On Trails

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ONCE, YEARS AGO, I left home looking for a grand adventure and spent five months staring at mud. It was the spring of 2009, and I had set out to walk the full length of the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. My departure date was timed so that I would transition seamlessly from a mild southern spring to a balmy northern summer, but for some reason the warmth never arrived. It stayed cool that year, rained often. Newspapers likened it to the freak summer of 1816, when cornfields froze to their roots, pink snow fell over Italy, and a young Mary Shelley, locked up in a gloomy villa in Switzerland, began to dream of monsters. My memories of the hike consist chiefly of wet stone and black earth. The vistas from many of the mountaintops were blotted out. Shrouded in mist, rain hood up, eyes downcast, mile after mile, month after month, I had little else to do but study the trail beneath my nose with Talmudic intensity.

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