Duncannon Daze

In the small town of Duncannon Pennsylvania, we spend two days lounging in the Doyle Hotel, a once-glamorous Inn that has housed travelers from near and far for over two centuries. Now its main business is providing cheap lodging to hikers on the Appalachian Trail, which passes directly through the town. Rooms are twenty-dollars a night, and a fair price. The hotel is the kind of place where only a thru-hiker would stay; dirty, run-down, odorous, and likely haunted. We choose to stay here partly from exhaustion after completing a strenuous multi-day section of the trail, but mostly from a desire to escape the brutal summertime heat which has descended onto the southern Appalachians like the biblical wrath of an angry God.

We spend the first day moving between the hotel and the little pizza place down the street where we buy microwaved mozzarella sticks and five-dollar pitchers of PBR, shuffling along the sidewalk in a heat-soaked daze. The first night it is so hot that I lay awake in the bed completely naked, both windows of the room wide open, the streetlamps shining below us like fuzzy cinders strewn along the empty streets. It is sweltering and miserable.

The next day is even hotter. The air in the hotel is soupy and hard to breathe. We try to decide what to do.

Lonebear’s knee is hurting badly. She wants to take a zero day to let it rest. Also it is miserably hot, too hot to be outside on the sidewalk for very long, let alone climbing mountains.

"I can't take another night in this hotel, though," Lonebear says, "we have to go somewhere else."

I understand. The age and history of the Doyle are enough to eclipse its decrepitude, but only for a day or so. There is no soap or TP in the hallway bathroom. I make the mistake of looking beneath the bed and find a wasteland of dust and hair that, if photographed correctly, could be mistaken for a moonscape. It is the kind of place where the air feels dirty. Our room was beginning to feel like a sauna.

We have heard there is a free hostel in the basement of one of the churches which allegedly has air-conditioning. We decide to move there if we can find it.

Outside the heat is brutal, the sun beating down on everything with relentless force. Before hiking the trail I had spent little time outside of Georgia, and for some reason had assumed that there was no real summer weather above the Mason Dixon line. I had believed this kind of heat was a hell belonging only to the south. I now realize my folly. The ground is like a griddle, radiating heat-waves that shimmer above the road in a translucent haze. The cracked sidewalk is too bright to look at, and after a while I am slightly snow-blind from it. Everywhere is a sizzle that might or might not be imaginary.

We walk by rows of houses with faded paint, passing train tracks and little roads that lead to the river. We pass a thermometer nailed to the wall of a house that reads one hundred and two.

We go to two churches before finding the right one, a Baptist and a Lutheran. An old man who lived next to the Lutheran church saw us standing in the parking lot and came out and directed us to the correct one.

"Wife's cooking up a heap'a corn-on-the-cob tonight," the old man said, "why don't y'all young'ins stay fur dinner?" We thank him for the offer but decline.

The hostel is at the Assembly of God church, which is actually right on the trail. A sign on the church says that the hostel is in the basement of the parsonage next door. At the back of the parsonage there are folding tables set up beneath the shade of a canopy. Here we meet a young, long-haired hiker smoking a Bugler and playing with a Husky on a leash. He is shirtless and tattooed. He introduces himself through a cloud of smoke.

"Tennessee Slim," he says, "and this is Majin Buu." He pats the Husky.

"Majin Buu," Lonebear says, "Is that Native American?"

"No, it's from Dragon Ball Z."

"Oh."

"This place is great," Tennessee Slim says, "I've been here a couple days. They say donations accepted but you don't have to pay anything really. People give a lot of food to the church too. I've been living off out-of-date cereal since I got here. It's a little stale but who gives a shit?"

A long stone staircase leads down to a door into the basement. Within is a single wide room with gray walls. There is a kitchenette and bathroom and a foosball table. Ground-level windows let light stream in, but it still seems dark after the blazing sun. The air is cool and full of mercy.

The floor is covered with sleeping pads and sleeping bags and hikers stretched out on them. Some are awake, but most appear to be sleeping. Alabama High-Pockets is there, lounging against the wall.

"All these people are night-hiking." He tells us in a whisper, " It's so hot during the day everyone just sleeps. Then they're gonna hike out at night when the sun goes down."

We stretch out our own bags on the floor near Alabama. We decide to walk to the store to look for a knee-brace for Lonebear.

It is past midday and the heat is oppressive. Any bare skin feels immediately raw, and the backs of my tanned arms turn a dull red. In this kind of heat time and distance seem to melt. Minuets pass like molasses and miles stretch past any known measurement. It seems to take forever to get anywhere. Everyone we pass on the sidewalks looks like they're moving through syrup.

We walk through town and down the highway. Other hikers have taped markers to the backs of stop signs with the word GROCERY and arrows guiding the way down the streets. Many must have made this same march before us. We have to walk along the side of a busy highway where there is no shoulder, just a gully. We walk between the guardrail and the cars and wind buffets our faces every time someone drives by. We keep our legs sliding against the metal, leaning as far from the cars as we can. The sun pounds down. We move down this six-inch strip of gravel and broken glass, stepping over trash and the bloated bodies of dead animals, the ragged, dangerous margin that is all foot travelers get in this car-crazy country.

I am used to the Georgia summers and fair alright. Lonebear wilts like a delicate New England flower. Between the heat and the knee-pain and the traffic, she moves in miserable silence. We buy her a new knee-brace at the grocery store, and then just wander around the aisles to stay in the air-conditioning a little longer. After an hour or so we make the long, hot trudge back through Duncannon to the hostel.

Things feel frayed and old. The town has the sun-faded feel of former glory, like many mountain towns once home to manufacturing industries long since outsourced overseas. A gutted feeling, a sense of remembered prosperity. Locals left to stitch together livelihoods clerking at dollar stores and working weekends tending bar. A grand and faded thing at the center, no longer even noticed by the people who call these towns home, just inhabited like the rooms of an ancient, run-down building still somehow standing.