So, why?
After all, there are surely plenty of ways to rediscover yourself that don't include ticks.
A few years ago, I was reluctantly riding passenger while on a site visit for a project at work. My then-boss and I were driving into the winding country roads west of Boston, away from the crowded urban sprawl of the city. It was my second-ever time in New England, and I was honestly really excited to be there again. Our first site visit for this project took place in the dead of winter, so I was looking forward to seeing the area livelier, with leaves shrouding the quaint homes tucked among the birch-striped woods.
To distract from our minor ongoing struggles with the baffling engineering of our rental Tesla, Boss attempted to make a bit of conversation. He asked, “So, what do you want to see while up here?”
I quickly showed my entire hippie ass, by saying that I had noticed our hotel was practically across the street from historic Walden Pond. At the time, I had just started on my first failed attempt to read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, so the pond’s trails were fresh on my mind. Boss’ face registered no reaction when I mentioned this. So, trying to keep my assumptions about his reading habits at bay, I asked Boss if he was familiar with the book.
He then confirmed my assumptions by saying that that he had not so much as heard of it. So, I kept it to the surface level synopsis (There was this guy Thoreau, he wanted to get back to basics and ‘left society’ for a bit,1 he built a cabin on Walden Pond, hence the title of the book, so on). I tried to play to Boss’ sense of patriotism by mentioning to him that big T is a well-known American thinker, and said again that I really wanted to walk the trail around the pond to see a slice of New England’s history and nature.
Boss - ever the great American thinker himself - replied:
“You know, when I see [things like] that, I’m like… ‘It’s just a lake. So what?’”
We continued the rest of the car ride in relative silence.
Why?
In my last post about the “what and how” of my hike, I left one sentence off the quote of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy’s description of the AT. As they report on appalachiantrail.org:
People from across the globe are drawn to the A.T. for a variety of reasons, such as reconnecting with nature, escaping the stress of city life, meeting new people or deepening old friendships, or experiencing a simpler life.
Dang, spot on. Thanks, ATC!2
In so few words, that’s really the gist of it for many hikers. Thru-hiking the AT is definitely a change of pace compared to most people’s everyday life, and a welcome breath of fresh air3 for a lot of folks. Having read about (and talked with) long-distance hikers, I have heard it firsthand; many of them do this because it can offer a bit of a reset and gives a chance to challenge yourself in a very physical, very tangibly rewarding way. It can help you regain perspective; being on the AT kind of forces you away from the part of the world built out of constant grim headlines, outrage, competition, and self-interest. Like I mentioned in my last post, it places you in the middle of a shared struggle alongside all sorts of different folks, an environment where cooperation and selfless help is a very real part of the thru-hiking subculture. And ultimately, though backpacking often is “type II” fun (that is, the “not fun at the time, but fun in retrospect” kind of fun)… it is fun!
Which sounds like exactly the kind of experience I desperately need right now for myself!
If you can’t tell by the crazy delay in getting this post out, I’ve really been struggling to find the right words and feelings to express myself for this post. Over the past two weeks, I’ve really been grappling with my personal why of hiking the AT - not because I’m getting cold feet or because I don’t have a reason, but because I have what feels like way too many of them! It has been so hard to weave the tangled, interlocking web of “why” into a coherent and digestible newsletter. Honestly, I’ve had to leave some of it out to keep this from blowing up into a whole novel.
That to say, all those reasons the ATC lays out are very relevant and fresh for me at this moment in my life, and here’s roughly why.
Ancient History
Funny enough, hiking the AT specifically has only been on my radar for about four years. It wasn’t necessarily always a life goal for me, though since realizing what the trail is, I’ve only gotten more driven and annoying about doing it.
What has been more consistent for me is interest in nature; surprising no one who’s talked to me for more than 5 minutes, I was a bug kid.4
My parents had to watch me closely in public because I had a regular habit of suddenly stopping to smell the roses watch the ants. Follow caterpillars in my grandparents’ backyard and gladly listening to the screeching “serenades” of cicadas in summer are both core memories from growing up. Meandering and navel-gazing outdoors have been part of my nature even when I was a sweet, dweeby kid.
Goofing off as a toddler was just the start of the through-line, though. I had an ill-fated run with the great outdoors through Boy Scouts which ended early in grade school,5 but thankfully freshman biology class in high school relit the torch. Luckily for me, that class included a surprisingly robust unit on evolution, including human evolution, and it was transformative for me! Natural selection was (and is) so fascinating to me that I have to stop typing this paragraph before I geek out too hard. It was the thing that made me remember how cool nature is.6
Later on, my senior year AP Environmental Science class taught me about the responsibility we owe each other and the environment, through lessons on ecology and conservation. Going to engineering school was a bit of a pivot away from nature for me, but learning physics principles made hydrology, plate tectonics, astronomy, metabolism (via thermodynamics) - hell, nature as a whole! - make so much more sense.7 Plus, I finally read Frank Herbert’s Dune at the recommendation of one of my engineering professors, nabbing me what should have been the free punch on my “environmental nerd” card all along.
But for all this dorky interest and scientific understanding, competing priorities through college meant my pet interest in natural science mostly just simmered on the backburner; it wasn’t until the isolating, mid-pandemic winter of 2021-22 that it was revived again. I needed a good distraction to keep myself sane through cold, humdrum work weeks, so I started reading about National Parks, first looked into the Appalachian Trail, and began squirreling away potential future plans for visits. I’m embarrassed it took me until then to see that Louisville’s parks system is so solid, but this was also when I first realized that I had a ton of fantastic nature practically just outside. Thanks, Olmsted Parks and the Parklands of Floyd’s Fork!8
So as that spring sprung and my brain thawed out from stir-craziness, I started taking walking breaks at work to get some fresh air, hoping to finally start hiking (you know, actually seeing nature again) later that year. That’s when I had some distressing realizations like oh man, I really feel these 15-minute walks. I’ve got some training to do if I want to properly get out to the woods. How did I get so inactive?
How Did I Get So Inactive?
or: I Swear to Never Talk About My Job Ever Again After This
This, much to my annoyance, is where job stresses come into this newsletter. I wish so badly I could just skip this all-too-familiar tale of becoming disgruntled. It would be so much easier to just say “oh, I’m doing all this to get out from behind the desk and meet new people.” But, leaving it there would really gloss over the depth of it.
My worst kept secret is that work has always been a huge stressor for me - it’s the other thing aside from “bug kid” that anyone who has ever heard a word cross my lips will know about me. As I’ve been saying, I think the science concepts behind engineering are - to use a technical term - sick as hell. But so far, working in the field has been way less inspiring.
A good part of this is on me. Paying down student loans was something I really got fixated on as a fresh grad, no thanks to my then-untreated anxiety mixing with my exact, mathematical knowledge of compounding interest.9 I won’t lie, I became a real engineer about it - everything else kind of felt secondary to making sure all my spare money went to loans since it was the “efficient” way of paying them off. In hindsight, this ain’t exactly an auspicious - or healthy - start to a career.
Chasing stable paychecks (and living in fear of the post-Covid job search grind) ultimately led me to stay far longer than I should have at ill-fitting jobs. Unfortunately for me, this means I got trapped at a few real boys’ club companies. We’re talking places with Good-Ol’-Boy culture strong enough that you can taste the cheap bourbon in the air - places where good engineering practice always, no debate loses out to cranking through designs, making money, and gaining personal status. In my experience, these tend to be the kinds of firms where no one even pretends to be interested in the science beyond the bare minimum of the building codes. And can you believe it? The personalities were rancid. The complacency and lack of imagination I started to encounter at these firms was - to again speak technically - a massive bummer. I have stronger and longer-winded opinions about specifically why this was “the vibe” at these places, but this post is long enough and I don’t need to go into that flatspin here.
Suffice it to say that some engineers unfortunately really do earn their worst stereotypes as overly-pragmatic, know-it-all, socially-phobic, dispassionate shut-ins… and boy, did I find those engineers. Boss’ quip from the start of this newsletter is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to incuriosity and its resulting lack of self-awareness.10
This straight up sucks to be around. Turns out, when your brain is largely surrounded by piss-and-vinegar personalities on the daily, it gets a bit pickled!
That was me; it became very hard to maintain my enthusiasm and impossible to not become jaded. There were many days where I would come home feeling utterly exhausted, angry, and stuck. On the worst weeks, I got disturbingly close to being the kind of guy who looks at Walden Pond and only manages a “so what?”
Thankfully, as I lined out in my first post, I have the loving and patient support of family and friends (and to be so real: one year of SNRIs and several of ongoing therapy), so I made it through.
With the help I had, I was able to see that malaise growing in me over the years and work to slow it down by hiking and staying busy, to get out from indoors and away from screens. Keeping my own curiosity and ethusiasm was never easy, and though it has been very far from an unalloyed success, I was able to pay off my loans, save for my future plans, and begin working towards the insane hike I’m now writing about.
And now here we are, just a few weeks away from Amicalola Falls.
So why hike the AT?
And so, with this kind of baggage-laden work experience thankfully now in my rearview, you can surely tell why something major like hiking the Appalachian Trail feels to me like a necessary emotional reset!
But there’s a lingering question here, which I feel some people skirt around uncomfortably, or only implicitly ask me: Why hike the Appalachian Trail specifically? It’s pretty dangerous, very exhausting, really frickin’ long, and there’s a very nonzero chance of having to leave the trail before finishing. It’s a fair question to ask, because that’s all true.
I’ve definitely waxed poetic about the hike in these first two posts, but the day-to-day reality of time on the AT is of course going to be far from capital-R Romantic. It is only literally a walk in the woods, because the effort it’s going to take will be anything but. For a lot of the next six-ish months, I will be sore, hungry, and powerfully stinky.
Though I’ve done a lot of hiking, the challenges of properly backpacking will be new for me. But, I’m not heading out for this completely blind. Like I said, I have talked face to face with four different thru-hikers, and specifically asked each about their levels of experience going into their hikes. Three of them went in with zero experience in camping. A couple of them hadn’t even really hiked long-distance before heading out! Every one of them finished their full hike.
Plus - and if you paid attention to the picture captions on my first post, you know this! - I’ve already hedged my bets by sampling the AT, sneaky writer that I am.
A few summers ago, I threw on my full-sized pack and hiked one of the hills at LeHigh Gap, part of the infamous run of the AT through “Rocksylvania.” It was the single most brutal hike I have ever been on - steep, rocky, humid… and even included a close-ish call with a timber rattlesnake! But I took it slow and eventually made it to the top of that mountain, where my persistence was rewarded with a fresh breeze, a lovely mountain meadow, and the vista of Lehigh Valley spread out below me. I unbuckled my pack, sat down for a rest at an overlook, and fully wept tears of joy. Feeling that sense of beauty and serenity at the top of that mountain was the moment I knew: I can do this and I want to do this.
No amount of flowery personal narrative changes that this is going to be a mental and physical endurance game. But I know that I can slog through some bullshit and that I have dweeby passion on my side.
There will always the possibility of having to hop off the trail due to injury, illness, life events - any number of things. But that’s just reality, which I’m all too happy to reengage with, clear-eyed, after the haze of negativity and anxiety my career has had me in. Even if things go wrong, I will at least know I tried.
Now imagine if things go well!
Hiking as a hobby has been a great outlet from work for me. It does share some of the things I like about engineering, but in a more grounded way. When hiking long-distance, planning and logistics are necessary, but you don’t have to obsess.11 Being in nature shows the tangible wonder of science; the beautiful views and landscapes you move through have been carved by millions of years of competing forces, and everywhere you look, the subtle pressures of evolution can be seen at work. Hell, at the very least it gets you out from behind the desk, moving around, and (gasp!) maybe even talking to people. It’s deliberate navel-gazing as a form of exercise, which means it rules.
Hiking the AT can be all of this dialed up to 11. Critically for me, thru-hiking isn’t a clever career move, it isn’t financially smart, and I am glad that it isn’t.
What it is is a needed adventure in miles of beautiful woods, thousands of chances to meet new people, and the opportunity to go at my own speed and chew the scenery (schedule permitting). Given the work culture blues I’ve had, the people and community of the trail are what I’m looking forward to most - a shared struggle and an atmosphere of cooperation and support sound like a bit of a needed balm to my shriveled, bruised soul. Even the length and difficulty of this trail are important to me for the challenge and potential accomplishments they present (I am not immune to wanting my pictures taken atop Katahdin or out at McAfee Knob).
Ultimately, I am looking for a chance to just exist away from a computer screen for a bit,12 to slow down, and to remind myself of what and who I’ve been missing because I haven’t looked up from the incentives of money and easy stability.
I’m going to try my best to make that bug kid proud.
-Michael
In reality, Thoreau did have his family do his laundry while he was out there. I don’t feel this factoid invalidates any of his points in Walden (at least any up to where I’ve read) per se. But, given the misconception some have about his time at Walden Pond as a pure divorce from society, it’s definitely a very funny fact to me.
https://appalachiantrail.org/get-involved/ways-to-give/
Hiker stink notwithstanding.
I typed this post’s first drafts at a desk topped by a hornet’s nest I have cross-sectioned and within arm’s reach of my very-amateur pinning collection, so I didn’t grow out of this, either.
I had an absolutely dire camping trip in Jefferson Memorial Forest that made me drop out. In addition to having several of my grade school bullies on this trip, my scoutmasters seemingly failed to account for the campsite being directly under Louisville’s UPS flight path. 747s, right overhead. All night. It was so bad, I told my parents I didn’t want to go for Webelos 2.
It helped that it felt as close to real occult knowledge as I could get in Catholic high school, I won’t lie.
These last two frankly also gave me Climate Dread™. If you for some stupid reason don’t think manmade climate change exists and is an eminent (and, disturbingly, an imminent) threat to humanity, come talk to me about my thermodynamics and combustion classes, and I’ll give you something to call your representatives about. :)
On a cheerier note, I need to give a shoutout to my sophomore-year geometry teacher, who once showed my class an old-school carousel of slides from when he spent a winter in Yosemite as a park ranger. Seeing the park’s beauty and hearing his stories really made an impression on me, and this along is probably half the reason California is a strong contender for my next big trip after the AT.
https://www.olmstedparks.org/donate/
https://theparklands.org/get-involved/donate/
Whoops! Should’ve been in therapy before Engineering Economics!
Once at a drafting temp job, an engineer made an example of me by screaming at me for 5 minutes in front of all my coworkers, calling me a “fucking idiot” because I had told him I needed to work on a 3D model for a project that wasn’t his. Years later while working for a different firm, I listened to a 50-plus-year-old, licensed engineer have a brief-but-genuine meltdown over seeing a tongue-in-cheek “dump your boyfriend” bumper sticker on a car at Buc-ee’s. I watched a snobby construction administration expert who had just an hour before finished lecturing me about his crass takes on geopolitics get visibly nervous about being on the streets of Manhattan in broad daylight. I’ve been forced to accommodate six-figure-salaried project managers working remotely from the decks luxury cruises and mansions, while they refuse to learn proper use of Microsoft Teams, and who then whine about how they aren’t kept in the loop. The conduct is embarrassing.
…I feel like a disgruntled Rutger Hauer.
Ultralight backpacking notwithstanding.
If you point out the irony of me posting this on social media… then fine, you’re right. But you also have to subscribe!