And the weather perked up. The sun came out; the air grew milder and heavier; the little mountain streams became lively with the tumble and gurgle of meltwater. I even heard the tentative twitter of birds. Above 4,500 feet, the snow lingered and the air felt refrigerated, but lower down the snow retreated in daily bounds until by the third day it was no more than scrappy patches on the darkest slopes. It really wasn’t bad at all, though Katz refused to admit it. I didn’t care. I just walked. I was very happy.

For two days, Katz barely spoke to me. On the second night, at nine o’clock, an unlikely noise came from his tent-the punctured-air click of a beverage can being opened-and he said in a pugnacious tone, “Do you know what that was, Bryson? Cream soda. You know what else? I’m drinking it right now, and I’m not giving you any. And you know what else? It’s delicious.” There was a slurpy, intentionally amplified drinking noise. “Mmmm-mmmm. Dee-light-ful.” Another slurp. “And do you know why I’m drinking it now? Because it’s 9P.M. -time for the ‘X-Files,’ my favorite program of all time.” There was a long moment’s drinking noise, the sound of a tent zip parting, the tink of an empty can landing in undergrowth, the tent zip closing. “Man, that was so good. Now fuck you and good night.”

And that was the end of it. In the morning he was fine.

Katz never really did get into hiking, though goodness knows he tried. From time to time, I believe, he glimpsed that there was something-some elusive, elemental something-that made being out in the woods almost gratifying. Occasionally, he would exclaim over a view or regard with admiration some passing marvel of nature, but mostly to him hiking was a tiring, dirty, pointless slog between distantly spaced comfort zones. I, meanwhile, was wholly, mindlessly, very contentedly absorbed with the business of just pushing forward. My congenital distraction sometimes fascinated him and sometimes amused him, but mostly it just drove him crazy.

Late on the morning of the fourth day after leaving Franklin, I was perched on a big green rock waiting for Katz after it dawned on me that I had not seen him for some time. When at last he came along, he was even more disheveled than usual. There were twigs in his hair, an arresting new tear on his flannel shirt, and a trickle of dried blood on his forehead. He dropped his pack and sat heavily beside me with his water bottle, took a long swig, mopped his forehead, checked his hand for blood, and finally said, in a conversational tone: “How did you get around that tree back there?”

“What tree?”

“The fallen tree, back there. The one across the ledge.”

I thought for a minute. “I don’t remember it.”

“What do you mean you don’t remember it? It was blocking the path, for crying out loud.”

I thought again, harder, and shook my head with a look of feeble apology. I could see he was heading towards exasperation.

“Just back there four, five hundred yards.” He paused, waiting for a spark of recognition, and couldn’t believe that it wasn’t forthcoming. “One side a sheer cliff, the other side a thicket of brambles with no way through, and in the middle a big fallen tree. You had to have noticed it.”

“Whereabouts was it exactly?” I asked, as if stalling for time.

Katz couldn’t contain his irritation. “Just back there, for christ sake. One side cliff, other side brambles, and in the middle a big fallen-down oak with about this much clearance.” He held his hand about fourteen inches off the ground and was dumbfounded by my blank look. “Bryson, I don’t know what you’re taking, but I gotta have some of it. The tree was too high to climb over and too low to crawl under and there wasn’t any way around it. It took me a half hour to get over it, and I cut myself all to shit in the process. How could you not remember it?”

“It might come to me after a bit,” I hopefully. Katz shook his head sadly. I was never entirely certain why he found my mental absences so irritating-whether he thought I was being willfully obstuse to annoy him or whether he felt I was unreasonably cheating hardship by failing to notice it-but I made a private pledge to remain alert and fully conscious for a while, so not to exasperate him. Two hours later we had one of those hallelujah moments that come but rarely on the trail. We were walking along the lofty breast of a mountain called High Top when the trees parted at a granite overlook and we were confronted with an arresting prospect-a sudden new world of big, muscular, comparatively craggy mountain, steeped in haze and nudged at the distant margins by moody-looking clouds, at once deeply beckoning and rather awesome.

We had found the Smokies.

Far below, squeezed into a narrow valley, was Fontana Lake, a long, fjordlike arm of pale green water. At the lake’s western end, where the Little Tennessee River flows into it, stands a big hydroelectric dam, 480 feet high, built by the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1930s. It is the biggest dam in America east of the Mississippi and something of an attraction for people who like concrete in volume. We hastened down the trail to it as we had an inkling that there was a visitors’ center there, which meant the possibility of a cafeteria and other gratifying contacts with the developed world. At the very least, we speculated excitedly, there would be vending machines and rest rooms, where we could wash and get fresh water, look in a mirror-briefly be groomed and civilized.

There was indeed a visitors’ center, but it was shut. A peeling notice taped to the glass said it wouldn’t open for another month. The vending machines were empty and unplugged, and to our dismay even the rest rooms were locked Katz found a tap on an outside wall and turned it, but the water had been shut off. We sighed, exchanged stoic, long-suffering looks, and pushed on.

The trail crossed the lake on the top of the dam. The mountains before us didn’t so much rise from the lake as rear from it, like startled beasts. It was clear at a glance that we were entering a new realm of magnificence and challenge. The far shore of the lake marked the southern boundary of Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Ahead lay 800 square miles of dense, steeply mountainous forest, with seven days and 71 miles of rigorous hiking before, we came out the other end and could dream again of cheeseburgers, Cokes, flush toilets, and running water. It would have been nice, at the very least, to have set off with clean hands and faces. I hadn’t told Katz, but we were about to traverse sixteen peaks above 6,000 feet, including Clingmans Dome, the highest point on the AT at 6,643 feet (just 41 feet less than nearby Mount Mitchell, the highest mountain in the eastern United States). I was eager and excited-even Katz seemed cautiously keen-for there was a good deal to be excited about.

For one thing, we had just picked up another state-our third, Tennessee-which always brings a sense of achievement on the trail. For nearly its whole length through the Smokies, the AT marks the boundary between North Carolina and Tennessee. I liked this very much, the idea of being able to stand with my left foot in one state and my right foot in the other whenever I wanted, which was often, or to choose at rest breaks between sitting on a log in Tennessee and a rock in North Carolina, or to pee across state lines, or many other variations. Then there was the excitement of all the new things we might see in these rich, dark, storied mountains-giant salamanders and towering tulip trees and the famous jack-o-lantern mushroom, which glows at night with a greenish phosphorescent light called foxfire. Perhaps we would even see a bear (downwind, from a safe distance, oblivious of me, interested exclusively in Katz, if either of us). Above all, there was the hop-the conviction-that spring could not be far off, that every passing day had to bring us closer to it, and that here in the natural Eden of the Smokies it would surely, at last, burst forth.