Bigelow Wilderness
Maine
August 1992
Ever since I first heard of the Appalachian Trail, and since the first time I carried a backpack through a weekend, I thought of the long distance hike from Georgia to Maine. I’ve been very lucky throughout my backpacking career, in some seasons spending as many as 80 nights on the trail. Not bad for a city boy with a job, I thought.
On the downside, I was never able to arrange the five months to thru-hike the A T, and I remained fascinated by how hikers could manage such a quest, not just in endurance but in logistics. So I asked the thru-hikers. August is about the time when these walkers show up in Maine.
“How did you take off work for that amount of time?” “Who handles your bills while you are away?” “How did your family react when you told them you would be away for five months?” “Do your pets miss you?”
In many cases, the thru-hikers were younger, freshly graduated, not yet committed to the settled life. Others were retirees who managed to avoid the sedentary lifestyle and remained in good shape.
One gentleman didn’t seem to fit any of these categories. We sat together in a shelter, chatting. “How did you manage,” I asked him, “to get away for half a year?”
His story was not a happy one. “The kids moved out and are on their own, my business failed and my wife left me. Somehow I thought this might be a good time to get away.”
“Oh my.” I tried to cheer him up. “So you parked the dog with your cousin, right?” I was joking. He wasn’t.
“Dog died,” he said.
