On the fourth evening, we made a friend. We were sitting in a nice little clearing beside the trail, our tents pitched, eating our noodles, savoring the exquisite pleasure of just sitting, when a plumpish, bespectacled young woman in a red jacket and the customary outsized pack came along. She regarded us with the crinkled squint of someone who is either chronically confused or can’t see very well. We exchanged hellos and the usual banalities about the weather and where we were. Then she squinted at the gathering gloom and announced she would camp with us.

Her name was Mary Ellen. She was from Florida, and she was, as Katz forever after termed her in a special tone of awe, a piece of work. She talked nonstop, except when she was clearing our her eustachian tubes (which she did frequently) by pinching her nose and blowing out with a series of violent and alarming snorts of a sort that would make a dog leave the sofa and get under a table in the next room. I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth, and Mary Ellen was proof that even in the Appalachian woods I would not be spared. It became evident from the first moment that she was a rarity.

“So what are you guys eating?” she said, plonking herself down on a spare log and lifting her head to peer into our bowls. “Noodles? Big mistake. Noodles have got like no energy. I mean like zero.” She unblocked her ears. “Is that a Starship tent?”

I looked at my tent. “I don’t know.”

“Big mistake. They must have seen you coming at the camping store. What did you pay for it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Too much, that’s how much. You should have got a three-season tent.”

“It is a three-season tent.”

“Pardon me saying so, but it is like seriously dumb to come out here in March without a three-season tent.” She unblocked her ears.

“It is a three-season tent.”

“You’re lucky you haven’t froze yet. You should go back and like punch out the guy that sold it to you because he’s been like, you know, negligible selling you that.”

“Believe me, it is a three-season tent.”

She unblocked her ears and shook her head impatiently. “That’s a three-season tent.” She indicated Katz’s tent.

“That’s exactly the same tent.”

She glanced at it again. “Whatever. How many miles did you do today?”

“About ten.” Actually we had done eight point four, but this had included several formidable escarpments, including a notable wall of hell called Preaching Rock, the highest eminence since Springer Mountain, for which we had awarded ourselves bonus miles, for purposes of morale.

“Ten miles? Is that all? You guys must be like really out of shape. I did fourteen-two.”

“How many have your lips done?” said Katz, looking up from his noodles.

She fixed him with one of her more severe squints. “Same as the rest of me, of course.” She gave me a private look as if to say, “Is your friend like seriously weird or something?” She cleared her ears. “I started at Gooch Gap.”

“So did we. That’s only eight point four miles.”

She shook her head sharply, as if shooing a particularly tenacious fly. “Fourteen-two.”

“No, really, it’s only eight point four.”

“Excuse me, but I just walked it. I think I ought to know.” And then suddenly: “God, are those Timberland boots? Mega mistake. How much did you pay for them?”

And so it went. Eventually I went off to swill out the bowls and hang the food bag. When I came back, she was fixing her own dinner but still talking away at Katz.

“You know what your problem is?” she was saying. “Pardon my French, but you’re too fat.”

Katz looked at her in quiet wonder. “Excuse me?”

“You’re too fat. You should have lost weight before you came out here. Shoulda done some training, ’cause you could have like a serious, you know, heart thing out here.”

“Heart thing?”

“You know, when your heart stops and you like, you know, die.”

“Do you mean a heart attack?”

“That’s it.”

Mary Ellen, it should be noted, was not short on flesh herself, and unwisely at that moment she leaned over to get something from her pack, displaying an expanse of backside on which you could have projected motion pictures for, let us say, an army base. It was an interesting test of Katz’s forbearance. He said nothing but rose to go for a pee, and out of the side of his mouth as he passed me he rendered a certain convenient expletive as three low, dismayed syllables, like the call of a freight train in the night.

The next day, as always, we rose chilled and feeling wretched, and set about the business of attending to our small tasks, but this time with the additional strain of having our every move examined and rated. While we ate raisins and drank coffee with flecks of toilet paper in it, Mary Ellen gorged on a multicourse breakfast of oatmeal, Pop Tarts, trail mix, and a dozen small squares of chocolate, which she lined up in a row on the log beside her. We watched like orphaned refugees while she plumped her jowls with food and enlightened us as to our shortcomings with regard to diet, equipment, and general manliness.

And then, now a trio, we set off into the woods. Mary Ellen walked sometimes with me and sometimes with Katz, but always with one of us. It was apparent that for all her bluster she was majestically inexperienced and untrailworthy (she hadn’t the faintest idea how to read a map, for one thing) and ill at ease on her own in the wilderness. I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for her. Besides, I began to find her strangely entertaining. She had the most extraordinarily redundant turn of phrase. She would say things like “There’s a stream of water over there” and “It’s nearly ten o’clockA.M. ” Once, in reference to winters in central Florida, she solemnly informed me, “We usually get frosts once or twice a winter, but this year we had ’em a couple of times.” Katz for his part clearly dreaded her company and winced beneath her tireless urgings to smarten his pace.

For once, the weather was kindly-more autumnal than spring like in feel, but gratifyingly mild. By ten o’clock, the temperature was comfortably in the sixties. For the first time since Amicalola I took off my jacket and realized with mild perplexity that I had absolutely no place to put it. I tied it to my pack with a strap and trudged on.

We labored four miles up and over Blood Mountain-at 4,461 feet the highest and toughest eminence on the trail in Georgia-then began a steep and exciting two-mile descent towards Neels Gap. Exciting because there was a shop at Neels Gap, at a place called the Walasi-Yi Inn, where you could buy sandwiches and ice cream. At about half past one, we heard a novel sound-motor traffic-and a few minutes later we emerged from the woods onto U.S. Highway 19 and 129, which despite having two numbers was really just a back road through a high pass between wooded no-wheres. Directly across the road was the Walasi-Yi Inn, a splendid stone building constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps (a kind of army of the unemployed) during the Great Depression and now a combination hiking outfitters, grocery, bookshop, and youth hostel. We hastened across the road-positively scurried across-and went inside.

Now it may seem to stretch credibility to suggest that things like a paved highway, the whoosh of passing cars, and a proper building could seem exciting and unfamiliar after a scant five days in the woods, but in fact it was so. Just passing through a door, being inside, surrounded by walls and a ceiling, was novel. And the Walasi-Yi’s stuff was, well, I can’t begin to describe how wonderful it was. There was a single modest-sized refrigerator filled with fresh sandwiches, soft drinks, cartons of juice, and perishables like cheese, and Katz and I stared into it for ages, dumbly captivated. I was beginning to appreciate that the central feature of life on the Appalachian Trail is deprivation, that the whole point of the experience is to remove yourself so thoroughly from the conveniences of everyday life that the most ordinary things-processed cheese, a can of pop gorgeously beaded with condensation-fill you with wonder and gratitude. It is an intoxicating experience to taste Coca-Cola as if for the first time and to be conveyed to the very brink of orgasm by white bread. Makes all the discomfort worthwhile, if you ask me.