Chapter 1
Not long after I moved with my family to a small town in New
Hampshire I happened upon a path that vanished into a wood on the edge
of town.
A sign announced that this was no ordinary footpath but the
celebrated Appalachian Trail. Running more than 2,100 miles along
America's eastern seaboard, through the serene and beckoning Appalachian
Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes. From Georgia to
Maine, it wanders across fourteen states, through plump, comely hills
whose very names -- Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Green Mountains,
White Mountains -- seem an invitation to amble. Who could say the words
"Great Smoky Mountains" or "Shenandoah Valley" and not feel an urge, as
the naturalist John Muir once put it, to "throw a loaf of bread and a
pound of tea in an old sack and jump over the back fence"?
And here it was, quite unexpectedly, meandering in a dangerously
beguiling fashion through the pleasant New England community in which I
had just settled. It seemed such an extraordinary notion -- that I could
set off from home and walk 1,800 miles through woods to Georgia, or turn
the other way and clamber over the rough and stony White Mountains to
the fabled prow of Mount Katahdin, floating in forest 450 miles to the
north in a wilderness few have seen. A little voice in my head said:
"Sounds neat! Let's do it!"
I formed a number of rationalizations. It would get me fit after
years of waddlesome sloth. It would be an interesting and reflective way
to reacquaint myself with the scale and beauty of my native land after
nearly twenty years of living abroad. It would be useful (I wasn't quite
sure in what way, but I was sure nonetheless) to learn to fend for
myself in the wilderness. When guys in camouflage pants and hunting hats
sat around in the Four Aces Diner talking about fearsome things done
out-of-doors, I would no longer have to feel like such a cupcake. I
wanted a little of that swagger that comes with being able to gaze at a
far horizon through eyes of chipped granite and say with a slow, manly
sniff, "Yeah, I've shit in the woods."
And there was a more compelling reason to go. The Appalachians are
the home of one of the world's great hardwood forests -- the expansive
relic of the richest, most diversified sweep of woodland ever to grace
the temperate world -- and that forest is in trouble. If he global
temperature rises by 4°C over the next fifty years, as is evidently
possible, the whole of the Appalachian wilderness below New England
could become savanna. Already trees are dying in frightening numbers.
The elms and chestnuts are long gone, the stately hemlocks and flowery
dogwoods are going, and the red spruces, Fraser firs, mountain ashes,
and sugar maples may be about to follow. Clearly, if ever there was a
time to experience this singular wilderness, it was now.
So I decided to do it. More rashly, I announced my intention -- told
friends and neighbors, confidently informed my publisher, made it common
knowledge among those who knew me. Then I bought some books and talked
to people who had done the trail in whole or in part and came gradually
to realize that this was way beyond -- way beyond -- anything I had
attempted before.
