Early in the book Dickey has his characters stop for directions in some “sleepy and hookwormy and ugly” town, which for all I know could have been Hiawassee. What is certainly true is that the book was set in this part of the state, and the movie was filmed in the area. The famous banjo-plucking albino who played “Dueling Banjos” in the movie still apparently lives in Clayton, just down the road.

Dickey’s book, as you might expect, attracted heated criticism in the state when it was published (one observer called it “the most demeaning characterization of southern highlanders in modern literature,” which, if anything, was an understatement), but in fact it must be said that people have been appalled by northern Georgians for 150 years. One nineteenth-century chronicler described the region’s inhabitants as “tall, thin, cadaverous-looking animals, as melancholy and lazy as boiled cod-fish,” and others freely employed words like “depraved,” “rude,” “uncivilized,” and “backward” to describe the reclusive, underbred folk of Georgia’s deep, dark woods and desperate townships. Dickey, who was himself a Georgian and knew the area well, swore that his book was a faithful description.

Perhaps it was the lingering influence of the book, perhaps simply the time of day, or maybe nothing more than the unaccustomedness of being in a town, but Hiawassee did feel palpably weird and unsettling-the kind of place where it wouldn’t altogether surprise you to find your gasoline being pumped by a cyclops. We went into the motel reception area, which was more like a small, untidy living room than a place of business, and found an aged woman with lively white hair and a bright cotton dress sitting on a sofa by the door. She looked happy to see us.

“Hi,” I said. “We’re looking for a room.”

The woman grinned and nodded.

“Actually, two rooms if you’ve got them.”

The woman grinned and nodded again. I waited for her to get up, but she didn’t move.

“For tonight,” I said encouragingly. “You do have rooms?” Her grin became a kind of beam and she grasped my hand, and held on tight; her fingers felt cold and bony. She just looked at me intently and eagerly, as if she thought-hoped-that I would throw a stick for her to fetch.

“Tell her we come from Reality Land,” Katz whispered in my ear.

At that moment, a door swung open and a grey-haired woman swept in, wiping her hands on an apron.

“Oh, ain’t no good talking to her,” she said in a friendly manner. “She don’t know nothing, don’t say nothing. Mother, let go the man’s hand.” Her mother beamed at her. “Mother, let go the man’s hand.”

My hand was released and we booked into two rooms. We went off with our keys and agreed to meet in half an hour. My room was basic and battered-there were cigarette burns on every possible surface, including the toilet seat and door lintels, and the walls and ceiling were covered in big stains that suggested a strange fight to the death involving lots of hot coffee-but it was heaven to me. I called Katz, for the novelty of using a telephone, and learned that his room was even worse. We were very happy.

We showered, put on such clean clothes as we could muster, and eagerly repaired to a popular nearby bistro called the Georgia Mountain Restaurant. The parking lot was crowded with pickup trucks, and inside it was busy with meaty people in baseball caps. I had a feeling that if I’d said, “Phone call for you, Bubba,” every man in the room would have risen. I won’t say the Georgia Mountain had food I would travel for, even within Hiawassee, but it was certainly reasonably priced. For $5.50 each, we got “meat and three,” a trip to the salad bar, and dessert. I ordered fried chicken, black-eyed peas, roast potatoes, and “ruterbeggars,” as the menu had it-I had never had them before, and can-t say I will again. We ate noisily and with gusto, and ordered many refills of iced tea.

Dessert was of course the highlight. Everyone on the trail dreams of something, usually sweet and gooey, and my sustaining vision had been an outsized slab of pie. It had occupied my thoughts for days, and when the waitress came to take our order I asked her, with beseeching eyes and a hand on her forearm, to bring me the largest piece she could slice without losing her job. She brought me a vast, viscous, canary-yellow wedge of lemon pie. It was a monument to food technology, yellow enough to give you a headache, sweet enough to make your eyeballs roll up into your head-everything, in short, you could want in a pie so long as taste and quality didn’t enter into your requirements. I was just plunging into it when Katz broke a long silence by saying, with a strange kind of nervousness, “You know what I keep doing? I keep looking up to see if Mary Ellen’s coming through the door.”

I paused, a forkful of shimmering goo halfway to my mouth, and noticed with passing disbelief that his dessert plate was already empty. “You’re not going to tell me you miss her, Stephen?” I said dryly and pushed the food home.

“No,” he responded tartly, not taking this as a joke at all. He took on a frustrated look from trying to find words to express his complex emotions. “We did kind of ditch her, you know,” he finally blurted.

I considered the charge. “Actually, we didn’t kind of ditch her. We ditched her.” I was’t with him at all on this. “So?”

“Well, I just, I just feel kind of bad-just kind of bad-that we left her out in the woods on her own.” Then he crossed his arms as if to say: “There. I’ve said it.”

I put my fork down and considered the point. “She came into the woods on her own,” I said. “We’re not actually responsible for her, you know. I mean, it’s not as if we signed a contract to look after her.”

Even as I said these things, I realized with a kind of horrible, seeping awareness that he was right. We had ditched her, left her to the bears and wolves and chortling mountain men. I had been so completely preoccupied with my own savage lust for food and a real bed that I had not paused to consider what our abrupt departure would mean for her-a night alone among the whispering trees, swaddled in darkness, listening with involuntary keenness for the telltale crack of branch or stick under a heavy foot or paw. It wasn’t something I would wish on anyone. My gaze fell on my pie, and I realized I didn’t want it any longer. “Maybe she’ll have found somebody else to camp with,” I suggested lamely, and pushed the pie away.

“Did you see anybody today?”

He was right. We had seen hardly a soul.

“She’s probably still walking right now,” Katz said with a hint of sudden heat. “Wondering where the hell we got to. Scared out of her chubby little wits.”

“Oh, don’t,” I half pleaded, and distractedly pushed the pie a half inch farther away.

He nodded an emphatic, busy, righteous little nod, and looked at me with a strange, glowing, accusatory expression that said, “And if she dies, let it be on your conscience.” And he was right; I was the ringleader here. This was my fault.

Then he leaned closer and said in a completely different tone of voice, “If you’re not going to eat that pie, can I have it?”

In the morning we breakfasted at a Hardees across the street and paid for a taxi to take us back to the trail. We didn’t speak about Mary Ellen or much of anything else. Returning to the trail after a night’s comforts in a town always left us disinclined to talk.

We were greeted with an immediate steep climb and walked slowly, almost gingerly. I always felt terrible on the trail the first day after a break. Katz, on the other hand, just always felt terrible. Whatever restorative effects a town visit offered always vanished with astounding swiftness on the trail. Within two minutes it was as if we had never been away-actually worse, because on a normal day I would not be laboring up a steep hill with a greasy, leaden Hardees breakfast threatening at every moment to come up for air.