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Walking to Vermont: A Foreign Correspondent Greets Retirement by Hitting the Road for the Crowning Adventure of His Life by Christopher S. Wren Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Take a Hike New York Times editor and former bureau chief and foreign correspondent, Christopher S. Wren retires, and decides to mark this passage by walking from Times Square to his home in Vermont. It takes five weeks, and the chronicle of this walk on the pavement and in the woods appears in his new book, Walking to Vermont. Even readers under age 65 will find this chronicle enjoyable to read. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter Three, “Connecticut,” pp. 77-87: The soft drizzle threatened to become hard rain and my wife’s patience was wearing thin while I dithered over what to put in my pack. I sifted through piles of camping gear, clothing, and food that I had indiscriminately tossed into the back of our station wagon a couple of weeks earlier. Jaqueline had kept her promise to deliver my tent, stove, and sleeping bag on the first weekend after I cleared New York City. The resupply mission had expanded to two romantic nights together. Now Sunday was slipping away, and the family’s sole remaining wage-earner had to return to New York and resume working at her school by eight A.M. Monday It was time to start walking again from where I left off, a few miles north of Pawling. Instead, I was paralyzed by indecision over parkas, sweaters, cookwear, sleeping bags of various weights, and metal gadgetry Retirement should mean liberation from workaday decisions. Yet here I stood with drizzle rolling down my nose and neck, getting spattered with muddy water by passing cars, as I engaged in Hamlet-like procrastination over what to take or not to take. I was as deliberately selective as someone dipping into a box of Belgian chocolates. Should I take a spare can opener or rely on the balky tool on my red Swiss Army knife, which tended to stick from years’ accumulation of gunk? I put the knife in my pocket and tossed the can opener into my pack. Would I use my poncho as well as my rain jacket? I was wearing the jacket, but the poncho could come in handy as a ground cloth under my tent. I took both. Did I need the complete cooking kit, which included a pot, pan, skillet, plate. bowl, cup, and enough utensils to feed an infantry platoon? They went along too; I wouldn’t have to wash up after each meal. What about my black sweater versus the fleece pullover? I shoved both into the pack, just in case. It could turn cold in the mountains, if I got that far. Should I take my old metal whistle in case my son’s orange plastic whistle failed? I did, giving me the option of calling for help in two-part harmony. Headlamp or flashlight.? Well, neither weighed that much. What if one got lost or malfunctioned? Double-A or triple-A batteries for my lamps and tiny tape recorder? I threw an extra fistful of batteries into my pack. I added what was left of my roll of duct tape, which I had applied liberally to the pack’s frayed shoulder straps. How many days of food? Two water bottles or three? One loaf of bread or two? Rice or noodles? Powdered lemonade with or without sugar? The difference in lemonades amounted to a couple of ounces. Liquid detergent or an old-fashioned bar of soap? I also took a stiff broad-brimmed hat that snagged on every passing branch, stiff canvas trousers that soaked up rainwater faster than a sponge, and several clean shirts with collars to wear off the trail. Jaqueline argued that I should carry something decent to wear if the mayors and lairds I passed invited me to dinner. I argued that where I was walking, people called it supper, not dinner. But the weight added up. Every traveler undergoes this exasperating anguish. But what I selected would have to travel on my back for a month or more, not in some overhead luggage compartment. The most painful decision involved a stack of books I had brought to read in the long summer twilights on the trail. In the end, I limited myself to the copy of Walden. Thoreau would hardly have approved of the rest of what I was carrying, which could be generically described as “stuff.” “Our life is frittered away by detail,” Henry whispered from the pages of my paperback. “An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes and lump the rest.” Reloading my pack took more than an hour. Every decision made sense. Taken together, they violated the first rule of going light: pack no more than half of what you lay out. I had toted a lot less traveling through distant backwaters as a foreign correspondent. At last, Jaqueline drove off in the direction of New York City having consented to meet me in Manchester, Vermont, a village that, I reminded her, was known as much for its bargain shopping outlets as for its gracious country inns and equally expensive restaurants. Swinging the pack against my thigh and onto my shoulder, I walked across the highway as jauntily as I could, into a pasture whose white blazes introduced me to the Appalachian Trail. I considered walking a few miles further up Route 22, then turning right to the Connecticut state line and hiking up Hoyt Road to the first shelter on the Appalachian Trail. But this would have taken me past the Wingdale state psychiatric hospital, whose grim brick buildings, now shuttered, resembled an old-fashioned penitentiary And I hadn’t seen anyone else hiking up the busy highway at least not with a pack as big as mine. I didn’t want to be mistaken for an inmate who had escaped with his mattress on his back. So I backtracked a few miles to pick up the Appalachian Trail sooner. With my wife having departed at fifty miles an hour, I was in no mood to hang around highways. Nearly three centuries earlier, New York and Connecticut had quarreled over this nondescript border strip, for reasons unexplained by the marker I passed on Route 22. The dispute was settled in 1731 by creating a tract called the Oblong, fifty-one miles long and two miles wide, which Connecticut later gave up. It took me not quite ten minutes to lose my bearings, which was no modest achievement. The Appalachian Trail may well be the most famous footpath in the United States, though not here, where the trail kept petering out until it was indistinguishable from the cowpaths intersecting the mown pastures. I plunked my pack in the middle of the field and sallied forth in several directions, without success. I checked the map again. The trail seemed to meander across the wooded ridge to my left, into a nature preserve set aside by the town of Pawling. I scrambled across a muddy ravine and bushwhacked up to the high ground on the other bank through undergrowth that left my trousers soggy with fresh rainfall. A half-hour out, and I needed a hot bath. By luck, I found some trees emblazoned with the white blazes of the Appalachian Trail. The trail itself was poorly marked and cluttered by fallen limbs and other deadfall as it wound through the nature preserve. The local hiking club had been preoccupied with something other than trail maintenance. Lesser paths, identified by competing blazes in reds, yellows, and greens, intersected with my route, adding to the confusion. They seemed to lead seductively downhill to Quaker Lake, a local holiday spot. I was being passed in both directions by brawny Sunday hikers flexing powerful quadriceps, and those were just the women. I forged ahead on the white trail at a retiree’s pace, trying not to lose altitude as it led me up and down to the wrought iron gates of an eerily abandoned graveyard, identified by a metal sign as “Gates of Heaven.” The graves, not to mention heaven itself, had vanished under a profusion of weeds. Here I encountered a local man who claimed to know the area well. Andy led me to the Wiley shelter at the head of Hoyt Road, which hugged the state line between New York and Connecticut. “There’s a lot of old magazines that you can read if you want to stay for a day or two,” said Andy, who sounded excited by the prospect. The collection was as large as he promised, but sitting around reading month-old soiled magazines at a shelter that looked bug-ridden and a little spooky was not what I had in mind. I decided to push on for three or four more miles, to the next shelter, in Connecticut. From the top of the one hill, I called Jaqueline on my cell phone, to make sure she had returned home. The trail led downhill a thousand feet or so to Ten Mile River shelter. The three-sided lean-to was built of logs, with a slanted roof jutting out over the open fourth side. Inside was a flat platform broad enough to sleep a half-dozen hikers. It was typical of shelters on the Appalachian Trail. Some were more elaborate, with open windows and a picnic table or campfire pit outside, but the design had changed little since Abe Lincoln, who spent his early childhood in a similarly rude dwelling on the Kentucky frontier and ended up in the White House. But Abe’s lean-to did not have its wooden beams festooned with nylon cords ending in metal cans and jar tops. Their purpose became apparent from the bags of food hanging from the contraptions, which looked like wind chimes for the deaf. They were meant to keep the food supply at a tantalizing distance from mice and insects, leaving these crawlers free to snack on the faces and hands of sleeping guests. The lean-to was already occupied by some young hikers who were cooking their respective suppers on tiny camp stoves. They paid scant attention to my arrival. One benefit of turning sixty-five is that the young tend not to see you. Senior invisibility has its advantages, especially when you begin taking notes about what others are saying. Here in the woods, it was hard not to eavesdrop on conversations that would be lost in the babble of a city street. The words emanated from the lean-to like whispers in the ear, though the punctuation didn’t. “I was, LIKE, really psyched by the killer stove this dude was using. Made it himself, you know? LIKE, it was way so cool and I was, LIKE—hello?—why didn’t I think of denatured alcohol, LIKE it was so totally rad?” one hiker said. “Wicked awesome,” another hiker seemed to agree. “Cut the straps off his pack, LIKE, down to sixteen pounds basic, you know? It just totally blew me away man. And, LIKE, he’s doing twenty-five a day over killer puds and hasn’t zeroed since Springer. That’s so gnarly, man, LIKE cool.” I once fancied myself fluent in Russian and got along well enough in Chinese. I knew how to speak loudly and point in French and Spanish. But the dialect spoken at the Ten Mile River shelter was Iike—hello?—going so totally over my head, dude. Compared to this, Finnegan’s Wake seemed a model of clarity Still, the tenor of the hikers’ conversation did acquaint me with the nature of permissible social discourse on the Appalachian Trail, which falls into three broadly defined categories: Stoves. Comparative weights of packs. Miles covered daily. Traveling the trail was for these kids a way of breaking away from their families and reinventing themselves, with a new identity forged under whatever trail name they chose. A clinical psychiatrist would tell me, for one hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour, that my annoyance manifested subconscious envy at not having done the same when I was young. Describing my companions simply as thru-hikers seemed inadequate because it revealed nothing about their lifestyle. I preferred to call them, and myself, trail travelers. Billowing gray clouds swallowed up a glimpse of sunset and threatened more rain, so I continued downhill to the tenting area before darkness. I pitched my one-man tent under a spreading fir tree near Ten Mile River, which merged with the Housatonic River some twenty yards away. After a week spent walking, this was my first night outdoors, and without a fire. Campfires were prohibited on the Appalachian Trail in Connecticut and, as it turned out, in many other states. The river flowing over the rocks sounded muffled and tranquil. But the night was muggy and the prospect of rain led me to drape my poncho over the tent, making the interior hot and claustrophobic. Six hours of hiking with a heavy pack had exhausted me, yet I could not fall asleep. My red Ensolite sleeping pad was supposed to inflate itself when I turned the valve, but it didn’t offer much cushioning until I puffed into it for a minute or so. The pad barely stretched from head to waist, insulating my torso from the damp ground, but not doing much for my legs. The sleeping bag, once I zipped myself into it, was too hot. I tried spreading it over me like a blanket, with a foot sticking out for temperature control. I plumped my fleece jacket and sweater together into a pillow. Inside the tent, it was becoming as humid as a sauna. I kicked off the sleeping bag. Sleep comes reluctantly on the first night or two outdoors, when the hard ground takes some getting used to and the silence of the woods amplifies the faintest buzzing of a mosquito. It is all part of becoming accustomed to the rhythm of the trail. Fireflies were dancing in the dark when I crawled outside and pulled off the poncho to let the tent breathe properly Sometime after midnight, I swallowed half a tranquilizer. The rain I had braced for never came. I awoke a little before five A.M. to the sounds of birdsong and rushing water. Sunlight spilled over my tent and set the interior aglow I didn’t feel up to the chore of finding my stove, so for breakfast I hacked some chunks of bread from my loaf, slathered them with peanut butter, and washed them down with powdered lemonade. Cooking could be postponed till dinner. The reality was that pieces of my stove had been swallowed up by other stuff that was spilling from my pack. Before setting out, I went to the pump to fill three water bottles. I originally planned to take two, then threw in a third just in case. The downside is that three liters of water add another six and a half pounds to your pack weight. At the pump, a fortyish hiker introduced herself as Jules. Her clipped Germanic accent made her sound like one of the jolly nuns in a touring cast of The Sound of Music. I looked puzzled about the gender confusion until she explained that Jules was her trail name. “What is your trail name?” Jules pressed. “I don’t have one,” I told her. Jules frowned. “Everyone must have a trail name,” she said, bringing a Teutonic logic to what was supposed to be an anarchic activity namely walking around outdoors. “I guess I don’t,” I confessed. Jules snorted at this breach of trail etiquette. “If you don’t have a trail name,” she warned, “the other hikers are going to give you one.” She implied that any trail name you chose for yourself would be less embarrassing than what others devised. I didn’t relish being called the Old Retired Guy Back There or worse, to my face or behind my back. A trail name, Jules explained patiently could be whatever you wanted, so long as it wasn’t your real name, though it should reveal something about you and be catchy like the inane label of a punk rock band. “What if I choose a trail name and then decide I don’t like it?” I asked. “You could change it,” she supposed. But her tone made clear that this fickleness was considered poor form because it confused fellow hikers when you signed the trail registers. Her meticulous explanation made her seem loopier than she was. Jules seemed to know what she was doing in the woods. Her space-age tent, which she had yet to strike, looked as spacious as the Astrodome. “Mine weighs two and a half pounds,” she boasted. Her tent was sewn from parachute silk. “How much does your tent weigh?” she asked. “More,” I told her. Mine was closer to four pounds and much smaller. An alias did made sense on the trail, when you are eating and sleeping and excreting and sneezing in intimate proximity to others whom you might not want to appear on your doorstep later to borrow money or take up living space on your floor. Nor might they relish your looking them up when they were back in their workaday world, clean-shaven with matching socks. Donning my pack, I crossed Ten Mile River over a small bridge. There was ample time to ponder a trail name while I walked among the hills and dells of Connecticut. In the course of my journey to Vermont, I acquired and discarded many sobriquets. I started out as Chris’s Dad, the name I answered to when my son was a teenager. But other hikers looked around for Chris and inquired where my son was. By the time I hit Massachusetts I was reborn as Super Tortoise, conveying a peverse pride in my comparatively slow pace. This got abbreviated to Tortoise in casual conversation, as in, “How many miles did you do today Tortoise?” I was inviting insults. Before I reached Vermont, I changed my trail alias to Hack, which is British slang for a foreign correspondent (and the title of a novel I wrote once). But Hack came across like a persistent cough if I was short of breath when I introduced myself. I invariably had to spell it, which ruins the fun of a trail name. I slogged across New England scattering more aliases behind me than a master forger of bad checks. My trail name ultimately metamorphosed into Jaywalker, which summed up what I had been doing since I left Times Square. Though most of the thruhikers I met would not recognize me as jaywalker, the reinvention of identity was familiar enough to many others who traveled the trail for any distance. I passed Bull’s Bridge, a covered bridge across the Housatonic River that gained renown as the spot where George Washington’s horse fell into the water back in 1777. The father of our country spent five hundred dollars, big bucks for a fledgling nation that tottered on the brink of bankruptcy to get his horse pulled out. How did Washington list the retrieval of his horse for the Continental Congress on his expense account—as transportation or entertainment? Nowadays, tourists are more likely to get wet when they are brushed back against the timbers by vehicles competing to drive through the single-lane covered bridge from opposite directions. I was tempted to follow the road along the Housatonic because the morning was turning hot, but stayed on the Appalachian Trail as it veered up Schaghticoke Mountain. The mountain’s name Mohegan meant “the place where the river divides,” referring to the juncture of the Housatonic and Ten Mile rivers. The Schaghticoke Indian reservation lies just below the mountain, and though the trail passed through it, I never saw any Indians. Only fifty-two miles, hardly two percent of the Appalachian Trail, wind through Connecticut, but they seemed to go on forever. It didn’t help that I was loaded down like a Himalayan yak. As I walked, mostly up and down, my mind became preoccupied with what I could jettison, or at least mail home from the post office in Kent, the next town upriver. “Simplicity simplicity simplicity!” Thoreau kept reminding me, but I only came up with more reasons for keeping everything I had stuffed into my pack. My Walden weighed barely eight ounces, though as I was to learn the hard way eight ounces here, another eight ounces there add up to a backbreaker. It fortified my resolve to empty my closets in New York City and Vermont of their accumulated clutter, assuming I would see those places again. The temperature was pushing into the nineties. I sweated profusely as the trail meandered up and along the mountain ridge. My three bottles of water were quickly consumed. When I stopped to drain the last drops, I paid little attention to the rewarding views of the Housatonic River Valley. I assumed that I had left New York behind, but my compass showed the trail swinging westward, indicating that I was wandering back into New York State. Wren’s passage into retirement, and this well-written chronicle of his personal journey home, provide an outlet for Wren’s fine writing skills, and present enjoyable reading. I recommend Walking to Vermont. Steve Hopkins, April 23, 2004
ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the May 2004 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Walking to Vermont.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com