American Trail

By Ted Field

American Trail is a story of redemption and a young man’s search for it.

Jack Gale is a Baby Boomer, a member of that loud, narcistic generation that grew up believing the American Dream was its entitlement. “My generation was the first to grow up with television,” is how Jack begins his story. It was the 1950’s, an age of innocence when TV sitcoms taught families how to be dutiful, conforming, and child-centered. On Saturday mornings kids sat on the floor watching cartoons and learned from the commercials what cereals their mothers should buy, the ones with the best toys boxed inside. “Hey, kids, tell your mom…” they were told. The stuff of Jack’s boyhood is Davy Crockett caps, Daisy air rifles, and American Bandstand. But so are fallout shelters in the basement and A-bomb drills in grade school.

While he is in college, Jack’s charmed life takes an unexpected turn one night when he draws a low number in the national draft lottery and suddenly the threat of military service in Vietnam darkens his Dream. From there he chooses a new trail, one that passes through some of his generation’s defining touchstones: anti-war rallies, Woodstock, failed idealism, and a bohemian search for fulfillment. The trail takes him to a battleground with his father where they fight over differences in ambition, values, and duty.

When Jack learns of a sociologist’s claim that America’s general happiness peaked in 1957 and has been declining ever since, he sees it as a reflection of his own life. Ultimately, he realizes his Dream was a gift and a debt to repay, and finds redemption in the most unlikely place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781728337845

Ted Field

Ted Field is the author of The Well: An Enviro Thriller and The Christmas Stories. As the principal artist of Have Pen, Will Draw, he writes and draws comic novels. A Baby Boomer, he once tried to build a fallout shelter in his basement. He lives with his wife in Minnesota, happier than he was in 1957.

Book preview

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1 - VIRGINIA

M y generation was the first to grow up with television , which explains a lot. We treated our TV like it was a member of the family and not just a box of lights and wires. It taught us about life and what to expect from it: happy endings to all our episodes. It became our window to the world, with everything in black and white. Starting from a young age, we saw the world as black and white.

I was five when my family got its first TV. It was a large wooden box with a small gray screen, two front knobs, and a fabric speaker. My father placed it on the floor in the living room where the radio used to be. We would turn it on, wait for the tubes to warm up, and, when a blizzard of confetti appeared on the screen, flip the bigger knob to choose a channel. We got four channels, grand media in 1955.

On Saturday mornings I sat on the floor watching cartoons and learned from the commercials what cereals my mother should buy, the ones with the best toys boxed inside. Hey, kids, tell your mom… I was told. We saw all the big events on TV. Ed Sullivan introducing Elvis, later the Beatles. M-i-c…k-e-y and American Bandstand after school every day. Astronauts launched into space. And the Kennedy funeral processions: JFK’s horse-drawn caisson on Pennsylvania Avenue and Bobby’s slow train to D.C. Sitcoms like Father Knows Best showed us how families were supposed to behave: dutiful, conforming, and child-centered.

The first color TV I ever saw was Uncle Bob’s. Only special shows were broadcast in color, like the Rose Parade, which we watched at his house on New Year’s Day. My mother sat close and admired the colors of the floats while my father remarked that the skin tones of the celebrities didn’t look as fake as he had been told. Gotta get me one of these, Bob, he said. This is an RCA, isn’t it? Raised on radio, his generation would marvel at the giant entertainment leap to television. Mine grew up thinking TV was a birthright, even with just four channels.

There was one show I didn’t just watch—I experienced.

I would never forget it—how could I when everything, including the rest of my life, turned on it? It was the first national draft lottery, and it was shown on TV one December night while I was in college, my sophomore year at Emory & Henry. Three classmates and I gathered in Paul Hyde’s dorm room to watch it on his small black-and-white set. Like most males over the age of 18, the four of us—me, Paul, Jim, and George—were unwilling participants, but our futures were at stake so we gave the show a focused attention we didn’t always bring to our classrooms. Young men everywhere—not just college kids—tuned in anxiously.

The show began with two men in dark suits walking solemnly onto a stage.

Shouldn’t executioners wear hoods? Paul asked. He stood up and played with the antennae until we saw only two men, not four.

They’re not executioners, I said. They’re travel agents announcing contest winners. The prize is a Southeast Asian cruise.

The men were introduced as Selective Service VIP’s.

The lottery was a serious dice roll. Before the lottery nobody knew their chances of getting drafted, or why the grim reaper might show up at their door instead of a friend’s. The lottery created a list of certain winners and losers, letting everyone know where they stood and whether or not it was okay to answer the door. A low lottery number meant military service for sure, perhaps Vietnam. The war was in its fifth year.

The game began. The men took turns spinning a wire cage filled with hundreds of bulbous capsules. Each time the cage stopped, one of them pulled out a capsule and snapped it in half like a fortune cookie. A slip of paper inside was read, a birthdate. The first capsule was September 14. A few seconds later the date appeared in block letters across the bottom of the screen. When the second date—April 24—was read, I exhaled loudly. "Geezus! That was close."

We celebrated the drawings of birthdays that weren’t ours and started feeling the momentum of a positive trend. Ten, twenty, then thirty capsules were drawn.

At thirty-two, we heard a baleful shriek down the hall.

Was that Holmes? Jim Hartman asked.

Paul and I exchanged glances and answered in unison. Holmes.

Fifty, then sixty capsules. Paul kept his fingers crossed. George clutched a rosary. With each announced birthday, we shook our fists triumphantly, relieved to be one step closer to winning.

When the 62nd capsule was drawn—April 21—my friends uttered soft cheers.

I felt a hard punch to my gut. The air rushed out of me and my body deflated. George was first to notice. Jack, is that you? he asked. The other guys spun around and looked at me curiously.

I nodded slowly.

"Oh, shit, Jack," Paul said.

No! Jim screamed.

A stony silence filled the room. Nobody moved. The guys just stared at me and ignored the TV. There were no immediate consoling words. I wanted to brush off the dread and their sympathy, so, pretending to act brave, I put on a stupid smile and mumbled, Bingo. The smile wasn’t real. My face was one of those bizarre portraits that can be flipped over to reveal a frown without changing a single line.

At the next commercial break George asked me, "What are you going to do? Silly question. I had two-and-a-half years left on a college deferment. How did I know what I was going to do? What were my options? Pizza, I said. Let’s go to Macado’s tomorrow night for pizza." It was gallows humor for sure, but also my way of saying the future comes one day at a time. Getting drafted was far over my horizon with a lot of pizza in between.

I turned inward and found a dark place to dwell in self-pity. I felt a dizzying loss of control. And anger. It wasn’t a death sentence, but it felt fatal. And unfair. I kept all these selfish thoughts to myself and tried to watch the rest of the show with my spirits up for the rest of the guys until all their birthdays were drawn, too. After mine was George’s, at 148, an ambiguous ranking between winning and losing. It didn’t ring with the certain fate of 62. Paul and Jim drew safe, high numbers. Paul announced he would celebrate right away by getting drunk. He turned off the TV and all four of us left his room and scattered through the dorm to learn who else had lost—or won—in the game. The whole dorm was vibrating with a nervous energy.

I accepted a host of condolences before going to the hall phone to call Russ Kitteridge, my best friend from high school. Russ still lived at home. His father answered and said Russ was at work. Just tell him I called, I said. I’ll try again tomorrow. Oh, and by the way, what’s his birthday? I forgot. He reminded me of the date. Later, I would check the final list. 298. Russ was in the clear. I was happy for him.

Paul and Jim and several other winners—including Bob Crowe, who had bowled the perfect game with a score of 366, the highest number possible—went to the commons room with a couple cases of beer and wasted no time getting a party started. I could hear their jubilant shouts down the hall. Later, a slightly inebriated Paul came to my room with two cans of Budweiser. He reached across my desk to close the textbook in front of me. I know your mind isn’t on economics, Gale, he slurred. Take a break. Here. He handed me a can.

We exchanged small talk while we drank. You should be thinking about silver linings, he said. And I’ve got one for you.

Let’s hear it, I answered tersely.

You’ve got two-and-a-half years before you graduate and they can draft you. By then the war is likely to be over. Tricky Dick’s got an election promise to deliver. He said he’d end it. Right now it’s hard to see how that’s going to happen, but in a couple years things will be different. He took a swig of beer and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. But I hear Canada is a nice place to live, he said in a joking tone.

Better than going to jail, I replied.

And then there’s the Coast Guard.

I wasn’t in a mood to talk.

But I hear it’s hard to get in, he added.

I downed the last gulp of beer and tossed the empty in the wastebasket and opened my textbook again, my signal to Paul that we were done. He got up to leave, inviting me to join the party downstairs. Maybe, I said. He left me to wallow in my gloom.

I tried to study but couldn’t concentrate. What was I going to do? I wasn’t a peacenik who wore his politics on his sleeve but I was still opposed to the war. I didn’t want to get shot at. But I knew Paul was right. My sentence was two-and-a-half years away. Worry about it then, I reminded myself. I began to relax and put the lottery out of my head. Then, George stuck his head in the doorway to tell me I had a phone call and I walked down the hall to answer it.

It was my father calling from home. Well, he said, this is a night we won’t forget.

What do you want, Dad?

I just wanted to call and cheer you up.

Actually, I’m in a pretty good mood, I lied.

Then, how about some advice? I always say you should make the best of every situation. Rather than getting drafted, you should be thinking about enlisting as an officer. It will look good on your resume someday.

Dad…. I took a loud breath. That can wait. I’ve got a test to study for.

I’m just saying think about it. This could be an opportunity.

An opportunity? Really? Honestly, I was feeling better until I heard my father describe my predicament as an opportunity. My mood was downgraded to lousy again. My father and I were optimists of different persuasions. He wasn’t an habitual purveyor of gloom, but a couple days later I realized he was right. There was an opportunity to mine from my misfortune, just not the kind he meant.

Boomer could benefit from my situation.

Boomer was my make-believe twin.

I was a geography major at Emory and Henry, but geography wasn’t what I was passionate about. Drawing comics was. I was a cartoonist for the campus newspaper, The Chronicle, drawing comics that expressed students’ angst for society’s ills. My best stuff was a comic strip about a teenager named Boomer who bore a striking resemblance to the famous comic teenager Archie, right down to the sweater vest and freckles. Boomer was my alter ego, his life mirroring parts of mine, good and bad. He had grown up in the innocent 50’s with soda fountains, high school crushes, and sock hops, but when he got to college his innocence faded. He got drunk at a frat house kegger. In another strip he went all the way with his golden-haired Betty. Emory students loved Boomer for its nostalgic echo. Maybe it was time for Boomer to grow some more and worry about darker matters than getting a date for Saturday night.

I started a strip in which Boomer is watching the draft lottery, but instead of his birthdate, it’s his name announced with a low number. That night, as he drifts off to sleep, the door to his dorm room swings open and the shadow of a hooded figure with a scythe is thrown against the wall above his bed. When I showed the strip to the Chronicle’s editor, he liked it, as well as my idea of a series of strips in which the lottery radicalizes Boomer. He told me to get started while the campus was still buzzing about the lottery.

Two weeks later, while I was home for Christmas break—in Burningtown, Virginia, my home town—I finished the series. In the last strip of the series Boomer tells his draft board he wants to swap lottery numbers with a friend who has already enlisted. Nice try, he is told. Here’s your draft notice. I would submit the strips when I returned to campus in January.

While I was home my father continued to lecture me about officers’ school. His best friend Art and Art’s wife came over to play bridge one night with my parents. Art was in the Army, a general and career man, and out of respect my father always called him The General. During a break in their game the two of them found me in the den watching TV. My father did all the talking. The General just listened.

You’ll be a college graduate, he said to me. Why waste your time hanging around privates and corporals? You’ll have nothing in common with them.

I can’t believe we’re talking about this, I answered in exasperation. It’s two-and-a-half years away.

It’s all about relationships.

"And war. Besides, there’ll be other college graduates getting drafted, too."

Rank is everything in the military, he said in a raised voice. It says who you are. I knew he was just trying to impress The General. Both had served proudly in World War Two.

As I recall, you were a lowly seaman, I said to him.

I wasn’t raised like you, he said in a scolding tone. I wasn’t as lucky. I was younger and not ready for a better crowd.

I ignored him, my eyes on the TV. They went back to their bridge game. Nothing was resolved.

The next night Russ Kitteridge picked me up and we went out to eat. Russ hadn’t chosen to go to college but that didn’t stop us from being best friends. We had been teammates on the high school football team. He reminded me of guys in our class already in uniform and one in particular, one of our closest friends, Wedge, who had enlisted in the Army before he pulled down a high number in the lottery. He had been my inspiration for the strip in which Boomer tried to swap lottery numbers with a friend.

Russ and I ate at Topps, the burger-and-malt drive-in that had been our favorite hangout in high school. On Friday and Saturday nights in the summer it was always packed with cars and people ordering at outside speakers and eating off of food trays hung from their rolled-down windows, but this was winter, Virginia-chilly, and the speakers were turned off and Russ and I sat at an inside table. Lucy Geiger waited on us. She and I had met in the 3rd grade.

I read about you in the paper, she said to me while leaning over to wipe our table.

What are you talking about? I asked.

You too, Russ. You guys were on the lottery list of Stuart grads.

The list was published in the Gazette? I asked.

And your numbers. She looked directly at me. There were only three guys lower than you. None of them were in our class.

Russ, did you know this?

Yeah, but I figured so what.

That’s because you’re in the safe zone, Lucy said to him.

Why would the Gazette print that list? I asked.

Because everybody is talking about it, she said. The article says the cutoff for getting drafted is one-seventy-six. At least it was last year. The draft board has a quota.

I expected Lucy to go on about how upset she was with the draft, the war, Nixon, everything. If there was a hippie I knew, it was Lucy. She dressed like one. Her dark hair was long and straight like Joan Baez and in high school she wore big hoop earrings and blouses embroidered with flowers. For her English paper junior year she had written about Jack Kerouac over the objections of our stuffy Victorian teacher, Mrs. Roberts, who claimed Beat writers weren’t real literature. Lucy’s subject choice probably cost her an A. I kissed up and stayed in the mainstream, choosing Hemingway. Now, Lucy was at Radford, a women’s college not far from Emory and Henry.

She returned with our food. I have a cousin, she said. He’s a couple years older than me and he dodged the draft by moving to Montreal. He says it’s a nice city. He likes it there.

Oh, yeah? Russ answered before I could. How’s he like not being able to come back?

When she brought our check, Lucy put a closing remark on the subject.

I hear they don’t give deferments anymore for being married. As she turned to go, she glanced back over her shoulder and winked at me. In case you were intending to propose. She smiled the way I remembered her from high school, biting her curled lower lip at the same time.

Russ looked at me with raised eyebrows.

He and I left and went to another one of our old haunts, this one a half-hour away. The General Sherman Inn was a roadhouse just across the state line in West Virginia, where we liked to shoot pool over pitchers of three-two beer. There had been lots of trips to the General when we were high school seniors, on account of a drinking age lower than Virginia’s. On our way home we stopped at a roadside rest to get out and piss, another tradition. Two pitchers of beer at the General meant we could only go so far before our kidneys needed tapping and that put us at the same roadside spot every time. I stood at the edge of the woods wetting the ground in front of a sign that couldn’t be read in the dark, but I knew what it said. I had read it countless times before in the sunlight. It identified a hiking path that took off into the forest.

Hey, I called out to Russ, You know where this goes, don’t you? Zipping up, I answered my own question. A guy could hike all the way to Maine and then keep going to Canada.

Don’t even think about it, Russ said.

The trail came up from the south, leapt over the highway, and continued north, boring a black tunnel in the forest. I stood there and stared into the tunnel with wonder.

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2 - VIRGINIA

T he General is dead. He died on a Monday. On Wednesday Jack learns of his passing when he goes to the Piedmont to visit his father and reads the obituary posted on the bulletin board in the lobby. Art Houtmann. 1921—2007 . The posting includes an enlarged black-and-white photo of Art— The General to my father—in his uniform when he was young, which was how he would have preferred to be remembered.

The General moved to the Piedmont a year after his wife died, two years before Jack’s father joined him there. For most of their lives his father—Dick—and The General had been best friends, bridge partners, golf and drinking buddies, and more. Compared to most of the retirement home’s memory-starved residents, Dick and The General were amazingly lucid. They played chess together and read the same spy novels. Every morning they wheeled their chairs down the Piedmont’s wide main hallway to the library to drink coffee and complain about the state of the world and retell the same war stories, two old military men who may have forgotten what they had for breakfast but could recall with crystal memory the details of battles fought over sixty years ago. Both served in World War Two, Dick as a Navy seaman on a cruiser in the South Pacific and The General as a captain leading an infantry company in Europe. Dick mustered out after VJ day but The General stayed in and became a career soldier, something Dick always admired about his friend.

Whenever Jack visits his father, he asks his mother to come, too. She lives by herself not far away in the house in Burningtown where Jack grew up and gets around well enough by herself even though she is past eighty. But, for this visit, like many times before, she declined his offer. I’m sorry, Jack, she said yesterday. I’ve done my weekly penance. But stop by and see me on your way home.

Agnes and Dick are still married, despite having lived apart for two years, by her choice, not his. It took a while for Dick to accept their separation. Jack knows physical limitations aren’t the only reason his father lives at the Piedmont. Agnes will explain freely to Jack and her other two children—Jack’s sister Elizabeth and brother Howard—why they separated, a healthy mental state for herself being at the top of the list. It’s good for her husband, too, she claims; he needs a break from her yelling. Even healthy marriages don’t have to be kept under the one roof. Trust me, she says, it is the only way theirs can survive. Jack knows there is more to the story than what she reveals, but he never presses her. Still, it is hard to grasp how two people nearing the ends of their lives can split up after being together for so long.

On this day—the day he learns The General has passed—Jack arrives at the Piedmont without stopping first at his mother’s. He goes to his father’s apartment and lets himself in. While his father is getting help with a shower in the bathroom, he takes a seat at the big desk in the living room. He looks around the room and takes everything in. His father’s entire life is summed by the keepsakes displayed on the desk, walls, and shelves. There are lots of photographs. One of his wife and three children. Another of Dick and The General on a golf course. And one photo of a half-dozen senior-aged men, including Dick, men who served together in the Navy, taken at a reunion they attended several years ago. There’s a retirement plaque on the wall citing his forty years of service for Rand Electronics. History books and a clock on a shelf. A typewriter—not a computer—on the desk. And a heavy blue-glass ashtray the size of a dinner plate that is spotlessly clean but was always butt-filled in the years Dick smoked, now just a paperweight.

For as long as Jack can remember, the big desk—christened by the family Flattop because of its broad, aircraft-carrier-like surface—was a fixture in his father’s study at home. So was the Smith Corona sitting atop it. And the blue ashtray. A typewriter and a glass butt tray. Two old relics. Still side by side. Papers are scattered across Flattop, some typed, some handwritten, a few letters. His father likes to write. He is a good writer and claims to be working on an autobiography.

Next to the desk lamp is another keepsake, a plastic car model built from a kit. A 1937 Ford. Jack knows modelling was never his father’s preferred hobby and that the Ford is the only plastic model he ever assembled, chosen because he once owned an actual ’37 Ford. It was his first car, he will reminisce proudly, bought used in 1941. Jack never forgot something his father told him once, that the summer of ‘41 was a high point in his life, the last golden days of his youth before the world plunged into war and he was forced to grow up. The car reminds him of that last wonderful summer.

There. That’s it. The digest of a man’s life story in the corner of a single room. A life that spanned the long arc from the Depression to the new millennium.

To occupy himself, Jack idly goes through Flattop’s drawers. He finds two shoe boxes inside, one secured with strings. The box on top is labeled in his father’s handwriting. In the dim light of the room Jack must lean down to read it, and just as he thinks he’s seeing his own name there, the bathroom door opens and the nurse rolls Dick into the room. Jack closes the drawer quickly.

Fresh and clean and ready to go dancing tonight, the nurse says. He pats Dick on the shoulder. Have a nice day, Mr. Gale. Dick rolls his eyes as the nurse leaves.

I see you’re peeking through my stuff, Dick says.

I see you’ve been busy, Jack answers, gesturing at the papers on the desk. Sorry to hear about Art.

Well… He shrugs. You know what Macarthur said about old soldiers. Dick is taller than his son, narrow-shouldered, but thick and heavy in his advanced years. A stroke a couple years ago left him with a leg that doesn’t work right. It took him a while to accept the wheelchair as a permanent addition to his life.

You’re going to miss him, aren’t you? Jack asks.

He was a great man…..

Yes, he was.

….despite what you thought of him.

Let’s not get started, Jack thinks. Oh, I liked him, Dad.

You want something to drink? I made coffee.

I’ll help myself. You want a cup?

Dick shakes his head. You said you had something to tell me, he replies.

It can wait. Is there going to be a funeral?

Of course, there is, his father answers sharply. What did you think?

Military honors? Jack asks from the kitchen.

What would you know about military honors?

Jack thinks he should switch subjects, but his father continues with this one. Arlington Cemetery. Friday. A trumpeter will play Taps. You should come. Take notes and you’ll get some idea what I want my funeral to look like.

Jack sips his coffee. Not anytime soon, I hope, he says. He thinks his father’s orneriness has been dialed up a notch, probably from the grief of losing Art. He has only a couple friends left at the Piedmont now.

You know I’ve got my plot picked out, don’t you? his father says. Next to Lou. He goes quiet and stares out the window, elbow on the armrest of his wheelchair, chin in his hand. Jack knows the look, and what his father must be thinking. The long gray line of military tradition. His wife’s parents—Jack’s grandparents—are buried in Arlington. And both of Jack’s uncles, one being Dick’s brother Lou. Afraid that his father will start complaining again about the gray line being threatened by his own sons, Jack changes the subject.

What I wanted to tell you, he begins, is that in two weeks I’m taking a trip with Sunny. A long one. We’ll be gone six months.

By his hesitation, Jack thinks, his father must not be listening. Maybe dwelling on cemeteries and rifle salutes. But then he blurts out, Six months! Where the hell are you going? Mars?

Sunny and I are hiking the Appalachian Trail.

What?

The Appalachian Trail. You know, the hiking trail from Georgia to Maine.

I know what it is. But, again? Are you going to finish this time?

Jack smiles. Sometimes, father and son come close to connecting. Humor, even the sarcastic kind, is an occasional avenue for them. But then Dick adds something to erase the pleased look on his son’s face.

You’re almost sixty years old. What are you running away from this time?

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3 - VIRGINIA

T he hiker up ahead was shirtless. Bare skin peeked around the edges of his backpack. It was a blistering hot day in June and, like me, he was lumbering northbound on the Appalachian Trail under the load of a heavy pack. I narrowed the distance between us until I could see he was tanned with a slight frame and thinly muscled arms and narrow pistons for calves. A pirate’s red bandana covered his head and long strands of straw-colored hair were matted to his cheeks and neck.

He was the first hiker—going north or south—I had met in several days and I was thinking of a welcome greeting when he stopped and turned to face me in a curtain-raising revelation: he was not a him, but a her, a young woman, topless indeed, wearing only shorts and boots. Both of us caught our breaths in silence. I kept chivalrous eye contact, but only after I had treated myself to a glimpse of two sweat-glazed melons pushed together by the tension in her pack’s shoulder straps. She stood in the bright sunlight, all her womanly shapes affirmed by the shadows they cast.

She exhaled tiredly, blowing blonde hair off her face.

Don’t your shoulders miss the cushion of a shirt? I asked, knowing the straps of a loaded pack were like sandpaper on bare skin. Doesn’t your pack feel like….

Really? she asked, smiling and making no effort to cover up. "My shoulders concern you?" She looked my age, twenty or so. Her eyes were blue as the sky. Crayola had a name for the color. Cornflower. Her cheeks were blushed. They had a name for that color, too.

No, I guess not, I recovered. "I meant to ask how your feet are holding up."

My weak comeback attempt put a smile on her face. She slid her hands under the straps to give her shoulders a break. They’re good, she answered. Feeling better every day.

The steepness of the trail—not to mention the heat of the day—was wearying. I was sweating rivers. My tee shirt stuck to me like Saran Wrap. I wanted to drop my pack and let a cool breeze dry my back, but the relief gesture might suggest we prolong our welcome and my ogling. Instead, I took off my ball cap and mopped my brow with a forearm. I reached back for the canteen hanging from the top of my pack and took a swig. She kept eyeing me, not saying anything, perhaps wishing I would get going and leave her alone. I needed to say something.

How long have you been on the trail? I asked. That both of us were intending to hike a long way on the AT was obvious; our packs were steamer trunks compared to the book bags of day hikers.

I started the fifth of April, she answered.

"In Georgia?" I continued staring into her blue eyes, trying to keep my gaze above her brown ones, but I couldn’t help but notice the red welt of a mosquito bite next to one of them.

She nodded, still grasping her shoulder straps. A bracelet slid from her wrist to the thick part of her forearm.

You’re hiking the whole trail? I asked.

Yes. She started to take her pack off. Removing a heavy backpack gracefully was not easy but she dropped hers smoothly, first lowering it to a bent knee and then using her leg as a slide to the ground, all with no wasted motion, except for the Jell-O sway and jiggle of her fruit. She unzipped a top pocket and pulled out a lacy shirt and put it on.

How about you? she asked. When did you start?

This is my third week. I started in Pearisburg. It was a trail town in southern Virginia, but she knew that.

"So, what’s your plan?" she asked.

Go all the way to Maine. Same as you, sort of. I took a long pull on my canteen.

There might be only five or six going end to end this year, she said. Why didn’t you start in Georgia?

I shrugged. Like they say, hike your own hike. Then I added, "And I’m from Virginia."

I thought maybe you were from California. I gave her a puzzled look. She pointed at my head. Your cap. L-A, she added. I was wearing a Dodger baseball cap.

No. Gift from a friend, I answered.

She eyed my gear. My pack was a military-surplus pack board, olive-drab-painted plywood, with hooks on the sides for lashing a Boy Scout rucksack, a sleeping bag, and all my other stuff with a thick rope. Compared to her bright-blue Gerry pack, mine was homemade with a dull camouflage hue.

What are you—in the Army or something? she asked.

Far from it. Do I look like it? I pulled on the ends of the hair covering my ears.

She took the bandana off her head and shook her blonde hair. I read about a grandmother, she said, who hiked the whole trail carrying everything in a bag slung over one shoulder. She slept under a blanket and used a shower curtain to stay dry.

I heard she wore Keds, I added.

She hiked her own hike. We both laughed.

I’m cheap. That’s my excuse for equipment.

I’d miss a waist belt. It steadies the load. She reached back to show me hers.

Conversations comparing hiking gear bored me. Hikers could sound like motor heads raising their hoods and bragging about performance. Cornflower Eyes had been a pleasant trail break but after a silent pause I said, Well… We made eye contact again. Happy trails. It was my standard exit line with other hikers I met.

Keep on keeping on, she said. Her exit line maybe, taken from a Bob Dylan song.

I hiked on. Sometimes it was like that: a brief encounter with another hiker without exchanging names, just a needed breath-catch, and maybe a few words about distances or where to find water. Mystery could be left hanging. There were questions I could have asked to reduce her mystery, such as "Why are you hiking the AT alone?" But on second thought, that question wasn’t simple enough to tackle while standing beside the trail. It needed a campfire. I liked her parting words—Dylan’s. And she was sweet on the eyes. The singular memory of her I would carry the rest of the day was the moment she turned to face me in the bright sunshine and give me the most stunning first impression, with sunshine blonde hair and sky-blue eyes, the colors of a summer day.

I stayed ahead of her. A white-hot sun blazed overhead, but the tree branches reached across the trail to create a thick, merciful shade. I had grown up with hot summer days like this, typical of Virginia in June, with the AT enclosed by a thick-leafed canopy that kept everything out. No sun or sky got in. Or view. Or chance of a breeze. The trail was a green tunnel.

That night I camped alone beside a brook, stringing my tarp between two trees and rolling out my sleeping bag underneath. A tent, even a lightweight one, didn’t fit my limited budget for gear. The tarp worked okay, but its open sides were no protection from flying bugs or slanting rain.

I built a small fire—for light, not warmth—and sat close thinking about the many reasons people hiked the AT. If Cornflower Eyes had asked me why, my answer would not have been the trite Everest reply because it’s there. Mine would have been a bit mystical. For starters, I would admit that backpacking had shown me natural beauty I never knew existed. But I started this hike in Virginia because a Georgia start would not have added anything to my purpose, which was to take a summer off and walk in the woods while trying to figure out what was next in my life. I had a hard decision to make and believed the answer was on the trail and to find it I was willing to go all the way to Maine if necessary. The decision I faced was hard to explain. She may have understood. Keep on keeping on. Her Dylan exit line reflected a poet’s spirit. People can reveal a lot about themselves—their curiosity and grasp of deeper thought—with just a few words.

The sky grew dark. Cornflower Eyes must have called it a day and made camp somewhere behind me. I put out the fire and crawled in my sleeping bag and lay in the dark listening to the familiar silence that came every night when the wind died and the birds ran out of songs and critters on the forest floor stopped scurrying.

I thought again about why I was there.

It had started the night of the draft lottery. Four of us were in Paul Hyde’s room. I drew the lowest number. Unlucky me. Paul drew the highest. Lucky him. He celebrated by getting drunk.

The next day Paul slept in and skipped two classes. After lunch he marched across campus to Military Affairs and resigned from Navy ROTC. The ensign on duty said he was making a great mistake, that he should give the matter serious thought. He threatened Paul, saying that by reversing his military commitment he was earning a black mark on his permanent record. Someday he would regret his decision. His chances when applying for jobs or grad school would be hurt.

Permanent record, my ass, Paul thought. That’s bullshit! He signed a paper and left a bag of uniform shirts and trousers on the ensign’s desk and walked out.

I was in his room that night when he told me what he had done. I guess I don’t want to be an officer, he said.

But I knew the real reason: he was in the clear now with regards to military service. Feeling testy, I challenged him, No, that’s not it. You didn’t want to get shot in Vietnam. ROTC was just the lesser of two evils.

No, Gale. I never cared for all that military crap. I’m just being honest now.

And last night didn’t matter? At least on the deck of a destroyer bullets aren’t flying over your head.

Paul looked at me with narrowed eyes. I apologized for being blunt. You’re just being human, I said. I’d do the same if I were in your shoes. We do whatever we have to. I might go hide in Canada.

But I wasn’t done baiting him. Paul Hyde. I wrote it on a piece of paper. I underlined Hyde. I said I might hyde in Canada. You’re a verb now, I said. "Webster will put you in their next edition. To hyde. It means to react in one’s best interests to the draft lottery."

The hell with you, Gale! You’re just feeling sorry for yourself.

We all hide in our own ways. H-y-d-e…

"Screw you!"

On my way out, I apologized again.

We would still be friends. We made up the next day. I told him I was letting some of my bitterness out. That was all.

But what was I going to do? Join ROTC? And where would that put me? Or was I going to Canada to hyde? If nothing else, it would piss my father off.

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4 - VIRGINIA

T he drive from the Piedmont to the house in Burningtown where Jack grew up takes twenty minutes. The road is two-lane and narrow and bends and twists over and around green hills and pastures. It is pretty country, but it is also lordly country. Horses graze behind white fences and stately brick homes with columns and long front porches sit atop hills like castles. These are the homes of Virginia’s gentry, where the men of the house—the lords of the manors—might go to work each day in seats of power or wealth in Washington forty miles away while their wives spend the afternoon at the country club. The well-to-do hire can afford maids, groundskeepers, and nannies to look after everything while they are out. The arrangements speak to prosperity and—perhaps unintentionally—to Tara and the old South, its caste and privileges, survival of the Lost Cause and all that. The socialist in Jack feels that way sometimes. The caste is evident at some homes, like the ones where small statues of black jockeys holding newspaper rings stand guard at the ends of long driveways. The statues say the Cause is still alive. Having lived in the area much of his life, Jack feels he is entitled to think that way.

Jack didn’t grow up in a home like these. And he wasn’t born in Burningtown. He was born in Alexandria, the colonial city across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital and was in grade school when his family—father, mother, Jack, his brother Howard, and sister Elizabeth—moved to Burningtown from a small apartment in an older section of Alexandria, a neighborhood called Old Town, where Jack’s mother had grown up. Back then travel was slow and distances seemed farther, and Jack’s grandparents, who seldom wandered from Old Town, thought the Gales were moving to the frontier. They feared they wouldn’t see their daughter or grandchildren anymore. Frontier unknowns scared them. What was Burningtown like? Did streetcars run there? How would the children get to school? Where were the corner markets?

As a kid Jack was too young to appreciate history, and Alexandria’s in particular, the city where George Washington had conducted his business and Robert E. Lee had once called home. Separated by a hundred years, the two Virginians drank in the same taverns and worshipped at the same church. One day schools and streets in the city would be named after them. Dick—Jack’s father—is not a Virginia native like his wife—Agnes. Born and raised in Ohio, his father has always looked down on locals, well-to-do or not. He is an avid history buff and once pointed out to Jack that Alexandria has the inglorious distinction of being the only city in America to be seized by invading armies twice, in two different wars, first by the British in 1812 and then by Union troops in the Civil War after Virginia joined the Confederacy. Dick says Southerners live in haunted shadows. "They are the only Americans, he would explain, to have experienced the shame of foreign occupation, and Alexandria folks suffered it twice. That’s why they’re so screwed up. Then he would tell his son, But you won’t have to be like them. You’re like me. We’re just passing through."

Burningtown has its own history. A hundred-and-fifty years ago it was just a dirt crossroads in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, a full day’s carriage ride from Washington and an overnight stop for travelers in need of an inn, a tavern, and a stable. When more people and businesses began to migrate into the area, more roads and houses were built and the crossroads grew into a charming little village with a quilt pattern of narrow streets and two-story frame houses behind white picket fences. In the middle of town was a square where people gathered to watch parades and listen to music played from a bandstand. The square is still there today. So are many of the original buildings, preserved and well taken of.

The town has a Civil War heritage—the war between the states, as Southerners prefer to call it. The armies of North and South battled back and forth in the region for months in 1862 until Stonewall Jackson drove the Yankees back to the Potomac for the last time. Local lore is that the town’s original name was something provincial like Siler’s Creek or Taylor Crossing, a name no one can recall exactly, but was changed to Burningtown for the night Union soldiers in their final retreat tried to burn the town to the ground setting fire to a barn hayloft. But another version is that the fire was the result of the careless mishandling of a lantern and that the arson version was invented to demonize the northern invaders. Both stories end in salvation and honor, though, with a chain of the town’s volunteers hauling buckets of water from the river to put out the fire and save the barn, and their own homes.

War reminders are everywhere. There are plaques in the town square. Erected to the memory of the Confederate dead reads the inscription on a statue of a soldier standing in front of the town hall. The high school Jack attended was Jeb Stuart High. They were the Rebels. When he was younger, eleven or twelve, and he and his brother Howard annoyed their father to his limit, the old man would suggest they go outside and turn over dirt in the surrounding fields to look for bullets and other buried war treasure. There’s lot of stuff in the ground nobody’s found yet, he said. The chance to find a sword or a Johnny Reb cap kept his sons out of his hair for hours.

Jack’s family came with the second migration a hundred years after the first one, when Burningtown got caught in the long reach of Washington’s suburban sprawl. Families were attracted to the region’s idyllic country setting—some parts of it still look like pages from a Currier & Ives calendar. But the new families didn’t move into the older section of town around the square; they settled instead at its edges—Burningtown’s own suburb—where pastures had to be plowed under, hills levelled, and farm houses knocked down to make room for new neighborhoods just for them. Brick homes, business centers and gas stations, a shopping mall, and signal lights went up, and a new Jeb Stuart High was built to replace the smaller, older one. When the main highway to town was widened to four lanes, the drive from Washington was reduced to less than an hour.

Jack was eight when his family moved there. Rand Electronics had built a Burningtown plant and promoted Jack’s father to become its regional sales manager. The Gale’s new house was a split-level with a spacious living room, a den and a basement, a carport, and a big yard. There were separate bedrooms for Jack, Howard, and Elizabeth. Their neighborhood came with a name, Beverly Hills, of no historical significance, just classy sounding. Instead of a busy street, Jack rode his bike on a quiet cul-de-sac. A typical 1950’s suburb. Spread out. No sidewalks. But nothing to walk to. Still, the kind of place where everybody wanted to raise a family.

Beverly Hills was where transplanted families found each other. And stuck together. On Saturday nights they took turns hosting barbeques on their backyard patios or cocktail parties in their dens. Their kids took swimming and tennis lessons at the nearby country club and went to summer camp together. High school was the only place they mixed with the kids from the older section of town—it was where Jack met his best friends Russ and Wedge. Parents, too, seldom went downtown to shop or listen to music in the square. On Sunday mornings they heard the church bells in town but weren’t particularly interested in going there to worship. Jack’s mother was a lifelong Presbyterian who thought differently. She dragged her children downtown to attend Sunday School while Jack’s father slept late and stayed home to drink coffee and read the Washington Post.

Time has passed. A few things have changed in Beverly Hills. The spindly seedlings planted forty years ago have grown into wide shade trees. The neighborhood doesn’t look so bare anymore. It has aged handsomely, mostly because of the trees. Many of the old neighbors are still there. They’re just older. Many are retired. The cars in their carports are different. When Jack was a kid, it was American fins and chrome. Big sedans and station wagons. Now it’s imports and SUV’s with rounded plastic bumpers.

Jack parks in the driveway and walks behind the house where his mother is working in her vegetable garden.

What are you planting this year? he asks.

I hope you like beans, she answers.

I hope I’m here to eat them.

Why? Where will you be?

Sunny and I are taking the summer off to hike the Appalachian Trail. You knew that.

I didn’t realize you’d be gone so long.

Six months. We’re flying to Atlanta on Monday to get started.

She comes to the patio table and removes her gloves and sits. How is your father?

Same. He lost a friend this week. Art passed away.

His mother looks hurt. Oh, no. I didn’t know he was sick. What happened?

Aneurism. It was sudden.

I’m sorry to hear that. That’s sad. How is your father taking it?

I dunno. I couldn’t tell. Art was his only close friend at The Piedmont, that much I know.

I always thought Art was a bad influence on your father.

Bad? How?

Oh, just the way he was. The way he treated people sometimes. Agnes Smith grew up in a middle-class family and not as a descendant of Southern antebellum aristocracy. But she inherited a personality of Southern manners and charm. She treats everyone kindly and manages to find the best in people. The General was a test of her kindness. But then, so was the man she married. Jack sometimes thinks—but never says out loud—she married beneath herself. It wasn’t comforting to think that way about his parents.

Well, today, he says, he preferred to rail on me rather than sing praises for Art.

"What is it this time?" she asks with only a hint of serious concern.

Oh, just the same general displeasure he’s had with everything I do.

Land sakes, Jack. You two better patch things up soon. You’re running out of time.

Always the family peacemaker, Agnes. She knows her son well. She knows he is sensitive to criticism and quick to strike back