To all who have been following my Appalachian journey again I’ve got to apologize. While the trail has taught me perseverance, I’m still sorely under-practiced when it comes to meeting a deadline or setting one for myself. So I’m sorry for the glacial pace that I seem to move at when documenting my adventure.

As you’ve most likely guessed, I made it to the AT’s northern terminus a while ago. A month in fact. I climbed Mount Katahdin in Baxter State Park, ME on July 20th. It took me a little under three hours to summit. The group I’d traveled with for three weeks usually stuck close together, but that day by unspoken agreement we spread out, each preferring to make the climb at our own pace, with our own thoughts, alone.
The end wasn’t something to rush towards, especially for those who’d begun in Georgia on the bitter fringe of a turning winter. They’d been on trail even longer than I had. The hiking lifestyle had become, for them, a familiar mould. And who has no reservations when it comes to abandoning familiarity and leaping into a wholly new and chaotic future? And how much harder is it to take that leap after you’ve been living a life as simple as “eat, walk, sleep” on a one lane path in the woods where it isn’t likely that you’ll get lost?

But we all made the top, a few falling to their knees before the weathered mountaintop sign which we’d all seen in pictures, but until then weren’t sure existed (the trail actually has an end?). It was summer in Maine, but it was bitter cold with wind chill up there and none of us had the clothing to handle it for long. Still, we stayed as long as we could, huddled behind rocks to avoid the wind, using 5 by 5 aluminum emergency blankets that had been folded down to nearly-microscopic size and stowed in zippered pockets since mid-April.

I could see 80 miles back the way we’d come. 80 miles and five days of hiking to a far-off, curved horizon. And although it seemed like the world just stopped there at that line, I was intimately aware now that it didn’t. I’d crossed that horizon twenty times over since April 5th and, to my great relief and agony, I hadn’t hit an edge, hadn’t fallen off.
Discovering, step by tiny step, the sheer scope of this place that we all live had been a liberating reassurance. I learned the hard way that what I see is not necessarily what I get, that the world doesn’t obey the illusion of it that you hold in your head. There’s always more if you’re willing to leave behind the familiar places you’ve been to before, the hardened stone of things you’re certain you already know. But there’s pain involved as well. Struggling for hours to reach a summit that turns out to be false is the same process required to verify or falsify a belief, a fact, an opinion, or really anything you think you’re certain of. But that’s how you grow. You can’t ask for answers, you’ve got to find them yourself.

Turning towards whatever comes next — Nomad