Chapter Three: A Long Walk

Chapter 3 

A Long Walk

I didn't really realize, when i started writing this, why I was doing it, and I certainly didn't expect folks to read it. But you are. And now I accept its gravity--my life, leading up to and during this very moment, has been a series of magical and wondrous adventures, astonishing individuals and incredibly beautiful memories, marked throughout with pain and contusions generally erupting from the maelstrom that raged only in my own head. These days, my mind feels like it has reached some type of critical mass, and that expunging these memories may be a very basic part of preparing myself for the next inevitable series of events, of wonder, of beauty, the literal action of expressing the old to make room for the new, to allow for transition, for growth, for true healing. I hope only to convey things truthfully, honestly and from my own perspective---but it is in no way to say that my memories are the exact way things were. I have a wild ability to retain things, to recall faces and names, scents and images, but this dictation of my life is only going to be more difficult as I continue writing. It is easy to write about your youth, about your childhood, but as I look back on my life as a whole it seems to have progressed deeper and deeper into places that many people never go, both physically and mentally, and especially into forms of darkness that will hurt me to reconsider. I think they are valuable, and I also recognize that I have created some form of an image of myself that more people than I, potentially, am even able to realize, respect and admire. Some see me as some type of hero figure, a mythic soul--and I do not say that in a self-absorbed sense. I have painted my life and I have been nearly paralyzingly blessed throughout the entire experience, protected both by my fellow man and many guardian angels, some who have taken specific form and nature in the recent days. Until this juncture, honestly the last few weeks, most of my life has been experienced devoid of a real sense of self-awareness and many of the things that happened to me simply happened to me, my part in them like a play that was written by somebody else, for me, and I simply walked the walk as it came to me, finding myself, sometimes, in places that were absolutely not where I should have been. I am quite brave, but that bravery was linked to the presence of ignorance for a great time. Whatever the occasion, though. I saw them all through, to their ends, sometimes bitter and occasionally resulting in death and great loss, and here I remain, at the foot of yet another mountain. I am going to continue relating things chronologically, even though I feel like skipping forward, to the things that seem important in the moment, but, if nothing else, I have a need to put my memories in some kind of order, to give voice to my life in a timely fashion, perhaps only so I can make some sense of it. As John Prine, again, sings, "Just give me one extra season/ So i can figure out the other four." There is never time enough. My two hands overflow with memories, with love, with talent. On top of all that, I feel this incredible sense of urgency about it all so i'm writing this down, as quickly as I can, and sharing it with some people, as quickly as I can, so that I do not forget where I have been as I take steps into a new direction. Pretty simple.

Folks seem to consider my, and many other people's, thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail some type of a feat. I am here to say that walking a very long way, 'specially along a well marked, well traversed and well maintained footpath, boils down to a rhythm that pales in comparison to the hoops and shenanigans of everyday life in town. It is simple. You wake up, you eat, you walk, you eat, you walk more, you eat again, you locate a place to sleep, you do that, and you wake up the next day and repeat the whole thing over again. Follow this equation for an amount of time and, perils of the woods and physical body permitting, you will find yourself standing on a mountaintop a great distance from whence you began. For any thru-hiker of the AT, the moment you stand atop Mt. Katahdin in Maine and look southward, supposing you started in the south and walked toward the north, is something that will live in infamy in your mind for the rest of your days and is, quite certainly, one of those moments that is rather difficult to put into words, for you have accomplished your goal. 

My family, my counselor and myself; we were correct. A long distance walk was something that my soul required at that confusing juncture, but even that did not heal my deep and strange sense of self-loathing, and my bulimia continued unabated for the entire duration of the trail. This is a fact that is astonishing to me. How a person can do something like that, achieve something like that, and still believe themselves unworthy of self-love…perhaps I have been crazy, at least for portions of my days. 

The Appalachian Trail is an incredible thing and, if you've never considered walking it, I recommend it with my entire heart. You begin in Georgia, in the tall pines and the scrub brush, you wander through North Carolina, through the Great Smoky Mountains and all their vistas of shades of blue. I reckoned I would be on the walk in solitude--my first night in the woods there were thirty-five other souls at the shelter. All these people, from all places in the world, all coming to do something so organic and innate to our species--walk. Most folks were in the midst of some great transition; a divorce, a mid-life crisis, the loss of a job or a loved one and, of course, some of 'em were out there simply for the hell of it. Whatever the case, the people I found on that walk through the woods continue to be some of the finest folks I know and they have inspired me greatly. They say, once you've walked it, a day does not pass where you don't think of it, and they are correct. In Virginia I contracted a painful tendonitis in the fronts of my ankles and became, instead, a Trail Angel for many of my friends for a section of the journey, picking 'em up in Samuel Carmickle and driving them home to my pops place in Radford where we ate both cold and hot food and slept in beds of cotton. In the Grayson Highlands, wild ponies nibbled on the ends of my trekking poles, craving the salt that had permeated the cork from the sweat on my hands. I celebrated my twentieth birthday alone on a mountaintop outside of Waynesboro along the Blue Ridge Parkway, toasting the sunset, and another year of life, with an orange that i had been saving for days. In West Virginia I learned about heat stroke.The White Mountains of New Hampshire astonished me with their grandeur and I found myself atop Mount Washington on one of the only crystal clear and warm days in the entire year. I saw my first moose. I swam in lakes and ponds. Again, there were pancakes consumed. I even lost my virginity somewhere along the way, but it wasn't a particularly monumental version of that event. 

In Tennessee I obtained my trail name from the infamous Miss Janet Hensely--Tomato Gravy, an homage to my vegetarianism and my adoration of her breakfast concoction in my honor. In Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, I learned how Reddi-Whip can be transformed into whippets from the local rednecks and in Vermont, we stayed at a hostel run by the Twelve Tribes, uh, cult? And they asked for only one thing in return for food and shelter--that the hikers assist with a favor in the morning. The six females were asked to slice and dice approximately thirty bananas for the fruit salads, the three men were requested to move a four-burner, cast iron stove and over down a flight of stairs. I also witnessed, first hand, the glorious difference between the genders--by the end of things, in Maine, all the women looked like goddesses, with thighs of thunder. The men, however, clearly had just stumbled straight out of the Holocaust and took to consuming entire blocks of cheese and uncooked ramen noodles with sticks of butter in vain attempts to regain sufficient calories. Ah, the wonders of being a member of the more intelligent sex. Ha! We are built to sustain life more efficiently, it seems. Also in Maine I was diagnosed, at least I think I was, with Lymes disease. I walked across fields, down roads, up and down mountains, forded rivers, laughed in the rain and stood atop rocky ridgelines in the midst of hailstorms, my frozen hair whipping at my cheeks, a great smile on my face. I slept in firetowers, beside campfires, near rivers and drank straight out of every water source I located, including beaver ponds, and didn't contract giardia. I saw my first moose in the wild and realized that moose can sprint away in the dead of night, through the woods, silently. I shared laughter, pace, stories and loudly sang Disney songs while walking with my friends and ended up atop Katahdin, on the last day of the parks open season, October 15th, 2006, with ten other glorious people, in the freezing rain. I am told the view from the top is something to remember, but we couldn't see a damn thing but the inside of a cloud.

All in all, and all in all, it was a great success. I didn't exactly walk the Trail, though, I more like sprinted with stints of sitting in between. I once covered thirty-five miles in one day and attempted to celebrate my victory with a Smirnoff Ice at the bar, purchased for me by my brother Don and resulting in the entire place being shut down and all of us kicked out into the streets for my underage drinking. As I can figure, i was in the woods for a total of six months, but only four of them was I walking. The rest was spent reveling in the great beauty of the seasons, of the heat of the summer and crisp and abundant fireworks of the fall, or renting cars and taking road trips to see Iron and Wine play in an abandoned swimming pool or to the Jersey shorelines where, to everyones dismay, we bared our glorious hiker shorts, socks and t-shirt tan lines. We smelled terrible the entire time and it was utterly glorious. 

And then, you reach the final blaze. Since then, i find myself wishing the rest of life was so well marked; if somebody would blaze ahead and let me know where exactly I am supposed to head from here, that would truly simplify things. But, that's not how this, nor any, story goes, and the mystery lies in that moment when one journey ends.