When I told people I was going to hike the Appalachian Trail this summer, the question they most often asked was, “Are you going alone?” – usually with strong emphasis on that last word.
Alone? Well, yes and no.
When you go to college, or when you join the Army, do people ask whether you are doing so alone? Like those other institutions, the Appalachian Trail through-hike, 2,179 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine (or the reverse, or the flip-flop, in which you start in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, hike south to Springer, then get back to Harper’s Ferry and hike north to Katahdin), attracts a variety of people who begin the trek as strangers but become part of a remarkable social unit.
Fifty-five days into the hike, I am pausing in the library in the small southwestern Virginia town of Glasgow to write this. Otherwise, I am out in the forests and the mountains with Pura Vida, Lightning Bolt, Blood Mountain, Grumpy, Squeaks, Sea Wolf, Goddess, Ghost, Olive, Tasty, Slow & Steady and hundreds of other people carrying backpacks, eating as much and as often as possible, and walking, walking.
We know each other by our trail names. I know Pura Vida’s actual name (Mark Mosher, 58, former professor of Latin American literature, now living in Costa Rica), and Lightning Bolt’s (Jeffrey Hale, 59, retired electrical engineer from Durham, N.C.), but I don’t know the others’ names, and they know me only as Whistler. When the trail is going downhill, and when I’m feeling energetic, I whistle. When it’s uphill, and when the pack feels especially heavy, I mostly just grunt.
Hiking the Appalachian Trail is a peculiarly two-dimensional experience. The trail is hardly a straight line; zigzagging every which way, it was created by stringing together a number of older, shorter trails, most of them laid out for day-hikers who wanted to climb some peak for a spectacular view. If you wanted simply to walk from Georgia to Maine, you could do so more quickly on back roads than on the trail.
Yet every hiker here is going from Point A to Point B, and the simplicity of that concept is reflected in a short, clear list of practical concerns. What is the weather supposed to be tomorrow? How near is the next water source? Is it easy to hitch a ride into Franklin-Gatlinburg-Hot Springs-Damascus-Pearisburg-Waynesboro-etc. to buy more food, or to find a hostel where I can take a shower and do laundry? My socks smell like a paper mill combined with a wastewater treatment plant and a tank of pickles.
The shared concerns partly explain how well through-hikers get along. Stopping for a lunch break, or settling into one of the many Adirondack-style shelters for the night, hikers are quietly alert to each other, careful of each other’s needs and personal space. Roll out your thin backpacking mattress on the shelter’s wooden floor, fluff up your sleeping bag and get into it, and in the sleeping bag next to you, sometimes less than a foot away, is another hiker whom you barely know. If you need to get up during the night, you switch your headlamp into its red mode, which provides enough light for you to see but is unlikely to disturb others. Move silently.
Most of each day is solitude. Some hikers travel in pairs, either because they planned to hike together or, more often, because they have met on the trail and discovered that their paces are similar. But many more walk alone, even if they are making the trek with a friend or spouse who’s up ahead or somewhere behind. In a day, I may encounter four or five southbound hikers and be overtaken by another four or five northbounders who hike faster than I do. Otherwise, I’m walking by myself for miles at a stretch.
Lightning Bolt, who has already done the through-hike a couple of times, hiked with me for nearly three weeks. That is, he hiked at his pace, much faster than mine, but waited for me at rest stops and shelters. I learned a lot from observing him – and then said a quick goodbye when he had to leave the trail and go home to Durham to replace a crown on one of his teeth.
That moment of departure illustrated a principle often repeated here: The trail will provide. At hostels and in some shops, hikers’ boxes contain things that one hiker has left behind, possibly useful to the next hiker to come along. An extra glove. A half-used propane canister. A spare hiking pole. I needed a water-repellent pack cover; when we got to a hostel in Franklin, North Carolina, Lightning Bolt promptly found one for me in the hikers’ box.
When Lightning Bolt decided he had to leave the trail and get back to Durham, we were somewhere in the vast woods and hills of east Tennessee. Phoning his daughter back home — cell phone connectivity is no sure thing on the Appalachian Trail, but this time he was lucky — he ascertained that an evening bus from Johnson City would get him to Durham by the next morning. So, how to get to Johnson City, 30 miles away?
The trail descended toward a small parking area on a back road, between the woods and an expanse of meadow. As Lightning Bolt reached the parking area, a silver pickup truck appeared around a curve. The driver slowed, pulled into the parking area, and got out to stretch his legs and enjoy the scenery.
One of Lightning Bolt’s favorite mottoes is “Ask, and ye shall receive.” “Can you take me to Johnson City?” he asked the driver.
“I can,” was the reply. In two minutes, Lightning Bolt was on his way to bus station.
This is an example of “trail magic.” Unexpectedly, yet with perfect timing, something will happen that solves a problem, lightens a load, keeps a hiker optimistic.
Not surprisingly, the most common trail magic involves food. One morning, I arrived at a spot where the trail crossed a forest road and found a family who had set up tables, folding chairs and a grill and were happily offering a substantial lunch to all hikers. I consumed three cheeseburgers, two Klondike bars, a Coca-Cola and four chocolate chip cookies.
No through-hiker can consume too many calories. Two miles later, on the top of a grass-covered North Carolina mountain called Max Patch, someone handed me an apple, and a bit farther on I had a Pepsi, a huge brownie and a beer.
The largest trail magic setup I have encountered was at Spivey Gap, North Carolina. Four people had driven there from Philadelphia to spend the weekend feeding all hikers who came along. Arriving in the afternoon and pitching our tents nearby, several of us gobbled up macaroni and cheese and chili in the evening, then eggs and homemade sausage the next morning before heading onward. The organizer of this trail magic was Badger, a hospital nurse who had made his own through-hike a couple of years earlier.
The smallest trail magic was an orange someone had left on a post. It was delicious.
This loosely knit, mutually supportive social unit includes many veterans. For some, especially those who have been deployed in combat, the trail may be a calmer way of dealing with the world than life in a city. It also includes plenty of recent college graduates and other 20-somethings who are making the most of their youth and energy before settling on what’s next. Other hikers have left one job or career and are postponing the next one. And a bunch of us are retirees who don’t play golf.
When we meet at a snack break or in a shelter, or now and then at a hostel in a town, we talk about how hard that last stretch of trail was, or how beautiful, or both. We talk about our equipment, or how far we’ll head tomorrow.
Now and then, someone talks about something in the current news, something in the world of television and shopping malls, but only as a joke.
John Stifler is a writer and teacher who lives in Florence. He hopes to reach Mount Katahdin by the second week of October.