![]() My first night alone in the woods was spent in Mammoth Cave National Park (which lacks bears). But I had never slept alone in the woods– not once in my life and I was thirty five years old. I had slept in a decent Manhattan hotel, and a not so decent Manhattan hotel, and I had slept alone on the street one night in Louisville when I was a couch surfer one summer. Some people grow up in areas where this experience is readily available, but I did not. Thinking of growth experiences, every adult should try sleeping alone in the woods at least once. The following spring I had a pack and other equipment and I began taking these out on solo trips to acclimate myself to solitude. The woods were calling my name, and I confess, I sometimes spent time on my office computer looking at hiking videos and hiking gear. I still found inspiration in teaching and from reading some of my students’ writing, but this was in spite of that oppressive feeling. An oppressive feeling hung in my heart, the sense that I would forever process insincere statements (things mostly written and said for a grade) through the lower intestines of academia. That is supposed to feel satisfying in professional life– an office with a door and a key.) The piles of student essays were there, documents mostly trying to say something their authors hoped an authority (me, the teacher) might approve. ![]() (I had an office at a community college then. The following Monday I went back to my office. As the marmalade glow of sunset bled into the grapes of dusk, I stared off into the hills and heard a voice in my head say quite clearly: “I want to go live in the woods for a while.” In another thirty five years I’d be seventy, if I made it. We had perfect weather and peak autumn leaves. The leaves seemed to change colors before our eyes that very day. Late that afternoon in Delaney Park in October 2009, we sat in camp chairs and ate his excellent pan fried pork chops and watched the sun go down. I had learned many things about the natural and human history of the Ohio valley from him. ![]() He grew up in rural western Kentucky, the son of a dedicated deer and bird hunter. I was car camping with my long time hiking and camping buddy, Schwaltz, at Delaney Park, in Indiana. I know exactly where I was when I decided to try thru hiking the Appalachian Trail. Who knows how many urban millions have had their first hiking or camping experience in the area? I don’t remember being particularly reflective about the trip afterward, or especially obsessed with the Appalachian Trail, but perhaps a seed was planted. Only a hundred miles from New York City, the trail section crossing the Hudson River was the first to be laid down in the 1920s. ![]() We were city people, like many who first experience the AT at Bear Mountain. So we shared the orange in the morning sun and hiked out. My father left our food in a pack resting against a tree, and in the morning we discovered some animal had dragged the pack fifty yards away and eaten all of our food– except an orange. We camped somewhere in the vicinity of Bear Mountain, just for one night. My father took my brother and me camping, the three of us sleeping in a little tent. The first time I stood on the Appalachian Trail was at Perkins observatory on New York’s Bear Mountain, in 1983.
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