At 3:30, I climbed some steps carved into granite and found myself on a spacious rock overlook: the summit of Springer Mountain. I shed my pack and slumped heavily against a tree, astounded by the scale of my tiredness. The view was lovely-the rolling swell of the Cohutta Mountains, brushed with a bluish haze the color of cigarette smoke, running away to a far-off horizon. The sun was already low in the sky. I rested for perhaps ten minutes, then got up and had a look around. There was a bronze plaque screwed into a boulder announcing the start of the Appalachian Trail, and nearby on a post was a wooden box containing a Bic pen on a length of string and a standard spiral notebook, its pages curled from the damp air. The notebook was the trail register (I had somehow expected it to be leather bound and funereal) and it was filled with eager entries, nearly all written in a youthful hand. There were perhaps twenty-five pages of entries since the first of January-eight entries on this day alone. Most were hurried and cheery-“March 2nd. Well, here we are and man it’s cold! See y’all on Katahdin! Jaimie and Spud”-but about a third were longer and more carefully reflective, with messages along the lines of “So here I am at Springer at last. I don’t know what the coming weeks hold for me, but my faith in the Lord is strong and I know I have the love and support of my family. Mom and Pookie, this trip is for you,” and so on.

I waited for Katz for three-quarters of an hour, then went looking for him. The light was fading and the air was taking on an evening chill. I walked and walked, down the hill and through the endless groves of trees, back over ground that I had gratefully put behind me forever, or so I had thought. Several times I called his name and listened, but there was nothing. I walked on and on, over fallen trees I had struggled over hours before, down slopes I could now only dimly recall. My grandmother could have got this far, I kept thinking. Finally, I rounded a bend and there he was stumbling towards me, wild-haired and one-gloved and nearer hysteria than I have ever seen a grown person.

It was hard to get the full story out of him in a coherent flow, because he was so furious, but I gathered he had thrown many items from his pack over a cliff in a temper. None of the things that had been dangling from the outside were there any longer.

“What did you get rid of?” I asked, trying not to betray too much alarm.

“Heavy fucking shit, that’s what. The pepperoni, the rice, the brown sugar, the Spam, I don’t know what all. Lots. Fuck.” Katz was almost cataleptic with displeasure. He acted as if he had been deeply betrayed by the trail. It wasn’t, I guess, what he had expected.

I saw his glove lying in the path thirty yards back and went to retrieve it.

“OK,” I said when I returned, “you haven’t got too far to go.”

“How far?”

“Maybe a mile.”

“Shit,” he said bitterly.

“I’ll take your pack.” I lifted it onto my back. It wasn’t exactly empty now, but it was decidedly moderate in weight. God knows what he had thrown out.

We trudged up the hill to the summit in the enveloping dusk. A few hundred yards beyond the summit was a campsite with a wooden shelter in a big grassy clearing against a backdrop of dark trees. There were a lot of people there, far more than I’d expected this early in the season. The shelter-a basic, three-sided affair with a sloping roof-looked crowded, and a dozen or so tents were scattered around the open ground. Nearly everywhere there was the hiss of little campstoves, threads of rising food smoke, and the movements of lanky young people.

I found us a site on the edge of the clearing, almost in the woods, off by ourselves.

“I don’t know how to put up my tent,” Katz said in a petulant tone.

“Well, I’ll put it up for you then.” You big soft flabby baby. Suddenly I was very tired.

He sat on a log and watched me put up his tent. When I finished, he pushed in his pad and sleeping bag and crawled in after. I busied myself with my tent, fussily made it into a little home. When I completed my work and straightened up, I realized there was no sound or movement from within his.

“Have you gone to bed?” I said, aghast.

“Yump,” he replied in a kind of affirmative growl.

“That’s it? You’ve retired? With no dinner?”

“Yump.”

I stood for a minute, speechless and flummoxed, too tired to be indignant. Too tired to be hungry either, come to that. I crawled into my tent, brought in a water bottle and book, laid out my knife and flashlight for purposes of nocturnal illumination and defense, and finally shimmied into the bag, more grateful than I have ever been to be horizontal. I was asleep in moments. I don’t believe I have ever slept so well.

When I awoke, it was daylight. The inside of my tent was coated in a curious flaky rime, which I realized after a moment was my all my nighttime snores, condensed and frozen and pasted to the fabric, as if into a scrapbook of respiratory memories. My water bottle was frozen solid. This seemed gratifyingly macho, and I examined it with interest, as if it were a rare mineral. I was surprisingly snug in my bag and in no hurry at all to put myself through the foolishness of climbing hills, so I just lay there as if under grave orders not to move. After a while I became aware that Katz was moving around outside, grunting softly as if from aches and doing something that sounded improbably industrious.

After a minute or two, he came and crouched by my tent, his form a dark shadow on the fabric. He didn’t ask if I was awake or anything, but just said in a quiet voice: “Was I, would you say, a complete asshole last night?”

“Yes you were, Stephen.”

He was quiet a moment. “I’m making coffee.” I gathered this was his way of an apology.

“That’s very nice.”

“Damn cold out here.”

“And in here.”

“My water bottle froze.”

“Mine, too.”

I unzipped myself from my nylon womb and emerged on creaking joints. It seemed very strange-very novel-to be standing outdoors in long Johns. Katz was crouched over the campstove, boiling a pan of water. We seemed to be the only campers awake. It was cold, but perhaps just a trifle warmer than the day before, and a low dawn sun burning through the trees looked cautiously promising.

“How do you feel?” he said.

I flexed my legs experimentally. “Not too bad, actually.”

“Me either.”

He poured water into the filter cone. “I’m going to be good today,” he promised.

“Good.” I watched over his shoulder. “Is there a reason,” I asked, “why you are filtering the coffee with toilet paper?”

“I, oh…I threw out the filter papers.”

I gave a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “They couldn’t have weighed two ounces.”

“I know, but they were great for throwing. Fluttered all over.” He dribbled on more water. “The toilet paper seems to be working OK, though.”

We watched it drip through and were strangely proud. Our first refreshment in the wilderness. He handed me a cup of coffee. It was swimming in grounds and little flecks of pink tissue, but it was piping hot, which was the main thing.

He gave me an apologetic look. “I threw out the brown sugar too, so there won’t be any sugar for the oatmeal.”

Ah. “Actually, there won’t be any oatmeal for the oatmeal. I left it in New Hampshire.”

He looked at me. “Really?” then added, as if for the record: “I love oatmeal.”

“What about some of that cheese?”

He shook his head. “Flung.”

“Peanuts?”

“Flung.”

“Spam?”

“Really flung.”

This was beginning to sound a trifle grave. “What about the baloney?”

“Oh, I ate that at Amicalola,” he said, as if it had been weeks ago, then added in a tone of sudden magnanimous concession, “Hey, I’m happy with a cup of coffee and a couple of Little Debbies.”