I hiked the Appalachian Trail. It fixed my brain.
- sciart0
- Jun 22
- 3 min read
Excerpt: "I hiked the Appalachian Trail last week.
I hasten to add, for those who remember a certain former governor of South Carolina, that this is not a euphemism. My brother and I really were hiking the trail through Shenandoah National Park, albeit rather slowly and covered in moleskin and kvetching constantly about an expanding catalogue of muscle and joint pains.
As we lumbered toward Brown’s Gap one day, we heard a commotion behind us, and three men approached us at a speed suggesting they were being chased by a bear. It turned out to be extreme trail runner John Kelly and his escorts. Kelly is attempting to break the record for the fastest traversing of the 2,200-mile trail by doing it in less than 40 days — which requires him to complete between 55 and 60 miles per day, every day.
I called out some encouragement to Kelly as he blew past us.
“Enjoy your hike,” he replied.
I was enjoying my hike. But was he?
Kelly is running more than two marathons each day and climbing the equivalent of Mount Everest nearly every other day as he runs from Georgia to Maine, enduring rain and hail and stealing a few hours of sleep here and there in the back of an SUV that his crew drives to rendezvous points.
True, he’s achieving a superhuman feat, and possibly a world record. But I seriously doubt he’s feeling the sense of awe that I felt walking that same path.
Kelly had no time to pause and gape at the mountain laurels in full bloom, which turned the path into a colonnade of pale, pink blossoms that gave the illusion of a June snowfall. He had no time to stop and listen to the flutelike call of the wood thrush, or of the otherworldly veery, which sings descending trills as if through a metal pipe. He didn’t have the luxury of pausing to smile at the wobbly fawns following their mothers, or to laugh at the wild turkeys breaking awkwardly into a run when they saw us.
I wandered happily along the trail last week spotting the colors of the forest in spring: the red columbine, the lavender wild geranium, the lacy maple-leaf viburnum, the tiny daisies of the Philadelphia fleabane, the ubiquitous white petals of the blackberry, and the little pink bells of the Eastern beardtongue. I found myself talking back to the birds that seemed to be following us: the Eastern towhee (drink-your-TEA), the red-eyed vireo (Here I am. Where are you?) and the occasional chestnut-sided warbler (Pleased, pleased, pleased to meetcha.)
Turning one bend, I found acres of wild hydrangea blooming delicate and white. Around another, I spotted a mourning-cloak butterfly on a rock, then watched the shy forest creature flutter into the canopy to join half a dozen of its brethren in a twirling dance. I stopped and admired the American chestnut saplings, doomed to succumb to the chestnut blight but still persisting, determinedly, in resprouting. A stand of sweet birch presided over a forest floor of hay-scented fern, followed by an old-growth forest of northern red oak above a spicebush understory. Looking up at various times, I saw shagbark hickory, black cherry and, improbably, white ash that hadn’t yet been felled by the emerald ash borer. Looking down, where my hiking poles kept sinking into vole tunnels under the path, I saw the tiny white teardrops of Virginia waterleaf and a carpet of dainty bluets."