Porter laughs at the question. "Dude," he says, "that place is like Disneyland. There's a bunch of characters up there dressed up in costumes, and people love it -- for the shock value. I mean, they're constantly asking Pirate for autographs."
Porter's account of his ex-wife's exit is more sober. "We never fought," he says. "She avoided conflict. But in the end, she wanted her own successes. She wanted to have a travel agency, and I said, 'You could do adventure travel and hook it into Mountain Crossings.' Then I found out that was not what she wanted to hear. She saw success as an individual act."
As Margie Porter tells it, she was living in the shadow of Winton's dream. "When he had a chance to buy Mountain Crossings," she says, "we didn't sit down as a couple and say, 'Let's talk about this.' No, it was, 'We're going for this!' And me being a people pleaser, I just went with it." Margie signed on as a helpmate, as a bookkeeper, and then, she says, "I just stuffed my unhappiness inside me." She began overeating. Over a period of years, she ballooned to 290 pounds.
Margie Porter is now a volunteer coordinator for a domestic violence shelter. She says Winton was supportive as she struggled with, and then overcame, food addiction. He helped pay for a $30,000 gastric bypass surgery. But Margie's sadness continued, and over the last two years of their marriage, she became erratic in her management of the store's finances. She took frequent draws from Mountain Crossings to cover family living expenses. She also spent money on herself; at one point, she went with girlfriends to Cancún.
Porter saw it all happening, but he never scrutinized the books. He was too busy tolerating strange up at the store -- and by the time Margie left him, she had run up credit card debts totaling more than $50,000. Porter was so strapped that soon he stopped making mortgage payments on his house. The place is a wreck now, because Porter has given up. The bank is poised to foreclose.
But as he sits there with me, kicking back in his La-Z-Boy, Porter still speaks of his ex with kind equanimity. "We're friends, dude," he says. "Look, I don't know anybody who's ever ended a marriage of 21 years by going to the mediator and laughing together, but that's what we did. I care about her, and maybe I should have held her hand a little more. She burned out and didn't let anyone know. You can't blame her for that, brother. Life just is what it is. And I take full responsibility for not keeping track of our accounts." He holds up his hand: "Guilty as charged."
On my third morning in Georgia, a few hikers wander in, eager to undergo a store ritual known as The Shakedown. This involves a Mountain Crossings staff member spending one to four hours with a given AT thru hiker, sifting through each item in his or her pack, in hopes of reducing the pack's weight to a tolerable 28 or 30 pounds. Everything -- underwear, pain meds, support stockings, corn pads, and girlie mags -- is laid out on the store's carpet.
The ritual could easily be invasive and awkward, like being frisked by airport security. But Porter has turned Mountain Crossings into a chummy and soothing clubhouse. The rafters are hung with some 700 pairs of hiking boots used by AT legends known by their trail names: Model T, Sawman, Crazy Number 1. The walls are crazily Scotch-taped with 200 nearly identical photos, each one depicting a victorious customer standing, arms raised, at the AT's northern terminus.
Many of these hikers send Porter notes, thanking him for saving their lives by proffering equipment advice. The man knows gear. Before he had kids, Porter owned 12 backpacks, five sleeping bags, six camp stoves, three bikes, and three snowboards. He produced camping gear on his own commercial sewing machine. Since buying Mountain Crossings, he has helped the shoemaker Dunham design hiking boots, and he has produced his own line of ultralight sleeping bags.
At one point, I watch Porter take over a shakedown initiated by Baltimore Jack. The two men confer a moment like surgeons standing above a faulty aorta. "He won't be parted with that sleeping pad," Jack says, "and it weighs 2 pounds."
"All right," Porter says with a shrug. "That's his luxury item."
"But he has made some good adjustments and sacrifices," Jack intones.
Lucas Fykes, 25, has most notably shucked his 8-pound backpacking guitar and agreed to send it home via Mountain Crossings's UPS service. As his elders ponder his case, he seems nervous and vulnerable. Fykes is a horse trainer. Back home in Kentucky, he says, he lost both his parents, then his aunt. "There was pretty much no one left," he tells me, "so I decided to get away and hike the AT. I was scared to come in here, though. I thought they'd make me get rid of stuff I didn't want to get rid of."
Porter seems to sense Fykes's need for support. He plays the wry older brother.
"You know how to play this thing?" he says, picking an emergency whistle out of Fykes's pack. "And what's gonna happen when you're in trouble?" Porter grimaces in mock terror and then imitates a moron. "Where's my whistle?" he says. "Aw, shit, I can't find it. I thought it was in my first-aid kit."
