The Path

for Liz D.

Unless you know to look you’ll drive on by,
and never see the track that boots erode,
the woods-hooded eyewhite stare splashed upon
a poplar trunk a few steps from the road;

only the chlorophyll-bright yards, the lawn
ornaments and shorn boxwood, the swelling
impoundment of strip mall parking that backs
from urban dams up blacktop bays, smelling

of diesel and mown fescue: billboard facts
of who you are and how you live that blur
outside your windows until you forget
the journey's end to which the signs refer.

Still, it abides: the path—obscure and yet
impossible to miss once you have seen.
It disappears into a strip of woods,
insinuates its way, within its green-

framed margins, through suburban neighborhoods,
emerging at the skirt-edge of blue hills
that, as a boy, your father flew your once
above. You know that valley—know its rills,

dirt roads, brown summer fields, far riverfront’s
meandering verge, its stippled orchardsquare
a wicker-woven basket for your dreams—
and wonder if the path still leads you there.

ii.

Benton MacKaye planned it, one of those schemes
we’d jeer today: a crackpot’s windmill-tilt
utopia upon a mountain ridge.
But his America was that which built

the steel roads heading west, the Brooklyn Bridge;
that armed a million men to end a war;
a bull moose of a land that blundered on
impervious to pain, just as T.R.

shrugged a gunman’s bullet off. No down-drawn
doubts or breadlines distracted volunteer
blaze painters shouldering shovel, hoe and axe.
The age’s ills—class wars, nativist fear,

Great Men, armed masses—these were simply facts
attesting to “the problem of living”
he claimed. Let men and markets liquidate
themselves! For beneath it, unforgiving

gears turned, wires hummed—machines that separate
head and heart, new efficiencies to chain
and not to liberate (as Edisons
would have us think). Instead, this half-insane

idea: a footpath through the wild that runs
along the Appalachian spine and takes
the walker high enough to see beyond
strait circumstance, delusion and mistakes.

iii.

Just south of Chestnut Knob, beside a pond,
they stop for lunch and watch the wind's quill-pen
inscribe its cursive in the grass atop
the bald ridge: five or six women and men

who every summer chop though catbrier, lop
encroaching limbs, settle stones, and mend stiles
from Poor Valley uphill to Walker Gap.
Their mountain garden runs these seven miles,

a dotted furrow on the contour map
that yields year-round its crop of muddy tracks
and braided bogwalks: scant produce, maybe,
for the price in poison ivy, sore backs,

and blistered hands. They pay it readily—
not just as some vague patriotic due—
and every month return, weaving the strands
of trail and lane and bridle path and view

into a single track that threads through stands
of pine and poplar, fir and spruce, that binds
two thousand miles of dreams, two million strides.
A way imagined, longer still, unwinds

beyond the miles they tend. To know it bides
is recompense enough: a last walk out
when detours dead-end; a road not taken;
a coffered promise for the times of doubt.

iv.

Some goose-down wound sarcophagi waken
with the birds as daylight rims the ridgecrests
and filters down the dew-wet hollow where
a lean-to squats, and quickened by forest’s

reveille resurrect themselves from their
mummy bags, prepare another long day’s
rations, assess tactics, matériel,
logistics for the battle of the blaze,

then off Katahdin-wards push on pell-mell.
Each day they quest, this band of errant knights
gone pricking in the pines for some sangrail
in Maine—a spring and summer’s bug-swarmed nights,

a fall of falls—and walk a crooked trail
to mend the crazing of their lives. They reek
of sweat and smoke, wear gaudy shells to turn
the storm away, take on new names, and speak

of aches, and boots and food; and yet they yearn
to strip the armor from their hearts, to wash
themselves in mountain rain and air until
like the wild columbine and black cohosh

they need be only what they are, until
out of the stone-strewn ground they bloom again,
until the weathered sign on Baxter Peak
points back along the path to where they've been.

You’ve started late. It isn’t long till dark,
and you’ve been on the trail for hours now.
McAfee Knob’s much-touted view, cloud-cowled,
was all blind grayness when you reached the brow;

the blue-blazed shelter shortcut nettle-fouled,
you climb Tinker Cliffs straight up the ridgeline.
Spent in ascent, you hump your sodden pack
up edged ledges split by rock-stunted pine,

until there’s no up left, just the hogback
brink and the breathing fog that beckons you.
For once you do not pause to take it in,
afraid to stop, afraid to listen to

its whispered invitation, here where skin
and bones of earth and stone rend in timeless
compound fractures. You stumble on, descend
to the old stone shelter near the nameless

stream for a mouse-lousy night and the end
of your ordeal. When morning comes you will
walk back down to the sun-bright valley floor,
to where your car is parked next to the hill,

the road crossing, the passing traffic’s roar,
the part of you that jokes of rock and earth,
but leave a better part behind and try
once more to figure out what the walking’s worth.

Note: I wrote this in the months before I began my 1987 thru-hike, and it’s a stab at capturing various facets of the “experience” of the Appalachian Trail. Part i describes a spot in Daleville, Virginia, where US 220 crosses the AT. It’s near where I grew up, and I drove past it many times. Part ii outlines the AT’s history, the dreamers who built it, and the reasons why. Part iii depicts a crew of the volunteer trail-maintainers who keep it open. I did this for several years before my hike. Part iv is a snapshot of thru-hikers, and their pilgrim lifestyle. Part v asks you to imagine yourself on my first overnight hike on the AT, which concluded at the road crossing in Part i. You’ll also note that the rhyme circles back too, ending where it began!