Skywalker--Close Encounters on the Appalachian Trail (2 page)

I had a long history as a
streetwalker.
I had lived in Chicago from 1985 to 1995, and had worked downtown as a futures trader at the Chicago Board of Trade. After a few years I had figured out the best way to avoid the paralyzing city traffic was to walk home. At first I began walking until I passed over the Chicago River, at which point I would catch the bus for the remainder of the trip home. After a few months I found the walk so cathartic that I began walking all four miles home every day. People I had ridden the bus with for years asked me at work what in the heck I was doing walking, often in the freezing cold, straight up the bus line after being on my feet on all day. But I enjoyed the notoriety, and, better yet, saved one dollar per day in bus tokens.

In 1995 I got a job in London and reveled in trooping all over the west end of that historic, old city, often to the consternation of male and female companions. After leaving London in 1999 I lived in four Latin American countries over the next four years. In each country I continued this habit of walking what I then considered to be long distances of several miles at a time. I had come to love walking.

And so it was with special interest that I read Bill Bryson’s book about his Appalachian Trail adventures. Bryson and Katz, his hapless high school sidekick, both in their mid-forties, had set off to hike the entire trail, but ran into one problem after another. During their fourth week in the Great Smoky Mountains—after days of slogging through mud, slush, and even snow—they bailed out and took a bus to Shenandoah National Park in northern Virginia. From there they challenged the trail for a couple hundred more miles, until a spooky encounter with a phantom bear shooed them once more. They disbanded, but reconstituted their partnership in Maine where, in the Hundred Mile Wilderness, Katz got lost. After a frightening search they happened upon each other the next morning. That was the final straw: They immediately took the nearest side trail back to civilization. Overall, they had actually hiked only about seven hundred of the trail’s almost 2,200 miles.

A light bulb went off in my head when I read in Bryson’s book that of the approximately four million people who hike some portion of the Appalachian Trail (AT) each year, approximately two thousand start off with the objective of being “thru-hikers.” A thru-hiker is someone who hikes the entire 2,175 mile trail in one year.

I immediately decided I wanted to attempt a thru-hike, despite a daunting statistic: Ninety percent of the two thousand drop out along the way.

For the next six years, no matter where I lived, the idea of thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail haunted and beckoned me. Despite my now relentless habit of striding seemingly endless miles through big cities, the cold fact was that I had never even spent a night in the woods. Many times during these years I’d wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and imagine what it would be like waking up like that in the deep woods. Would I be able to sleep out there?

And then there was the obvious, looming question:
Was I strong enough and determined enough to walk 2,175 miles in mostly rugged, mountainous terrain from the north Georgia mountains, where the trail begins, to Mount Katahdin in north central Maine
? It is usually too cold to start off in the southern Appalachians before late March, and one needs to arrive in northern Maine by early October to beat winter. Thus, a thru-hiker has a window of opportunity of a bit over six months. Instead of the several pedestrian miles per day I was accustomed to walking, I would daily need to cover considerably longer distances in mostly mountainous terrain, hauling a fully provisioned backpack. If I tried it I would be taking on—in my mid-forties—a challenge on a vastly different scale and of a completely different character than anything I had attempted up to that point.

On November 19, 2004, my father died. The year before his death I had mentioned the possibility of trying to hike the entire Appalachian Trail. He was incredulous. Later that afternoon, while exercising on his patio, an electrical storm chased me into his house. “What do you do on the AT when the lightning is cracking like this?” I mused.

“Hide under a bear,” he deadpanned in his trademark ironic tone.

Within weeks of his death I made my decision. Despite my lack of hiking experience and some serious doubts about my capability for such a monumental journey, I was going to give it my all in 2005—I would hike the entire Appalachian Trail.

It seemed logical to start my preparation by finding the best hiking equipment—something about which I knew almost nothing. I had never owned even the most basic items, such as a sleeping bag, a tent, or a backpack. I didn’t even know what to take. Everyone said REI is the premier company in the outdoor equipment business, and I was determined to spend whatever it took to gain the greatest odds of success on this quixotic journey.

Once inside REI’s main Atlanta store I realized that purchasing outdoor equipment involved more decisions than I had ever fathomed. Everything was further complicated by a most unusual personal characteristic—I’m 6’ 11”. When I started looking at tents, it immediately became clear that my long frame wouldn’t fit in any one-person tent. A very upbeat employee from Georgia Tech then showed me a two-person tent, but it was two-and-a-half pounds heavier than any one-person tent. Worse yet, even the two-person tent seemed claustrophobic, and I wondered if I’d be able to sleep in it.

Undecided, I walked over and muttered to the sales assistant in the boots section. He happened to be a former AT thru-hiker. “What you need is a bivy sack,” he said enthusiastically. “They’re lighter weight, and you can sleep anywhere you want.”

“Oh, yeah,” I responded with my hopes lifted. We rushed across the store to look at some bivy sacks. But, upon seeing how prophylactic they appeared, my lifted hopes were soon dashed.

Noticing my existential crisis, a nice, willowy brunette sales assistant approached. “You would probably be perfect for a tarp,” she said sincerely. “They’re open on both sides so you won’t feel claustrophobic. Also, they’re lighter than either bivy sacks or tents.”

“Could you show me one?” I pleaded. We went over and started fumbling through them. But when the Georgia Tech student noticed this he came over and said, “Dude. Tarps are much tougher to set up than tents. Also, they don’t protect you from bugs and cold weather. I’ve used both. Trust me on this.”

Reluctantly, I finally decided on the two-person tent and bought a pair of boots and a backpack after similarly baffling discussions with still more REI personnel. This first of several shopping trips set a pattern. I was unusually vulnerable to the equipment recommendation of whichever “expert” I was speaking with at the time. Usually, I just ended up following the suggestion of the last person I spoke with. I was the easiest lay in town.

From the beginning
he
seemed
different
. He was a professor of childhood education at Lee’s McRae College in his daytime job. But what Warren Doyle was most renowned for was having hiked the entire Appalachian Trail a record
thirteen
times—that’s 28,275 miles, which is more than the earth’s circumference—and for being one of the trail’s epic personalities. He once even held the record for the fastest thru-hike of the entire AT—sixty-six days! So it was probably safe to say he was different.

I had signed up for his four-day Appalachian Trail Institute seminar in Banner Elk, North Carolina on
how
to thru-hike the AT. Naturally, I was quite curious as to what such a person was like. In his mid-fifties, and with a vibrant, flowing, white beard covering a bespectacled demeanor, Dr. Doyle was of a short, powerful build. But surprisingly he didn’t
appear
to be in great physical shape. After brief salutations he quickly led us to the university lunch hall as I closely observed his walking stride—quite unexceptional.

But once the formal seminar began it quickly became clear that the key to the real Doyle lay not in any exceptional physical characteristic, but in his deeply held philosophy of the so-called “outdoor lifestyle.” “Walking the AT is not recreation,” he began. “It is an education and a job. And walking the entire AT is not ‘going on a hike,’ but a journey with deeper ramifications.”

“The trail is inherently difficult,” he said with great conviction, and he went to great lengths to demonstrate just that. Various ‘Doylisms’ included:

During the seventh straight day of rain a drenched hiker should exclaim: “Great, the streams are full of drinking water.”

During the third straight week of mosquitoes and black flies: “At least they aren’t wasps.”

And when you are dehydrated or have the runs: “Ho! Ha! Who cares? This is the song of the trail!”

He said there were two main reasons people drop off the trail. They try to go too fast, and they carry too much weight. In a line that I was to repeat many times in moments of duress, Doyle said, “There is no way you can go too slow on the uphills.” This made sense when he pointed out that many more calories are burned going up a hill at a fast pace than at a slow pace. “And it’s all about calories out there.”

The second point—of not carrying too much weight—was a personal obsession for Warren. In short, he was an ultra-minimalist. He spoke rhapsodically about the advantages of a lighter tarp versus a tent. “That’s a no-brainer,” he said.

As for hiking boots, there were no ifs, ands, or buts. One should never, ever wear them, but rather something much lighter. “I went to a garage sale once,” he recalled fondly, “and bought five pairs of used sneakers for a total of six dollars. They carried me all the way from Georgia to Maine.”

And I just didn’t know what to make of suggestions such as this one: “Instead of purchasing mittens, we could save weight by just using our spare pair of socks when our hands got cold.” After all,
who wants to be known as the hiker with the smelly hands?

On the second afternoon he drove us in his recently purchased $350 car to the AT, which is about ten miles from Lee’s McRae College. It was my first look at the trail. Amy’s too. She was a fifty-four-year-old Singaporean woman who had extensive experience as a cross-country skier above the Arctic Circle in Norway. Of Chinese extraction, Amy had been preparing for years, in Confucian-like fashion, to thru-hike the AT. The AT is marked by two-by-six inch white-blazes spray painted on trees and rocks. When Amy saw her first blaze she lost her vaunted self-control and began jumping for joy. Meanwhile, I insecurely bolted up the mountain ahead of the others and made sure I “beat” them to the top. My classmates were impressed by my speed. Warren wasn’t.

“It’s much better to be a smart hiker than a strong hiker,” he said with great conviction. The next morning in class he strongly emphasized that we had not attempted anything difficult yet: “The mountains in New Hampshire and Maine will be more difficult by a factor of seven or eight,” he solemnly intoned.