Annalytical 003
Pardon the interruption.
Thanks for sticking with me even though I took a week off after my hike on the Appalachian Trail and my birthday celebrations. I’m back to reality now, which means job after job application. I’ve gotten no after no from publication after publication. If failure is the breakfast of champions, then I must live in the Denny’s Realm of reality.
Enough about that, I want to talk about the woods.
Uphill both ways
I went to hike the Appalachian Trail for my birthday. My mom joined me, and we unofficially began our trek to hopefully cover all ~2,200 miles of the trail that stretches from the Georgia Blue Ridge Mountains to Maine’s Mt. Kahatadin.
I’ve got more hiking plans in the books for May and June, and hopefully April too? We’ll see. If you have experience on the AT and need to mark more miles off your map, send me an email. (Do not try to kidnap me–I’m not quite that stupid).
I’ve got this wanderlust for the woods that just won’t let me go. I admit one of my first thoughts when I was laid off was “huh I wonder if I’ll get a severance that finances an AT thru hike…?” I was hopeful, but that’s not what happened. I did meet another thru hiker who got lucky enough to be able to afford to make that wet dream of mine a reality in his world. Kudos to him.
I ran this idea by my mother and she shook her head, whether in shame that I would consider being a happy freeloader or that I was truly crazy enough to attempt such a feat if I had the money. (Perhaps God knew better, and spared me from myself).
“No one knows about the AT,” she said sadly. “Hardly anyone I told at work knew exactly what I was talking about when I told them we were hiking the AT for your birthday.”
I had not considered that other people weren’t quite as insane and obsessed as I was in my emotional, laid-off, capitalism-striken state. I guess we all are tempted by the pull of the wilderness more than once in life, and many of us feel it’s pull the most when everything in their carefully constructed matrix of domestic life comes crashing down.
The origin of the AT is rooted in both ingenuity and grief. Benton MacKaye, the father and creator of the trail, lost his wife to suicide just as he was preparing them for a trip to nature to soothe her anxiety.
“Many of these sufferers could be cured," he wrote of the trail. "But not merely by ‘treatment.’ They need comprehensive provision made for them. They need acres, not medicine.”
The words of MacKaye and other outdoor pioneers like John Muir run through my head when I feel the most existential about life.
“The mountains are calling and I must go,” is a quote from Muir pulled from a letter to his sister penned in 1873. That little bit is nice, but there’s more to the quote that makes it hit harder.
The mountains are calling and I must go, and I will work on while I can, studying incessantly.”
It’s that “studying incessantly” bit that rocks my world. As someone plagued with the curse of curiosity, I have never felt so seen by Muir–pulled apart by his desire for the wilderness and his desire to work, know, research, discover, be a little kid in the science lab of reality.
In times like these I think about the movie “Into the Wild,” based on the book by Jon Krakauer, which tells the story of Chris McCandless, whose body was found in an abandoned bus on the Stampede Trail in Alaska.
Chris had had enough, and he journeyed into the wild for one last adventure at the young age of 24. He weighed around 70 pounds when his body was discovered in an abandoned bus along with his notes and self-portraits he had taken of himself in the Alaskan wilderness.
There comes a point where we all just want to run away. Run from the challenge and go hide instead of playing the game fair and square. It’s hard to admit this part of me that feels so relatable to people like McCandless, whose death is still debated as a tragedy or his own suicide. Regardless of how he died in the wilderness or if he wanted to die or not, it’s clear he wanted to be in the wild world untouched by human greed.
But then there are other, far more greedy humans, who use the woods to hide. James Hammes spent 5 years hiding out on the Appalachian Trail after he was questioned by the FBI over more than $8 million missing from the company ledger books. As the company controller, he handled all the money. Once his work was in question, he disappeared.
He was later found during an AT trail festival. Other hikers who knew him were in disbelief and were shocked to learn of their friend’s criminal past.
Not all of us go to the woods with pure intentions, but we all go to escape something.
On writing and walking
My grandfather was a true working man. It’s all he had. In the world he grew up in, it was what a man needed to make ends meet for his family. With an 8th grade education, he bought property, built a home and adopted and raised two children.
In today’s America, the vast majority of homeowners (about 70%) have a college degree or some level of college experience. Just over a quarter of American homeowners only have their high school diploma or GED equivalent.
When I imagine my grandfather as a young man in 2024 seeking to buy a home and start a family with an 8th grade education, I feel a pit in my stomach. Yes, he did go on to get his GED while he was in the Army, but would he have had that opportunity otherwise? I’m not sure.
His time in the Army left him disabled, but educated. He didn’t receive a payout for his disability related to his service in the Korean War until he was on his deathbed. That fact burns me up.
But what really burns me up is knowing that he only read on a 2nd grade level.
My mother told me that despite getting his GED, he didn’t read or write all that well. I’ve seen his handwriting on notes and trinkets my mom has stored away. He spelled a lot of things in the phonetic way. For example, “knife” was spelled “nife.” It only makes sense, and such a spelling would cause a second grader to be chastised today.
I don’t remember learning how to read or write. Truly. Yes, I remember handwriting class (because my handwriting was and still is horrendous), but reading was something I always knew about.
I can remember sitting in my booster seat in the back of my dad’s white Jeep Grand Cherokee (that didn’t have A/C) and trying to read the road signs and billboards along the road. I felt frustrated that I couldn’t read. I knew the signs said something. I knew the shapes stood for something significant, but I didn’t have the knowledge to tell you why. I just knew it was something I couldn’t read… yet.
There’s a story my mom loves to tell about me and my older cousin Josh (her brother’s son). One Sunday while we were decorating my grandfather’s grave (the one I mentioned above), we went to check out this one headstone far out in the corner of the graveyard. The graveyard was and is surrounded by fields–usually of cotton, but sometimes other things–and it just looked lonely out there.
We ran out to the headstone, hoping to figure out who was buried there, and found we couldn’t read. We ran back to the family, who was decorating Pawpaw’s grave.
“Me and my cousin Anna went out there to see who it was, but when we got there we couldn’t read,” Josh apparently told the family upon our return. Josh is just a year older than I, and was hardly old enough to read at the time. Still, we were curious, and we knew there was writing there that meant something to someone, and that there was a person there who meant something to someone.
I still don’t know who is buried in that back corner of the graveyard, but I’m certain he or she has company now, more than 20 years later. The miracle of time also created a world where a man who can’t spell all that well could have a granddaughter who makes her living by writing.
Suddenly the gravity of my layoff felt small, as I hiked through the Blue Ridge Mountains and thought about my grandfather, Bob Kitchens, and the price he paid to create a world where I could be butthurt about losing my writing job.
How silly is existence? It’s actually not silly at all.
News You Can Use
I’m hoping to create a news-only version of Annalytical, where you’ll get two newsletters a week–one with News You Can Use and the other my typical blog ramblings. For now, here are the headlines that caught my eye this week:
Rising Numbers of Americans Say Jews, Muslims Face a Lot of Discrimination, Pew Research Center
Long-term Outcomes Better for Those Who Stop Taking Antipsychotics, Mad in America
Fears grow over Comstock Act, Justices Thomas, Alito, The Hill
Why some Christians are angry about Trump’s ‘God Bless the USA’ Bible, CNN
A note:
Thank you for reading and listening to this week’s edition of Annalytical. I appreciate all of your support and kind words as I continue to write about life and the pursuit of happiness. I’m glad you’re on this journey with me.
Keep wandering,
Anna