Skyline Sketches are short stories from Appalachia, AMC’s journal of mountaineering and conservation. Each captures a unique perspective about what we feel and the ways we connect in the mountains.
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Appalachian Trail thru-hiker Don Root, called by his trail name Taps, had been on the AT for a number of months, and now, on the verge of crossing into Maine, he was treating himself to a stay at each of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s high huts.
On Sunday, July 17, 2022, Taps arrived for his night’s stay at Lakes of the Clouds Hut. We—the fill-in croo substituting for the summer croo during their midseason break—were not yet aware of it, but this would turn out to be a special guest.
Taps, who normally lives in Beaumont, Texas, was a retired Navy captain, a submariner, and the former commanding officer of the USS West Virginia. He had earned his trail name from his practice of playing “Taps” on his bugle around sunset every night of the journey, wherever he happened to be that evening. His business card advertised that he played the music to support the Wounded Warrior Project, founded in 2003 to help military, their families, and caregivers.
Taps joined the AMC that year to qualify for the member rates in the huts. He carried not the usual three-valve trumpet many “Taps” players use for military funerals and other occasions, but an actual bugle, a silver one, such as might have been seen in an old Western movie featuring the U.S. Cavalry. And what a beautiful instrument it was. Taps kept it polished and strapped it on the outside of his pack, where all could see it as he hiked.
Of course, the substitute croo asked him to play “Taps.”
Near sunset and just after the hut naturalist’s presentation on early years of Lakes of the Clouds Hut, Taps stood at the far end of the dining room in the presence of most of the hut’s 90-plus guests and croo.
Those who might have wondered about the seeming incongruity of a Navy man attempting to play the difficult instrument most closely associated with the cavalry need not have worried. Every one of the 24 notes was rendered faithfully, somberly, and reverently. Taps had indeed mastered his instrument. When he had finished playing, you could have heard a pin drop. Then, a few seconds later, enthusiastic applause erupted.
The large, open dining space at Lakes is a memorial space displaying, among other things, a plaque in memory of former AMC President Judge William Fuller (father of five hut croo members) and another larger plaque at the end of the dining room commemorating Judge Fuller’s son, Ted, hutmaster at Lakes in 1943 who enlisted in the Army and, fifteen months later, was killed in the Battle of the Bulge.
If Taps’s rendering of “Taps” can be said to have paid tribute to the AMC’s commemoration of the Fuller family, then it was likely an occasion not seen at Lakes of the Clouds since the mid-1940s.