What We Carry

Chapter 1: The Weight of Nothing

The white blaze on the tree looked like a scar.

Jim Buckley stood at the base of Springer Mountain with forty-two pounds on his back and nothing in particular to live for. Not suicidal—he'd told himself that a hundred times, and he mostly believed it. He just couldn't find a compelling reason to do much of anything except put one foot in front of the other, and somebody had been kind enough to paint a trail for that.

March in north Georgia was mud season. The parking lot at Amicalola Falls had been half-empty, just a few rental cars and a van with Vermont plates disgorging a pack of college kids who looked like they'd bought their gear that morning. Jim had driven down from Pittsburgh in Robbie's truck—the silver F-150 that still smelled like french fries and teenage boy no matter how many times he cleaned it—and parked it in long-term storage at a lot near the trailhead. He'd paid six months in advance. If he didn't come back for it, well. The lot owner would figure it out eventually.

He signed the register at the Springer Mountain shelter with a stub of pencil. Name. Date. Trail name. He left the last line blank. He didn't have a trail name and didn't want one. Jim was enough. Jim was almost too much.

The first miles were steep and wet. Rain had been falling for three days, turning the trail into a creek bed, and Jim's boots—brand new Asolos he'd broken in by walking circles around the high school track at two in the morning because he couldn't sleep—squelched with every step. His pack was heavy. He knew it was heavy. He'd read the ultralight forums, the gear lists optimized down to the gram, the debates about whether to cut the handle off your toothbrush to save a quarter ounce. He didn't care. He'd packed what he'd packed: a four-season tent he didn't need, a cast-iron skillet he definitely didn't need, three paperback novels, a first-aid kit big enough for a small clinic, and, wrapped in a freezer bag at the very bottom, Robbie's baseball cap.

Pirates. Black and gold. The bill curved just so from the way Robbie used to bend it, working it between his hands while he watched games on the couch. Jim had found it in the back seat of the truck, wedged between the cushions, two weeks after the funeral. He'd sat in the driveway holding it for an hour.

He didn't think about that now. He thought about his feet. Left, right, left, right. The rhythm of it, the monotony—that was the point. Grief counselor back in Pittsburgh, a woman named Dr. Neff with kind eyes and a box of tissues that never ran out, had suggested the hike. "You need to move, Jim," she'd said. "Your body needs to process what your mind can't."

He'd nodded and signed up for nothing and then one Tuesday in February, three weeks before he left, he'd found himself in an outfitter on the South Side buying a pack and a sleeping bag and a water filter, and the kid behind the counter had asked if he was section-hiking or thru-hiking, and Jim had said, "All of it," and the kid had grinned like Jim had just told him he was going to the moon.

All of it. Two thousand, one hundred and ninety miles. Georgia to Maine. Five to seven months. One foot in front of the other until the trail ran out or he did.

The first night he slept at Hawk Mountain Shelter, a three-sided wooden structure that smelled like mouse droppings and old smoke. Two other hikers were there—a married couple from Tallahassee who introduced themselves as Compass and True North and who were so relentlessly cheerful that Jim felt like he was being assaulted by greeting cards. They offered him trail mix. He took a handful to be polite and ate it without tasting it.

"First day?" Compass asked. He was maybe sixty, lean and weathered, with a gray beard that reached his sternum.

"Yeah."

"It gets better."

Jim didn't ask what "it" was. He crawled into his sleeping bag at seven-thirty, pulled the drawstring tight until only his nose was exposed, and fell asleep listening to rain on the tin roof. He dreamed of nothing. That was the first mercy.

The days blurred. Georgia was green and vertical—long climbs up Blood Mountain, standing Indian, the Tray Mountain ridge—and Jim moved through it like a machine set to low speed. He ate oatmeal for breakfast, peanut butter tortillas for lunch, ramen for dinner. He filtered water from streams and springs and once, desperately, from a puddle that tasted like pennies. He spoke to other hikers only when spoken to and kept his answers short.

"Where you from?"
"Pittsburgh."
"What's your trail name?"
"Don't have one."
"How far you going?"
"Katahdin."

That last answer always earned a nod of respect, and Jim always felt like a fraud for receiving it. He wasn't going to Katahdin because of some grand ambition or spiritual quest. He was going to Katahdin because it was the farthest point from where he'd started, and between here and there were enough miles to fill the days until—until what? He didn't know. Until something changed or nothing did.

He crossed into North Carolina on day eight. The terrain didn't change much—the same knobby ridges, the same tunnels of rhododendron, the same white blazes appearing every hundred yards or so like breadcrumbs left by some benevolent ghost. But the crowds thinned. The bubble of March starters began to spread out, the fast hikers pulling ahead, the slow ones falling behind, and Jim found himself walking alone for hours at a stretch.

Alone was good. Alone was the whole point.

Except that alone meant his mind had nothing to chew on but itself, and his mind was not a safe neighborhood to walk through after dark. Memories came uninvited. Robbie at six, learning to ride a bike in the alley behind their house on Wharton Street. Robbie at twelve, pitching his first no-hitter in Little League, the ball popping into the catcher's mitt like a firecracker. Robbie at sixteen, getting his driver's license, grinning so wide his face couldn't contain it. Robbie at seventeen, the last time Jim saw him alive, heading out the door with his car keys, saying, "Later, Dad," over his shoulder.

Later.

There was no later. A drunk driver in a Dodge Ram had seen to that, running a red light on Route 28 at eleven-fourteen on a Saturday night. Robbie's Honda Civic had been hit on the driver's side at fifty-three miles per hour. The paramedics said he'd died on impact. The funeral director said he looked peaceful. Jim's ex-wife, Karen, who'd remarried and moved to Columbus and who'd flown back for the funeral with her new husband standing awkwardly behind her like a man who'd wandered into the wrong room, had said, "At least he didn't suffer."

At least.

Jim didn't think about the accident. He thought about his feet. Left, right, left, right. The trail provided a narrow channel for his attention: roots to step over, rocks to navigate, stream crossings to ford. When the trail was technical enough, he could go minutes—sometimes whole hours—without thinking about anything except the next step. Those were the good hours.

The bad hours were the flat stretches, the easy walking, when his body moved on autopilot and his mind slipped its leash.

He was in the bad hours now, crossing a long ridge somewhere south of the Smokies, when he realized he'd been crying. Not sobbing—just a steady, silent leak from both eyes, the tears cutting tracks through the trail dust on his cheeks. He wiped his face with his sleeve and kept walking.

A day-hiker coming the other direction—a woman in clean clothes and new trail runners—gave him a concerned look. "You okay?"

"Allergies," Jim said.

She nodded and moved on. People always moved on. That was one of the things Jim liked about the trail: nobody stayed long enough to ask twice.

He reached the Smokies on day fourteen. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park required permits and designated shelters, which meant company whether he wanted it or not. Jim secured his permit at the ranger station at Fontana Dam, a concrete monstrosity that the hikers called the Fontana Hilton because of its flush toilets and covered porch, and headed into the park.

The Smokies were different. Higher, colder, wetter. The balds above five thousand feet were still brown and skeletal, waiting for spring, and the wind up there had teeth. Jim pulled on every layer he had and still shivered. The shelters were full—chain-link fencing across the front to keep bears out, hikers packed in like sardines, snoring and farting and rustling in their sleeping bags all night long.

Jim endured it. Endurance was what he had.

On his third night in the park, he reached Icewater Spring Shelter in a downpour. The rain wasn't falling so much as being thrown—horizontal sheets of water driven by a wind that made the trees groan. Jim arrived soaked to the bone, his rain jacket having given up the ghost somewhere on Charlies Bunion, and ducked into the shelter to find it already crowded. A dozen hikers were crammed onto the wooden platform, their wet gear steaming, their headlamps creating a constellation of bobbing lights in the dimness.

He found a spot near the back wall, stripped off his wet layers, and hung them from a nail. His hands were shaking—not from cold, exactly, but from the deep exhaustion that had become his baseline state. He unrolled his sleeping pad, laid out his bag, and was about to crawl in when he noticed the girl.

She was sitting in the far corner, knees drawn up to her chest, her back pressed against the shelter wall like she was trying to push through it. Young—early twenties, maybe. Dark hair plastered to her skull, skin pale enough to see the veins at her temples. She was wearing a cotton hoodie soaked through to transparency and jeans—jeans, on the Appalachian Trail, in the Smokies, in March—and she was shivering so violently that her teeth were clicking.

Her pack was enormous, one of those external-frame monsters from the 1990s, and it was stuffed to bursting with what looked like everything she owned. A sleeping bag was strapped to the outside with bungee cords, and it was wet. Everything about her was wet.

Jim looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked away. Not his problem. He had enough problems.

He crawled into his sleeping bag and closed his eyes.

The shivering continued. Click, click, click. Like a metronome set to the tempo of misery.

Jim lasted four minutes.

"Hey," he said, sitting up. The girl's eyes snapped to him—wide, dark, startled, like a deer that had just heard a branch crack. "You're hypothermic."

"I'm fine," she said. Her voice was thin and shaky, the words coming out in fragments between shivers.

"You're not fine. You're in wet cotton in forty-degree weather. That's how people die." He unzipped his pack and pulled out his extra base layer—a merino wool long-sleeve he'd been saving for colder nights. He tossed it to her. "Put that on. Under your hoodie."

She caught it but didn't move. Her eyes were still locked on him, scanning, evaluating. Not just startled, Jim realized. Afraid. Specifically afraid of him.

"I'm not—" He stopped. Started over. "I'm fifty-two years old, I've got a bad knee, and I'm too tired to be anything but helpful. Put the shirt on before you start seizing."

Something in his voice—the flatness of it, maybe, the absence of any agenda—seemed to register. She turned her back to him, peeled off the soaked hoodie, and pulled the wool shirt over her head. It was enormous on her, the sleeves hanging past her fingertips.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

"You need to get out of those jeans too. Wet denim will kill you faster than the cold."

"I don't have anything else."

Jim dug into his pack again and produced his rain pants—cheap Frogg Toggs, basically a garbage bag with legs, but they were dry. He tossed them over without looking at her. "Change under your sleeping bag."

She did. When she was done, she curled up in her wet sleeping bag and pulled it tight around her. The shivering slowed but didn't stop.

Jim lay back down. He stared at the shelter ceiling, listening to the rain hammer the tin roof, and tried to go back to not caring.

It didn't take.

"Your sleeping bag's wet," he said after a while.

"I know."

"It's not going to dry tonight."

"I know."

He sat up again, unzipped his own bag, and spread it over her like a blanket, doubling up on top of her wet one. The combined insulation wouldn't be great, but it would be better than what she had.

"What about you?" she asked.

"I've got a wool shirt and a puffy jacket. I'll be fine."

He wasn't fine. He was cold all night, dozing in fitful stretches, waking to the sound of rain and wind and the girl's breathing, which gradually steadied from the ragged gasps of hypothermia into something closer to sleep.

In the gray light of dawn, Jim opened his eyes to find her already awake, sitting up, watching him with those scanning eyes. In the daylight, he could see her better: sharp features, a scar through her left eyebrow, hands that were calloused and rough. Not a weekend warrior. Not a college kid on spring break. Something else.

"I'm Jolene," she said.

"Jim."

"Thank you, Jim. For last night."

"Don't mention it."

He meant it literally—don't mention it, don't make it into something, don't turn a simple act of decency into a bond that would require him to care about another human being. He'd used up all his caring. There was nothing left.

But Jolene either didn't get the message or chose to ignore it, because when Jim packed up and headed north, she fell into step behind him, fifteen yards back, matching his pace exactly. And when he stopped for water at a stream crossing, she stopped too. And when he sat on a log to eat a peanut butter tortilla for lunch, she sat on a rock twenty feet away and ate—he couldn't help noticing—a single granola bar that she broke into pieces and chewed slowly, making it last.

She was rationing. She didn't have enough food.

Jim finished his tortilla, made another one, and left it on the log when he stood up.

"I'm not hungry," he said, which was true. He was never hungry anymore. Eating was just maintenance, like changing the oil in a truck.

Jolene took the tortilla without a word.

They walked like that for the rest of the day—not together, exactly, but not apart. Jim in front, Jolene behind, the distance between them narrowing by imperceptible degrees until, by the time they reached the next shelter at dusk, they were walking side by side.

Neither of them acknowledged this. It just happened, the way weather happens, or grief.