This is Earl’s latest book and the third one of his that I have read. Mr. Booklog and I knew him slightly when he rented an apartment in our friend’s house after winning a grant and we found him delightful. I was enthralled by the two books of his that I have read, and one of them, Auto Biography, was reviewed here twice: by my brother and by me. So though I haven’t seen him in years, I think of him as my friend.
It was a great joy to read the details of his two hikes on the Appalachian Trail, one in 1990 and one in 2024 when he was sixty-five years old. I loved reading all the details of his preparations and the eventful times on the trail. The title refers to the location of a horrifying murder in 1990 of a young couple that he had spent time with and also knew from their entries on the trail registers. There have been few acts of violence on the trail, which makes them especially shocking. In this case, a madman killed a sweet and appealing young couple and took their equipment. He was apprehended before long and Earl describes the revelation of the event, the reaction of the couple’s parents, the reaction of other hikers, and the trial in sections inserted throughout the book. As a result, my reading was sometimes interrupted by weeping.
Sometimes Earl made me laugh aloud, particularly when he described the Doyle Hotel in Duncannon, PA, one of those towns the trail runs through. He first stayed there ten years after his first hike. Even his low expectations were too high and I’ve quoted three bits about his experience there:
The three shared bathrooms were moldy studies in communicable heartache, if not disease….As I turned down a dimly lit hallway toward my room, I was confronted by an ancient, emanciated man stumbling toward me, completely naked, yammering incoherently, and pinballing from one wall to the other….the bed was made, though with a single nubby sheet pulled over a cratered mattress years late for a date with the landfill.
As I read this book, Mr. Booklog and I talked about it and about his month on the trail in 1975. I found a folder of letters we wrote to each other while he was on the trail and what a treat it is to read. After reading Earl’s detailed descriptions, it’s fun to read about Mr. Booklog’s aches and pains, decisions about whether to keep hiking to the next shelter, the tribulations of the weather, joys of solitary hiking, and joys of being with other hikers. In his entries about birds, the beauty of the landscape, and how often it rained, his wonderful prose is on display. He wrote about sharing a shelter one night with ten boys (10-13) from an institution for juvenile delinquents: “I really wonder what they did to be sent there. They were really nice, very anxious to talk to me.”
Mr. Booklog wrote about a murder that occurred near Vandeventer Shelter in Tennessee that he learned about it after he arrived in Damascus, another trail-town. In a letter to me he wrote that the murderer had called the sheriff in Elizabethton and said he thought he murdered a girl on the A.T. The police found her (Janice Balza was her name) near the shelter. According to accounts I’ve seen online, he murdered her with a hatchet and she was left 100 yards from the trail. Mr. Booklog and other hikers had probably stayed at the shelter while her body was nearby, though no one he spoke to had encountered her previously on the trail. The three days Mr. Booklog stayed in Damascus was like summer camp, he said. The hikers ate, drank, listened to music and enjoyed each others’ company. They even had a group photo made.
While Earl’s book was wonderful, it paled in comparison to reading what Mr. Booklog wrote and all the memories of 1975 it brought up for me. Thank you, Earl.
Earl Swift, Up on Cove Mountain, Mariner Books, 2026, 360 pages (I read the kindle version). Available in the public library.