Category: Appalachian Trail

In the woods at night anything can happen: in your mind. It’s what makes the telling of scary stories around the campfire so effectively scary. Once, when I was a kid, my mother lowered her voice around the campfire and told us about a vandal attacking the campground’s bathroom, the night before. It was really creepy when she told it.

Because it’s so easy for a mind to run to terrifying cliffs in the dark, in the woods, I try to keep my mind in check: the large animal outside my tent is a deer or an elk, not a bear. The scary guy wearing cotton clothes and carrying a large knife on his belt is not a killer, just a novice backpacker that doesn’t know what to wear or bring. Only thing is that sometimes the big animal is a bear and sometimes the scary guy is a murderer.

I arrived at a shelter on the Appalachian Trail about 8pm. There were two worried hikers at the picnic table. They motioned to an opened backpack in the shelter and said, “Checkout the reading material�. There were a bunch of books on survival and a camouflage bible. Whoever it was, he was packing a lot of weight. All his gear and food was left in the shelter. One of the hikers had found a bag of knives about ½ mile down the trail.

About 10 pm, we got out a map and figured out where the nearest road was. One of the hikers had a cell phone and called the police to report the abandoned backpack. About 1 am two sheriff deputies showed up. They looked through the back pack and found a note that said:

To whom it may concern, I have murdered my father and gone to the woods to live. I have had to abandon my mission and am returning to Chesapeake to do something that you will read about in the papers. Anyone is welcome to any of my gear.

I just want to die.

Shaun Cubage Age 16

One of the deputies looked around the dark deep woods and said “he could be hanging from one of these trees.�

The police took all the knives and the note and said that they would send someone for the rest of the gear in the morning.

A couple months later, curious about what they had found out about the mysterious backpack, I called the sheriff department and asked them what happened. They said the police went to the boy’s house. They knocked and when no one answered they broke in and found the father dead. Two days later the boy turned himself in.

A copy of the newspaper article

Trail angels are people who help long distance hikers achieve their dream of hiking a long trail. Help may take the form of cans of pop chilling in a stream, a cooler full of snacks left along the trail, a ride into town. Sometimes they will even invite you home and let you take a shower, wash your clothes, have some dinner and even spend the night. Some towns sport trail angels extraordinaire: people that have almost a calling to help hikers. Some even have “trail angel” listed on their business cards.

In one town I met such a trail angel.  He offered a ride to the motel outside of town that I wanted to stay at because it also had a laundry mat nearby and a grocery store for buying food for the next section of trail. He gave me his business card and said to call him when I wanted a ride back to the trail. The next day I called him, left a message on his cell phone and proceeded to check out. When I turned around there he was.

A woman that I had been hiking with was meeting her husband and was staying another night. I wanted to wait for her but all the rooms in town where full. He said that he was caretaker of a cabin in the woods that I could stay at. He wanted to show it to me. We drove into the woods but some blow downs blocked the way. I told him I planned to stay at a hostel down the trail a ways.

I was hanging out in town talking to another hiker when he drove up. He invited us home to his house for dinner and said that he would drive us to the hostel afterwards.

We went back to his sparsely furnished apartment and he fixed a wonderful and generous dinner of steaks, salad, and ice cream for dessert. But he started drinking whiskey while he cooked. By the time dinner was over he was drunk and we knew that the only way we were going to get to the hostel was walking. About then it started to monsoon and even though the man was getting weirder and scarier by the minute we didn’t want to forge out into the rain.

He said we could stay there. I soon tired of his rambling, pulled out my sleeping bag and tried to sleep. He rambled on about being summoned to the White House, and how he was a restaurant critic and other crazy stuff. He talked about two hikers who had spurned his invitation and said people like that make a person want to wait 50 miles and then hire someone to jump out and slit their dog’s throat. He rambled on to the other hiker long into the night. At first light I hurriedly packed up to try to get out of there before the trail angel woke up. The other hiker gave me a thumbs up and did the same. I left a note thanking him for dinner and his hospitality and walked away.

It wasn’t long, before I see the guy driving up asking me where I was going. I told him I was heading back on the trail and that I didn’t need a ride or anything. I met the other hiker at the register, a book where all the hikers where putting in their e-mail and snail mails address as a way for people they had met on the trail to get back in touch with them. He was erasing his address, afraid that the trail angel would stalk him further. He said it made him think more carefully about who he took hospitality from.

On the trail, life is beautiful and grand. The people you meet are people who took a big leap and are living out their dream. When meeting someone like him, it’s like finding your twin, that you never knew you had, locked in the attic, pasty and weird.