Almost There

Today is my anniversary. A year ago today (around lunchtime), I reached the summit of Mount Katahdin and officially finished my Appalachian Trail thru-hike.  Of course, I still needed to hike back down, but what's five or six more miles?

A couple weeks ago, I posted a chapter from the manuscript I wrote about my hike. I'm still waiting to hear back from a few of the agents I queried, but so far there have been no takers. Keep your fingers crossed! Maybe to mark this occasion, I'll post another chapter today. This is the very first chapter of the book. I hope you like it, but I really hope it will show up in your bookstore someday soon.

Almost There

Later, a friend of mine would refer to her as “the crazy lady.”  That’s no way to narrow down the vast field of characters you meet on the Appalachian Trail, except in terms of gender.  It’s also pretty judgmental, coming from a guy who got so dehydrated and hungry that he hallucinated unicorns shortly before meeting her.

I didn’t think that she was genuinely crazy.  Not any more than any other person who grabs a pack and decides to spend a few months hiking between Georgia and Maine.  Like the cat said, “We’re all mad here.”  The specific flavors of crazy vary a bit, but I’d like to be very clear on one point before we delve too deeply into my 2014 Appalachian Trail thru-hike: I never met anyone who I thought posed any genuine danger to me or others.  There were one or two people I didn’t really like, but it was mostly a vague feeling of disinterest.  I just didn’t want to hang out with them.  I never met anyone that I thought was going to pull a knife while I was sleeping and start poking it into people.

This woman was, if anything, overly optimistic, and maybe a little naïve about the scope of what lay before her.  To be fair, that’s how everyone starts a thru-hike.  My little party was four northbound (or NOBO) thru-hikers.  We had met each other individually earlier along the trail, and had serendipitously come together as a group at Winturri Shelter, just north of Rutland, Vermont.  She was hiking alone.  I met her a little before noon on June 29.  I had spent the morning climbing South Horn and Bigelow Mountain, with a ten-minute break on Avery Peak, and was heading down the other side when I met her on her way up.  I’d already seen my highest elevation for the day, but mosquitoes whining incessantly in my ears the night before had kept me from getting any sleep, so I was exhausted, and I confess that although I smiled and listened attentively when she spoke with me, a persistent part of my brain was annoyed that I couldn’t return to the day’s work of getting to West Carry Pond until the conversation ended.  I wasn’t proud of that part of me, so I shoved it in a corner and ignored it as best I could.

“Good morning,” I had opened.

“Hi!” She beamed at me, overflowing with the giddy optimism I remembered from my first weeks on the trail.  Hell, I could remember having it as recently as ten days earlier, but somewhere in between I’d crossed an invisible line, and was now powered by sheer force of will to see this thing finished.  She was southbound, or SOBO, so she had only been on the trail for a couple of weeks.  I was on track to finish in less than ten days.  “What’s your name?”

I stood to one side of the trail, which in that section was a long, sloped sheet of granite canted slightly to one side.  It had been like that most of the way down from the summit, with intermittent stands of small, scrubby trees. Smiling through my exhaustion, I told her, “Treefrog.”  For the first few days on the trail, your brain stumbles on that question, unsure whether to respond with your given name or your “trail name,” which is a bit like a CB handle for hikers.  It becomes your identity so quickly that I started correcting other hikers who would answer “James” or “Ellen” by reminding them that they were “Beans” or “Hoof It.”  In Tennessee, I tried to order a pizza as “Treefrog” and the 50ish woman at the counter drawled, “Are you serious?” with such nasal disbelief that my brother Chris, who was visiting me at the time, barely made it outside before doubling over with laughter.

She gazed past me, up the slope that would lead her to views of Flagstaff Lake and the peak named for Myron Avery, the man who did most of the hard work of making the Appalachian Trail a reality after Benton MacKaye came up with the idea.  MacKaye is more well known, but Avery actually got things done.  It was head in the clouds versus feet on the ground, traits which are both experienced in a very literal sense by the people enjoying the combined efforts of the two men.  “Almost there,” she breathed, with what I took to be an almost reverential awe.

Nodding, I looked back over my shoulder.  “Yeah, not much further, you’ll be at the top.”  I’d been on both sides of similar conversations for almost four months, but most conversations between people who have just met on the trail become routine after a little while.  Same questions, different answers.  What’s your name?  When did you start (an easy, unobtrusive way to determine which of you is faster)?  Where are you heading tonight?  If you see them again, or if the conversation lasts a while, you get into more detail.  Where are you from?  What do you do in The World?  What brings you to the trail?  Talk to the same person long enough, and you will, in dribs and drabs, get their life story.

She shook her head and looked at me like I’d missed the joke.  “No, that’s me.  Almost There.”

We talked a few minutes more, while she radiated good vibes and optimism and I waved half-heartedly at the few mosquitoes who had ventured above the treeline to bring me the itchy welts they saw as gifts that keep on giving.  Almost There had sold everything before starting her hike.  “Got rid of it all,” she said, nodding proudly.  With both hands, she pinched at a roll of stomach below her hip belt.  “Gonna get rid of this, too!”

I was warming to her.  I couldn’t help it.  I knew I’d make it to West Carry Pond in plenty of time.  My real concern was making it from there to the ferry across the Kennebec River the next day—really just a man with a canoe, but his canoe was the official route across the Kennebec, and if we didn’t make it across by the time he stopped service for the day at 11 AM, we’d have to backtrack 3.6 miles to the nearest campsite and wait for the next day.  Our little party was locked in to our schedule.  We had to finish on the 8^th, because that’s when my family would be there to give us a ride out of the park.  Two of the others had already purchased plane tickets for the 9^th—we couldn’t afford to lose a day.  Almost There had no such concerns.  She was past the Kennebec, and from here to Georgia all she had to do was keep walking, at whatever speed pleased her most.  In her mind, she wasn’t just beginning the hike, but the rest of her life.

“I haven’t decided yet what to do next.  I’ve lived in Maine all my life, but I think it’s time for a change. It’ll be hard saying goodbye, but maybe I’ll just keep going when I get to the end, you know?”

No, I didn’t know.  I knew that I wanted to sleep for about three days straight.  I knew that I felt capable of eating an entire salad bar myself, and chasing it with a pan of lasagna, and maybe some waffles and sausage, and a glass of milk.  I knew that if I saw another “Scenic Viewpoint” sign, I would react exactly as I had for the past week: with a middle finger and a dirty look, never breaking stride.  My body was depleted of all energy reserves.  The night before, I had used a borrowed cell phone to call my girlfriend and told her, nearly in tears, to cancel all hiking plans she had for us in Maine after I finished Katahdin.

But I remembered being where Almost There was.  Not physically, but spiritually.  I remembered practically glowing with excitement, even three months into the trip, knowing that I was finally doing something I’d wanted to do since I was eleven.  It made me happy to see her still so full of high spirits, still looking forward to an adventure I had almost completed.

“I’ve got my passport with me—I could just keep traveling!”  Maybe she would.  She wouldn’t even have to finish the trail.  Many people started a thru-hike and later decide it wasn’t what they expected.  Most of those just go home, but some maintain their momentum and go on to do something else.  In North Carolina, I’d met a man whose wife had to leave the trail when she dislocated her toe, but they were looking into a long-distance canoe trip to replace their thru-hike aspirations.  I suspect that there are an awful lot of people who set out on the trail hoping to find a new direction.  Almost There was the fourth person I’d met who’d sold everything, including their homes, before starting the journey, and their first post-hike task would be to find a new place to live.  I had met a 27-year U.S. Army veteran who set out on the trail to heal her soul, two men who had struggled with drug addiction and who viewed hiking as a form of rehab, and two people who hiked to recover from the death of a spouse.  To some degree, I think many people expect to experience some sort of revelatory change along the trail.  It was one of the questions I often fielded from people who knew a little about the trail, but had never completed a Long Hike themselves: How has it changed you?

I usually laughed it off, telling them that it had made me hairier, hungrier, and tired, because the truth of it is that those were the only changes in me I could discern.  Otherwise, I didn’t feel Changed so much as… Honed.  I had spent most of my life becoming someone who knew they could hike the Appalachian Trail, who had the physical ability and the mental discipline to succeed at such an endeavor, and although I spent 121 days proving that, I didn’t feel like I’d become a new person.  Still, I remembered having the bubbling cheeriness of Almost There, the bright hope for the trail ahead of me.  And, yes, the hope that it would change me somehow.  Most of my time after college had been spent in generally futile efforts to find gainful employment in my field, and although I’d had a few jobs, I’d spent almost as much time out of work, looking for a company that wanted me.  It wore me down, and eroded the confidence I’d taken so long to build.  I was generally a happy person, but I wasn’t really happy with where I was.  In time, that felt more like I wasn’t happy with who I was.  There was something very attractive about the idea of walking into the woods to disappear, and to be replaced, weeks or months later, by someone better.