At the beginning of the summer after his high school graduation, John Hunt accepts a job as a junior counselor at a hiking camp which operates in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. He is hired in lieu of his older brother, a college student who is off to Europe for a few months.
John's father has a little talk with John before the boy leaves for his summer work. He tries to tell John that relationships with adults are tricky, hard – sometimes – to understand, and therefore a bit dangerous. Be cautious, he advises.
John is a healthy lad; he feels competent to deal with challenges; and he sets himself the task of understanding the adults he will be working with. But his father's warning – only partially understood – makes him a little jittery, especially when his initial contacts with those adults are immediately fraught with behaviors and ideas unfamiliar to him.
His chief boss is Tooley Madison, whom he meets unexpectedly in a strange place in a strange mood. Tooley turns out to be unlike anyone John has ever known. John watches as the arriving campers almost instantly place unfaltering trust in the man, and he observes how the boys come to love this, their leader, within the first few days.
It is Tooley who introduces the campers to the mythical Zip, whose inspiring presence accompanies the group as they climb up and down the ridges in the beautiful mountains.
Tooley evokes in John reactions which are new and worrisome. John, just as predicted, cannot make heads nor tails of his feelings. There is an early discussion of charisma among the members of the group, but understanding that sociological phenomenon does not settle John's uneasiness. A phone call to his dad helps, and John determines to live with the mystery as it is.
Then there is Richard, the high school teacher who seems at first a familiar type to John – a person who shares the middle-class, liberal views which dominate John's understanding of the world. John is, from the beginning, at ease with Richard, but not in the way the younger boys relate to Tooley.
Richard, for his part, understands and values John's qualities – the old aristocratic traits of beauty, intelligence, and virtue. Rich is a dedicated teacher, and he finds in John the perfect pupil. The relationship between the two flourishes. But Richard, though he understands much more of the world and life and time than John does, is very different from Tooley – more down-to-earth, more disciplined, less openly affectionate. John does not understand why the two men interact so well. Another mystery.
Clyde, at first, seems just like a hired man to John. Clyde does not hike on the trail with the rest of the group. He drives the truck and packs in to and out of the appointed campsites. John fairly quickly sees how important Clyde is to the functioning of the group, but only gradually does he discover that Clyde contributes to the spiritual well-being of the hikers. Clyde seems the most mundane of the three adult leaders, but as John gets to know Clyde better – from working closely with him on several occasions – he begins to feel the warm, caring interest Clyde has for the hikers and to grasp the depth of understanding, the sense of reverence, which Clyde has for the forest and the mountains. From Clyde, too, come insights into the events on the trail, objective observations which anchor John to the realities of the outside world.
And while John struggles with making sense of these adults and their relationships, things are happening – real events are demanding attention. At Gravelly Springs Shelter, for example, the hikers encounter an old mountaineer who had come up to that spot to spend alone a few of his last days. He is dying of a cancer which has deformed his face, but he is full of a sweetness that the boys have rarely seen, and they sense some clue here of why Tooley is so attractive to them. With great reluctance they leave the old man, and the experience leads to a serious give and take about male role-playing in society.
At another time, after climbing Mary's Rock, they encounter a Methodist youth group on a religious retreat. Those young people turn out to be John's age, and he finds among them soul-mates with whom to share a refreshed reverence for nature. In the music and in the self-searching of their activities, John re-commits himself to a high calling to always serve others. In a later discussion of this episode with Richard, John learns to evaluate this religious exercise and to see himself more clearly.
There is a crisis which Rich and John – separated at the time from the rest of the hikers – sense, as if psychically, from afar. When they catch up to the group, John sees Tooley in the role of a worried parent – nervous and upset, down from Olympus. An allergic reaction to a wasp sting has sent one of the boys off to a hospital in the lowlands, and Tooley is anxiously awaiting Clyde's return with news of the boy's condition. Tooley plans to go to the boy as soon as Clyde gets back, and with Rich there to take command, he asks John to hike with him out to the road. John sees Tooley's vulnerability, observes his Chief's less-than-Stoic agitation in the face of a situation which is out of his hands. But he feels flattered to be taken as a confidant and even more warmly drawn to this man who shows such deep concern for the stricken boy. That crisis passes.
It is in Rip Rap Hollow that John gets a further glimpse into Tooley's character. There, Tooley tells a story about himself that is full of symbolism, full of a kind of melancholy, a sense of confusion and defeat. But the story, by a strange set of circumstances, becomes a story within a story, and John sees that much of life is like that – stories within stories within stories. And it is at Rip Rap that John gets a hint that all hikes may be pilgrimages.
Days later, without warning, all of what John thinks is his growing understanding of Tooley is demolished by a letter which he finds on the trail. The letter describes a situation which is so foreign to John that the words themselves might as well be Greek. When, in his amazement, he shares the letter with Richard, they are confronted by Tooley, who claims the letter as his own. John is forced to see the Chief as a man who leads a life of quiet desperation and he cannot fathom how the generous, loving Tooley, a man so full of understanding and compassion, can see life as futile and meaningless. It makes for a personal crisis for John.
Richard calmly helps John through this insight into the paradoxes of existence, but John is a wiser and sadder fellow. And then, again without warning, Burgess shows up. John has known Burgess only as a character in stories told on the trail – stories about last year's junior counselor. But Burgess is real, and he has come back to Tooley to seek help in his own personal and philosophical crisis. Burgess knows that Tooley has somehow changed his life and, in doing that, has precipitated his crisis, so he has come back to the source. Burgess has a rational mind, but his heart is full of ghosts.
As the summer wanes and the hikers come to their last few days on the trail as a band of brothers, they create a ritual honoring the mythic Zip and embodying the sense of union they have found or created in the wilderness. But, despite the ritual, parting, as Richard says, is like a small death.
The pain of saying goodbye makes it almost impossible for John to articulate to himself what he has learned. But as the story ends, the lessons tumble out – rich, philosophical lessons that anticipate a maturity coming on quickly.
