Chapter 26

Monday, November 8, 1999

Under a gray, uninspiring sky, a cold wind blew through the trees knocking down golden and tan and reddish leaves. The trees around here still had a lot of leaves up, and there were even patches of green showing, but Jason could see that farther up the mountainside things were getting pretty barren. When the leaves were down, it was winter as far as he was concerned; driving south to Amicalola Falls State Park in northern Georgia had just driven him back into a last gasp of autumn.

He was getting a little stiffish sitting in the truck, and Tom Clancy wasn't holding his interest right at the moment. He kept glancing at the sign marking the trailhead, glancing up the trail the short distance he could see. On a nicer day he might have been tempted to hike up the trail a bit, but on a raw, blustery one like this, being out of the wind in the cab of the pickup seemed to be more favorable.

Still, getting out of the truck, stretching his legs, having a cigarette would be a welcome break from the tedium. When the call had come two days before, it had been impossible to pin the time down better than "sometime around midday." It was getting on toward noon, now. It was a shame, he thought, that things had to be done on such short notice.

In any case, it had been enough time, if not way too much. He'd slept in a little the day before and spent some quality time with Vicky, who had spent the night like the previous weekend, before showering, getting set and hitting the road -- south to on US-30 and taking it east, then south on I-75. It would have been possible to do the trip straight through in a long day -- he'd made similar trips to the vicinity in the past in that amount of time. But the timing would have been wrong, so he'd taken his time, gotten a motel south of Knoxville, had a leisurely breakfast, and gotten here in plenty of time. Now, there was nothing to do but wait, which he'd been doing for over an hour.

He just about had the cigarette finished when a hiker -- no, two hikers -- appeared around the bend of the East Ridge Trail, which led up 8.3 miles to the trailhead of the Appalachian Trail on the top of Springer Mountain, hidden in the distance behind the trees. The first he recognized in an instant; the second hiker was a short, slender, dark-haired girl who like her companion walked with the easy pace of an experienced walker on a long hike. He flipped the cigarette onto the pavement, and walked toward them. He could see a smile on the taller hiker's face; then father and son fell into each other's arms for a brief hug. "Good to see you again, Duane," he smiled. "You have a good hike?"

"Couldn't have been better," the most recent successful Appalachian Trail thru-hiker grinned. "I'll tell you what, it was a little snotty up on the ridge this morning when we started, and that and the fact I knew you'd be waiting was about all that kept me from wanting to turn around and start right back up to Katahdin."

"You wouldn't be the first, from what I hear," Jason grinned, pleased and proud at his son's finally completing his long-held dream.

"Not even the first this year," the dark-haired girl said. "We met a couple who were heading back north for a while. It's hard to let go."

"Yeah," Duane sighed. "We sat up there on the ground by the plaque for a while just in tears that it was all over with, and that it's all behind us, now."

"Up on the trail, it's real simple," the girl said distantly. "You get up in the morning and walk. Things aren't going to be that simple again."

"I suppose," Jason smiled at the pleasant-looking young woman, about Duane's age. "I assume you're finishing a thru-hike, too? Congratulations!"

"Sorry, Dad," Duane said. "I should have made some introductions. This is Chica; she started a couple days after me at Katahdin, and we passed each other several times. We've been hiking together since Shenandoah." As Duane introduced them, Jason thought that this was just a touch surprising. There had been occasional mentions in letters and phone calls that he was with another hiker, and since it hadn't been every time it hadn't even been clear that it was the same hiker -- or that she was a girl.

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. MacRae," the girl said politely. "Chica's a trail name, my real name is Charlotte. Icewater and I don't use our real names much."

"I can understand that," he grinned. "My real name is Jason, I don't use MacRae much and you don't have to."

"Dad," Duane said. "We were wondering if you could give Chica a ride home. It's up at Waynesville, North Carolina. That's not all that far from NOC, and it's not much farther than going back through Chattanooga, if that's how you came in."

"Sure, I have no problem with seeing some different country for the sake of seeing some different country. Chica, your carriage awaits."

"Damn," she shook her head. "It's going to be hell to have to learn to answer to 'Charlotte' again."

It was a good three hours up to Waynesville, made longer by a stop for lunch at Dahlonega -- the hikers still had bodies that cried aloud for food even though the hike was over with. As they rode along, the two hikers told stories Jason sometimes didn't understand from the context, from not having been there. A few miles up the road from Dahlonega they crossed the trail at Neel's Gap, and he could see both hikers glancing up the trail. They'd been there; it was not new country to them, but some place he'd never been, and likely never would be. Jason had known that this hike would just add to the degree of separation he felt from his son; again, Duane'd had experiences they couldn't really share, much though he'd like to. It was more than just mountains climbed, trails walked, sunsets seen; it was the inevitable growing apart of two lives that had once been very close and interdependent.

Another degree of separation was evident. The truck was big enough that it was no big deal to sit three wide across the front seat, although Jason quickly noted without comment that Chica, in the middle, was sitting closer to Duane than she was to him. He also noticed, and did not comment on, a certain amount of handholding going on between the two; obviously there was more going on there than they'd mentioned so far. Jason knew that Duane had never messed around with girls much as a teenager; not that he was anything but straight, but they just hadn't been all that high on his priority list. Evidently that was changing; Jason suspected that Duane would tell him in his own good time.

The suspicion deepened as Charlotte guided him to a decent if not spectacularly large suburban-type house on the edge of the town. "Guess they're not home yet, Icewater," she said to Duane as the three of them piled out of the cab and went to the back of the pickup to dig her pack out from under the cap. "We'll have to do it like we talked about."

"I'll give you a call tomorrow," he told her. "It'll probably be late; I don't think Dad is heading straight back."

"I'd just as soon stop up the road a ways, unless you feel like driving most of the night yourself," Jason contributed.

"Not really," Duane replied. "I'm pretty much running on sun time, I'll be crashing within an hour of sunset and getting up with the birds."

"Then I guess we'll just have to leave it at 'see you in a few days, '" she sighed. All of a sudden the two of them were in a kiss, and it was a serious kiss, indeed.

"Hey, Chica," he said softly when they came up for air -- but loud enough that Jason could make it out, "We'll work something out somehow. It'll just have to depend."

There was another long, deep kiss while Jason was waiting behind the wheel of the truck, and a couple heartfelt "goodbyes" before they drove off. They got up the street a bit before Jason asked, "Did my eyes just see something I don't know about?"

"Yeah, Dad," Duane replied. "Chica and I have gotten to be pretty good friends in almost three months. There were all those rumors going around Shenandoah that there's some geek who raped and killed a solo woman hiker, and Chica didn't want to go through there alone. I didn't blame her one bit, either. I kept my sheath knife on my belt all the way through there. After that, we just sort of stayed together and we, uh, got closer."

Jason didn't need to ask what his son meant by that; the scene in front of her parents' house a couple minutes ago told him all he needed to know. If he had to bet it would be that the two of them had been a lot closer than Duane would be willing to admit -- say, about as close as he and Vicky had been the last two Saturday nights. He knew he would be about equally reluctant to admit that to his son. "You're telling me I just met a potential daughter-in-law?" he smiled.

"Maybe," Duane sighed. "I don't know. We've been talking it over since the Smokies. We both know people aren't always the same people off the trail as they are on the trail, and, well, there's limits to how far we want to go until we've seen the other side of the coin."

"Good thinking," Jason nodded.

"The thing of it is that Bradford and Waynesville are a hell of a long way apart," Duane commented. "We've pretty well worked it out that we need to be with each other off the trail for a while before we start talking about taking things further, and most likely we're talking down here. When we went through Wesser I stopped off and talked to Leon at NOC. There's nothing much going on there this time of year, he only has a few people on in the winter and everything is full up, although there's a couple people he thinks might be leaving soon, he's not sure. Scooter used to rent a little travel trailer not far away, it was pretty cheap; I might be able to do that. If nothing else works out, I can probably get on rafting in the spring."

"You've given up on looking for a Park Service job?"

"No, not really," Duane said. "I figure I can send resumes and applications in from Wesser or Waynesville as easily as I can from Bradford. NOC just gives me a fall-back next spring; I know I can do that."

"Makes sense," Jason nodded. "But if you can't get something at NOC until spring, then what?"

"That's what we're working on," his son replied. "I think I can tell you that what we're talking about is spending the winter living together some place. She isn't real sure how her folks are going to take the idea. If they don't go through the roof, we're thinking around here somewhere, if for no more reason than I think I can stand a winter where the snow isn't ass deep on a tall moose. The job situation isn't the greatest, but we've still got a few bucks here and there, and we should be able to come up with something that'll tide us through till spring."

"If that falls through, you could come home, I suppose," Jason offered, realizing instantly it would offer complications he hadn't really contemplated.

"It's a possibility," Duane agreed, then let out a sigh. "But Dad, I have to ask. When I saw you and Vicky at Harper's Ferry, well, it looked to me like things had gotten quite a bit closer between the two of you."

"They have," Jason admitted, now giving Duane a chance to read between the lines. "And I have to admit they've gotten closer yet since we saw you then." He hadn't really given any great deal of thought to the idea Duane would be staying around home for much more than a few days once he got done with the hike. After all, he'd been gone so much for over four years he'd gotten used to not having him around. It would make things more cumbersome, but not impossible with Vicky -- which might not be all bad; the last few weeks it seemed like things had been moving forward more quickly than they had been before, perhaps more quickly than he'd wanted. Duane being around might keep them from getting out of hand, too. "But they're not so close that I want you out of the way, either," he added.