Date: 2007-10-09
To: home
Miles today: 0.0
Weather: scattered clouds

Final entryFirst of all I owe a big thank-you to everyone who supported me this past six months on my journey. I cannot fully express how much I¢ve appreciated the support from friends and family, including the thoughtful emails, care packages, trail magic, guestbook entries, and letters. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Hunter who diligently transcribed all of my chicken scratch. Next, I¢d like to congratulate everyone who hiked this year ¢ no matter if you made it one mile or two thousand, you should all be very proud of yourselves for going out on a limb and doing it. Some words of advice for those of you contemplating a long hike on the AT: DO IT. It can be the greatest experience of your life, regardless of how it pans out. It¢s a place of freedom where there¢s a strong supportive community. A trip like this can test you and infuse you with joy. You shouldn¢t have to think twice about it¢¦As a conclusion to this year¢s trailjournal, I feel like it¢s a good idea to recap what I¢ve gained from the trail. This is important for me as a cathartic exercise and also as a conclusion to my online account of my experience on the trail. I begin my thoughts with the white knuckled drive back home after I got off the trail. Having lived in the city where no one drives for a few years and after spending months on trail, I¢ve developed a real aversion to driving. Actually, I¢m terrified of it! During the drive home in my rental car, I experienced more psychological challenges than I ever did on the trail. Seriously! Recounting my fearful flirtations with going 50 miles per hour plus to my friends, I laughed and said that it was more of a character building exercise than my hike had ever been. But character is something that reveals itself in times of trial, rather than being a thing that¢s built at those times. The trail revealed things about myself ¢ some good, some not so good. But I realized that my life on and off the trail is predominantly lived well and is a joyful experience with occasional bumps along the way. It¢s funny to have walked for months only to realize that my little utopia is something I¢ve carried inside myself since Springer Mountain and before.At the beginning of the trail, I thought my basic goal was to walk from Georgia to Maine. That simple goal dissolved as I spent time alone walking in thought. In fact, all goals dissolved. The trail became a place for me to relax for once in my life, to quit trying to be the over achieving A student, diligent employee, the competitor and type-A control freak. I used the AT loosely as a framework on which to build a journey, choosing paths less traveled on a whim, checking out waterfalls, visiting towns, and exploring the mountains of Appalachia. No longer did I have the goal of passing every white blaze or walking big miles. I was no longer out to dazzle anything aside from my own senses. It was liberating. I learned to say ¢I can¢t¢ and, more importantly, ¢I won¢t¢ and to be okay with my personal limitations. This evolved into a trip of seeking comfort in my own skin and of hiking my own hike, to use the tired clich©. I often found it psychologically difficult to do as I pleased¢¦and, early on, I found myself going with the flow even when it wasn¢t what I really wanted to do. Then I learned to sit and be still and to allow others to flow around me while they pursued their own journey and I pursued mine.   I think that was the point when my own journey really began. It was a big test to decide to get off the trail early for safety reasons. But it was a test that proved that I had really learned some of the lessons I needed to learn ¢ patience, humility, vulnerability, and the ability to say I¢m afraid and have no control over a situation. There¢s been quite a buzz on whiteblaze and on the AT grapevine lately about the whole situation with Granite. Many thanks to those of you (and there were so many) who supported my decision. It¢s good to have affirmation after making a difficult decision such as this. For those couple of you who question my choice in getting off the trail, stating that I used it as an ¢excuse¢ to leave, among other criticisms: How DARE you question a woman¢s decision to keep herself safe? You have mothers, maybe even daughters, wives, sisters, or girlfriends. How would you feel if one of these women were in the situation I was in? I never made any false claims about Granite ¢ I merely described my own experience. Forrest, Spaceman, Birdman, and myself gave statements to the Maine State Police and it is on record that I had good reason to do what I did. Is Granite a bad guy? Would he have caused me or anyone else harm? Who knows? All I know is that I had to make a decision about my own well-being and I had no desire to stick around and see if a bad outcome would have come of it. I guess you could say that I¢m not a gambling kind of person. From my perspective as a woman living in what is, unfortunately, a violent world, I chose to be safe. If I needed an ¢excuse¢ to leave the trail, I would¢ve got off when my friends Lala or Bad Influence left, or when I hurt my back so badly in Vermont that I could barely walk, or when I was having diarrhea a zillion times a day in the Whites. But I didn¢t quit then and that should be an indicator of my tenacity and the seriousness of this situation for me. And, as for the accusations in hushed tones of my ¢yellow blazing¢: OF COURSE I yellow blazed! In fact, I pretty much blazed every color of the whole damn rainbow during my hike ¢ I even took a gondola up a mountain one time! If the few of you questioning my motives had actually read my trailjournal, you¢d know that I¢m very straight forward as to my status as a non-purist and give an account of my trespasses around the white blaze. I was never out here to get a badge or a title. I am not a 2,000 miler, though I admire those who chose that path as I admire anyone with the guts to hike for months on end. I merely wanted to walk and think and grow¢¦and have a little fun. And that I did very successfully. And I am proud of myself. I feel that a public forum on AT safety is valuable and most everyone is using it responsibly as a tool to keep people safe and informed. But I really hate that my hike and decisions about my personal safety are fodder for lunchtime message board activity. This hike meant a lot to me and it disgusts me that a few rotten apples are turning it into the next AT tabloid sensation. Moving along¢¦A lot of people express difficulty in readjusting to life after the trail. I haven¢t felt the transition to be too taxing, though I¢m still getting the hang of taking regular showers and changing my clothes on a daily basis. I experienced something pretty rough after I went on a month and a half long sailing and hiking trip in Canada years ago. At that point, I returned home and couldn¢t sleep or function normally. I eventually realized that it wasn¢t the absence of a schedule or nature (though I genuinely missed those things) that bothered me but, rather, that I had been living a compromised life. That trip dropped an ideal life in my lap and, when it was snatched away and I was deposited back into the real world, I was appalled at how I¢d been living. So I enrolled in grad school and started changing little things about how I lived. Time away can give you a lot of perspective¢¦and I got perspective this time around too. But I feel like this time around I had a good sense of what I wanted before I ever set foot on the trail -- even if I couldn¢t put it to words. I feel like I¢ve found a good spot for myself in the world. Being a librarian isn¢t a glamorous job but I help people and spend my days doing work that doesn¢t compromise my ideals. It¢s a pretty neat thing to do for forty hours a week and a great career choice for a lifelong idealist. When I returned to the city to visit my old library, I ran into an old patron of mine, Lio, a fourth grader who lives in the neighborhood. Immediately, I sat down with him and proceeded to do a little pro-bono work, talking with him and helping him with his homework. I had missed my job. The trail gave me a lot of ideas about how to live more in harmony with the planet.   I¢ve been considering finding property where I can live off the grid, compost, and garden. I¢m trying not to drive ¢ partly because it terrifies me (!) and partly because it¢s wasteful. I looked like a bit of a freak walking down the highway yesterday with my pack full of groceries (see ¢ I knew that pack was a good investment when I bought it!) but my time on the trail taught me that being a oddball is celebrated by entire communities when it¢s done in responsible ways. I¢ve been at my apartment for a week now and my roommate and I have become recycling fiends. So¢¦little things, little steps are being made in the right direction. It¢s not some grandiose answer to the issues that bother me about the world we live in but it¢s an effort. After all, tiny steps are what took me hundreds of miles through the mountains. The first steps are the most difficult but, after you get going, you just walk. And walk. And, eventually, you get to the place you need to go.