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August 1 - August 24, 2022
There were a million heavenly things to see and a million spectacular ways to die.
She’d tell them that her father always told her, “Pick up your feet,” and that, through rain and snow, through the valley of the shadow of death, she was following his instruction.
Emma was a teetotaler. She didn’t even drink coffee, and she took great pride in that fact, making a point to turn it down outright, a hidden lecture buried in her refusal.
The children slept four to a bed, and in the winter the snow on the clapboard roof would blow in on them and they’d shake the covers before it could melt.
They were married three months before he drew blood.
Gallipolis, “the city of Gauls.”
She read encyclopedias, but she was particularly fond of classic Greek poetry, quest stories like The Odyssey and The Iliad, and she read them cover to cover when she could find the time.
By two years old, they were sweeping floors and gathering eggs. By three they were collecting kindling for the potbellied stove. By four they were washing and drying dishes. By five they knew how to wash their own clothes.
They learned that birds and animals don’t go hungry, so why should people? So many trees and bushes provided food—hickory nut, beechnut, walnut, honey locust pod, maple syrup, crabapple, mulberry, plum, cherry, huckleberry. Edible plants included dandelions, narrow dock, wild lettuce, white top, clovers, violets, meadow lettuce, poke leaves, and milkweed. And nothing went to waste.
Beef was rare,
outhouse, which they called “the closet” or “bath with a path.”
just beyond the thin shroud of his respectable public persona, there gurgled a mean streak,
She sucked on bouillon cubes as she hiked,
rattlesnake, coiled and ready to strike again.
planting a crop of memories,
the magic of campers who shared their sausage sandwiches across picnic tables.
The trail itself was the product of a dreamer, a man named Benton MacKaye.
Hundreds contributed, blazing and mapping sections, searching through property and tax records in county courthouses, angling to cobble together and preserve for the public the longest continuous walking path in the world.
It’s ironic, perhaps, but the new expressway’s conceptual father was the same man who thought up the Appalachian Trail: Benton MacKaye.
The rise of the car in the 1950s was accompanied by the rise of television. At the beginning of the decade, only 9 percent of American households had a TV set. More than half had one by 1954, and 86 percent would own one by the end of the decade. Americans began to experience life not by the soles of their feet, but by the seat of their pants.
When given a choice, Americans preferred to grab the car keys. Streets and cities were being designed for the automobile, rather than the pedestrian.
Charles Dickens captured the ecstasy of near-madness and insomnia in the essay “Night Walks” and once said, “The sum of the whole is this: Walk and be happy; Walk and be healthy.”
man named Harold Allen summarized its appeal: Remote for detachment, narrow for chosen company, winding for leisure, lonely for contemplation, the Trail leads not merely north and south but upward to the body, mind and soul of man.
1948, Earl V. Shaffer became the first person to hike its entirety in a single trip, the first thru-hiker,
wild dogs came back,
she finally crossed the state line, into Virginia, and into the little town of Damascus. It was a place that would become known as Trail Town, USA, in part due to its kindness to A.T. hikers,
The widowed mother of 11 children,
The Ohio housewife has 26 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
In those early days, nobody fathomed walking the thing from beginning to end in one go.
In 1952, George Miller became the fifth thru-hiker, at age seventy-two.
grotesque, gibbous knees surrounded by unnatural, tumorous outthrusts.
trail magic,
she found three dollars beside the road. It was getting dark, so she used the lucky bills to get a room at a motel and ate five pieces of fried chicken—a feast.
She had never dreamed she would get to walk across the Hudson River on a bridge, but step-by-step she went as cars blurred by. She stopped in the middle, suspended between the water and the sky, to behold the sights. Downriver was New York City, and to the north was the United States Military Academy at West Point, where monuments to dead soldiers dotted the manicured grounds.
she had established a pace of about seventeen miles per day, “rain or shine.”
That Friday was the rainiest August day in the written history of New York City.
A home is made of many things, Books and papers and little strings, A comb and brush to fix one’s hair, A mending basket, and easy chair. A clock, some music, the Sacred Book, A kitchen stove and food to cook. The sound of little feet about Up the stairs, and in and out. Little trinkets on the floor,
Trains and cars and dolls galore. Children’s clothes and children’s beds, A kitty cat that must be fed. A dog to warn us with his bark, When someone bothers when it’s dark. A mother that is kind and good, And patient with her little brood. A great big place must Father fill, Besides the paying of the bills. A Spirit there that brings together, In every trial and kind of weather. There must be kindness every day, If it’s a home with shining ray.
Emmett Till,
To make matters worse, the reporter in Rutland a few days before had somehow gotten the idea that she intended to square-dance in front of the television cameras when she finished the trail. And CBS News had broadcast the error on television. She had no intention of square-dancing in private, much less in front of the American television-viewing public.
the Old Man of the Mountain, a set of granite outcroppings on a mountainside in the shape of a man’s face. The great orator and statesman Daniel Webster once said about the outcropping, “Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoe makers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but up in the Mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.”
the trail stretched alongside a bluff, so close to the edge of a cliff that she was afraid she’d fall off. Falling happened to be the number one cause of death in these parts.
Maine was rugged. Maine was wild. In forty years, Maine would still have more uninhabited forest than any other continental state.
Edward Payson Weston
Maybe she was trying to articulate that exploring the world was a good way to explore her own mind.
Emma tossed her sack across the gap and took a quick few steps on her bad knee and jumped, a great-grandmother aloft, then landed safely on the other side.
I thought it would be a nice lark. It wasn’t.
It is difficult to conceive of a region uninhabited by man.
On the trail, she said, “the petty entanglements of life are brushed aside like cobwebs.”
Emma told a reporter that she had found “an aloneness more complete than ever.”
