Black Heart on the Appalachian Trail Read Online Free Page B

afterward. Eventually, she felt so confident she had gained control that she began driving to the Appalachian Trail during her summers, often testing herself when she came up on hikers taking pictures on overlooks. With each successful interaction she became even more confident and often sat with the hikers and held conversations that lasted for minutes at a time.
    Then, during a day hike in the Whites, the urge reappeared with such ferocity it left her shaken. The boy had turned toward her as she neared, had stepped away from the edge in a hurry. He had looked frightened, as though he had seen something in her eyes.
    That was the moment she decided to seek out ways to force change. She experimented with Buddhism and Catholicism, then finally resorted to self-help books. Her favorite was How to Become a Completely New Person in Twenty-One Days , and she read it three times in a two-week period. Afterward, she affirmed, she wrote negative notes to herself and set them on fire, she adopted positive attitudes that turned every half-empty glass half full. Nothing worked.
    Now, as she contemplates her earlier interaction with Devon,she’s annoyed with herself. This is the man she plans to marry. Soon as the urge appeared, she should have gotten up and walked away.
    *   *   *
    That afternoon, Simone and Devon crest another mountain and arrive at an overlook, and he glances at her with curious eyes. He asks if she wants to stop and enjoy the view.
    â€œI don’t want to sit next to you,” she says.
    â€œYou’re serious about this?”
    Simone tells him yes and they walk down the mountain, he in the lead, she lagging behind. She crouches to take pressure off an old knee injury, wishes he would slow down so she could keep up. He looks back from time to time, but in the end seems to drop whatever is on his mind.
    Devon plans to hike to her first resupply point—Hiawassee, Georgia—a town sixty-four trail miles north of Springer. When she first heard he was joining her for the start of her thru-hike, a conversation that took place back in the winter when she was dehydrating food for her mail drops, she was happy. Now she’s not so sure. She’s not worried about pushing him off—long as she stays clear of him on ledges bad things won’t happen—but she thinks he might try to take over her hike and make it his. He is a male, after all, and genetically they are more comfortable when they are in control. She stretches out her stride until she runs instead of walks. Catches him at the next switchback. They hike to the base of the mountain and drop their packs in a clearing.
    â€œA fire would be nice,” Devon says. “Be dark before you know it.”
    Her lover prefers camp chores to gathering wood because heworries about getting lost. Getting lost never happens to Simone. She has a keen sense of direction, much keener than Devon’s.
    Knowing he will not stop hinting until she brings him wood, she walks out of camp, along a ridge interspersed with pines, poplar, and white oaks. Fiddleheads, green and slender, curl out of the ground, but higher up, where branches are without leaves, colors are muted slashes of gray and brown. An owl’s hoot drifts through the trees. Against the sky, in the upper reaches of a scarred poplar, wings unfold and a feathered shadow glides through the forest, gone before she can raise a hand and offer a hello.
    She picks up a branch and drags it behind her. Picks up another branch and adds it to the first. Head down, she walks a wide loop that takes her into an oak grove south of the campsite. She hoists herself onto a low-hanging limb, climbs high enough to see down into the clearing. In a fork gently buoyant under her weight, she watches Devon glance in the direction she has disappeared. He restakes the guy line at the rear of the tent, then restakes the guy line at the front. He’s fiddling, something he does when he is