Three Months Later

A lot of people (by "a lot" I mean, like, three) have asked me why I never put a summary posting for my hike, a sort of valedictory summation of the whole thing. What grand insights into life have I gotten from the hike?

I wanted to write that up. I meant to. But every time I even though about it, it was just profoundly depressing.

When I was heading back to the trail out of Gatlinburg, I caught a ride with a guy I met at the outfitter. He’d done a thru-hike several years ago, so we swapped stories. As the truck was getting up to Newfound Gap, where he’d be letting me off, he started talking about how much he envied me. “Man, enjoy your hike, ‘cause after you’re done, life just sucks in comparison. I’m not complaining about life – I’ve got a girlfriend and a good job and all, but nothing you ever do is going to be this awesome. You’re gonna finish, and be depressed for a year.”


He pissed me off ... mostly because I knew that he was right.

Real life does suck in comparison, and I have been depressed for the last three months.

I’ve told a lot of people that during the last two months of the hike, I wanted nothing more than to be finished with the damn trail; but that after two weeks, I wanted nothing more than to be back. Of course, if I did go back, that enthusiasm would last about three days, and I’d again be pining for a refrigerator.

What I want to go back to is not the trail itself, but the summer of 2008. I want to go back to the handful of moments on the trail that will be forever burned in my memory: Mt. Moosilauke; walking into Damascus for the first time; Cool Breeze pulling up in that SUV; Raffle Queen and Lipstick showing up, repeatedly, just when I needed them to; hearing my name called out as I summitted Katahdin. Those were some of the best moments of my life, and I want to live in those moments, the way other people would, if they could, live forever in their honeymoon or at the birth of their children. When I was a kid, I would reread my favorite books again and again.

The problem is, of course, that while you can read those stories again, you can never read them again for the first time. And I can never again climb Clingman’s Dome for the first time.

Shit, this is gotta be a downer to read. But there it is.