Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Walker Page A

that they eat their young in the South?”
    “Only when we run out of possum pie and squirrel innards,” I responded.
    Then, out of nowhere, Rooney lit up with a spate of racist jokes. It came as a surprise to everyone; he seemed to be too upbeat and bright to wallow in such filth.
    “You can’t really be a racist, Rooney,” Tigress protested. “You have a full set of teeth.”

     
    It was a three thousand-foot, sharp drop-off from Wesser Bald to the Nantahala River. Even traversing the switchbacks, it was a rugged descent. Fortunately, I was part of a big group traveling down together. Hiking was often fulfilling, but a big, chatty group like this also made it fun.
    Scottie Too Lite and I shared a cabin at the Nantahala Outdoor Club and allowed Captain Hook to sleep in the loft. Hook was an eighteenyear-old, just out of high school who had been accepted to Harvard, but was delaying it for a semester to thru-hike the AT.
    “How in the world could you pass up Harvard for the AT?” Scottie Too Lite wanted to know.
    “Everybody said I would learn more on the AT than in my first semester of college,” Captain Hook replied.
    Scottie Too Lite wowed several of us at dinner with details of his meticulous planning for the AT. He was optimistic at all times and equally voluble. One female hiker named Scholar claimed that one day she had been listening to him talk non-stop about every bit of trail minutiae to the point that she couldn’t take it anymore. She began to run from him. She swore that as she fled he ran after her talking nonstop.
    Scottie went to the pay phone at about nine o’clock to call his wife. Forty-five minutes later he came back ashen-faced.
    “Hey man,” Captain Hook said, “what happened?”
    Uncharacteristically terse, Scottie said, “My daughter in France.”
    “Oh no,” I said alarmed.
    “Well, she’s okay right this minute,” he said, “but I have to get off the trail.”
    Scottie was kept off the trail for more than a month, but didn’t give up. He got back on the trail and began racing all-out every day. But, on October 7 torrential rains made the trail impassable in Massachusetts and he spent several days waiting to cross a swollen, impassable stream. Finally, he had no choice but to give up on his dream. He’s now back in the computer business and wondering if he will ever get another shot at a thru-hike.

     
    We had been warned that the pull out of Nantahala would be the most difficult thus far. That alert, combined with a dire weather forecast, had me tense. Unfortunately, most of the group I had traveled with the previous day had dispersed.
    The first eight miles up to Cheoah Bald offered a net ascent of 3,300 feet. Almost immediately upon embarking, thunder began rattling in the distance and my gut tightened. The tendency in such situations is to hurry, which I tried to resist. Attempting to sprint up a mountain that long and steep was a hopeless enterprise.
    Big, cold rain drops began to pelt me, and the sky became a veritable pyrotechnics show. The conditions steadily worsened with the elevation. I saw a tarp set up very low to the ground, right in the middle of the trail. Squatting down I yelled inside, “Hello, dry person.”
    “Skywalker, is that you?” Seth’s voice came from parallel to the ground. “With your height you might want to look for somewhere to hide,” he yelled out.
    “I’ll see you at the shelter,” I said and hurried off.
    I had never thought my height made me much more vulnerable to lightning, despite many jokes over the years. But someone at the Appalachian Trail headquarters had told me that lightning (which travels at a decidedly brisk two hundred seventy thousand miles per hour and has the width of a pencil) was an underrated source of danger. I would later meet a hiker named Lightning Rod, who had twice been indirectly struck by lightning in previous years on the AT.
    But the one thing my height did make me vulnerable to was getting