Epilogue

A month has passed since my summit of Springer Mountain and today, I must admit, I miss the trail more than ever. I dream of it nightly. A recurring dream I have is one in which I am standing on one of the many railroad tracks the trail crosses over. I’m smelly, carrying a heavy pack and have two trekking poles in hand. I’m right back there. I look down the straight endless line of railroad tracks and see Wolfdog, Young Gandolf, Spills, Howdy, and so many other familiar faces walking toward me from a distance. I hear their voices. I see their smiles, and right before they reach me, they disappear.

Even during the day sometimes, I find my mind adrift in a sort of AT daze. I’ll hear a conversation I had on trail playing over as background noise to the real goings on of the moment. A flash view from the top of Stratton or Greylock or Bear Mountain will pop into my sight, though I am really looking down a grocery aisle or staring at the television. Yes, it seems I am constantly haunted by the beauty, the melancholy, and the wonder of the wilderness that once encompassed all of me, but oh what a spectacular ghost to have preoccupying my spirit. I hope it spooks me forever. In fact, I think one of my greatest worries is that I will forget. As each day goes by, I feel the memories fading, their freshness, their realness. And as the clarity of them in my mind starts to blur, and the toll of the trail on my body starts to finally heal, my fear is that, one day, the entire experience will only exist as a surreal dream in the ever erasing corners of my mind. Luckily, I have about a million pictures to look at, and have my blog journals to read to take me back there. How thankful I am to have those entries to reference. As hard as it was to make the time to write them, I am so grateful I did. I love reading them and reliving the experience. I like to see where my head was in the beginning of the trek compared to the end. Oh how naive I was when I began. How inexperienced. How innocent. How simple. I loved those times.

When people ask what my favorite part of the trip was, my mind never goes to a specific location, but always just goes back to those first few weeks. Everything was so new. I felt so free, so adventurous. Every view took my breath away. Every moment was so precious. I remember whispering to myself “this is real” so often just to convince myself I wasn’t dreaming. I didn’t care about miles or money or time. All I had to live for were the steps I took during each day. I have never been so present and so content in my own life as I was during that period. It was my nirvana. My heaven on Earth.

It saddens me that the newness of that experience can only happen once. Even if I set out to hike the PCT or CDT one day, it will not be the same. I will be seasoned. I will have expectations and will know exactly how to carry myself. The beginning of my thru-hike of the AT was a special corner of time I will never be able to visit again, but at least I enjoyed the hell out of it while it lasted. I also love where my mind was during the end of my trip. How brave, and strong, and confident I was. I still feel as if I can do anything I want because of this hike, that I can conquer any feat, solve any problem. I hope never to lose that courage.

I met my friend Kimber, who hiked the trail in 2015, for coffee the other day, and we began discussing the intense feeling of missing the trail. Even three years later, she says she still thinks of it, at least once, every day. She referenced another hiker’s story about the trail in which the hiker referred to not only missing the trail, but missing who she was when hiking the AT. I had never thought of this idea before, but when I heard the story, I totally related to the idea. The hiker referred to the phenomenon as “the fruit loop effect”. This hiker was on the trail craving fruit loops one day and started telling everyone about her affliction (when you have a food craving, it is all you talk about out there). For days and days this hiker talked about fruit loops until she eventually came up to a road where a trail angel was working magic and had brought all sorts of sodas and fun food goodies. The angel had heard about the hikers hankering for some sugary round colorful bits of goodness from hikers who had passed the road before her, and he just so happened to had brought some fruit loops with him on this trip. He had set them aside for her especially, and when the hiker arrived at the road, she was beyond grateful. She had the most intense feeling of appreciation for something as meager as a few pieces of children’s cereal….and that’s what she missed. She missed the person who could feel beyond grateful for every little thing. I mean that’s how all of us want to feel, right? Grateful for every little thing we have.

That is what I miss. I miss Mona. Mona is everything Hillary is, plus a person who takes nothing for granted. Mona is everything Hillary is, plus a person who is appreciative for every little moment and thing. Mona is me, plus a person who is grateful at a level Hillary can never be in the real world, because the real world naturally makes us take almost everything for granted. Clean water, hot food, a warm bed. It is all at our fingertips constantly. It is nearly impossible to imagine life without it, and therefore nearly impossible to truly appreciate it always.

I loved this conversation with Kimber. It was a discussion that only can occur between two thru-hikers, and boy did I appreciate the connection.

Since being home, I have gotten a lot of questions. Most of them are the standard:

Really?

How long did it take?

Did you go by yourself?

Did you bring a gun?

Did you see any bear?

How was it?

Did you meet any interesting people?

Most of my answers are rehearsed and regurgitated: Yes. Yes. No. Yes. It was amazing…etc.

When I first got home I was so excited to share what I had experienced with my friends, family, and loved ones. I wanted them to feel that buzz, that magic that I was so full up of inside, but I found myself absolutely incapable of doing so. I couldn’t relay the enchantment, the thrill, the delight of it all. I must have said, “It was amazing” ten thousand times since I have been back, but I don’t think anyone of the people I said those words to really got it. “It was amazing” doesn’t really tell you anything first off. I mean it tells you that it didn’t suck, but beyond that, “amazing” is so ambiguous. I have found it doesn’t matter what I say though. What I experienced cannot be verbalized or expressed in a way that evokes true understanding. I can’t share the magic with just words. I can’t create the buzz that Kimber and I feel when we talk about the trail with another person who hasn’t hiked the AT. I know this because I have experienced the same dilemma when talking about addiction and recovery. Only when the person I am talking to about addiction is an addict, do I get that sympathetic gaze of true comprehension. Only when I speak about recovery to a person in recovery, do I get a response of true recognition of what I am talking about, and now I think only when I am talking with another thru-hiker will I be able to truly get that spark of connection I am searching for when speaking about the trail. But

while I may not be able to explain my experience and be totally understood, I have found that I can easily share much of what I learned on the trail, and those lessons can be easily grasped by anyone. In fact, I find myself referring to the trail constantly when giving advice or sharing information with someone. My AT hardships, dilemmas, blunders, successes, pleasures, and accomplishments are all so analogous with life’s joys and sorrows, the words ‘life’ and ‘trail’ could be interchangeable terms in almost any conversation I have. This gives me hope. It lets me know that while I might not be able to share the magic with everyone, I can share the knowledge with anyone.

So, What’s next?

This is my favorite question. I know people don’t mean it this way, but I always take it as a notion that recovering from addiction, graduating college, and then hiking a 2,200 mile trail solo just wasn’t enough. (the cynic inside me chuckles) However, I get it. I know the end of the AT is not the end of my story. And that is just exactly my answer that I give when asked this question. I say, “I am continuing the journey”.

The journey right now consists of a pretty rigorous job application process and working part-time at the restaurant to sustain my bills. I have an internship with the director of the CRC lined up for the six weeks after Thanksgiving, and then plan on enjoying the holidays with my husband and family. I hope to have a job somewhere within mental health and human services by 2018, and hopefully be in the market to purchase a home sometime later that year. Graduate school, children, learning a new language, living in a new state, traveling abroad, and the John Muir trail are all on the docket as well. The order of those events will reveal themselves in time though, and I am truly in no hurry to rush through achieving them. For now, I will continue to share my story, try never to forget the trail, and try to remain as humble as possible as reentry into this real world continues. I will try to channel Mona at the beginning of her hike and just for today, be in the now, stop and smell the roses, and continue to take each step one at a time.