For those who make pilgrimages to the wilds carrying the
essentials of survival on their backs, there is only rule – hike your own hike.
Even though as in life, you may for a time, spend part of
that journey in the close company of others, ultimately, when you shoulder a
pack and seek the solace of wilderness, you walk alone.
The Mecca of all long-distance hikes in the United States is
the storied Appalachian Trail that stretches 2,185 miles from Springer Mountain
in Georgia to the lofty summit of Katahdin in Maine.
Granted the peaks of the Appalachian Range are mere hills
compared to the Rockies. It is their advanced age, however, not youth and
inexperience, that dictates their diminished situation. Atop these ancient
mountains that pushed skyward 400 million years before the Himalayas began
their geologic rise, the trail climbs the highest peaks and passes through some
of the most scenic and wild areas on the East Coast.
While some of it features highly engineered switchbacks for
ease of walking, other stretches are chaotic jumbles of ankle-biting rocks. There
are heights to scale, streams to ford, bears to fend off, and extremes of heat
and cold to endure, all while carrying 40 pounds on your back. The rewards are
more sublime -- views out 100 miles, the embrace of unmanicured nature, and the
satisfaction at being able to look up as the alpenglow fades in the western sky
to marvel at how far you’ve come.
Those who accept its physical challenge come to understand
the route wasn’t laid out to be easy on the feet. It was chosen to be nourishment
and inspiration to the soul.
I was reminded of that last weekend when I spent three days hiking in Maine's 100-Mile Wilderness near Rainbow Lake. It was two years ago, while trying to route-find a new way into that stretch from the Golden Road to the north, on old logging roads, that I snagged a root in a skidder rut with my foot and dislocated my hip. Fortunately, it went back in when I landed on it. It hurt like hell and the two-mile hike back to the truck was agony. Having good friends who took turns hefting my full pack, filled with everything for a four-day trip, was a Godsend.
Sitting in the Emergency Room in Millinocket the doctor noticed no broken bones on my x-ray. "Boy, you do have a lot of arthritis in that hip," he said. It was news to me as I had never had any pain.
Over the next two months, however, things went downhill. The verdict nearly a year later -- I needed a new hip.
So last fall, I had the surgery with the winter to recover. Over the past summer I built up my day hiking endurance. That set up my determination to get back into Rainbow Lake, to finally reach my original destination.
An estimated 2,500 people set out to hike the AT end-to-end
each year. Slightly more than 10 percent succeed. The woods near the first road
crossing north of Springer are often littered with cast off gear, the detritus
of poor planning, unreasonable expectations, and the premature evaporation of what
at first seemed to be a boundless supply of perseverance.
Some stop due to injury; others when the tangential tug of gravity
from lives and loves back home can no longer be ignored.
Some run out of time. Some run out of money. Some run out of
heart.
For others, vagabond dreams surrender to a new daily monotony
and the reality of being at times cold, wet, bug bit, hungry, sore and tired –
and often all of the above.
Others depart unable to accept the notion of themselves as sole
confidante, needing more entertainment than is offered by the metronome of
their own pulse.
Not all are comfortable with powerful rhythm, itself life’s
primordial soundtrack. Its detection in the womb corroborates a new spark of
existence – its departure at the end of life’s journey irrefutable evidence of
entropy's inescapable silence. With acknowledgement comes acceptance that the
number of our heartbeats is finite, some say fixed – as fleeting in the cosmic
sense, as ancient mountains, as time itself.
Since it opened in the 1930s, slightly more than 10,000
people have managed to complete the Appalachian Trail. Few among them know that
a Mainer is among those they are indebted to for showing the way.
Myron Avery was born in Lubec in 1899, graduated from
Bowdoin and later became a successful lawyer. A friend of Appalachian Mountain
Club founder Benton MacKaye, who first proposed the AT in a 1921 article, While
MacKaye had a dream, Avery helped pioneer and build the actual route.
The original plan called for the trail’s northern terminus
to be Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Avery persevered in his insistence it
end atop Katahdin.
When the sign demarking Katahdin as the northern terminus of
the AT reached the summit, Avery is reported to have made a very brief speech.
“Nail it up,” he reportedly said.
Thanks to Avery, hikers have an additional 250 rugged miles
to cover through the most remote wilderness found anywhere, including Mahoosuc
Notch, considered to be the AT’s toughest mile, and the renown 100-mile
Wilderness, the longest section that doesn’t intersect a paved road on the entire
route.
Author Bill Bryson, in his classic “A Walk in the Woods,”
tips his hat to Avery. “In under seven years, using volunteer labor, he built a
2,000 mile trail through mountain wilderness,” Bryson writes. “Armies have done
less.”
Sadly, despite being thin and fit from a life devoted to
life in the out of doors, Myron Avery died at the young age of 53, of a heart
attack.
Last weekend dawned cold with muddled clouds overhead. It's always a good sign, while bumping into Nahmakanta and Rainbow over the Jo Mary Road, when there are actual rainbows overhead. It spit snow as we hit the trail on the old logging road that cuts into the Murphy Ponds and follows the old AT path along the north side of the Rainbow Deadwaters.
It took a couple hours, some cursing at the mud and rocks, but eventually I was standing at the Dam, the spectacular view of a snow accented Katahdin looming large across the unfrozen water.
As I lay in my 20-degree sleeping bag that night, contemplating whether to don another layer as the wind blew steady and the temperature dipped to 19, I was warm in the satisfaction that comes from fulfilling a mission I had begun two years before. Fate had conspired to keep me from this remote and beautiful place on the AT. But it did not win in the end.
The Appalachian Trail Conference doesn’t keep records; it
discourages folks from trying to set them. That is because there is nothing
about the Appalachian Trail experience that requires or compels one hiker to
compare themselves to any other. Doing so misses the point.
In the end, whether on the trail or off, there is only
one rule in life. Hike your own hike.
