Folk Trails
BY André Pronovost
Translated from French by Oana Avasilichioaei
First, I am indebted to the folks of the Appalachian Trail Museum Society in Gardners, Pennsylvania, for inviting me to pen a summary of my 1978 journey on the A.T. Their request touches a chord in me.
My lonesome thirty-six-year-old self hit the trail in Georgia on February 20, 1978, a mild sunny day. Destination, north. (The day before, I had flown with Eastern Airlines from Montreal to Atlanta.) I reached Mount Katahdin in the haunted forest of Maine on July 2. A remarkable journey. Just a pack on my back and sometimes tears in my eyes. I remember every part of it like it was yesterday.
I'm certainly not going to make you believe that everything was going fine for me then. Since my early teens, I have suffered a morbid fear of speaking before an audience larger than two people. What's more, I was mourning my beloved spouse, Marilyn Monroe, gone for fifteen years. I am only slightly exaggerating. Elvis, too, had left us. Despite my writing and love for the French language, Quebec had never wholly resonated with me. Though I adored my family. At age twenty-two, my mother gave birth to me. Old photos show her brilliant beauty equal only to the stars in the sky. Her Kennedy cousins make her a distant relative of the assassinated president. Now ninety-five, she lives alone in the large village house of her childhood, encircled by a white veranda. Her knits are masterpieces. Her pea soup is unbeatable.
Many of the people I met along my journey are portrayed in Appalaches, the road novel I published in France and Quebec in 1992, and republished in 2011. I think of the late Samuel Waddle, the farmer with a biblical name from Chuckey, Tennessee. He was the caretaker of one of the most stunning sections of the whole Appalachian Trail, along the crest that separates the states of Tennessee and North Carolina just beneath the firmament. Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. I visited him and his wife Zella in the eighties and nineties. His Southern accent loaded with phrases like "nahs whaht rahs" for "nice white rice" never bothered me. I always understood his goodwill. And his love of firearms. When he passed away, in 2006, I sent blue irises.
I remember the Quinn family of Simmonsville, Virginia: Terry, Carolyn, the two girls, and the dog. Martha Nicole Quinn, six years old at the time, later became a cheerleader before graduating from Virginia Tech. Her younger sister Alison is now the proud mother of four beautiful young girls in ponytails, all excellent softball players. Time goes by, thank the Lord. I fondly remember the good Franciscan Friars of the Atonement in Graymoor, New York. They gave me shelter one night. Despite a supper of mammoth proportions, I tiptoed to their kitchen during the night and stole two slices of baloney. Go, Johnny, go! With love, I think of Kathy Janet Fraser, then a student at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Now a writer and psychiatrist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she flew to Montreal last year to attend a concert of our rock and roll band, Cavalcade d'étoiles (Cavalcade of Stars). I also think of coyotes, bears and moose, Virginia deer with their white tails and haughty looks, black flies by the billions.
I remember Dahlonega in peachy Georgia and Elk Park in North Carolina.
I remember the friendly folks by the old railroad track in Damascus, Virginia. I remember the torrential rain in the State of New Jersey, the tyrannical heat in Connecticut, and the deafening flight manoeuvres of the U.S. Air Force just above the tree line in peaceful south Vermont. I will never forget the week when my old pal Pierre Leduc shut his physician's office and flew to central Virginia to hike a hundred and twenty miles at my side. Since then, I've called him Roanoke, Roanoke Leduc.
Times have changed. Back in those days, we didn't walk with ridiculous steel poles. Mostly, we moved like lone wolves. Now, hikers tend to travel in packs. Often from broken families or marriages, perhaps they roam the woods in search of something they have lost.
Over the years, I have rarely mentioned my books when having to introduce myself or share my life's path. But I have always said that I hiked the long Appalachian Trail. I'm often asked if my journey made me more introspective. No, not really. I was much too busy walking. Nelligan would have written: "Ah, how the blizzards blazed over the Great Smoky Mountains!" I had to quit the trail and hitch a ride to Knoxville, Tennessee, to buy snowshoes made in Quebec. Many corn-fed pretty blondes call Knoxville their home. I was worn out. I got drunk.
While writing this essay, I can't help but think of the countless stories and fables of the Appalachian Trail. They say that one guy hiked it end to end on the night shift. Walked by night, slept by day. One day in Massachusetts, another hiker, mad with fatigue, is said to have barricaded the path with a makeshift tollbooth, demanding two dollars from fellow hikers to pass.
In 1981, hiker Robert Mountford and his sweetheart Susan Ramsay never reached the Maine woods. In southwest Virginia, near the spot where three years earlier I had watched with wonder the spectacular urgent take-off of a pack of wild turkeys, the two were shot dead. The young woman had been raped. No fable here.
Have you seen Mary Lou Young? She was from Carbondale, in southern Illinois. Have you seen the Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus? Hand on the Bible, I swear I saw them beneath a Coca-Cola sign at the road-crossing in Allen Gap, Tennessee. As for Jill and Page, I would pay to see what's become of them. I met them on the summit of Tray Mountain, Georgia, on the night
of February 25. They were both twelve at the time, up in the mountains for the weekend with their older brothers and cousins. In the morning, the two little angels invited me to breakfast. They were so physically cold and so passionately absorbed in their cooking that their nasal discharge fell in the pan and mixed with the eggs. I pray for them every day.
Allow me to conclude this summary with two events that took place earlier this year and which brought me back to these recollections of the Appalachian Trail. One concerns a man named Robert Leske. He was on duty when, on the afternoon of May 20, 1978, I entered his Pawling Post Office, right on the trail in New York State. I was exhausted, a little depressed from the oppressive heat. If only I could wait till the end of his shift, he would take me to his home on Old State Road for a decent shower, a decent supper, and a good night's sleep in a decent bed. We were seven or eight around the table, and I ate like a horse. A few weeks ago, I thought to look him up on the Internet and learned that he passed away in 2004 at age seventy-three. Following the internet trail, I found the street address of one of his children and sent a letter. Jim Leske replied within a week and wrote about his father with the same poignant words I would have used to describe my own departed father. Jim was at the table that May evening, a young ten-year-old. He remembered my asking his father the next morning to drive me back to the post office, where I had left the trail, instead of north of Pawling, where the A.T. re-enters the woods. I was a purist, perhaps even a compulsive one, so there was no question of skipping a single step of this insane trail. In his letter, Jim recalled how he and his father had often spoken over the years "with respect and understanding" of my request.
The second event concerns Phil Everly, the lonesome tenor of the Everly Brothers, who passed away in Burbank, California, on January 3, 2014. For someone who is a stranger to the notion of rhythm in prose, it can be hard to understand that I learned to write as much by listening to the Everly Brothers as by reading French classics. I loved Phil. And it eased my sorrow to learn from American journalist Willem Lange, a short time after Phil's death, that in 1957, while Bye Bye Love was high on the charts, he drove from New York City to hike for a day in the Adirondacks.
BY André Pronovost
Translated from French by Oana Avasilichioaei
First, I am indebted to the folks of the Appalachian Trail Museum Society in Gardners, Pennsylvania, for inviting me to pen a summary of my 1978 journey on the A.T. Their request touches a chord in me.
My lonesome thirty-six-year-old self hit the trail in Georgia on February 20, 1978, a mild sunny day. Destination, north. (The day before, I had flown with Eastern Airlines from Montreal to Atlanta.) I reached Mount Katahdin in the haunted forest of Maine on July 2. A remarkable journey. Just a pack on my back and sometimes tears in my eyes. I remember every part of it like it was yesterday.
I'm certainly not going to make you believe that everything was going fine for me then. Since my early teens, I have suffered a morbid fear of speaking before an audience larger than two people. What's more, I was mourning my beloved spouse, Marilyn Monroe, gone for fifteen years. I am only slightly exaggerating. Elvis, too, had left us. Despite my writing and love for the French language, Quebec had never wholly resonated with me. Though I adored my family. At age twenty-two, my mother gave birth to me. Old photos show her brilliant beauty equal only to the stars in the sky. Her Kennedy cousins make her a distant relative of the assassinated president. Now ninety-five, she lives alone in the large village house of her childhood, encircled by a white veranda. Her knits are masterpieces. Her pea soup is unbeatable.
Many of the people I met along my journey are portrayed in Appalaches, the road novel I published in France and Quebec in 1992, and republished in 2011. I think of the late Samuel Waddle, the farmer with a biblical name from Chuckey, Tennessee. He was the caretaker of one of the most stunning sections of the whole Appalachian Trail, along the crest that separates the states of Tennessee and North Carolina just beneath the firmament. Knock, knock, knockin' on heaven's door. I visited him and his wife Zella in the eighties and nineties. His Southern accent loaded with phrases like "nahs whaht rahs" for "nice white rice" never bothered me. I always understood his goodwill. And his love of firearms. When he passed away, in 2006, I sent blue irises.
I remember the Quinn family of Simmonsville, Virginia: Terry, Carolyn, the two girls, and the dog. Martha Nicole Quinn, six years old at the time, later became a cheerleader before graduating from Virginia Tech. Her younger sister Alison is now the proud mother of four beautiful young girls in ponytails, all excellent softball players. Time goes by, thank the Lord. I fondly remember the good Franciscan Friars of the Atonement in Graymoor, New York. They gave me shelter one night. Despite a supper of mammoth proportions, I tiptoed to their kitchen during the night and stole two slices of baloney. Go, Johnny, go! With love, I think of Kathy Janet Fraser, then a student at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Now a writer and psychiatrist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, she flew to Montreal last year to attend a concert of our rock and roll band, Cavalcade d'étoiles (Cavalcade of Stars). I also think of coyotes, bears and moose, Virginia deer with their white tails and haughty looks, black flies by the billions.
I remember Dahlonega in peachy Georgia and Elk Park in North Carolina.
I remember the friendly folks by the old railroad track in Damascus, Virginia. I remember the torrential rain in the State of New Jersey, the tyrannical heat in Connecticut, and the deafening flight manoeuvres of the U.S. Air Force just above the tree line in peaceful south Vermont. I will never forget the week when my old pal Pierre Leduc shut his physician's office and flew to central Virginia to hike a hundred and twenty miles at my side. Since then, I've called him Roanoke, Roanoke Leduc.
Times have changed. Back in those days, we didn't walk with ridiculous steel poles. Mostly, we moved like lone wolves. Now, hikers tend to travel in packs. Often from broken families or marriages, perhaps they roam the woods in search of something they have lost.
Over the years, I have rarely mentioned my books when having to introduce myself or share my life's path. But I have always said that I hiked the long Appalachian Trail. I'm often asked if my journey made me more introspective. No, not really. I was much too busy walking. Nelligan would have written: "Ah, how the blizzards blazed over the Great Smoky Mountains!" I had to quit the trail and hitch a ride to Knoxville, Tennessee, to buy snowshoes made in Quebec. Many corn-fed pretty blondes call Knoxville their home. I was worn out. I got drunk.
While writing this essay, I can't help but think of the countless stories and fables of the Appalachian Trail. They say that one guy hiked it end to end on the night shift. Walked by night, slept by day. One day in Massachusetts, another hiker, mad with fatigue, is said to have barricaded the path with a makeshift tollbooth, demanding two dollars from fellow hikers to pass.
In 1981, hiker Robert Mountford and his sweetheart Susan Ramsay never reached the Maine woods. In southwest Virginia, near the spot where three years earlier I had watched with wonder the spectacular urgent take-off of a pack of wild turkeys, the two were shot dead. The young woman had been raped. No fable here.
Have you seen Mary Lou Young? She was from Carbondale, in southern Illinois. Have you seen the Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus? Hand on the Bible, I swear I saw them beneath a Coca-Cola sign at the road-crossing in Allen Gap, Tennessee. As for Jill and Page, I would pay to see what's become of them. I met them on the summit of Tray Mountain, Georgia, on the night
of February 25. They were both twelve at the time, up in the mountains for the weekend with their older brothers and cousins. In the morning, the two little angels invited me to breakfast. They were so physically cold and so passionately absorbed in their cooking that their nasal discharge fell in the pan and mixed with the eggs. I pray for them every day.
Allow me to conclude this summary with two events that took place earlier this year and which brought me back to these recollections of the Appalachian Trail. One concerns a man named Robert Leske. He was on duty when, on the afternoon of May 20, 1978, I entered his Pawling Post Office, right on the trail in New York State. I was exhausted, a little depressed from the oppressive heat. If only I could wait till the end of his shift, he would take me to his home on Old State Road for a decent shower, a decent supper, and a good night's sleep in a decent bed. We were seven or eight around the table, and I ate like a horse. A few weeks ago, I thought to look him up on the Internet and learned that he passed away in 2004 at age seventy-three. Following the internet trail, I found the street address of one of his children and sent a letter. Jim Leske replied within a week and wrote about his father with the same poignant words I would have used to describe my own departed father. Jim was at the table that May evening, a young ten-year-old. He remembered my asking his father the next morning to drive me back to the post office, where I had left the trail, instead of north of Pawling, where the A.T. re-enters the woods. I was a purist, perhaps even a compulsive one, so there was no question of skipping a single step of this insane trail. In his letter, Jim recalled how he and his father had often spoken over the years "with respect and understanding" of my request.
The second event concerns Phil Everly, the lonesome tenor of the Everly Brothers, who passed away in Burbank, California, on January 3, 2014. For someone who is a stranger to the notion of rhythm in prose, it can be hard to understand that I learned to write as much by listening to the Everly Brothers as by reading French classics. I loved Phil. And it eased my sorrow to learn from American journalist Willem Lange, a short time after Phil's death, that in 1957, while Bye Bye Love was high on the charts, he drove from New York City to hike for a day in the Adirondacks.