Loneliness of the long-distance hiker

HERE'S SOMETHING exhilarating about walking 1,000 miles. I'm told. You see, I've only walked 994.8 miles, all of it along the Appalachian Trail. People ask me, "So, Waldo, how far have you gotten so far?" And I find myself answering, "Oh, a thousand miles! Well...", I'll pause, embarrassed now, "only 994.8." People laugh, trying to react to what appears to be hyper-modesty or perhaps a plea for recognition, despite my shortcoming. But my embarrassment can be understood only by somebody who has walked that 994.8 miles, or farther, along the Appalachian Trail.

The Appalachian Trail is a footpath leading from Georgia to Maine, 2,159.1 miles of twisty trail. It was conceived by Benton MacKaye (rhymes with "sky"), an architect and outdoorsman, in an article that appeared in Journal of the American Institute of Architects in 1921. In "The Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning", MacKaye described "civilized" people as being "helpless as canaries in a cage". He went on to say that people had become so caught up in city life that they had lost sight of the importance of venturing into the outdoors. He proposed an elaborate trail system stretching along the east coast that would be far more than just a footpath. He suggested that it go from the highest peak in the north, Mount Washington, to the highest peak in the south, Mount Mitchell, connecting and adding to pre-existing trails. It was a four-fold plan: The Trail, Shelter Camps, Community Groups, and Food and Farm Camps.

To summarize, he envisioned the trail as a way of life, employment for 40,000 people and a place for vacation and recreation for the rest of America. The trail would be blazed and shelters would be built by volunteers, people who, in the spirit of cooperation, would see work as being play. Communities would then be constructed around more popular shelters and rest areas. Finally, farms would provide food to the communities and hikers throughout. Benton MacKaye basically envisioned a back-to-nature form of communal living.

This idea of his snowballed rapidly, though not without much debate. New trail clubs began to pop up, pre-existing ones began to adapt their trails to the concept of connecting them north and south. One problem that immediately became clear was where the Appalachian Trail should go. Many trail clubs felt that their trail's terminus was right where it ought to be, and that the next trail club north or south of them should work from there. In 1925 the Appalachian Trail Conference was created to coordinate the construction and lay of the Appalachian Trail. By August 14, 1937, all of the kinks were worked out, with the trail extending, physically, far beyond MacKaye's original plan. The completed continuous footpath now ran from Springer Mountain, Georgia, to Mount Katahdin, Maine. MacKaye's dream was realized to the extent that the continuous footpath and shelters materialized. The remainder of his vision, communities and farms, remains unfufilled.

The Appalachian Trail was not created with a continuous hike in mind. It was created with the more humble purpose of a place for a few days or weeks of hiking. Up until the mid-80s, people going the whole length (known as thru-hikers) were few and far between. In 1996 over 2,000 people signed in at Amicalola Falls State Park, in Georgia, declaring their intentions of hiking all the way. Based on statistics from previous years, we can predict that only 200 hard-core, grizzled, tired, happy hikers will make it through Baxter State Park, Maine, to climb Mount Katahdin.

I have, starting months before my hike began, fancied myself one of those 200 hard-core hikers. Not to say that I was hard-core, mind you. My hiking experience was limited. Most of my backpacking was done with the Boy Scouts, Troop 7 in Free Union, Virginia. Not that there's anything invalid about hiking with the Boy Scouts, but it just didn't seem like real backpacking, somehow.

In Spring of 1995 I headed off, thinking in terms of my impending thru-hike, and did some non-Boy Scout hiking. I did a few days of solo trekking in the Shenandoah National Park, hoping to overcome my concern of being alone in the woods. The days were much easier than I'd thought. The nights were a little different. A simple shelter mouse, scurrying along the floor, becomes an angry bear's claw-tap, in the dark of the night. By a series of serendipitous events during this hike, I managed to meet up with my friend Ryan Williamson, a hikin' fool. He was, for fun, hiking much of the Shenandoah National Park at night. I had enough trouble comprehending why somebody would undertake such a hike that I headed off with him for a few nights to do the same. It certainly helped to be hiking with another person, for I simply couldn't see swatting my way through this thick blackness myself. Walking grew easier after the moon had risen, trees casting shadows across the pale glow of the ground, the world viewed in negative. Occasional use of flashlights made sign-reading simpler, though Ryan seemed to enjoy the challenge of life without man-generated light. On the second night I did something that I'd never done before -- over 20 miles of hiking. Admittedly, I hardly remember the last few miles. I actually fell asleep a few times while walking, something I'd never thought was possible. I weenied out after 23 miles, though Ryan continued on and walked all the way home. This was my first taste of real hiking. It's a shame I slept through it.

Between this and a few other, more fondly-recalled, hikes, I discovered my hiking style, speed and equipment needs. And so began the great adventure of saving up the money and purchasing the equipment for The Long Haul. One day, after working for a few weeks at Comet.Net, a budding Internet Service Provider, a co-worker laughed at my hike, saying that he doubted I -- my mother swears I used an Ethernet Card for a pacifier -- could go for more than a few days without being around a computer. The discussion that followed led to the idea of carrying a laptop and a cellular phone while hiking and updating a World Wide Web site with journal entries and photos of my trip. It would be a great way to add content to the Internet and educate people about the value of our natural resources and how to make use of them. Research showed that it was within our financial grasp, and it seemed to be a modest proposal for modern-day technology. Such innocent beginnings.

On April 10, 1996, five days before I began my hike, Comet.Net purchased an IBM ThinkPad and a cellular modem. There was a frantic effort to get it set up to complete the simple task of sending documents over a cellular connection. It took over a month and a half for that task to be completed, due to faults with the cellular modem we had purchased from Motorola. The fault was not, actually, with the modem; the problem was that Motorola, unbelievably, never actually got around to making a cable to connect their modem to a cellphone, despite that the modem we purchased was sold specifically as a cellular modem. We never found out why this happened, but it certainly did affect my plans.

The week that I got my cable from Motorola, when I was several hundred miles into my hike, my IBM ThinkPad broke. It shattered into many pieces, plastic bits and glass shards littering my backpack. Apparently, it was not created with backpacking in mind. We considered and tried out several other options for computers since the loss of the IBM. We have come as far as the Apple Newton, a cute little 1.2 pound laptop. Now we find that Apple, in failing to create a keyboard or proper modem drivers for its system, has not lived up to its promises. So we continue on the quest for The Perfect Backpacker's Laptop.

All of this--the failures and achievements with technology, the delayed journal entries and spotty updates, the newspaper interviews and regular radio shows--has had nothing to do with my hike. I know that, from the perspective of the reader of the newspaper or the browser of the web, it appears as if I am a computer geek first, a hiker second. But the fact is, when I hit that trail, when I am among my trail buddies slogging through streams, dancing through forests or screaming my name from the tops of mountains, everything else disappears. It's all irrelevant. All that matters is me, my hike, how far I've gotten that day and my friends. Whether or not Joe Webhead in Kansas can read about what I ate for breakfast will not make me hike faster, it will not take away that cramp in my left calf, and it will not fix my food shortage. So it all fades to gray. But when I get home, when I get to a motel and get my e-mail, when I pick up my cellular phone, it all floods back, and my world is one of worries, of bills, money, birthdays, and college applications. And so I hike on.

I have had many people ask me, "Why?" My answer has been, so far, "Because it's there." The fellow who originally said that died while climbing Mount Everest, which has encouraged me to choose a new response. I really don't know what is making me hike this hike. Despite that I am now at home, waiting for my broken foot to heal, I still fancy myself one of those 200 who will finish the trail this year. Before I began this hike, I never could have grasped how important the Appalachian Trail is to me, to many others and to our culture. Even now, I really don't think I know the half of what the trail is all about. I don't think that the desire to know the secrets of the AT is what's driving me on, it's merely something that comes with the trip: karmic scenery. So, back to the original question: Why? Why don't I just call it quits? Perhaps others see a broken foot as a sign that maybe I've gone far enough. Nonetheless, I will continue until I have hiked the whole distance. Maybe that is what separates the 200 from the 1800, the drive, the willpower, the goal of inhaling the frosty Katahdin sunrise. Maybe that is what makes me only walked only 994.8 miles. Maybe it's because I fear that I'm not one of those 200.

All photos by Waldo L. Jaquith, all rights reserved., © 1996 -- Waldo Takes A Walk.

---

Back to the Journals page