Yes, he had. His trail name was Sailor J, he was from Baltimore, and he’d started the Appalachian Trail at Springer Mountain, Georgia, on April third. “What’ll you do now?” I asked.

The notion seemed to startle him. “Well, first I’ve got to figure out how to get down this mountain. They tell me all the trails are rough. Then I guess I’ll hang around Maine for a few days, and then, I’m not sure.” I offered him a handful of gorp, and we parted. Shortly afterward I reached the cairn at the summit that has ended thousands of hikes like Sailor J’s.

Some time after dark this evening I drove my truck down the eight-mile dirt road from Roaring Brook Campground to the Baxter State Park gatehouse. At the posted speed limit of 20 miles an hour, it seemed a long way. I could hardly believe that only 23 years ago some friends and I skied up that road in February, hauling pulks loaded with winter gear, and the next day climbed up onto the mountain. Not tonight. I doubted that when I got out of the truck I’d be able even to walk.

Still, the jet-black sky, unstained by any earthly light, beckoned. So at one opening in the canopy of trees, I stopped, turned everything off, and got out. Jupiter hung in the south like a great landing light; the band of the Milky Way stretched all across the sky that I could see. I climbed stiffly back in and putted down to the gate, where two young rangers checked me out. (The park is tightly managed, and the staff knows where each visitor is, or ought to be, at all times.)

Now, an hour later, the night sky is washed in the glare of a hundred parking lot security lights, the aircraft warning lights of the smokestack of the Millinocket paper mill, and the luminescence of a McDonald’s. I’ve checked into an Econolodge rather than dodge moose and deer all night. Dawn, the desk clerk, has given me a room with a “pool view” (translation: no outside window), and I can’t get cell phone service. If I could, I’d call Mother to tell her I’m off the mountain, safe, uninjured, bathed, and bedded; also that I’m having trouble getting around the room because I can’t lift my feet high enough to climb up over the edge of the carpet.

Mount Katahdin (Thoreau, who climbed it in the 1840s, spelled it “Ktaadn.”) rears up dramatically from an infinity of spruce, pine, fir, and birch. Its Wabnaki name means “the big one.” It’s surrounded by 200,000-acre Baxter State Park. Former Governor Percy Baxter, heir to a Portland fortune and a genuine character, had loved brook trout fishing in the area as a child, and grew to feel that the magnificent peak and its forests should be rescued from constant cycles of logging and preserved as a wildlife sanctuary. He tried fruitlessly for years to get the legislature to set aside money for the purpose. Frustrated, he began to buy the land himself in bits and pieces.

Often he was able to buy a section for a very low price by, for example, allowing the seller a few more rounds of logging on the property before turning it over. Eventually Baxter had put together a patchwork quilt of land, which he gave to the people of Maine under a deed of gift with strict conditions: If human activity threatens the wild nature of the land or any of its native denizens, it is to be halted till the impact has been negated. And if any abuses are not mitigated or halted, ownership reverts to Baxter’s heirs. This explains the strict rules governing the park’s use.

Our crew spent the first night in the bunkhouse at Roaring Brook Campground, planning to climb the mountain the next day and spend the second night at another bunkhouse higher up, in the spectacular setting of Chimney Pond on the floor of the cirque called the Great Basin. But that first night was one that will live in infamy. I hadn’t remembered that the bunks were plywood, so had brought no sleeping pad; the cooking gear was too small to make my supper; the woodstove heated the place to at least 90; and one of the guys had a very loud Cheyne-Stokes snore that would have kept everyone else awake in the best of conditions. It was no problem to roll out at five in the morning, grumpy and unrefreshed, pack silently in the dark, and start up the 3.3-mile trail to Chimney Pond. We dropped our overnight gear in the bunkhouse there, and tackled the mountain.

I’d forgotten something else: There’s no easy trail up or down Mount Katahdin. Carved by mountain glaciers that left long boulder trains for miles around, shattered into rubble by freezing in postglacial times, and festooned with rock slides, the mountainsides are obstacle courses – for an old guy, at least; the kids around us swarmed up and down it like orangutans. At the top, on which I hadn’t stood since 1971, I felt little exhilaration, but instead the same concern voiced by Sailor J: How in the world am I going to get down this thing? Luckily, the rest of the crew stayed with me all the way back to Chimney Pond, and one of them even added my pack to his own as I clambered slowly down – backwards on almost all the steepest, most threatening pitches.

On the way I swore that if there was any gas at all in the tank when I got back to Chimney Pond, I’d keep going and forego the pleasures of another night of plywood, snoring, and starvation. And so I did...