Chapter 23

Sunday, August 8, 1999

Although she'd spent a lot of time with Duane when he had been a kid, Vicky really hadn't seen much of him in recent years, and barely had time to say hello to him the last time she'd seen him back at the end of April. Now, it was hard to realize that the bronzed, bearded hiker sitting on the steps of the Appalachian Trail Conference headquarters in Harper's Ferry, West Virginia late that afternoon was really him at all.

He'd always been a pretty fit kid, but now he seemed so lean and ruggedly handsome it was almost unbelievable!

Vicky had been present several times when he'd called home, and she'd talked with him a few times; Jason also usually let her read his letters, so she was aware that he was having a successful trip. He was running just a touch behind schedule -- at one point this meeting had been planned for Shenandoah National Park. He'd been slowed by rough going in the rock fields of eastern Pennsylvania, so was a couple days over his planned schedule when he hit the halfway point of the trail a few days earlier. By then, Harper's Ferry, slightly more than halfway but the psychological center point, was such a convenient place for the meeting that he'd dawdled a little, arriving only a couple hours ahead of them. He was still hiking alone, and there were several easy days supposedly ahead of him so he expected to catch back up to his schedule sooner or later.

In spite of its allure for thru-hikers, Harper's Ferry isn't much of a motel town. They drove briefly through the old section, past the historic engine house where John Brown, one of the firebrands who touched off the Civil War, had made his last stand, and then the trio got out on the highway and drove to Charles Town a few miles away.

There was some administrative overhead to deal with; Jason and Vicky had brought a mail drop package with them, and Duane had to find a supermarket and get groceries. They found a motel; Duane immediately appropriated the shower to wash off a week's accumulation of trail dirt. Then, with him feeling almost human, they found a decent chain restaurant for dinner; Vicky was awed to see him eat several days' worth of her diet allowance as he spouted off trail stories one after another. The kid was having a serious adventure, and there would be stories there he could draw on for the rest of his life.

Eventually they headed back to the motel, and since it had a pool, they decided to use it. Vicky pulled on a multicolored bikini -- not the red-hot thong job -- and the three of them splashed around for a while, then sat in lounge chairs around the edge of the pool as they listened to Duane continue with trail talk.

The awkward part came when they headed in to sleep -- they'd gotten a double, but no matter how much Vicky would have liked to spend the night in the same bed with Jason, sex or no sex, it was unthinkable with Duane present. Duane saved propriety, however; he said he was so used to sleeping on rocks and hard shelter bunks and floors that his sleeping pad on top of a carpet seemed almost luxurious.

The next morning they were up early. Duane packed a huge breakfast away like he was using a shovel, but the hiking burned a lot of calories, and he had to feed the furnace. It was still early, so they drove back to Harper's Ferry and spent a little time walking around "below the hill" in the old part of town. Just for the sake of doing it, the three of them walked back up the trail for a moment, across the bridge over the Potomac River into Maryland, and then came back. Duane suggested his dad might like to walk with him for a bit, and if they did it in the next couple miles he could walk across an entire state with him. Vicky drove the Stratus back through town and across the Shenandoah River Bridge into Virginia, and waited for a while until the two of them showed up, walking across the bridge behind her. She gave him a hug and wished him good luck on the rest of the hike, and then got out of the way and let father and son have a few private moments and a strong hug before Duane turned, walked past the trail marker, and headed up the trail towards Georgia.

"Shit," Jason shook his head as they watched him disappear. "I sure as hell wish I was twenty-two again and I could go with him."

"You're not that old," she told him. "People a lot older than you do it every year."

"Yeah, I know," he sighed. "At one time, back when this idea was first cooked up, I thought I might take an extended leave and go with them. I mean, it was Duane and Cory back then. But I thought no, it's their adventure, they don't need me watching over them. And then, this spring I've been reading his letters and reading the trail guides about the stuff he's been passing, and the itch has been going again. Hell, I'm not that far from retiring, after all. But," he said, with a glance at her that she didn't think he knew she saw, "I realize there are other priorities, too. I've got time to think about it and things could happen."

Whether or not he was pointing that statement at her, she could feel it hitting her, but she thought it was best to not explore it at the moment. "It's hard to watch him go, isn't it?" she asked softly.

"Damn hard," he shook his head. "Yeah, I'd like to be out there with him, that's one thing. But, Vicky, I realized back when I hiked up Katahdin with him last spring that he's all grown up now, he's got a life of his own to lead, and the best thing I can do is get the hell out of the way and let him lead it. There comes a time when I have to let him go, after all. That doesn't mean I won't be there if he needs me, but he has to follow his own trail." As Duane disappeared from sight without looking back, he sighed and continued, "Hell, you know that, your parents went through it."

"I suppose," she said, realizing he'd laid a statement no less profound on her, another one requiring thought and discussion that she didn't want to have intrude on the moment right now. "You want to get moving?" she suggested.

"Might as well," he shrugged, turning away from the empty trail toward the car. "Nothing more to do here. You want to drive?"

"I might as well."

"Tell you what," he said. "It's still early. The Antietam battlefield isn't far from here. Duane bitches that he doesn't want to get assigned to a cannonball park, but I've always heard it's a pretty good one. Let's head up the back roads and spend an hour there."

"Talked me into it," she smiled.

The route up to the battlefield was a quiet, scenic two-lane road, with interesting views, but Vicky couldn't help but wish she was riding it on the Street Hawk -- a bike made for a road like that. The battlefield was interesting; they stopped at the visitor center for a self-guiding tour map, and drove around checking it out. They stopped at the Wheat Field, near the north end of the park. It was quiet, except for aged monuments standing in many places around the field, denoting this event or that. "You know," he said slowly at one point, "We've seen Bert fire his Napoleons, we've seen Civil War muskets fired, and it's fun to watch, but it's still not easy to imagine what a killing field hundreds of those cannon, thousands of those muskets made in this place." He let out a sigh. "I've never been to Gettysburg either, but I'm told that to stand at the Bloody Angle and look out at that field of fire is one of the most sobering sights you can think of, to imagine thousands of men walking across that huge field into those guns."

"A long time ago," she said.

"A lot of young men who should have had good, productive lives died here and there," he said philosophically. "Men Duane's age. I can barely imagine how devastated a father or mother who raised a son to that point would be to have their kid's life pissed away like happened in a place like this. And by the thousands."

"Heartbreaking would barely cover it," she shook her head.

"Wouldn't come close," he said. "Shit, I can imagine it happening all too damn easily. After all, I've got a son the age of a lot of the men who died here. You put all that work, all that love, all that hope, all that sacrifice into trying to raise the best young man you can. Then some idiot yells 'charge' and it's all gone in an instant, just pissed away to no good end. My parents got lucky. I worked in a blacksmith shop in Vietnam. A couple times I heard artillery in the distance, but mostly the banging I heard was a hammer on steel on an anvil. Even watching Bert fire a cannon doesn't help me imagine it much better. I'm just goddamn glad Duane's big adventure is a walk down a trail, not a year walking around with a rifle in some goddamn hellhole like Vietnam."