Best of all, there were views, luscious and golden, to left and right. For four hundred miles through Virginia, the Blue Ridge is essentially a single long fin, only a mile or two wide, notched here and there with deep,V-shaped passes called gaps but otherwise holding generally steady at about 3,000 feet, with the broad green Valley of Virginia stretching off to the Allegheny Mountains to the west and lazy pastoral piedmont to the east. So here each time we hauled ourselves to a mountaintop and stepped onto a rocky overlook, instead of seeing nothing but endless tufted green mountains stretching to the horizon, we got airy views of a real, lived-in world: sunny farms, clustered hamlets, clumps of woodland, and winding highways, all made exquisitely picturesque by distance. Even an interstate highway, with its cloverleaf interchanges and parallel roadways, looked benign and thoughtful, like the illustrations you used to get in children’s books in my boyhood, showing an America that was busy and on the move but not too busy to be attractive.

We walked for a week and hardly saw a soul. One afternoon I met a man who had been section hiking for twenty-five years with a bicycle and a car. Each morning he would drop the bike at a finishing point ten miles or so down the trail, drive the car back to the start, hike between the two and cycle back to his car. He did this for two weeks every April and figured he had about another twenty years to go. Another day I followed an older man, lean and rangy, who looked to be well into his seventies. He had a small, old-fashioned day pack of tawny canvas and moved with extraordinary swiftness. Two or three times an hour I would sight him just ahead, fifty or sixty yards away, vanishing into the trees. Though he moved much faster than I did and never seemed to rest, he was always there. Wherever there was fifty or sixty yards of view, there he would be-just the back of him, just disappearing. It was like following a ghost. I tried to catch up and couldn’t. He never looked at me that I could see, but I was sure he was aware of me behind him. You get a kind of sixth sense for the presence of others in the woods, and when you realize people are near, you always pause to let them catch up, just to exchange pleasantries and say hello and maybe find out if anyone has heard a weather forecast. But the man ahead never paused, never varied his pace, never looked back. In the late afternoon he vanished and I never saw him again.

In the evening, I told Katz about it.

“Jesus,” he muttered privately, “now he’s hallucinating on me.” But the next day Katz saw him all day-behind him, following, always near but never overtaking. It was very weird. After that, neither of us saw him again. We didn’t see anyone.

In consequence, we had shelters to ourselves each night, which was a big treat. You know your life has grown pathetic when you’re thrilled to have a covered wooden platform to call your own, but there you are-we were thrilled. The shelters along this section of trail were mostly new and spanking clean. Several were even provisioned with a broom-a cozy, domestic touch. Moreover, the brooms were used (weused them, and whistled while we did it), proving that if you give an AT hiker an appliance of comfort he will use it responsibly. Each shelter had a nearby privy, a good water source, and a picnic table, so we could prepare and eat our meals in a more or less normal posture instead of squatting on damp logs. All of these are great luxuries on the trail. On the fourth night, just as I was facing the dismal prospect of finishing my only book and thereafter having nothing to do in the evenings but lie in the half light and listen to Katz snore, I was delighted, thrilled, sublimely gratified to find that some earlier user had left a Graham Greene paperback. If there is one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy-something we could all do with more of in our lives.

So I was happy. We were doing fifteen or sixteen miles a day, nothing like the twenty-five miles we had been promised we would do, but still a perfectly respectable distance by our lights. I felt springy and fit and for the first time in years had a stomach that didn’t look like a ball bag. I was still weary and stiff at the end of the day-that never stopped-but I had reached the point where aches and blisters were so central a feature of my existence that I ceased to notice them. Each time you leave the cossetted and hygienic world of towns and take yourself into the hills, you go through a series of staged transformations-a kind of gentle descent into squalor-and each time it is as if you have never done it before. At the end of the first day, you feel mildly, self-consciously, grubby; by the second day, disgustingly so; by the third, you are beyond caring; by the fourth, you have forgotten what it is like not to be like this. Hunger, too, follows a defined pattern. On the first night you’re starving for your noodles; on the second night you’re starving but wish it wasn’t noodles; on the third you don’t want the noodles but know you had better eat something; by the fourth you have no appetite at all but just eat because that is what you do at this time of day. I can’t explain it, but it’s strangely agreeable.

And then something happens to make you realize how much-how immeasurably much-you want to revisit the real world. On our sixth night, after a long day in uncharacteristically dense woods, we emerged towards evening at a small grassy clearing on a high bluff with a long, sensational, unobstructed view to the north and west. The sun was just falling behind the distant blue-gray Allegheny ridge, and the country between-a plain of broad, orderly farms, each with a clump of trees and a farmhouse-was just at that point where it was beginning to drain of color. But the feature that made us gawk was a town-a real town, the first we had seen in a week-that stood perhaps six or seven miles to the north. From where we stood we could just make out what were clearly the large, brightly lit and colored signs of roadside restaurants and big motels. I don’t think I have ever seen anything that looked half so beautiful, a quarter so tantalizing. I would almost swear to you I could smell the aroma of grilling steaks wafting up to us on the evening air. We stared at it for ages, as if it were something we had read about in books but had never expected to see.

“Waynesboro,” I said to Katz at last.

He nodded solemnly. “How far?”

I pulled out my map and had a look. “About eight miles by trail.”

He nodded solemnly again. “Good,” he said. It was, I realized, the longest conversation we had had in two or three days, but there was no need to say anything more. We had been a week on the trail and were going to town the next day. That was self-evident. We would hike eight miles, get a room, have a shower, phone home, do laundry, eat dinner, buy groceries, watch TV, sleep in a bed, eat breakfast, return to the trail. All this was known and obvious. Everything we did was known and obvious. It was wonderful really.

So we pitched our tents and fixed noodles with the last of our water, then sat side by side on a log, eating in silence, facing Waynesboro. A full moon rose in the pale evening sky and glowed with a rich white inner light that brought to mind, but perfectly, the creamy inside of an Oreo cookie. (Eventually on the trail everything reminds you of food.) After a long period of silence, I turned to Katz and asked him abruptly, in a tone that was hopeful rather than accusatory, “Do you know how to make any thing besides noodles?” I had been thinking, I guess, about resupplying the next day.

He thought about this for a good while. “French toast,” he said at last, and grew silent for a long period before inclining his head towards me very slightly and saying: “You?”

“No,” I said at length. “Nothing.”