Trailed: One Woman's Quest to Solve the Shenandoah Murders

by Kathryn Miles

By my junior year in college, I was anorexically thin and living an ascetic existence only a medieval hermit could appreciate.

I have never been someone adept at compartmentalizing my feelings or differentiating which of those feelings are mine and which belong to other people.

But it is true that both of Thoreau’s erroneous suppositions make for great metaphor: in the case of the former, the idea is that a woodland saunter, even in one’s own backyard, could achieve the same kind of spiritual significance as a religious pilgrimage; in the latter, that the best hikes are those where we proceed as if we have no home or, perhaps more exactly, that we shuffle through the world like a snail or a turtle, with our homes on our backs. This idea comes with an appealing kind of simplicity: that thrift and austerity, even if it is temporary and artificial, can grant us peace and liberty. Sauntering, we are free to walk for days, stopping when and where we choose for a snack or a nap or to set up camp for the night.