Week 52 will be my second to last post reliving our walk across the country from ten years ago. The final two days will be posted shortly after May 24, the tenth anniversary of when we finished the hike and the date my symphony about the hike will premiere. The following link is for those in the neighborhood who want to register and attend.
American Discovery Symphony Registration
We left the Community Presbyterian Church in Chester for the last time, with Ky dropping us off just miles away from the New York border. By the end of the day we would be inside New York and on the Appalachian Trail, which we would follow for most of the way home. We packed for nine days, the remainder of the journey, with the intent of camping mostly on the AT. I got the sense that Ky would have liked to continue supporting us until the end, but the opportunity to meet her would be few and far in between while we followed the AT.
We tell people asking how we met that thru-hiking the AT was our fifth date. Ending our ADT journey this way, on the same trail where our overall journey began, added an exclamation point of nostalgia for us as we passed familiar places like Harriman State Park, Bear Mountain State Park and the crossing of the Hudson River. We hiked on familiar rocky trail through familiar deciduous forests, as comfortable to us as the local park.
Interjected into this comfortable nostalgia was a heartwarming sign of new hope. On our second night of camping on the AT, I was in the midst of cooking our traditional trail supper of mac and cheese with tuna when Cindy told me she wanted to put the tent up by herself. I watched her slowly but surely lay out the ground cloth, tent and rain fly; stake down the tent and properly attach the fly; then put sleeping pads and bags into the tent. She looked at me with that cute smile of hers when she was done, a subdued expression of joy I suspected held back soaring spirits underneath. Certainly my spirits were soaring.
On our third night along the AT we camped on the grounds of the Graymoor Monastery. When I first thru-hiked the AT in 1975 I stopped at the Monastery, as almost all thru-hikers did, for the free all-you-can-eat meals they provided, in keeping with their mission of accommodating wayward travelers. AT traffic back then could be measured in the hundreds total, now the traffic measures in the thousands yearly. Predictably, the Monastery no longer offered all-you-can-eats, but instead constructed a pavilion on their property for AT hikers, along with a fire ring and even a shower. Once again this is an example of how the nature of kindness must change, or even disappear, once volumes of people come to expect kindness from targeted sources.
While a graduate student in the late eighties I entered a national essay contest in my field of Natural Resources. My paper on “UHiking” was awarded second place. My thesis was that as long distance hiking traffic increased, established trails would suffer both environmental and cultural abuse. I offered “UHiking” (I should have called it You Hiking) as an alternative. Rather than follow a fixed, established trail end-to-end, I suggested sojourners incorporate just sections of established trails into a journey tailored specifically for “you,” with meaningful start and end points that do not necessarily correspond to the established trail, thus spreading out the traffic and mitigating the abuses.
If I wrote that essay today I also would encourage sojourners to be spreaders of kindness, not just recipients. Perhaps there are things you know how to build or repair; Habitat for Humanity’s Bike and Build programs follow this model. Perhaps you are in the health care or culinary fields. Perhaps you can perform music or other means of entertainment. Perhaps your kindness to folks along the way can be giving talks about kindness or community. Your mission of kindness would be tailored to you, just like the route you choose.
Shortly after the Graymoor Monastery we shortened our route by getting off the trail and onto roads for that day. I knew from several times hiking that section that we missed with our detour. As an AT thru-hiker this would be an appalling detour worthy of scorn for “yellow blazing” (the Appalachian Trail is marked with white blazes). As an ADT “You Hiker” I become the only judge of my routes.
Through this extra mixture of rural roads we met a variety of hikers, bicyclists, motorists and people out in their front yards, over fifty people in five days. Some were earlybird AT thru-hikers, having hiked over 1200 miles already. We delighted in meeting thru-hikers because of our own experiences; now I wonder how I might have felt if, after hiking over a thousand miles on my own journey, rightfully satisfied in doing so, I suddenly met a couple who had just hiked four thousand more.
On our alternate route we camped at Fahnestock State Park, where we became celebrities to the neighboring campsites. One young couple shared their supper and had their picture taken with us. A group of young adults invited us to join in their birthday celebration at another site. Some of the birthday gatherers were involved in a social experiment leaving T-shirts in bathrooms for strangers to pick up, hoping that these shirts would end up being spotted around the world. They gave us one of their T-shirts to leave in a bathroom farther up the trail.
Our daughter Charissa came out to join us for the last four days of our journey. Being our daughter she of course had prior hiking experience. We once went out to Mt. Rainier to hike the 100 mile Wonderland Trail as a family, but Charissa literally went the extra mile. As a high school student she worked at a McDonald’s in the neighboring town of North Canaan, eight miles away. She occasionally would bike to work and even walked there once. Charissa left no doubt she was the daughter of the woman who once told me “mind over matter” for handling the pain and discomfort involved in long distance hiking.
The evening we met Charissa we hiked a short distance to the next AT lean-to. We encountered several hikers already set up there and had a good time chatting with them. The next day featured heavy rains and we hiked only eight miles to the next lean-to, which we shared with Craig and his 12 year old son Hunter, both thru-hikers. I asked Craig what kindness he experienced on their travels and his first reply was the kindness of his son taking care of him during the hike.
The eight mile day meant hiking 22 miles the next with Charissa, who of course was not yet broken in. The weather continued to be rainy, but you would not know from the women in our group. Though Cindy’s spirits were lifted when she put up the tent by herself, that was nothing compared to her obvious joy from hiking with her oldest daughter. Despite the long miles and rainy weather, Charissa infused the days with good cheer.
Not everything was rosy. For my part I had a slight intestinal disorder which worried me as to whether I could do justice to the potluck dinner awaiting us at the end of the hike. Those concerns were alleviated when we reached the Housatonic Valley Association office at the end of the 22 mile day. We arrived too late to spend time with my former officemates, but they left behind a feast for us while we camped on the office floors.
I also worried for Cindy, as during this stretch I noticed a red bullseye on her. I knew this came from our guerilla camp near the zoo in New Jersey, when our tent was invaded by ticks that night. Having had Lyme disease twice before myself, I made a doctor’s appointment for Cindy the day after our journey would end.
