Preliminary Results

The first thing that happened when I got home from hiking the Appalachian Trail for four and a half months was that I started sneezing. Apparently I’m wildly allergic to my own house, and breathing almost nothing but outdoor air for a third of a year destroyed any acclimation I had developed. With a lot of cleaning and dust mite proof bags encasing all of my bedding, I’ve started to recover. But now that I have a point of comparison, it’s easy tell that I was always allergic to my house, I had just gotten used to it. I carried an asthma inhaler on the hike and never used it, not once, but I need it at home at least weekly. I was lonely on the trail almost every day, but I did sleep better and wake up without a headache.

It turns out that hiking was pretty good for me, physically. After Election Day (the post, not the actual day) I hiked for five more days, through Harriman State Park, over Bear Mountain, across the Hudson on the Bear Mountain Bridge, along Canopus Lake and Nuclear Lake, and finally on the boardwalk through beautiful overhead reeds just outside Pawling, where Mica and I had finished our time together back in September. It was Wednesday November 13th, and after a total of 1,333 miles in 127 days from Mt. Katahdin, Maine to Rockfish Gap, Virginia, I was done hiking for 2024.

Getting home was as simple as taking the Metro North to Grand Central, then the S shuttle to 42nd St. and the 2 train one stop past Penn Station because I wasn’t paying attention, then walking a few blocks back to Penn Station, then taking Amtrak to South Station in Boston, then taking a Concord Coach Lines bus to Portland, where my wife picked me up at the bus station and drove us to the ferry, then taking the ferry to Peaks Island, then driving home from the ferry dock. Nothing to it.

I didn’t intend to do this, but after I got off the train in Harper’s Ferry for the second time, heading north, I traveled entirely by foot for the rest of the hike except once—the day I wrote the election day post, I took a ride from the owner of the Lake Lodging Motel back to the Rt. 17A trailhead, which is otherwise a winding road walk up a steep ridge on a busy and fast road. I got very used to walking everywhere, and the pace of walking everywhere seeps into you after a while. The trip home took about twelve hours, and every part of it felt unbearably fast. My soul was coming back from much further away.

I lost 20 pounds, all of it in the first three months. All the way northbound through Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York I just maintained the same weight. I don’t know if I was eating more, or exerting myself less, or my body had just reached a new equilibrium. In six weeks at home I’ve gained back about five pounds. People keep telling me I look skinny, but the difference is not that dramatic.

In an effort to maintain at least a little of my improved cardiovascular fitness, I started running almost immediately and have run nearly every day since I got home. I’m about two and half minutes per mile faster than I was in May of this year, and that’s a pace I can maintain easily and enjoy. Early this year I had really been struggling to get back to the point where running is comfortable and fun, and I feel like I’ve skipped past a huge amount of grinding misery which, at my age, I may never have been able to overcome just by huffing and puffing through a few miles a week. And all it took was walking an average of 10.5 miles a day up and down mountains carrying 25 pounds on my back for nearly five months! What a deal.

Mica made it a few hundred miles further than me into southern Virginia. He hiked for the last few weeks with his girlfriend, who had a series of minor misadventures which slowed them both down. So he didn’t finish the trail either, due to taking care of people who needed help—first me, then his girlfriend, which is exactly what anyone who knows him would expect to happen. In a couple of weeks he’s off to New Zealand for the next year. Until then he’s sleeping on our couch and doing some construction work on the island to keep from going insane with boredom.

I started writing this post weeks ago, and I’ve struggled to finish it because the core question in my mind is: “so now what?” and I don’t really have an answer. I gave myself time to be home with my family, and to just sit with the question. I took over making dinners and orthodontist appointments, things I should have done long ago. I replaced our broken stove, got some other house repairs started. I’ve been hauling junk out of the basement at a rate of several large black trash bags a day. After months carrying everything I owned on my back, all this stuff just feels like weight. It’s time to get rid of it. This has been intensely satisfying, but it’s also been a distraction.

Almost all the writing I did since July was done under the impending deadline of an 11 am motel checkout. I planned to write on the trail, but mostly what I did was compose in my head on the trail, and actually sit down and write between about 7 and 11 am on the morning I was due to depart a town. I thought maybe the lack of that urgency was keeping me from finishing this post. I could do it any time, and any time means no particular time. It certainly doesn’t mean “right now.” But the weeks passed, and I found myself with unoccupied hours practically begging to be filled by sitting down and finishing this post. And yet, I still wasn’t doing it.

Some of you wrote to me, wishing me and Mica well and gently asking if everything was ok, which I genuinely appreciated. And belatedly the answer is yes, everything is ok, but I’m also not sure what’s supposed to happen now. All summer and fall, once or twice a week, I would finish writing, hit send, then pick up my pack and head back out. Finishing a post was a departure, and I always knew where I was going next. It still feels like a departure, but this time the destination is not so obvious. I think I haven’t finished this post because I’m scared to go.

But it’s time to go. It’s not going to get any easier, and I’m out of excuses.

If you were a subscriber to my other newsletter, Today in Tabs, I hope you’ll be happy to hear that it’s coming back, although not every day. Part of the motivation for Today on Trail was to stretch my creative limits and do some writing outside of the Tabs format, and I want to keep doing that. Writing and researching Tabs every day is all-consuming and absorbs 100% of my creative energy, and frankly I don’t know if the world needs that close a reading of the media landscape anymore. But whether it does or not, I don’t want to be the one to do it. So Tabs will probably resume more like twice weekly, and not try to cover absolutely everything that happens on the internet.

Meanwhile I am also attempting to sell a Today on Trail book of some kind. Think of this less as a done deal and more as a statement of intent. All I have right now are some ideas and an agent, but I will let you know how that project is coming along if and when developments warrant. If you’re a publisher and you’d like to offer me a hefty advance without all the tedious rigamarole of pitching the book, please do get in touch, but I’m not counting on that.

Finally, I have put too much time and energy into this trail to not finish hiking the damn thing, so I am planning to head back to Virginia in the early spring and do that. Incredibly, the volunteer clubs that maintain the trail have cleared and reopened all of it as of December 13th. I have about 860 miles remaining, which should take two months or so. I’m hoping to start southbound from Rockfish Gap in mid-March, so as to be done before my middle son’s high school graduation at the beginning of June. So watch your inbox for Today on Trail 2: Trail Harder, premiering this spring. If you just joined recently, there’s a lot of archive waiting for you to catch up on and getting a one-payment-only membership unlocks all of it, past and future. Buying a paid membership will also make it a lot easier for me to cobble together the income to write a book, so if you want that to happen, you know, think about it. If you’re already a paid member, thank you! You’ve already done your part in making this whole thing possible, including my past few weeks of dithering.

And that’s where things stand. If every post is a departure, I guess now I’ve set off again. I’m sure I’m not the only one who doesn’t know what happens next, but I do know that if I put one foot in front of the other, somehow I can walk more than 1300 miles. Let’s go.