beaten sofa that someone had dumped about 100 yards from a remote road in a small mountain field which the trail crossed before entering the woods again. The sofa looked inviting as a place to lounge for a break, except that upon closer inspection stuffing bulged from the back, rips showed in the fabric over the arms, and sunken cushions seemed better suited for bugs than us. We gave it a pass. The contrast between the decayed sofa and the surrounding beauty of tall grass, wildflowers, and fall woodlands made us laugh. It gave me the impish impulse to make an alternative AT calendar. I explained to Karen that rather than photographs of grand vistas, rich forests, and majestic mountain tops, this calendar would feature less glorious scenes, like this sofa, or a stretch of boggy, muddy trail in Maine, or a bicycle we had seen with a twisted front wheel looking like it had been hit by a car propped against an AT sign at a notorious road crossing in Pennsylvania. We laughed as other unglamorous images we had seen on our hikes flashed through our minds—privies with no doors or roofs as if to say, Why bother?, bald tires dumped down the side of a ravine, a glowing Coca-Cola machine near a major bridge, an abandoned road grader at the end of a forest road. The ratty sofa had inspired us to see new life in what some might have considered dead or pointless.
In a more serious way and on a much larger scale we found ourselves almost literally on the borderline between life and death when the trail abutted reclaimed Superfund land. For five miles the AT skirts the edge of the Palmerton Zinc Pile Site. Near Palmerton, the trail traverses Blue Mountain and ends with a precipitous mile long, 1000’ rocky descent into Lehigh Gap to the wide, powerful Lehigh River. Between 1912 and 1980, a factory in Palmerton smelted zinc that yielded such toxins as arsenic, lead, and copper along with zinc which leached into local water sources and floated in the air, defoliating thousands of acres of forestland. Declared a priority Superfund site for reclamation in 1983, restoration did not begin until 1987 and took years to accomplish. When Karen and I reached that section of the trail, a sign informed us that we were passing through a reclaimed Superfund site and cautioned hikers not to stray from the trail because of increased health hazards. We did not need a sign telling us that trauma had struck the land. The denuded mountainside looked as if it had suffered a devastating fire. A few scraggly trees reached up like skeletal fingers through the scorched earth-scape. Nevertheless, we could see signs of life returning: a thin layer of grass had begun to grow at places on the mountain side; small, barely visible flowers covered patches of ground; weeds sprouted an inch high. Poison and death were not having the last word. Families came to hike this section, and parents allowed their children to run on the open terrain disregarding the sign. Karen and I had our doubts about the air quality despite the clean-up and decided haste was in our best interest.
By the time we reached the cliffs, the sun hung low in the sky. I looked at my watch and figured that if we scrambled down the boulders at the same rate we had clambered over Maine’s big rocks, we might have enough ambient light to reach our car before nightfall. Much like our hiking in Maine, the climb down into Lehigh Gap required us to follow white arrows pointing the correct direction amid the boulders as well as the usual white blazes. In the gravelly portions we had to step slowly because the stones slid and shifted with our weight. Part of the way down we smiled when we looked up over our shoulders and saw, famous to the trail, a large American flag painted on one of the boulders overlooking the gap. The sun kept sinking, casting a warm but waning light on the cliffs urging us down the mountain. In the afterglow of the sunset we finally stepped onto dirt path and raced on for the last few tenths of a mile. We reached the car at the very moment dusk merged into night. Feeling victorious, Karen and I embraced, crossing our own kind of finish line. We had hiked 20.4 miles in a day. We pumped our fists and declared, “Not bad for 40-something year-old ladies!” I quoted an Australian friend, “’Better than kick in the bum!’”
We headed to a local pizzeria to celebrate and to discuss plans for the next day’s far shorter hike. By the time we returned to our hostel, we only had to resupply our daypacks, zip up our travel bags, and collapse into bed. Falling asleep took no time.
In the morning we arose before dawn as usual but not quite as early as the day before because we did not have to drive as far to our southern trail head before hitting the trail back north. When we stepped from the car and donned our daypacks, the air had the nip of fall and the leaves rustled in the slight breeze of the approaching front. We expressed appreciation for our fleece pullovers, beanies, and light gloves. Daylight broke at the start of the hike, but a dark gray sky portended the afternoon rain.
The trail wound mostly through woodlands. Four tenths of a mile into the hike, Bake Oven Knob, the one major rock outcrop, stood as an important point along the hawk migration route, but we did not see any hawks probably because we had come too early in the season. No hike in northern Pennsylvania was complete without rocks, and one particular area featured a rock slide that required careful going to avoid toppling over. We also faced the not too difficult but annoying necessity of distinguishing between the white 2”x4” AT blazes and the bigger, splotchier white blazes marking state game lands that border the AT in Pennsylvania. I wore my hunter’s orange beanie aware that it was bow hunting season.
Around our fifth mile, what we was shaping up to be an uneventful hike suddenly took a surprise turn when we happened upon a hiker who had stopped in a nondescript place. From a distance it looked like the man might be injured. We drew cautiously nearer and as he came into focus he looked strangely familiar to me. In his 50s, he reminded me of someone Karen and I had met in a hostel in Maine two-and-a-half months earlier. But what were the odds? I walked closer towards the man, and then with a sudden spark of recognition asked, “Papillon?” “Yes,” he answered unsure why someone in such a remote place heading north should know him by his trail name. “It is P-Dub and Walkabout,” I said using our trail names. “We met at the hostel in Rangeley.” “I remember,” he said, his smile spreading across his face. The three of us began conversing like long lost friends. Karen and I updated him about the rest of our hike in Maine and told him about our mid-Atlantic trips. He told us that when he realized he would not make it as far south as he had hoped, he had decided to gear down and keep hiking until time and the weather forced him off the trail. Papillon’s aim remained the same: walk as far south as possible on his way to Charlotte where he was moving to take up a new job at the first of the year. His trail name corresponded to the new start in life he was making—“papillon” being French for “butterfly” and a symbol of new life. We agreed that our meeting came as “trail magic” (for me a Godhit) that brightened an otherwise gray day. The three of us looked at our watches and knew that we had to make tracks. We bid genuine fare wells and headed in our opposite directions. Several times over the next three miles, Karen and I turned to each other and declared in spontaneous litany, “Can you believe we met Papillon?!”, “Yes! Amazing!”
Later that day while I drove home and looked back on the trip, our meeting of Papillon and the new life he represented came as a fitting end. From reuniting with my dear friend Karen, saying Kaddish for John, finding new purpose in a “dead” sofa, hiking along the border of a Superfund site, and meeting Papillon when I had expected my good-bye of several months earlier to have been my last, I realized that new life could arise in barely anticipated, even unimagined ways. I only had to keep moving into the new life that was reaching out to meet me. Alas, easier said than done. I had also seen in this hike that no one moves into this new life alone, not even when hiking solo as Papillon did, because company would come. Company might come in obvious ways whether as a friend like Karen or in a chance meeting with a fellow hiker like Papillon; but it was also present in less visible ways—in the trail maintainers who kept the path clear, people who protected the adjacent lands (even restoring them when needed), and the hikers who walked the trail ahead of us. The long arm of new life seemed to reach out from both sides of eternity, breaking into the present, pulling me in by giving me gratitude, joy, and hope, and all unexpectedly on a hike in Pennsylvania known for its rocks. L’Chaim!