Paper Journey

I have a friend who is walking the Appalachian Trail. She started in Georgia, back in April, and now, she’s in Maine, only a few days away from completing the whole thing. I wish I could write about her journey, but it’s not my journey. My journey has been following her journey, looking up her location on my phone (she shares it via a GPS app) and finding the corresponding place on the four-foot long paper map of the trail that I have hanging on my refrigerator.

In the mornings when I am making my coffee, I mark off where she has camped for the night and squint at the mountain elevation and the nearby ponds and rivers. When I started my journey marking her journey, I had to squat in front of the fridge to see where she was on the map. Now, I am fully standing, the last bit of her trek level with my freezer.

At this point she has walked approximately 2100 miles out of the 2198.4 total miles of the trail. Many days she walks 20 to 25 miles. I have only walked that much in one day a few times in my life (these were touristy trips around big cities—New York, Boston, San Francisco, DC) but I have never done it two days in a row, never mind for weeks or months. I have rarely walked long stretches alone.

I have never camped alone. But I have stayed in hotels alone. I’ve gone on writing retreats solo and driven long distances by myself (long distances being ten or eleven hours, which is roughly the amount of time my friend has been walking each day.) I used to be afraid to be alone, especially at night, but over the past few years this fear has gone away. I don’t know why.

I’ve gone on hikes before. I’ve strolled small segments of the Appalachian Trail, jumping on and off in the Smokey Mountains, and probably a few other times without realizing it. Before my friend left for her journey, she invited me to walk with her on a hilly trail by her house. She wanted to see how it would feel to carry her twenty-five pound backpack. I carried nothing but a water bottle. We walked to the top of the hill that was really more like a mini mountain, and I chattered away the whole time because I do that when I’m nervous. Unsurprisingly, I was out of breath when we reached the top.

My friend was not out of breath. We looked at the view for one minute, the valley down below, the little house where she lives, a lake beyond that, and more mountains, and then we turned around and marched down. I didn’t talk much this time. I gulped my water and wiped the sweat off my face. I marveled at my friend who was striding along in front of me as if she wasn’t hauling a twenty-five pound backpack.

When we reached the bottom, I asked her if I could put the backpack on. I wanted to see what twenty-five pounds felt like. Let me tell you, it felt like a lot. I tried to imagine carrying it for more than two minutes. I tried to imagine hiking back up the mini mountain. Hiking three mountains, twenty, fifty.

Hiking for five months. Plotting out where I would camp for the night and where I would pee. Calculating how much food I would need and how to fit it in my backpack. Settling myself into a tent at night and looking up at the stars. Taking the kind of journey where you step out of your ordinary life and set yourself on an unfamiliar path. Knowing, even as I imagined it, that I would never take a journey like this, and I could be okay with that. I have had other journeys. With luck, I still have more to come.

I hoisted the backpack off my back and went home. I bought a paper map and taped it to my refrigerator.