Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [80]
That night in my tent, I felt uneasy. In one day I had seen a naked man, encountered my first rattlesnake, and passed a dark figure moaning to the sky. I was all about adventure, but this was too much for one day. One of the encounters by itself would have been humorous, a good story, but the three of them together left me feeling restless and afraid.
The next day, I still felt uneasy. I was busy looking at the ground and trying to place my feet on rocks that wouldn’t move when I heard laughter coming up the trail. When I discovered the source of the giggling, I thought I was dreaming. Two teenage girls were hiking down the trail in long-sleeved floor-length blue dresses and bonnets.
The rocks didn’t seem to bother them at all. Even though they couldn’t see their feet underneath their flowing skirts, they glided easily down the trail.
The heat didn’t seem to bother them, either. I was in a tank-top and running shorts and I was sweating, but they looked cool and comfortable with everything covered but their faces and hands.
They said hello and smiled as they passed, then continued gliding down the trail, immersed in their lighthearted conversation. The image of their carefree grins stayed with me. It was the most genuine and innocent expression of joy that I had seen since playing Dora the Explorer with Lila.
I guessed the two girls must be Amish. I knew that Pennsylvania had a large Amish population, and I couldn’t think of any other sixteen-year-old girls who would dress that way. They seemed happy and full of life. I wondered what they were talking about. Maybe they were giggling because the boys they liked were just starting to grow out their Amish beards? Or because they were planning to catch one of the plentiful Pennsylvania snakes and play a prank on one of their brothers?
The encounter felt welcome and redemptive, but still seemed completely out of the ordinary. I felt like I must have gotten off the trail somewhere past Maryland and entered an alternate universe. The thruhikers had disappeared, the terrain was different, and I was beginning to expect the unexpected.
The eeriness of Pennsylvania continued when I reached Duncannon. The trail winds right through downtown. I was tired and my feet hurt, but I didn’t stop because Warren Doyle had said that the one town that I shouldn’t stay in if I was hiking alone was Duncannon.
I didn’t know the history of the town, but I did know that there was a hostel/bar in town called The Doyle. It stood out in my memory because Warren had said that he wouldn’t want his daughter to stay there and he didn’t think I should either. I thought it was funny that the one hiker service that warren warned me about bore his last name. But it did make it easy to remember.
I followed the white blazes on telephone poles through a residential neighborhood. The two-story homes and fenced yards that lined the street looked lifeless. The doors were locked, the windows were drawn, and several yards had tall grass and weeds that came up to my knees.
I heard a noise as I passed by a wooden house that looked exposed under a peeling coat of white paint. In the backyard, I saw a rusted swing set; the empty swing swayed back and forth in the breeze and creaked eerily.
The neighboring house had a wraparound porch with several pieces of railing missing, like gaps between teeth. The open slats revealed a wooden porch swing with one end suspended from the ceiling and the other resting on the floorboards. On the other side of the porch sat an elderly man in a rocking chair. His eyes were closed, and he was so still that I couldn’t tell if he was sleeping or dead.
In Duncannon, wherever I expected to see life, there was decay.
The trail turned out of the neighborhood and toward a large bridge over the Susquehanna River. To my left there was a gas station, and looking ahead beyond the potholes in the road, I could see a looming mountain. I wanted to stop at the gas station to buy some candy or a soda before I kept hiking, but the entrance