Travel & Leisure

     Outback takes great interest in my stories about the town but then is diverted by the stuff a group of previous hikers had left behind at Thomas Knob Shelter—pots and pans plus bags of food hanging from hooks. He’s intrigued by the cooking gear, the sight of which has made him hungry. “The important thing is, you’ve got to eat, even though it may not be the best food,” he says. “I have energy bars. I carry cheese. I carry salami. But it’s not like you eat steak.” Laughing, Outback tells a joke: “How do you fit eight hikers into a one-man tent? You tell them that there’s free food. And how do you get them to leave? You tell them that they have to pay.”

     Standing at the shelter’s picnic table, Outback announces plans to sign the trail journal at Thomas Knob, just as he had left behind his words in a spiral notebook at the Wise Trail Shelter. He writes, “Getting closer to Damascus—hope I’m not disappointed.”

     For Outback, Damascus marks the end of a road blazed by a blur of white flashes on rocks, trees and jagged posts. For myself, the Thomas Knob Shelter marks the place where we part ways. For the rest of the day, I retrace the trek—back toward Grayson Highlands. But it hardly seems like I’m on the same trail. With so much beautiful scenery, this rocky passage seems almost new to me. At the end of the day, after covering nine miles in eight hours, my modest journey is over. I’ve got a dry mouth, sunburned ears and a head full of new sensations gleaned from the hike and the people I met along the way. I figure that’s the joy of the escape that is the Appalachian Trail.