People that are thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail have a sort of community.
By the end of the White Mountains, as southern Maine demonstrated that the climbing and rock scrambling were not over, there was a general wearing out amongst the hikers I met.
With the goal in mind, but the ups and downs still very real and in the way, it greatly eased the trek to hike in groups.
And so, up the trail would roll caravans of four or five hikers. Silent and mechanical, with eyes pointed north to Mt. Katahdin, we weary travelers walked.
At night there would be conversations and laughter around a fire while dinners were made, in the morning silent deliberate packing, and at lunch jokes and plans of where the next night would be spent.
As we walked we would fantasize about enormous meals at steakhouses with salad bars and soft-serve ice cream, or talk about the state of affairs in the world, or philosophize about consciousness, or share our life stories, or excitedly narrate the plots of movies that we had seen.
One day, sitting and snacking, four of us had a discussion about a misconception.
In the southern part of the trail, when we were all getting used to life on the trail, it seemed there would come a day that our packs would be light as air, our legs numb, indestructible pumping machines that were completely undaunted by a steep mountain.
We thought mosquitoes, friction rashes, the heat and the cold would cease to bother us. We thought our feet would callous and our bones would turn to steel. That soaked boots would feel completely normal.
Even 2,000 miles into the trail there was never an easy day. Even when the terrain got flat there were still rocks and roots to hop over, and if it felt too easy we would walk further.
No pain was overwhelming, but at all times there was a nag or a throb somewhere in my body, be it feet, shins, knees, shoulders or back. We all agreed that things would never get easy.
Meeting a friend
To my surprise, things did get easy, though. The last hundred miles of the trail, I met back up with a friend I had made down south and had hiked with for a large section of the trail before Virginia.
In the Hundred Mile Wilderness, we hiked through the valleys around the countless lakes, swamps, beaver dams and pine forests of central Maine. As we cruised along each day, the end of my hike got closer and closer.
With a mix of reluctance and excitement, I accepted the fact that I was almost done, but also denied that it was a sure thing until the end, still taking each day very seriously (maybe too seriously).
Mt. Katahdin
The weather was beautiful the day that I summited Mt. Katahdin.
It happened to also be a weekend, which meant that Baxter State Park, in Maine, was filled with tourists. Mt. Katahdin is more than 5,000 feet tall and rises suddenly up over relatively flat surroundings.
The walk up is more like a climb for much of the way, and as a fellow thru-hiker and I rushed up to the final point of our journey, politely skirting the weekenders resting against rocks and stopping to huff and puff in the middle of the trail, we were hardly even slowed down by our occasional glances back at the vast, lake-strewn, unpopulated forests we had just come through, or by our short halts, in which we would admire the ever visible peak of the mountain.
We rushed over several plateaus covered in alpine vegetation and in an anticlimactic finish reached a mountain top, densely crowded with tourists.
There was a crowd around the sign that is the peak and the end of the trail. I’d seen pictures of weather-beaten hikers, proudly holding their hands in the air at this sign, people with huge smiles, with triumph on their faces, windblown hair and joyful eyes.
I didn’t feel all that, though. Just that I was done, and that I wasn’t sure what came next, and that I hoped eventually the crowd would clear a little and I could get a picture by the sign to prove I was there (as if I needed or cared about proof at that point) or something.
I got my token pictures by the sign, took some for my friend and walked over to some rocks facing south on the side of the mountain.
Behind me, a team of semi-pro ice hockey players from somewhere in Maine were making a bunch of noise, and the sound of different conversations stuck out in scattered words and phrases. People were chatting on their cell phones about petty nothings.
I sat on my rock, had a snack and thought about all the mountaintops I had been on, alone and proud, confronted by all of nature.
Now, I sat at the end of my hike, on Katahdin (“The Greatest of all Mountains” in the local Native American language) trying to ignore the sound of a crowd and to let things sink in.
Tired of sitting amongst the commotion, and curious about what was on the other side of the mountain, I walked down past the end of the trail, over to the steep side of the ridge, a long wall, stepped with huge crumbling cubes of granite and curving around sharply, almost a semicircle around a shallow, crystal clear blue lake thousands of feet below.
I climbed down the rocks to a nice ledge, hidden from the crowd above, where the wind drowned their noise out.
Awed by the enormity of this rocky mountain that was slowly, cube by cube, being split away into pieces to crumble down into the valley, by the millions of years that it had existed, by the miles and miles of hills that existed north to Canada, and by the range of mountains that stretched the whole way south to Georgia, I absorbed everything around me.
I thought, then, of how an hour earlier I had reached the sign and assumed that my hike was over, only to discover that just a few hundred feet further was one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen in my life.
Quietly, I breathed in the clear mountaintop air, climbed back up to my pack and started back down the mountain the way I had come.
Driving home
The day after I finished the hike, my Mom came and picked me up in Millinocket, Maine, near where the trail ends.
The drive home took 10 hours, while the walk from Shippensburg to there took about three months.
After about a week and a half at home, I went down to South Carolina to help my brother John pack his house up so he could go to Afghanistan, where he is serving with the Air Force for three-and-a-half months.
In a week and a half, I was back where I started six months ago, before John drove me to the trailhead. It took so little time to get back to where I started.
Not much had changed, except when I was there before, his son Isaiah was a quiet, red-faced infant.
Six months later Isaiah curiously looks around, babbles, giggles, smiles and bounces up and down as much as possible. I feel pretty much the same, maybe a little bit wiser, except whereas then I had a plan, now I’m not sure what to do with myself.
I can’t count the times that people have asked me why I would choose to walk more than 2,000 miles through the mountains. It’s a question that I can’t quite answer myself.
When they ask how I did it, I have a simple answer: by wanting to. As for why I wanted to, who knows?
Benton MacKaye, the man who first envisioned a walking trail that would follow the Appalachian Mountain range, said its purpose would be, “To walk, to see, and to see what you see.”
I’ve heard people say life is about the journey.
Others say that life is about the destination, but I’d say it’s about journeying a little past the destination, just because there might be something beautiful to see there.
So what do you do? I guess you just gotta walk on through.
Ray Cressler, 24, grew up in Shippensburg. He has a bachelor’s degree in creative writing and philosophy from Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove. He is the son of Sam and Chris Cressler and grandson of Frank and Mabel Cressler and Raymond and Mary Smith. Recently having moved away from the beautiful Cumberland Valley where where he was reared and that he crossed on his journey north on the Appalachian Trail, he now resides in Providence, R.I.
