The Maryland Challenge: Borderline Insanity

"How much farther is it to the parking lot?" asked one, his face stricken with exhaustion. Obviously he'd been hiking for a few days, and he'd had enough.

"About 10 minutes," I replied.

"What if you've hiked 15 miles today?" he pleaded, convinced I was lying.

"We've hiked 31," I said without enthusiasm as I passed.

"Thirty-one?" he exclaimed. "Thirty-one miles?!"

At that point, as the trail climbed, all that was left to do was keep walking. The sun disappeared as we crested the hill and navigated down into the river basin. Toby trudged ahead as I fell behind. The hiking poles in my hand became walking canes, twice saving me from pitching off the trail. As we looped around the last switchback, the trail leveled out and spilled us onto a stretch of blacktop. We crossed the road and kept on until the Appalachian Trail reached the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal towpath. That gravel path marked the beginning of the end: three miles of flat terrain straight to the edge of Maryland. After that last descent, which had tortured my ankles, knees and hips, walking on level ground was like floating.

It was just past 8 p.m. and a full moon was rising, casting the Potomac and the towpath in silvery light. To our right, a carpet of algae, glowing electric green in the moonlight, covered the canal. To our left, families set up camps on the river basin, their flashlights dancing in massive tents like surreal shadow-puppets as we slipped silently by. I was moving on, ready to be done with the damn thing already, when Toby called out "Stop!" in an urgent whisper. I froze -- earlier he'd told me a story about a massive rattlesnake he'd once seen stretched across the trail, and with less than a mile to go, I didn't yearn for a detour to the nearest emergency room. He pointed to a black lump 15 feet ahead. Skunk? Fox? Nope . . . just a beaver, as we discovered when the massive beast thwapped its tail on the path before sliding into the canal.

We left the C&O by crossing the Byron Memorial Footbridge, which carries the trail into Harpers Ferry. As we walked over the Potomac, the border between West Virginia and Maryland and our finish line, we were too stricken with exhaustion, too delirious, to do more than smile and keep on walking. We reached the car in the National Park Service parking lot, where we'd left it a lifetime ago, at 9:30 p.m., and drove to a nearby gas station craving every processed food imaginable. We got to the nearby Comfort Inn by 10.

And after 15 1/2 hours of hiking, the hardest part of the day was climbing three flights of stairs and trudging the five yards of carpeted hallway that stood between us and our beds.