THE TRAIL UP AHEAD
In addition to my comedic endeavors, I'm currently writing about my 2003 thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. You can read the beginning of the story here, and I post 2-3 installments of the story a week at: http://thetrailupahead.tumblr.com
PART 1
E and I stood around in the parking lot at the base of Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the Appalachian trail, with our friend from high school, Nicole, who had driven E down from our hometown in Ohio, and my boyfriend, Kevin, who had driven me up from Florida, where we had been living together for the past 5 months. We made small talk and took goofy pictures of E and I all bundled up with our packs on our backs and hiking poles in our hands, trying to figure out how to say goodbye. Kevin would be going back to his life, our life for the past months, alone, and I was walking into the woods without him. We had made tenative plans to be together after I reached Maine in 5 months, but we both knew that as soon as I started walking down the trail, things would be different. He was supportive of my need to go, but he readily admitted that he would be happier if I had stayed with him in Florida, playing house, so that we could seriously start planning our future together. At 25, I thought I might be ready for that future, too, but I needed what I saw as maybe my last big adventure, before I made any decisions. Standing there in that parking lot, I was having a hard time balancing my sadness at leaving Kevin with the overwhelming excitement and nervousness I felt because the time had finally come, after almost a year of planning, plotting, thinking, obsessing about the trip, for us to take our first steps.
It had all started with a phone call in March, 2002. I was, as I typically was in those days, stuck in Chicago traffic when my best friend, E, called from her house in St. Louis.
"Dude, I think I'm going to hike the A.T."
"When?" I asked.
"Next year, probably February or March." E was in the process of studying for the MCATs, and would be applying to medical schools that fall, with the goal of starting school the following fall, so she would be able to take the five months needed to hike the A.T. the following spring, assuming everything went as planned.
"Wow, that's really great." I told her. We talked some more about her plans; me, inching along in traffic on my way back to the office in downtown Chicago; her, sitting on her porch in St. Louis getting ready to bike to the hospital where she was working as a nurses' aid. E and I became best friends the moment we met the summer before seventh grade, and could, even now, a year out of college, spend hours talking on the phone about anything or nothing at all.
When E finally got off the phone so she could get to work, I was still about five miles from the office, which meant probably another hour in the car. I was working for non-profit that required me to routinely travel out to the Chicago suburbs, and I often spent hours at a time in my 86 Honda Civic that had no CD player or air conditioning, driving out of and back into the city. After realizing road rage was doing nothing but giving me an ulcer, I had come to appreciate the time it gave me to think.
I thought about E's plans. I was jealous. The previous summer, right after I graduated from college, E, E's sister and my good friend, Cara, and I spent a month backpacking the Long Trail, a hiking trail that traverses the Green Mountains of Vermont, from the Massachusetts line to the Canadian border. It was my first long distance hiking trip, and I hadn't been prepared for how hard it would be. In the minutes after we completed the trail, but before I collapsed with exhaustion, I swore I would never do something like that again. But now, almost a year later, the pain had faded, and the memories of the constant laughter and gorgeous vistas were all that remained.
Sitting there, in bumper to bumper traffic, I thought " Damn, I wish I could do something like that." And maybe, if the cars had started moving, and I had made it back to work, that thought would have stayed just that, a thought. But I wasnt going anywhere fast, and pretty soon, I wondered Why not ? And that was all it took. Without any idea of how I would make it work, still stuck in my car, I called E back.
"I'm coming with you."
You can read the latest installments here .
