Meetings and Partings

“Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it.” That line always wrecks me when Kermit says it in The Muppets’ Christmas Carol, and it was the thought that finally broke my fragile composure yesterday when Mica and I sat on a rock overlooking Great Barrington, MA, and he told me we’d be parting ways in October. We both had some big feelings in the woods, but that’s what the woods are for. And ultimately, this isn’t bad news. Let me explain.

Thru-hiking involves a surprising amount of math. Every day I add up mileage to figure out how far it is to the next shelter or the next town. I multiply average speed by distance to figure out where I should be trying to go and when I might arrive. On Sunday, after hiking nearly 19 miles from just outside of Dalton, MA to the Upper Goose Pond cabin, I found myself trying to estimate how long the rest of the hike might take. The news was not good.

I started my estimate assuming we’d be in Pawling, NY by October 1st, at the Route 22 road crossing—trail mile 743. My niece is getting married in Northern Virginia at the end of next week and we had originally hoped to be close enough on the trail to get a ride to the wedding from friends, but that hasn’t been a possibility for some time. Plan B is to take the train down, which will be easy since we’ll be somewhere in Metro North territory, and New York to DC is one of the only routes in this backwards country that actually has good train service. Now that we’re close enough to make firmer plans, it looks like Pawling is the easiest spot to hop on the train south, and therefore we’d be back in Pawling by the first.

Assuming the trail is 2,200 miles total, that would leave us with 1,457 more miles to hike. Taking December 31st as a deadline to finish, we’d have 92 days to cover that distance, which means we’d have to hike an average of 15.8 miles per day. Since September 1st, as we hiked all of Vermont and most of Massachusetts, we’ve averaged 13.3 miles per day, but in just the six days since we left Bennington, VT, we’ve been up to 15 miles per day. When I did all this math in my cozy bunk at the Upper Goose Pond cabin, I thought “15.8? Well that’s not so bad. We’re almost doing that now.”

But the next day I had plenty of time to reconsider, as I doggedly followed Mica through another 17 miles of the Berkshires. I’ve been dealing with tendinitis in my right ankle since Maine, and it got much worse in New Hampshire. It’s better on some days and less better on others, but most days I’m walking with a deep ache in my whole lower right leg that only improves if I take five or ten minutes out of every hour to sit down and rest it. It’s tolerable, but it is slowing me down. Terrain that Mica can cover at three miles per hour, I am generally only doing 2.5 or 2.8, especially on descents which are much harder on my ankle. Averaged out over many days, it means we’re going slower together than Mica could by himself. 

I also need more rest days. Neither of us even know if Mica would ever take a zero on his own—every day we’ve taken off so far has been at my insistence. He’s always miserable the first day after a zero too, as if resting paradoxically makes him weaker. “Like Martin Sheen at the beginning of Apocalypse Now,” I said, but he didn’t know what I was talking about.   

And finally, I need to find time to write. You may have noticed I didn’t send a newsletter this past Sunday. That was because covering Southern Vermont and Western Mass at 15 miles per day has left me with no energy to sit down and type words into the phone. I’ve had some good ideas, but by the end of the day all I’m fit for is to boil up my Spanish Rice and go to sleep. I need at least four solid, alert-brained, could-be-hiking hours to write a newsletter post, which means I simply must go slower. I gradually realized that if 15 miles a day for a week is wearing me out in the gentle terrain of Western Mass, almost 16 miles a day for three straight months is simply not going to happen. I do not have enough time to hike the whole Appalachian Trail this year. 

At lunchtime on Monday, after spending the morning grumpily hiking and thinking about all of this, I came to a shaded picnic table at the top of a sun drenched field of wildflowers overlooking a tidy Massachusetts farm and more rolling green Berkshire hills. It was about as idyllic a spot as anyone could possibly imagine, but did I savor my simple repast whils’t gazing ‘pon the clouds and thinking poetic thoughts? Nope. Instead I called my wife and warned her that I was going to complain at her for twenty minutes so that I didn’t find myself complaining at Mica instead. Then I complained at her for twenty minutes, as promised, delivering a much less organized, coherent, or mature version of the list of problems above. 

When I ran out complaints, and admitted that I was in fact currently in an absurdly beautiful spot eating lunch, and yes the weather was absolutely perfect, she asked me two very perceptive questions. First she said, “Put aside every other problem here. What are your goals for this hike?” 

We both remembered the first time she asked me that question, last fall, which she followed with “I mean, to hike the whole trail of course, but what else?” I’d had to admit that I’d made a list of goals and “hike the whole trail” wasn’t actually one of them. I added it, but only in a half-hearted way. It would be a nice bonus if it worked out, but as the hike has progressed it’s become clear to me that my only hard distance goal is the Bryson Threshold: 870 miles. As long as I cover more of the trail than Bill Bryson did in “A Walk in the Woods,” the rest feels completely arbitrary. If I hike 1,800 miles instead of 2,200, am I going to feel bad about that? Absolutely not. If I hike 1,000 miles? Amazing! Who can even conceive of such a thing? I will chew glass and crawl on four broken limbs to make it to 871 miles if necessary, because I am, as I’ve said before, excessively competitive. But beyond that, I don’t really care very much what the distance number ends up being. 

My only real goals are to write a good newsletter and enjoy my hike. That’s it. And for the past week or so I haven’t felt like I was accomplishing either one, which made it obvious why I was so grouchy. Having casually sorted out that whole mess, my wife went on to say: “So you know you can’t finish the trail without sacrificing both the ability to write about it and the ability to enjoy it. And you don’t really care that much about hiking the whole trail. So all you have to decide is: which miles are you going to skip?” She pointed out that I could come back to New York after the wedding and continue through New York, New Jersey, and the dreaded Pennsylvania, universally hailed as the worst part of the whole trail. If I did that, I’d probably make it to somewhere in Virginia by the end of December. Through Shenandoah, but not the Smokies. 

Or, she suggested, I could take the train down to Virginia and just… not come back. After the wedding I could get a ride to Harper’s Ferry, roughly the midpoint of the trail, and continue south from there. Skipping about 350 miles of the mid-Atlantic would leave me with 1,100 miles to go at a very reasonable 12 miles per day average. If I finished, I would end up hiking over 1,800 miles total, or a little more than 80% of the trail. If I felt motivated enough, I could potentially even take a month in the spring and hike north from Harper’s Ferry back to Pawling, completing a calendar year thru-hike if I finished before July. Most importantly, this plan would have me hiking Virginia and the Smokies, the big mountains of the South that I really want to experience, while I still have the trail legs that will let me enjoy them.  

I understood immediately that this was what I was going to do. The realization was like puzzle pieces clicking together in my head. The only remaining question was what would Mica do? It’s been clear for a while that I’m slowing him down. He hasn’t complained about it, but as we’ve gotten stronger and he’s started to do more 16 and 17 mile days, it’s becoming obvious that he could go even faster, while I’m starting to wear down. It’s not a sure thing that he can average nearly 16 miles a day for three solid months, but it’s also not out of the question. Neither of us know what his limits are yet.

Monday night over dinner we talked about all of this. I told him I was going to continue south from Harper’s Ferry after the wedding, and that I was not going to be as ambitious as we’ve tried to be so far. He could stay with me, with the understanding that I’m going to go slower than he’d like, or he could come back to Pawling and see what he’s really capable of on his own. 

When I imagined him deciding to stay with me, or deciding not to, I was surprised to find that deep down, I didn’t have a preference. Or more accurately that my preference is for him to do what feels most compelling to him. One of my other original goals for this hike was to lay the foundation for a relationship with Mica as two adults, as equals, and here we are. This is a choice faced by two adults, each with their own ambitions and limitations, and I was glad to find that I didn’t want to sway him either way. I just wanted to know what he would choose.

He said he’d have to think about it, and I thought he might not decide for a while, but on our lunch break Tuesday, as we sat on a rocky outcrop in more of the seemingly endless Berkshire fall sun, he started to say something and then immediately choked up. It took a few minutes, which was ok because I was starving and needed some more time to eat just about every remaining item in my food bag, but eventually he told me that he was going to come back alone and try to hike the whole trail. That he’d decided on that goal at the beginning of this trip, and he had to do his best to see it through. He said he knew right away, the day before, but he didn’t know how he could possibly tell me. 

“It feels like a betrayal,” he said. “You planned this trip, and showed me the app I needed to get, and helped me get all my gear, and taught me how to thru-hike. How can I just abandon you now?” I shook my head, thinking about Kermit and helpless to actually say anything yet. “But then I realized,” he went on, “that this is, like, what parenting is? I mean this whole hike I’ve been literally and symbolically walking away from home, and I guess as a parent, you always know your kids are going to leave you eventually. I guess it’s kind of the point?” 

Had I been able to speak, I’d have said exactly the same. It’s the furthest thing from a betrayal—this is the best possible outcome for a parent. You give your kids whatever they’ll take and hope they can do something with it that you couldn’t. For Mica to say that I taught him to thru-hike, and now he’s going to take those skills and find out what he’s capable of? Maybe go on to finish a big hike that I couldn’t do myself? What parent could hope for more than that?

In theory, he will eventually catch up with me and we’ll finish the trail together. But there’s a lot of days and miles between now and then. Who knows what will happen? I’m sure neither of us shall forget this first parting there was among us, but that is the way of it.