American Camino: Walking as Spiritual Practice on the Appalachian Trail (Toposophia: Thinking Place/Making Space) 9781666916690, 9781666916706, 1666916692

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American Camino

TOPOSOPHIA Thinking Place/Making Space This series, dedicated to the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of place, will be of interest to scholars and students in a variety of fields, especially those in philosophy, geography, political theory, architecture, landscape design, history, planning, urban studies, environmental studies, media, and the creative arts. As the combination of topos and sophia in the series title suggests, the aim is to engage with issues of place and space (geographical, architectural, environmental, political, aesthetic, virtual) in a questioning and reflective (broadly “philosophical”) fashion. However, the series is not restrictive in the range of disciplines included nor in the ways in which place and space might be taken up. Series Editors: Jessica Dubow (University of Sheffield) and Jeff Malpas (University of Tasmania) Editorial Board: Edmunds Bunkse, Nader El-Bizri, Matti Itkonen, Eduardo Mendieta, John Murungi, John Pickles, Beata Sirowy, Ingrid Leman Stefanovic, Dennis Skocz Books in the Series: American Camino: Walking as Spiritual Practice on the Appalachian Trail, by Kip Redick The Place of the Mosque: Genealogies of Space, Knowledge, and Power, by Akel Isma’il Kahera Toward a Directionalist Theory of Space: On Going Nowhere, by H. Scott Hestevold Urbanizing Carescapes of Hong Kong: Two Systems, One City, by Shu-Mei Huang Mapping and Charting in Early Modern England and France: Power, Patronage, and Production, by Christine Petto Remembering Places: A Phenomenological Study of the Relationship between Memory and Place, by Janet Donohoe Spoil Island: Reading the Makeshift Archipelago, by Charlie Hailey Reading the Islamic City: Discursive Practices and Legal Judgment, by Akel Isma’il Kahera Metamorphoses of the Zoo: Animal Encounter after Noah, Edited by Ralph R. Acampora The Timespace of Human Activity: On Performance, Society, and History as Indeterminate Teleological Events, by Theodore R. Schatzki Environmental Dilemmas: Ethical Decision Making, by Robert Mugerauer and Lynne Manzo When France Was King of Cartography: The Patronage and Production of Maps in Early Modern France, by Christine Petto Mysticism and Architecture: Wittgenstein and the Meanings of the Palais Stonborough, by Roger Paden

American Camino Walking as Spiritual Practice on the Appalachian Trail

Kip Redick

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Redick, Kip, author. Title: American camino: walking as spiritual practice on the Appalachian Trail / Kip Redick. Description: Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, [2023] | Series: Toposophia: Thinking place/Making space | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book explores the relationship between long-distance hiking-in this case, hiking the Appalachian Trail-and spiritual pilgrimage. Kip Redick interprets the Appalachian Trail as a site of spiritual journey and those who hike the wilderness trail as unique contemporary pilgrims”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023029546 (print) | LCCN 2023029547 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666916690 (cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781666916706 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Hiking—Appalachian Trail. | Hiking—Religious aspects. | Pilgrims and pilgrimages. | Self-actualization (Psychology) Classification: LCC GV199.42.A68 R44 2023 (print) | LCC GV199.42.A68 (ebook) | DDC 796.510974--dc23/eng/20230808 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029546 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023029547 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Figures vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 1  Getting to the Mountain

7

2  Spiritual Journey Versus Aesthetic Tourism

39

3  A Social/Spatial Journey

99

4  Can Wildness Be Found on a Wilderness Trail?

157

5  Wilderness as Sacred Space

187

6  Spiritual Rambling

233

7  Veterans, Healing, and Long-Distance Hiking

283

8  Summiting Katahdin and Coming Home

309

Bibliography 325 Index 335 About the Author

345

v

Figures

CHAPTER 1 1.1.  B  ronze Plaque on Springer Mountain, Georgia. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

8

CHAPTER 2 2.1.  Mountain Crossings, Georgia. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

41

2.2.  M  cAfee Knob, Virginia. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

59

2.3.  D  escending from Dragons Tooth, Virginia. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

62

2.4.  L  ooking South from Jane Bald to Roan High Knob, Tennessee/North Carolina Border. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

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2.5.  G  rayson Highlands, Wild Ponies with Wilburn Ridge in the Distance, Virginia. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

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2.6.  C  louds Interacting with the Mountains, Roan Highlands, Tennessee/North Carolina Border. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

67

2.7.  D  oe and Fawn Stepping Off the Trail Near Peters Mountain, Virginia. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

74

vii

viii

Figures

2.8.  S  horeline of Nahmakanta Lake, Maine. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

87

2.9.  T  op of Nesuntabunt Mountain, Maine, Mount Katahdin in the Distance. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

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2.10.  V  iew Over Nahmakanta Lake from the Top of Nesuntabunt Mountain, Maine. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

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CHAPTER 3 3.1.  T  he Author Buffeted by Strong Winds along Franconia Ridge, White Mountains, New Hampshire. Photo taken by Kip Redick. 115 3.2.  T  hru-Hikers Doing Work-for-Stay, Sleeping in the Dining Area, Carter Notch Hut, Wildcats, New Hampshire. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

116

3.3.  M  idpoint Sign, Pennsylvania. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

120

3.4.  G  raffiti on the Camino de Santiago, Hiker Trash. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

140

3.5. 

 rashcan’s Worn-Out Shoes, Near the Delaware T Water Gap, Pennsylvania. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

3.6.  K  incora Hostel, Dennis Cove, Tennessee. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

142 144

CHAPTER 5 5.1.  C  limbing the Pyrenees Out of St. Jean Pied de Port, France, and Looking Back. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

201

5.2.  Two Blond Cows. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

202

5.3.  Mist Rising in the Pyrenees, France. Photo taken by Kip Redick. 204 5.4.  A  ncient Fortress Atop a High Mountain, Pyrenees, France. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

207

5.5.  R  omanesque Church of Santa Maria de Eunate, Spain. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

210



Figures ix

5.6.  Puente la Reina, Spain. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

211

5.7.  G  othic Ruins of San Anton Convent, Spain. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

217

5.8.  S  hrine Fence, Via Crucis, near Rabanal del Camino, Spain. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

221

5.9.  R  ock Art at the Shrine Fence, Via Crucis, near Rabanal del Camino, Spain. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

222

CHAPTER 7 7.1.  T  he Author Heading Out on the Approach to the PCT, Mount Lassen Volcanic National Park, California. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

284

7.2.  T  he Author at the Entrance to Mount Lassen Volcanic National Park, PCT, California. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

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CHAPTER 8 8.1.  Mahoosuc Notch, Maine. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

310

8.2.  Mahoosuc Notch, Maine. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

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8.3.  Mahoosuc Notch, Maine. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

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8.4.  T  rail Magic, Grafton Notch, Maine. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

313

8.5.  L  ooking Toward Mount Katahdin, Bigelow Mountain, Avery Peak, Maine. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

315

8.6.  M  ount Katahdin Reflected in the Pond at Abol Bridge, Maine. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

316

8.7.  D  rinking from Thoreau Springs, Mount Katahdin, Maine. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

317

8.8.  S  ummit of Mount Katahdin, Northern Terminus of the AT, Maine. Photo taken by Kip Redick.

318

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the support of my wife, Sarah, who has encouraged me to follow this journey. She mailed all my food resupply boxes when I thruhiked the AT. She has performed countless deeds of kindness and love in all my journeys and interactions with students, hikers, and pilgrims. She has also accompanied me on two Camino treks, one of which was the extremely challenging Primitivo. I also acknowledge my children, Caroline, Caleb, and Danae, who have been my assistants on many journeys. I look forward to more journeys with them. Thanks to my colleagues in the Department of Philosophy and Religion, past and present, for collaboration, encouragement, and inspiration. In addition, I am deeply grateful for many collaborations with colleagues from beyond my department, in disciplines other than my own. I must thank all my students—there are more than 450 who have accompanied me on various pilgrimages. I could not name one without giving credit to each. I always learn from my students. Of special note, Michael and Darlene Graves, who inspired me to move into the study of spiritual journeys. George Greenia, who offered assistance and advice when I began planning for my first class on the Camino de Santiago. He has continued to encourage and support me through the years. Thanks to my trail family at the Appalachian Long Distance Hiker Association (ALDHA). I am so blessed to know each one. A special blessing for those in the family who have received their Final Blaze. I am extremely thankful for all the help and support I have received from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and the AT Museum. I also offer gratitude to the many Trail Angels who have been there for me and other hikers, each of you have given true hospitality. I include all the hostel owners and staff in with the Trail Angels. xi

xii

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank all the hikers and pilgrims with whom I have shared in pilgrimage and long-distance hiking. I will call out to some of them using trail names. These represent the countless many I cannot name. I love each of you: True Grit, Jacob, Light Foot, Truckin, Soul Slosher, Pebbles, Otter, Brother of the Wind, Coconut, Scribbles, Snake Farm, Poncho, Yinz, Elby, Hollywood, Colorado, Caps, Big Ben, Lady Sherpa, Baby Ruth, Forebeard, Coyote, Milkman, Molasses, El Flaco, Delaware Dave, Maniac, Piece of Work the Roaming Gnome, Always Fine, Evergreen Boy, HeBGB, Where in the Blazes[?], Lewis and Mark, Trail Angel Mary, Miss Janet, Jester, Lumpy, and Timber. Finally, I am so overwhelmingly blessed to have been jolted into my first journey, up on the PCT, by my soul brother, my comrade from the Marine Corps, and companion with whom I shared some of the most transformational moments of life. Thanks John! Thanks for calling me out of complacency, for declaring the truth when it was not something I wanted to hear. For saying, “Kippy! Man, we’re blowing it.” And when I questioned the meaning of that, you responded, “we’re in a spiritual rut.” You convinced me to purchase backpacks, go up on the PCT, and then live our lives searching for meaning. You are a true brother. Semper Fidelis.

Introduction

There are various ways one might experience the Appalachian Trail, ranging from vicarious to walking the entire length in one calendar year. Numerous well-made documentaries of hikers walking the entire two thousand, plus miles have been produced. Dozens of books have also been written, including personal accounts as well as fictional tales. Reading these books or watching the films allows a vicarious experience, a peek at the scenery without the hardships that accompany a long-distance hike. The Appalachian Trail (hereafter cited as AT) is officially designated a National Scenic Trail, so experiencing the landscape through someone else’s point of view, whether that be prose, poetry, photography, or cinematography, opens the reader/spectator to a highly mediated perspective of wilderness scenery. Another vicarious way of experiencing the AT is open to those driving in places such as the Blue Ridge Parkway or the Skyline Drive, roads which parallel and intersect the AT. Drivers park at one of the many scenic overlooks, some of which share close proximity to the AT, and view the same prospect as hikers. But do driver and hiker, standing in the same location and looking out over the same range of mountains extending to the horizon, really see the same scenery? Those who drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway might choose to stop at one of the many “trail head” parking areas and spend a morning or afternoon hiking along the AT. Most people who experience the AT do just that, hike out from one of the hundreds of parking areas, day pack loaded with a picnic meal, and amble along the same track that extends north or south to Georgia or Maine. They too share the AT with long-distance hikers, walk over the same roots and rocks, cross the same streams, climb the same mountains, and lounge under the same canopy of trees. But do day hikers and long-distance hikers really see the same scenery, smell the same forest fragrance, taste the same cold creek water, experience the same trail? 1

2

Introduction

There is yet another significant group of persons who regularly hike the AT, those staying overnight, a weekend, or a little more than a week. Most hikers who enjoy the AT are not able to devote the four to six months of time that is required for a thru-hike, that is, completing the entire trail in a calendar year. Not only do these short-term backpackers share the same scenery as thru-hikers, they carry the same equipment, subject themselves to the same hardships, even fellowship over shared miles. But do these two groups of hikers really experience the same AT? One might argue that each individual hiker has a unique subjective experience of the AT, and therefore there is no common ground of experience. One thru-hiker crosses over the ridges above tree line in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and blue skies extend to the horizon. The vast space and vaulted sky create a sublime experience of being swallowed in openness. Another thru-hiker, just an hour later in the same day, reaches the very same ridge and is enveloped in a cloud. Visibility is reduced to a couple of meters and strong winds buffet her body. She also experiences the sublime of this particular place on the ridge but completely unlike the first. Clearly the two hikers walk over the same ground but experience completely different spatial surrounds. Even though these long-distance hikers experience the same geographical location differently, their extended shared time and space create a common experience. Their encounters along the way can be compared and contrasted. That is, their subjective experiences will not be limited to themselves but communicated. Their communication becomes intersubjective in the interplay of expression and reception, of comparing and contrasting actual experience and encounter. This intersubjective communication transcends the vicarious. In addition, the AT constituents and geographical features comprising unique places participate in all these experiences and encounters, ranging from the vicarious to the fully embodied and extending over months. However, the degree to which the AT participates creates distinctions. Even thru-hikers themselves differ in whether they remain open or closed to the participation of the surrounding milieu. One group of hikers may be so caught up in their conversation, in their camaraderie, or in their focus on getting to the agreed upon destination for the day that they close themselves to the constituents of the particular places they pass. This exploration of the AT, though limited to the written word, rises out of a fully embodied, mutual participation. The AT is more than a scenic space, a beautiful expanse appealing to the eye. The environment along the AT engages the hiker’s full range of senses as well as demands every muscle, bone, and internal organ to participate. It is more than a footpath extending from Maine to Georgia along the Appalachian Mountains. Though every hiker is



Introduction 3

aware of the mileage of the AT, its more than two thousand miles of varied tread through valleys and over ridges cannot be defined by distance. Each year the distance changes as trail maintainers continue to interact with the ecosystems in their areas of responsibility. The AT is ephemeral and enduring, ineffable and composed of specific, concrete constituents. The way provides sublime prospects and encounters, but may also thrust hikers into long stretches perceived as monotonous. The AT is not a passive receiver, a standing reserve of resources for aesthetic enjoyment. The AT makes itself known to those who open themselves to encounter its constituents along the way. It might be said that the real AT cannot be discovered in a book, in a photograph, or even in a brilliantly made documentary. It is much more than its history, its geographical features, its official designation as a scenic trail. In order to discover the AT, one must step out onto its tread and walk. In walking one finds that the AT itself vanishes, that is, the AT as a concept, a footpath ranging over fourteen states. In walking, one only finds the trail immediately before, and extending behind in the memory of the various places through which one has passed. The hiker might imagine the trail ahead, the climb to the top of Katahdin, the AT as a concept, but that is not the AT as it reveals itself. If the hiker imposes those imaginative thoughts onto the trail, projects a conceptual frame, that hiker closes the mutuality of encounter. The real AT is discovered in a thousand unique places interlaced along the way, places constituted by a diversity of beings, human and extra-human whose performative actions create something greater than any one individual aspect. The AT discovers itself as its constituents play out their roles, interacting with each other and moving through their journey to its culmination. This discovery is existential in that it continually unfolds in the interaction of the constituents. The AT may have had its genesis in the vision of Benton Mackaye, its final construction under the leadership of Myron Avery, and its designation as a National Scenic Trail through the signature of President Lyndon Johnson, as well as many other iterations as its route changed between its opening in 1937 and today, but no one person or board of trustees can define it. In 1948, Earl Shaffer changed the meaning of the AT when he became the first thru-hiker. Understanding the AT must therefore be approached carefully and existentially. In the ongoing interaction of the various constituents of the AT, both human and extra-human—hikers, maintainers, and support persons; flora, fauna, and geological features—meaning arises. I am most interested in the spiritual meaning of the AT. By spiritual, I do not bifurcate spirit and matter, looking for meaning that transcends embodiment. Rather, spirit in this context is closer to the way Christian NorbergSchulz discusses the spirit of place. He writes, “Since ancient times the genius loci, or “spirit of place,” has been recognized as the concrete reality man

4

Introduction

has to face and come to terms with in his daily life.”1 The spiritual meaning of the AT happens through the concrete activity of walking along its pathway. Norberg-Schulz notes that the architect creates meaningful places through an architecture that is a visualization of the genius loci.2 The architecture is a concretization of the spirit of place, an incarnation. The incarnation is not a copy, a representation. In its concreteness it is a presentation of the spirit in matter, an enfleshment, an embodiment. In the same way the incarnation of spirit on the AT is discovered through walking, especially on long-distant hikes. The spiritual meaning of the AT also resonates with the widely extensive human practice of journeying. Some of our earliest historical texts involve humans engaged in spiritual or religious journeys, as will be explored further in subsequent chapters. The pilgrim walks toward a goal and along the way experiences transformation. In the practice of spiritual walking, or rambling, pilgrims communicate one with another as well as with both this worldly and other worldly beings. The resulting insight, revelation, and enlightenment are integral aspects of spirituality. In orienting this exploration to spiritual meaning, I will also contrast such meaning with alternative ways of understanding the AT. Clearly there are hikers whose motivation and experience are in no way implicative of anything overtly spiritual. There are aesthetic tourists who merely enjoy the scenery and whose experience in the wilderness more closely resembles a vacation than a journey. There are hikers who experience the AT as a conquest, overcoming a great challenge, an opportunity to put another feather in their cap, a notch on their stick. Some hikers start walking with such spiritually void motivations and as the AT unfolds both an internal and external dialogue shifts the experience, the spirit manifests, incarnates. The AT is not associated with any particular religion or spiritual practice. Its status as a National Scenic Trail places the administration of the AT in the responsibility of the federal government. Specifically, the National Scenic Trail Act of 1968 says that the AT is to be administered “by the Secretary of the Interior, in consultation with the Secretary of the Agriculture.”3 The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution indicates that with the National Scenic Trail Act of 1968, Congress was not creating a system of trails for religious or spiritual purposes. Nevertheless, hikers who venture on the AT may have religious experiences, and in many cases, those experiences may be better understood by referencing and comparing the AT to clearly established pilgrimages and AT hikers to pilgrims. With this in mind I will dedicate a portion of chapter 5 to the Camino de Santiago. Given the existential nature of the AT and its constituents, I will employ a phenomenological approach in discovering the spirit of the Trail. Some of the ideas of phenomenologists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger will be used to explore the role of environment, space, and place



Introduction 5

in the manifestation of meaning along the AT. I will introduce the reader to the ideas of Martin Buber, especially as expressed in I and Thou4 and Between Man and Man,5 and Emmanuel Levinas to frame the intersubjective relationship between hikers themselves and between the hiker and the constituents of the environment through which the hiker walks. Belden C. Lane’s books, Landscapes of the Sacred,6 Backpacking with the Saints,7 and The Solace of Fierce Landscapes8 will provide further insight into the interrelationship between human beings and sacred places. Victor Turner’s study on rites of passage in both The Ritual Process9 and Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture10 will be referenced in exploring liminality and communitas, key experiential aspects of spiritual journey. I will make use of Mircea Eliade and Gerardus van der Leeuw to explore the phenomenology of religion as it pertains to environment, space, place, and journey. An important aspect of the phenomenological approach is in interpretation. I will make use of Paul Ricoeur’s ideas, especially in his book The Symbolism of Evil,11 in combining a hermeneutic and phenomenological approach. These authors and texts are a cursory listing of some of the works I will employ in this exploration of the AT as a spiritual journey. NOTES  1. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (London: Academy Editions, 1960), 5.  2. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, 5.   3.  “U.S.C. Title 16—CONSERVATION.” GovInfo | U.S. Government Publishing Office. Accessed December 17, 2022. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/ USCODE-2020-title16/html/USCODE-2020-title16-chap27-sec1244.htm.  4. Martin Buber, I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970).  5. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man. Translated by Maurice Friedman (New York: Macmillan Co., 1967).  6. Belden C. Lane, Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001).   7.  Belden C. Lane, Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).   8.  Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).   9.  Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1969). 10. Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1978). 11.  Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper & Row, 1967).

Chapter One

Getting to the Mountain

SPRINGER AND KATAHDIN Springer Mountain, located roughly seventy-five miles north of Atlanta, Georgia, and rising to 3,782 feet above sea level, is the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. Getting to Springer Mountain to begin the journey north requires hikers to choose either to walk a little more than eight miles up an approach trail or drive along winding country roads and then several miles up a dusty forest service track before a one-mile hike to the top. Embarking from the northern terminus, atop Mount Katahdin, Maine, requires similar efforts. Katahdin is in Baxter State Park, which is twenty miles from the nearest town, Millinocket. Reaching the summit of Katahdin involves a five-mile scramble over rocks of various sizes and a climb of about 4,000 feet. Hikers then descend on the same trail and start hiking toward Georgia. The five-mile climb, like the approach trail to Springer, does not count in the total tally of miles that guidebooks list on any given year. The first artifact one sees after reaching the summit of Springer Mountain, Georgia is a bronze plaque attached to a slab of schist. A hiker with a full backpack and hatchet hanging from his belt is depicted on the plaque, dated 1934. See figure 1.1. Hands clutching his pack straps and one foot mounting a rock, he strikes a pose and seems to be viewing the prospect of mountains trailing off toward the horizon in the background. At the top of the plaque large letters spell out “Appalachian Trail.” The hiker’s head covers most of the letter “a” in the word “Trail.” In smaller letters the words “Georgia To Maine” appear just below, with “Georgia” hovering over the hiker’s backpack and “Maine” appearing just in front of his face. Under “To Maine” and in smaller letters 7

Figure 1.1.  Bronze Plaque on Springer Mountain, Georgia. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.



Getting to the Mountain 9

are four lines of invitation: “A Footpath for Those who seek Fellowship with the Wilderness.” The plaque invites those present to embark on a particular kind of journey. It seems to say, “Come all who would set forth on foot.” This is not a bike path, a horse trail, or a rustic motorway. Given our contemporary culture’s fixation on getting from one point to another without lingering on the way, walking in the context of this trail means slowing down. With each step our feet connect us to the earth. Through our feet we feel and hear the difference between rocky and sandy soil. We ambulate under the canopy of brush and trees, feeling the wind against our face, hearing the rustling leaves. The myriad of bird species calls resound, their unique songs resonating with wood, earth, and stone. We smell the atmosphere, a ripe petrichor filling the air. Our pace is slow enough to sense shifts in these forest scents. The water running in the creek more often moves faster than do we, allowing us to listen to the trickle, the song of the stream cascading over stone. The plaque’s invitation also seems to say, “This trail requires hiking, but not just any kind of walking will do.” Peregrination involves a walking journey, most often far from home. Hikers on such journeys are foreigners in strange lands. Wilderness is just such a land.1 In the wilderness environment humans pass through without setting down roots. This journey opens hikers to fellowship with the wild along the trail. The Greek term for fellowship, koinōnia, means “to share with someone in something which he has.”2 Hikers bring only themselves and what fits in their rucksack. Those constituents who dwell along the wilderness trail may be encountered in fellowship or experienced as mere objects of use.3 The plaque’s invitation points to the possibility of fellowship, of a participation between hikers and those who dwell along the way, of sharing what each brings to the encounter. Stoic philosophers also used the term koinōnia and valued “the model harmony and fellowship which is found in the universe and which is the basis of its preservation.”4 In the New Testament, koinōnia characterizes the incarnation of Christ: “He entered into a full fellowship of flesh and blood in order that He might vanquish death thereby.”5 In his letter to the Philippians Saint Paul describes another aspect of koinōnia, a mystical participation. He writes of desiring to know Christ and the koinōnia of his suffering becoming like him in his death.6 This koinōnia is a mystical participation, a “knowing” unlike other kinds of knowing, or what Emmanuel Levinas refers to as “the hidden side of meaning other than knowledge.”7 “Knowing Him” in this context is a participation (koinōnia) in his suffering. In light of both Stoic and Christian aspects of fellowship, the invitation to commune with wilderness involves mystical participation, profound sharing, and a basis of preservation.

10

Chapter One

As hiker and wilderness constituents share, they are brought to mutual preservation through the fellowship made possible in this peregrination. During the first part of the Appalachian Trail north from Springer Mountain, hikers find no town or resupply for thirty miles; and from Katahdin, hiking south, it will be a hundred miles. In either case, those four lines of description on the plaque at Springer Mountain, inviting the hiker to a fellowship with wilderness, serve as a frame for the entire journey. For those who choose to hike its winding and mountainous course, the AT immerses them in the wild but sprinkles in a few artifacts, which become traces of orientation along the way. The plaque, which is one of those artifacts, represents the reciprocity between wilderness and art, giving rise to a journey of meaning-making. 2200 MILES OF CONNECTED PLACES The AT is really a series of interconnecting places that extends nearly 2,200 miles, running from the mountains of northern Georgia to Mount Katahdin, 5,268 feet, which seems to rise alone above the bogs and ponds of the lowlands in north, central Maine. The trail in the southern Appalachian Mountains begins at 3,782 feet, rising and falling a little more than 1,000 feet in the course of thirty miles and reaching the highest point in Georgia, Blood Mountain, at 4,000 feet. Over the next five hundred miles, running through North Carolina, Tennessee and southern Virginia, the trail climbs mountains of 4,000, 5,000 and 6,000 feet, rising and falling several thousand feet in distances of four to ten miles. The mountains of central and northern Virginia rise to 3,000 and 4,000 feet with elevation gains and losses over relatively short distances that make for strenuous hiking. Leaving Virginia and entering West Virginia, the trail does not rise above 2,000 feet again until just before the Massachusetts border in Connecticut, all the while traversing Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York. In the New England section, elevations again rise: 3,491 feet on Mount Greylock in Massachusetts, 4,236 feet on Killington Mountain in Vermont, and multiple summits between 4,000 and 6,000 feet in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Southern Maine presents the most rigorous section of the trail with climbs of between 1,000 and 2,000 feet in the course of a mile or two and over difficult rocky and root laden pathways or through deep bogs and fords across swift moving streams. Each mountain and corresponding valley present hikers with varied stands of trees and shrubs, rock formations, rivers, creeks, streams, lakes, and ponds. Evidence of the Appalachian culture is also encountered in the form of working farmland as well as old rock walls that speak of another era.



Getting to the Mountain 11

The southern mountains give northbound hikers their first experience of the difficult terrain and leave a lasting impression. The mountains are steep, and the trail is continually rising and falling over great elevation changes. The approach trail from Amicalola Falls State Park to Springer Mountain is 8.8 miles long with an elevation gain of 2,082 feet. The trail begins with a notorious 602-step staircase, climbing up the face of Amicalola Falls. The falls themselves rise 729 feet, one of the highest waterfalls in the eastern United States. Most of the approach trail is uphill, but there are several downhill sections as the route traverses several mountains along the way. A rocky outcrop of schist at the top of Springer Mountain, described in the opening of this chapter, serves as the southern terminus of the AT, with views to the western horizon. Beside the invitational plaque is a second artifact that will become the hiker’s best friend all the way to the final terminus, a white blaze: a two by six-inch painted blaze. These will appear on tree trunks, rocks, and posts at intervals of roughly every hundred yards. Those hikers who stay on the ridgeline pathway, walking north to Maine, come to discover, as the bronze plaque invites, a fellowship with wilderness, with all the varied constituents that bring the wild into focus. Those arriving at the top of Springer Mountain most likely came to the trail with a desire to walk in the wild, but their experience will eclipse any preconceived notions. Most have no real basis for their preconceived ideas of what constitutes a wilderness. They might only be familiar with roadside viewpoints and the grand prospects they afford; wilderness from the vantage of a viewpoint is what stretches out to the horizon. Maybe they have walked for a day or two on the AT itself. But it will be weeks before they discover this sought-after fellowship. The numbers of those embarking on the AT for such fellowship are increasing each year as people seek an encounter with something wild. Evan Eisenberg writes, “that man-made landscapes, from the wheat fields and vineyards of ancient Canaan to the strip malls of New Jersey, survive only by courtesy of the wilderness around them and the wildness that remains in them.”8 Henry David Thoreau, in his essay “Walking,” wrote the same idea more concisely, “in Wildness is the preservation of the World.”9 Seeking fellowship with wilderness in this light involves a journey of restoration, of finding the essence of what it means to survive, of discovering the preservation of us all, human and extra human. Our lives are inextricably bound up in a latent and life sustaining connection with wild places. Could it be that a key aspect of the attraction of long-distance hiking on wilderness trails stems from a growing cultural desire to connect with something undomesticated? Clearly, American literary and visual rhetoric of the mid to late nineteenth century focused in part on the wild. Writers such as Thoreau and John Muir as well as painters of the Hudson River School and

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landscape architects such as Frederick Law Olmsted espoused the value and health benefits of both contemplating wilderness and rambling through parks designed to give an experience of less domesticated environments. This last century has seen a vast number of the population migrate from rural to urban and suburban living. Whereas those nineteenth-century champions of wild spaces composed a very small percent of the population, a group whose voices resulted in a disproportional focus on the value of undomesticated environments, those in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries who grew up in highly artificial environments compose a much larger group. Many of the hikers attracted to the AT come from this later group and are familiar with the rhetoric of the former group. In addition, the last fifty years have seen an increasing cultural interest in environmental issues. Our cultural connection to the environment in general, and specific ecosystems—wetlands, melting glaciers, watershed, and rising sea levels to name a few—has become a leading issue of our time. When asked about motivations for long-distance hiking in the wild, many give answers that imply restoration, discovery of ways to simplify living, connecting to core values; answers that point to the connection between humans and the environment in which they live. Given that the AT’s very identity is rooted in the integration of hiking and wilderness, exploring the meaning of the Trail necessitates grounding the inquiry in an understanding of environment, space, and place. Growing numbers of people are attempting to complete a long-distance hike, seeking fellowship with the wilderness, and therefore discovering their temporary placement in an undomesticated environment. Placement, finding our place as it relates to meaning-making, will be of equal importance in this study. Placement involves discovering spatially inscribed meanings. Hiking is a thoroughly embodied experience, and embodied experience rises out of the lived-body entwined in space. As we interact with and make sense of our surroundings, our enfleshment in space, our integration into a particular environment, we discover place. In the introduction to Symbolic Landscapes, Gary Backhaus points out that Edward Casey’s notion of implacement, “the collusion of the lived-body and place,” “favors or emphasizes the lived-body pole of the relation.”10 This book’s exploration of spiritual rambling on the AT will maintain a focus on the collaboration between lived-body and place, favoring neither pole. Backhaus writes that “both the lived-body and the perceived object are poles constitutive of an ambiguous field that is rendered as a situation. . . . The body schema is a co-constitutive field—it is formed from both the structures of the lived-body and the structures of its perceived world (EarthBody) in an inextricably intertwined gestalt.”11 Since they are so intertwined and interact as a gestalt, I will make an effort to attend the collaboration between them.



Getting to the Mountain 13

APPROACHING TERMS AND CONCEPTS Before moving further into this exploration of the AT, we need to prepare by examining some of the terms and concepts needed for the journey. It would not be wise to launch into the journey without reviewing important terminology and acquainting ourselves with a little background. Preparation for exploring the phenomenology of the hike through a written study is in many ways similar to the actual walking exploration. Most hikers who attempt the long march north to Katahdin or south to Springer spend months in preparation: reading guidebooks, seeking advice, compiling food and equipment, strategizing, establishing an itinerary. Success hinges upon grounding the journey in preparation. But once the hiker steps forth on the trail, like an accomplished jazz musician who has developed a skill through intense practice, whose fellowship in playing with other musicians in the group requires a setting aside of theory and attention to techniques and a letting forth of communication, thoughts of journey preparation, of trail techniques, must be bracketed in order to find fellowship with the constituents of the journey. Preparation ends and the journey begins. While walking, the hiker must shed conceptual frames and open themselves to the things themselves. But without preparation, the journey may be cut short. I have interviewed many hikers whose first attempt to thru-hike—as stated in the introduction, hiking the entire length of the Trail in twelve months or less—ended because of a failure to prepare. In some cases the lack of preparation means not breaking in new gear, not wearing footwear until the actual first miles of the journey, not performing practice walks with a fully loaded pack to determine whether or not one can actually carry the weight, not attempting to pitch a tent until the first night of the hike and then in the midst of a storm, or planning to walk fifteen miles a day from the start and not having enough food to make it to the first resupply because eight mile days were the limit of possibility. One close friend, an experienced hiker who came to the United States from Romania, was nearly derailed because he tried to start a southbound hike in March. I met Zoltan in the first days of a pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago in 2008. I was leading a university class, studying the Way of Saint James, and Zoltan soon became an unofficial member of the class. As we walked across Spain and talked about other hikes, Zoltan became interested in the AT. We continued to correspond after the Camino, and he decided to hike the AT in 2009. Zoltan’s hiking window, based on a tourist visa, limited him to a strict timetable. I informed him that the March to September timeline was best advantaged by a northbound hike, as Maine was normally still too cold and

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weather nearly unbearable. But he decided that a bit of winter weather in Maine could not be that different from the mountains of Transylvania from where he had come. After all, he had snowshoes and good cold-weather gear. As he started walking south from the boundary of Baxter State Park and into the “hundred-mile wilderness,” about three feet of snow covered the ground and the temperatures were hovering around zero. He walked all day and then camped. During the night, he thought death was waiting outside his tent. In the morning he walked back out of the woods and made his way to Georgia on a bus. Though the mountains in the south are subject to cold winter weather in March, one is much more likely to complete a thru-hike when starting before May by hiking north from Springer Mountain. Zoltan did complete the journey back to Baxter State Park and summited Mount Katahdin. Phenomenological Approach Remember that to walk north from Springer Mountain, Georgia, hikers may choose to walk up an eight-mile approach trail, arriving at the summit and the official southern terminus. To orient ourselves in this written exploration of the AT, and embark from the terminus, we will acquaint ourselves with the phenomenological approach. This approach opens us to the meaning of the AT as it manifests itself in the particular situation of an actual long-distance hike rather than allowing us to impose meaning from an abstract conceptual frame removed from any particular hike. In using the phenomenological approach, we open ourselves to the manifestation of the AT as it shows itself from itself. The AT is a complex of ecological spaces and their constituents: the varied flora, fauna, rock, river, and geological features; visionaries who have and continue to bring into existence the footpath and its buffers; hikers doing day hikes, weekend trips, and extended hikes lasting weeks or months; maintainers who keep the trail passable to foot travel; helping hands who reach out with what is known as “trail magic” to bless hikers; village folk who support the trail community; and administrators who do behind-the-scene work that makes the whole complex live. The AT is much more than a footpath through the wilderness or a scenic trail. The phenomenological approach lets the AT speak for itself, show itself from itself rather than passively standing by while we who hike and study the trail try to define it by imposing a narrowed meaning upon it. This phenomenological exploration will be dialogic, bringing the vast array of constituent voices to the surface and hopefully revealing the genius loci of the AT. To imagine the AT as a singular place is to miss the great variety of environmental phenomena, of layered places in both time and space, of enumerable locations, all in an exercise of abstraction. Each interconnected



Getting to the Mountain 15

place along the trail is formed by its own constituents, which themselves are not elemental aspects that may be abstracted from their habitat or sojourn. They are constituents in a Gestalt. Aron Gurwitsch writes regarding the constituents of a Gestalt, “What they are as constituents of one Gestalt they are not as constituents of a different one. The way they look, their ‘physiognomy,’ their entire habitus, changes, and this holds regardless of whether they are subordinate or dominant in the new structure.”12 Their appearance manifests itself in relation to the surrounding environmental milieu. Each place on the trail is uniquely formed through the interplay of constituents and in relation to the organic whole. Gerardus Van der Leeuw writes of such a structure, “It is an organic whole which cannot be analyzed into its own constituents, but which can from these be comprehended.”13 In addition to closely attending the constituents in whose habitat the hiker walks, the mode of transport also bears upon the manifestation. Passing through such places via bicycle or automobile would not allow driver or passengers the same experience of the manifestation of the unique characteristics of the relational formation of such places. The interconnected places on the trail reveal themselves to hikers who are walking north or south, who are to be or have been on the trail for days, weeks or months. The constituents themselves are not static, do not remain the same over time, but change with the hour of the day, with the day as a changing aspect of the season or the weather, and with the particular year that has wrought changes on the interconnected places through greater shifts in climate. The following description of the trail in this book, for the most part, takes the perspective of a northbound thru-hiker. Southbound thru-hikers and section hikers will encounter these locations in different circumstances and therefore have alternative points of view: seasons change the face of these places, the hiker’s orientation in relation to the condition of their body and the duration of their hike also changes the encounter. I will offer some contrasting points of view throughout the description in order to illuminate the way these places may seem different depending on the hiker’s orientation.14 Though our approach opens us to the phenomenon manifesting itself, to suspending judgment, to intersubjective testing, to engaging with the AT and its constituents as having their own voice, our approach necessitates clearly identifying key terms used to facilitate the exploration. Because identifying these terms is not meant to impose meaning independent of intersubjective testing, the following sections do not define terminology. Rather, I will engage in an exploratory hermeneutic. I introduce these terms as starting points in the negotiation of meaning, the tenuous understanding brought to the dialogue. In this way we come to a richer understanding. If these terms fail to hold up in the dialogue, I will still discover some truth in jettisoning some preconception in favor of the richer meaning.

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Journey Journey is the first of our terms that need clarification. The life situation, Lebenswelt, of the hiker on the AT involves a particular kind of journey. A long-distance hike is not a migration. Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans engaged in migration, left hearth and home in search of opportunity in the west. On the other hand, many Native American tribes were forced to migrate, expelled from their homes and lands and made to journey. The “Trail of Tears” and “Trail of Death” accounts depict just two examples in the history of these horrific migrations: Cherokee and Potawatomi nations. Such migrations are clearly journeys for those involved. I will also distinguish between touring as journey and long-distance hiking as spiritual journey. Hiking the AT may be interpreted as scenic tourism. I will explore various ways of interacting with the Trail that range from athletic challenge, landscape tourism, to spiritual journey. In some cases, the same hiker might experience the full range during a long-distance ramble. Descriptions of journey distinct from migration and tourism are replete in various narratives that compose some of our earliest writings. Gilgamesh sets out on a journey to discover the elixir of life. Odysseus, in what should have been a simple crossing of the Aegean, journeys for ten years around the Mediterranean all the while seeking to return to his home. Aeneas leads a group of refugees from the burning city of Troy and wanders about the same Mediterranean in search of a new home. Jacob flees from his brother Esau and crosses the desert to find a temporary home before returning. The people of Israel, Jacob’s descendants, emulate their ancestor’s journey and spend forty years wandering about in the desert before finding their new home in a previously promised land. Whether or not these wanderings take the sojourner to a new home, a profound transformation happens. Upon returning home from the AT, the sojourner may reunite with kith and kin, but the one who has completed the trek brings something new to the situation. Journey on the AT has many similarities to religious pilgrimage. Pilgrims leave home and travel long distances over extended periods and experience unmediated connections with fellows along the way, not to mention spiritual encounters both mediated and unmediated. Pilgrimage from a religious perspective involves journeying to a sacred site. Victor and Edith Turner write, “Pilgrimages often begin when a considerable number of people are satisfied that a ‘sign’ of supernatural intervention in human affairs has indeed been given at a particular place in a particular way.”15 The Turners go on to note that the “Saint’s shrine marks critical points in the ecosystem–contact points with other worlds.”16 The AT is not associated with any particular religious tradition, and critical points in the ecosystem are not identified with any saint. However, hikers do have encounters at critical points that may be interpreted



Getting to the Mountain 17

as contact points with other worlds. In some cases, these contact points catalyze inward journeys and revelation. As Jacob woke from his dream and recognized the place where he slept as the house of God, so AT hikers have associated their own visionary experiences with particular places along the way. While religious pilgrimages of various faiths continue to thrive, pilgrims of a different stripe are taking to some pathways leading to traditional sacred shrines and places. The last twenty years has seen an explosion in the number of pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago. Many of these contemporary pilgrims are not motivated by traditional religious reasons for such a journey. Traditional pilgrimage is said by the Turners to allow the pilgrim to move away from sin: “On such a journey one gets away from the reiterated ‘occasions of sin’ which make up so much of the human experience of social structure.”17 They continue, “One piles up a store of nagging guilts, not all of which can be relieved in the parish confessional, especially when the priest himself may be party to some of the conflicts. When such a load can no longer be borne, it is time to take the road as a pilgrim.”18 The Turners note that the goal for pilgrims of historical religions is “salvation or release from the sins and evils of the structural world, in preparation for participation in an afterlife of pure bliss.”19 Many contemporary pilgrims have not been steeped in traditional religious language. The idea of sin does not fit their world view, and the word is beyond their vocabulary. They don’t envision their journey as a preparation for participation in an afterlife. However, they may see the journey as a release from various “evils” of the structural world. Closer scrutiny of the symbolism of sin reveals that non-traditional pilgrims might have a common bond with those who are familiar with the idea of sin, who do use “sin” in their vocabulary. If the word sin is interpreted as a kind of alienation and encompasses the symbolism of alienation, then the seemingly non-religious pilgrim may be on the kind of religious journey that the Turners describe, one not so different from the religious pilgrim. Christian Norberg-Schulz highlights an example of alienation that is characteristic of the modern condition. He writes, “In general, man no longer forms part of a meaningful totality, and becomes a stranger to the world and to himself.”20 He advocates a phenomenological approach to resolving this alienation, that in the presence of this loss of meaning we need a “rediscovery of the world as a totality of interacting, concrete qualities.”21 Pilgrimage, in light of the idea of sin as a form of alienation, is an opportunity for release from the meaninglessness of alienation, a reorientation to the world as a totality of interacting, concrete qualities. So, both those who engage in traditional pilgrimage and those who don’t identify as religious may be participating in a journey of transformation. In each case, whether the place of transformation is understood as a sacred site or catalyzing that transformation without

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acknowledging anything sacred, environment/space/place interacts with the person on journey. Religious or not, pilgrims encounter “critical points in the ecosystem–contact points with other worlds.” Environment, Space and Place The terms environment, space, and place will also need some clarity from the outset of our journey. The AT extends more than 2,100 miles and undulates from 6,000 feet to nearly sea level. There are many varied ecosystems along the footpath. Given the length of the AT and ecological diversity along the way, there are many distinct environments long-distance hikers traverse. They pass through varied surrounding conditions and influences daily. Robert Mugerauer points out that environment is not solely those ecological conditions and influences of the surround writing, “that environment is neither a brute given to be recorded passively in seemingly objective, scientific language nor a raw material to be organized according to coherent cultural patterns by an actively creative, trans-subjective language.”22 Environment manifests as we interact with it in both our language practices, which vary from rational, scientific to poetic and artistic, and through our senses and other embodied practices. Understanding the intertwining of language, our bodies, and environment is necessary in discovering the way meaning-making arises on a long-distance hike or a pilgrimage to a sacred site. Hans-Georg Gadamer writes that “in truth we are always already at home in language, just as much as we are in the world.”23 We don’t usually pay attention to the way language sculpts our world, and vice versa, the world interacts to change and create words and phrases. Similarly, Mugerauer writes, “language and environment always already are given together.”24 A phenomenological approach facilitates closely attending the intertwining of language, the environment, and our bodies. Space often references a general surrounding area, emptiness contained by some kind of boundary or uncontained and spreading out into infinity. Space has not always been thought of as emptiness. As Mugerauer has pointed out with the term environment, language plays a role in not just our conceptions but also our experience. Language and embodied experience in a particular environment resonate with each other and new meaning arises. This new meaning creates more experiences and possibly new words, which in turn resonate. Terms such as void have influenced our experience of space as the seeming emptiness between ourselves and the next object, or that vast infinite expanse that surrounds our planet. In his book Out of the Silent Planet, C. S. Lewis employs mythopoeic language to transform the reader’s understanding of space, to open the reader to new possibilities in experiencing space. The



Getting to the Mountain 19

protagonist, Ransom, who has been hijacked to Mars, discovers a new experience of space as he travels between the planets. Space is transformed from “the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds” to an “empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam.”25 Lewis writes, “the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel.”26 In the renewed experience, space became “the womb of the worlds.”27 He concludes the section of the novel with an archaic use of a common word, “Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens.”28 Ransom, a philologist, discovers a lived experience of the archaic term, “the heavens.” Lewis’s description may have been influenced, not only by his reading of mythology, but in reading Plato. In the Timaeus, Plato calls our attention to khôra as that space out of which the created order emerged. Space is the womb from which the world comes into being. The space, writes Plato, that “provides room for all things that have birth.”29 Or, “providing a situation for all things that come into being.”30 Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of space opens us to this more active role to which Plato alludes. Where both translations of the Timaeus use the active term provide, either “providing room” or “providing a situation,” MerleauPonty writes that space is “the means whereby the position of things becomes possible.”31 He contrasts this active presence with the passive notion of a setting, writing, “Space is not the setting (real or logical) in which things are arranged.”32 He goes on to clarify the action of space writing that rather than “imagining it as a sort of ether in which all things float, or conceiving it abstractly as a characteristic that they have in common, we must think of it as the universal power enabling them to be connected.”33 Belden C. Lane also references this active role, calling attention to khôra, describing it as, “an energizing force, suggestive to the imagination, drawing intimate connections to everything else in our lives.”34 But khôra acts on and connects bodies. Embodiment, like language, is a key resonator in disclosing space actively drawing connections. Merleau-Ponty writes, “Far from my body’s being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body.”35 In providing room, or enabling, khôra connects us to our being as embodied creatures, and in the Gestalt of our embodiment in space, both bodies and space manifest themselves together. In this way both space and body actively engage in drawing connections, in meaning-making. Rather than my body manifesting in space as an empty container, space becomes an intimate home. Space has as much to bring to my identity as does my body. Merleau-Ponty writes that our body “inhabits space and time.”36 He goes on to elaborate: In so far as I have a body through which I act in the world, space and time are not, for me, a collection of adjacent points nor are they a limitless number of

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relations synthesized by my consciousness, and into which it draws my body. I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them.37

The embodied actions of belonging, combining, and including involve sensing and are integral to inhabiting. As embodied beings, we involve ourselves in the spatial milieu through our senses. Though some of the language used to investigate the environment privileges sight, such as the many references to landscape,38 all of our senses work together in our communication with the constituents of the environment and the resulting meaningful exchange. In this regard, Merleau-Ponty writes concerning our embodiment among others that we are “sensitive to all the rest, which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colours, and provides words with their primordial significance through the way in which it receives them.”39 Each of our senses contributes to the way we employ language and inhabit the spatial milieu. Marshall McLuhan calls attention to the way we rely on a particular dominating sense and thereby reduce the others. He refers to this interplay as sense ratios.40 Social settings and the primary communication medium used in those settings interact with sense ratios. An oral society relies heavily on the auditory as a primary means of communication, and the auditory becomes the dominant sense in the ratio. In print societies the primary means of communication is the written word. The visual becomes the prime sense in the ratio. Many long-distance hikers, coming from print culture, begin their journey on the AT relying on the visual as the dominant sense in the ratio. But later in the journey, some of these hikers will begin to shift toward the auditory as the dominant sense in the ratio. Some of these hikers will begin to experience an awakening of the tactile and olfactory, bringing these senses much more into play. An extended sojourn in the wilderness, along the Appalachian Trail for example, may open hikers to a more proportionally balanced ratio of senses. That is, the sense of sight does not usurp the other senses in communication. So, on a wilderness ramble the hiker might receive communication through olfactory and tactile senses just as readily as the visual and auditory thus changing the sense ratio. The configuration of the hiker’s circuit with the surrounding milieu changes as she extends her homeless journey into the wilderness. This in turn influences language practice and mediates experiences of the environment as the body, language and environment resonate. The visual field along the AT is varied, but dominated by thick shrubs, hemming the trail so tightly that vision is restricted to a few feet on either side. The trail more often than not winds through these shrubs, usually rhododendron, so that the view to the front or rear is typically no more than twenty or thirty meters. The next most common prospect is of a middle distance, extending



Getting to the Mountain 21

beyond the tightly bound tunnel of shrub that opens up in many wooded areas so that the hiker might see nearly a hundred meters. Finally, there are vista points on some of the mountains, providing expansive landscape views extending to the distant horizon. The soundscape is much more dominant and continually mediates the hiker’s experience of and encounter with the spatial environment. When cloud or thick fog reduces the visual field to almost nothing, sounds reverberate and provide a sense of the spatial surround. Even when bivouacking inside one’s tent, the sounds of the forest continue to report that one is embedded in a vast living ecosystem. In many instances, the sound of cascading water rises from deep gorges and meets the hiker walking along the ridge. The gulf between ridges becomes palpable through the resonance of the roaring stream as its sound waves play along the forested slopes. Merleau-Ponty writes, “Music is not in visible space, but it besieges, undermines and displaces that space.”41 The soundscape besieges, undermines, displaces visible space. If the eyes report vast distances between mountains and an expanse of sky arching overhead, ears and tactile sensations receiving invisible waves perceive space more like a palpable medium, an ocean through which I swim and feel its presence undulating over, around, and against my skin. There are also ways that tactile sensations inform our habitation of the spatial environment. The wind bends the surrounding trees and buffets the hiker’s body, filling the atmosphere with its thickness. What seems to be empty space between embodied beings reveals itself saturated with presence. Gusts pulsate over ridgelines and catch backpacks as if they were ship sails, causing hikers to stumble like drunken sailors. The valley floor is calm while the mountain heights seem to be perpetually pummeled. The trees down below grow straight and tall while those on the ridges are stunted and bent. As I walk the ridge, the feeling of this energy rushes over my skin, moving my body from side to side. Gravity is also manifest through our tactile sensations. Most of the hike involves climbing or descending steep inclines. Gravity tugs at our torsos. We feel burning in our leg muscles, pain in our joints, and the core of our bodies is pressed by this invisible force. Even the temperature, extreme heat and humidity in the summer as well as freezing wind in the late winter, becomes a tactile experience. The heat seems to cling to your skin, sweat forms, and you feel beads running down your nose, your neck, into your eyes. Both olfaction and taste also inform the hiker’s sense of environmental space. The AT immerses hikers in mostly deciduous and occasionally coniferous forests, whose humus-laden floors exude the fragrance of ancient cycles of growth. As warmer weather slowly engulfs the mountains, it ripens the petrichor. The undulating switchback trail brings hikers from northern

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to southern exposures in just minutes. The cool northern exposure’s forest floor does not give the same strong scent as the sun-soaked southern face. Time and space intertwine in the scent wafting up from the rich soil along the varying slopes. On the other hand, I might pluck a dandelion or another fragrant flower and bring it up to my nose, taking in the sweet aroma. I bite into the vibrant yellow flower and chew its pedals, releasing the flavors of the mountain. Merleau-Ponty writes: I am brought into relation with an external being, whether it be in order to open myself to it or to shut myself off from it. If the qualities radiate around them a certain mode of existence, if they have the power to cast a spell and what we called just now a sacramental value, this is because the sentient subject does not posit them as objects, but enters into a sympathetic relation with them, makes them his own and finds in them his momentary law.42

In the spatial milieu along the AT, hikers’ senses are fully active in the embodied walk; meaning arises in seeing, listening, touching, smelling and tasting. Merleau-Ponty writes, “All the senses are spatial if they are to give us access to some form or other of being, if, that is, they are sense at all.”43 As we inhabit the spatial environment, we continually reacquaint ourselves through our sensations and motions. Walking, camping, and resting along the AT are clearly embodied activities. The various environments through which the hiker engages in these embodied activities interact and give rise to meaningful encounters. The AT is a continually shifting khôra, providing room for the hiker to make connections. Merleau-Ponty writes, “By considering the body in movement, we can see better how it inhabits space (and, moreover, time) because movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and time, it actively assumes them, it takes them up in their basic significance.”44 Each hiker’s movement is a kind of dance, a choreography whereby the individual interacts with the constituents of the environment, a 2,100-mile spatial inhabiting that draws everyone involved into the continual renewal of meaning-making. In the dance of spatial inhabiting, particularities of the environment begin to stand out, various constituents move in close and share the space, participate in the happening and disclose the space as place. Place manifests itself in the relations of particular constituents. Yi-Fu Tuan writes, “the meaning of space often merges with that of place. ‘Space’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”45 Our embodied interaction with the constituents of the environmental milieu discloses space as place, shifts our attention from space as abstraction to place as meaningful. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes embodied movement in the disclosing



Getting to the Mountain 23

of space. Our embodied movement is an integral part of what Yi-Fu Tuan references as getting to know and endow it with meaning. But language, as Mugerauer points out—“language and environment always already are given together”46—works with embodiment to reveal the particularities of place. Language is always already working in the disclosure of space as meaningful place, the revelation of environmental constituents there present. The AT itself is not a place. Rather, it is the designation of a trail that meanders through a vast space and is constituted by countless interlocking places that each hiker will find unique. It is this unique encounter with these places that gives rise to the AT thru-hiker aphorism, “hike your own hike.” A similar happening occurs on the Camino de Santiago, a thousand-year-old Christian pilgrimage route that culminates in Galicia, Spain. The Camino is composed of innumerable trails originating at virtually every doorway in Europe and converging in a couple of towns on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, where it winds its way across northern Spain and reaches the Atlantic Ocean. The Camino is “the way” to Santiago, and pilgrims reference the journey as “my Camino.” In each case, whether walking the new-world wilderness trail along the Appalachian Mountains or the old-world religious path across Europe, places will manifest themselves uniquely. In some cases, there will be common encounters where the meaning of a place makes itself known to most of the hikers. In other instances, a single sojourner will discover meaning in a place that others would designate as mere space. The pilgrim who leaves home from some doorstep in Europe or embarks from the French side of the Pyrenees in St. Jean Pied de Port exits their dwelling place and enters the vast space of unfamiliar territory. They walk through various places that have meaning to those who dwell therein, but the pilgrim may not have any meaningful attachment. Walking through an alien village may give the pilgrim an experience of entering uncharted space, or the sojourner may project meaning upon the village, relating to something familiar about the architecture, a scent, music wafting out of some café, or just the ubiquitous traffic. It is only after some significant happening or the unfolding of time in the location that these spaces become unique places for the pilgrim, that the projection from another place ceases to make itself manifest and the present place joins with the pilgrim in an encounter of meaning. When a hiker enters the wilderness of the AT and looks out from one of the mountain overlooks, she experiences an expanse of space extending over distant ridges and stretching to the horizon. She might envision this spatial expanse to encompass the entire Appalachian range. For the one who starts in Georgia, the space extends north to Maine, an expanse outstripping any existential experience of space and can only be thought of as a spatial abstraction. If a hiker enters the trail in Virginia, the space extends north to

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Maine and south to Georgia, another spatial abstraction extending before and behind. Walking south through New York, the hiker again experiences the vast wilderness behind and in front, the existential space seen from some mountain clearing and extending to the horizon over vanishing hilltops in the distance and then replaced by the idea of mountains rising from here to Georgia and from here to Maine. All places are located in space, but space may not contain any particular place. Just as the Camino pilgrim experienced a transformed place, a place of abstract meaning taking on existential meaning or uncharted space becoming familiar place, the AT hiker finds meaning in various places along the trail. One difference between the Camino and the AT is that the vast wilderness has few cultural artifacts versus the thick array of culture on the Camino. The wilderness provides few opportunities for cultural projection. In most cases the hiker is surrounded by dense forest, seemingly undifferentiated from the miles of woodland already traversed. The often-monotonous walk-through tunnels of rhododendron or coniferous bogs can be alienating as these wild spaces are unlike familiar places from the hiker’s life world. Whereas the Camino pilgrim finds familiar artifacts that facilitate place making, AT hikers sometimes refer to the Trail as the “Green Tunnel.” In either case, language is brought to bear in the disclosure of meaning. The encounter with wild spaces and places therein rises out of both embodied movement and the symbolic action of gestural and language practices. Referencing again Mugerauer’s point that “language and environment always already are given together,”47 I will look more closely at the role language plays in manifesting the countless interlocking places that constitute the AT. Because language and environment are mutually given, language is not the tool that discovers the particulars of the environment. The environment and its constituents do not lay passively waiting to be discovered. Rather, language and environment form a Gestalt and a world becomes manifest as human beings engage in embodied communication practices. Merleau-Ponty writes that language “is the voice of the things, the waves, and the forests.”48 In exploring the phenomenon of language, he writes, “the whole landscape is overrun with words as with an invasion, it is henceforth but a variant of speech before our eyes.” The AT hiker does not walk amongst a voiceless and passive panoply of wilderness inhabitants, a mute geographical display waiting to be invested with meaning and value. Heidegger writes, “Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”49 He goes on to caution against the reversal, “When this relation of dominance gets inverted, man hits upon strange maneuvers.”50 The inversion makes us think that the environment is there to be catalogued. But language in the role of master builder, along



Getting to the Mountain 25

with the cooperation of environment and the intertwining of bodies, build a “house” wherein we dwell; Heidegger writes, “language is the house of being.”51 Owen Barfield throws a different light on this writing, “language is the storehouse of imagination; it cannot continue to be itself without performing its function.”52 Language itself speaks out from beyond the human. Gadamer writes that language “is always out beyond us. The consciousness of the individual is not the standard by which the being of language can be measured.”53 Language comes to us through the voices of the constituents in the environmental milieu. As we encounter these extra-human beings we speak in response to their voices. Heidegger writes, “Man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language.”54 Language calls out, and we, the human beings, respond in speaking. In our responding, though they were always already there, the constituents of the environmental milieu appear. Heidegger writes, “Language beckons us . . . toward a thing’s nature.”55 Poets respond to the call and find words, letting the things nature appear,56 and “only where the word for the thing has been found is the thing a thing.”57 He goes on, “The primal calling, which bids the intimacy of the world and thing to come, is the authentic bidding. This bidding is the nature of speaking. . . . It is the speaking of language.”58 The resulting happening is mythopoeic rather than rational. Ernesto Grassi writes “from Plato on, in the Western world, rational language became preeminent for determining beings and thus reality. Each word, in consequence of its rational definitions, aims at “fixing,” out of space and time, the meaning of a being.”59 Prior to this rational language fixing the meaning of being, poetry’s attentiveness to the call aligned us, and continues to align us, with the existential situation wherein language and environment form the world of dwelling. Grassi goes on, “Poetry unveils originally the calls of the Being that emerge within the various existential situations.”60 Myth, the poetic ordering of the call and response to language, discloses these existential situations. Myth is the repository for poetic unveiling. Paul Ricoeur, in discussing the symbolic function of myth as opposed to history, writes that a particular myth is not merely a myth, “something less than history” but has “more meaning than a true history.”61 The richness of mythic meaning comes from “the power of the myth to evoke speculation.”62 As we engage in speculation, we interact with the environment and begin to dwell therein. Our poetic response acquaints us intimately with the particularities and gives rise to the manifestation of place. When we discard myth, we lose touch with our intimate connection to place as it rises out of the milieu of the environment. Belden Lane writes that “myth that is understood is no longer myth. That which we analyze with thorough objectivity—turning into psychology, history, or

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social geography—has ceased to exercise any formative power upon us.”63 We become alienated from the very places wherein we find our dwelling. J. R. R. Tolkien calls attention to the power of myth as formative. He writes that “Max Muller’s view of mythology as a ‘disease of language’ can be abandoned without regret. Mythology is not a disease at all . . . It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are the disease of mythology.”64 Barfield also makes the point writing that Max Muller “perceived very clearly the intimate bond connecting myth with metaphor and meaning” and “was actually obliged to characterize the myth as a kind of disease of language.” But, notes Barfield, “The word ‘disease’ is meaningless in such a connection.”65 C. S. Lewis goes even further writing that reality itself is disclosed by myth, “What flows into you from the myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and, therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.”66 Though Ricoeur calls attention to the distinction between myth and history, that in myth there is more meaning, our own cultural orientation is toward history, toward a rational objectivity whereby we experience ourselves as discovering a world whose meaning is disclosed through rational language practices. In myths, existential meaning unfolds through the poetic calling described by Grassi and Heidegger. Whether we engage in rational explanation or mythopoeia (mythic creation), we are model building. Paul Shepard calls attention to the effects of model building writing that “the individual feels that he is discovering rather than making a world.”67 Yet language, environment, and embodied human agency, given and working together through mythopoeic creativity disclose a world made in cooperation. In mythic and therefore religious discourse, a world of mutual habitation is disclosed, and those inhabitants of that world are fellow creatures. But our modern orientation turns away from religious and mythic discourse and desacralizes the world, interprets the constituents of the world as natural objects rather than as creatures. Ricoeur writes, “The cosmos is mute. Human beings no longer receive the meaning of their existence from their belonging to a cosmos itself saturated with meaning.”68 Language cut off from myth finds meaning in the instrumentality of natural objects, of nature as a storehouse of goods. Everything in the storehouse is to be used and thereby loses status as fellow creature, of mutual sacred existence. Ricoeur writes, Modern persons no longer have a sacred space, a center, a templum, a holy mountain, or an axis mundi. . . . It was in adopting science and technology, not just as a form of knowledge, but as a means of dominating nature, that we left behind the logic of correspondences. Because of this we no longer participate



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in a cosmos, but we now have a universe as the object of thought and as matter to be exploited.69

These two ways of experiencing language bear upon the AT hiker and the potential encounters along the way. The hiker who is steeped in mythopoeic language becomes enmeshed in a spiritual journey wherein meaning resonates from the voices of fellow creatures, from a mutual encounter of beings along the way. The hiker whose cosmos has been desacralized experiences a muted environment that may also be an aesthetically rich, scenic backdrop. These two ways of walking on the AT will show that some hikers do not interpret their walk as spiritual journey. Even along the Camino de Santiago with its centuries old pilgrimage tradition, persons whose cosmos has been desacralized do not find spirituality along the way unless the sacred breaks in and transforms them. Mircea Eliade writes, “Desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies.”70 These quasi pilgrims are much like some of the hikers along the AT; they are a kind of aesthetic tourist.71 However, if nonreligious hikers do encounter the sacred, they become open to an environment that is already pregnant with meaning, a cosmos that can only be made sense of through mythopoeic language. Eliade writes, The experience of sacred space makes possible the “founding of the world”: where the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence. But the irruption of the sacred does not only project a fixed point into the formless fluidity of profane space, a center into chaos; it also effects a break in plane, that is, it opens communication between the cosmic planes (between earth and heaven) and makes possible ontological passage from one mode of being to another.72

Those who engage in spiritual journey are involved in this communication, a communion of creatures discovering new ways of being together and open to sacred manifestations. Ricoeur writes, “Through fiction and poetry new possibilities of being-in-the-world are opened up within everyday reality.”73 The everyday space of the wilderness trail, the ordinary environment of the Appalachian Mountains becomes sacred in particular places along the way. Joseph Campbell writes, “For a culture still nurtured in mythology the landscape, as well as every phase of human existence, is made alive with symbolical suggestion.”74 Whether the hiker is already nurtured in mythopoeic language practices or comes into such practice through a sacred encounter, the environment is truly alive with rich and varied meaning.

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Liminality Mythopoeic language practices open the hiker to experiencing places symbolically, to encounters in places that manifest sacred reality and communicate meaning. These kinds of encounters have been described amongst Celtic Christians who are particularly attuned to transcendence manifesting in an environmental milieu. Philip Sheldrake, in exploring place and journey in Celtic spirituality, writes that there is “a strong sense of living on ‘edges’ or ‘boundary places’ between the material world and the other world” among Celtic Christians both in the past and today.75 These are known as “thin places” “where the membrane between this world and the other world, between material and spiritual, was very permeable.”76 Sheldrake notes that particular “kinds of places had more spiritual potential.”77 Celts had “a fascination with borderlands and liminality particularly associated with a strong sense of the closeness of the ‘other’ world to the world of everyday experience.”78 David Brown, writing of the importance of place in meaning-making, calls attention to “the symbolic potential inherent in the artefacts themselves.”79 He writes that places have a “capacity to develop a symbolic and imaginative reality that is larger than the construction of specific individuals” and this “keeps their power alive.”80 He goes on to explore a key motivation for people to uproot themselves and “seek solace from particular places.”81 Pilgrimage is often motivated by “the desire to enter into a new reality, the crossing of a threshold that dislocates but also makes possible a new relation with God.”82 Brown points to Edith and Victor Turner’s study of Christian pilgrimage in drawing a connection between this motivation to enter a new reality and liminality writing that such action is “the attempt to move or initiate oneself into a new sphere.”83 The experience of liminal places as set apart from everyday places is often a result of ritual action such as pilgrimage. The ritual aspect of spiritual walking not only engages the pilgrim or hiker in a relationship with places, in both urban and rural settings, but connects these persons one to another intimately and intersubjectively. Edith and Victor Turner explore this social aspect of spiritual journey as pilgrims transition through stages in the ritual process: separation, margin or limen, and reaggregation.84 The Turners used Arnold van Gennep’s idea of a liminal phase in rites of passage.85 They write, “By identifying liminality Van Gennep discovered a major innovative, transformative dimension of the social. He paved the way for future studies of all processes of spatiotemporal social or individual change.”86 Liminality occurs in the second of the three phases—separation, margin, and aggregation.87 Margin is also referenced by the Latin limen, meaning threshold. Turner writes that “Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and



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ceremonial . . . as liminal beings they have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system.”88 So, from this perspective liminality is the in-between world of religious ritual, the mode of being where potentiality dominates, where change is necessary.89 Pilgrims leave their own particular places of habitation and social structures behind and walk together through the in-between world. Though they walk through towns and villages where people live in stable traditions, pilgrims are separated into their own ritual practices. The Turners describe liminality as the condition of being either permanently and by ascription set outside the structural arrangements of a given social system, or being situationally or temporarily set apart, or voluntarily setting oneself apart from the behavior of status-occupying, role-playing members of that system.90

Though pilgrims come from particular traditions, cultural practices, and familiarity with their own home environment, these are in some way set aside in the meeting of so many diverse people from so many backgrounds. In so doing, pilgrims form unique relationships. The Turners refer to this social aspect of pilgrimage as communitas, that is, “social antistructure,” a relational quality of full unmediated communication, even communion, between definite and determinate identities, which arises spontaneously in all kinds of groups, situations, and circumstances. It is a liminal phenomenon which combines the qualities of lowliness, sacredness, homogeneity, and comradeship.91

Being outside the structures of their own culture, and liminal, pilgrims engage in a ritual of change. The Turners note that Liminars are stripped of status and authority, removed from a social structure maintained and sanctioned by power and force, and leveled to a homogeneous social state through discipline and ordeal. . . . In this no-place and no-time that resists classification, the major classifications and categories of culture emerge within the integuments of myth, symbol, and ritual.92

Though the Turners describe this “in between” status as being “no-place and no-time” they go on to elaborate on liminal spatiality. The Celtic Christian tradition, as noted, points to more than a liminal social status. Places are themselves liminal. In moving from the rituals of tribal society to “historical” or “salvation” religions, the Turners note that “One obvious difference was seen in the spatial location of liminality.”93 The secluded, sacralized enclosure of the ritual in tribal society is comparable to monastic or

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special orders of religion in “historical” or “salvation” religions.94 Those adherents not privy to the special orders could enter a spatiotemporal liminality while on pilgrimage. The Turners write, “If mysticism is an interior pilgrimage, pilgrimage is exteriorized mysticism.”95 Here is mysticism unlike the Neo-Platonic and Gnostic traditions that reject material space. In pilgrimage and spiritual journey, the constituents of place form a rich sacramental array. Within the liminal world of spiritual journey place is experienced as khôra. The trail to Santiago de Compostella is a gathering of liminal places. Pilgrims have been journeying to Santiago for more than a thousand years, walking toward the tomb of a saint, whose relics promised a powerful encounter. But the varied and particular landscapes also communicate meaning. The ritual of the journey gives rise to an interplay of mythic places, whose legends, histories, and spaces congeal as language and environment are given together.96 Pilgrims cross the Pyrenees, where Charlemagne took his army into Spain and along the route Napoleon traversed. They walk through the mountains and hill country of Navarra, where Roland met his death at the hands of a Basque army. They spend many days traversing the Meseta, along the Via Romana, a seemingly flat high plain in north central Spain. They climb the great mountain range west of Leon and drop a stone at the base of the Cruce de Ferro. They climb to O’Cebreo, where the Holy Grail is said to be kept in the small church. From here they descend into the wet, green hill country of Galicia. In each of these distinct storied environments they walk through villages, towns, and great cities. Scattered about the landscape, artifacts peculiar to the Camino connect pilgrims of the present to those who walked and lived along this way in the past. Artifacts that are explicitly religious and many seemingly non-religious speak to those whose attention is arrested by the ritual of spiritual walking. Yet the Camino as described above is not a place. Rather, it is constituted by countless interlocking places that each pilgrim will find unique. In the light of each pilgrim’s subjective experience along the storied route they refer to the journey as “my Camino.” Each one with a personal narrative, interacting with the countless places along the way wherein their narrative rises up, and interrelating with their fellow pilgrims. The Camino unlike a written text is composed of a field of symbols that the interpreter enters bodily. The Camino involves a ritual wherein a myth is enacted. Yet both the written text and the field of ritual and mythic symbols that is the Camino are mediated, they both require an interpretation. Ricoeur writes, “there exists nowhere a symbolic language without hermeneutics; wherever a man dreams or raves, another man arises to give an interpretation . . . is brought into coherent discourse by hermeneutics.”97 In the case of the Camino, hermeneutics looks for meaning in the enacted myth and existentially among the pilgrims



Getting to the Mountain 31

who actively encounter the rich symbols while reflecting and conversing over an extended time. Through the ritual action of this pilgrimage those who participate by walking to Santiago act in and among a complex field of concrete mediated symbols through which a particular set of symbolic forms create meaning for the pilgrim and extend from the ritual to the world. Each pilgrim enters this rich symbolic ritual bodily, not alone but with companions who for the most part were unknown to each other prior to the journey’s beginning. Drawing meaning from the Camino results from the interrelation between pilgrims and the mediated field of symbols into and through which they walk. Pilgrims use all their senses to gather information for a meaningful interpretation of the journey. Rather than merely reading or hearing, they insert themselves bodily into a sacred narrative, a myth, and thereby identify bodily with the story. The Christian Eucharist has some similarity in communicating meaning to the ritual participant. The believer takes bread and wine, the body and blood of Christ, into his or her own body and thereby communes bodily. But in pilgrimage the ritual participant steps into the myth, his or her body surrounded by particular places, the earthen elements of communion. In the first case, the Eucharist, the sacred is male and enters the believer, the female whose womb receives the life-giving seed. In the second case, the Camino, the sacred is female and receives the pilgrim into herself, surrounding the ritual participant with the earthen elements. The pilgrim’s life-giving seed manifests itself in a profusion of artifacts born from the womb of God the Mother. “My Camino” integrates into “your Camino” and when we arrive in Santiago de Compostela our narrative has joined with that of the Camino itself. The AT has also become a site of spiritual journey. It shares a similar characteristic with the Camino, separating hikers from the marketplace and setting them above the rush of everyday existence. For some hikers it is a thin place, a place of connection and communication to a transcendent reality. For nearly all of those who travel for long distances on the AT, it is a liminal journey, one in which the hiker receives a new name, a trail name that often reveals something that captures the person’s true identity. Like pilgrims along some medieval route in Europe, twenty first-century sojourners along the AT seek some experience that only a journey will suffice, and along the way they meet fellow seekers, find fellowship, and find spiritual fulfillment as a result. Most of these seekers are described by Noel Grove as “people at some transitional point in their lives-divorce, job change, or just self-discovery . . . It’s a pilgrimage not unlike those made in the Middle Ages.”98 Contemporary sojourners like their medieval counterparts seek relationships that transcend the means-to-ends utilitarian structures that dictate both spiritual and community-oriented relationships. Pilgrims of the

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twenty-first century often experience alienation as a result of technologically saturated societies. They seek meaning beyond the profane chronology that such societies create and have the option to embark on spiritual journeys. On such journeys societal norms lose their orienting power. The Turners claim that pilgrimage in the modern classification “serves not so much to maintain society’s status quo as to recollect, and even to presage, an alternative mode of social being, a world where communitas, rather than a bureaucratic social structure, is preeminent;” and the modern pilgrimage “may be seen as providing live metaphors for human and transhuman truths and salvific ways which all men share and always have shared, had they but known it.”99 Those who engage in spiritual journeys have also gone into the wilderness in various landscapes including desert and rugged mountain expanses. Forest monks and desert hermits are two designations for people who have sought solace or spiritual awakening in wilderness. Entering the wilderness for these pilgrims becomes a spiritual journey. The American wilderness can be compared to recognized sacred places where pilgrims, monks and hermits have journeyed. Those who hike wilderness trails are exposed to a potential sacred topography. An examination of spiritual journey on the AT can be seen through the lens of the Camino de Santiago and other traditional pilgrimage routes. The Camino de Santiago, one of the three major Christian pilgrimages, illuminates the wilderness as sacred journey site and shows that long distance backpacking on the AT is a uniquely American contribution to pilgrimage. LEAVING THE MOUNTAIN AND EMBARKING ON THE JOURNEY Given the overarching cultural context that interprets the environment as a storehouse of resources, whether natural or aesthetic, I will begin our journey of discovery on the AT through the lens of it being a National Scenic Trail. Though there are countless specific motives drawing hikers to the wilderness trail, I will not approach the AT by looking for such preceding purposes. Rather, I will begin the exploration by looking at the way the AT is cast by the culture that has invented it. As the exploration unfolds, a contrast will be drawn between an aesthetic orientation as it relates to the National Scenic Trail and a spiritual journey.



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NOTES 1.  Wilderness is fraught with meaning. Roderick Nash highlights its subjectivity and the difficulty of defining it. He writes that wilderness “is so heavily freighted with meaning of a personal, symbolic, and changing kind as to resist easy definition” (Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982]), 1. Michael Frome writes that wilderness is “more than a place,” it is “an idea, a principle, a state of mind, even a dream. While the state of wilderness exists in the mind, it does so only to the degree it exists somewhere on the ground” (Michael Frome, Battle for the Wilderness, Revised Ed. [Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 1997]), 11. William Cronon also examines the complexity of understanding wilderness and the lessons it might teach. He writes, “If the core problem of wilderness is that it distances us too much from the very things it teaches us to value, then the question we must ask is what it can tell us about home, the place where we actually live” (William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. Ed. William Cronon [New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995]), 87. Consistent with the project of this book as it relates to the Appalachian Trail as a place to find fellowship with wilderness, Cronon writes, “When we visit a wilderness area, we find ourselves surrounded by plants and animals and physical landscapes whose otherness compels our attention. In forcing us to acknowledge that they are not of our making, that they have little or no need of our continued existence, they recall for us a creation far greater than our own. In the wilderness, we need no reminder that a tree has its own reasons for being, quite apart from us” (Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, 88). In subsequent chapters, I will explore the complexity and seeming contradictions found in seeking fellowship with wilderness. 2. Friedrich Hauck, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965), 797. 3. I will follow Martin Buber’s distinction between encounter and experience. Buber’s I-You pairing “establishes the world of relation” where encounter happens between two in meeting one another. Experience happens in the I-It pairing, where the mediation of use orients the self toward objects to be experienced for the self as a means to some end. Martin Buber, I and Thou. Translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 56, 109, 112. 4. Hauck, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 799. 5.  Ibid., 804. 6.  Phil. 3:10 NRSV. 7.  Emmanuel Levinas, “Beyond Intentionality,” Philosophy in France Today. Ed. Alan Montefiore. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 109. 8.  Evan Eisenberg, The Ecology of Eden (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 78. 9.  Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Portable Thoreau, Ed. Carle Bode (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 609.

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10.  Gary Backhaus, “The Problematic of Grounding the Significance of Symbolic Landscapes,” Symbolic Landscapes, eds. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 22. 11.  Backhaus, “The Problematic of Grounding the Significance of Symbolic Landscapes,” Symbolic Landscapes, 19. 12. Aron Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1979), 209. 13.  G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology. Vol. 2. Translated by J. E. Turner (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 672. 14.  Northbound and southbound hikers have differing orientations. For example, during a northbound walk the sun will rise predominantly in the hiker’s face and set behind; the opposite being the case for the southbound hiker. Seasons will also alter orientations. Immediately after finishing at the northern terminus, I flew to the south and walked from the Great Smoky Mountain National Park to Springer Mountain, the southern terminus, to experience the southbound finish. 15. Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1978), 205. 16.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 207. 17.  Ibid., 7. 18. Ibid. 19.  Ibid., 8. 20.  Christian Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Meaning and Place: Selected Essays (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1988), 11. 21. Norberg-Schulz, Architecture: Meaning and Place: Selected Essays, 16. 22.  Robert Mugerauer, “Language and the Emergence of Environment,” Dwelling, Place, and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World, Eds. David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer. (Dordrecht: Springer, 1985), 57. 23.  Gadamer, “Man and Language,” Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 63. 24.  Mugerauer, “Language and the Emergence of Environment,” Dwelling, Place, and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World, 58. 25.  C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet (New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1996), 32. 26. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, 32. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Plato, Timaeus, Trans. Rev. R. G. Bury, 52b. 30. Plato, Timaeus, Trans. Francis Macdonald Cornford, 52b. 31.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A Landes (Abingdon, VA: Routledge, 2012), 243. 32. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 243. 33. Ibid. 34. Belden C. Lane, Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2001), 39. 35. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 102.



Getting to the Mountain 35

36.  Ibid., 139. 37.  Ibid., 140. 38.  As will be discussed in subsequent chapters, landscape privileges the eye. The term comes into English from the Dutch in connection with Flemish painters. Clearly, painting is an art medium that appeals to the eye. For further information on the Dutch/English connection to landscape see Laure Meyer, Masters of English Landscape: among others, Gainsborough, Stubbs, Turner, Constable, Whistler, Kokoschka (Paris: Terrail, 1993), 17. 39. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 236. 40.  Cite McLuhan, both The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man and Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Also Lance Strate writes, in referencing Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, that “McLuhan considers sense perception primary, and discusses the interplay among the senses in terms of the sense ratios and the sensorium.” (Lance Strate, “A Media Ecology Review,” Communication Research Trends Vol 23, no. 2 [2004]: 7.) 41. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 225. 42.  Ibid., 213–214. 43.  Ibid., 217. 44.  Ibid., 102. 45.  Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6. 46.  Mugerauer, “Language and the Emergence of Environment,” Dwelling, Place, and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World, 58. 47. Ibid. 48. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 155. 49.  Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 215. 50.  Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 215. 51.  Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1971), 63. 52.  Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 23. 53.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Man and Language.” Philosophical Hermeneutics, 64. 54.  Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 216. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57.  Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, 62. 58.  Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 206. 59.  Ernesto Grassi, “The Originary Quality of the Poetic and Rhetorical Word: Heidegger, Ungaretti, and Neruda.” Philosophy Rhetoric 20, no. 4 (1987): 248. 60.  Ernesto Grassi, “The Originary Quality of the Poetic and Rhetorical Word: Heidegger, Ungaretti, and Neruda,” 253. 61.  Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 236. 62.  Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 236.

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63. Belden C. Lane, Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality, 24. 64.  J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: Unwin Books, 1964), 25. 65.  Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, 89. Note that Barfield disagreed with Muller. 66.  C.S. Lewis. “Myth Became Fact.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 66. 67.  Paul Shepard. Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 38. 68.  Paul Ricoeur. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Ed. Mark I. Wallace. Trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 61. 69. Paul Ricoeur. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, 61–62. 70.  Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (trans. Willard R. Trask; San Diego: Harcourt Brace and Co., 1987), 13. 71.  I will explore the aesthetic tourist in chapter 2. 72.  Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 63. 73.  Paul Ricoeur. Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, 43. 74. Joseph Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Meridian Books, 1956, 43. 75.  Philip Sheldrake. Living between Worlds: Place and Journey in Celtic Spirituality (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1995), 7. 76.  Philip Sheldrake. Living between Worlds: Place and Journey in Celtic Spirituality, 7. 77. Ibid.,, 31. 78. Ibid., 32. 79.  David Brown. God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 161. 80.  Ibid., 162. 81.  Ibid., 214. 82.  Ibid., 215. 83.  Ibid., 217. 84. Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1978), 249. 85.  Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1969), 94. 86.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 2. 87.  Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 94. 88.  Ibid., 95. 89.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 1–39. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 94–130. Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1974), 231–299. 90.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian, 233. 91.  Ibid., 250.



Getting to the Mountain 37

92.  Ibid., 249–250. 93.  Ibid., 4. 94. Ibid. 95.  Ibid., 7. 96.  Mugerauer, “Language and the Emergence of Environment,” Dwelling, Place, and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World, 58. 97.  Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 350. 98.  Noel Grove, “A Tunnel through Time: the Appalachian Trail,” National Geographic (Feb. 1987), 235. 99.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 39.

Chapter Two

Spiritual Journey Versus Aesthetic Tourism

HIKING NORTH FROM SPRINGER MOUNTAIN If the climb from Amicalola Falls to Springer Mountain, a mere eight miles, has not dampened a hiker’s spirit, or, if someone were dropped off just below Springer Mountain on the forest service road and felt the excitement of having walked an easy mile up the rocky trail to the summit, their next few miles are deceivingly easy. These first few miles of the white-blazed AT are conducive to a leisurely walk and uncharacteristic of things to come. Most of those who hope to thru-hike have never undertaken an extended backpacking trip, never walked a hundred miles into the wild, carrying everything needed for survival in an uncomfortable sack on their back. Longdistance hiking produces a unique backcountry experience, unlike shorter section hikes. Preparation is extremely important, but nothing substitutes for weeks of hiking over seemingly countless miles through rugged wilderness, carrying everything one needs to survive. Many do their research before embarking: read guidebooks, pour over maps, seek advice on equipment, plot their intended course and send food drops to themselves. They envision themselves ambling along the mountain course while enjoying the views and connecting with whatever preconception they have of the wild. They are, after all, embarking on a National Scenic Trail. Visions and memories of various scenic trails in national and state parks fill their thoughts with images of pristine and picturesque landscape. Those preconceptions will start to fall apart, if not in the first week then later; after mile upon mile of trekking through the difficult terrain their expectations will be shattered. Starting at the southern terminus of the AT the trail drops gently to a forest service road approximately one mile north, where many hikers who hiked the Approach Trail find the parking area and drop-off point for the easy approach 39

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to Springer Mountain. From the forest service road, the trail then drops a little more than a thousand feet to Stover Creek before rising back up to Hawk Mountain Shelter, at 3,200 feet and 7.8 miles from Springer Mountain. Hikers then descend into two deep gaps and climb steeply out of these, Horse Gap and Cooper Gap. The first paved road crossing is at Woody Gap some twenty miles from Springer Mountain. Hikers then climb Big Cedar Mountain, a six-hundred-foot elevation gain in one mile. Having only been on the trail a day or two and still needing more physical conditioning, the northbound hiker, referred to as a NOBO, finds such ascents to be difficult. Later in the hike, after being conditioned by constantly ascending and descending such mountains, a six-hundred-foot elevation gain over one mile will seem easy and not a thought will go toward any difficulty. Blood Mountain is the highest peak in Georgia at 4,450 feet and the NOBO finds a rock outcrop on top with views in all directions. Somewhere to the southwest nestled in the sea of mountains, Springer can be seen on clear days. The summit of Blood Mountain affords an aesthetically pleasing prospect that so many hikers seek in venturing out of civilization and into the wild. Blood Mountain provides both a view and an allusion to a narrative of ancient Native-American battles. The name references a mythic battle between tribes in which the warriors’ spilt blood painted the rocks. Some novice hikers find the experience inspiring. Most of the NOBOS are here before spring leaves have even hinted at coming onto the trees. Views at this time of year are unobscured, and on clear days the horizon looms well over fifty miles in the spatial surround, ridge after ridge fades in the distance, one behind another. Other hikers are so spent by this point that their appreciation of the summit is dampened by their physical and emotional condition. They will be leaving the AT in just a few miles, at the gap just below. Their preconceptions did not prepare them for the journey. An aesthetic amble in the wilderness was never thought to be so uncomfortable, exhausting, emotionally draining, and lacking in visual stimulation. From the summit of Blood Mountain, the trail drops down to Neels Gap, at 3,125 feet, where hikers find an equipment outfitter and hostel: Mountain Crossings. See figure 2.1. This is the first food resupply where hikers pick up boxes they have mailed to themselves. Mountain Crossings is the only building through which the AT passes. It is also the place where most hikers send home pounds and pounds of unneeded gear. As novices—at best most have only done weeklong trips in such terrain—they have loaded their packs with gadgets that will not be used. The staff at Mountain Crossings is experienced at going through these packs, “shaking out” the surplus weight and helping hikers better understand what they will really need.



Spiritual Journey Versus Aesthetic Tourism 41

Figure 2.1.  Mountain Crossings, Georgia. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

There are veteran hikers who don’t need a pack shake down. When I started backpacking in the 1970s, packs were much heavier. I started out on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) with a new Kelty, external frame pack. My gear, food, and water amounted to sixty five pounds. Since that time an ultra-lightweight hiking culture has developed. Veterans from this group of hikers reduce pack weight to as little as fifteen pounds, not counting food and water. However, most of those who start a thru-hike have no long-distance experience. Many section hikers carry more weight, not having thought through how much can be carried over the many months required to walk two thousand miles. At Neels Gap, the realization of carrying so much weight over mountains for so long manifests with the possibility of sending unused gear home. In addition, it is at this point that the potential thru-hiker begins to realize that they are embarking on more than a mere aesthetic tour. They may not appreciate the fact that humans have been engaged in such journeys for eons. These extended journeys are rooted in an age-old tradition known as pilgrimage, whereas tourism has entered history more recently. Pilgrims may have been the first tourists. Trekking to some sacred shrine and then back home again is the primal tour. Tour originally referred to traveling out from a place of origin and then returning. Tour enters the English language from the Latin Tornāre and the Greek Tórnos, coming to mean a movement around a

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central axis. Both the tourist and the urban commuter accomplish this circumlocution, but there is more associated with the action of a tourist than going out and returning home. Tourists journey round trip for pleasure, recreation, and the whole activity brings to mind vacation. Pilgrims have also engaged in this dual opportunity, circling out to the sacred shrine and then returning home all-the-while taking in the sights. But pilgrims and tourists, though sharing some aspects of travel, differ greatly. Our earliest spiritual journey narratives describe travels that involve the tour but lack contemporary motivations associated with tourism. Pleasure and recreation seem inappropriate descriptors when applied to Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Aeneas, Israel’s desert sojourn, and Jesus. These progenitors of pilgrimage tour over the land and sea in search of meaning that transcends sightseeing. Yet, the major pilgrimages of Christian Europe, as well as those in India, Japan, and the Middle East, seem replete with a blending of religious devotion and recreation. In addition, contemporary sacred destinations have become sites where pilgrims and secular tourists seek to experience a diversion and engage in sight seeing. The contemporary milieu increases blurring any distinction between pilgrim and tourist. The Turners write that Some form of deliberate travel to a far place intimately associated with the deepest, most cherished, axiomatic values of the traveler seems to be a “cultural universal.” . . . And every year, millions visit national parks and forests (the precincts of ‘Old Faithful’ in Yellowstone Park irresistibly recall the cultural landscape of a major religious shrine), mostly, no doubt, for recreational reasons, but partly to renew love of land and country, as expressed by “secular psalms” like “America the Beautiful.”1

The Turners’ description illustrates the ambiguity of such journeys, the overlap of recreation and spiritual quest.2 Though some may think the distinction between pilgrim and tourist, between sacred and profane touring is clear, the contemporary context is more problematic in identifying the two. Yet, Henry David Thoreau calls our attention to a difference. In his essay, “Walking,” Thoreau writes of “the art of Walking,” referring to this special case as sauntering, the basis for the expression coming from medieval pilgrimage, “‘going a la Sainte Terre,’ to the Holy Land.”3 He continues, “They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.”4 Thoreau points out that at least two types of people go on tour, pretenders and authentic pilgrims. A similar distinction manifests itself on the AT, usually well into the journey, when hikers known as “yellow blazers” skip sections of the trail via hitchhiking on the paved roadway.5 The AT crosses many highways and sparingly



Spiritual Journey Versus Aesthetic Tourism 43

follows beside a few for short distances when necessary. The term “yellow blaze” references the yellow paint on the highway in opposition to the white blazes painted on trees, boulders, and posts that serve as trail markers. These yellow blazing “pretenders” brag on their accomplished mileage and other trail craft, claiming to have endured the rugged wilderness trail. Other hikers who truly experience the entire footpath often remain indifferent to such braggadocious wind bags. Distinguishing “pretenders” from authentic hikers is not the concern of this inquiry. The difference serves to illustrate that people tour for divergent reasons. Whether the “tourist” is an authentic pilgrim or a “pretender” is a personal religious matter and is probably better left to priests and prophets. An interesting variation between authentic long-distance hikers on wilderness trails such as the AT rises out of personal motivations. For some, the primary motive for sauntering over thickly wooded mountains involves what has come to be called sightseeing. These aesthetic tourists walk the trails in search of prospects, vistas, viewpoints and an experience of landscape. Such touring came of age through a landscape aesthetic inspired in part by European painters and established itself in both Europe and America in the nineteenth century. Scenic trails in America have roots in this aesthetic tradition. RISE OF AESTHETIC TOURISM For most of human history, apart from religious hermits who sought solitude in the desert, wild places were avoided, associated with terror and deemed ugly. The Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, in an exploration of hunting, makes a distinction between countryside and landscape. His use of the term countryside is equivalent to what we refer to as wilderness; “Countryside is that which is beyond our habitation, whether that is a house, a garden, a park, or a hacienda.”6 The Roman locus amoenus refers to pastoral and cultivated places far removed from the wilderness, Ortega y Gasset’s countryside. He describes inhabited landscape, what the Romans deemed the locus amoenus, writing, “To walk, then, through an orchard, sown field, or stubble field, through an olive grove laid out in diagonal rows or a methodically planned grove of pin oaks, is to follow man traveling within himself.”7 What better way of describing domestic landscapes so prevalent in our contemporary environment than a journey within human conceptual provinces?8 Clearly, the highly domesticated and abstract forms found in gardens such as Versailles are a concretization of human ideas imposed upon Creation. Even landscapes such as the Ramble with New York City’s Central Park, though inspired by and modeled after the wild, still bear the mark of domestication.

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Though worthy of exploration and profoundly complex, a journey therein traverses human ordering. The locus amoenus stands forth as aesthetically pleasing but always within the limits of a human construct. Is it possible to discover any aspect of the world that transcends the conceptual framing of human beings? Merleau-Ponty in characterizing phenomenological description writes that “To turn back to the things themselves is to return to that world prior to knowledge of which knowledge speaks,”9 and “The real must be described and not constructed or constituted.”10 A turn to the wild is also a gesture of opening oneself to the world of things that exist beyond the conceptual framing imposed by human beings. Phenomenologists attempt to discover such a world of things, as do many who venture out on the AT. Though the wild may be perceived as terrible and its aesthetic appeal has a history of being identified as unpleasing to those who prefer landscapes, it has only in the past century come to be valued. What of the contemporary situation wherein AT hikers seek wilderness places to discover beauty rather than loath the wild as unbearably ugly? Are these hikers applying the conceptual sublime to the wild and transposing the horror once ascribed to such places? Is this not a human strategy to turn the alterity of the other into an object and thereby incorporate it into the selfsame? Levinas writes, “To think the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger, is hence not to think an object.”11 He goes on to point out that this is “in reality to do more or better than think.”12 If the wilderness becomes another object of aesthetic imagination, can it remain the place of the Stranger? Is experiencing the wilderness as a landscape thinking an object? The conceptual sublime frames the wild, turning it into scenery now thought to be picturesque. Could this reinterpretation be another human strategy to tame wild spaces, to domesticate and thereby establish a human domain, to conquer that which looms terrifyingly about us? Ortega y Gasset calls attention to the reinterpretation of wild spaces writing: For the tourist, the countryside, as landscape, is no less human than the others: it is a “painting” and its existence depends on the lyric conditions that man wishes and is able to mobilize. . . Poets and painters are the ones who have formed it, little by little, and its qualities were discovered—that is, invented—slowly, generation by generation, in periods of very advanced culture.13

The process of transformation began when painters in the sixteenth century focused their gaze on the countryside and reached its peak three centuries later through a plethora of landscape painters: “Only by the beginning of the nineteenth century was there enough force behind the human impulse which leads man to convert a piece of ground into the ideality of a landscape.”14



Spiritual Journey Versus Aesthetic Tourism 45

This reinterpretation of landscape can be better understood by examining the English landscape tradition and the subsequent rise of landscape aesthetics. ENGLISH LANDSCAPE TRADITION The term landscape comes from the Dutch Landschap, entering English via the Dutch and Flemish painters in the seventeenth century.15 English aesthetic rhetoric sought to understand landscapes through an innovative, critical vocabulary. Landscapes were characterized as “picturesque,” “beautiful,” and “sublime” in an attempt to articulate the aesthetic value of landscape art, both painting and gardening. Claude Lorrain’s (1600–1682) paintings became associated with the beautiful and Salvator Rosa’s (1615–1673) with the sublime.16 E. H. Gombrich points to Paolo Pino, who writing in 1548 gave us “the first formulation of the idea of the ‘picturesque,’” but the English refined the terminology.17 English aestheticians articulated a new criterion whereby beauty could be understood to reside in the countryside. Joseph Addison (1672–1719) looking to the classics, writes that Homer “strikes the imagination wonderfully with what is Great,” Virgil “with what is Beautiful,” and Ovid “with what is Strange,” three different ways of distinguishing places which affect the imagination.18 Addison, looking to Longinus, picked up the theme of the sublime to describe landscapes, but Edmond Burke’s (1729–1797) articulation of the sublime in relation to landscapes most clearly shows such places causing strong emotion. Burke’s comprehensive attempt to distinguish between the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beautiful were written in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1756.19 Like Addison, Burke’s inquiry rests at least in part on the work of Longinus, whose influence had long been established in England: Marjorie Hope Nicolson notes that though Longinus was first available in England after 1554, there was little interest before 1674.20 Burke characterizes the sublime as the strongest emotion that can be produced, caused by something that we would call awesome: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.21

The resulting passion is astonishment, which is said to be “that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. . .

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The mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it.”22 Causes of astonishment in nature were said to result more from dark, confused, and uncertain images that have a greater power over the imagination than those things in nature that are clear.23 The sublime is said to come “upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness . . .”24 Consistent with this view is Burke’s assessment of color as productive of the sublime. Here he says, “an immense mountain covered with a shining green turf, is nothing, in this respect, to one dark and gloomy; the cloudy sky is more grand than the blue; and the night more sublime and solemn than day.”25 The category of the beautiful is said to be the cause of love. Examples of the beautiful producing love are small, delicate, smooth, or polished objects. Comparing the beautiful and the sublime Burke writes, the sublime, which is the cause of the former, always dwells on great objects, and terrible; the latter on small ones, and pleasing; we submit to what we admire, but we love what submits to us; in one case we are forced, in the other we are flattered, into compliance. In short, the ideas of the sublime and the beautiful stand on foundations so different, that it is hard, I had almost said impossible, to think of reconciling them in the same subject, without considerably lessening the effect of the one or the other upon the passions. So that, attending to their quantity, beautiful objects are comparatively small.26

Burke contends that the beautiful and the sublime are neither categories of reason nor do objects that appeal to the reason produce them. Objects of nature that produce an experience of the beautiful and the sublime appeal to the senses and excite emotion. Elizabeth Manwaring’s study of the influence of Italian landscape painting on English aesthetic taste makes clear that the letters and literature concerning landscape scenery of the mid to late eighteenth century were filled with allusions to the paintings of Claude, Rosa, and Poussin, and these allusions, often in reference to the picturesque, point to the similitude between English landscapes and the compositions of Italian landscape paintings. Manwaring notes that the writings of the “cult of the picturesque” show how far visual rhetoric went in influencing perceptions of nature.27 These perceptions were acquired not by persons going out into the countryside and directly experiencing these aesthetic categories, an activity that is more common in our own contemporary situation, clearly what happens on a long-distance hike on the AT. Rather, composed landscape paintings created the cult of nature. Gombrich writes, “sixteenth century landscapes, after all, are not ‘views’ but largely accumulations of individual features; they are conceptual rather than visual.”28 Paintings train the eye to appreci-



Spiritual Journey Versus Aesthetic Tourism 47

ate the picturesque. Late eighteenth-century criticism established paintings by Claude, Rosa, and Poussin as ideal in their depiction and characterization of landscapes. The “Claude-glass,” a small device used to frame landscapes by those engaged in countryside walks, that is “touring,” rendered an actual scene into something like one of the paintings of the masters. William Gilpin’s (1724–1804) tour of the Wye became well known in publications starting in the 1780s. He described landscapes along the tour as picturesque, by which he meant “that kind of beauty which would look well in a picture.”29 The theme of the picturesque chained out into the public and by 1800 Gilpin’s book was in its fifth edition.30 Manwaring quotes Gilpin as describing nature saying, “her general colouring, and her local hues, are exquisite. In composition only she fails.”31 Gilpin’s comment underscores the conceptualization of landscape, the need to impose human ordering so as to render a landscape aesthetically acceptable. Richard Payne Knight (1750–1824), and Uvedale Price (1747–1829) elaborated on the picturesque and clearly distinguished between the picturesque, the beautiful, and the sublime. Price followed Burke in attributing smoothness and diminution to the beautiful, while darkness and limitlessness were associated with the sublime. The picturesque was said to be somewhere in between the two, associated with “roughness and sudden variation.”32 Refining these aesthetic categories opened human understanding to a new way of perceiving the countryside in relation to scenic beauty. These aesthetic categories of landscape art helped to identify and produce a new way of relating to undomesticated places, extending the classical ideal—satyr and nymphs attending—with places that were either beautiful, picturesque, or sublime. Though these aesthetic categories facilitate a new interpretation of wild scenery, they are still human projections. Aesthetic tourists such as Gilpin experience a mediated version of the countryside, an objectification. OBJECTIFICATION, EXPERIENCING THE AESTHETIC OBJECT IN ISOLATION Along with this new understanding landscapes become objectified, isolated scenes framed by devices such as the Claude Glass. Wild places, the countryside as Ortega y Gasset indicated, is experienced through the filter of the painting. In teaching us that wild places have aesthetic value, we were also trained to look at such places through a frame, a kind of window that separates us from the life world. As we gaze upon the beautiful, the picturesque, or the sublime, we are removed from the place, distanced by the frame, which composes the scene. The landscape becomes an object of aesthetic value that

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mediates a subjective experience, but intersubjectivity is not part of what happens between the viewer and the constituents of the scene. Yet, we owe a debt of gratitude to these aestheticians for calling attention to the value of wilderness and other places beyond the locus amoenus. Our national parks and national scenic trails rise in the wake of landscape painting and then photography. One of the Hudson River School of American painters, Thomas Moran, accompanied Ferdinand Hayden’s expedition into the Yellowstone along with the great photographer William Henry Jackson.33 National parks, though promoted as natural wonders and unique, derive much of their notoriety because of the way roads and trails give aesthetic tourists vantage points from which to view scenery. It is in the wake of objectifying the wild beauty of landscapes through art, of experiencing the aesthetic object as worthy of visual contemplation that the AT becomes integrated into the American cultural milieu, all in response to a shift in consciousness toward wilderness and an aesthetic appreciation of wild spaces in America. Literary figures such as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, artists such as Thomas Cole, Thomas Moran and Asher Durand, and the first of the American landscape architects, Frederick Law Olmsted, helped to bring this new vision of the American wilderness to the popular consciousness. Thomas Cole writes that America’s most impressive identifying aspect is its wildness.34 He contrasts American and European scenery writing, “American associations are not so much of the past as of the present and the future.”35 Asher Durand encourages American painters to focus on their own unique scenery writing: Go not abroad then in search of material for the exercise of your pencil, while the virgin charms of our native land have claims on your deepest affections. Many are the flowers in our untrodden wilds that have blushed too long unseen, and their original freshness will reward your research with a higher and purer satisfaction, than appertains to the display of the most brilliant exotic. The “lone and tranquil” lakes embosomed in ancient forests, that abound in our wild districts, the unshorn mountains surrounding them with their richly-textured covering, the ocean prairies of the West, and many other forms of Nature yet spared from the pollutions of civilization, afford a guarantee for a reputation of originality that you may elsewhere long seek and find not.36

A key theme in the paintings and literature of the period focused on a perception of the vast virgin landscape. Important rhetorical essays such as Cole’s “Essay on American Scenery” (1835), Thoreau’s “Walking” (1862); longer literary works such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans (1826), and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature (1836); or poetic works such as William



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Cullen Bryant’s “The Prairies” (1832) highlighted the waxing American interest in wild spaces.37 In 1867, John Muir left Indianapolis and walked a thousand miles to the Gulf of Mexico. His journey represents a shift in the way wild spaces are valued. He was clearly influenced by the cultural milieu just outlined; however, his excursions open the way to an intersubjective encounter with the constituents of wild spaces. He was not viewing mediated scenery. His later writings hint at his interaction with the constituents of the places through which he walked. They were more than mere objects of aesthetic enjoyment. His writings, though aesthetically consistent with the landscape tradition, allow the reader to experience more than scenery. If Dutch landscape painters brought focus to what had been background in previous painting traditions, that is, opened the way for the viewer to gaze more directly on wild scenery, Muir revealed the interplay between various co-constituents of a wild ecosystem. He did not start publishing until late in the nineteenth century, but his actions are consistent with the shifting cultural valuation of wild spaces. In all of this, painting, architecture, and rhetoric, the aboriginal wilderness became a symbol for a healthy, spirited, vibrant, and youthful nation. Health and a less meditated, more embodied experience of the natural world was an important goal in Olmsted’s collaboration to make Central Park a reality. Olmsted preceded Muir in an extended stay at Yosemite, both men receiving profound inspiration from the sublime California mountains. Olmsted believed that public parks should be havens, places conducive to health. His view in this regard is outlined in “Preliminary Report to the Commissioners for Laying Out a Park in Brooklyn, New York: Being a Consideration of Circumstances of Site and Other Conditions Affecting the Design of Public Pleasure Grounds” (1866).38 In the report, the phrase “unbending of the faculties,” points toward a restoration of psychological health. Such unbending is said to be possible only through the occupation of the imagination with objects and reflections of a quite different character from those which are associated with their bent condition. To secure such a diversion of the imagination, the best possible stimulus is found to be the presentation of a class of objects to the perceptive organs, which shall be as agreeable as possible to the taste, and at the same time entirely different from the objects connected with those occupations by which the faculties have been tasked. And this is what is found by townspeople in a park.39

Olmsted mentions two circumstances common to parks in producing the desired “unbending of the faculties”: “scenery offering the most agreeable contrast to that of the rest of the town,” and in conjunction, a place of gathering.40

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Olmsted and Calvert Vaux started working on the design of Central Park in 1858. They submitted the “Greensward” plan and were announced winners of a competition to design the park in 1858. Important contemporary influences on Olmsted are consistent with the rise of American landscape art and literature. Olmsted also travelled extensively in the years prior to and immediately after his work on Central Park. He published four books between 1852 and 1861—Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England (1852), A Journey to the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey to Texas (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country (1860)—each of which integrates the ideas of journey and the influences of environment, space and place. The first area of Central Park to be completed was the Ramble, also called both a “wild garden” and the “American Garden” by Olmsted. The Ramble is a relatively small area within Central Park, being between thirty-three and fifty acres depending on where one measures its non-existent boundaries. As the visitor to the park draws closer to the Ramble, views of the surrounding city fade and a landscape modeled after the Appalachian Mountains dominates the experience. Years after the completion of Central Park, Olmsted characterized his work as “art to conceal art.”41 In this context a landscape that does not appear to have been produced is an instance of visual art/rhetoric, and an audience is invited to experience a wild garden. The wild garden opens the audience to a new understanding of the inspiration for the garden, wilderness itself. That is to say, wilderness as a thing arrives at its own unique appearance for the audience in the work of art. Rhetorically, the artist’s vision of wilderness is part of the meaning viewers experience through the invitation to stroll within the frame of a garden. In addition, the frame creates a place where the viewers are free to offer their own opinion as to the meaning of the landscape. All of this happens in a less mediated environment than the landscape art and rhetoric of painting and literature. The birth of the national park came in the wake of this cultural transformation. Between 1869 and 1871, three expeditions surveyed the Yellowstone area: the Folsom-Cook of 1869, the Washburn of 1870, and the Hayden of 1871.42 Out of these expeditions came a mythic account, known to some as the Firehole Story or the Campfire Story, of the genesis of Yellowstone National Park. In these accounts, the members of the storied expedition camped at the junction of the Gibbon and Firehole Rivers, at whose confluence forms the Madison River. The consensus of the group was to communicate the unique character of the places in the vast space surrounding the Yellowstone River. It was thought that no individual person should be able to control these places, which was the historical precedent, whether the establishment of a royal park or of a capitalist entrepreneur’s park at Niagara Falls in democratic America. Here the whole nation should be able to enjoy the land.43



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Muir’s publishing came at the same time that the national parks were in their infancy. He published Our National Parks in 1901, My First Summer in the Sierra in 1911, and A Thousand-mile Walk to the Gulf in 1916.44 Muir’s rhetoric invited the whole nation, and the world, to enjoy the wild environment, to discover its great value and spirituality. Where other artists and rhetors had only made excursions into wild places, Muir had walked, camped, and worshipped there. THE AT AS AN AESTHETIC LANDSCAPE OF EMBODIED IMMERSION The landscape of the wild garden may also be extended from the action of a single artist/rhetor’s invitation, such as Olmsted or Muir, to the action of a group—a conference, a conservancy—of visionary artist/rhetor’s such as was formed with the founding of the Appalachian Trail Conference by Benton Mackaye and other important followers such as Myron Avery. In the case of the AT, the vision continues to be carried forward to the present as various trail clubs and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy work to maintain the pathway and surrounding environment of the AT. These trail clubs and the ATC act in concert to create and maintain a wild garden that stretches from Georgia to Maine, and they invite the public to enter this wild space. In the period after the establishment of Yellowstone, almost immediately after Muir’s rhetorical writings, and during the rise of the national parks movement, Benton Mackaye wrote “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” which was published in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, in 1921.45 Mackaye proposed building a trail that would extend from New England to the Carolinas and follow the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. Consistent with symbols of wild places as both environmental resources and conducive to health, Mackaye wrote that the trail would provide possibilities for health and recuperation. The oxygen in the mountain air along the Appalachian skyline is a natural resource (and a national resource) that radiates to the heavens its enormous health-giving powers with only a fraction of a percent utilized for human rehabilitation. Here is a resource that could save thousands of lives.46

The Appalachian Trail Conference was founded in 1925 to coordinate volunteers who would create, manage, and maintain the AT. By 1937, the AT was complete and ran from Georgia to Maine. Those who first ventured onto the trail did not envision themselves hiking the entire two thousand miles in a

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single year. For most, the AT provided an experience similar to a visit in one of the national parks. It opened up the possibility of a rustic trip into the wild, a scenic vacation away from more occupied vacation places. The AT is currently administered by the National Park Service. Though the AT was dreamed up in the 1920s and built in the 1930s, it was not until the 1960s that The National Trail System Act of 1968 placed the trail under the authority of the National Park Service. Like the national parks, the AT is oriented around the idea of scenic beauty. As is the case in the national parks where natural landscapes are framed by constructed roads and trails, the AT is an artifact that highlights the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime. The difference is that hikers have the option of immersing themselves in the wild environment along the Appalachian Mountains when visiting the AT. These hikers may engage in a wilderness journey wherein precedents are more closely similar to mythic pilgrimages than vacations in the national parks. COUPLING THE SCENIC WITH JOURNEY Thru-hiking the AT, an extended journey or long-distance hike, was not part of the original vision for scenic experiences in the mountain wilderness. It was not until 1948 that Earl Shaffer, a veteran of World War II, walked the entire 2,100 miles in one go. In his youth, Shaffer had hiked the mountains near his home in central Pennsylvania and talked of sharing a journey on the AT with his childhood companion, Walter Winemiller. Both Shaffer and Winemiller served in the Pacific theater during WWII. Winemiller was killed in the battle of Iwo Jima.47 Shaffer came home from the war and “decided to walk the trail and clear his head of wartime traumas,” writing, “that he was ‘confused and depressed.’”48 His thru-hike shattered all previous conceptions of hiking on the AT, so much so that “the ATC [Appalachian Trail Conference] greeted his claim with skepticism until he showed hundreds of his own slides and gave detailed descriptions of the trail.”49 Just before Shaffer’s hike “an article in the A.T. News debunked the notion that anyone could do a thru-hike.”50 Shaffer’s hike was so unique that he was dubbed the “Crazy One.” Shaffer had embarked on a healing journey consistent with a long tradition of pilgrimage. After Shaffer a handful of hikers followed in the 1950s, then more in the 1960s and 1970s, and in the 1980s the flood came. Emma Gatewood, known as “Grandma Gatewood, became the first woman to thru-hike in 1955. Gatewood, like Shaffer engaged in a journey of healing. She had suffered in an abusive marriage and the trail offered freedom and release. “Grandma Gatewood” and Dorothy Laker, the second woman to thru-hike the AT, were



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the first people to complete a second thru-hike.51 Justice William O. Douglas completed his section-hike of the AT in 1958, walking the entire trail over multiple trips. Ed Garvey wrote a book based on his thru-hike in 1970, Appalachian Hiker; and National Geographic published a book on the trail in 1972.52 Now hundreds of hikers set forth each year to walk the more than two thousand mile journey that stretches from Georgia to Maine. Each year the number of those attempting to walk the entire length increases. A longdistance hike along this national scenic trail potentially alters one’s aesthetic orientation. In some cases, these journeys are consistent with pilgrimage, coupling the scenic with a spiritual sojourn. AESTHETIC JOURNEY The spiritual sojourn, sacred journey, or pilgrimage is another way to approach the aesthetic aspect of journey independent of its connection to scenery. Though the scenic and the spiritual are not mutually exclusive, the rise of landscape aesthetics and scenic touring is distinct from pilgrimage traditions. Though pilgrims while journeying to connect with the bones of Saint James surely enjoy various landscapes in route, a quest for attractive scenery does not trigger the adventure. The Camino de Santiago began long before the rise of landscape aesthetics. Rather than a landscape aesthetic, pilgrimage offers a spiritual aesthetic that may culminate in a mystic encounter sometimes referenced as the beatific vision. Umberto Eco describes this spiritual aesthetic in relation to its medieval sensibility as “an apprehension of all of the relations, imaginative and supernatural, subsisting between the contemplated object and a cosmos which opened on to the transcendent. It meant discerning in the concrete object an ontological reflection of, and participation in, the being and the power of God.”53 The mystic encounter with its aesthetic, the beatific vision, involves an inward journey. As noted in the previous chapter, the Turners write that pilgrimage is said to be “the great liminal experience of the religious life. If mysticism is an interior pilgrimage, pilgrimage is exteriorized mysticism.”54 Christian mystics such as Saint Teresa of Ávila describe the interior journey and its aesthetic aspect in terms of an ecstatic communion.55 Of this sublime, interior experience, she writes, “For as long as the soul is in this state, it can neither see nor hear nor understand.”56 As an interior vision “seeing” transcends even the active imagination. She clarifies how one’s soul might see or understand even though its apprehending transcends the senses, “I am not saying that it saw it at the time, but that it sees it clearly afterwards, and not because it is a vision, but because of a certainty . . . put there by God.”57 Saint Teresa’s sublime

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experience is inward, happening in the wilderness of her own soul. In this bewildering encounter, the person “is conscious of having been most delectably wounded, but cannot say how or by whom; but it is certain that this is a precious experience and it would be glad if it were never to be healed of that wound.”58 Her account highlights a paradox involving “great grief” and also being “sweet and delectable.” Her beautiful description paints a picture of the ineffable, ephemeral, and sublime encounter with the Divine, an experience of rapture. In one beautiful passage, possibly inspirational for Bernini’s sculpture located in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, she writes: This distress seems to penetrate to its very bowels; and that, when He that has wounded it draws out the arrow, the bowels seem to come with it, so deeply does it feel this love. . . the fire is not hot enough to burn it up, and the experience is very delectable, the soul continues to feel the pain and the mere touch suffices to produce that effect in it. . . this delectable pain, which is not really pain, is not continuous: sometimes it lasts for a long time, while sometimes it comes suddenly to an end, . . . for it is a thing which no human means can procure. Although occasionally the experience lasts for a certain length of time, it goes and comes again; . . . never permanent . . . and leaves the soul yearning once again to suffer that loving pain of which it is the cause.59

The rhetoric of Saint Teresa’s aesthetic account incorporates bodily sensations to show the reader something of the depth of this inner sublime rapture. As the Turners indicate, pilgrimage also offers such an aesthetic through an exterior journey. While many long-distance hikers on the AT do not have any connection to Christian mysticism, their aesthetic encounters can be understood through this lens. Conditioning, both physically, mindfully, and emotionally, becomes a total focus in the first weeks of a long-distance hike on the AT. After this conditioning, hikers might begin to experience something akin to Saint Teresa’s account of ecstatic communion. Though she attributes the experience to her “divine Majesty,” hikers may attribute theirs to the AT itself. Not that the AT takes on divinity, but it becomes the identity of the terrain, the mountains, the trees, the weather, and various other constituents that thrust an arrow into the bowels of the hiker. For many, there is constant pain during their thru-hike. Conditioning does not take pain away. Rather, it attunes hikers to the pain. The pain becomes, in the words of Saint Teresa, “delectable,” leaving “the soul yearning once again to suffer that loving pain of which it is the cause.” Every night I felt this pain penetrate every joint, muscle, sinew each time my body shifted, or when I needed to rise in the middle of the night. The pain was often so overwhelming that I thought, “if I feel this way in the morning, I will not be able to hike.” But, at the same time, when my body was still, I



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felt the deepest rest, peace, an overwhelming harmony between myself and the earth that buoyed me. Hiking up steep mountains took every ounce of energy, and the burning pain caused by pushing muscles to the limit relentlessly made itself felt. Moving down those steep slopes felt like being shot in the knee with each step. One hiker said such downhills would “blow the kneecaps off a normal person.” All this suffering met with love, a fellowship that also penetrated to the bowels. Such mystically oriented hikers may be motivated by a much older practice, rooted in spiritual journey narratives expressed in mystical writings. These writings range from desert hermits to wandering monks, and still proliferate through contemporary fictional journey narratives. Rumi’s “In Baghdad, Dreaming of Cairo: In Cairo Dreaming of Baghdad” is an example in the Islamic mystic tradition.60 Some contemporary backpackers of this stripe may eventually become known as wilderness mystics and pilgrims. They too find themselves on an aesthetic journey. Theirs involves a wider array of encounters, in some cases transcending scenic stimulation that manifests aesthetically. Rather than disinterested subjects experiencing the landscape as scenic beauty, aesthetic sojourners, each a “complex, intentional ‘Body-Subject in-the-world’”61 encounters the intertwining of a field of “Body-Subjects” in a dialogue wherein meaning arises. Merleau-Ponty writes in reference to encountering a painting, “I do not look at it as one looks at a thing, fixing it in its place. My gaze wanders within it as in the halos of Being. Rather than seeing it, I see according to, or with it.”62 This seeing “according to, or with” involves the dialogue between intertwining “Body-Subjects” all emplaced within the aesthetic environment. Christian mystics such as desert hermits learned to “see according to, or with” their environmental emplacement while living in community. Some contemporary AT sojourners experience a transformation of perception wherein they begin to see “according to, or with” the constituents that make up the environmental milieu. Richard Lanigan writes, “Meaning becomes the ‘primordial perception.’”63 Merleau-Ponty further describes this intertwining of body-subjects and milieu writing, “Things have an internal equivalent in me.”64 In this way, I see “according to, or with” them. The aesthetic sojourner wanders through places of beauty, acting and being acted upon, being present “at the moment when things, truths, values are constituted,” summoning her “to the task of knowledge and action.”65 Pilgrimage as exteriorized mysticism involves a spiritual quest for truth that can be traced to classical Greece. The Greek focus on aesthetics coupled the beautiful and the good, kalós kai agathós.66 In addition, Kalós is paired with gê for the good land and with khrónos for the good time. Socrates searched for kalós kai agathós wherein outward beauty was not the distinguishing feature. Gerardus van der Leeuw points to the classical Greek spiritual quest for this “awful loveliness” in Socrates’ prayer for inward beauty, “The longing

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for beauty is so deep in this most ugly of all men that the word ‘beautiful’ here receives an extended meaning which it possessed more or less constantly in Greek.”67 Leeuw calls this an example of “the most moving prayer of a soul thirsting for beauty, that of Socrates, in the Phaedrus.”68 For Plato, kalós and agathós work together to unite us with the divine. Agathós itself is made up of kalós, summetría, and alethéia.69 The good takes form in the beautiful. The basis of paideia is the hunger of the soul for the beautiful. The soul strives for the higher image of man by letting itself be led to the beautiful as a prototype. Rather than a focus on outward beauty such as visual scenery, Plato’s aesthetic ultimately involves an inward journey toward the Good. Whereas the myth of the cave is given in the Republic,70 Plato depicts a myth in the form of a journey of ascent in the Symposium.71 Eros, as all those who lack both wisdom and ignorance, desires wisdom. Diotima tells Socrates, “He who does not think himself in need does not desire what he does not think he lacks.”72 Need of wisdom produces desire and moves this pilgrim toward the desired thing, a journey toward wisdom. Wisdom itself is beautiful, attracting Eros and all who journey in that direction, “For wisdom is surely among the most beautiful of things, but Eros is love of the beautiful; so Eros is necessarily a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, and, being a philosopher, intermediate between wisdom and ignorance.”73 Diotima goes on to ask, “Why does he who loves, love beautiful things?” and “What will he have who possesses beautiful things?”74 The terminus of the journey brings the pilgrim to love the Good that becomes one’s own forever.75 Plato’s journey of ascent involves a liturgy of pilgrimage: wisdom calls the pilgrim/philosopher, a lover of wisdom and intermediate between ignorance and wisdom. The journey toward wisdom begins in responding to a call. Loving the Good is the telos of the journey where the pilgrim/philosopher comes to a terminus of communion with the Good. Whereas the terminus for Plato is to love the Good, Christian liturgy involves a journey completed in loving God. In either case the pilgrim responds to an initial call to journey, and along the way answers other calls, responds, and continues repeatedly until reaching the terminus. Plato describes the journey toward the Good as beginning in the pilgrim’s youth with an exterior desire, experienced as a call to love beauty awakened in relation to an immediate, single beautiful body. A further call directs this pilgrim/philosopher to realize that less immediate bodies have similar beauty. Then the sojourner begins to love the beautiful residing in all bodies. Iterations of call and response shift the pilgrim/philosopher’s attention to the soul, initiating an interior journey. Diotima depicts this liturgical journey as ascending a ladder saying: Beginning from these beautiful things here, to ascend ever upward for the sake of that, the Beautiful, as though using the steps of a ladder, from one to two and



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from two to all beautiful bodies, and from beautiful bodies to beautiful practices, and from practices to beautiful studies, and from studies one arrives in the end at that study which is nothing other than the study of that, the Beautiful itself, and one knows in the end, by itself, what it is to be beautiful . . . that human life is to be lived: in contemplating the Beautiful itself.76

This classical aesthetic shows the beautiful as that form of the good fusing deity, world, and humanity into an ideal unity. The Christian mystic tradition picks up on this Platonic quest in Pseudo-Dionysus who sees the soul finding true happiness when it discovers a vision of Beauty and the true source of the knowledge of that Beauty. In this vision the soul finds itself identical with the ultimate soul and realizes that its embodiment and contact with matter was a necessary expression of the Being. Sacramentals being given through embodiment and material objects, the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty are set forth. Lane’s exploration of the aesthetic journey found within various religious traditions shows the complexity of such a quest in that it cannot be understood as merely an inward search but reveals itself as an interplay of spirit and place. Lane writes, “The interior truth here is that human beings don’t long for another world, far beyond the ordinariness of this one.”77 The mountain becomes the focus of our longing, “The magnificent yet inaccessible mountain is a symbol of our deep longing for the beatific vision.”78 Yet the mountain does stand beyond, not beyond ordinariness as mountains are part of the common human experience, but beyond our ability to control: “Not being subject to human control, the cosmic peak stands beyond every exercise of power.”79 The beatific vision ushers the sojourner into a spirituality of desire. Lane writes, “Far from being something always repressed in the Christian tradition, a ‘spirituality of desire’ (symbolized in the mountain of wistfulness) recurs continually in the writings of the mystics.”80 Beauty encompasses both a sensual and intellectual apprehension. Here the aesthetic journey is also a mystic quest. Though a cursory review of Christian mystical writing may seem to involve a renouncing of the physical world, a kind of gnostic turn away from enfleshment, Christian mystics went into the undomesticated countryside to discover the beatific vision; their contemplative practices and prayer life finds resonance in wild places. Lane writes that these early mystics deliberately chose such places: “While it may appear recklessly wild, even dangerous, to outsiders, for this very reason it fed the spirits of those who had chosen the desert way.”81 Lane references St. Anthony, patron of the desert monastics in Egypt, as alluding to the Creation as God’s second book, writing “Knowing the physical and the spiritual to be profoundly interwoven, he recognized the desert as his most important teacher.”82 Though other Christians did not look

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to Creation sacramentally, these mystics involved themselves deeply in their places of dwelling on the edge. Lane writes that rather than despisers of the created world, they discovered “a new way of seeing and appreciating life” through their connection with the environment.83 Their catechism of love came from this environment, “what the desert finally taught them was love.”84 CONTRAST OF TOURING AND JOURNEYING So how does the same space mediate divergent meanings? How does the same path through the wilderness mediate both an experience of sedimented, objectified beauty—as given through the English landscape tradition—as well as a spiritual encounter between hikers and the constituents of wild spaces? Do aesthetic tourists and aesthetic sojourners, those on day hikes, weekend hikes, and long-distance hikes really occupy the same places when they stand next to each other on any given day? The vast majority of persons who hike on the AT continue to be day hikers and section hikers, those persons for whom the trail was originally envisioned. Much of the footpath seems appropriate for such aesthetic tourists. The AT manifests itself in varied ways depending on the time one spends out in the wild and the distance one walks along the winding footpath. Though much of the 2,100 miles of trail seems to take the hiker through what is called a “green tunnel,” there are many scenic overlooks and other aesthetic wonders. Those who practice day and section hiking encounter less of the “green tunnel” and in some ways more of the inspiring aesthetic wonders. How is it that day or section hikers encounter less of the dense flora of the AT in the same way a long-distance hiker might? These short-term hikers target sections of the trail that tend to be more scenic and walk fewer miles through dense forest in between the overlooks and open country. Where day or section hikers may enter the AT near a trailhead car park and have relatively few miles of walking to reach a particular place of beauty, long-distance hikers walk all day, and sometimes into the night, for months at a time. A long-distance hiker experiences every step of the way as one who has already been immersed in the environment over a vast space and for an extended time. Whereas day and section hikers experience novelty in the environment, long-distance hikers have begun to be acquainted with the constituents of the varied environments along the way. In certain sections of the AT, long-distance hikers walk through places that in some cases are rarely experienced by short-term hikers. Whereas day and section hikers remain focused on the scenic aspect of walking on the AT, long-distance hikers begin to accommodate themselves to the journey as something distinct from a visually oriented aesthetic experience.



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Figure 2.2.  McAfee Knob, Virginia. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

In order to illustrate these two ways of experiencing the same place whereby the place itself may actually be two and not one, I will describe, from both perspectives, a hike to McAfee Knob, part of Catawba Mountain near Roanoke, Virginia. McAfee knob is one of the most photographed overlooks on the AT, a favorite rock outcrop for posing atop the overhanging cliff. See figure 2.2. The summit’s elevation, 3,197, though not the highest point in the central part of Virginia, still provides a sweeping prospect with clear views of both sunrise and sunset. It is 707 miles north of Springer Mountain and 1,477 miles south of Katahdin. Potential northbound thru-hikers will have been on the trail for a month and a half or possibly two at this point in the journey. There are three access points to McAfee Knob for day and section hikers. The most popular is the Catawba, Virginia trailhead parking lot just off of Highway 311. Located near the cities of Roanoke, Salem, and Blacksburg, as well as the campus of Virginia Tech, this access point is only 3.5 miles from the summit and attracts many aesthetic tourists. A second access at Daleville, Virginia, requires more from a day hiker as it is sixteen miles from the summit. Hikers may also gain access via a side trail at the base of Tinker Cliffs. The Andy Layne Trail, located in Troutville, Virginia, is a three-mile side trail to its intersection with the AT just below Tinker Cliffs, about ten miles north of McAfee Knob. Some will stage two cars, one at Catawba and the other at either the Daleville or Andy Layne Trail access points, making the entire hike between seventeen and twenty miles for the day. The longer hike is also more

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demanding in terms of elevation gain and loss. Over the sixteen miles from Daleville, there is an eighteen-hundred-foot elevation gain to Tinker Cliffs. The Andy Layne Trail involves a 1,945-foot elevation gain in less than four miles. From Tinker Cliffs there is a near thousand-foot drop and then gain to McAfee Knob, and a final twelve-hundred-foot drop to Catawba. Those who hike to the summit from Catawba and then return to the same location experience seven miles with one of the best views on the entire AT in the middle of their hike. The forest along this approach, which is mostly on a southwest orientation, provides a less dense walk to the summit compared with other similar hikes, especially when northern facing rhododendron thickets abound. The forest is mostly deciduous with mountain pines near the summit. Walking in late spring immerses the hiker in a sea of white as a plethora of mountain laurel are in bloom. The view from the overhanging rock is spectacular, Tinker Cliffs juts out about four miles distance across the valley. The ridgeline between McAfee Knob and Tinker Cliffs bends in an arc above the valley, the convex side of the arc faces Roanoke and the concave curves inward above the valley of Tinker Creek. Looking to the east-northeast, out over the convex arcing ridge, one can see the Peaks of Otter about forty miles in the distance. The Blue Ridge Mountains extend from the Peaks of Otter to the north. Long-distance hikers, realizing that they will be walking well beyond the horizon, may attempt to guess at which of these distant mountains may contain the footpath that will be trod upon in the next day or two. Spending the day or camping for a few days in the environment around McAfee Knob provides hikers with a limited entrance and interface with the constituents therein. The orientation will have been framed by a visual aesthetic, most likely seeking the sublime prospect on the summit. For many, the walk to the summit is at worst an inconvenience and at best a refreshing ramble and a pause from the routines of daily life. The long-distance hiker has a completely different orientation. Many thru-hikers will have never heard of McAfee Knob and walk out onto the overhang with wonderful surprise. Others, whether they have been looking forward to the view or not, will arrive at the summit when weather conditions provide no prospect. Rain, thunderstorm, and thick fog are commonly experienced occurrences, and unlike day hikers who may choose another opportunity to summit, thru-hikers will walk past the cliff and move on to the evening camp site. My own hike through this area while completing a walk from Georgia to Maine serves as an illustration of the orientation of a long-distance hike; visually enjoying the aesthetic wonder of the environment but being involved in a whole complex of relationships beyond the visual in that same environment. Two evenings before my summit of McAfee Knob, I spent the night at Niday Shelter, twenty-six miles to the south on the AT and 677 miles north of



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Springer Mountain. I rose as the sky was just starting to brighten and walked several miles prior to sunrise. I was to pick up a food resupply at the Catawba post office, which, according to the guidebook, would close at 3 p.m. I had to walk seventeen miles, climb two mountains with elevation gains of one thousand feet each, and hitch a ride to the post office before it closed. At the top of the first summit, Brush Mountain, I paused for breakfast and visited the Audie Murphy Monument. This was the place where the highly decorated WWII veteran and Hollywood actor died in an airplane crash. The monument is surrounded by cairns and tokens of honor from those who visit. The trail then descended more than one thousand feet before gaining the same again on the summit of Cove Mountain, the site of a picturesque rock outcropping known as Dragons Tooth. From this summit I could see far to the north, and, having hiked in this area many times previously, knew the mountain upon which McAfee Knob raised its head. Because the food resupply was pressing, I did not linger at Dragons Tooth, but scurried down the mountain. This is yet another distinction between the long-distance hiker and the scenic tourist. The exigence of a food resupply supplanted my desire to linger on the summit of Cove Mountain, no matter how spectacular the view, and on that day, I had a perfectly clear sky with no haze. The descent from Dragons Tooth requires much care and attention as it involves negotiating some near vertical rock slabs. This particular kind of rock scrambling is better accomplished without a large backpack threatening to use gravity’s pull to launch the hiker into the abyss. These large rock faces, which form the teeth of the dragon on the summit, have small ledges of an inch or two where one searches for foot and hand holds. In some cases, the ledges run out across the rock face, paralleling the horizontal plane at the base of the slab. See figure 2.3. As I descended across this difficult terrain, I thought about the various types of hikers who use this particular route. It seemed to me at the time that such a route is more conducive to day hiking as a lighter pack would be less precarious on such a face. In any case, the stress of the difficult terrain and the pressing matter of making it to the post office all weighed heavy as I made my way down the mountain. I was too focused on each handhold, foot-plant, and keeping my center of gravity from throwing me off the mountain to even think about scenic beauty. Finally, I reached the road crossing and hitched to the post office. After filling my pack with fresh supplies, I hitched back to the trail and continued north for another six miles. At this point in the day, my agenda had changed. Even though I had just filled my pack with food, I knew of a country restaurant, The Home Place, just about a mile and a half down Highway 311 from the trailhead parking for McAfee Knob. Here was an opportunity to eat several plates full of good, hot food. This is yet another difference between

Figure 2.3.  Descending from Dragons Tooth, Virginia. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.



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long-distance hiking and scenic tourism. The daily requirement for calories exceeds what the hiker typically carries between resupplies. Losing too much weight has been the cause for many to drop out of their hike and return home. When there is a nearby restaurant or some local person offers a home-cooked meal, the typical thru-hiker will immediately move in that direction. The Home Place manager allowed me to sleep out under the stars on the property of the restaurant, so I did not have to hike back up the highway in the dark and then search for a campsite along the AT. I was back on the trail early in the morning and hiked the 3.5 miles, gaining one thousand feet of elevation, to the summit before breaking for my first meal. I sat on the ledge, feet dangling over the rocks and enjoyed breakfast as I gazed out across the Catawba Valley and Tinker Creek below. There are relatively few such views on the AT, the vast space arcs both vertically and horizontally at more than 180 degrees. The June afternoon heat was still hours away, and a cool breeze touched the nearby trees, causing them to dance ever so slightly. The atmosphere was clean and the blue sky, unobstructed, seemed to begin at my nose and extend into infinity. The same stars I had seen the night before were hiding in all that bright blue expanse. After taking in this marvelous prospect, I hoisted my pack and walked north, leaving the rocky precipice and entering the thickly wooded forest that grew on the ridgeline. Since leaving Niday Shelter, the day before, I had only come across a couple of hikers on the trail, as well as one very large black snake stretched out across the path. Just a half-mile north of McAfee Knob, a southbound day/section hiker crossed my path and said there was a bear less than a quarter of a mile up the trail. Suddenly the environment seemed to change. Everything—trees, shrubs, rocks, and soil—came into sharp relief. I strained to listen to every sound coming from beyond the visual boundary of the forest. Not knowing whether there was a mother bear and her cub, or cubs, I continually threw my gaze as far as possible in sweeping arcs. I also slowed down; not that I wanted to be quiet—it is better to let a bear know one is occupying the same territory, but to focus more attention on detecting a living presence in the surrounding space rather than attending to the pathway. My attention was not on scenery but trying to discern a difference between the shadows on the forest floor and a large, dark animal. After a few miles of this heightened awareness, my normal pace kicked in and my usual rhythm of walking returned. Soon thereafter, I arrived at Tinker Cliffs and discovered another thru-hiker basking in the late morning sun atop the rock outcrop. His trail name was Molasses, and he looked southward, back down the curving ridge to the rocks of McAfee Knob, about five miles away. We sat together and enjoyed the view for a while, eating a little and chatting. I left to hike north before Molasses, who decided to enjoy the cliffs for a while longer.

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After descending nearly one thousand feet, the AT parallels a stream, meandering under a canopy of mature deciduous trees. For the next seven or eight miles the AT remains at an elevation of about two thousand feet, gently rising and falling a few hundred feet. A couple of miles before descending into Daleville, Virginia, the path runs between, over and beside some large boulders, the tops of which provide good views of the surrounding forest, not at all the same kind of view as is afforded from the higher summits, but pleasing. At Daleville, I discovered a Mexican restaurant just across Highway 220 from the AT crossing. It was now 5 p.m. and well above ninety degrees. I entered the airconditioned space and ordered a large dinner and cerveza. While the meal was being cooked, I used the restroom sink to clean up. Sweat and twenty miles of grime covered my body. After two hours of eating and drinking, I went back out onto the trail and again climbed more than one thousand feet to Fullhardt Knob Shelter, five miles from Daleville. The last mile required my headlamp as all but starlight held the night sky. I walked up to the shelter and found it occupied by one person, who though in his sleeping bag, was still awake. He warned me that there was a bear out there in the woods close by the shelter. I carefully hung my food in a tree and made camp for the night. As a thru-hiker, I clearly enjoyed the magnificent views and varied forest environments in this section of Virginia. So what is the difference between the aesthetic tourist and the wilderness rambler? One clear distinction that this account illustrates is that of divergent goals. The rambler’s goals are not met in the scenic highpoints. These moments of visual beauty are highly inspiring, but long-distance hikers—wilderness ramblers—must focus on moving along whether or not such sights inspire. On countless days during the hike, inclement weather will be common, and the rambler walks through all conditions. A ready aphorism on the trail prepares long-distance hikers for these conditions, “no rain, no pain, no Maine.” As equipment improves more and more, aesthetic tourists are able to acclimate to the harsh conditions and so remain on the trail. As Aldo Leopold writes concerning such tourists, “A gadget industry pads the bumps against nature-in-the-raw.”85 But the AT is still challenging enough that even with the best equipment the “bumps” persist. When rewards fail to match one’s intended goals, the long-distance wilderness ramble will be replaced by shorter treks, or a modified hike aimed at reducing the most challenging sections or conditions and enhancing a more comfortable aesthetic. One goal of any tourist is collecting experiences and memories. Leopold refers to this aesthetic tourist as a recreationist and enumerates a number of possible ends. The duck hunter brings home the kill, the birder or botanical enthusiast is said to also engage in hunting, the nature-lover/writer captures “bad verse on birchbark,” the motorist collects National Parks, and the professional conservationist gives “the nature-seeking public what it wants” or



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makes that public “want what he has to give.”86 All of these recreationists, or aesthetic tourists, share in the hunt, bring home the kill, photographs, essays, or memories and display their trophies. Leopold’s point, there is not that much distinction between hunters displaying a mounted elk head on their walls and “nature-lovers” hanging photographs on their walls: each are “symbols or tokens of achievement such as heads, hides, photographs, and specimens.”87 Leopold goes on to write: All these things rest upon the idea of trophy. The pleasure they give is, or should be, in the seeking as well as in the getting. The trophy, whether it be a bird’s egg, a mess of trout, a basket of mushrooms, the photograph of a bear, the pressed specimen of a wild flower, or a note tucked into the cairn on a mountain peak, is a certificate. It attests that its owner has been somewhere and done something— that he has exercised skill, persistence, or discrimination in the age-old feat of overcoming, outwitting, or reducing-to-possession.88

Leopold compares what seem to be divergent activities and shows they reveal common aesthetic exercises: “The duck-hunter in his blind and the operatic singer on the stage, despite the disparity of their accouterments, are doing the same thing. Each is reviving, in play, a drama formerly inherent in daily life. Both are, in the last analysis, esthetic exercises.”89 Aesthetic sojourning as opposed to touring involves a movement through liminal space. On such a liminal journey the sojourner or pilgrim’s orientation toward symbols differs from the tourist. If the rambler had a previous orientation toward such aesthetic tourism, long-distance hiking serves to reorient their gaze. Part of this reorientation rises out of frustration with the miles and miles of walking through dense wilderness without a visually framed aesthetic reward. An overlook such as McAfee Knob, if discovered on a cloudless day, becomes a brief visual aesthetic reward during this hike of endurance. If the goal were to collect such experiences, exasperation may sever the rambler’s connection to a vast portion of the trail. Two of the most scenic sections of the AT in the south are the Roan Highlands along the Tennessee–North Carolina border and the Grayson Highlands in southern Virginia. See figures 2.4 and 2.5. Most of the footpath in these two sections is above 4,500 feet and rises to a highpoint of over six thousand feet on Roan High Knob. Much of the way hikers may experience breathtaking views as the terrain consists of many balds, sometimes giving 360 degrees of scenery, extending one hundred miles. Standing on Round Bald, 5,826 feet and about 380 miles north of Springer Mountain, I have seen Mount Rogers in Virginia, which is 495 miles north of Springer Mountain. Yet, these high elevation balds are often exposed to extreme weather conditions. Hiking out across these open mountaintops during a thunderstorm can be deadly. Clouds often shroud

Figure 2.4.  Looking South from Jane Bald to Roan High Knob, Tennessee/North Carolina Border. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

Figure 2.5.  Grayson Highlands, Wild Ponies with Wilburn Ridge in the Distance, Virginia. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.



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these peaks, obscuring sight, visibility sometimes reduced to a few meters. See figure 2.6. Many hikers quit the trail after experiencing these conditions and decide that day hiking and section hiking provide better ways to enjoy the scenic wonders of the wilderness. Continuing a long-distance hike after experiencing these conditions that dampen visual scenery alters the sojourner’s perspective. Many thru-hikers would rather experience more scenic overlooks and less of the “green tunnel.” Another similar complaint voiced by thru-hikers references climbing mountains without views. These are known as PUDS, pointless ups and downs. The AT often takes the hiker up a steep mountain that is densely forested on top and then right back down again without a scenic reward. The pathway could very well have skirted the mountain and skipped the summit. This way of interpreting places along the wilderness trail underscores the objectification of an aesthetic that privileges a visual orientation and preconceptions based on what has been deemed beautiful scenery. Norman Wirzba writes: When we desire our relationship to nature to be mediated by the expectation that only places deemed pretty or spectacular are worthy of our attention, then we do witness an idolatry that condemns much of the world to neglect or even

Figure 2.6.  Clouds Interacting with the Mountains, Roan Highlands, Tennessee/North Carolina Border. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

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disparagement. What we often fail to realize is that our worship of nature’s beauty, especially our designations of certain kinds of landscapes or creatures as beautiful, is also fundamentally a reduction of the world to the expectations that we bring to it. In this reduction great stretches of the world and a multitude of its creatures are abandoned by us as unworthy and thus unlovable.90

The orientation of a scenic footpath frames the immediate surround according to a preconceived idea of landscape beauty and thereby hinders aesthetic tourists from encountering the ecological complexity of the place itself. The aesthetic tourist experiences the constituents of the ecoplace—which is the immediate geographical area surrounding the hiker and being encompassed by a larger ecoregion—as scenic backdrop or as standing in the way of picturesque beauty.91 AN AESTHETIC OF FELLOWSHIP Those wilderness hikers who find their sojourn becoming spiritual, a sacred journey, or pilgrimage open themselves to an aesthetic of fellowship distinct from the aesthetic of picturesque scenery. As noted with the example of Saint Teresa, her mystic vision involved a profound communion with the Holy Other, an aesthetic of fellowship. We saw that mystics find fellowship in a community who share in contemplating the beatific vision. Pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago find a unique communion with fellows who are also walking toward the bones of Saint James. A ramble along the AT, as noted in the previous chapter, opens hikers to fellowship with the wilderness as indicated by the invitational plaque on Springer Mountain, Georgia. Here I call into question the articulation of that invitation. Rather than fellowship with wilderness, which would be fellowship with an idea, a better articulation would be fellowship within the varied ecoplaces that constitute wilderness, a mutual inhabiting. Roderick Nash writes, “There is no specific material object that is wilderness. The term designates a quality (as the ‘-ness’ suggests) that produces a certain mood or feeling in a given individual and, as a consequence, may be assigned by that person to a specific place.”92 Wilderness as alluded to by the invitational plaque is too abstract, but those persons who read the invitation, for the most part, only know wilderness conceptually. They have not yet entered into a mutual inhabiting, have not actively moved through the varied ecoplaces. Merleau-Ponty writes that “movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and time, it actively assumes them, takes them up in their basic significance.”93 As hikers move through these ecoplaces along the way, they as body-subjects actively share in a meeting of other body-subjects, inhabiting together the vast wild space. Merleau-Ponty



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writes, “We must therefore avoid saying that our body is in space, or in time. It inhabits space and time.”94 Wilderness, as a quality, manifests through the concrete constituents encountered along the way. In the happening of this aesthetic of fellowship, a co-inhabiting, hikers encounter a wider community, extending to geological features, flora, and fauna. The aesthetic of scenery, in contrast, places the hiker at the center of a visual field. The aesthetic of fellowship moves the center beyond the self. Martin Buber’s articulation of the distinction between experience and encounter shows the contrast between the aesthetics of scenery and that of fellowship. Experience is centered in the self, whereas encounter occurs in the meeting of those who share in the happening.95 As noted in the previous chapter, koinōnia, means “to share with someone in something which he has.”96 I pointed out that koinōnia is a happening of mystical participation. Through this participation there is a special kind of “knowing,” what Levinas refers to as “the hidden side of a meaning other than knowledge.”97 He writes, In starting with sensibility interpreted not as a knowing but as proximity, in seeking in language contact and sensibility, behind the circulation of information it becomes, we have endeavoured to describe subjectivity as irreducible to consciousness and thematization. Proximity appears as the relationship with the other, who cannot be resolved into “images” or be exposed to a theme.98

This hidden side of meaning is a profound sharing preceding the “articulation of information it becomes.” In an essay interacting with Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel, Levinas points out that Buber and Marcel challenge “the claim of the intellectual act of knowledge” as “the spiritual primacy of intellectual objectivism.”99 Buber and Marcel join others in “the search for an ecstatic fullness of existence as a whole and for a presence that, in the objectivity of things-to-be-known, becomes limited and distorted.”100 This mystical participation, a knowing other than the intellectual act of knowledge, happens beyond the self as center, outside of experience, “the ‘ekstasis’ around which concrete human plenitude gathers is not the thematizing intentionality of experience, but the addressing of the other, a person-to-person relation, culminating in the pronoun ‘thou.’”101 Levinas notes that Marcel refers to this as meeting and Buber as relation. In each case, they break away from “an ontology of the object and of substance” and “characterize the I-Thou relation in terms of being. ‘Between’ is a mode of being: co-presence, co-esse.”102 This is not some romantic feeling of harmony, a collective vibe of convergence into oneness, but a profound koinōnia wherein two or more body-subjects participate in a kind of dialogue. Though koinōnia is a happening of mystical participation, those who share in the encounter do not merge together. Buber describes two forms of

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mysticism wherein the self and the other, or Holy Other, either merge or the self realizes the divine oneness of itself.103 Buber writes, “Both annul relationship—the first, as it were, dynamically, as the I is swallowed by the You, which now ceases to be a You and becomes the only being; the second, as it were, statically, as the I is freed, becomes a self, and recognizes itself as the only being.”104 He goes on to describe the phenomenology of this feeling of unity writing, “What the ecstatic calls unification is the rapturous dynamics of the relationship; not a unity that has come into being at this moment in world time, fusing I and You, but the dynamics of the relationship itself.”105 In the happening of the relationship, while it is unfolding, it “cannot be spoken about, I can say in my language, as all can say in theirs: You. For the sake of this there are I and You, there is dialogue, there is language, and spirit whose primal deed language is.”106 It is afterward, in reflecting on the profound fellowship, that through description a person attempts to articulate the relationship. But description might easily slip into thematizing, whereby the one describing encompasses the other in an “ontology of object and subject.” In this light, I will attempt to carefully describe a few instances of wilderness koinōnia as the relationship unfolded, showing dialogue happening in the meeting. In each instance, the I and You remain distinct, their voices preserved. I recognize an aporia here, that I am describing the happening and thereby giving voice to another, seemingly eliminating the voice of the other. However, I will carefully attend the description so as to reduce my own projection and allow the other to give itself from itself. All three examples arise out of encounters occurring on the AT between me, a doe, and her fawn. In each instance, we were three body-subjects in the wilderness. The first example took place in the Grayson Highlands of Virginia. The AT winds its way to within about a half-mile of Mount Rogers, Virginia’s highest peak at 5,729 feet. It then crosses Rhododendron Gap and follows Wilburn Ridge, descending into Grayson Highland State Park. From here, there is a blue blaze side trail leading down to Massie Gap, where another scenic loop leads to Cabin Creek. The creek runs between Wilburn Ridge and Cabin Ridge and originates up in Rhododendron Gap. I often take my students on these side trails after establishing a camp up in Rhododendron Gap. We follow the Cabin Creek Trail up and interact with the many waterfalls along the creek. The trail loops back to Massie Gap, but I take the students further up the creek, leaving the trail and walking in the cascading water, climbing over the rocks. The rhododendron becomes more and more dense as elevation is gained. Eventually we climb through the tangled branches while wading in the shrinking stream until the undergrowth becomes impenetrable. We then climb



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the slope on either side of the creek, up Wilburn or Cabin Ridge, and eventually complete the bushwhacking adventure at our campsite. One year, we left the tangle of the rhododendron and entered a large stand of young fir trees, which had grown about head high. Climbing the steep slope up to Wilburn Ridge was made more challenging by the thicket of firs. We had to push through the dense boughs that continually blocked our progress. I steered toward stands of more mature trees trying to escape the thickets. At some point in the climb, it began to rain, a little more than a mist but not yet a shower. As we pushed through the forest, the wet trees soaked us more than the rain. Looking ahead I noticed a clear area in the canopy. The sky appeared in the gap between the high tree branches. Under this gap, I discovered a small meadow, spring grasses almost knee high, and ascended through the opening, which was about sixty meters long and thirty meters wide. I had taken about twenty steps up through the grass, closely followed by a line of my students, when in my periphery a movement captured my attention. I turned to the left and saw a doe just a few meters into the forest at the edge of the meadow. She was standing there flicking her white tail. Her appearance and gesturing unsettled me, left me perplexed yet without a thought. I continued for a few more paces, all the while looking at her looking at me. My bewilderment gave way to a thought, “she wants me to see her.” I wondered why? I paused and pointed her out to the students. Just then, the person closest to me got my attention and pointed to the ground. I had just stepped over a newly born fawn. The doe had already cleaned the little one, but it was nestled down in the grass, fur wetted with the heavy mist, and slightly shaking. The class quickly gathered round the fawn and for about a minute we silently gazed at this wonder. We then continued up the slope, a hush falling over the group. Later we chatted about what took place. That doe had been trying to draw our attention before we reached her fawn. She was signaling, gesturing with her tail, for us to follow her. She did not leave the spot after we saw her and stopped but continued to gesture as we encircled the fawn. She was giving herself to us. That is, she was making herself manifest in the loudest possible way. This was no gesture of friendship. A translation of the gesture might go like this, “Here I am. This way. Look at me.” She was not seeking approval as a child might in calling out to her mother, “Look at me.” She simply wanted attention, demanded our attention. The little one never really moved. It lay there, curled up in the grass as if invisible, another gesture of giving itself, wrapping itself in invisibility. I was reminded of my own childhood, when I lay frightened in bed and drew the covers over my head, feeling safe from monsters. I was proclaiming to the monsters, “I am not here!” Was this the meaning of the fawn’s stillness and

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bodily position in the grass? Afterall, the body gesture was a form of proclamation. Even as the light rain fell, the fawn did not move. The next example took place while I was hiking north through the Shenandoah National Park in the context of a thru-hike. I came around a bend in the trail and saw a doe and her fawn about ten or fifteen meters ahead and standing on the trail. The doe saw me. Our eyes met, and she immediately bounded into the forest, disappearing in the thick vegetation. My gaze followed her until she was out of sight. I then looked back to the trail, and there stood the fawn in the same place. I stood still, not wanting to intrude, though already having failed. Before I could form a plan of action, the fawn started to move. It could hardly walk, wobbling and shaking, making toward me. I looked into its eyes and could not find reciprocity. It seemed as though the fawn could not focus, did not recognize what stood before it. Its face protruded forward, pointing toward me, probing the space between us. As it drew closer the face seemed to say, “I see something; what is it?” It came within a meter and stopped. I could have reached out and touched it. The head, face, and eyes continued to probe me. After a long fifteen or twenty seconds, it sounded out a bleat. Its voice penetrated the atmosphere and resonated with the forest. Levinas writes, “The Other becomes my neighbor precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question.”107 This little fawn called me into question, summoned me to respond. I decided to answer. I needed to find a way out of this dilemma, me holding hostage this infant, putting its life in danger. I said, “I am not your mother.” I was not shirking my responsibility. Rather, I proclaimed it, “You belong to another. I am an intruder, a potential threat.” As my voice resounded, the fawn’s body jerked back just a fraction, seeming evidence that it was startled. But it did not move off the trail, not even to attempt a wobbly step. Instead, it peered more intensely at me, moved its face just a little closer, and examined me. Then, in an instant, it dropped its head closer to the ground and shakily walked off the trail and into the vegetation. It only walked a few meters and then stopped. I decided that this was my que to exit the scene, to respond appropriately, and continued north on the trail. I felt a profound connection to both the doe and fawn. The doe’s gestures of communication kept me at a distance. She left her fawn in my presence, but not as some gift of friendship. Her action indicated fear. Only about five miles earlier, I had come across the hind quarter of a fawn, ripped from the body and laying in the middle of the trail. I am sure it was the work of a bear. Unlike the doe in the Grayson Highlands, this mother immediately abandoned her fawn. I don’t judge the doe with the word “abandoned.” This was merely her proclamation, fleeing into the forest with all haste. In the last example, I was about ten miles north of Pearisburg, Virginia, where the AT crosses the New River. Hikers climb from the New River at 1,600



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feet in elevation to a ridgeline along the Virginia, West Virginia border, a little over 3,400 feet. The second day out of Pearisburg, I was alone around 7 a.m. and climbing a shallow pitched rise, still on the ridgetop. The forest was mature, but the trees and brush were not as thick as the growth below in the lower elevations. I could see fifty or seventy meters up the trail. Walking at a good pace, the elevation gain not taxing, I spied a doe and fawn ahead, walking in the same direction, north. They were about fifty meters away. I slowed my pace so as to respect their space. I felt as though the distance between us did not pose a threat, so I matched their speed, less than a mile an hour. I thought the doe would take the fawn off trail as soon as she became aware of my presence. For a couple of minutes, I enjoyed following from a distance and attending the relationship between mother and baby, engaged in their own dialogue. I figured the fawn was days old as it walked easily behind the doe. At some point the doe looked back and saw me. She stopped, and I responded by halting and standing still. We looked at each other for maybe half a minute. In this way, we were giving ourselves to one another, a gesturing of stillness and silence. She then began walking north again but did not change her speed. She remained on the trail, and I followed, maintaining the same distance. She continued to pause, turn her head toward me, look at me, and then turn back to the trail and walk. We walked together like this for twenty or thirty minutes. So long, that I wondered if she would ever let me pass. But this was her place, not mine, and I respected her hospitality. We had been engaged in a walking dialogue. Finally, she stepped off the trail, walked about ten meters into the forest, stopped, and again faced me. She allowed me into her life, gave me permission to be here in her place. I slowly walked by, meeting her gaze, admiring mother and child. Her body gesture indicated no fear. She placed her fawn between herself and me. If she were human, I would have thought she wanted me to admire her beautiful child. Is that what this doe was communicating? See figure 2.7. I have had similar encounters in other wilderness contexts. The ocean is a vast wilderness, and I have enjoyed surfing its waves for most of my life. On one occasion, in the breakers off the northern county of San Diego, I was alone in the early morning. I had been in the water for about an hour and was sitting on my board, looking out to sea, watching for a forming set. Off to my right, about thirty meters away, a dolphin broke the surface and was swimming in my direction. She then continued in a dive and disappeared below the water. I have surfed among dolphins and seals, sharing the same wave at times, so her presence was not unusual. She then surfaced just next to me, but now I saw that she was with her calf. She positioned herself so that the calf was between us, only a meter away, so close I could have touched it. They both paused there. The mother’s face was partially out of the water, and

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Figure 2.7.  Doe and Fawn Stepping Off the Trail Near Peters Mountain, Virginia. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

I looked in the eye on her left side. She seemed to look at me and then back at her calf. The two remained there for almost a minute. As with the doe who shared her fawn with me, this mother seemed to be allowing me to wait in their presence to find koinōnia with them in the wilderness. Not that the others in their fear did not also share. All were distinct encounters of koinōnia. Marion’s contrasting of the idol and icon shows another way to distinguish between the aesthetics of scenic tourism and an aesthetic of fellowship in wilderness. He writes, “the idol and the icon are distinguishable . . . inasmuch as each makes use of its visibility in its own way.”108 The one gazing at the idol frames the scene, becomes the one making the experience. The Claude Glass, carried by aesthetic tourists in Europe during the rise of landscape tourism in the eighteenth century and named for Claude Lorrain the French artist, illustrates a human imposed frame. The Claude Glass allows the scenic tourist to isolate prospects and create landscapes while walking through the countryside. The countryside itself, or wilderness in the case of the AT, lays buried beneath a conception, under the sediment of objectification. Marion continues, “The idol thus acts as a mirror, not as a portrait: a mirror that reflects the gaze’s image, or more exactly, the image of its aim and of the scope of that aim.”109 No meeting happens between an idol and the persons gazing. Persons merely gaze back upon themselves gazing. That is, their vision is limited to their own conception, never penetrating or being penetrated. What



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they see may be taken for wilderness but is actually their own projection, their conception of a wild landscape. The icon, writes Marion, “summons sight in letting the visible . . . be saturated with the invisible.”110 The doe and fawn, as body-subjects in the wilderness, remain invisible until they provoke a vision. I could frame them as idols, compose a scene wherein they appear as I conceive them. But in this they would appear as objects of scenic beauty not body-subjects inhabiting a place in the wild, provoking a vision. Marion writes, “The icon does not result from a vision but provokes one.”111 Distinct from the idol being passive, formed as the image of the gaze, the active gaze of the one who encompasses and conceives, the icon is active, provoking a vision. Each doe and fawn were active, saturating the visible with the invisible. It is the icon who gazes at our gazes, rendering our vision passive, wherein we receive the one who saturates us with meaning. Marion writes, “in a nearly perfect inversion: the gaze no longer belongs here to the man who aims . . . such a gaze belongs to the icon itself, where the invisible only become visible intentionally, hence its aim.”112 Levinas describes this interplay between the one who gazes at their own conception and the inversion. The inversion “cannot be defined in terms of intentionality,” wherein “the given enters into a thought which recognizes in it or invests it with its own project, and thus exercises mastery over it.”113 The inversion is a subjectivity prior to the play of consciousness, prior to selfconsciousness. The icon reveals itself as a subjectivity inconceivable, choosing to show itself as it saturates the visible with its own invisibility. This is the hidden side of meaning other than knowledge, the meaning of wilderness as a quality. The wild creature, a constituent of the wilderness, appears in an inversion of intentionality. Levinas writes, “The face of the other in proximity, which is more than representation, is an unrepresentable trace, the way of the infinite.”114 Creatures inhabiting the wilderness open themselves to fellowship on their own terms, reveal themselves not as domesticated animals nor as objects of aesthetic appreciation. We who receive their gazes find ourselves the intended ones. Most often, we enter their space, we intrude, and prior to any aesthetic of fellowship we must surrender our mastery. As English aestheticians established a rhetoric of landscape, and Jose Ortega y Gasset revealed the countryside as uniquely distinct from the landscape, Aldo Leopold opened us to ecology, the interrelationships between the various constituents of a particular environment. Leopold describes an encounter in a particular ecoplace, an example of iconic inversion that resulted in his having a revelation of the interrelationships between the constituents of an ecoregion through the imagined “thinking” of a mountain. This spiritual account of ecology was written in a short essay titled “Thinking Like a Mountain” and part of his book A Sand County Almanac.115 Here Leopold,

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who has a scientific rather than a humanistic leaning, describes a spiritual awakening, a point in his life when the interrelations of the ecosystem became real. The awakening does not happen in a laboratory or in a classroom but out in “rimrock” country in America’s Southwest. After shooting a wolf and seeing her life end, the “fierce green fire dying in her eyes,” he suddenly understands the ecosystem from the mountain’s point of view.116 The generalized environment in this location, “rimrock” country, becomes an ecoplace, the abstraction characterized by a description such as “environment” is made concrete in the interrelationship of particular constituents on the slopes of this mountain. Leopold encounters the constituents of this ecoplace through an intersubjective dialogue. Leopold has shared a poetic and spiritual vision of the interrelationships between the constituents of an environmental milieu. Some Appalachian Trail hikers are opened to such spiritual and poetic encounters. AESTHETIC OF SOLITUDE In addition to an aesthetic of fellowship, distinct from landscape aesthetics, wilderness sojourners open themselves to an aesthetic of solitude. Given the wilderness environment along the AT, its thickly wooded mountain terrain, hikers may experience solitude even during the busiest hiking seasons. Long-distance hikers often discover that after several hours of walking alone, no other soul having been heard or seen, another person has been several hundred meters ahead or behind. After arriving at a shelter and preparing a meal, this other hiker walks up, and a conversation reveals they were in close proximity during the morning or afternoon. In more open country, such as the Rocky Mountains or the deserts of America’s southwest, hikers see each other hundreds of meters away, leading to a feeling of being in the company of others walking the trail. Another contrast to the perceived solitude while hiking the AT is the Camino de Santiago. Crowds of pilgrims throng the French route of the Camino during summer months, reducing the possibilities for solitude. Though the opportunity for solitude is widely available on the AT, many hikers prefer to walk in groups, reducing their experience of solitude. Those who choose solitude open themselves to a unique aesthetic. In this section of the chapter, I will describe the aesthetic of solitude as it manifests on the AT. The fruits of this solitude will be explored in chapter six. Wilderness environments, from barren deserts to dense woodland, from wind swept islands to the open ocean have provided space for religious hermits to find solitude. The term hermit itself is steeped in meaning that indicates solitary places. Hermit comes from the Latin erēmīta, drawn from the Greek erēmitēs, the one who is of the desert. The Greek term erēmos



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means an empty place, without inhabitants, and is sometimes translated as wilderness or desert.117 Jesus begins his ministry in such a place, staying there for forty days of fasting after being consecrated by John the Baptist.118 Throughout the Gospel accounts he seeks places of solitude in the context of prayer and taking his disciples away from the crowds. In places of solitude “nothing separates Him from God.”119 Jesus goes to these empty places when “He wants to escape the crowds or when He tries to find a place of quiet for His disciples.”120 “He said to them, ‘Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.’ For many were coming and going and they had no leisure even to eat. And they went away in the boat to a deserted place by themselves.”121 Several passages indicate Jesus going up to a mountain to pray, the mountain being a place removed from crowds.122 The story of the transfiguration involves taking Peter, James, and John up to a “high mountain apart by themselves.”123 These biblical passages reveal something more to solitude than giving someone time to be alone. In some of the passages Jesus is not with other human beings but seeks the presence of God. In these places of solitude, whatever separated Jesus from God is eliminated. In other passages Jesus is with his disciples, and they find solitude together as a community. They need to escape the crowds, even though those same crowds are part of the ministry. In the buzz of the crowd, they cannot find leisure. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Professor Faber teaches Montag the art of reading, pointing out the necessity of leisure. Montag thinks he has plenty of leisure and gives the example of “off hours.” To which Faber cautions of the erosion of leisure in so many of the pursuits of “off hours.” “Driving a hundred miles an hour” and arguing “with the four-wall televisor” gives one no time to think. Faber says, “It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense.’”124 Books, on the other hand, require true leisure, that is, proper reading involves time to think, meditate, reason. Jesus and his disciples seek quiet places where rest is possible. In this context, rest from the frenetic pace of being in and ministering to the crowd. In solitude one has both the time and space for prayer, waiting, and listening. An aesthetic of solitude arises, not necessarily with being alone, but through a practice of leisure, quiet, rest, and waiting, all of which might happen in the company of others. Embracing an attitude of true leisure, quieting the distractions life throws, making rest real, and learning to wait, are some practices of a pilgrimage askesis. The interplay of pilgrimage askesis, spatial wilderness environments, walking distance, and the time hikers sustain their journey works together as solitude unfolds. Each of these in and of themselves may not give rise to solitude. The wilderness environment along the AT varies greatly. Day hikers access wilderness from car parks found along the entire 2,100 miles.

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But their sustained time therein and distance walking will not bring about the same quality of solitude as is open to the long-distance hiker. Time and distance in and of themselves will not suffice to ensure the kind of solitude a long-distance hike affords. One might immerse themselves in the wilderness for weeks but fail to still the buzz of life’s exigencies, the urgent press of perceived tasks, the demands of family and friends that weigh heavy. Pilgrimage askesis, practiced over time and distance while journeying through the wilderness of the AT, orients hikers to a unique quality of solitude. The Turners write in relation to pilgrimage askesis, “the weariness of the body is submitted to hard, voluntary discipline, loosening the bonds of matter to liberate the spirit.”125 In addition to bodily discipline, solitude requires a discipline of the will. Choices allow stillness to pervade one’s soul: choosing not to listen to soothing or motivating music but press deeper into whatever situation brings about the desire for that music; choosing to stay on the trail rather than walk a half-mile to a convenience store for food when one’s pack still has a good supply; choosing to walk in silence, even though such may seem awkward when walking with companions; choosing a camping beyond the one others have chosen; choosing not to use one’s cell phone for conversation, texting, or social media updates. Making these choices conditions hikers, opens them to a unique aesthetic of solitude. Pilgrimage askesis has similarities to some monastic practices. Exemplary, the Desert Fathers and Mothers—Abbas and Ammas—were some of the first Christians to practice flight from civilization in pursuit of salvation. Thomas Merton writes, “They were the first Christian hermits, who abandoned the cities of the pagan world to live in solitude.”126 Merton notes that their departure from civilization was neither negative nor individualistic. “They were men who did not believe in letting themselves be passively guided and ruled by a decadent state, and who believed that there was a way of getting along without slavish dependence on accepted, conventional values.”127 The same can be said of those who choose a long-distance hike on the AT. Society, whether decadent or not, has little to do with a hiker’s motivation for thru-hiking. In many cases, family and friends think such an endeavor has little value. These acquaintances that long-distance hikers hear from when announcing their desire to walk the entire length of the AT sometimes ask, “How are you being a productive person when you spend four or five months in the wilderness?” Neither the Desert Fathers and Mothers nor long-distance hikers are rejecting society in a way that places themselves above everyone else. The Desert Fathers and Mothers neither wanted others to impose their will on the community, nor did the Abbas and Ammas desire to rule over anyone. An aphorism on the AT announces, “Hike your own hike.” Merton writes, “The society they sought was one where all men were truly equal, where the



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only authority under God was the charismatic authority of wisdom, experience and love.”128 Creating and maintaining such a community requires great discipline, practices that attune each person to humility. Each member “could not dare risk attachment to his own ego, or the dangerous ecstasy of self-will. He could not retain the slightest identification with his superficial, transient, self-constructed self.”129 All of this meant practicing a discipline of solitude in the context of community. In pursuing community, the Desert monks’ practice of solitude involved silence, humility, prayer, labor, hospitality, and love. Merton writes, “Charity and hospitality were matters of top priority, and took precedence over fasting and personal ascetic routines.”130 In this context love meant “an interior and spiritual identification with one’s brother so that he is not regarded as an ‘object’ to ‘which’ one ‘does good.’”131 Practicing these virtues was not done as a means to some end, which only builds up the self at the expense of others. These virtues truly require discipline, for loving the other places the other above self-seeking. Merton writes, “Love demands a complete inner transformation—for without this we cannot possibly come to identify ourselves with our brother.”132 As pointed out in the previous section, Lane writes, “As strange as it sounds, given the austere, threatening quality of the monks’ life in the wilderness, what the desert finally taught them was love.”133 A few sayings of the Desert Fathers show this practice. Abbot Anthony said, “Have no confidence in your own virtuousness. Do not worry about a thing once it has been done. Control your tongue and your belly.”134 “Fasting has its reward, but he who eats out of charity fulfils two commandments, for he sets aside his own will, and he refreshes his hungry brethren.”135 Abbot Ammonas came to another elder sitting in his cell, working and wearing a hairshirt. Abbot Ammonas said, “That thing won’t do you a bit of good.” At this point the elder confessed three troubling thoughts: the desire to withdraw further into the wilderness, to seek a foreign place where he would not be known, and to wall himself “into this cell and see no one and eat only every second day.” On hearing these thoughts, Abbot Ammonas said, “None of these three will do you a bit of good. But rather sit in your cell, and eat a little every day, and have always in your heart the words which are read in the Gospel and were said by the Publican, and thus you can be saved.”136 Abbot Anthony gave similar instruction concerning the solitude of the monk’s cell, “Just as fish die if they remain on dry land so monks, remaining away from their cells, or dwelling with men of the world, lose their determination to persevere in solitary prayer.”137 Many long-distance hikers who exit the trail for resupply and a night at some hostel or hotel, find it difficult to return to the discipline of the hike. Sometimes trail towns are known as vortexes, sucking hikers in and not letting them go. I have interviewed many who without in-

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tending, stayed in town too long, spending much more money than budgeted, because in living this way they lost their determination to persevere. Abbot Anthony continues, “Apply yourself to silence, have no vain thoughts, and be intent in your meditation, whether you sit at prayer, or whether you rise up to work in the fear of God.”138 “Abbot Pastor said: Any trial whatever that comes to you can be conquered by silence.”139 Abbot Pambo, when asked to offer words of edification to the Bishop, replied, “If he is not edified by my silence, there is no hope that he will be edified by my words.”140 Saint Julian of Norwich offers another example of this askesis. Her written account also illustrates the aesthetic of solitude. She became an anchoress at St. Julian’s church after receiving “visions during a serious illness when she was thirty and a half years old, in May 1373.”141 Her discipline of solitude, living in the small cell attached to St. Julian’s Church in Norwich, gifted the world with a literary account of her encounter in book form, expressive of her experience of divine love. Her beautiful words reveal an aesthetic of solitude. Marion Glasscoe writes that Julian’s experience of the revelation of love involves “a special and direct knowledge of love, divine in origin but human in response.”142 Glasscoe also writes that it was a “direct experience of God in the soul.”143 This direct experience is described as “an indivisible unity which bridges the gap between God and man and gives a certainty of purpose to the failures and contradictions in human experience.”144 The mystical experience of the direct presence of God, a union of transformation, also involves a seeming paradox between knowledge and the articulation of that knowledge. Recall from chapter one Lewis’ claim that it is reality rather than truth that flows into us from the myth.145 Lewis points to the paradox between knowing and experiencing reality. He writes, “the only realities we experience are concrete.”146 While we experience the particular pain, pleasure, person, or find ourselves loving the one who is present, we are “not intellectually apprehending,” and when we do begin to apprehend, to “know” in that way, “the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples.”147 Lewis points to myth as a “partial solution to the “tragic dilemma” of this gap between knowing and experiencing.148 Saint Julian’s description does not take the recognized form of myth, yet her writing can be interpreted from a mythopoeic perspective. Glasscoe writes in reference to Julian bridging the gap between intellectually knowing and describing a concrete experience mythopoetically, “It is just this gap between knowing and expressing that Julian tries to close.”149 In closing the gap, Saint Julian uses language as an artist rather than a theologian. In contrast to the theologian or philosopher, the artist gives an account that preserves the aesthetic dimension of the experience; or, as Lewis articulated, lets reality flow into us. Rather than explain, Saint Julian expresses the experience poetically. Glasscoe writes



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that Julian “uses language with the quickening power of the artist through whom human experience is both interpreted and shared.”150 With this poetic use of language, Saint Julian approaches “directly that which is recognized as essentially ineffable.”151 Lane points to her poetic evocation of imagery.152 In addition to word pictures, poetry evokes power through the rhythm and melody of voice, an example of embodied spirituality. In this regard, Leeuw writes, “under rhythmic constraint, words exert a force.”153 He continues, “the beauty of words does not reside in their meaning, but in their rhythm, in their meter.”154 Saint Julian also creates with her words, opens the reader to new meaning. Leeuw writes: The poet is, in the strict sense, a mythologist, a creator of words. The word which he creates is an image, a living image. He does not use the jargon which we commonly call “everyday language.” He does not speak in “concepts” or “abstractions.” All of those are ways of stunting the language of poets, the living language.155

Where the theologian and philosopher interact with sedimented language to explain, the poet reveals truth through innovative linguistic composition. As noted in the previous chapter, Grassi writes, “from Plato on, in the Western world, rational language became preeminent for determining beings and thus reality. Each word, in consequence of its rational definitions, aims at “fixing,” out of space and time, the meaning of a being.”156 Poetry, on the other hand, “unveils originally the calls of the Being that emerge within the various existential situations.”157 Matthew Arnold said: ‘Poetry is nothing less than the most perfect speech of man, in which he comes nearest to being able to utter the truth.”158 Saint Julian, from the solitude of her cell, receives a direct revelation from God and communicates it through her art rather than setting forth a theological treatise. Leeuw writes, “To express the holy by means of the human is certainly the most difficult and the most amazing problem which religious art has to master.”159 Rudolph Otto writes, “Both imaginative ‘myth,’ when developed into a system, and intellectualist Scholasticism, when worked out to its completion, are methods by which the fundamental fact of religious experience is, as it were, simply rolled out so thin and flat as to be finally eliminated altogether.”160 Saint Julian’s poetic expression frees readers, does not subject them to rational constructions, and thereby they discover an encounter. Saint Julian’s written account retains an aesthetic dimension that Otto references as “creature-consciousness or creature-feeling.” “It is emotion of a creature, submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.”161 But, at the same time, the experience of Saint Julian’s nothingness is joined with resting in God’s

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love for the creature. She writes, “He is our clotheing that for love wrappith us . . . and all beclosyth us for tender love, that hee may never leave us.”162 She has a vision of a small hazelnut in her palm, and even though it is so small it is said to last for ‘God loveth it.’”163 She poetically describes the play of the creature’s nothingness and God’s love for that creature using variations of the word nothing: naught, which poetically connotes knot. She writes, “there is right nowte that is made betwixt my God and me.” And “that no soule is restid till it is nowted of all things that is made. Whan he is willfully nowtid, for love to have him that is all, then is he abyl to receive ghostly rest.”164 Lane points out that “in the playfulness of language that came to characterize her subsequent work, she made use of punning word-knots to describe this knowing, noughting, nothing, no thing, this coming to naught in which she found her greatest joy. She understood it as a sharing in the emptiness (the nawtedness) of Jesus.”165 Julian’s unique contribution illuminates the experience of love coupled with “creature-consciousness.” The solitude practiced by the Desert Fathers and Mothers as well as Saint Julian involves leisure, quiet, rest, and waiting, to note a few important aspects. Leisure has already been outlined, a stepping outside the seemingly urgent requirements life throws at us to focus full attention on the present: for example, with those in whose presence we find ourselves; or, in reading, praying, meditating, or contemplating. As Bradbury’s character Professor Faber points out, true leisure requires more than free time. Quiet also needs to be coupled with that freedom. We have all experienced the rush of thoughts demanding attention, seemingly loud enough to interfere with sound. In the din of those thoughts, we are unable to listen to bird song on a spring morning. Even the cacophonous call of the crow goes unnoticed. Quieting these thoughts requires time, a distancing from their buzzing origination. As they become fainter, we become open to voices much softer, to stillness and silence. We rest, pausing the pull of requirements, finding an alternative voice rising from within. Elijah the prophet retreated into the wilderness after a confrontation with King Ahab. While seeking solitude on Mount Horeb God spoke to Elijah, not in the earth splitting wind, nor the earthquake, nor the fire, but in the “sound of sheer silence.”166 If Elijah had not retreated to the wilderness, finding quiet, rest, and then waiting, would he have heard the voice of God in the sheer silence? Waiting in solitude differs from the waiting that takes place in the marketplace, where standing in the queue at the bank, post office, grocery store, or sitting at the gate in the terminal involves a tangible reward in a relative fixed time frame. Waiting in the context of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, Saint Julian, or a long-distance hike on the AT involves stillness—that is, stilling the soul—opening the self to another’s presence beyond any agenda



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the self would impose. When Jesus and his disciples entered the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his crucifixion, he took Peter, James, and John apart and asked them to “remain here and watch with me” (meinate hōde kai grēgoreite met’ emou) as he was very sorrowful.167 Jesus himself is waiting in prayer in the face of his own imminent death. He asks Peter, James, and John to be there with him, to sit with him in prayer, no agenda, no real projected answer to come. The disciples failed in their practice of this aesthetic of solitude. So it is in the marketplace of our present reality, we have lost what it means to wait. Walking in solitude on the AT cultivates this waiting. An example from a trail register at Kincora Hostel, dated August 10, 2003, illustrates something of this waiting in relation to long-distance hiking, “The past five days has been my first experience with the AT. It is my new home. All my life I have waited to feel completely fulfilled and at peace and now I do. All I know now is that if I die tonight, I’ll die a happy man. I’m not sure who to thank for this wonderful dream, so may I thank all life that inhabits this earth. Thank You!”168 What does it mean to wait one’s entire life for something? Not all waiting leads to the feeling of fulfillment, as indicated by the trail register entry. Sometimes solitude brings about a purging. Waiting in solitude is a watching over our soul as character flaws are purged in the “furnace of Babylon.”169 William Harmless writes, “Life in the cell could be excruciating, a place of loneliness, temptation, boredom.”170 It becomes a fiery furnace, “The temptation was always to leave, to flee the testing and to lose sight that it is precisely in the ‘furnace’ of the cell that one sees the Son of God.”171 This is the furnace experienced by early Christian monastics in their solitary cells and continues in Greek monasteries today. The same furnace purges the soul during the solitude and ordeal of long-distance hikes, especially in the wilderness. The temptation, mentioned earlier, is to relieve the loneliness or boredom with distractions such as music players, phone calls, social media, even immersing oneself in the company of others while feeling the fire. I have often been amazed at how many long-distance hikers smoke cigarettes. Many who did not smoke prior to the journey, pick up smoking during their hike. It seems incongruous to me that someone would take up such an unhealthy practice while hiking in the wilderness. Hiking is such a healthy endeavor, why start smoking when the mountain air is cleaning one’s lungs? I have asked the question often. One answer is repeated, “Smoking relieves the boredom out here.” Cigarettes are yet another strategy to overcome the fiery furnace of solitude. Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane sweats great drops of blood.172 Jacob upon returning to reunite with his brother Esau, remains alone in the wilderness and wrestles all night long with “a man.” After the ordeal, the man says, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” Jacob, in answering says,

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“For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.”173 Jacob did not turn away from the fiery furnace and found himself in the presence of God. One example of my own experience of this purging solitude, though no epiphany followed, happened in central Virginia. After picking up a resupply at the post office in Glasgow, Virginia, I hitched back out to the trail, about five miles east of town. I was dropped where the trail crosses US 501, and hiked about two miles, coming to Johns Hollow Shelter, where there was a nearby stream. Earlier in the morning, I had crossed the James River over the longest footbridge on the AT, about 775 miles north of Springer Mountain, Georgia, and 1,400 miles south of Mount Katahdin, Maine. I walked less than three miles from Matts Creek Shelter, across the James River and to US 501 before hitching to Glasgow. Now that the resupply was complete, I was back on the trail in the late afternoon, at 5 p.m. At this point, I had only hiked a total of five miles for the entire day. Long-distance hikers refer to such mileage as a “nero,” meaning almost zero. It was June 7. The sun was still high in the sky and would not set till about 8:40 p.m., plenty of time for more miles. But a deep depression fell over me. Nothing warranted this bout of depression: no injury, reception of bad news from home, no clear trigger. The days before had been good, and nothing in the future weighed upon me. If I were with a companion, I might have relieved the feeling through conversation. I wrote in my journal, “I wanted to go home.” If I had pulled out my music player, the soothing tunes might have served as a respite. I retreated to the stream, entered the shallow, rapidly rushing water, and sat down. The cool water swirled around me, rising to just above waist level. I began splashing water into my face, using my cupped hands as pitchers, dowsing my head. I called out, “what is wrong?” Tears began to flow and mingled with the water running down my face. I prayed and cried for maybe half an hour. I then rose from the stream, repacked my bag, and started hiking up the mountain. Here the trail tracks west till reaching the ridgeline, about three miles and nearly two thousand feet in elevation gain. The sun was streaming through the trees, its rays striking my face as it dropped to the horizon. The ridgeline shifted in direction, north, and the sun inched closer to the mountains in the west, off to my left. I made it to Saltlog Gap, another two miles, where there was a side trail to a spring and an old campsite that had not been used this season. Someone had written a note on the sign, “no water at the spring.” That would mean no water for three more miles and a climb of six hundred feet in the middle of the mileage. I decided to camp and make my water last till the next day. Water is a continual concern for long-distance hikers, especially in summer when the need is greatest. This lack of water weighed heavily on me and caused me to conserve in making my meal.



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Because nobody had camped in Saltlog Gap this season, the area around the fire ring was overgrown with stinging nettles, about knee high. In addition to the unpleasant task of making camp in the midst of stinging nettles, the wind had started to blow hard from the west. The trees were swaying and singing as the breeze rustled their leaves. A local man told me there were many bears up on this ridge. So, after my meal, I climbed into my hammock tent and listened to the concert outside. There would be no way to hear a bear browsing around the camp, so I hung my full pack from a tree, about twelve feet from the ground. A couple of hours later, I heard groans from at least two different directions around the camp. I took them for bear cubs calling. I became nervous that a bear family was zeroing in on my pack. So, I exited the tent with headlamp in hand and started aiming the light in the direction of one of the groans. I also yelled, “Hey bear, stay away from here!” I spotted my pack hanging in the tree, and no bear appeared. I heard another groan and yelled out again, “Hey!” Then another groan in the opposite direction sounded. I turned the light toward the sound. Suddenly the sounds revealed themselves, not as bears, but tree trunks, high up in the canopy, rubbing against one another in the windstorm. The solitude of the day, manifesting after returning to the trail from my resupply, started with a deep and unexplainable depression. This feeling continued as I climbed into the sun. Anxiety over a short supply of water added to the foreboding, and stinging nettles pushed me further into the fire. Finally, the threat of bears ripping my backpack to pieces brought my blood to a boil. I did get to sleep, rose early, climbed Bluff Mountain, descended to Punchbowl Shelter and collected water before breakfast. There I ran into Cog and Earthman. Earthman and I walked together after breakfast as my trial slowly lifted. A different example of the manifestation of solitude happens in Jacob’s dream of a ladder stretching from heaven to earth and angels ascending and descending. Jacob pauses in the wilderness after fleeing from his brother. In his distress and solitude, he comes to a “certain place.”174 The Hebrew, ba-makom, is significant. Amir Eshel notes that the Judaic concept of makom is literally place, but when written Ha-makom can also refer to God.175 In the dream God announces that he is the one who appeared to Abraham, the God of Isaac, and will give the same blessing to Jacob that was given to Abraham.176 When Jacob wakes up in bethel, the house of God, he thought, “Surely the Lord is in this place (ba-makom), and I was not aware of it. . . . How awesome is this place (ha-makom)!”177 The English translation for both instances of “this place” does not communicate the distinction. “This place” has been transformed into ‘the place,’ ba-makom into ha-makom. It is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”178 There is nothing

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in this place to indicate a house, a dwelling. Martin W. Ball, in discussing the central role of place in indigenous religious practice, and specifically within Mescalero Apache tradition, shows the connection between place and encounter—such as spiritual revelation, vision or dream. He writes, “Most often these experiences are recounted to have taken place on a mountain, in a cave, or elsewhere away from normal human habitation and activity.”179 Ball points out that this shows a “profoundly participatory relationship between spiritual experience and the ‘physical’ world of ‘objects’ and implies radically different epistemology and ontology than that of the dominant culture.”180 Jacob’s proclamation and subsequent marking of the place as bethel indicates the participatory agency of the place, the interplay between ba-makom and ha-makom. This is the place where communication happens between God and Jacob. Such a happening must have been a true blessing for Jacob on his flight from Esau. The blessing of shalom rising within an aesthetic of solitude. David Brown writes concerning shalom, “The Hebrew notion of peace [shalom] refuses to confine the word to purely internal or interpersonal relations but also insists on the totality of a changed environment.”181 Here again is the interplay between ba-makom and ha-makom. Brown continues: One recent rich study of the issue concludes that to put the main Old Testament emphasis on divine action in history or on emancipation is radically to misrepresent biblical categories: “the central problem is not emancipation but rootage, not meaning but belonging, not separation from community but location within it, not isolation from others but placement.”182

Jacob belongs, even though in exile, and discovers this in the experience of an aesthetic of solitude in the wilderness. This feeling of belonging, of placement can be ecstatic, the feeling of communion described by Saint Teresa or the love described by Saint Julian. I experienced this shalom many times while long-distance hiking on the AT. In 2007, I led a university class on the northern most section of the AT, the hundred-mile wilderness. There were eleven students, most of whom had never backpacked, and a couple who had never been camping. Though remote, the hundred-mile wilderness is not the most challenging section of the AT. The first fourteen miles involves hiking over rolling hills, with ascents and descents of less than five hundred feet. The stone in the area is slate and when wet can be extremely slick. After the rolling section, there is a twothousand-foot ascent of Barren Mountain, 2,670 feet in elevation, then about twelve miles of more rolling ridges before descending to the West Branch of the Pleasant River at 680 feet of elevation. The trail then climbs White Cap Mountain, 3,654 feet, a rolling elevation gain of about three thousand feet in ten miles. If the weather is clear, hikers will see Mount Katahdin looming in



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the distance. After descending White Cap Mountain, the elevation levels off to between five hundred and seven hundred feet for nearly twenty miles. Nahmakanta Lake is in this section, about seventy-five miles into the hike, twenty-four miles from Abol Bridge and the end of the hundred-mile wilderness, and 38.6 miles to Mount Katahdin. On the seventh night, my students and I camped on a beautiful sand beach along the shore of Nahmakanta Lake. See figure 2.8. After the first few days, struggling to get trail legs, the group became veterans. They all decided to cowboy camp on the sand beach. As is my custom, I rose when the sky was just starting to brighten, some of the last stars still visible. I looked out over the beach, about thirty meters of sand stood between the water and the forest, and saw my students scattered and still in their sleeping bags. I sat quietly, not wanting to disturb their sleep, and watched the morning unfold. I was tempted to wake everyone so they could see the beauty of a new day dawning. Across the lake, to the east, the sky slowly transformed. The silhouette of mountains against the ever-changing sky played with the colors, which seemed to radiate upward into the darker part of the heavens. I must have been sitting there for more than an hour before the sun finally peaked over the distant ridge. I was overcome with absolute bliss, shalom, feeling that body and soul,

Figure 2.8.  Shoreline of Nahmakanta Lake, Maine. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

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undivided, were cradled in the perfect place. This became my own encounter with the interplay between ba-makom and ha-makom. This place, this sand beach beside Nahmakanta Lake, was the tip of a cosmic vortex that had deposited me there. The thought occurred to me, “There is no place I would rather be than here and now. I don’t belong anywhere else. I am in the perfect place.” I rested in this; waited, not for anything to happen, it was already happening. I waited in the happening, fully attentive, fully present. When the feeling subsided and I reflected, a pang of guilt knocked at the door. The accompanying thought ran like this, “You have a family somewhere else. How could you feel there is no other place than here when you are away from the ones you love the most?” I rejected those thoughts and embraced the shalom. My belonging here, right now, makes it possible to belong more fully in other places when I get there. Several years later, in 2011, I was sitting on that same beach on Nahmakanta Lake. I had started at Amicalola Falls State Park, Georgia, in February, walking north and now found myself only thirty-eight miles from Mount Katahdin. I had been sharing the final 218 miles of the AT with Truckin. We met in Virginia, hiked a little together in New Hampshire, and met up again on Saddleback Mountain, Maine. We entered the hundred-mile wilderness together and had walked in four days what had taken my students and I seven days in 2007. I told Truckin about the special beach on Nahmakanta Lake, communicating my desire to make camp there again, and he opted to quit hiking a little earlier than normal in order to enjoy the place. We arrived at the beach around 5:30 and made a fire. As the evening matured, we moved a few meters closer to the lake, sitting next to the water. We began to read poetry, our voices resonating with the calm water, the forest behind, lake stretching out 180 degrees from our resting place in the sand. After about ten minutes, a loon suddenly came up from the depths, breaching the surface of the lake just ten meters directly in front of us. The entrance of the loon silenced us. We looked out at the loon and the loon looked back at us. We remained present with each other for several minutes while a seeming dissipation of time came upon us. The happening involved a meeting, an extra-linguistic dialogue as we gazed into one another’s eyes. The loon remained a loon, an extra-human inhabitant of the lake, and we seemed to be guests. Was the loon investigating our presence on a beach that was part of its territory? Were we being invited to stay? Were we simply other living beings perceived with indifference? Yet, we felt a sharing, a koinōnia. Truckin and I could have walked past this beach. I could have shared the story of my students, showed him the beach, but continued hiking. After all, there was plenty of daylight left, more time to gain mileage, progress toward our final destination. Our breaking with the normal urge to push on opened us to a gap, an emptiness where solitude could manifest in a beautiful belonging, a shalom. Three body-subjects shared this place, where ba-makom became ha-makom. Truckin and I discovered a belonging as pilgrims passing



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Figure 2.9.  Top of Nesuntabunt Mountain, Maine, Mount Katahdin in the Distance. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

through, the place cooperating as the constituents therein gave themselves in hospitality. We received the gesture through the representative of those whose home became our temporary dwelling, the loon, who already belonged in the array of forest, lake, and mountain habitat. In the morning, we climbed Nesuntabunt mountain standing on the precipice looking out over the entire lake, low clouds hovering over the waters, Mount Katahdin raising its majestic head just over the ridge where the sun had risen. See figure 2.9. We were now viewing the expanse as though it were the first day of creation: “And the spirit of God was hovering. (brooding) over the surface of the waters.”183 See figure 2.10. From our perch on Nesuntabunt Mountain, about one thousand feet above the clouds moving over the waters, we offered thanks for the hospitality received in our camping place along the shores of Nahmakanta Lake. In solitude the buzz of life is reduced, opening us to the immediacy of our mutual presence. Jean-Luc Marion has proposed a “fourth and last formulation of a possible first principle of phenomenology: ‘As much reduction, as much givenness’”184 Reduction distances from the natural attitude, setting aside the ordinary way of lived experience. When Truckin and I paused our daily routine, stopping at this beach, we distanced ourselves from the ordinary routine, gave ourselves to another’s giving, gave ourselves to each other, received the hospitality of the other. In this we entered a liminality

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Figure 2.10.  View over Nahmakanta Lake from the top of Nesuntabunt Mountain, Maine. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

wherein we encountered one another and all of those present in a communion, a koinōnia of belonging. Our understanding of this communion did not rise out of a knowing that reduces the other “to the level of ‘the same,’ the level at which all reality is made to conform to horizons of meaning over which we have control.”185 Our aesthetic was transformed from a fellowship with wilderness to a fellowship in a wilderness ecoplace. The frame of our gaze disappeared, no central perspectival point of reference. A COMPLEX OF AESTHETIC INTERACTIONS I have explored a complex of aesthetic interactions both through experience and encounter along the AT in the context of a long-distance hike. The trail has been shown to be both a scenic landscape as well as an ecosystem of interacting constituents who inhabit places that compose what has been deemed wilderness space. The trail constituents through encounter are located in their own habitats that may be experienced by hikers as spatially liminal, between the raw wilderness and domestic landscapes. Landscapes are experienced through an aesthetic distance, a contemplative position whereby the sojourner is removed from her everyday lifeworld and walks



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through a wilderness wherein she is far from home. Yet, this distance is sometimes collapsed when she happens into mystical encounters where communion rather than distance interrupts the walk. Hiking may manifest as movement that is ecstatic, and the sojourner becomes one with the surround. Yet, walking can also be contemplative where the aesthetic distance is preserved. C. S. Lewis points to the desire humans have for such encounters in his essay “The Weight of Glory.” Lewis writes, We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words–to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves–that, though we cannot, yet these projections can enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image.186

This complex of aesthetic interactions involves a communication between the one who is passing through and those beings who dwell in the places of that passing. These aesthetic interactions, as Lewis points out, can be far more than a visual experience. They may involve embodied encounters that employ all the senses, brought to the situation not distinctly but all working together as the hikers’ being-in-the-world unfolds. NOTES 1.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1978), 241 2.  William T. Cavanaugh discusses modern tourism in a globalized world in his book, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church. He contrasts Daniel J. Boorstin’s critique of such tourism, the “inauthentic consumption of ‘pseudo-events,’” with Dean MacCannell’s teasing out “the spiritual quest that lies behind attempts to transcend everyday life.” Cavanaugh goes on to describe the pilgrim as one who moves toward the center whereas the tourist toward the periphery of their world (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publ. Co., 2011). 69–87. 3.  Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Portable Thoreau, ed. Carle Bode (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 592. 4.  Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Portable Thoreau, 592–593. 5.  “Yellow blazing” is a phrase that plays with the white blazes that mark the route from Georgia to Maine. There are also blue blazes on side trails, usually to water sources and shelters. Those who follow the “yellow blazes” are hitchhiking on the paved highway, where lanes are separated by yellow lines painted on the road. These “yellow blazers” will skip sections of the trail but claim to be hiking the entire length.

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  6.  Jose Ortega y Gasset. Meditations on Hunting, trans. Howard B. Wescott (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 141.   7.  Jose Ortega y Gasset. Meditations on Hunting, 140.   8.  Later in the book, I will explore contemporary uses of the term nature as another example of a human abstraction. To journey through nature involves the inner provinces of human thought, abstract constructions that are then posited upon the raw environment, a form of domestication.   9.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “What is Phenomenology?” Cross Currents 6 no. 2 (1956), 60. 10.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “What is Phenomenology?” Cross Currents 6 no. 2 (1956), 61. 11. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Duquesne University Press, 1969) 49. 12. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, 49. 13.  Jose Ortega y Gasset. Meditations on Hunting, 140. 14.  Ibid., 141. 15.  Laure Meyer, Masters of English Landscape: among others, Gainsborough, Stubbs, Turner, Constable, Whistler, Kokoschka (Paris: Terrail, 1993), 17. 16.  Elizabeth W. Manwaring. Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1925), 54. 17.  E. H. Gombrich. Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, 2nd ed. (London: Phaidon Press, 1971), 116. 18.  John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, eds. The Genius of the Place: the English Landscape Garden 1620–1820 (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1975), 144. 19.  Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1968). 20.  Margorie Hope Nicolson. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (New York: W. W. Norton and Co. Inc., 1959), 30. 21.  Edmund Burke. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 39. 22.  Ibid., 57. 23.  Ibid., 62. 24.  Ibid., 66. 25.  Ibid., 81–82. 26.  Ibid., 113–114. 27.  Elizabeth W. Manwaring. Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England. 28.  E. H. Gombrich. Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, 116. 29.  Elizabeth W. Manwaring. Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England, 185. 30. Ibid. 31.  Ibid., 187. 32.  Ibid., 198.



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33.  Roderick Nash. Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 111. 34.  John McCoubrey ed. American Art 1700–1960: Sources and Documents. History of Art Series. Series ed. H. W. Janson (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1965), 102. 35.  John McCoubrey ed. American Art 1700–1960: Sources and Documents, 108. This point will also be emphasized in relation to comparing long-distance hiking on wilderness trails versus established pilgrimages such as the Camino de Santiago. Walking across Spain immerses the pilgrim into thousands of years of history and culture. Near Burgos is the prehistoric site of Atapuerca where there is archaeological evidence of some of the earliest known human occupation. There are many locations where the path of the Camino traverses Roman roads, paving stones still present. Whereas wilderness trails have little evidence of human occupation. 36.  John McCoubrey ed. American Art 1700–1960: Sources and Documents, 112. 37.  Thomas Cole and Thomas Cole National Historic Site (Catskill, NY). Essay on American Scenery, Catskill (New York: Thomas Cole National Historic Site, 2018). Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Portable Thoreau. James Fenimore Cooper. The Last of the Mohicans, (New York: Bantam Books, 1981). William Cullen Bryant. “The Prairies.” American Literature, Tradition and Innovation, ed. Harrison T. Meserole, Walter Sutton and Brom Weber, 907–909, (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1969). 38.  Frederick Law Olmsted, “Preliminary Report to the Commissioners for Laying Out a Park in Brooklyn, New York: Being a Consideration of Circumstances of Site and Other Conditions Affecting the Design of Public Pleasure Grounds,” The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, eds. Charles E Beveridge, Carolyn F Hoffman, Lauren Meier, and Irene Mills. Supplementary Series. Vol. 1, Supplementary Series. 79–111, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 39.  Frederick Law Olmsted, “Preliminary Report to the Commissioners for Laying Out a Park in Brooklyn, New York: Being a Consideration of Circumstances of Site and Other Conditions Affecting the Design of Public Pleasure Grounds” The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, 86–87. 40.  Frederick Law Olmsted, “Preliminary Report to the Commissioners for Laying Out a Park in Brooklyn, New York: Being a Consideration of Circumstances of Site and Other Conditions Affecting the Design of Public Pleasure Grounds” The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, 87. 41. Frederick Law Olmsted, Records of the Olmsted Associates (unpublished) Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 42.  Paul Schullery and Lee H Whittlesey. Myth and History in the Creation of Yellowstone National Park (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 3. 43.  Paul Schullery and Lee H Whittlesey. Myth and History in the Creation of Yellowstone National Park, 3–4. 44.  John Muir, Our National Parks (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981). John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (The John Muir Library. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990). John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, ed. William Frederic Badè (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998).

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45.  Benton MacKaye, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects (Oct. 1921): 325–330. 46. Benton MacKaye, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning.” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 9 (Oct. 1921): 325–330. Quoted from http://www.appalachiantrail.org/atf/cf/{D25B4747-42A3-4302-8D48EF35C0B0D9F1}/MacKaye.pdf. Retrieved November 8, 2002. 47.  Larry Luxenberg, Walking the Appalachian Trail (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 1994), 101. 48.  Larry Luxenberg, Walking the Appalachian Trail, 101. 49.  Ibid., 102. 50.  Ibid., 32. 51.  Ibid., 33. 52.  Ibid., 34. 53.  Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 15. 54.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 7. 55.  See Saint Teresa’s book for a detailed and expanded description of the interior journey: Teresa Interior Castle. London: Sheed and Ward, 1999. 56. Teresa, Interior Castle, 51. 57. Ibid. 58.  Ibid., 76. 59.  Ibid., 77. 60.  Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, The Essential Rumi, Trans. Coleman Barks, A. J Arberry, and John Moyne. New expanded ed. 208–211 (New York: HarperOne, 2004). 61. Richard L. Lanigan characterizes Merleau-Ponty’s “Body-Subject” as the holistic person in opposition to Cartesian dualism (“Merleau-Ponty, Semiology, and the New Rhetoric.” The Southern Speech Communication Journal 40, no. 2 (1975): 131. For the idea of a judgment of aesthetic taste from a disinterested standpoint see Immanuel Kant. The Critique of Judgement. Trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961). 62. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A Johnson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 126. 63.  Richard L. Lanigan, “Merleau-Ponty, Semiology, and the New Rhetoric,” The Southern Speech Communication Journal, 136. 64. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, 126. 65.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 25. 66.  Several of Plato’s dialogues deal with the beautiful and the good, see Plato, “Greater Hippias,” In Plato in Twelve Volumes: IV, trans. E. Fowler, 385–400. Heinemann 1970. Also, Plato. “Symposium,” In Plato in Twelve Volumes: III, trans. Lamb, 199–207. Heinemann 1975. Also, Plato. “Phaedrus,” In Plato in Twelve Volumes: IX, trans. Fowler. Heinemannn 1925.



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67.  G. van der Leeuw. Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art. Trans. David E. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 339. 68.  G. van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, 339. 69.  “In the Greek world the concept of kalos . . . received from Plato a significant and characteristic impress which persisted to the time of Plotinus.” “The central idea of the good was made up of kalos, summetria, and aletheia.” (Georg Bertram. “Kalos.” Theological dictionary of the New Testament, eds. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964), 536–556. 70. Plato, The Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 514a–517a 71. Plato, The Symposium (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 210a– 212c 72. Plato, The Symposium, 204a. 73. Ibid., 204b. 74. Ibid., 204d. 75. Ibid., 206a. 76.  Ibid., 211c–d. 77. Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 144. 78.  Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, 144–145. 79.  Ibid., 145. 80. Ibid. 81.  Ibid., 161. 82.  Ibid., 165. 83.  Ibid., 175. 84. Ibid. 85. Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949), 166. 86.  Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, 167. 87.  Ibid., 168. 88.  Ibid., 169. 89.  Ibid., 168. 90.  Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015), 58. 91.  Ecoregion is defined as a “relatively large units of land containing a distinct assemblage of natural communities and species, with boundaries that approximate the original extent of natural communities prior to major land-use change” by David M. Olson, Eric Dinerstein, Eric D. Wikramanayake, Neil D. Burgess, George V. N. Powell, Emma C. Underwood, and Kenneth R. Kassem, et al. 2001. “Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World: A New Map of Life on Earth.” Bioscience 51, no. 11: 933. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed January 10, 2017).  92. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 1.  93. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 102.  94. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 139.

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 95. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 56.  96. Friedrich Hauck, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965), 797.   97.  Emmanuel Levinas, “Beyond Intentionality,” Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 109.  98. Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, ed. Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1989), 89.  99. Emmanuel Lévinas, Outside the Subject, Continuum Impacts (London: Continuum, 2008), 22. 100.  Emmanuel Lévinas, Outside the Subject, 23. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. 103.  Martin Buber, I and Thou, 131–132. 104.  Ibid., 132. 105.  Ibid., 135. 106.  Ibid., 143. 107.  Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 83. 108.  Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) 9. 109.  Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, 12. 110.  Ibid., 17. 111.  Ibid., 17. 112.  Ibid., 19. 113.  Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 91. 114.  Ibid., 106. 115.  Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, 129. 116.  Ibid., 130. 117.  Gerhard Kittel, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament Vol. 2, trans. and ed., Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), 657. 118.  Matt. 4:1–11; Mark 1:12; Luke 4:1–13 119.  Gerhard Kittel, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 658. 120. Ibid. 121.  Mark 6:31–32. 122.  Matt. 14:23; Mark 6:46; Luke 6:12; John 6:15. 123.  Matt 17:1–3; Mark 9:2; Luke 9:28–30. 124.  Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950), 84. 125.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 95. 126. Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, trans. Thomas Merton, (New York: New Directions Book, 1960), 3. 127.  Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, 5. 128. Ibid. 129.  Ibid., 7. 130.  Ibid., 16.



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131.  Ibid., 18. 132. Ibid. 133.  Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, 175. 134.  Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, 25. 135.  Ibid., 77. 136.  Ibid., 41. 137.  Ibid., 29. 138.  Ibid., 47. 139.  Ibid., 55. 140.  Ibid., 74. 141.  Saint Julian of Norwich, Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love. Ed. Marion Glasscoe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1986), vii. 142.  Saint Julian of Norwich, Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love, xiii. 143.  Ibid., xiv. 144.  Ibid., xiii. 145.  C. S. Lewis. “Myth Became Fact.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 66. 146.  C. S. Lewis. “Myth Became Fact.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Ed. Walter Hooper, 65. 147. Ibid. 148.  Ibid., 66. 149.  Saint Julian of Norwich, Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love, xv. 150. Ibid. 151.  Ibid., xiii. 152.  Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, 68. 153.  G. van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, 115. 154. Ibid. 155.  Ibid., 122. 156.  Ernesto Grassi, “The Originary Quality of the Poetic and Rhetorical Word: Heidegger, Ungaretti, and Neruda,” 248. 157.  Ibid., 253. 158.  Matthew Arnold, Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism: First and Second Series. Everyman’s Library, No. 115 (New York: Dutton, 1966), 295. 159.  G. van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, 108. 160.  Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958) 27. 161.  Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 10. 162.  Saint Julian of Norwich, Julian of Norwich: A Revelation of Love, 7. 163. Ibid. 164. Ibid. 165.  Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, 68. 166.  I Kings 19:11–13. 167.  Matt. 26:38. 168.  Kincora Hostel Register, April 10, 2003; hereafter cited as KH. In order to convey an accurate portrayal of the shelter registers, abbreviations, and other symbols

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will be retained in the text of register quotes. I will only alter the quotation when clarity requires it. 169.  William S. J. Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 228. 170.  William S. J. Harmless, Desert Christians, 228. 171. Ibid. 172.  Luke 22:44. 173.  Gen. 32:28–29. 174.  Gen. 28:11. 175.  Amir Eshel, “Cosmopolitanism and Searching for the Sacred Space in Jewish Literature,” Jewish Social Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring, 2003): 121–138. 176.  Gen. 28:12–13. 177.  Gen. 28:16–17. 178.  Gen. 28:16–27. 179.  Martin W. Ball. “‘People Speaking Silently to Themselves’: An Examination of Keith Basso’s Philosophical Speculations on ‘Sense of Place’ in Apache Cultures.” American Indian Quarterly 26, no. 3 (2002): 464. 180.  Martin W. Ball, “‘People Speaking Silently to Themselves,’” 464. 181.  David Brown, God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience, 156. Quote comes from W. Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, 2nd edn. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 197–201. 182.  David Brown, God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience, 156. Quote comes from W. Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith, 2nd edn. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 197–201. 183.  Gen. 1:2. 184.  Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 17. 185.  Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation, 54. 186.  C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Harper Collins Publ., 1980), 42–43.

Chapter Three

A Social/Spatial Journey

In the previous chapter, while outlining the objectification and experiencing of aesthetic objects in isolation, I noted Olmsted’s conceptualization of public parks as arrangements of space conducive to health. In his report on constructing a park in Brooklyn, he used the phrase “unbending of the faculties” in relation to the health benefits of such social and spatial constructions. These parks offered both appealing aesthetic scenery as well as a place of gathering, a social/spatial milieu.1 Also noted, the AT followed in the wake of landscape aesthetics and potential positive social benefits as illustrated in Benton Mackaye’s essay “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” published in the Journal of the American Institute of Acchitects, in 1921.2 Mackaye saw the trail as a “national resource” that “could save thousands of lives.”3 In the previous chapter, I also pointed out that the aesthetics of the AT were shown to be integral to both fellowship and solitude. The meaning of fellowship from this perspective was closely linked to participation, communion, sharing the same reality, and intimate relations. Various aesthetic dimensions of the spiritual journey open hikers to sharing their experience and forming bonds, as well as finding fellowship with extrahuman elements. In this chapter, I will explore the coupling of the social and the spatial as distinct from the aesthetic dimension of the journey. Aristotle uses the phrase koinōnia politikē in his Politics, which can be translated as political community but which the fifteenth-century Florentine translator, Leonardo Bruni rendered, societas civilis, which gets translated into English as civil society. The polis is then rendered a civil society. James Schmidt points out Saint Paul’s use of koinōnia as fellowship between believers, as well as their Eucharistic participation, whereas Aristotle’s inclusion of koinōnia has a different social dimension.4 In exploring the social and spatial relations of hikers on the AT, I will highlight koinōnia from the Aristotelian 99

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perspective, not the formation of a civil society but the experience of partnership and the formation of a community, which might be construed as a foundation for a civil society. I also contrasted pilgrims with tourists in the previous chapter. Pilgrims and tourists share their journeys with fellows along the way or at the destination. However, one distinction I will show in this chapter is in hospitality or the lack thereof. Tourists save up money, book reservations, stay in hotels, eat in restaurants, and vie with each other for space in often crowded venues. Pilgrims on the AT also save money for their extended journey, though the way they spend it will be shown to be vastly different from tourists. Tourist venues and the AT as a scenic trail in relation to long-distance hiking are distinct economic spaces. AT hikers might book a few accommodations, but the uncertainty of schedule tends to nullify those plans. On occasion, longdistance hikers will go into a trail town and stay at a hostel or a hotel, but the majority of the trip will involve camping in the wilderness. Hikers will venture into trail towns for resupply and enjoy a meal at a local restaurant, but their focus is more often than not, finding inexpensive food with a lot of calories and some variety in diet—eating fresh vegetables and salads for example. What really sets AT hikers apart from adventure and other tourists is in giving and receiving hospitality. I will explore the meaning of hospitality with this contrast in mind. NEELS GAP TO THE SMOKIES: FORMING SOCIAL BONDS IN THE SOUTHERN FORESTS Those NOBOS who continue after reaching Neels Gap solidify the social bonds that have started to form in the walk thus far. Many who started at Amicalola Falls or Springer Mountain entered the trail solo. Persons who feel the call to hike the whole trail continuously over the four to six months required find it very difficult to enlist a companion with a similar desire who has that much free time or the strong desire to walk more than two thousand miles across the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains. Most of those who do start solo discover new relationships in the first few days of their journey. During this initial social bonding hikers often receive “trail names” that characterize some unique personal trait or signify some happening that occurred in the first thirty miles of the journey. A large number of hikers quit the trail at Neels Gap, and those who remain, having lost newfound friends to the ordeal of this long-distance hike, begin to form relationships with others. Those who remain on the trail continue in the struggle to adjust their bodies to the terrain. Their packs will be lighter after mailing unwanted equipment home, but even



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their much-reduced pack volume can be a great burden on the steep, long climbs of the southern Appalachian Mountains. As hikers walk together, or pass one another other multiple times each day, their bond of mutual suffering and comradeship of wilderness sojourning grows stronger. Pilgrims have always formed these strong bonds. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales illustrates the camaraderie of fellow pilgrims who journey together.5 A long-distance hike on the Appalachian Trail, like pilgrimage, is a liminal journey. The wilderness itself is a liminal space and hikers are being transformed in the crucible of ordeal.6 As noted in chapter 1, communitas arises in this liminal journey and is characterized by unmediated and spontaneous bonds between persons.7 Turner writes, “communitas emerges where social structure is not. Perhaps the best way of putting this difficult concept into words is Marin Buber’s . . . [who] uses the term ‘community’ for ‘communitas.’”8 Hierarchical social status and means to ends social relationships are abandoned in the liminality of the sacred journey. Giving and receiving trail names is evidence of communitas as social status and position do not play into the naming. Martin Buber described these bonds in terms of I and You and writes that “the relation to You is unmediated.”9 These bonds also distinguish pilgrims from tourists. In any tourist venue social status is reiterated by such practices as VIP treatment. Buber writes, “Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.”10 What is it about this particular liminal journey on the AT and hiker interactions within its varied environments that gives rise to multifarious social interactions, ranging from mediated, touristic to unmediated and spiritual? Various iterations of hiking groups will form in the first 166 miles leading up to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. These groups will be in flux as hikers encounter unexpected conditions—weather, geography, physical injury, and emotional stress. Support from local residents along the way and from “trail angels” who station themselves along remote road crossings will also manifest social interactions. Hostels are accessible throughout the trail and help to integrate the hikers with local residents and “trail angels.”11 The AT community is made up of a number of groups on and off the trail, both volunteer and professional. In addition to persons helping hikers directly, such as hostel owners and staff or “trail angels,” trail clubs and other organizations volunteer to maintain the entire length of the AT.12 These maintaining groups often enlist current long-distance hikers in their efforts. Most hostels are in towns near the trail and accessed via road crossings. Mountain Crossings at Walasi-Yi Center is uniquely situated right on the AT at Neels Gap: The trail leads hikers through a passageway between buildings. The first twenty miles of trail beyond Neels Gap, at 3,125 feet, remains over three thousand feet in elevation with Blue Mountain at 4,025. The AT then

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drops to Unicoi Gap at 2,949. Some hikers go into Helen, Georgia, for a resupply. Helen is nine miles from the trail and in most cases hikers will hitch into town. Hitching is common along the entire length of the AT as most resupply towns are at least five miles from the trail. Many local residents offer rides. After getting back on the trail at Unicoi Gap, the hiker climbs Rocky Mountain, at 4,017, more than one thousand feet of elevation gain in less than a mile and a half. Tray Mountain, about fifty-eight miles from Springer, rises to 4,430. The trail then roller coasters up and down a half dozen times, rising and falling 300–800 feet before dropping to Dicks Creek Gap, at 2,675 feet, about sixty-nine miles from Springer. The hiker then climbs to the Georgia, North Carolina border at Bly Gap, about 3,800 feet and almost seventy-nine miles from Springer. Once in North Carolina the hiker climbs up to 4,500 feet and for the next twenty miles rarely drops below that elevation. Standing Indian Mountain, the first above five thousand feet, is nearly 5,500 feet. In the next forty miles the hiker will climb Albert Mountain, Siler Bald, Wine Spring Bald, Wayah Bald, Copper Ridge Bald, and Rocky Bald all above five thousand feet. The lowest point in this stretch is Winding Stair Gap, below four thousand. Ten miles after Rocky Bald the hiker will have descended to the Nantahala River, which is below two thousand feet and about 137 miles from Springer, still 2,048 miles of trail left till Mount Katahdin. The bridge over the Nantahala River is at the Nantahala Outdoor Center, known as the N.O.C., an outpost of civilization on the trail. Crossing the highway just before the bridge, a seeming small town presents itself: a restaurant and an outfitter on either side of the bridge. Across the river is another restaurant as well as some other buildings. Up on the hill, north of the river, a cluster of lodges appear. Not really a town, the whole complex composes an adventure center where the trappings of the outdoor tourist industry loom large. If the NOBO crosses the bridge at the right time of day, she may witness white water kayaking just below. After the Nantahala River the NOBO will climb to five thousand feet in eight miles, reaching the summit of Cheoah Bald. Between Cheoah Bald and Fontana Dam, about twenty miles, the hiker will ascend and descend at elevations of between three-thousand and four-thousand feet until plunging to Fontana Dam at about 1,700 feet. Fontana is the highest dam in the eastern United States and was built in the 1930s in association with the Tennessee Valley Authority. It is one of two TVA dams on the AT, the other being Watauga 261 miles to the north. In addition to the rugged terrain and steep slopes, the densely wooded forests of the Appalachian Mountains create an environment that interacts with the social aspects of long-distance hiking. In more open landscapes, such as the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, or Mohave Desert, hikers have unobstructed views, sometimes for a distance of many dozens of miles. One might see fellow sojourners walking ahead or behind, in groups or solo.



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Such environments give hikers a sense of sharing the vast space with fellow humans. The AT, on the other hand, is tightly hemmed by a variety of vegetation—undergrowth, trees, and shrubs—obscuring most views. One might be walking only fifty meters from a companion and not realize this for an entire day. Those who do not enjoy walking alone in such conditions will walk in very close proximity to friends. Many long-distance hikers emphasize the social aspects of the trail. An often-repeated phrase describing the AT experience exemplifies this social focus, “it’s all about the people.” While at a trail festival attended by many potential hikers, sometimes referred to as “dreamers,” who were seeking advice on long-distance hiking, I heard a young veteran of the AT characterize the trail foliage with indifference, preferring her human companions. She was a featured speaker at the festival, and in answering questions about her trail experiences, noted that she did not like walking alone in the woods. Not because she felt threatened or lonely but indicated that most of the AT was filled with a bunch of boring trees. She said that they all looked the same. What made the trail so wonderful were her social interactions. Her viewpoint is very common amongst long-distance hikers. The AT is sometimes referred to as “the green tunnel.” Perfect for facilitating solitude, as previously discussed, but uninteresting for scenic tourists or those who seek fellowship independent of the extra-human inhabitants. For those whose experience of the forests along the AT transcends projecting a broad and misleading description characterizing the surround as “a bunch of boring trees,” the possibility of encountering the immediate extrahuman inhabitants enhances social bonding. Buber’s two basic word pairs, the I-You and the I-It, when spoken “establish a mode of existence.”13 Buber writes that “Those who experience do not participate in the world. For the experience is ‘in them’ and not between them and the world.” Also, “The world does not participate in experience. It allows itself to be experienced, but it is not concerned, for it contributes nothing, and nothing happens to it.”14 Clearly, long-distance hikers who characterize the surround along the AT as merely “a bunch of boring trees” do not participate with those trees. There is no fellowship (koinōnia), and the experience is “in them” not between them and the constituents who inhabit the AT ecology. Buber goes on to write, “IYou establishes the world of relation. . . Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.”15 Experience as mediated gives rise to the self using objects of experience for itself. In relation to trees, Buber’s phenomenological description reveals two ways that long-distance hikers interact with the surrounding vegetation—undergrowth, trees, and shrubs: I contemplate a tree. I can accept it as a picture: a rigid pillar in a flood of light, or splashes of green traversed by the gentleness of the blue silver ground.

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I can feel it as movement: the flowing veins around the sturdy, striving core, the sucking of the roots, the breathing of the leaves, the infinite commerce with earth and air—and the growing itself in its darkness. I can assign it to a species and observe it as an instance, with an eye to its construction and its way of life. I can overcome its uniqueness and form so rigorously that I recognize it only as an expression of the law—those laws according to which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or those laws according to which the elements mix and separate. I can dissolve it into a number, into a pure relation between numbers, and eternalize it. Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition. But it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me.16

These two ways, experience versus encounter, unfold and sometimes shift back and forth each day while walking the AT. The “green tunnel” and “a bunch of boring trees” show a dissolution of relation and exclusiveness into number, kind, picture, scene. Levinas similarly writes, “the tree, too, instead of being of use to me or dissolving into a series of phenomenal appearances, can confront me in person, speak to me and elicit a response.”17 The only approach to being drawn into relation with the vegetation along the pathway of the AT would be actually walking amongst those extra-human constituents through whose habitat the hiker passes. Such an encounter involves negating cultural conditioning that experiences landscape as scenery and opening oneself to the alterity of the other through something like a face. Levinas writes, “But, in its expression, in its mortality, the face before me summons me, calls for me, begs for me, as if the invisible death that must be faced by the Other, pure otherness, separated, in some way, from any whole, were my business.”18 Through encounter the mediated and utilitarian screen through which we experience others is dissolved and we discover a face, even the face of a tree, a balsam fir or red spruce, not just any fir or spruce, but this one right next to me. Levinas writes, “The proximity of the other is the face’s meaning, and it means from the very start in a way that goes beyond those plastic forms which forever try to cover the face like a mask of their presence to perception.”19 Because this description is bound by the medium of a book, the reader, while reading, cannot make this approach. As a way of moving toward such an approach, I will give a brief listing of the variation in trees and shrubs along the AT. As hikers attend to each face along the way, they begin to notice species differentiation, an initiation toward encountering each face.



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In low and middle elevations, the AT is dominated by broad-leaf deciduous forests. High elevations in the south and all throughout the forests of the north are coniferous trees such as red spruce, Fraser fir, and balsam fir. Northern hardwoods abound and can be encountered in the higher elevations of the south. Sugar maple is evident on White Top Mountain in southern Virginia. Mountain ash, also known as the rowan tree, is evident in both the south and north. Other species are buckeye, beech, birch, chestnut (though blighted, its root systems continue to live and send up young trees, which succumb to the blight in a few years after sprouting), black and white oak among other varieties. In the southern mountains we find in addition to some of the northern hardwoods, yellow birch, hickory, magnolia, gum, black cherry, white basswood, red maple, poplar, walnut, sycamore, chestnut oaks and blighted chestnuts. Hemlocks (being attacked by the Wooly Adelgid) are quickly dying. Dense hemlock groves through which I hiked twenty years ago are, for the most part, standing dead. Some of the smaller trees are redbud, mountain ash (also known as the rowan tree), sassafras, dogwood, locust, sourwood, and shrubs such as rhododendron, azalea, mountain laurel, devil’s walking stick, paw-paw, and hawthorn of several varieties. Primarily there are broadleaf deciduous trees and evergreen needle-leaf conifers. The American Holly is a broad-leaf evergreen. Among the pines are eastern white pine, Virginia pine, pitch pine, table mountain pine, and shortleaf pine. Two favorite shrubs are blueberries and huckleberries. Interacting with the great variety of extra-human plant life enhances human bonding by loosening utilitarian and mediated frames whereby hikers open themselves to faces extending across relations from extra-human to human. C. S. Lewis writes, “The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”20 Two or three hikers who share in an encounter with another being who is extrahuman might say something like this to one another: “Did you see that?” “Where you also moved to the core of your being in the presence of that?” “Did you also feel a profound connection with that?” Such a shared encounter transforms any perception of trees as being all the same into that of wonder. Opening ourselves to wonder through an encounter with a tree increases the likelihood that we will form stronger bonds with fellow humans. Perceiving ourselves as being surrounded by either boring trees or beautiful scenic trees casts them as objects for our experience and use. This perception transfers to persons who become a means to some end. Buber writes: The ego does not participate in any actuality nor does he gain any. He sets himself apart from everything else and tries to possess as much as possible by means of experience and use. That is his dynamics: setting himself apart and taking possession–and the object is always It, that which is not actual. He knows

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himself as a subject, but this subject can appropriate as much as it wants to, it will never gain any substance: it remains like a point, functional, that which experiences, that which uses, nothing more.21

The Turners tell us that true pilgrimage offers modern society a social critique, writing: Pilgrimage has become an implicit critique of the life-style characteristic of the encompassing social structure. Its emphasis on transcendental, rather than mundane, ends and means; its generation of communitas; its search for the roots of ancient, almost vanishing virtues as the underpinning of social life, even in its structured expressions–all have contributed to the dramatic resurgence of pilgrimage.22

Pilgrimage has the potential to transform social relations through its critique and emphasis on transcendent valuation. Social relations begin to rise out of encounter versus individual experience. In the wake of encounter the scenic or adventure tourist may begin to perceive anew. The constituents of the AT forests open themselves whether or not the hiker experiences them or discovers wonder in the meeting of encounter. Trees along the way once perceived as boring stand out after someone calls attention to them. As they manifest beyond all looking the same, our consciousness toward trees changes. The tree, however, remains itself, indifferent to our whims. There are several trees along the trail that have been called out as special. The Keffer Oak in central Virginia is indicated by a sign and described as “the largest oak tree on the AT in the South . . . Its girth is more than nineteen feet and is estimated to be three hundred years old.”23 The Dover Oak, 1,450.2 miles north of Springer Mountain and near Pawling, New York, is “reportedly the largest oak tree . . . Its girth four feet from the ground is more than twenty feet, four inches; estimated by some to be more than threehundred years old.”24 If the hiker experiences these senators as distinct from the other trees, admires them for a few minutes before continuing the journey, but never realizes that all of the surrounding trees have their own value, the forest remains a vast space of boring trees. But something more may happen. The hiker may be “drawn into a relation” wherein “the tree ceases to be an It.”25 In this the hiker comes to understand a new relationship. Merleau-Ponty writes of this kind of situation, “It is not a surveying of the body and of the world by a consciousness, but rather is my body as interposed between what is in front of me and what is behind me, my body standing in front of the upright things, in a circuit with the world, an Einfuhlung with the world, with the things, with animals, with other bodies . . .”26 In finding meaning through



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perceiving themselves as being in a circuit with all of the other bodies, new kinds of social relations form. If hikers open themselves to the alterity of the others through this perception, the spatial milieu of the AT reveals new possibilities for social interaction. This transformation of perception is spiritual, manifest in the intertwining of valuing one another, emplacement, and sacred presence. Buber writes, “Spirit in its human manifestation is man’s response to his You. . . Spirit is not in the I but between I and You.”27 He continues, “It is not like the blood that circulates in you but like the air in which you breathe. Man lives in the spirit when he is able to respond to his You. He is able to do that when he enters into this relation with his whole being. It is solely by virtue of his power to relate that man is able to live in the spirit.”28 Merleau-Ponty describes this spiritual relation as it manifests between embodied beings in a sensuous encounter: Sensation is intentional . . . I am brought into relation with an external being, whether it be in order to open myself to it or to shut myself off from it. If the qualities radiate around them a certain mode of existence, if they have the power to cast a spell and what we called just now a sacramental value, this is because the sentient subject does not posit them as objects, but enters into a sympathetic relation with them, makes them his own and finds in them his momentary law.29

As hikers continue north, this transformation of perception follows from their continued emplacement in the wilderness environment. One hundred and sixty-six miles north of Springer Mountain, they arrive at the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, and many have been walking for two weeks at this point. NATIONAL PARKS, STATE PARKS, AND RECREATION AREAS Amicalola Falls State Park is actually the first of the parks for many NOBOS, but not everyone starts there, choosing to be dropped on the forest service road one mile from the summit of Springer Mountain. For those who do start at Amicalola Falls, it is a gateway park, the entrance to the long wilderness trail, and hiker’s experiences of the park will not compare to those of the other parks along the way. Weeks of walking the AT in relative isolation from civilization will alter experiences of parks further north. After Amicalola Falls, the next recreational place along the trail is the Nantahala Outdoor Center, thirty miles south of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. There are twenty-two State Parks, two National Parks, a National Historic Park, and two National Recreation Areas along the AT. In addition, hikers will walk

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through eight National Forests, fourteen State Forests/Reserves, as well as other popular places that day and weekend hikers frequent.30 Each of these places provides a unique social/spatial experience for the long-distance hiker. Great Smoky Mountain National Park The Smoky Mountains, along the North Carolina and Tennessee border, contain the highest elevation on the entire trail and some very challenging ascents and descents. The Great Smoky Mountain National Park was designated in 1934 and established in 1940. Some of the AT within the park provides the only horseback riding in the entire two thousand miles. This may be the only section of trail where hikers share the way with horseback riders. The AT is a footpath and other modes of transportation, including horses is forbidden, except with The Great Smoky Mountain National Park. National parks have more rules and regulations to follow than do other parts of the AT. A backcountry permit is required, costing twenty dollars in 2022, and hikers must camp in designated areas or shelters. Shelters along the AT are not uniform, some made of cinderblock, others constructed from logs, and others with milled lumber. The vast majority of shelters are three-sided, lean-to type buildings with a wooden floor, whereon six to eight hikers may lay their sleeping bags out. Shelters in the park are rockwork and aesthetically pleasing. There are twelve shelters in the roughly seventy-one miles of trail in the park. For many years, these shelters were enclosed by chain link fences in order to keep hikers separated from the many bears in the park. The fences encouraged poor behavior on the part of hikers, who threw food out to hungry bears, attracting those bears to the shelter areas. During the early 2000s, fences were removed from these shelters. The last shelter on the northside of the park, Davenport Gap, still had a fence enclosing the sleeping area in 2011. When bears encroach, making it a regular habit to remain close by, the park service closes the shelter and hikers must move on to the next one. These shelters are shared by long-distance and section hikers. The density of backpackers within the park is much higher than beyond its boundaries. The mix of day hikers, sections hikers, and long-distance hikers creates a unique social atmosphere, different from beyond the boundaries of the park. Though day hikers and section hikers frequent most of the AT, their presence is more evident with these parks. From Fontana Dam the hiker climbs steeply into the Smoky Mountains, reaching Shuckstack Mountain at 3,800 feet, an elevation gain of 2,100 feet in four miles. From Shuckstack, the trail offers a less taxing ascent until Doe Knob where the AT meets the Tennessee border at 4,520 feet. The rest



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of the way through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park proceeds along the North Carolina and Tennessee border. The trail dips just below four thousand feet in Ekaneetlee Gap just a couple of miles from Doe Knob and then remains above four thousand feet until dropping out of the National Park into Davenport Gap some sixty-three miles north. Some of the highest peaks along this section are Thunderhead Mountain at 5,527 feet, Clingmans Dome—the highest point on the entire trail—at 6,643 feet, Charlies Bunion at 5,905 feet, Mount Chapman at 6,417 feet and Mount Guyot at 6,395 feet. As the hiker descends from Mount Guyot and looks down the mountain to the right, she will see the remains of an F-4 Phantom that crashed here years before.31 For the next twelve miles, the trail mostly descends into Davenport Gap, at 1,375 feet, where the Pigeon River flows down the valley and Interstate forty passes through the mountains. These high elevations mean NOBOS have a good chance of walking through snow in the early spring. Snow or not, spring is very cold on the high ridges. These ridgelines are unique in the Smoky Mountains, seemingly forming bridges between mountaintops. Sometimes the ridgeline drops precipitously on either side of the narrow trail. Much of the way, the trail on the ridges is tightly hemmed by densely packed fir trees. As I was walking along one of these fir-lined ridges a black bear dropped straight down along the trunk of a fir tree, its claws digging into the bark, breaking its descent until it hit the ground, rear end plopping hard. It started sliding down the tree when I was adjacent and only a foot away. I heard the breaking of branches and the claws scrapping along the trunk. I stopped and turned left, seeing the black blob within arm’s reach plummeting through the branches. In less than a moment after its rear end hit the ground, it dashed down the steep slope, disappearing in the dense woods. I didn’t have time to be scared. I barely processed what happened until after the bear was gone. Bear sightings are frequent along much of the AT, but in the two national parks, their populations are higher per square mile than in other areas. Passing through the park takes between four and six days. Many longdistance hikers veer off the trail at Newfound Gap, where Highway 441 winds through the rugged mountains connecting Gatlinburg, Tennessee, with Cherokee, North Carolina. Some hikers hitch-hike into Gatlinburg for resupply and spend the night at a hotel, enjoying restaurant food, replenishing calories before returning to the AT. There is a large car park at the gap, filled with automobiles of day hikers and sightseers. A nearby side road, about five miles long, leads from the highway up to Clingman’s Dome, which also has a car park and is often filled with tourists. Hiking among sightseers and day hikers is very common when the weather is good in the vicinity of these car parks.

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Shenandoah National Park Shenandoah National Park, in central Virginia, was authorized by Congress in 1926, but not established until 1935.32 Most of the land in the present-day park was privately owned. “In 1927, Virginia authorized condemnation of all private property within the boundary of the proposed park.” Of four thousand tracts of surveyed land, “1081 were purchased and given to the federal government, uprooting most of the 465 families who live on the land.”33 A similar occurrence took place in Great Smoky Mountain National Park, but the AT does not pass through previously settled land there such as Cades Cove. Like so much of AT in its entirety, there is evidence along the trail of human habitation of the mountain ecosystem in Shenandoah National Park. Construction of Skyline Drive began prior to the park opening in 1931. The parkway was built, for the most part, along the originally constructed AT. The AT had to be rerouted, but because the ideal is for the trail to follow the heights, Skyline Drive and the AT are in close proximity. Today, the AT crosses Skyline Drive twenty-eight times within the park.34 Further south the AT intersects with the Blue Ridge Parkway, which becomes Skyline Drive in the park. The first meeting of the AT and Blue Ridge Parkway happens just north of Roanoke at Black Horse Gap, 743 miles north of Springer Mountain. The AT and Blue Ridge Parkway weave back and forth from Black Horse Gap until Petites Gap, thirty-four miles north. From there the trail and the parkway parallel each other for twenty-one miles, crossing at Punchbowl Mountain Crossing, and then in another forty-seven miles, crossing at Reids Gap. This is where the AT was relocated for the ski resort at Wintergreen. From Reids Gap the AT and parkway follow each other in close proximity until the entrance to the Shenandoah National Park where the parkway becomes Skyline Drive. Hikers are acquainted with automobile tourists by the time they enter the park but encounter many more within the park boundaries. The southern entrance is 2,200 feet in elevation, 858.6 miles from Springer, and 1,326.7 miles from Katahdin. Like the Smokies, a backcountry permit is required, but in Shenandoah there is no fee. The park’s northern exit is 2,300 feet in elevation, 962.1 from Springer, and 1,223.2 miles from Katahdin. The trail through the park rolls, climbs, and descends five hundred to seven hundred feet at a time, except for a thousand-foot climb to and descent from Hightop Mountain, about fifty miles into the roughly 103 miles of park. The high point in the park is at the side trail to the summit of Stony Man Mountain, which is 3,837 feet in elevation and about seventy miles into the park. Most of the trail in the park is above 2,500 feet. Upon exiting on the northern boundary, the trail descends below two thousand feet and continues this way through the middle Appalachian states, only briefly rising a couple of dozen feet above that in Pennsylvania. Through all of West Virginia, Maryland, almost



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all of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York, hikers will walk below two thousand feet in elevation. At Bear Mountain, Connecticut, just a mile south of the Massachusetts State Line, the AT rises to 2,316 feet, the first time since Shenandoah National Park. Most of Massachusetts is also below two thousand feet until the ridge leading up to Mount Greylock, which rises to 3,491 feet. Shenandoah gives the NOBO a vastly different experience in comparison with the Great Smoky Mountains. It is only at Clingman’s Dome and Newfound Gap, in the Smokies, where car parking is available near the trail, that the two parks have similarities regarding the presence of day hikers and sightseers. Skyline Drive gives easy access to day hikers along most of the AT in Shenandoah. There are more than seventy-five pull offs along Skyline Drive, some of which are immediately adjacent to and in view of the AT. Some of these pull-offs are large enough to provide room for visitors to the park to offer meals to thru-hikers. Many former thru-hikers frequent these pull offs during the height of summer, offering current hikers good food and drink, a way of paying it back for the blessings they received while on their own hike.35 The presence of sightseers, day hikers, and former long-distance hikers gives Shenandoah a unique social character, and Skyline Drive lends to this in its spatial configuration, running parallel with the AT and in close proximity for much of the park. During my own thru-hike, while walking through Shenandoah, I experienced several hiker feeds and other social happenings beyond my relations with fellow hikers. On one occasion, as I was descending the gentle slope of Hazeltop, I passed a man and woman who were day hiking. I greeted them, passed, and continued. Long-distance hikers develop a very fast pace, and when the man started tracking my speed, staying just behind me, I wondered what was happening. After a minute or two, he asked about my hike. We chatted for a few minutes, all the while continuing at the quick pace of a long-distance hiker who is not being slowed by a steep ascent or descent. He announced that his home was in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and that he would love to show me hospitality when I was in the vicinity of Duncannon. He offered to let me spend the night and to slackpack me for a day. Slackpacking is when someone carries the heavy backpack in a vehicle, allowing the hiker to walk with only a day pack; or, in the case of this man’s offer to me, keeps the pack at his house and takes the hiker to a section of the trail with only a day pack. After walking for ten or twenty miles, the host either returns the pack, or takes the hiker back to their house, giving the hiker a ride back to the drop off point the next day. This gives long-distance hikers an opportunity to experience a short section of trail with relative ease, enjoying the brief respite from carrying their heavy burden. It also creates a unique social situation, an example of true hospitality, where strangers become acquainted over shared

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experiences connected to the AT. This unique form of hospitality sets the journey on the AT apart from other tourist activities. Upon hearing this man’s wonderful offer, I slowed down and exchanged contact information. He and his companion, his wife, and I then continued walking down the trail together. Later I discovered she was a Methodist minister, a bishop. He was a trail enthusiast. They were both on a short vacation down in Virginia, enjoying Shenandoah. We arrived at Milam Gap along Skyline Drive at mile 52.8, where their car was parked in a pull off. He then offered to take my pack up to Big Meadows, about three miles north on the AT. I eagerly threw my pack in his back seat, grabbed the brain of my pack, which functioned as a day pack, and started off to the north. The woman then called out to me, offering me a bag of fresh cherries. About a mile later, I began to rethink what had just happened. This man and woman were complete strangers. We had only shared about a mile of trail, chatting as we walked. I had just entrusted all my gear to them. What guarantee did I have that they would be there at Big Meadows with my stuff? When I did get to the rendezvous, he was standing in the trail holding a take-out box of food. He and his wife had leftover chicken cacciatore from their evening meal the night before. There was no way for me to pack this away, so we stood together as I ate the leftovers right there on the side of the trail in Big Meadows. When I did get to Duncannon, I rang the couple, and as promised, received their hospitality for two nights. He and I both play banjo, he much better than I, and in addition to slackpacking me, we shared an exchange of music and some very good meals. Another distinction between the Smokies and Shenandoah, known as the Shennies, are the waysides along Skyline Drive. Even though I had visited the Shennies many times prior to my thru-hike, I never stopped at one of the waysides. I had never even noticed them before. My focus had always been on hiking rather than stopping for food. The waysides are like camp stores, filled with much in the way of food and snacks, including ice cream and beer. On my thru-hike when I was somewhere between Thornton Gap and Elkwallow Gap, three quarters of the way through the park, I came across two elderly women who were backpacking. I immediately knew they were not long-distance hikers, being so clean and moving so gingerly down the trail. But their large packs indicated they must be doing a section. I greeted them as I passed but reconsidered moving on without asking about their condition. I stopped and turned around, facing them, and asked, “Is everything okay? Do you need any help?” They answered without hesitation, “We’re fine. We’re trying to make it to the wayside.” I asked, “What is the wayside?” They filled me in, describing the convenience, grocery, and grill combination. I asked, “Do they have beer?” The women answered in the affirmative and assured me that they would be fine. I turned and scurried down the trail, arriving at



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the Elkwallow Gap wayside in time for an afternoon meal: grilled hamburger, beer, and soft-serve ice cream. There were a couple other thru-hikers present, Jen and James, and after our meal we hiked out together, getting in another six miles before camping at Gravel Springs Hut. Similar to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, camping is more tightly controlled within the Shennies. It is prohibited for hikers to camp or spend the night in some of the three-sided structures, known as shelters in the park. Hikers may use the huts, another three-sided structure, for overnight accommodations, either camping around the hut or staying within. Because camping is restricted in both parks, long-distance hikers are less spread out in the forests along the AT. This brings more hikers together, creating opportunities for social bonding. White Mountain National Forest After Mount Greylock in Massachusetts, 3,491 feet, the AT climbs ever higher into the northeast. In Vermont the AT climbs above four thousand feet for the first time since Virginia. Killington Peak rises to 4,241 feet. In New Hampshire, Mount Moosilauke rises to 4,802 feet and on clear days provides views of the White Mountains just to the north. Because the AT has not risen above four thousand feet since The Priest in Virginia, 4,063 feet, 830 miles from Springer, until Killington Peak, 1,699 miles from Springer, the Whites loom large and intimidate NOBOS. Even though the highest mountain on the AT, Clingmans Dome, is on the Tennessee and North Carolina border, and NOBOS regularly ascended and descended 4,000–6,000-foot mountains in the south, the nearly thousand miles between the heights of Virginia and those of New Hampshire serves to create a forgetfulness of the first month and a half of struggle. The giants of the Whites appear in the north in the distance on clear days and loom large in the psyche of long-distance hikers. In addition to the anticipation of challenging ascents and descents, high peaks this far north are above treeline. The views are wonderful along these open ridges, but they are exposed to rapidly changing weather. All types of weather happen in these mountains, even snow in summer. Many recreational hikers perish in these mountains because of rapidly changing and unexpected weather conditions. When an afternoon thunderstorm suddenly manifests itself, hikers who are on the ridgeline must get off the trail and make a beeline to the forest below. Lighting strikes are a real possibility on the ridge. High winds buffet the ridgetops often, making the already challenging trail tread even more difficult. Franconia Ridge, climbing up to Mount Liberty, served as one of my most challenging days on my thru-hike. I had been extremely sick during the three

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days prior to the climb that day. I thought it was from bad apples, gathered from an old orchard south of Mount Moosilauke, somewhere near Wentworth, New Hampshire. It hit me in the morning, while staying at Beaver Brook Shelter on the north side of Mount Moosilauke. The 1,500-foot descent in a mile and a half, on a rock slab next to cascading water, and with the aid of wood steps anchored into stone, was made more precarious because my stomach had become a volcano. After continuing to hike in this condition the next day, a very bad decision, climbing over South and North Kinsman Mountains, I thought about staying in Lincoln, a nearby town, until the stomach issue eased. In the late morning I resolved to continue the hike and took a shuttle out to Franconia Notch. I climbed the two miles in two thousand feet of elevation gain up to Liberty Springs Tentsite, where I fell onto a tent platform, exhausted and nauseous. My fellow hikers, Pebbles, Lightfoot, and Sherpa, encouraged me to continue as the wind had started blowing and the atmosphere was getting colder. Another hiker, Spit Walker, came up and expressed real fear in face of the coming conditions. I climbed into my sleeping bag and lay there; it was still morning. The caretaker asked me if I were spending the night? I was not sure, but if I continued to feel sick, I would. He indicated that some very foul weather was supposed to arrive by late afternoon. It was supposed to get dangerously cold. About an hour later, I lost what little was left in my stomach, which made me feel better. I packed up the sleeping bag, deciding to push over the mountain, and began to ascend again. I climbed another 2,500 feet in three miles reaching the summit of Mount Lincoln. While walking the Franconia Ridge Trail and rising above treeline, I was buffeted by forty to fifty mile per hour winds, precursors of the looming storm. See figure 3.1. Just below treeline, all the fir trees are stunted, being so often pounded by high winds. The gusts grabbed my pack and nearly threw me off of the mountain more than a dozen times. The view was fantastic, but I was unable to really enjoy it due to my condition, the wind, and the challenge of the trail tread. This ridgeline presents difficulty in the best of weather conditions. When I reached the summit of Mount Lafayette, a cloud formed and enveloped me. I continued slowly through the thick fog, not wanting to stop, trying to keep my body heat up with the exertion of navigating the trail. Descending Mount Lafayette, slowly picking my way down the rock face while continuing to be pummeled by the wind, I lost the trail a couple of times. I was able to find my way back, seeing day hikers ascending toward me. I came across another thru-hiker named Scribbles. She encouraged me and guided me along. We had one more very difficult climb, the nearly thousand-foot ascent of Mount Garfield, 4,500 feet, in less than a mile. Because



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Figure 3.1.  The Author Buffeted by Strong Winds along Franconia Ridge, White Mountains, New Hampshire. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

I could not eat, my energy level dropped, and I struggled over the mountain. The view was magnificent. We then descended just as steeply as the ascent. We arrived at Garfield Ridge Shelter, finding friends—Spit Walker, who was with a section hiker, Truckin, and Pancho. The caretaker told us of the many college groups using the White Mountains at this time. There were thirty-five from Harvard and Yale present, tenting in the area. The day before, two NOBOS had come just as a thunderstorm was starting, lightning striking just above their heads as they arrived. One Harvard group needed rescue due to the conditions. Soon enough the storm predicted for this day hit with fury. Lightening flashed and thunder boomed as we sat in the shelter. The rain came down in volumes, sounding as it pelted the metal roof of our shelter. The temperature did drop down into the thirties that night. The next day as Scibbles and I continued together, the trail had become a river. At one point, we came to a nearly vertical drop. The river we were walking through became a waterfall, and there I stood at its summit. I thought we must have veered from the trail and turned to tell Scibbles that we needed to find the AT again. She answered, “You’re standing on the AT right now.” In disbelief I answered, “No way! This is a waterfall.” She pointed to the tree just next to me. On the side of the tree visible to Scribbles but invisible to me was a white blaze. Sure

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enough, the rain the night before had turned this part of the trail into a waterfall. We had to descend through the water with a nearly vertical drop. The Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) maintains the trails in the White Mountain National Forest, from Kinsman Notch in New Hampshire to Grafton Notch in Maine, 120 miles. The tent sites and campsites, unlike other camping along the AT, require a fee: $15 per night as of 2022.36 Huts sleep from thirty-six to ninety persons and cost between $82 and $167 per day. These huts are staffed by a crew and include bunk, pillow, blanket, bathroom, and water; there are no showers. The cost prohibits most long-distance hikers from taking advantage of the accommodations. Each of the huts offers a “work for stay.” A few thru-hikers are given minimal accommodations for their labor. I took part in the “work for stay” on two separate occasions. I scrubbed pots and pans for labor in one. I swept the floor and cleaned out the freezer in the other. After the paying guests are finished eating and have exited the chow hall, thruhikers are allowed to eat the leftovers. Then, at the end of the evening, dining tables are moved to the side and thru-hikers sleep on the floor. See figure 3.2. The AT has unique signage with alternate names through the Whites. For example, a few of these include the Mt. Kinsman Trail after descending North Kinsman Mountain; after the Kinsman Pond Shelter, the trail is named

Figure 3.2.  Thru-Hikers Doing Work-for-Stay, Sleeping in the Dining Area, Carter Notch Hut, Wildcats, New Hampshire. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.



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Kinsman Pond Trail; climbing Franconia Ridge is referred to on signage as the Franconia Ridge Trail; after Zealand Mountain the trail is named Zeacliff Trail; after Mount Franklin the trail is named Mt. Monroe Loop Trail. Some of these trails are between 0.1 and 0.5 miles long, such as the Great Gulf Trail, the Westside Trail, Mt. Clay Loop Trail, and Jewell Trail all just north of Mount Washington. This can be very confusing to hikers who have walked almost two thousand miles on the same trail, a trail that now has many other names and trail blazes. “Every summer, the AMC serves tens of thousands of backpackers and campers at its backcountry shelters and campsites in the White Mountain National Forest.”37 There are eleven tent sites/campsites/shelters in the Whites that charge a $15 fee. Huts from south to north are Lonesome Lake Hut about fourteen miles from Kinsman Notch and New Hampshire Highway 112, and 2.5 miles from North Kinsman Mountain; Mount Lafayette, Greenleaf Hut, which is six miles from Franconia Notch and U.S. Highway 3, then 1.1 miles down a side trail; Galehead Hut, which is about thirteen miles from Franconia Notch; Zealand Falls Hut, which is about twenty miles north of Franconia Notch; Mizpah Spring Hut, which is about six miles north of Crawford Notch and U.S. Highway 302; Lakes of the Clouds Hut, which is about eleven miles north of Crawford Notch and about a mile and a half south of the summit of Mount Washington, the high point in the White Mountains and the Presidential Range; Madison Spring Hut, which is about 5.5 miles north of Mount Washington and about eight miles south of Pinkham Notch and New Hampshire Highway 16; finally, Carter Notch Hut, which is about 5.5 miles north of Pinkham Notch and about fifteen miles from Gorham and the end of the White Mountains. Mount Moosilauke is the first of the peaks in the White Mountains at 4802 feet. From New Hampshire Highway 25 to Gorham, at the end of the Whites, is roughly one hundred miles. Hikers climb Mount Moosilauke after crossing New Hampshire Highway 25, the trail gently rises, gaining about five hundred feet in two miles. The AT then gains about 3,500 feet in the next 3.5 miles, an extremely strenuous hike. From Beaver Brooke Shelter, on the northern slope of the mountain, hikers can look further north, about twentyfive miles via trail, and see Franconia Ridge with Mount Lincoln and Mount Lafayette, both above five thousand feet, silhouetted against the sky. The trail descends from Mount Moosilauke into Kinsman Notch, at 1,812 feet, crosses Highway 112, and then ascends both South and North Kinsman Mountains, each around four thousand feet. The hiker then descends into Franconia Notch, at 1,450 feet before the extremely taxing hike up to Franconia Ridge, a gain of nearly four thousand feet in the next six miles. From Franconia Ridge to Zealand Mountain, a little more than ten miles, the hiker twice descends

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one thousand feet and twice regains that elevation. From Zealand Mountain to Crawford Notch, a little more than ten miles, the trail dips down to 1,277 feet. This section provides the most leisure in walking with a comparatively gentle descent of 1,500 feet over 3.5 miles, then a relatively level six-mile amble before a final descent of 1,500 feet over the last three miles. From Crawford Notch the trail ascends the Presidential Range, first climbing 2,500 feet in the three miles to Mount Webster, at 3,910 feet. From here it is about ten miles to the high point in the Whites, Mount Washington, at 6,288 feet. From Mount Washington to Mount Madison, nearly six miles, the trail remains above treeline and hikers must scramble over rocks and boulders, following cairns that mark the way. This rocky section requires full attention, navigating rough terrain, branching side trails, and is exhausting as well. From Mount Madison the trail descends steeply over these rocks before entering the trees again, a loss of nearly three thousand feet in less than three miles. From the base of the mountain at Osgood Campsite the trail enters Pinkham Notch, about six miles of hiking between two thousand and 2,500 feet. After Pinkham Notch the hiker again ascends, this will be the final range in the Whites, the Wildcats, about eighteen miles over ten mountain peaks. On clear days, the views of the Presidential Range to the south are stunning. Mount Moriah at 4,049 feet is the last peak in the Whites. The trail then descends more than three thousand feet to U.S. 2 and Gorham, New Hampshire. State Parks The trail passes through twenty-two state parks, one in Georgia, two in Virginia, three in Maryland, three in Pennsylvania, two in New Jersey, five in New York, one in Connecticut, one in Vermont, three in New Hampshire, and culminates at Baxter State Park in Maine.38 I have already mentioned both Amicalola Falls State Park in Georgia, site of the approach to Springer Mountain, and Grayson Highlands State Park in Virginia, near the two highest mountains in that state. Though the AT only passes through the Grayson Highland State Park for three miles, both to the north and south of the park hikers are placed within the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area. Scenic tourists, day hikers, and overnight backpackers populate the area, attracted by the relative open country, wild ponies, and high elevation peaks offering stunning panoramic views toward the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee. From Whitetop Mountain long-distance hikers may look south on a clear day and make out the route they took from the Roan Highlands. Sharing the trail with so many other hikers gives the journey a more diverse social aspect. North of Shenandoah National Park, the AT tracks through Sky Meadows State Park for about a mile, then drops to Ashby Gap. Here the AT takes



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hikers through the notorious “roller coaster.” The ridgeline here has been occupied by Mount Weather, a federal government facility used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and designated as an emergency evacuation location for top government officials in case of a national crisis. The AT, not able to follow the ridgeline, must drop down and use the forests in the spurs just to the west of the ridge. The resulting rollercoaster involves steep ascents and descents that follow each other in immediate succession, starting at 996 miles north of Springer Mountain and ending a couple of miles north of the West Virginia line, roughly fifteen miles of rolling trail. When I approached this section and looked on the profile map, it did not look as challenging as its reputation suggested. The ascents were all less than nine hundred feet. But the June heat and humidity combined with the constant climbing and descending exhausted me. At one of the low elevation points there was a stream running through the valley; I dropped my pack and plunged into the cool waters to find relief. Almost twenty miles north of the rollercoaster the AT descends into Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, a nearly thousand-foot descent into the valley at the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac Rivers, 1,025 miles north of Springer Mountain and 312 feet of elevation. The hiker crosses the Shenandoah River while walking on the side of Highway 340. Here the trail enters the Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, which includes the town. The AT leaves the highway and enters the town woods, paralleling Washington Street, the town’s major road. There is a side trail to Washington Street and the location of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy headquarters, on the corner of Storer College Place and Washington Street. Here long-distance hikers check in, enter their names in the register, and enjoy fellowship with the staff. Some go back to the trail while others choose to walk down Washington Street to The Point, very close to the John Brown Museum. Harpers Ferry is the site of several Civil War battles and where John Brown and his followers raided the federal armory. There are a number of restaurants in the area and hikers mix with historical tourists. From The Point, hikers use the Goodloe E. Bryon Memorial Footbridge, crossing the Potomac River into Maryland. Just across the river are the Maryland Heights, a rock escarpment overlooking the river. Hikers unfamiliar with the area may be thinking they will have to climb the heights to get back on the ridgeline north. But this is not the case. On the Maryland side of the river, hikers come to the Appalachian Trail and C&O Canal Towpath, a rails-to-trails path shared by hikers and bikers. This combined use trail leads downriver for about five miles, a very nice flat section overlooking the rapids along the Potomac, where hikers will, in good weather, most likely see kayakers, rafters, and canoers.

Figure 3.3.  Midpoint Sign, Pennsylvania. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.



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The Maryland section of the AT is a little over forty miles and after leaving the Potomac River valley gently rolls at elevations between 900 and 1,800 feet, with one place at 1,950 feet (High Rock). Gathland State Park, the home of the American Civil War correspondent, George Alfred Townsend, and a memorial to war correspondents, is barely recognizable as a state park. Both the Washington Monument, a cylindrical stone tower near Boonsboro, and Annapolis Rock evidence more use from day hikers. Pen Mar County Park marks the Mason-Dixon Line and the border with Pennsylvania, 1,067 miles north of Springer and 1,250 feet of elevation. The AT tracks through the middle of this day-use park, and during operating hours the place is well used by families enjoying the facilities. Caledonia State Park, 1,085 miles north of Springer, 1,109 miles south of Katahdin and 960 feet of elevation is the first within Pennsylvania and near the half-way point on the AT. The half-way point shifts each year as trail maintainers create switchbacks and relocate the trail along short sections, sometimes to let eroded tread heal. In 2022 the Midpoint Sign was located 0.3 miles north of Toms Run Shelter. See figure 3.3. When I thru-hiked in 2011 the Midpoint sign was about fifteen miles south of that. Caledonia State Park is very popular with the local population and often packed with picnickers. Some long-distance hikers are very adept at securing extra food from picnickers. This common practice has been dubbed “the art of yogi,” or “yogi-ing.” These parks are an intensified convergence of the social/spatial journey, and “the art of yogi” is a great example of social entrepreneurship wherein the successful hiker pitches a need to a group of people who have an abundance of wealth—that translates to food for longdistance hikers—in order to receive an investment. Or, the “yogi” is simply someone with a high social IQ and knows the art of the pitch. In addition to a large picnic area, the park also has a swimming pool. Hikers use the pool showers for a highly needed washing. I also washed my clothes in the shower. Another feature for those of us who have no “yogi” skills is a snack bar where hikers can order cheeseburgers and fries, then for dessert enjoy ice cream. Only thirty miles north of Caledonia is Pine Grove Furnace State Park, 1,113 miles north of Springer, 1,081 miles south of Katahdin and 850 feet in elevation. The Ironmasters Mansion, a hiker hostel, and the Appalachian Trail Museum, just a few meters up the trail, are near the south entrance to the park. The museum has a wonderful collection, and many hikers spend time browsing through the place. Also next to the hostel is the Pine Grove General Store, a camp store. Here is the place hikers take the “half-gallon challenge.” This is an attempt to eat a half-gallon of ice cream in less than an hour. Many who try hear from their bellies for the rest of the day. I skipped the challenge, preferring a cheeseburger and a simple ice-cream cone afterward. Less than

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a half mile north is Fuller Lake, where there is a sand beach and swimming. In summer the lake and beach are packed with swimmers. After a long swim here, I took a shower, culminating in two showers in two days, what a privilege for a long-distance hiker. There is also a snack bar at the lake where hikers can order sausages from the grill. The AT through Pennsylvania is always in close proximity to populations that easily access the mountains. Most thru-hikers are in this area during the month of June, which makes for many day hikers frequenting the trail. The proximity to large numbers of people and the summer months combine to influence the social/spatial milieu in Pennsylvania. Much of the trail in the state follows the ridgeline staying around 1,500 feet in elevation, dropping into gaps of around four hundred feet a few times. The longest flat and low elevation section on the entire AT is in the Cumberland Valley, about fifteen miles long and also the location of a trail town: Boiling Springs. Pennsylvania has a notorious reputation for an abundance of sharp rocks on the trail tread. As I entered the state, I attended Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of phenomenological description that was mentioned in chapter two: “To turn back to the things themselves is to return to that world prior to knowledge of which knowledge speaks,”39 and “The real must be described and not constructed or constituted.”40 I did not want to project a reputed construction onto the AT at any point, let alone here. I did not find rocks any more numerous or sharp here than further south. It seemed to me that rocks were sharp and numerous everywhere. True, some parts of the trail have trail tread that facilitates easier walking. But the longest stretch of such smooth and relatively level trail tread was here in Pennsylvania, the Cumberland Valley. After climbing Katahdin, I reflected on the infamous rocks of Pennsylvania and concluded that the perception was a projection. What I did find here, especially north of Duncannon, were piles of rock, deposited naturally in some prehistoric geological event, either by the receding ice age glaciers or the eroding Appalachian Mountains themselves. Rattlesnakes like to nest in these rocks, and I was nearly struck by one about ten miles north off the Susquehanna River. I took to calling these piles rock gardens. The trail took us over many of these, as it did in every state. The Delaware Water Gap and Delaware River border New Jersey at 1,297 miles north of Springer and 897 miles south of Katahdin. On the New Jersey side the AT passes through the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area, another place highly frequented by day hikers. Sunfish Pond, the first glacial pond on the trail, shows evidence of these day hikers with the many rock cairns built along the shoreline. New Jersey takes up only seventy-two miles of trail and the AT passes into New York on a ridge, tracking over large boulders on top, creating great views when the weather is clear. About eighteen miles north of the state line,



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the trail descends, crosses I-87 and enters Harriman State Park at 806 miles south of Katahdin and 560 feet in elevation. The famous Lemon Squeezer is about a mile from here, a rock formation wherein the hiker walks into a crevasse that continually narrows, requiring the removal of the pack before climbing up and out of the fissure. Bear Mountain State Park is also highly frequented by day hikers. New York City is only fifty miles down the Hudson River. The park also has a zoo, the lowest point in elevation on the AT at 124 feet. As with many of the parks in Pennsylvania, walking through Bear Mountain feels like passing through a city. The Bear Mountain Bridge takes hikers across the Hudson River and onto N.Y. Route 9D. Traffic along this short stretch prior to the trail leaving the pavement is nerve racking. In a little less than twenty miles hikers arrive at Clarence Fahnestock State Park, also in New York. There is a half mile access trail to the park campground, near Canopus Lake. The camping is free to long-distance hikers. At the lake there is a concession stand with hot food and a shower nearby. The lake is a favorite swimming hole for people from the area. Just as with other state parks in the middle section of the AT, a distinct social/spatial atmosphere with picnickers, swimmers, and hikers sets these places apart from the wilderness. After swimming in the lake, eating a cheeseburger, and setting up my tent in the camping area, I changed my mind about staying there for the night. The desire to hike overcame me, and I packed everything up and set out on the AT that evening, walking a few miles to an overlook. I arrived just after sunset and could see the lake far below. From the top of the escarpment I could hear the banter of campers that evening. The New York section of the AT is ninety miles long. Most of the rolling hills are below one thousand feet, the only heights above being Bear Mountain at 1,305 feet, Shenandoah Mountain at 1,282, Mount Egbert at 1,329 and West Mountain at 1,200. Just seven miles from the Connecticut border is a rustic train stop, just a small platform, no building. The commuter train stops at the station on Saturdays and Sundays, taking passengers to Grand Central Station, a two and a quarter hour ride to New York City. The AT crosses into Connecticut at four hundred feet in elevation and 734 miles from Mount Katahdin. The Connecticut section of the AT is fifty-one miles long and the high point on Bear Mountain rises up to 2,316 feet in elevation. In Massachusetts the AT rises and falls more precipitously and the elevations remain above one thousand feet for the most part. The high point is Mount Greylock at 3,491 feet in elevation and 603 miles south of Mount Katahdin. Here the AT enters Mount Greylock State Reserve. There is a paved road to the top of the mountain, where a large War Memorial towers high

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above the top of the mountain. Bascom Lodge is also located at the top, just meters away from the memorial. There are numerous parking places around the lodge and memorial, bringing sightseers as well as day hikers. The trails on Mount Greylock are brimming with these folks. Hikers who stop for a bite to eat at the lodge will mix with people who have never dreamed of a long-distance hike. Some have never heard of this kind of hiking and marvel at hearing that the hiker started in Georgia almost 1,600 miles to the south. The Massachusetts and Vermont State Line is just ten miles north of Mount Greylock, 593 miles from Katahdin and 2,330 feet in elevation. As with New York, long-distance hikers are in Massachusetts for ninety miles. There is only one state park in Vermont, but Killington Peak and surrounding forests have many side trails creating a social/spatial milieu similar to a park. These trails are popular amongst day hikers. Cooper Lodge, a warming hut at the junction of the AT and a blue blazed trail to the summit of Killington Peak, at 4,241 feet in elevation, is typically full of day hikers who stop for a break in the late morning and early afternoons. My hiking companion, Brother of the Wind, accidentally turned onto one of the side trails and walked more than a mile before realizing he hadn’t seen any white blazes. At the bottom of the northern side of Killington Peak the AT crosses over U.S. 4 in the gap, 1,880 feet of elevation and 489 miles to Katahdin. The Inn at the Long Trail sits beside the highway at the crossing. The inn is very popular amongst thru-hikers, serving good food and beer, including live music. Hikers may choose to stay at the inn or camp across the street in a grass field owned by the inn. Here is a rare opportunity to enjoy some social nightlife. On my thru-hike there were four long-distance hikers and a day hiker camping together in the field. After enjoying some of the music in the bar, we went across the street to the camping, made a fire, and created our own music. The day hiker had some instruments in her car: a guitar, drum, and other percussion instruments. I pulled out my harmonica, and we enjoyed a jam session under the trees. Here the Long Trail and the AT split. The two trails share the same path from the Massachusetts border to the Inn at the Long Trail. Just three miles north is Gifford Woods State Park. Some thru-hikers choose to camp here amongst the other campers. The park is located along the shore of Kent Pond, 1,450 feet in elevation and 485 miles south of Katahdin. Forty-three miles north is the Vermont and New Hampshire border and the twin trail towns of Norwich, Vermont, and Hanover, New Hampshire. The Connecticut River divides the two states. Baxter State Park is the home of Mount Katahdin, at the end of the hundred-mile wilderness. Hikers enter the park at Abol Bridge, a rustic camping. There is only a hiker’s entrance to the park here, no road into the park. It is ten miles through the park to the Birches Camping, a designated area for thru-



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hikers to spend the night before ascending Katahdin. Baxter is a wilderness park and therefore provides a unique social/spatial milieu. There are no paved roads in the park, no electricity, no camping areas for vehicles. The rules are strict. This is a park that is centered on wildlife, humans are merely visitors. However, because long-distance hikers are at the end of their journey, the camping at the Birches offers a special last place for fellowship. Toward the end of the season, September through mid-October, inclement weather causes the rangers to close the mountain to hikers. The various trails up to the summit of Mount Katahdin close to hikers every year on October 15. In 2003, I was conducting research on the AT in Baxter State Park on Mount Katahdin. I arrived on October 8 and found that the mountain had been closed for about a week due to snow and ice. Forty thru-hikers filled the camping at the base of the Hunt Trail, the route AT hikers take to the summit. One of the hikers had tried sneaking up the mountain a day before and was caught. His pack was confiscated, and he was banned for life from the park. On October 9, the mountain opened back up and all the waiting hikers summited. ANGELS AND MAGIC Trail Angel is a designation given to persons who perform extraordinary acts of kindness toward both section and long-distance hikers. In some cases, the Trail Angel remains anonymous, their deed is recognized as having been provided as an act of kindness. Angels who become known usually offer some gift while in the presence of hikers. Some Trail Angels give rides to hikers who go into town for resupply. There are shuttle services that charge a fee, but Trail Angels do this as an act of grace. Trail Angels could provide knowledge, advice, lodging, food, water, or first aid, to name just a few examples. Sometimes Trail Angels are associated with Trail Magic, to be discussed below. One example of a Trail Angel I met happened where the AT crosses Blue Mountain Summit Road in Pennsylvania, 1,246 miles north of Springer Mountain, where I came to a hiker feed being conducted by the Appalachian Mountain Club. They had hotdogs on the grill, fresh salad, corn casserole, fruit and more. I met a woman named Knitting Bull, who was one of the trail angels at the feed. She told me there was a twenty-five-mile section just ahead with no water source, all the springs had dried up. She offered to leave jugs of water for me at a road crossing before the Leroy A. Smith Shelter. I asked if she could leave some for my friends as well? When we did get to the road crossing the next day, she had deposited eight gallons of water with my trail name attached.

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Another example that illustrates the overlap of angels and magic, as well as introduces hospitality, happened near Moxie Pond in Maine. About fifteen of us, both long-distance hikers and a couple of section hikers, spent the night at Pierce Pond Lean-to, 155 miles south of Katahdin and 1,150 feet in elevation. Soul Slasher and I walked a few hundred meters through the woods to Tim Harrison’s Pierce Pond Camps, making reservations for a morning breakfast. Tim makes American Flag pancakes—red, white, and blue—with strawberry, powdered sugar, and blueberries. Ten of us enjoyed the breakfast in the morning then hiked to the Kennebec River crossing, the only ferry on the AT. A ferryman takes hikers across the river in a canoe as the river has claimed the lives of many hikers in its strong current. The ferryman offered to take us in his van down to Northern Outdoor Adventure and Brewery. The whole hiking crew opted for the brewpub, and we found ourselves enjoying a second hot meal that day. While eating burgers, drinking beer, and watching the baseball playoffs on the big screen, a woman at the next table interrupted and asked us if we were thru-hiking. She then invited us to her house, near Moxie Pond, for cupcakes. Her house was about twelve miles north on the AT. She said if we did come, we could pitch tents in her garden. It was around 2 p.m., so Truckin, Soul Slasher, and I decided to attempt the hike over Pleasant Pond Mountain, at 2,477 feet in elevation, a near two-thousandfoot climb, and eat some cupcakes. We found her cabin before dusk. She and her raft-guide boyfriend invited us in and offered to cook us a spaghetti dinner with beer for beverages. The cupcakes were for dessert. This made for three hot meals in a single day! As we sat waiting for the meal, she offered to let us sleep in a spare room. Truckin, Soul Slasher, and I received the meal from this Trail Angel; her gift is what is commonly referred to as trail magic. Combining the giving and receiving of this hospitality with the designation trail magic shows an aporia in relation to long-distance hikers, or pilgrims, as liminal personae versus tourists. It also shows magic to be the wrong designation when considering a long-distance hike as a spiritual journey, or pilgrimage. In chapter 2, I discussed the distinction between hikers who were on a spiritual journey versus those who were scenic tourists. Pilgrims, or those on spiritual journey, are strangers in the places through which they walk. As such they are liminal personae. Scenic tourists, on the other hand, have purchased a right to call a place their temporary home, or, their gaze colonizes space, creating the landscape through which they pass. These two approaches, pilgrim versus tourist, show a distinction between conditional and unconditional hospitality. Scenic tourists exchange something of value and thereby receive conditional hospitality provided by institutions of the recreation industry.



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The designation, trail magic, ambiguates hospitality. In order to see this, we need to explore the various meanings of magic. Magic has been associated with fantasy literature. J. R. R. Tolkien notes that such magical literature is a “vehicle of Mystery.”41 Mystery fits well with trail magic in some cases because the gift appears as if out of nowhere, it is unexpected. However, Tolkien cautions that magic is the wrong word to convey mystery. He writes, “Magic should be reserved for the operations of the Magician.”42 Clearly those Trail Angels who gift hikers are not magicians. Tolkien goes on, “Magic produces, or pretends to produce, an alteration in the Primary World.”43 That is, magic alters the regular operation of something’s nature. Magic, writes Tolkien, “is not an art but a technique; its desire is power in this world, domination of things and wills.”44 Clearly, those who gift hikers do not seek power or the domination of things or wills. But what if we turn this around and see the hiker as the magician, the hiker as performing magic? Is the hiker employing a power? Leeuw writes, “Magic is certainly manifested by power; to employ power, however, is not in itself to act magically.”45 He goes on to write, “whatever is addressed to nameless Power is magic.”46 Neither the hiker nor the angel are a nameless Power. There is another term, more appropriate for pilgrimage or sacred journey than magic, the Arabian baraka, which means blessing. Leeuw writes, “Power may be assigned to some definite bearer or possessor from whom it emanates. . .. An emanation from holy men and closely connected with their graves; it is acquired by pilgrimage.”47 Baraka can also be associated with a saint. Baraka shows human fascination with divine power, longing to be in proximity with the Holy through which a blessing is received. Magic, on the other hand, involves a different connection to power. In this connection to power pilgrims receive blessing but it is associated with a different kind of power, one in which the pilgrim merits power as a result of the long journey. In order to receive this kind of power, special attention is focused on performing rituals correctly while on the journey. Failing to perform correctly negates reception of the power. Buber distinguishes between prayer and magic writing, “Magic wants to be effective without entering into any relationship and performs its arts in the void.”48 The one performing magic wrests power from the other, receiving that power through technique, reciting a formula for example. Buber writes that in prayer we step “before the countenance.”49 Levinas points to the power of the countenance writing, “The Other becomes my neighbor precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question.”50 In prayer we are summoned, called “before the countenance” and in this presence called “into question,” a measuring. Prayer becomes an encounter with Power that

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cannot be manipulated in the performance of some art, cannot be made our own. Prayer, in this light, is a dialogic relationship between two who remain transcendent to one another. In magic, the power of the one is transferred to the other, negating the transcendence of the one whose power is received. In dialogue, on the other hand, a blessing may be received wherein the transcendence of the one giving remains. In baraka the gift of blessing happens in the relationship made rich through the journey and all of the happenings along the way. The giver as transcendent presents herself and exceeds “the idea of the other in me . . . destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure.”51 That is, exceeds my preconceived image of the other and thereby opens me to the gift of the giver. This relationship with the transcendent Other is “a departure from all that is usual and familiar” and an encounter with Power.52 Magic, as has been shown, involves manipulation. Recipients of magic, who are also the practitioners, are implicated in bringing about a desired outcome and thereby enter into an economy of exchange. This exchange negates gifts of hospitality. Performing the ritual correctly merits the gift. Dialogic prayer and the blessing following may exceed any economy of exchange. Jean Luc Marion, interacting with Jacques Derrida and his deconstruction of the gift, shows a way that the gift may manifest beyond any economy of exchange. Marion writes, “the gift begins and in fact ends as soon as the giver envisions that he owes something to someone, when he admits that he could be a debtor, and thus a recipient.”53 Performing magic causes the giver to be bound to giving. The giver becomes a debtor through the correct performance of ritual by the recipient, the proper formula recited. Marion points out that in this performance or recitation the gift is annulled, “it does not belong to the economy of exchange.” He goes on to elaborate: If one understands loving as giving in a privileged sense, this gift can only remain itself inasmuch as it does not diminish itself in an exchange, wherein reciprocity would annul gratuity. In order to give itself, the gift requires that it decide itself as a gift beginning with itself alone, and that it give without return, without response or reimbursement.54

Marion points to one of Christ’s eschatological parables that illustrates the gift that exceeds any economy of exchange. From Matthew 25:37, “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?” In this story none of the righteous have seen the recipient of their gift. The righteous givers did not give out of an expectation of exchange. Neither party are in debt to each other. In fact, they are invisible to each other. He writes, “This invisibility manifests the bracketing of the recipient without dispute. Nevertheless, far



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from forbidding or weakening the gift, this invisibility doubles it by universalizing it: every human being may discern the face of the recipient precisely because this face remains invisible.”55 Marion continues, “The impossibility of identifying the recipient par excellence Christ, permits us to let the gift emerge on every other human face; Christ’s withdrawal permits the ‘least of his brothers’ to rise and offer himself to the gift as a recipient’s face.”56 The blessing of baraka happens in fellowship (koinónia). Rather than trail magic, power opens hikers to the other and discovers a communion. Two strangers who remain strangers, one not swallowed up in the other, find a calling to respond in love, a giving of true hospitality, an act of grace. This interpretation understands the gift that Truckin, Soul Slasher, and I received as grace. Neither we nor the woman who invited us into her home participated in any economy of exchange. Her gift, given freely and without condition, and our reception, without feeling a need to reciprocate, is an example of grace. We as long-distance hikers were liminal personae rather than tourists; we were required to give nothing in exchange for her hospitality. We could have stepped out of our liminality, as already had happened in the lunch at the Kennebec River Brewery, where we temporarily became tourists engaging in an economy of exchange. Derrida writes, absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner . . . but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names.57

This Trail Angel opened her cabin on Moxie Pond without condition. She saw that we were thru-hikers, which placed us beyond status: pilgrims and longdistance hikers, as liminal personae, exist beyond cultural classifications. Turner writes, “these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space.”58 He goes on to describe these persons has having “no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system.”59 As liminal personae, all we had was our trail names. We lived a kind of dual existence: journeying beyond the boundaries of the marketplace reality but at times seeming to inhabit the same marketplace and entering into an economy of exchange. Trail magic may become an aspect of the economy of exchange, may indeed be understood as a manipulation of the environment. If so, it is best understood as magic. However, if trail magic operates outside of the economy of exchange, hikers receive baraka, a gift of grace. In that case, the phenomenon is better understood as trail grace.

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FESTIVALS The number of festivals associated with the AT fluctuates yearly. Among the more stable festivals are the Appalachian Trail Kick Off (ATKO), held at Amicalola Falls State Park in early March; the Dahlonega Trail Fest, held in past years in either spring or fall, Dahlonega, Georgia; the April Fools Trail Fest held in Franklin, North Carolina; the Round Hill Appalachian Trail Festival held on June 11, 2022, in Round Hill, Virginia; and in September, the Trail’s End Festival held in Millinocket, Maine to celebrate the end of the hiking season. The largest of these festivals is the Trail Days Festival, held in Damascus, Virginia, which started in 1987. Trail Days serves as a celebration of those currently hiking as well as a grand reunion of past year’s hikers. It is held in the middle of May. This means some of the current year’s thru-hikers are far to the north, having started in Georgia in late February. Others, who started later, in April, are still to the south. Those hikers, far north or south, find rides or hitchhike to Damascus for the festival. Many hike into Damascus right on schedule. Their walking journey from the Smokies involves some anticipation for the carnival atmosphere and fellowship. The Pigeon River, near the northern boundary of The Smoky Mountain National Park, is 240 miles north of Springer Mountain and from here thru-hikers walk 130 miles to Damascus, seemingly being pulled by the magnet of the festival. By the time these thru-hikers complete the Smokies they are completely attuned to the rigors of long-distance hiking. The section from the Smokies to Virginia has some of the highest mountains on the entire AT, and the challenging trail tread, steep ascents and descents continue. For the past twenty years I have been bringing my students to this section of the trail and hiking with them into Damascus while conducting ethnographic research. We walk about ten miles each day. The terrain is almost too much for these college students who have not yet been attuned to the AT. For ten years, I had them walk a fifteen-mile section on one day of our two-week trip, from Vandeventer Shelter, 437 miles north of Springer Mountain to Double Springs Shelter, 452 miles north of Springer. In order to get the whole group through this hike, we had to begin at five in the morning, walk four miles before stopping for breakfast, and then continue through the day. Some of the students had a difficult time making the fifteen miles before dark. Thru-hikers, in contrast, are walking twenty-plus miles each day, with plenty of daylight left at the end. Hiking to Damascus These thru-hikers have been hearing about Trail Days from hiker feeds, hostels, and veteran thru-hikers who frequent the trail. After crossing the



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Pigeon River on a paved road bridge, just north of park, the trail takes the NOBO on a six-mile ascent of Snowbird Mountain, 2,888 feet of elevation gain, to a grassy bald at 4,263 feet. On a clear day the hiker can see the valley containing Asheville to the east. After a 1,200-foot drop into Deep Gap—a very common name for a gap in the southern Appalachians—and then another ascent to 4,629 feet, all in less than ten miles, the hiker reaches one of the most spectacular balds on the entire AT, Max Patch, where miles of distant mountains fading to the horizon can be seen in all directions. The Smoky Mountains rise high and dominate the southern prospect, the heights of Mount Mitchell—the highest peak in the eastern United States—rises up to the east, the Roan Highlands greets one’s gaze to the northeast, and the Tennessee Valley stretches out in the west and northwest. From this vantage many NOBOS watch both sunset and sunrise from their chosen campsite, at least that was possible until 2021. The U.S. Forest Service has now closed Max Patch to camping and fires. The bald closes one hour after sunset and opens one hour before sunrise.60 When I sat on top of the bald eating an evening meal, I could see storm clouds moving toward me as they hovered over the Smoky Mountains. A high bald is the last place one wants to camp in a storm. Not only does the grassy knob provide no shelter from the blasting wind and rain, it projects the campsite into the sky and begs lighting to strike. After eating I walked another couple of miles to Roaring Fork Shelter and weathered the storm, arriving before the downpour. From Roaring Fork Shelter up to the slopes of Bluff Mountain the trail passes through highland valleys, along and across streams, and through thick rhododendron. These groves provide the green tunnels that characterize so much of the AT in the south and continuing up into the northeast. From Bluff Mountain at 4,686 feet, the trail drops over the next ten miles till it reaches the French Broad River at Hot Springs, North Carolina at 1349 feet. Exiting the Smoky Mountains, the trail continues along the border and then dips into North Carolina just before Bluff Mountain. Hot Springs is the first trail town, a traditional small village, wherein the AT follows the main street across its bridge and over the French Broad River. There are a couple of hostels here and many hikers take a zero day to enjoy the hot springs. The AT leaves town and climbs the bluffs overlooking the river along Lovers Leap Ridge some three hundred feet above the gorge. For the next twenty miles the AT gently rises and falls in the 2,000-to-3,500-foot range of elevation, then climbs above four thousand feet for ten miles before descending into another highland valley, crossing several streams and plunging into thick rhododendron. About fifty miles after crossing the French Broad River, the AT finally climbs back up to 5,500 feet at Big Bald, again providing sweeping views if the weather cooperates. I climbed Big Bald one early morning

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and found a group of biologists who were conducting a survey by catching songbirds in nets and tagging them. The biologists informed me a storm was approaching that would bring snow to all the mountains above five thousand feet. Ahead of me were the Roan Highlands at over six thousand feet, so I descended into Erwin, Tennessee, almost twenty miles away, which sits at 1,712 feet along the Nolichucky River. There I checked into Uncle Johnny’s Hostel and zeroed while the storm passed. After crossing the Nolichucky River on a paved road bridge, the AT follows the river for a couple of miles and then climbs up into the Unaka Mountains. A high bald called Beauty Spot gives the NOBO a view of Erwin from 4,333 feet, ten miles and 2,600 feet of elevation gain from the river. The AT continues to climb into the fir and spruce to the top of Unaka Mountain at 5,180 feet. Roan Mountain can be seen to the north and east as one climbs up from the Beauty Spot to the top of Unaka Mountain. As I climbed, I could see the top of both mountains shrouded in snow and ice. As I entered the frozen zone above five thousand feet the afternoon sun had started melting some of the ice that had formed on the trees during a freezing rain before the snow. Ice fell in fist size chunks from the fir and spruce trees, pelting my head and shoulders. Descending from the top of Unaka Mountain, the AT barely goes below four thousand feet, rolling up and down, through gaps and over rises until Hughes Gap some sixteen miles later. From Hughes Gap the AT climbs into the Roan Highlands, a two-thousand-foot elevation gain in about two and a half miles. Now the NOBO has hiked 380 miles from Amicalola Falls to Roan High Knob and these miles have conditioned her. Each climb tests the hiker’s endurance, but this climb up Roan High Knob would have been brutal in the first week. The Roan Highlands extends over about twelve miles, passes through thick balsam fir and red spruce stands, and rarely drops below five thousand feet. After descending Roan High Knob into Carvers Gap, at 5,512 feet, the AT traverses several balds, which provide stunning views to the west, north and east—that is if the weather cooperates. At these elevations, the weather changes rapidly and the winds pummel the body. In the higher elevations, the dense tree cover provides shelter but the open balds starting at Carvers Gap expose hikers to the buffeting gales, driving rain, pelting hail, and stinging sleet. During the fall months the mountain ash—known as the roan tree, or rowan tree for which the highlands are named—turns bright red with its berries. Bears eat the berries but have a difficult time digesting them. In the fall, the trail is littered with red berry, bear scat wherever the mountain ash proliferates. If the atmosphere is clear in the highlands one can see Mount Rogers and Whitetop Mountain, the two highest peaks in Virginia, some 120



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trail miles to the north and east. One can also see a hideous ski lodge, its boxlike shape standing in profile on top of a distant ridgeline at Sugar Mountain to the east. The last high point on the ridge is Hump Mountain at 5,587 feet. The trail descends almost 2,700 feet in five miles to the highway, U.S. 19E, about midway between the towns of Elk Park and Roan Mountain. The next twenty-five miles involves a less strenuous hike with an elevation gain of a little over a thousand feet and a more rolling terrain. A few miles of the trail follow Laurel Fork Creek and pass by a few cascades and a waterfall. The NOBO reaches the highest point in the section, White Rocks Mountain at 4,206 and then plunges down into Laurel Fork Creek again reaching the low point at Laurel Falls at 2,120, a drop of 2,086 feet in six miles. In Dennis Cove, just a mile before the falls, many NOBOS check into Kincora Hostel and take a break. Laurel Falls is one of the largest cataracts on the AT. Just before climbing down a long rock stair, built by trail maintaining volunteers, some take a blue blaze trail to Laurel Fork Shelter and thereby bypass the falls. The blue blaze to the shelter is also known as the “High Water Trail,” in case the water volume in the creek floods the valley trail that extends from the falls to the base of Pond Flats. Here, the AT follows the creek for a lovely mile and a half, crossing back and forth over the water via several foot bridges, and passes through mountain laurel, rhododendron, and under what is left of a hemlock forest. Careful attention to detail reveals the presence of beaver. Walking along such waterways is rare along the AT as much of the trail stays up higher on the ridges and mountain slopes. At the end of the creek walk the trail crosses the creek one more time and turns sharply to the left, taking the hiker downstream a hundred meters. The base of Pond Mountain rises steeply to the immediate right of the hiker. The trail then turns into the mountain and angles back, following the creek upstream while rising obliquely up the mountain. The first quarter of a mile is an easy, gentle climb and follows an old rail cut—these rail cuts are widespread in the south along the AT and were created to log the area a century ago. Leaving the rail cut, the trail switches back and forth up the mountain for nearly two miles, climbing nearly two thousand feet—from 1,900 feet at the base to 3,780 up in Pond Flats. This particular section has gone through changes in the past decade. Ten years ago, the trail left the rail cut and followed a ridgeline straight up the mountain. The climb was brutal, one of the steepest climbs in the south and nearly two miles long. Many NOBOS over the years have opted for a slackpack southbound over the mountain. Bob Peoples, who owns Kincora Hostel and leads the maintenance crews in this section of the Tennessee Eastman Hiking and Canoeing Club’s responsibility, offers a slackpack over Pond Mountain. He keeps the hiker’s pack at Kincora Hostel, drives a group to the north side of Pond Mountain, where they climb a well-switchbacked trail

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heading south and back to Dennis Cove. The Tennessee Eastman Hiking and Canoeing Club maintains this section of the AT and over the past ten years has added switchbacks to Pond Mountain as well as to many other sections of the AT in their area of responsibility. Switchbacks not only make for easier walking grades but interrupt the erosive damage of rainfall drainage. There are no views from the top at Pond Flats. The views are intermittent on the way up and down. Walking north on the ascent, views of the Laurel Creek gorge reveal the elevation attained. While descending the hiker is presented with glimpses of Watauga Lake. The lake is artificial, the product of the Tennessee Valley Authority. The dam is one of two TVA dams that the AT uses for trail, the other being Fontana Dam just south of the Smoky Mountain National Park. After crossing the dam, the AT climbs Iron Mountain and follows its ridgeline for a little more than sixteen miles. For much of the way Watauga Lake can be seen far below to the east as the trail climbs about 1,500 feet above the water. On clear days Holston Mountain can be seen off to the west as the trail stays nearly right on the ridge top. Ridgetop walking is common on the AT and makes for numerous ups and downs. Iron Mountain’s ridgeline in this particular section involves less ascents and descents. At the end of the sixteen miles the hiker leaves the ridges of Iron Mountain, crosses over Tennessee Highway 91, and climbs up Holston Mountain near the northern end of its ridgeline. The trail then descends the Holston Mountain ridge with views of Shady Valley to the south and east, and on a clear day the hiker might see Whitetop Mountian, Virginia’s second highest peak, off to the east. After one more road crossing, U.S. 421, and following a rolling ridge that remains above 3,500 feet for ten miles, the hiker descends to the Virginia border at 3,231 feet. The Virginia section of the trail is also extremely mountainous and is the longest section of the trail within one state. Virginia takes up more than a quarter of the trail and proves to be a mental challenge: hikers enter Virginia at roughly 460 miles north of Springer Mountain and walk 537 miles in the commonwealth, 997 miles north of the southern terminus. Crossing political boundaries creates feelings of accomplishment and progress for thru-hikers. Even though Virginia has a varied geography and numerous opportunities for the thru-hiker to gauge progress toward the end goal, having to remain for so long within the borders of the Commonwealth has proven difficult for many. Damascus is three miles from the state line at 1,928 feet of elevation. After crossing the border at 3,231 feet, the hiker drops steeply to Damascus, about three and a half miles and 1,285 feet of elevation loss below the political boundary. When Trail Days is in full swing, the festival can be heard from miles to the south along the AT, sounds rising up on the sides of the mountains. Weary hikers find renewed strength anticipating food, drink, and fellowship.



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The AT tracks through the middle of this small mountain town, using the sidewalk along Laurel Avenue, the central road through town. Damascus has shifted from a town that derived its economic sustainability through logging in the early part of the twentieth century, to a dye factory in the mid to late twentieth century, to that of catering to outdoor and adventure sports such as backpacking, biking, and fishing. The town holds the Trail Days festival every May. Thru-hikers past and present gather for about five days of celebrating the AT. The town has set aside a large vacant property for camping. That property is the site of the former dye factory. Damascus rests at the confluence of two creeks, Beaver Dam Creek and Laurel Creek, both of which send their waters to the Gulf of Mexico. The Iron Mountain ridge and the Holston Mountain ridge, along both of which the AT has brought the hiker into town and between which Beaver Dam Creek runs, draw close together just south of town. The trail departs from town to the west and follows an old railroad bed that has been converted to a biking and hiking trail known as the Virginia Creeper Trail, which is named after the railroad. Trail Days When hikers do arrive for Trail Days, they find the town swollen with people, both hikers and other-than-hikers frequent the festival. Those who have hitchhiked in from the north, having passed through Damascus days or weeks before, find a completely different atmosphere, the small, sleepy village transformed by a carnival atmosphere, feasting, and live music. So many concurrent events are happening that the town publishes a program. The 2006 program indicates that the festival grew “from a few hundred in 1987 to a projected thirty-thousand this year, a figure which exceeds Damascus’ population by thirty times.”61 The main event each year is the Hiker’s Parade that runs down Main Street. Hikers from past years as well as the current year gather in the parking lot at Sun Dogs, an outfitter on the western end of town. The staff at Sun Dogs holds a hot dog and chili feed prior to the start of the parade. The parking becomes swollen with hikers coming together in reunion. The whole affair has the feel of a Mardi Gras parade. Many wear costumes and cross dress. As the parade begins, hikers fall into their class years and sometimes march behind a homemade banner indicating which year they hiked the AT. All of the hikers walk at the end of the parade. Included in the parade is a massive water fight, a long-standing tradition. Legend has it that bystanders threw water at the hikers in one of the early parades. Some say they were offering refreshment under the hot afternoon sun. Others say that they were showering the smelly hikers, attempting to give them a washing. As the years passed and the parade antics evolved, the water fight became a free-

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for-all, town’s people versus hikers. There are water guns of all types, supersoakers, and some homemade contraptions that can spray thirty feet and have a capacity of five gallons. Town people sometimes bring out garden hoses. There are large buckets of water along the side of the avenue for reloading. Up until about 2015 there were also water balloons. Now the balloons are outlawed, a very disappointing structure, evidencing what happens to many festivals rooted in some spontaneous celebration. The free-for-all outbreak of semi-chaos gets smoothed out by people who enjoy structure more than antistructure. Other Trail Days events listed in the program include “street dances, a town-wide yard sale, a hiker’s talent show” and live music. In addition to these events a large number of vendors set up shop, some typical of summer festivals in any location, but others more targeted to the hiking community. In 2006, there were 140 vendors.62 Mark Taylor describes the festival as “One part Bohemian party, one-part outdoor lifestyle celebration, the event will feature entertainment and displays from dozens of outdoor gear vendors.”63 Taylor goes on to emphasize the ludic aspects of the festival: Because a lot of Appalachian Trail thru-hikers use Trail Days as an excuse to take a break from the tough, often stressful life on the Trail, there is no shortage of loud, late-night fellowship. If you plan to camp and are interested in a good night’s sleep, you might not want to pitch a tent among the revelers.64

Play, ludic action, is “vividly represented in liminality.”65 A juxtaposition of worship and commerce occurs on traditional pilgrimage routes where travelers attend fairs and shop at markets along the way: “Those who journey to pray together also play together in the secular interludes between religious activities.”66 Trail Days is an example of play on the AT. Festivals Rooted in Religious Ritual Festivals are rooted in religious practice, celebrations of feasting, but many in more recent history have lost their connection to the power of the feast. Humans have, until recently in developed nations, felt the powerful tension between feast and famine. Religious rituals, for the most part, are rooted in the tenuous relationship between finding food and starving. Jane Ellen Harrison writes that ancient art and ritual rise out of a common human impulse responding to death.67 Death is always there at the horizon. Ritual, she writes, “desires to recreate an emotion, not to reproduce and object.”68 She notes that a rite is a “sort of stereotyped action,” what the Greeks called a dromenon, “a thing done.” “The Greek had realized that to perform a rite you must do something, that is, you must not only feel something but express it in action,



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or, to put it psychologically, you must not only receive an impulse, you must react to it.”69 This emotion rises out of the interplay of life and death, the dread of starving and the elation of plenty. The ritual celebrating the harvest, or the hunt, is a communal feast that temporarily moves death further out on the horizon and makes space for joy in life. Harrison writes regarding the feast, “A meal digested alone is certainly no rite; a meal eaten in common, under the influence of a common emotion, may, and often does, tend to become a rite.”70 “Collectivity and emotional tension” are noted by Harrison as two elements that turn a reaction into a rite: intensity and collectivity go together “both are necessary for ritual.”71 The ritual becomes a re-enactment of a particular happening, a representation that “cuts itself loose from the particular action from which it arose.”72 The participants desire to re-live the event. She writes that two things are sought as primal desires among humans, “food and children.” These become the focus of “rites for the regulation of the seasons.”73 “The seasons are indeed only of value to primitive man because they are related, as he swiftly and necessarily finds out, to his food supply.”74 “It is these times that become the central points, the focus of his interest, and the dates of his religious festivals.”75 She notes that ritual was once “shaped and cast by a living spirit: the intense immediate desire for food and life, and for the return of the seasons which bring that food and life.”76 The place of the ritual, of the dromena, the things done, gives us worship of gods, “place of sacraments, holy bulls killed and eaten in common, we get sacrifices in the modern sense, holy bulls offered to yet holier gods.”77 Feasts are then associated with seasons, which are existential indicators of the movement and passing of time. Feasts that have lost connection to their ritual roots are also more likely to be experienced through an abstract experience of time, cut loose from seasons. Leeuw writes, “Celebration is carried on in time. We moderns, of course, read time from the clock. . . We count the hours and seconds—regard them, that is to say, as equivalent things. But they are neither things, nor perfectly alike.”78 The festival enacted by a local town such as Damascus is more than likely established to benefit the town economy and align itself with a chronology that is cut off from anything like the tension between feast and famine. The festival cut off from its religious roots will be more aligned with capturing wealth in a market driven chronology that rises and falls in conjunction with abstract economic conditions. Festivals rooted in the interplay of feast and famine open participants to the mystery of life and death. Time in this instance is better understood as kairos rather than chronos. Leeuw writes, “A time is therefore always some definite time, at first the given, and then the best time, the time of the due situation, kairos, the time of grace.”79

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This “time of grace” breaks open the profane and makes way for the sacred. An eruption occurs in both time and place, and those who encounter the eruption enter liminality. Leeuw, in tracing the eruption that translates the mere hiker into a liminal personae, writes: But while celebration certainly has this background of eternity, it is itself a part of the time movement; it is at the same moment, however, the deed of man, who stands stationary in the midst of time because he finds the “situation,” and who therefore does not simply surrender to duration but firmly plants his feet, and for one moment concentrates both himself and time. He who is celebrating, so to say, controls time; he attempts to dominate it. For here also he cannot simply accept the given: he is first startled and then becomes alarmed; . . . Duration, then, is the great stream flowing relentlessly on: but man, encountering Power, must halt. He then makes a section, a tempus; and he celebrates a “sacred time,” a festival. 80

The festival marks the place where liminal personae seek the possible. Leeuw goes on to write, “In this manner he shows that he declines the given as such, and seeks possibility.”81 Pilgrims or hikers feel the duration as a “great stream flowing relentlessly on” through the daily rhythm of walking, eating, sleeping, rising and walking again. Hour upon hour and mile upon mile hikers move as persons flowing over the land, and in this flowing, they encounter Power, manifesting itself in any number of ways. Leeuw writes, “duration unfolds and rolls on from section to section, and at the halting places Power manifests itself.”82 Walking—feeling the earth beneath each foot-fall, leg muscles flexing, arms swinging, mouth drawing air, lungs expanding and contracting, heart pounding beneath ribs, and blood pulsing throughout the body—over rises, down steep inclines, upon rocky pathways and across irregular tree roots, a hiker begins to weaken as the morning meal is exhausted. Lightheaded and limbs shaking, the walker drops her burden and sinks to the earth floor. She opens her pack and finds a food sack. Slowly, she prepares a meal and begins to reflect. Her power has run its course and she must renew, draw power from another. She chews the flesh of formerly living beings, a dried apricot or fig, a spoon full of peanut butter, a tortilla, a chunk of jerky. Life flows back into her body in the “halting place,” just as life coursed through her body and was exhausted in the walking. She has encountered the dance of life and death, of feast and famine, all in a morning walk. Life manifests itself in this livedbody encounter with Power. This “halting place” and sacred time becomes a celebration, a feast on the side of the trail.



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This encounter with Power involves an intersubjective dialogue between beings exchanging life for death and death for life. This exchange has in much of human history been referred to as sacrifice. Bataille writes, “The first fruits of the harvest or a head of livestock are sacrificed in order to remove the plant and animal, together with the farmer and the stock raiser, from the world of things.”83 Here the term “thing” refers to the plant and animal having “lost its status as man’s fellow creature.”84 In our contemporary market economy, we rarely encounter our fellow creatures while eating them. Our food is packaged and marketed in such a way that the creature is invisible. We no longer sacrifice, drawing the “thing” out of a market economy, restoring it to its place as fellow creature. “Sacrifice destroys an object’s real ties of subordination; it draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to that of unintelligible caprice.”85 As Harrison pointed out, our ritual roots rise out of a desire to bring life from death. Bataille points to another desire, that of a return to intimacy. He writes, “The sacrificer’s prior separation from the world of things is necessary for the return to intimacy, of immanence between man and the world, between the subject and the object.”86 The liminality of the trail separates hikers from the world of “things” of utilitarian relations and restores the intimacy of connecting as fellow creatures. To live requires a sacrifice, one who is alive must die so that one who is dying might continue to live. The exchange of life and death happens whether or not we recognize it. The real meaning of the feast draws attention to this sacred exchange made evident in sacrifice, revealing the interplay of life and death. Bataille writes, “Death reveals life in its plenitude and dissolves the real order.”87 Real order refers to the relations of utility. The market economy seems to hide the interplay of life and death but “cannot prevent life’s disappearance in death from revealing the invisible brilliance of life that is not a thing.”88 The meaning of life and the intimacy of those who live in fellowship becomes more acute in the presence of death. Bataille writes, “life’s intimacy does not reveal its dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out.”89 Sacrifice reveals the kinship between living beings, their mutual contingency. Market economies subordinate contingency, attempting to push death beyond the horizon. Sacrifice is the antithesis of production, which is accomplished with a view to the future; it is consumption that is concerned only with the moment. This is the sense in which it is gift and relinquishment, but what is given cannot be an object of preservation for the receiver: the gift of an offering makes it pass precisely into the world of abrupt consumption . . . in sacrifice the offering is rescued from all utility.90

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Figure 3.4.  Graffiti on the Camino de Santiago, Hiker Trash. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

If sacrifice is the antithesis of production, the same is true for pilgrimage and long-distance spiritual rambling. Both the pilgrim and many thru-hikers leave the marketplace where production creates value and become liminal personae. The Protestant work ethic crushes festivals and pilgrimages as they are unproductive. Pilgrims produce no marketable goods, nothing of utilitarian value. A label given to thru-hikers, meant to point out the uselessness of their identity, is “hiker trash.” Pilgrims who produce no earthly goods have adopted the identity and wear it openly. I have seen it in graffiti along the Camino, the AT symbol with “hiker trash” and “family” above and below the symbol. See figure 3.4. Just as in pilgrimage, the feast as liminal ritual breaks the relations of utility, profane relations, and gives rise to the intimate connection amongst creatures. Gary Snyder’s poetry illustrates the spiritual connection between beings who eat each other and remain intersubjectively related. He writes, “If we eat each other, is it not a giant act of love we live within?”91 In his poem, “Song of Taste,” Snyder describes eating various elements of the creatures with whom we are familiar. Rather than naming some food product, Snyder reveals our intimate connection with the other eaten. We eat the “living germs of grasses,” the ova, the “sweetness” of tree sperm, muscles of soft-voiced cows.” He then draws attention to the mutuality of eating one another:



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Eating each other’s seed.  Eating   Ah, each other.

Finally, he points to the erotic in eating: Kissing the lover in the mouth of bread   Lip to lip.92

Snyder captures the intimacy of eating, breaking relations of utility and communicating intersubjectively with the beings we eat. TOWNS AND HOSTELS As with so many other aspects of the AT, mileage and festivals for example, the number of hostels fluctuates year by year. At the time of this writing there were about eighty-four hostels along the route from Georgia to Maine.93 Most are listed in guidebooks, but there are some “secret” hostels that hikers discover by word of mouth. Some hostels give hikers an experience similar to a hotel: clean sheets, laundry, kitchen, sitting room, and showers. Others are extremely rustic: no sheets, a bunk made from plywood with no mattress, minimal kitchen, and minimal showers. I will describe just a few of these hostels, choosing examples of both rustic and hotel-like. I will also give an account of a “secret” hostel. Green Mountain House Hiker Hostel One of the least rustic hostels is in Manchester Center, Vermont, 1,655 miles north of Springer Mountain. The Green Mountain House Hiker Hostel is owned and operated by Jeff Tausigg, who is a long-distance hiker, having section-hiked the AT between 2001 and 2006. Jeff also hikes other long journeys such as the Pacific Crest Trail. Each hostel along the AT has different rules and requirements. The Green Mountain House forbids alcohol. It is one of the cleanest hostels on the trail. There is a full-service kitchen and laundry facilities. The house itself is located in a middle-class neighborhood in town and is a two-story structure with a very nice surrounding garden. The interior is nicely furnished and decorated with artifacts from the AT. When I had reached Stratton Mountain, Vermont, 3,936 feet of elevation and about 1,641 miles north of Springer Mountain, I decided to spend the night in Manchester Center the next day. I needed to pick up a mail drop, a resupply of food from the post office. I found the hostel listed in the

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Thru-Hikers’ Companion and having cell phone service on top of the mountain, called the hostel. Jeff answered the phone and indicated that I would need a reservation as this was the busy thru-hiking season. I made the reservation and Jeff told me his procedure. After hiking into town and accomplishing all my chores, I would call him from the local outfitter store. My hiking companion at the time, Brother of the Wind, and I climbed the fire tower atop Stratton Mountain and enjoyed the rare panoramic view, something which would become more familiar as the heights of New Hampshire and Maine rise above treeline. We then descended almost 1,500 feet to the Stratton Pond Shelter, one of the nicest AT shelters, sleeping twenty hikers. We then walked a half mile over to the pond and enjoyed a swim. There were only three of us in the shelter that night, unusual for this busy time of year with the combination of section and long-distance hikers out at the end of summer. The next day, we hiked about eleven miles to the road crossing and entered Manchester Center. My chores in town included picking up a food drop from the post office and finding a new pair of hiking sandals. Very few long-distance hikers on the AT wear boots, preferring light weight trekking shoes or running shoes. Grandma Gatewood, mentioned in chapter 2, hiked in Converse high-tops. It

Figure 3.5.  Trashcan’s Worn-Out Shoes, Near the Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.



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is typical for shoes to wear out along the way. One thru-hiker named Trashcan had so much duct tape holding his running shoes together that we could barely see any evidence that there were shoes under the tape. See figure 3.5. He walked this way from northern Virginia, through Maryland and Pennsylvania, applying tape several times each day and finally purchasing new shoes at the Delaware Water Gap just before crossing the river into New Jersey. I prefer to wear Chaco sandals, letting my feet breathe and giving my toes freedom. I noticed that the sandal webbing was wearing out and needed to replace them before they broke out on the trail. After finding new sandals and picking up my food, I called Jeff. He shuttled a couple of us out to the hostel. That night I shared the place with Frenchy, a hiker from Quebec who was accompanied by his dog, a husky. Brother of the Wind was also there. I met Frenchy at the outfitter before Jeff arrived. Frenchy promised to cook us a real French meal if I purchased the required ingredients. I eagerly accepted and headed for the grocery store. Frenchy called to me, “Don’t forget the wine.” I called back, indicating the policy of no alcohol. Frenchy had already spent one night in the hostel, his dog needing to visit a veterinarian, and had met Jeff. Permission had been granted to have wine if we were to eat a real French meal. Jeff, who lives next door to the hostel, came over and shared the meal with us that night. In the morning Jeff shuttled us back out to the trail, and we climbed Bromley Mountain along the ski runs and then reached the chair lift at the top. We looked back on Manchester Center and the Green Mountain House Hostel, somewhere down in the valley, and knew we had shared something special. Kincora Hostel One of the most rustic hostels is located in Dennis Cove, Tennessee, about fifty miles south of Damascus, Virginia. Kincora Hostel is owned and operated by Bob Peoples, elected into the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame in 2018. Originally from Massachusetts and after retiring from the Air Force, Bob and his wife Pat searched for property within a quarter of a mile from the AT. In 1997 they opened Kincora Hostel, just a quarter mile up from where the AT crosses Dennis Cove Road. The original building, into which Bob and Pat moved, is an old log cabin. See figure 3.6. Bob added rooms, shower, toilets, a porch, and a kitchen onto the rear of the cabin. He only asks for donations from those who stay. In addition, as mentioned earlier Bob slackpacks hikers in the area. Bob also leads trail maintaining and relocations efforts for the Eastman Hiking Club of northeastern Tennessee. For many years, he organized the Hardcore work effort around the time of Trail Days. Bob recruits the current year’s hikers, as well as veter-

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Figure 3.6.  Kincora Hostel, Dennis Cove, Tennessee. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

ans from past years, to go out on the AT for two days of work. This is an opportunity for hikers to give back to the trail. Bob is quite a legend on the trail and hikers enter comments about him in shelter registers north of Kincora. One entry, dated April 30, 2015, written in the Iron Mountain Shelter register exemplifies his legendary status, “Bob Peoples once slammed a revolving door.” Written by SAM-i-AM (both A’s are written as AT symbols).94 The combination of hostel, slackpacking, and trail maintenance build community, a true social/spatial aspect of the journey on the AT. I have been frequenting Kincora Hostel for twenty years, conducting research in the area, bringing students, participating in trail maintenance, and fellowshipping. Kincora’s registers are a rich resource, evidencing the social/ spatial interplay between the hostel, the AT, and hikers. Crumbsnatcher and Bear, whose register entry dated May 3, 2002, indicating that one had hiked the entire AT between 1998 and 2002, and the other completed two thruhikes, one in 1999 and the other in 2002, wrote of the social dynamics: I’m always being asked, which is my favorite section. It’s not where, but who might be there, with me. I come out to hike the beautiful, all powerful, mighty APPALACHIAN TRAIL to meet new friends and share a few moments in time. There’s always other reasons too, sometimes I’ll be hiking along and I might start doubting myself, then someone happens along, and a few memories are born, then someone else joins in and changes the dynamics a little more. I love my trail family, and I love the fact that my family grows bigger each year!95



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In 2015, I heard that year’s thru-hikers using a term that was new to me. Rather than “trail family,” as referenced by Crumbsnatcher and Bear in the quote above, hikers were referring to their “tramily.” This term has caught on, and I have heard the term more and more each year since 2015. Another example from Kincora starts, “What a great place to celebrate one month on the trail.” Kincora is 420 miles north of Springer Mountain, for many a month’s journey. Peace Pilgrim, the author of the register entry, then crafts a poem, another common occurrence in shelter registers: I have walked 25,000 miles as a penniless pilgrim. I own only what I carry in my pockets. I belong to no organization. I have said that I will walk until given shelter and fast until given food, remaining a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace. And I can truthfully tell you that without ever asking for anything, I have been supplied with everything needed for my journey, which shows you how good people really are.96

This last sentiment is also commonly expressed by hikers who have been on the trail for months at a time. Many have their faith in humanity restored after receiving hospitality along the way. Lightbearer wrote a similar sentiment, also a poem, with a subscript, “I do believe this is my first poem.”97 Lightbearer writes: The way of the world is that nothing is free My heart has been restored in such a beautiful place just to be No one can measure your gift except thee. So thanks for your love and commitment to us Those that wander and struggle so much Over mountain, through rain, bugs and such Your reward, no one knows, but we are all forever touched.98

An example of a hiker who had paused for “Hard Core” to do trail maintenance with Bob, written by The Bandit, expresses the gratitude felt for being given the opportunity to give back to the trail community. The Bandit writes: The coolest thing in the world was the fact that Smokey and I were helping blaze this trail. I can honestly say that it’s probably one of the best single moments of my life. Thank you to everyone that’s taken the time to talk to me & the kind souls who have taken care of me like Bob, Jack & Ms. Janet [Jack refers to Baltimore Jack, who thru-hiked the AT at least eight times and continually aided hikers whether or not he was doing a hike. Ms. Janet is a trail angel, who travels with the largest bubble of thru-hikers giving support].99

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Hostels Under the Radar There are some hostels not publicized in the guidebooks. I will describe one of them. Dalton, Massachusetts is one of the trail towns, like Hot Springs and Damascus that were already described. As hikers enter town on Depot Street, they pass a publicized hostel, Tom Levardi’s place. He has a lovely home on the west side of the street that functions as a hostel. Tom is very gracious, and many hikers enjoy their stay, receiving hospitality. Another hostel, across town, called the “Bird Cage,” no longer existing as a hostel, operated under the radar. Hikers passed along the reputation of this place by word of mouth. The instructions were to go down High Street and check in at the Shell gas station. The attendant would then give hikers a ride a few blocks away in a neighborhood to the home of Rob Bird, who died in 2022. When I arrived at the Bird Cage there were thirty other hikers already staying there. The house is a typical rancher in a middle-class area. Rob had converted every room into a bunk space. The enclosed front porch held three bunk beds, which is where I bedded down for two nights. His garage had a loft with mattresses for several more hikers. When I arrived, Rob had me leave my pack and shoes on the porch. He then showed me to some shelves containing clean shirts and shorts. I grabbed something that fit and entered the bathroom. Rob told me to pass my dirty clothes out of the door before I stepped into the shower. He then took the dirty stuff and washed it in his laundry room. That evening at 7 p.m., Rob gathered those of us who wanted a hot meal into his large van and drove us to Pittsfield, where there was a Price Chopper grocery and a buffet style restaurant, all you can eat. While enjoying the hot meal, we mingled with the crew who were staying at Tom Levardi’s hostel. Tom was also there eating with us. After eating and shopping, Rob ferried us back to his place, and we sat in his kitchen singing and making music. I saw a hiker named Molasses, who I hadn’t seen since the middle part of Virginia. He and Rob played guitar. We jammed until midnight, when Rob had a lights-out policy. Rob also slack packs those who desire it. He charges a mere $20 for gas. At 6:30 a.m. we rose, picked up a bagel with ham and cheese from a local country store, piled into two vans, and went to North Adams. Fishhead, Four Beard, Iron Lung, and I were dropped at the north end of Mount Greylock. We slack packed over Greylock and back to Dalton, twenty-five miles. We were together until the top of Greylock, where we split up. I arrived back in Dalton just after a summer rainstorm broke loose. Rob usually left with the hikers for Pittsfield at 7 p.m. I came to the paved road in Dalton at 7:12 p.m. I was rain soaked and very muddy. I ran down the road, thinking there was an outside chance I could make the van ride to the buffet. A jeep pulled up and the driver asked if I were going to the Bird Cage. He let me into the jeep,

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even though I was covered with mud and dripping wet. When I arrived at the house, Rob was gathering everyone for the meal run. He allowed me to take a shower, and I was able to join the crew for another feast. Trail Towns In addition to the trail towns already mentioned, others also influence the social/spatial experience of long-distance hikers. Pearisburg, Virginia, is a small town on the New River with very good resupply stores, hotels and a hostel. Daleville, Virginia, is just a road crossing but there is a motel and a few restaurants. Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania, is one of the loveliest of the trail towns, the path runs along a pond in the middle of town. Duncannon, Pennsylvania is on the Susquehanna River and is home to the Doyle Hotel, an original Budweiser establishment. The hotel is a little rustic, but the cook is amazing. Port Clinton, Pennsylvania, is a railroad town, a sleepy town at the confluence of the Schuylkill and Little Schuylkill Rivers. Salisbury, Connecticut is also a sleepy village and home to the original public library in the United States. Norwich, Vermont, and Hanover, New Hampshire, are only divided by the Connecticut River, seemingly one city. Dartmouth College is in Hanover, which has a college town atmosphere. Caratunk, Maine, is just across the Kennebec River from the ferry crossing. Monson, Maine, is at the beginning of the hundred-mile wilderness and home to a couple of hostels, including Shaw’s Boarding House. Finally, not really on the AT, Millinocket, Maine is the closest town to Baxter State Park, home to Mount Katahdin. There is a hostel in Millinocket, the A.T. Lodge, run by a veteran thru-hiker and Vietnam Veteran, Old Man. He shuttles hikers from Mount Katahdin to Millinocket, where many receive his hospitality at the conclusion of their long-distance hike. GROUPS, COMMUNITY, AND COMMUNITAS Once hikers have reached Virginia, variations of social structure and antistructure clearly manifest. Many tend to stay in fairly close proximity, hiking and camping together, forming groups with clear social structure. On the other hand, the liminality of the journey brings some hikers into relationships characterized by communitas, social antistructure: a relational quality of full unmediated communication, even communion, between definite and determinate identities, which arises spontaneously in all kinds of groups, situations, and circumstances. It is a liminal phenomenon which combines the qualities of lowliness, sacredness, homogeneity, and comradeship.100

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In communitas friendships transcend boundaries found in society, young and old form bonds, people with professional diversity find something else that brings them together, and other social structures lose their influence. Rather than mediated relations that are transactional, communication arises spontaneously through the shared ordeal. Those whose walking paces correspond find themselves walking together. Rhythm and shared experience on the same trail tread become a mutual dance, tightening bonds that may have begun in a casual conversation. After walking together for a few days, circumstances may arise that separate those who have formed a bond. It may be weeks, or even months, before they come into proximity again, but the bond remains, and the dance continues. In looking forward to a reunion, many leave messages to each other in shelter registers. While on my own thru-hike I noticed that though hiker’s paces may result in their walking in solitude, they seek fellowship with one another by camping together. Shelters become magnets, drawing hikers together at the end of the day. They gather around a fire or sit at the shelter table, sharing stories of the day’s unfolding experiences. I was invariably the first hiker to leave a shelter in the morning, just as the first birdsongs filled the forest. As a result, I came to the next shelter when many of the hikers were eating breakfast or preparing to start walking. On some occasions I walked late into the day after others had already set up a camp. I noticed that groups formed at some shelters but not at others. I thought about how soap bubbles form next to each other, a thin film separating them. I characterized these loose hiking groups as bubbles. The metaphor is far from original as I heard other hikers using it to refer to areas where hikers concentrated. Those who remain within a bubble perceive the AT as a social hike through the wilderness. However, it was always possible to find a camping place, either at an established site or shelter, where no other hiker was present. The bubble analogy worked here as well. Between groups of thru-hikers, seams of solitude could be found. As the days turn into weeks and finally months, some of the group structures congeal and communitas transitions to community. Turner writes, “Spontaneous communitas is a phase, a moment, not a permanent condition. The moment a digging stick is set in the earth, a colt broken in, a pack of wolves defended against, or a human enemy set by his heels, we have the germs of a social structure.”101 I noticed that these highly structured groups began to form a hierarchical order. Some of these groups form very tightly structured “societies.” They typically number from five to ten persons but may grow larger as the journey unfolds. There is a leader, functioning as the captain of the group. The captain would inevitably have a couple lieutenants who enforced the rules of the order. If the captain determined where the group would stop for a meal or camp, the lieutenants would make sure everyone fell



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in line. If someone was invited into the group, they would fall into the ranks. If that person declined the invitation, the group would remain aloof from them. Some group members found this arrangement very satisfying. There seemed to be a need in some people to find a leader to follow. Of course, this kind of group arrangement was not pervasive on the AT, yet I ran across several of these tightly organized groups while thru-hiking, and over years of research on the trail have witnessed them here and there. Trail Register Entries Evidencing Communitas First, “Rookie” puts it this way: “It has been remarkable. The trail, in and of itself, is like a separate civilization and culture. It’s like a utopia in that my heart and mind have been free to wander and ponder all in the midst of unspeakable [sic] free and valuable persons of the world. I’ll not soon forget the feelings and appreciation of such a unique experience. Peace and Love”102 Another hiker, “Rocket,” describes this state where ordeal and alternative situations are characteristic. That Rocket writes this in the register indicates a sharing of the ordeal, one of the very dynamics that form strong bonds: “I love hiking but I don’t think it’s the best part of the trail, I think the different experiences make the trail so great like: hitchhiking, being completely wiped, trail angels/magic, weather, food, and so on. Can’t wait for more of these experiences and hope everyone hiking is having a great time.”103 The following entry acknowledges being halfway in the journey with fellows: Heading towards Harper’s Ferry today with mixed emotions. We are pleased to be nearing the halfway mark on this [AT, a symbol is drawn] journey. Hiking with the Howdy Train has been a pleasure; our band will likely disperse tomorrow. The days are passing quickly now, sometimes too fast, making me aware of each moment. I have very much enjoyed the fellow pilgrims, you are wonderful folks.104

In some entries the hiker offers thanksgiving, another more traditional religious expression performed in community. Here an anonymous entry reads: “what an incredible experience that we have had thus far. What a grand + beautiful gift to take some time + reflect on all the goodness we have been given of God and nature and people. It’s good just to sit in silence a moment . . . let it cover over you.”105 The second example is a poem inscribed by a two time thru-hiker: I am soooo blessed to be here again The kiss of the sun for pardon The song of the birds for mirth

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Surely one is closer to God’s heart on the AT Than anywhere else on earth.106

The following entry by “Boy Howdy” is indicative of communion between hikers and their relationship with the AT itself. Here the environmental milieu is given voice as it is acknowledged in the existential mutuality of embodied dwelling. The opening lines are characteristic of countless entries wherein fellow travelers are addressed, again evidencing communitas: To everyone I’ve met out here and to everything that has inspired me: I won’t get gushy (I left a longer note at Blackburn if you want Howdy mush) but thank you so much. No words can express the depth of my gratitude and appreciation for everything [I] have experienced out here. This is definitely the top of a lifetime. And no matter how hard it is at times, it is always worth it, especially now at the end. Over the long hard days have shaped me for the better [sic]. Don’t give up the flood of emotions [I] feel now is so powerful that everything I have endured seems now fated [sic] to set up this moment, this day. These last few weeks have been spectacular, weather, people [,] and trail have converged to form a perfect ending. Thanks to everyone for sharing it with me and most of all thanks to the trail for giving me these past months. Share the Journey107

Someone with the trail name of “Thru-Thinker” reflects on the emergence of communitas after approaching the psychological halfway point in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia: My thoughts on leaving VA behind and hiking one thousand miles are hard to put into words. From the very first mile of the Approach Trail to Springer on March 15, when a father (+son) walked by me + said “God Bless you” like he really meant it, to meeting my great new friend Leif the very next morning + hiking fifty+ straight days with him, Popeye + so [double underline] many other great friends . . . to the infamous winter storms in GA + the Smokies . . . to the infamous “Eagle” encounter at Fontana . . . to the awesome climbs, trail magic @ Max Patch, the Banner Elk Bistro, + many other places too! . . . to the incredible # of kind people who gave us rides + words of encouragement . . . to my wife + family who have struggled to understand my need for this journey +, over time, have come to be my biggest sources of support . . . to awesome oases of goodness like Bears Den, Tellico Guys, Keith’s Cabins, etc. . . to the cold rain, fog, snow, sleet, thunder, rain, mud, + SUNSHINE . . . its been the most awesome time of my life! Whatever happens from here, I’ve learned, loved, laughed, cried + prayed with more life + intensity than ever . . . I hope I never forget to live life so large, + to help others as the gateway to helping myself!



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May your trails always bring you LIFE [underlined three times]. God Bless + Hike On.108

The Turners writes “that there is a connection between the pilgrims’ discipline and privations and their sense of communitas.”109 The following poem captures the spirit of both discipline and privation: There are days when it seems that your pack could sprout wings And you’ll fly all the way to the sun. Then a mountain comes in and you fall again Got to tell you, it isn’t much fun. There are days when you feel that it couldn’t be real That they let you do this with your life. Then the rain starts to pour, and your muscles get sore And you’re missing your kids and your wife. Then there are days bad and good, but now neither one should Make you leave, nor should one make you stay. So whatever its like, keep on hiking your hike Cause this trail isn’t walked in a day.110

Another entry, this time in prose, illustrates the existential interconnection of lived-body and environmental milieu on the AT, all of this shared in a bond with fellows: “Hiked in the rain for a few miles. It was a monsoon. My hands are chapped [;] my lips are chapped and about to fall off. This is a great place to dry off for a while. [smiley face drawn] My feet are soaking wet and it is cold! I love it! Well, gonna make food and be out.”111 The experience of AT hikers is consistent with more traditional pilgrims as “the weariness of the body is submitted to hard, voluntary discipline, loosening the bonds of matter to liberate the spirit.”112 Another shared experience in the form of privation is the food that the hiker must eat. Everything must be carried, and luxuries are quickly abandoned in favor of lightweight necessities. One of the culinary staples of the trail is peanut butter. The inside cover of the 1996, May through July, Double Springs Shelter Register has a hand-drawn color rendering of George Washington Carver with a barn and field, including the plowed furrows, in the background. The left side is a red border of peanuts and the inscription states, “This shelter register is dedicated to the memory of George Washington Carver the great African-American scientist who invented, among many things, peanut butter. Thanks George.” After eating freeze-dried meals, dried fruit, nuts, oatmeal, and peanut butter for weeks on end, the thru-hiker dreams of chocolate, ice-cream, and a host of other delicacies. In the camaraderie that is typical of the trail community, one hiker encourages another with the promise of better food:

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Note to Buttercup: Don’t even take off your pack!!! Imagine wrapping your fingers around that waffly-textured cone, the sharp delight of that first icy-sweet taste as the cold cream melts across your tongue and glide delectably down your throat. Mmmmm. Can you feel it? Why, when heaven is an itsy-bitsy ten tiny miles away, would you dwell any longer in Power-Bar Purgatory? (When you get excited about p-bars, you know its time to go into town Buttercup, your destiny calls, in the form of double dip twisty one dipped in chocolate. Listen, you can hear it if you try. Don’t try to deny it. If you but follow the call, the miles will melt away beneath your feet. Go little Buttercup, go! Go to find your bliss!113

NOTES   1.  Frederick Law Olmsted. “Preliminary Report to the Commissioners for Laying Out a Park in Brooklyn, New York: Being a Consideration of Circumstances of Site and Other Conditions Affecting the Design of Public Pleasure Grounds,” The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, 79–111.   2.  Benton MacKaye. “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects. (Oct. 1921): 325–330.  3. Benton MacKaye, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 9 (Oct. 1921): 325–330. Quoted from http://www.appalachiantrail.org/atf/cf/{D25B4747-42A3-4302-8D48EF35C0B0D9F1}/MacKaye.pdf. Retrieved November 8, 2002.   4.  James Schmidt. “A Raven with a Halo: The Translation of Aristotle’s ‘Politics,’” History of Political Thought 7, no. 2 (1986): 295–319.   5.  Peter Ackroyd, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Nick Bantock. The Canterbury Tales (London: Penguin Classics, 2009).   6.  I will explore wilderness as a liminal space in a subsequent chapter.   7.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian, 250.   8.  Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1969), 126.  9. Martin Buber, I and Thou, 60. 10.  Ibid., 112. 11.  There are more than eighty-four hostels or similar accommodations along the trail. As of January of 2017 the Appalachian Trail Thru-Hiker’s Companion listed eighty-four: four in Georgia, five in North Carolina, seven in Tennessee, eighteen in Virginia, one in West Virginia, three in Maryland, ten in Pennsylvania, four in New Jersey, three in New York, two in Connecticut, six in Massachusetts, three in Vermont, eight in New Hampshire, and eight in Maine. This number is always in flux as new hostels open and some hostels close. There are also a number of “underground” hostels, information about them is passed on by word of mouth along the trail. One such hostel, that has now closed, invited hikers to show up at a particular gas station in town and there ask for lodging. The manager of the gas station would shuttle hikers to the house.



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12.  From the Appalachian Trail Conservancy web site: http://www.appalachiantrail.org/home/about-us/regional-partnerships downloaded January 19, 2017. There are thirty-one affiliated trail maintaining clubs. In the southern region, they are: Georgia Appalachian Trail Club, Nantahala Hiking Club, Smoky Mountains Hiking Club, Carolina Mountain Club, Tennessee Eastman Hiking and Canoeing Club. In Virginia they are: Mount Rogers Appalachian Trail Club, Piedmont Appalachian Trail Club, Roanoke Appalachian Trail Club, Outdoor Club at Virginia Tech, Natural Bridge Appalachian Trail Club, Tidewater Appalachian Trail Club, Old Dominion Appalachian Trail Club. In the Mid-Atlantic region, they are: Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, Mountain Club of Maryland, Cumberland Valley Appalachian Trail Club, York Hiking Club, Susquehanna Appalachian Trail Club, Allentown Hiking Club, Blue Mountain Eagle Climbing Club, Keystone Trails Association, AMC-Delaware Valley Chapter, Batona Hiking Club, Wilmington Trail Club, and New York-New Jersey Trail Conference. In New England, they are: AMC-Connecticut Chapter, AMC Berkshire, Green Mountain Club, Dartmouth Outing Club, Randolph Mountain Club, Appalachian Mountain Club, and Maine Appalachian Trail Club. 13.  Martin Buber, I and Thou, 53. 14.  Ibid., 56. 15.  Ibid., 56, 63. 16.  Ibid., 57–58. 17.  Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 70. 18.  Ibid., 83. 19. Ibid. 20.  C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1988), 65. 21.  Martin Buber, I and Thou, 114. 22.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian, 38. 23. Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association, and Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Appalachian Trail Thru-Hikers’ Companion 2022. Ed. Robert Sylvester (Harpers Ferry, WV: Appalachian Trail Conservancy, 2022), 84. 24. Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association, and Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Appalachian Trail Thru-Hikers’ Companion 2022, 160, 167. 25.  Martin Buber, I and Thou, 58. 26. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Séglard Dominique, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège De France, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 209. 27.  Martin Buber, I and Thou, 89. 28.  Ibid., 89. 29.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception, 213–214. 30.  National Parks: Great Smokey Mountains National Park along the Tennessee/ North Carolina border Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, and Harpers Ferry National Historic Park in West Virginia. State Parks: Amicalola Falls State Park in Georgia; Grayson Highlands State Park and Sky Meadows State Park in Virginia; Gathland State Park in Maryland; Pine Grove Furnace State Park, Caledonia State

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Park, and Swatara State Park in Pennsylvania; High Point State Park and Wawayanda State Park in New Jersey; Bear Mountain State Park, Harriman State Park, Hudson Highland State Park, Clarence Fahnestock Memorial State Park, and Sterling Forest State Park in New York; Housatonic Meadows State Park in Connecticut; Gifford Woods State Park in Vermont; Crawford Notch State Park, Mount Washington State Park, and Grafton Notch State Park in New Hampshire; and Baxter State Park in Maine. State Reservation: Mount Greylock State Reservation in Massachusetts. National Recreation Areas: Mount Rogers National Recreation Area in Virginia and Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey. 31.  One of the premier fighter jets in the United States arsenal of weapons during the 1960s and 1970s. 32. Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association, and Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Appalachian Trail Thru-Hikers’ Companion 2022, 100. 33. Ibid. 34.  Ibid., 98. 35.  This is an example of what is known as trail magic. I will describe this practice in more detail further into this chapter. 36. Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association, and Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Appalachian Trail Thru-Hikers’ Companion 2022, 218. 37.  Ibid., 217. 38.  See footnote 30 for a list of state parks. 39.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “What is Phenomenology?” Cross Currents 6 no. 2 (1956), 60. 40.  Ibid., 61. 41.  J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, (London: Unwin Books, 1964), 28. 42.  Ibid., 48. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45.  G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology Vol. 1, trans. J. E. Turner (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 25. 46.  G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology, 157. 47.  G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology, 27. 48.  Martin Buber, I and Thou, 131. 49. Ibid. 50. Emmanuel Levinas. The Levinas Reader. Edited by Sean Hand (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1989), 83. 51.  Emmanuel Levinas. Totality and Infinity: an Essay in Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 50–51. 52.  G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology, 23. 53.  Jean-Luc Marion. The Visible and the Revealed (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 91. 54.  Jean-Luc Marion. The Visible and the Revealed, 96.



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55.  Ibid., 98. 56. Ibid. 57.  Jacques Derrida, Anne Dufourmantelle, Rachel Bowlby, Of Hospitality (Standford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 25. 58.  Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 95. 59. Ibid. 60. https://www.fs.usda.gov/recarea/nfsnc/recarea/?recid=48620 61.  Appalachian Trail Days Guide, May 13–21, 2006. Published by the Town of Damascus, Virginia. 62.  Appalachian Trail Days Guide, May 13–21, 2006. 63.  Mark Taylor, “Trail Days,” Roanoke Times & World News, 2001. 64. Ibid. 65.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian, 35. 66.  Ibid., 36–37. 67.  Jane E. Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (New York, Greenwood Press, 1969), 18. 68.  Jane E. Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual, 26. 69.  Ibid., 35. 70.  Ibid., 36. 71.  Ibid., 37. 72.  Ibid., 43. 73.  Ibid., 50. 74.  Ibid., 51. 75. Ibid. 76.  Ibid., 139. 77.  Ibid., 140. 78.  G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology, 384. 79. Ibid. 80.  Ibid., 385. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid. 83.  Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 43. 84.  Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, 39. 85.  Ibid., 43.  86. Ibid., 44.  87. Ibid., 47.  88. Ibid.  89. Ibid.  90. Ibid., 49.   91.  Gary Snyder, “Grace,” Co-Evolution Quarterly Vol. 43 (Fall 1984), 1.   92.  Gary Snyder, “Song of Taste,” Regarding Wave (New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1970), 17.   93.  See endnote 11.

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  94.  Iron Mountain Shelter Register, April 30, 2015.   95.  Kincora Hostel Register, May 3, 2002; hereafter cited as KH.   96.  KH, May 31, 2002.   97.  KH, July 18, 2003.   98.  KH, July 18, 2003.   99.  KH, May 19, 2003. 100.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian, 250. 101.  Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, 140. 102.  Bears Den Register, May 17, 1999; hereafter cited as BD. 103.  BD, April 18, 2001. 104.  David Lesser Shelter Register, May 8, 2001; hereafter cited as DLS. In order to convey an accurate portrayal of the shelter registers, abbreviations and other symbols will be retained in the text of register quotes. I will only alter the quotation when clarity requires it. 105.  DLS, June 26, 2001. 106.  DLS, June 11, 2001. 107.  DLS, May 9, 2001. 108.  DLS, June 8, 2001. 109.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 133. 110.  DLS, July 9, 2001. 111.  DLS, March 21, 2001. 112.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 95. 113.  Abingdon Gap Shelter Register, June 27, 1996.

Chapter Four

Can Wildness Be Found on a Wilderness Trail?

Henry David Thoreau symbolized journeying in the wild as a restorative endeavor. The journey toward salvation takes the pilgrim westward, away from civilization’s cradle, away from the alienating influences of the old world. He writes, “We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.”1 Thoreau’s version of the promised land, “the West,” is, he writes, “another name for the Wild.”2 So, his often quoted axiom, “in Wildness is the preservation of the world,”3 comes to us in the context of an extended metaphor that calls for a journey to the West, which is also a journey into the wild, the land of salvation. He continues in this vein writing that no culture can provide this restoration, and that we must look to myth rather than literature to find inspiration. The appeal goes out to follow a new mythology, an “American mythology,” that will inspire the poets who will in turn inspire the rest of us to journey in this direction. Of course, this American mythology rises out of the journey to the West and therefore to the Wild. Thoreau concludes his essay with an apocalyptic passage, a culminating vision of the salvation to which he has been pointing, “So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.”4 Thoreau’s reference to a plurality sauntering toward the celestial anticity, the wilderness, raises questions about an aporetic relation between the individual and the social, the wild and culture. When humans start marching into the wild searching for salvation, how long will the wild itself be preserved? Humans tend to domesticate the places they traverse and inhabit. In the previous chapter, we explored the AT as a social/spatial journey and found that 157

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many hikers project mediated values onto the constituents along the trail. Many never encounter a tree but gaze at countless trees, viewing them as scenic backdrop or merely boring vegetation. Some discover a transformation of perception and find themselves encountering others who transcend a projected view. This transformed perception may be accompanied by entrance into liminal space. If the journey through the wild is liminal, a pilgrimage of preservation, maybe the aporia works itself out? Maybe the transformed perception coupled with a liminal journey preserves the wild, the alterity of the other. However, when cultures establish a journey as something regular, a route often traveled even if it is liminal, the places through which pilgrims pass may become domesticated. We are back to the aporia. The journey on a “wilderness trail” happens only in name. Wilderness evades us, moving further to the West, just ahead of those who would go into it. This chapter explores the aporetic of the AT, a proclaimed pathway through the wilderness, a way “for those who seek fellowship with wilderness.”5 The AT appeared in the East after America’s advance west came to the vast wilderness of the Pacific Ocean. Levinas’s focus on the face as the manifestation of alterity, helps us delve into the possibility of a fellowship with wilderness constituents that does not at the same time tame and thereby destroy that which saunterers seek. In addition, journeys into the wilderness offer an opportunity for a phenomenological reduction of the various environments through which sojourners pass. As discussed in chapter 2, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of phenomenological description highlights a turning from the conceptual landscapes of human habitation and toward the wild still there beyond our projection: “To turn back to the things themselves is to return to that world prior to knowledge of which knowledge speaks.”6 Phenomenology opens those who would seek wildness, to discover the other through its giving of itself from beyond the sedimented and objectified categories of experience. As discussed in chapter 3, Jean-Luc Marion’s “fourth and last formulation of a possible first principle of phenomenology: ‘As much reduction, as much givenness,’”7 indicates that reduction distances from in its bracketing of the natural attitude. A distancing from and setting aside of ordinary ways of lived experience, experience resulting from a thematized existence. Givenness manifests the other from beyond sedimented and objectified themes. More precisely, bracketing the natural attitude opens us to the other giving itself from itself, beyond our conceptualizations. Liminal space facilitates reduction and walking through the wilderness as a liminal space involves a fully embodied encounter with the other. Liminal distance creates a gap so that the given both gives itself and is received. Marion points to the creation of such a gap “between the (appearing, transcendent) thing and (immanent) lived



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experience (in which the thing would appear).”8 Liminal distance facilitates dialogic meaning-making as it happens throughout a journey. Liminality breaks the “natural attitude” and opens pilgrims to an alternative attitude, such as the fully embodied attitude of climbing the steep mountain trail and discovering communion with the constituents along the way, even with boulders surrounding the path. Liminality opens us to an alternative meaning, a distancing from the usual, or what Husserl refers to as the “natural attitude.” The natural attitude interprets the wilderness as being composed of things ready to hand, an objectification of the constituents of a survivalist’s march or an aesthetic hiker’s scene, combines with established conceptualizations and reinforces them. As I, the survivalist or the aesthetic hiker, survey the scene with eyes as the principal means of gathering, or a coupling of eyes and ears, an individuation of my senses, I impose a self derived meaning upon the given, I stand as master of all I see, I am the center of the prospect. This gives rise to a conceptual frame that lacks the alterity of the face that gives itself in the way Levinas discovers. The scene comes into its meaning as a thing, ready to hand rather than as an “I know not what” that I must “seek,” “await,” “touch,” with my whole being. BRACKETING WILDERNESS In pointing to wilderness Thoreau references something beyond the influences of civilization. Levinas shows us that approaching something such as wildness requires care: “To think the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger, is hence not to think an object.”9 In perceiving an object, I have already thematized the thing. No longer infinite, transcendent or Stranger, I have made it my own, turned it into the self-same. The infinite, transcendent, Stranger, and wilderness appear from beyond cultural adaptations and all human conceptualizations. Working through a definition of wilderness is itself aporetic. Definitions are conceptualizations. How is it possible to define the wild, the very thing whose nature is strange to me, to the human? Yet, Levinas shows us a way to approach transcendence. He writes, “But to think what does not have the lineaments of an object is in reality to do more or better than think.”10 The approach involves a unique intentionality.11 He looks to Plato’s Phaedrus in exploring this intentionality, which involves “winged thought,” “the delirium that comes from God,” and quoting from Plato’s text, this delirium is a “divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention.”12 This is said to be “reason itself, rising to the ideas, thought in the highest sense.”13 The other as transcendent presents herself, the face appearing before

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me, and her face exceeds “the idea of the other in me.”14 The constituents of wilderness who are each the face of the Other “at each moment destroys and overflows the plastic image it leaves me, the idea existing to my own measure and to the measure of its ideatum—the adequate idea.”15 Rather than an object, wilderness gives itself through the face of the Other who appears there before me. Wilderness as opposed to cultural spaces/places transcends and thereby exceeds my ideas, destroys and overflows my measuring of the constituents of space/place. Definitions are themselves ways of measuring, of conceptualizing, of organizing our ideas. Defining wilderness, therefore, erases the very thing we attempt to understand. Yet, we are drawn to understanding in the very proclamation of seeking fellowship. Theological discourse provides a tradition wherein the theologian seeks understanding through negation. In apophatic theology, every concept of God is negated. This does not result in atheism, as such would also involve the negative concept. Rather, understanding proceeds toward mystery, finding value in the relationship with the Other who transcends all conceptual framing. So, in addition to approaching those in wilderness as faces, our way is also apophatic, it employs reduction. In the wake of Thoreau’s call to set out for wild lands, Americans did respond, and in some cases preserved vast tracts. National parks appeared, scenic trails were established, and people sauntered toward Thoreau’s Holy Land. As already referenced in chapter 2, The Appalachian Trail Conference was created in 1925 in response to a 1921 article, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” published in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, authored by Benton Mackaye. Myron Avery took over organizing and building the trail and in 1937 it was complete, stretching from Georgia to Maine. The rhetoric of the pathway included its designation as a wilderness trail. This in turn produced documents that described and conceptually framed the nature of such a trail. As Thoreau called for a new American mythology, the AT did not enter into such a poetic project until Earl Shaffer, referenced in chapter 2, walked the entire length in one go, starting and finishing in 1948. His accomplishment inspired others and baffled those who had originated the trail. Entering the wilderness for months and trekking the length in one stretch was not part of the vision of those who established the footpath. Shaffer, “the Crazy One,” let appear a new way. Emma “Grandma” Gatewood became the first female to thru-hike in 1955, and she and Dorothy Laker became the first to complete two thru-hikes. Their approach did fulfill the poetic turn and became mythopoetic dramatization. Almost a half-century after the establishment of the AT, the Wilderness Act of 1964 was passed and as is required of its now legal status, a definition created conceptual boundaries. The Wilderness Act of 1964 definition:



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A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this chapter an area of underdeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man’s work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.16

This extended definition is analogous to what scholastic theologians proposed concerning God. Rather than apophatic, these conceptually frame the thing intended and approach it as an object. As referenced in chapter two, Otto notes that such attempts to understand religious experience fail: “Both imaginative ‘myth’ when developed into a system, and intellectualist Scholasticism, when worked out to its completion, are methods by which the fundamental fact of religious experience is, as it were, simply rolled out so thin and flat to be finally eliminated altogether.”17 Roderick Nash more subtly tries to describe wilderness writing, “There is no specific material object that is wilderness. The term designates a quality (as the ‘-ness’ suggests) that produces a certain mood or feeling in a given individual and, as a consequence, may be assigned by that person to a specific place. Because of this subjectivity a universally acceptable definition of wilderness is elusive.”18 Nash continues articulating the difficulty of defining wilderness writing that it “is so heavily freighted with meaning of a personal, symbolic, and changing kind as to resist easy definition.”19 Nash traces the etymology of wilderness where it is shown to mean the place of wild beasts implying “the absence of men,” and “a region where a person was likely to get into a disordered, confused, or ‘wild’ condition.”20 All cultural orientation is absent in Wilderness. People wandering in this wild space become bewildered. Humans have not erected artifacts of habitation; wilderness is the environment of the non-human, as Nash describes it.21 Michael Frome points out that wilderness is “more than a place,” it is also “an idea, a principle, a state of mind, even a dream. While the state of wilderness exists in the mind, it does so only to the degree it exists somewhere on the ground.”22 These descriptions of Nash and Frome show the difficulty of defining wilderness, but the descriptions are still rooted in the abstract: “an idea, a principle, a state of mind.” Frome moves toward the concrete in referencing

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a dream. It is in the dream, after all, that we as humans cease our measuring and seem to be reduced to some hidden consciousness that would measure us. The dream is itself a kind of wilderness and as Thoreau alluded, implies a mythology. Carl Jung explored this aspect of dreams, rising from the unconscious, measuring us in mythic symbols. Australian aboriginal tribes refer to the “dreamtime,” or, the “dreaming,” their own way of describing myth and its integral connection to meaning making in the present. Wilderness can be understood mythically as rising from within, erupting and thereby showing that vast cauldron of our unconscious, or those spaces through which we journey in our search for meaning, or as both in a continual interplay. WILDERNESS AS IT APPEARS IN OPPOSITION TO MYTHOLOGY Given a mythic interpretation versus a conceptual understanding of wilderness, how do contemporary hikers find wilderness on a wilderness trail? The so-called wilderness survivalist goes out into the wild, but do they ever encounter the face of alterity? The well-trained survivalist travels within the conceptual provinces of technique. They study the edible flora and fauna of a particular environment, the shelter making possibilities, and other ways of domesticating, even temporarily, the inhabitants of the land. Rather than receiving the hospitality of the constituents of the particular environmental milieu, the survivalist imposes technique and masters the other who is already there. There is no looking into the face of the other, no establishment of relationship where the other is the host. As previously referenced, Levinas writes, “The Other becomes my neighbor precisely through the way the face summons me, calls for me, begs for me, and in so doing recalls my responsibility, and calls me into question.”23 The survivalist never finds a face that summons, calls for help. Rather, everything in the wilderness is ready to hand. The survivalist may counter, pointing to the very motivation for such an endeavor as desiring to be tested, and so to be measured by the wilderness. But such a test points back to the techniques that the survivalist uses in approaching the wild. The measure fathoms the application of technique, the practice of successfully implementing a conceptual frame. The wilderness is not measuring but the technique is. That is, the survivalist is measured according to an application of technique, which mediates the wilderness experience.24 The same can be said of the recreational or aesthetic hiker. As referenced in chapter 2, Ortega y Gasset points to the way such a hiker approaches wilderness writing:



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For the tourist, the countryside, as landscape, is no less human than the others: it is a “painting” and its existence depends on the lyric conditions that man wishes and is able to mobilize. . . Poets and painters are the ones who have formed it.25

In chapter 2, we saw that painters of the sixteenth century introduced wild scenery with their focus on the countryside. The process culminated two centuries later as landscape painters captured wild scenery in their paintings and opened our culture to a new conceptualization of wilderness: “Only by the beginning of the nineteenth century was there enough force behind the human impulse which leads man to convert a piece of ground into the ideality of a landscape.”26 Such landscape is very different from the midbar of Jewish and Christian mythology. Landscape comes forth as a result of enframing, it is revealed as cultural rather than some alterity speaking from beyond. Just as with the survivalist we measure it rather than being measured by it. This objectification of landscapes, enframing it, isolates scenery. That is, scenery does not manifest ecologically. As previously referenced, the Claude Glass, a device inspired by the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain, was carried by aesthetic tourists who used it to frame scenery as they walked along country paths. This device illustrates the practice of enframing, isolating scenery, of imposing a conception upon the land, creating a landscape. The things themselves are hidden by conception, buried under the sediment of objectification. Wilderness, or the countryside as Ortega y Gasset would say, is experienced through the frame of the painting and then the glass. The same could be said of the camera, another imposition of technology to transform the wilderness into landscape. Painters teach us that wild places have aesthetic value, but they also train us to look through a frame. As an aesthetic hiker, I experience the land through a kind of window that separates me from the things themselves, from the life world. As my gaze falls upon the beautiful, the picturesque, or the sublime I am removed from the place itself, distanced by the orienting frame that composes the scene, whether it is an actual device or a conception. The landscape remains an object of aesthetic value, mediating a subjective experience. WHERE IS NATURE’S BODY? Another mythic and conceptual frame that is often confused with wilderness comes with the conflation of nature and wilderness. Nature has its own mythic and conceptual origins that are distinct from those of wilderness. Conflating the two words confuses the meaning of a spiritual journey through the wilderness. Thinking that a wilderness ramble is a way to “get back to nature,” a return to some spiritual essence or primordial environment, is

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fraught with preconceptions that filter a “return to the thing itself.” We think that “getting back to nature” is a return to some authentic thing distinct from the sedimentation of culture, something that precedes culture. Employing phenomenological reduction, that is, bracketing the concept of nature, reveals we don’t get back to anything except the concept itself. We need to navigate to the origin of the conceptual frame. In order to navigate a wilderness trail like the AT, hikers need a guidebook or a map. I will reference these maps as a way of navigating the wilderness of nature. There are several official organizations that publish AT maps.27 I used both guidebooks and maps on my thru-hike. I found that the topographic map placed me in the vast space of the wilderness trail. Others thought their maps helped them find a way through nature. I could never find nature using a map. Maps have always captured my interest. I loved picking out specific places that were attached to family lore. We moved from Maryland to California before I reached my first year. We were then transported to Hawaii on a U.S. Navy ship and sailed into Pearl Harbor on my third birthday. My memories from that time are filled with family stories my mother told, such as my great grandfather’s Civil War adventures as a Union soldier and being held at Andersonville Prison. After the war he raised a family in a sod house in Nebraska before loading his wife and almost a dozen children in a wagon bound for Oregon. My dad’s family migrated from Michigan and Kentucky to Washington State. These were all places I located on maps in our family atlas. I was also fascinated by places international. My dad served on a Navy destroyer and deployed several times to the orient. We had a globe as well as a world map. I would pick out the places he mentioned in letters: Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and the Philippines to name a few of them. As I spun the globe, other places attracted my attention: India, Norway, Greenland. Then I was awakened to the earth itself. It was at this time, while we were in Hawaii, that Alan Shepard became the first American to enter “space.” Then John Glenn circled the earth. My dad was part of the naval fleet that picked up these astronauts from the Pacific Ocean. I became aware of the Earth as a ball floating through space. Soon, all of the planets came to my awareness, and I pondered celestial maps, picking out bodies beyond the Earth. I write these memories in order to draw a contrast between these various bodies—bodies of water, land, and the Earth itself—and something very familiar whose body does not seem to exist in terms of a location. Nature is often evoked as if we walked around in it, swam in it, flew through it. But if it is everywhere around us, where is its location? John Muir writes that “There is nothing more eloquent in Nature than a mountain stream.”28 The stream is “in nature,” but where is nature? Peter Coates lists five overlapping categories of nature: physical place, collective phenomena of the world, essence that informs the



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workings of the world, inspirational guide governing human affairs, and the conceptual opposite of culture. Some of these categories hold concrete and others abstract meanings. Mapping an abstraction is in reality a diagram or model depicting an idea: a Cartesian plane for example. Mapping the concrete should locate some kind of body. Does nature have a body? This section will explore whether or not there is such a body. PHÚSIS Köster writes that for the early Greeks phúsis “is a verbal abstraction . . . whose meaning is ‘to become,’ ‘to grow.”29 The verbal gives rise to “budding,” “growth,” “development.”30 How do you map a verb? “The meaning ‘birth’ occurs for the first time in pre-Socratic philosophy.”31 “The nature and qualities of man are often called phúsis.”32 Qualities such as “caring for children,” “the love of power,” “or natural talents.”33 The tragedians used it as “inner nature,” or the “manner of a man” whereby the virtue of “the race comes to expression.”34 Phúsis begins to reference a thing’s “true nature” “in contrast to” acts. “When man does wrong even though he knows what is right he abandons his phúsis.”35 It also begins to refer to a thing’s constitution. “To ask what things are in their true constitution is to ask concerning their phúsis.”36 In this way stars, land, foreign countries are constituted according to their phúsis. Aristotle uses the term in this sense, “The phúsis of a thing is what this thing is as the end product of its development.”37 In addition to the thing’s constitution, Aristotle also adopted the sense of origin for phúsis. “That from which the first movement comes, that of all the things which are ‘by nature’ inorganic as well as organic.”38 In describing phúsis, Heidegger writes, “The Greeks early called this emerging and rising in itself and in all things phusis. It clears and illuminates, also, that on which and in which man bases his dwelling.”39 From its earliest uses, the concept of phúsis evolved, adding a noun form to the verbal. Wirzba writes, “The enlivening power of nature (expressed with a verb) soon came to be personified as Nature (noun), a reason or force that, though showing itself in the movements of the world, was nonetheless concealed from direct human view.”40 Coates writes, “By the fifth century in Greece, a personified nature (Natura) had become an object of piety in its own right, endowed with a moral purpose and meaning independent of mankind. Nature was also personified as the creative force within the universe— the immediate cause of phenomena.”41 Lewis explores the personification of nature, or Natura writing:

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The pre-Socratic philosophers of Greece invented Nature . . . The great variety of phenomena which surrounds us could all be impounded under a name and talked about as a single object. Later thinkers took over the name and the implication of unity . . . Aristotle’s Nature which covers only the sublunary . . . The object (if it could be called an object) called “Nature” could be personified. 42

Personification brought nature into consciousness abstracted not from the verbal form but from person and thing. The combination of verb and noun forms can be understood from Aristotle’s analysis of phúsis. But connotations of nature as constituting space or place are not yet articulated. In characterizing Aristotle’s articulation of nature Coates writes, “Nature, in short, was an internal property rather than a physical territory, a principle and process rather than a material entity.”43 Hellenistic philosophers added an ethical dimension. To live the good life is to follow according to nature. An antithesis arises between phúsis and nómos, things of law being arbitrary and things of nature growing necessarily. In the antithesis we arrive at the nature and culture distinction, phúsis versus nómos. Köster writes, “It is important to note here that phúsis and nómos are two opposing spheres to which man is equally subordinate and subject.”44 Human beings receive the lógos by nature,45 however, culture is derived and not received. Köster writes, “The whole problem of the Greek concept of nature comes to light in the idea of natural law.”46 There is both a deterministic and human decision thread running through natural law. It was only after “Jewish and Christian belief in nature as the creation of God” that these problems resolve.47 But after the Enlightenment the problem returns, Nature set apart from Creation. NATURE IN THE POST ENLIGHTENMENT Thomas Hobbes understands humans to be in a state of nature that brings about war. Our nature is to seek self-interest. This natural state pits us against each other. Reason is also given by nature and provides a potential salvation. The only way to end the war is to give up self-interest, to create an agreement wherein we give a sovereign our natural right. So, culture, our constructed agreement, saves us from nature.48 Thoreau sees the reverse, salvation through a return to nature, thus his articulation, “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”49 As stated at the beginning of this chapter, Thoreau uses the east to symbolize culture and the west to mean the wild, synonymous with nature. In moving west, “we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done.”50 In Hobbes we need culture, nómos, to curb our nature and improve our lot in life. For Thoreau,



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culture moves us away from our nature. We must flee culture to awaken, or preserve, our nature. In line with Aristotle, Emerson uses the term nature to mean the order of things, “We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy.”51 Aristotle distinguishes “between things which are by nature and things due to other causes,” which “imitate nature.”52 Emerson draws the distinction between culture and nature more sharply, writing, “Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf. Art, is applied to the mixture of his will with the same things, as in a house, a canal, a statue, a picture.”53 In addition to setting nature and culture apart, this quote shows Emerson raising the outward form from an intrinsic order, “essences unchanged” are “space, the air, the river, the leaf.” Aristotle explains phúsis as a thing’s true constitution or telos. Yet, the ambiguity of extrinsic and intrinsic qualities remains in Emerson. In a passage describing the beauty of “Nature,” he cautions concerning the least part of this beauty, “The shows of day the dewy morning, the rainbow, mountains, orchards in blossom, stars, moonlight, shadows in still water, and the like, if too eagerly hunted, become shows merely, and mock us with their unreality.”54 Thomas Jefferson has a comparable view of nature; Coates writes, “wild and unmodified environments did not constitute nature. Wilderness was the raw material out of which nature was fashioned—nature being the improved, privately owned landscape of farms, gardens, and rural estates that occupied the middle ground between industrial urban society and untamed savagery.”55 Hannah Arendt explores the tension between nature and culture, arriving at a conclusion similar to Hobbes but uses Marx to frame the investigation. If we take nature in the verbal sense, the Greek presentation of nature as movement toward telos, human beings are by nature makers of things. Our making of things could not comprise a world apart for we make according to our nature. There would be no distinction, natural versus artificial. Through our nature as humans, we have been called homo faber. But Arendt sees two kinds of making, distinguishing between labor and work. She notes that “the word ‘labor,’ understood as a noun, never designates the finished product, the result of laboring, but remains a verbal noun to be classed with the gerund, whereas the product itself is invariably derived from the word for work.”56 “To labor meant to be enslaved by necessity.”57 Arendt writes, “It is indeed the mark of all laboring that it leaves nothing behind, that the result of its effort is almost as quickly consumed as the effort is spent.”58 She notes that the productivity of work “adds new objects to the human artifice.”59 In addition, homo faber, the maker, “fabricates the sheer unending variety of things

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whose sum total constitutes the human artifice.”60 The products of human artifice, she writes, “Viewed as part of the world, the products of work—and not the products of labor—guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all.”61 She continues describing the durability of the products of work, “Their proper use does not cause them to disappear and they give the human artifice the stability and solidity without which it could not be relied upon the unstable and mortal creature which is man.”62 Concerning nature she writes, “It is only within the human world that nature’s cyclical movement manifests itself as growth and decay. . . . the whole household of nature swings perpetually. Only when they enter the man-made world can nature’s processes be characterized by growth and decay.”63 This “man-made” world is a “home erected on earth and made of the material which earthly nature delivers into human hands,” and “consists not of things that are consumed but of things that are used.”64 She notes that animal laborans sees nature as the provider of goods for consumption. Homo faber, on the other hand, sees nature as providing nothing of value, said to be “almost worthless” but “whose whole value lies in the work performed upon them.”65 She writes that “untouched nature” and its “overwhelming elementary force” compels us to “swing relentlessly in the circle” of our “biological movement.”66 Homo faber has erected an objective world out of what nature has given. This fabricated world protects homo faber from nature. Arendt writes, “Without a world between men and nature, there is eternal movement, but no objectivity.”67 NATURE IN ART Both Ancient Greek, Enlightenment, and contemporary philosophers deliver a tangled understanding of nature. However, much of our shared experience in the current age rises out of artistic depictions. Yet, these are not consistent with each other. Concerning nature in works of art from the Middle Ages, Coates writes: Some literary historians might have overreached themselves in their attempts to construct a grand theory of Nature out of various scattered references and images. As George Economou muses, “if the role of capital N nature in works of art cannot be concretely depicted or articulated, can we be certain it is there?”68

Concerning Saint Francis of Assisi, whom Romantic poets looked to as a model for elevating nature, Coates points out that we don’t find any reference to a mother nature. Rather, Saint Francis refers to various constituents of the created world as brothers and sisters. He “never even used the word



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‘nature.’”69 Landscape art also plays into our tangled view of nature. Coates writes: The natural world’s positive appearances are mostly confined to a personified Natura, who operates as a secondary creative force (the “vicar of God”) to give form to what Thomas Aquinas called “the wax of things.” According to this way of thinking, the fashioning of a garden out of chaotic waste did not amount to the conquest of an original nature. Nature, having no previous identity, came into being through the garden.70

Romantic artists—poets, painters, and musicians of the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries—give the current age a view that nature is a noun that names spaces, places, and personae. Coates writes, “Our basic understanding of nature today derives from the Romantic ‘nature poets’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” These artists depict nature as being composed of all that humans have not made, yet, if made long enough ago, may be included as natural.71 The distinction between nature and culture rises to a new level. The Romantic poets desire communion with nature “based on an arresting distinction between nature and culture.”72 Yet, Romantic poetry and landscape art are derived through an aesthetic convention. Though Romantics depict nature as if unfiltered, and thereby seem to show us nature as distinct from culture, the aesthetic convention is thoroughly steeped in a new expression of culture. Coates writes, “The ground for Romanticism was also prepared by the aesthetic of the picturesque.”73 Recall the discussion of the aesthetics of landscape in chapter two, the conventions of the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime. Though Coates writes, “The aesthetic mood that rebelled against the picturesque was that of the sublime,”74 in reality, the sublime is just another convention that ultimately colonizes the wild, makes the terrifying approachable. Sublime landscapes begin to be carved out of spaces formerly understood as wastelands, deserts, and in some cases having been occupied by people deemed wasteful, uncivilized, savage. Long after the Highland Clearances in Scotland, wherein people who were viewed as not using the land efficiently and replaced by herds of sheep and cattle, scenic tourists admire the sublime of the open landscape. The same thing happened in the United States after removing indigenous people from their lands. Yellowstone National Park becomes a place of sublime prospects with little or no recognition that it was sacred to several tribal peoples. Coates writes, “The brushing aside of the Native American created a blank canvas onto which Euro-Americans projected their ideas of wildness (initially negative but increasingly holy by the time whites penetrated Yosemite Valley).”75 Aesthetic conventions of Romanticism were so prevalent that John Muir experienced the wild through them. Coates

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writes, “Even the Californian Sierra Nevada was described by that most enthusiastic American celebrator of ungilded wildness, John Muir, in terms of the aesthetic conventions rooted in eighteenth-century English parkscapes.”76 J. R. R. Tolkien, like Hannah Arendt, gives us another picture of two worlds. But unlike Arendt and others whose picture is composed by the natural and artificial, Tolkien describes primary and secondary worlds. He writes that when “the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator,’ a “Secondary World which your mind can enter” is made. “Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world.” If the reader disbelieves, the art fails, and “You are out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside.”77 I already quoted Tolkien’s view of mythology, itself a sub-creation, in chapter 1: “Max Muller’s view of mythology as a ‘disease of language’ can be abandoned without regret. Mythology is not a disease at all . . . It would be more near the truth to say that languages, especially modern European languages, are the disease of mythology.”78 Tolkien goes on to write, “The incarnate mind, the tongue, and the tale are in our world coeval.”79 Here Tolkien alludes to the Greek use of nature, its verbal sense, human beings through naturing or becoming are world makers. Our imagination erupts, emerges from our very essence as beings and creates. Rather than the problematic of distinguishing between nature and art, another more rooted distinction manifests, truth versus creative imagination, the epistemic of logos versus poiesis. Tolkien writes: The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faërie is more potent.80

Tolkien claims that in the creation of these imaginative works, human beings become sub-creators. Heidegger also sheds light on the relationship between nature and art, truth and imaginative creation. He writes, “The art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings. This opening up, i.e., this deconcealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work. In the artwork, the truth of what is has set itself to work. Art is truth setting itself to work.”81 NATURE’S ABSENCE FROM MYTH Looking back to the ancient Greeks, prior to its abstraction, while still in its verbal form, nothing mythopoeic appears in relation to nature. Lewis writes:



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Nature may be the oldest of things, but Natura is the youngest of deities. Really ancient mythology knows nothing of her. It seems to me impossible that such a figure could ever arise in a genuinely mythopoeic age: what we call “nature-worship” has never heard of what we call “Nature.” “Mother” Nature is a conscious metaphor.82

That is, a metaphor constructed conceptually, interacting with abstract ideas. Coupling the concrete experience of mother with the abstraction of nature requires joining them conceptually. Mother coupled with earth brings two concrete things together, two things that humans relate to as body-subjects in a reciprocal circuit. Revisiting chapter 3 in exploring our relationship with trees shows this coupling of concrete things with which we form a circuit. In this I pointed to Merleau-Ponty who writes of this kind of situation, “It is not a surveying of the body and of the world by a consciousness,”83 which produces the conceptual metaphor, “but rather is my body as interposed between what is in front of me and what is behind me, my body standing in front of the upright things, in a circuit with the world, an Einfuhlung with the world, with the things, with animals, with other bodies.”84 Mother is the first of these things. Our first encounter comes upon us when she holds us, drawing us to her breasts, kissing our face, delivering us into a relation with the upright things. Likewise, earth becomes one of our primary experiences. We crawled over the earth, grass under our belly, sand pliable in our hand and falling back to the ground but clay remaining, sticking to our fingers. Our relation to earth expanded. We placed a seed in the earth, added water, and watched a plant-body appear, an individual of the grass kind. But our conceptual life slowly squeezed our body life, the subject of the body-subject usurped, and we began to understand earth as a ball floating in space. The creation myth in Genesis 1 should be read in light of our being as body-subjects in the primal sense, prior to the usurpation by the subject. The Hebrew for earth is haáretz, the very land on which we dwell. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

‫ָָארץ‬ ֶ ‫ ְואֵת ה‬,‫שּׁ ַמי ִם‬ ָ ‫ אֵת ַה‬,‫ ָב ָּרא אֱֹלהִים‬,‫שׁית‬ ִ ‫ְב ֵּרא‬ We dwell on this present land, that on which our feet tread, into which we dig, upon which the water falls and runs. Above us is sky, the dome of heaven, out of which rain appears, wind caresses, the sun shines. There is no ball floating in space. Heidegger writes: We call this ground the earth. What this word says is not to be associated with the idea of a mass of matter deposited somewhere, or with the merely astronomical idea of a planet. Earth is that whence the arising brings back and shelters

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everything that arises without violation. In the things that arise, earth is present as the sheltering agent.85

Later the Hebrews would extend the meaning of haáretz to “the land of Israel.” The extension retains the existential meaning, the land of our dwelling. Lewis goes on to contrast the conscious metaphor of mother nature with the existential metaphor of mother earth and its mythopoeic depiction. He writes: “Mother” Earth is something quite different. All earth, contrasted with all the sky, can be, indeed must be, intuited as a unity. The marriage relation between Father Sky (or Dyaus) and Mother Earth forces itself on the imagination.86

Evan Eisenberg, in contrasting the mythologies of the mountain dwelling Canaanites with the Egyptians living on the Nile River writes, “It is hardly surprising that people whose farming depended on infrequent rain or on rain-fed rivers should worship a sky god or mountain god. Nor is it surprising that that god should be a god rather than a goddess, for the analogy of rain to semen has escaped few farming peoples.”87 Eisenberg goes on to describe the Egyptians as having missed the analogy, “not having seen the sources of the Nile in the rain-flushed mountains of Abyssinia and Central Africa, they thought it sprang full-grown from the depths of the desert.”88 The Egyptians reversed the arrangement with the sky goddess, Nut, and the earth god, Geb, a painting depicts “Nut arched above the prone Geb’s towering penis.”89 Lewis goes on to write, in relation to the mountain god arrangement, “He is on top, she lies under him. He does things to her (shines and, more important, rains upon her, into her): out of her, in response, come forth the crops—just as calves come out of cows or babies out of wives. In a word, he begets, she bears.”90 The relationship between heaven and earth appears to us. As body-subjects on the earth and under the sky we live in the circuit that connects us. Our primal communication describing the circuit is mythopoeic, rising out of the existential situation. Lewis writes, “You can see it happening. This is genuine mythopoeia. But while the mind is working on that level, what, in heaven’s name, is Nature? Where is she? Who has seen her? What does she do?”91 We invent her through a metaphor abstracted from the verbal form, morphing into a noun, and then personified. Lewis writes: This personification could be either treated as a mere colour of rhetoric or seriously accepted as a goddess. That is why the goddess appears so late, long after the real mythopoeic state of mind has passed away. You cannot have the goddess Nature till you have the concept “Nature,” and you cannot have the concept until you have begun to abstract. 92



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To step out beyond culture, a liminal stepping, a separation from what we as humans have constructed, cannot be realized in thinking about it from the perspective of the nature/culture distinction. The metaphor of nature as a noun is much too ambiguous. Wirzba writes, “The term “nature” has been put to so many (often contradictory) uses that it confuses far more than it clarifies the world.”93 Wilderness, on the other hand, though having its own problems, communicates more clearly. Coates writes that “whereas nature is culturally constructed (and by definition, therefore, a domesticated thing, wilderness is an objective, primordial condition.”94 In discussing Bill McKibben’s book, The End of Nature, Coates writes, “what he really means by the end of nature is the destruction of the idea of nature as an untrammelled entity. In short, the demise of the idea of wilderness.”95 Coates goes on to write that for McKibben and other Americans, “nature is synonymous with wilderness.”96 Nature, understood from the Greek verb phúō (to grow) and phúsis (a thing’s essential characteristic), shows that the essence of what it means to be human is to create, and in creating we make a world for ourselves called culture. That is, it is in our nature to create, and the world of our creation is culture. Culture then is natural. Nature itself is a human construct, a product of culture. Coates writes, “We have not made the natural world but we have, in a sense, created nature.”97 Thinking we escape culture, in the liminal sense, by going out into a nature that is posited to be distinct from culture is an illusion. Coates notes that the problem with understanding nature as everything material leads us to conclude nothing can be unnatural.98 If we mean nature is everything that is not culture, or artificial, then nature as a concept depends on the concept of culture.99 Wilderness, on the other hand, is a spatial location distinct from cultural space. NATURE AND WILDERNESS Those who hope for health through a walk in the wilderness find meaning in its therapeutic possibilities. If we replace the American transcendentalist’s use of the word nature with wilderness, we find that a journey through the wilderness can be a practice of spiritual walking. Coates writes, “Nature [wilderness] indicates that for the transcendentalists human spirituality was the element of highest value in the universe, leaving nature [wilderness] as a conduit, a raw material to assist the human spirit in its quest for perfection: ‘beauty in nature [wilderness] is not ultimate. It is herald of inward and eternal beauty, and is not alone a solid and satisfactory good.”100 Rather than Thoreau’s turning his back on culture in the journey west, a sojourn through the wilderness brings healing to culture and the vast space extending beyond human projection. That is, wilderness is neither a wasteland nor the celestial

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anticity. It is the liminal space through which we pass in a spiritual ritual of unbending our nature, of restoring a healthy nature. Recall William Cronon’s critique of wilderness, his examination of the complexity of understanding wilderness and the lessons it might teach. He writes, “If the core problem of wilderness is that it distances us too much from the very things it teaches us to value, then the question we must ask is what it can tell us about home, the place where we actually live.”101 Rather than interpreting wilderness in this way, if, in the context of this exploration of the AT as a space to enact spiritual practices, wilderness appears as liminal space, we discover it as therapeutic. In chapter 2, we read Olmsted’s claim that landscapes have therapeutic value. His design of Central Park in New York City included the relative wilderness of the Ramble. He referenced the health benefits of such places as “unbending of faculties” and “a place of gathering.”102 I pointed out that this unbending points toward the restoration of psychological health. The value wilderness might teach us in relation to the place we live comes in the wake of restoring a healthy imagination that incorporates others into a community of belonging, of including both humans and extra-humans in that wider community. In this restoration of health, we tread more carefully, leaving less of ourselves behind and focusing more on the needs of others. That is, as Levinas has shown, we open ourselves to the other, whomever summons me, recalling our responsibility and calling us into question.103 LEAVE NO TRACE, A WILDERNESS ETHIC: BACKPACKING AS ART I was sitting on top of Mount Katahdin, Maine, with a group of hikers who had just completed their 2,100-mile journey. Some of those present had been walking through the wilderness for six months. The last day of their experience involved a 5.2-mile hike and an elevation gain of about four-thousand feet to reach the summit of Mount Katahdin at just over 5,200 feet above sea level. One of those pilgrims, whose trail name was CC, sat carving his name in the wood hiking poles he had used over most of his trip. He had acquired the poles from the forest and fashioned them to fit his stride. Another hiker, Chicken Legs, who had acquired her poles in a similar way, named them. These hikers had become attached to their poles as extensions of their bodies. CC wanted to leave his poles at the base of the sign that indicated the terminus of the AT. This offering was to be his way of extending his identification with the AT, of leaving something of himself on top of the mountain. He spoke of having visualized this moment for several hundred miles. As he



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spoke of these plans, and outlined a kind of impromptu ceremony, I wondered about such an act. It would be positive for CC. He would for years reflect on leaving something of himself, both metaphorically and actually, on the trail. But what would those “sticks” mean to the hikers who came to the sign after CC descended the mountain? The wooden poles, selected from tree branches that had dropped to the forest floor, would eventually decompose. But, the summit of Katahdin is well above the timber line, and tree branches are not natural in such an environment. I did not say anything, not wanting to interfere with CC’s thoughts in this sacred moment at the end of his journey. As a researcher, I also did not want to impose on the situation. Then, he verbalized his reflection in this regard, “what will my sticks mean to those who reach the top after me?” He went on to surmise the reaction of those who would encounter his hiking poles. The poles would not be part of their journey. His poles would intrude upon the experience of other hikers. At this point I told CC about a scene from the film Harold and Maude wherein Maude throws a ring into the bay. The ring had just been given to her by Harold, a token of his love for her. Maude looks out at the water where the ring has just vanished below the surface and says, “I’ll always know where it is.”104 CC then decided to throw his sticks off the mountain, where nobody would ever encounter them, but where he would always know their location. In this case, CC was practicing two different ethical teachings, that characterized by the rhetorical aphorism and land use ethic “Leave No Trace,” and the spiritual relational action of reciprocity. “Leave No Trace” is a phrase that came out of efforts made by land managers “to encourage visitors to voluntarily learn and apply low-impact practices that avoid or minimize such impacts.”105 The U.S. Forest Service (USFS), Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the National Park Service (NPS) had been attempting to implement a low-impact ethic in the 1970s and 1980s.106 After years of attempts by wilderness managers to balance protecting public lands and creating positive experiences for visitors to those environments, they created several brochures: “Wilderness Manners,” “Wilderness Ethics,” “Minimum Impact Camping,” and “No-Trace Camping.”107 After more cooperation and increased efforts to protect wilderness, in 1987 the three agencies “developed and distributed a pamphlet titled ‘Leave No Trace Land Ethics.’”108 In 1990, in attempting to expand knowledge and education on this ethic, the USFS brought the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS) into the effort.109 In 1994, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service became involved.110 “Leave No Trace” principles are plan ahead and prepare; camp and travel on durable surfaces; pack it in, pack it out; properly dispose of what you can’t pack out; leave what you find; minimize use and impact of fire; respect wildlife; and be considerate of other visitors.

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“Leave No Trace” is a consciousness raising rhetorical statement. Those who practice the teaching may learn new ways of relating to wilderness, and even those less inclined to journey into the wilderness for extended periods benefit from the thought-provoking idea behind the aphorism. Practicing “Leave No Trace” means treading lightly and being conscious of one’s every action. Even footprints in some instances are intrusions into the wild and may not be repaired for years. Tracks in desert climates may last a century. The Oregon Trail, though not traveled for a century and a half, is still evident in places where wagon ruts are visible. Lifting rocks and moving dead logs disrupts lived-in places. Though fire is part of the natural cycle in wilderness environments, fire pits are not, and the rocks used to ring those pits will be marked, charred black, for some time. A journey into the wilderness is a visit to another’s dwelling place. It is like entering a friend’s home and spending time in his company. The visitor who marks, scratches, dents, or damages another’s dwelling does not practice sound manners. Leaving no trace is what we would have visitors to our own homes practice. The ethic of reciprocity is commonly linked to the Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It is further explored by Martin Buber in his writings, especially I and Thou and Between Man and Man.111 As noted in chapter three, Buber’s exploration of human relationships outlines two basic word pairs, the I-You and the I-It, which when spoken “establish a mode of existence.”112 Experience is said to belong to the I-It and therefore to the ego, whereas “I-You establishes the world of relation” and is characterized by encounter rather than experience.113 Experience is mediated and the ego looks to the objects of experience as means to some end, as involved in some purpose for the ego.114 Because experience is mediated the ego does not participate in the world and is remote from the subjects of the world. Encounter, on the other hand, involves persons in relation to one another. Buber writes, “The relation to You is unmediated. . . No purpose intervenes between I and You, no greed and no anticipation; and longing itself is changed as it plunges from the dream into appearance. Every means is an obstacle. Only where all means have disintegrated encounters occur.”115 This relation is characterized as reciprocity: “My You acts on me as I act on it.”116 As noted in chapter 2, Buber’s mysticism opens reciprocity to the possibility of an encounter beyond the human sphere as my you may be plant, animal, or mineral. An encounter between hikers and constituents of the immediate environmental milieu, involving the ethic of reciprocity, where I am the hiker, identifies the constituents of the environment as You, not objects to be manipulated, used to my desired end. We, myself and the constituents, are in mutual relationship.



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Apophatic spirituality emerged in light of understanding God as wholly other in an atmosphere where some theologies objectify God, and so, according to apophatic theologians, make God into an idol, which would be no God at all. Even using the designator “God” is problematic in apophatic theology or spirituality. Apophatic spirituality, also known as the via negativa, involves eliminating or moving beyond images or metaphors in the spiritual search. The designator “God” is eliminated. Kevin W. Hector writes that apophatic theology insists “that God cannot be set within the horizon of human conceptuality.”117 Opposite of apophatic theology is the spiritual path known as the kataphatic way, or approaching an understanding of God through, according to, images. Lane writes that the apophatic tradition within early Christianity “insisted that any similarity one might find between the Creator and some aspect of creation could not be expressed without acknowledging a still greater dissimilarity.”118 He goes on to write, “Its bold proclamation that ‘less is more’ came to be applied not only to wordiness of theologians, but also to the complexity of one’s life.”119 The mystical relationship between the worshiper and God in the apophatic tradition may also be applied to the relation between any I and You. The encounter between I and You is facilitated by a “less is more” attitude. The less I presume about the You encountered, the more the relationship opens to authentic interaction. Apophatic spirituality is also counter cultural; rather than leaving our mark upon society, our trace is methodically eliminated as we seek an encounter with God. John the Baptist says, “I must decrease, He must increase,” in reference to his relationship with Jesus.120 Jesus himself says, “foxes have holes to live in, and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to rest his head.”121 His own practice involved doing with less to the extent of not having a permanent dwelling. Those who followed Jesus and were sent out to minister received instruction to “take nothing for your trip except a walking stick, wear sandals, but take only the clothes you are wearing.”122 Clearly these followers were not colonizers except in the spiritual sense. These practices outlined in the New Testament are consistent with the principles practiced by conscientious hikers who visit wilderness places and are representatives of humanity in a place where humans are not home. “Leave No Trace” hiking opens backpackers to the wilderness as You versus It. Rather than taking myself in the fullness of my identity into the wilderness, importing all the items that serve to construct my idea of myself, I empty and thereby open myself to the constituents of wilderness, waiting in emptiness to receive. Lane writes concerning apophatic teaching, “As a mode of contemplative ascent to God, it taught spiritual poverty and the imitation of Christ’s self-emptying love.”123 “Leave No Trace” teaching is also a selfemptying love, hiking in the wilderness with less in order to give place to the

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other, whose own voice meets those who cease projecting themselves onto that other. And as with apophatic teaching, “Always its goal was the wonder and simplicity of ‘less,’ both in exercise of language and the relinquishment of self,”124 I encounter the wilderness and those beings in the wilderness as You in wonder and simplicity. “Leave No Trace” hiking requires less comfort, less of culture carried into the wilderness. In this way the hiker approaches the wilderness with the least possible tether to culture. The backpack itself is a technological tether providing minimal equipment.125 This tether makes possible leaving no trace while engaging in an extended journey through wilderness. It is analogous to apophatic contemplation. Lane writes, Being stripped of images, therefore–standing naked before God without the protective interference of language–is as important to the practice of contemplative prayer as the use of images may be in reaching that point where silence begins. Metaphorical images can bring us to God, but once we stand face to face with God’s imageless glory, we realize the impoverishment of all imagination.126

The backpack is the closest approximation of standing naked in the wilderness. If we really were naked in the wilderness, we would either die of exposure or need to alter the place itself, the opposite of leaving no trace. Going into the wilderness requires some technical equipment, but while out there the hiker begins to realize that too much gear mediates encounter, separates I from You, the hiker from the constituents of wilderness. The practice of “Leave No Trace” moves us toward a contemplation of the wild through encounter rather than from experience. Knowing that a complete union with the wild is beyond us, we may still move in that direction, move toward an understanding that transcends human centeredness. Indigenous peoples practicing hunting and gathering, or basic agriculture, are sometimes referred to as living harmoniously with the environment, living in such a way that their practices are cooperative in relation to the extrahuman constituents of their milieu. Snyder points to a reciprocal relation between hunters, gathers, and their milieu. They practice an intersubjective relationship integral to living mutually in a place, recognizing interdependence between themselves and their extra-human co-inhabitants. Their habitus is informed by their habitat. Lane explores that interplay by distinguishing between habitat, the place of dwelling, and habitus, the way of dwelling in the particular environmental milieu, the ecoplace. Lane writes that habitus is the ritualized way of perceiving reality, “to ‘dwell’ in a place creatively over an extended period of time is to conduct oneself according to a custom or habit that draws meaning from the particularities of the environment.”127 Lane shows the intertwining of ritual and place. When ritual ceases to rise out of



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dwelling as a cooperation between human practice and environmental milieu, the constituents therein become a means to an end where the human eclipses any mutuality. Lane writes: Without a habitus–particularly one that is drawn, at least in part, from the rhythm of the land around us–our habitat ceases to be a living partner in the pursuit of a common wholeness. We become alienated from an environment that seems indifferent, even hostile. Habitat turns into scenery, inconsequential background. Habitus is reduced to a nonsacramental, individualistic quest for transcendent experience. . . . We are, in short, a people without “habit,” with no common custom, place, or dress to lend us shared meaning.128

If we look closely at a particular habitus, we discover the depth of dialogue that is happening between humans and extra-human constituents of a habitat. As pointed out in the previous section, our interface with phúsis is always mediated through culture, our art reveals dialogue when the inhabitants of a place cooperate, or monologue when the extra-human has been silenced. Examining a particular habitus reveals the relationship, or its lack, a people have with their habitat. In some cases, indigenous people, like those who come to the habitat from another location, do not have a reciprocal relationship with the constituents of their environmental milieu. Peoples of such cultures may in fact relate to their surroundings in what Buber would describe as I and It. Their culture reveals a utilitarian versus a familial relation. They experience the environment as a mere means to end, a standing reserve. Culture in this case categorizes flora and fauna in relation to mere survival or profit, an exploitation of the extra-human constituents of the environmental milieu. The same thing is true for the survivalist hiker as discussed earlier in this chapter. In this case, experience of environment is unlike the encounter that a hiker practicing “Leave No Trace” is inclined to have. Our own highly elaborated, technologically enhanced habitus, nonsacramental and highly individualistic, has cut us off from sharing meaning with the constituents of our own environmental milieu. Rather, we impose meaning, domesticate, colonize the other. If we are to enter the wilderness in opposition to our current habitus, we must learn the ethic of “Leave No Trace.” I suggest we envision “Leave No Trace” as art, an art that reacquaints us with the dignity and virtue of the extra-human inhabitants of wilderness. Rather than attempting to approach wilderness through a confused idea of nature, in which case we would enter the wild naked as mentioned earlier, we embrace a culture of “Leave No Trace,” an art of backpacking that makes this possible. Those who spend more than a day or two in the wilderness require a backpack and some technical equipment. This is just the beginning of the art of entering the wild as leaving no trace. Because humans do not dwell in the

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wilderness, they must bring provisions that allow for a temporary visit. Too little gear, as noted above, might lead to a violation of the “Leave No Trace” ethic. When the equipment causes the hiker to alter the landscape, a metaphorical and physical footprint is left. Another possibility is that too much gear insulates the hiker from an encounter. All gear mediates the relation between hikers and the constituents of the wild, but too much gear creates a human space, a human halo that is impenetrable. Minimal equipment opens the hiker to encountering the wild, allowing the voice of the other, flora and fauna, to penetrate the membrane of culture. Their voice is authenticated through encounter wherein participants do not anticipate or attempt to alter subjects thereby making them objects, even objects of the aesthetic gaze. When the hiker does have enough provision to survive, they open themselves to the other’s voice by not attributing means to end characteristics to flora and fauna. Instead, that which is encountered reveals itself as having intrinsic value rather than instrumental value. The ecosystem reveals itself in all its complexity. The other remains an alterity, a stranger. Some who encounter constituents of the wild in this way sometimes describe the encounter as sublime. The sublime cannot be humanized. When the land is encountered as sublime, its value rises above potentiality, above the possibility of improvement, and voices themselves spill forth in a relation of I and You. “Leave No Trace” is an aphorism recognized by those who regularly engage in outdoor recreation on public lands. The ethic implies a practice whereby the land continues to appear not to have been visited by persons who use the land. Though some public places are designated for recreational use, they are at the same time being set aside to preserve habitat. “Leave No Trace” considered spiritually can be interpreted as an apophatic land use ethic, erasing the metaphorical footprint of humanity in the natural world but inviting them to recreate themselves in that world. Just as the first line of the Tao-Te-Ching uses language to say that language is of no use in understanding the Tao—“The Tao that can be spoken is not the true Tao”—this apophatic ethic and backpacking art allows humans to move through the wild but restrict their inclination to mark a territory, the value of which rests in its “unimproved” quality.129 Wilderness in this way may be discovered on a wilderness trail. CONCLUSION In light of our contemporary situation, how do we open ourselves to a fellowship within a wilderness ecoplace while hiking constructed pathways such as the Appalachian Trail? One early morning, as the predawn light slowly



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illuminated the surrounding forest, I stood with my back against a tree and watched as life awakened along a creek. A fox, who was walking along the creek edge, stopped just in front of me, one meter away and looked up into my face. I was motionless, maybe blending into the tree trunk, and I looked back into the face of the fox, but I did not see a fox. That is, I did not project anything onto the face of the fox, but looked into the infinite alterity of the other who confronted me, the other who lived as I live but was not I. In the seconds that transpired, I became the focus of the fox; I was the intended one as the fox measured me. Protagoras’s maxim that “man is the measure of all things” seems to apply to the world of things that shows itself in the face of technology, the “standing-reserve” as Heidegger has written. Wilderness reveals itself from beyond this measuring and counters that it is humanity that is measured. The slavery of the children of Israel in Egypt, revealing an approach to living wherein there is only an ethic of exploitation, of using the other whose face vanishes in the enframing of society, leaves no place for alterity. Wilderness, the seeming infinite expanse, reveals hospitality in the action of tsim tsum, a reduction, being present in absence where the infinite withdraws and makes room for the finite. Tsim tsum is the mystical Jewish description of divine hospitality, a withdrawing so that the creation also forms a face. The mythology of wilderness opens us to being measured, to finding ourselves to be responsible, one for another, rather than exploiting one another. Wilderness as liminal is both space/place and the approach one takes while sojourning. Finding fellowship within a wilderness ecoplace happens in finite moments when the (appearing, transcendent) thing and (immanent) lived experience (in which the thing would appear) commune. NOTES 1.  Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Portable Thoreau, Ed. Carle Bode (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 604. 2.  Thoreau, “Walking,” The Portable Thoreau, 609. 3. Ibid. 4.  Ibid., 630. 5. There are twenty-six wilderness areas through which the AT hiker will pass. Here is a list of the current wilderness areas given by state. New Hampshire (White Mountain National Forest), Great Gulf Wilderness Area (1964), Presidential Range— Dry River Wilderness Area (1975), Pemigewasset Wilderness Area (1984), Wild River Wilderness (2006); Vermont: (Green Mountain National Forest), Big Branch Wilderness Area (1984), Peru Peak Wilderness Area (1984), Lye Brook Wilderness Area (1975), Glastenbury Wilderness Area (2006); Virginia: in Shenandoah National

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Park: Shenandoah National Park Wilderness Area (1976), in George Washington and Jefferson National Forests: Three Ridges Wilderness Area (2000), Priest Wilderness Area (2000), James River Face Wilderness Area (1975), Thunder Ridge Wilderness Area (1984), Mountain Lake Wilderness Area (1984), Peters Mountain Wilderness Area (1984), Beartown Wilderness Area (1984), Little Wilson Creek Wilderness Area (1984), Lewis Fork Wilderness Area (1984); Tennessee: in Cherokee National Forest: Big Laurel Branch Wilderness Area (1986), Pond Mountain Wilderness Area (1986); North Carolina: in Nantahala National Forest: Southern Nantahala Wilderness Area (1984); Georgia: in Chattahoochee National Forest: Southern Nantahala Wilderness Area (1984), Tray Mountain Wilderness Area (1986), Mark Trail Wilderness (1991), Raven Cliffs Wilderness Area (1986), Blood Mountain Wilderness (1991).   6.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “What is Phenomenology?” Cross Currents. 6 no. 2 (1956), 60.  7. Jean-Luc Marion. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, 17.  8. Jean-Luc Marion. Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 55.  9. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: an Essay in Exteriority, 49. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13.  Emmanuel Levinas. Totality and Infinity: an Essay in Exteriority, 49–50. 14.  Emmanuel Levinas. Totality and Infinity: an Essay in Exteriority, 50. 15.  Emmanuel Levinas. Totality and Infinity: an Essay in Exteriority, 50–51. 16.  Wilderness Act of 1964, Pub. L. 88–577, 88th Congress, S. 4, Sept. 3, 1964, 78 Stat. 890–896. 17.  Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 27. 18.  Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 1. 19.  Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 1. 20.  Ibid., 2. 21.  Ibid., 7. 22.  Michael Frome, Battle for the Wilderness Rev. (Salt Lake City: Univ. of Utah Press, 1997), 11. 23.  Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 83. 24.  See Jacque Ellul’s idea of technique or Martin Heidegger’s characterization of technology. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, Trans. John Wilkinson, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967). Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977). 25.  Jose Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting, 140. 26.  Ibid., 141. 27. Most are published by the ATC. Maps of the Maine section of the AT are published by the Maine Appalachian Trail Club. Some of the maps in the central section of the AT are published by the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club. These are three examples. Because these maps have different publishers, they are not uniform in appearance.



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28.  John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, 30. 29.  Helmut Köster, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. 3. Ed. Gerhard Kittel. Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 789–809 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1965), 251. 30.  Helmut Köster, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 251. 31. Ibid. 32.  Ibid., 253. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 36.  Ibid., 254. 37. Ibid. 38.  Ibid., 257–258. 39. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, 42. 40.  Norman Wirzba, From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World, 33. 41.  Peter Coats, Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times, 4. 42.  C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 38. 43.  Peter Coats, Nature:Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times, 23. 44.  Helmut Köster, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 261. 45.  Ibid., 264. 46.  Ibid., 266. 47. Ibid. 48.  Thomas Hobbes and W. G. Pogson Smith, Hobbes’s Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 49.  Thoreau, “Walking,” The Portable Thoreau, 609. 50.  Ibid., 630. 51. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems, Ed. Robert D. Richardson, Jr. (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 15. 52.  Helmut Köster, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 258. 53.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, 15. 54.  Ibid., 23. 55.  Peter Coats, Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times, 123. 56.  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 80. 57.  Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 83. 58.  Ibid., 87. 59.  Ibid., 88. 60.  Ibid., 136. 61.  Ibid., 94. 62.  Ibid., 136. 63.  Ibid., 97–98. 64.  Ibid., 134.

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65.  Ibid., 134–135. 66.  Ibid., 137. 67. Ibid. 68.  Peter Coats, Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 41. 69.  Peter Coats, Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times, 53. 70.  Ibid., 60. 71.  Ibid., 3. 72.  Ibid., 127. 73.  Ibid., 132. 74. Ibid. 75.  Ibid., 112. 76.  Ibid., 123. 77.  J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: Unwin Books, 1964), 36. 78.  J. R. R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, 25. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 81. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, Trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial Library, 1971), 39. 82.  C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 37. 83. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Séglard Dominique, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège De France, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 209. 84. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Séglard Dominique, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège De France, 209. 85. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Poetry, Language, Thought, 42. 86.  C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 37. 87.  Evan Eisenberg, The Ecology of Eden (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 78. 88.  Evan Eisenberg, The Ecology of Eden, 78. 89. Ibid. 90.  C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, 37. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93.  Norman Wirzba. From Nature to Creation: A Christian Vision for Understanding and Loving Our World, 32. 94.  Peter Coats, Nature: Western Attitudes Since Ancient Times, 107. 95.  Ibid., 176. 96.  Ibid., 177. 97.  Ibid., 9. 98.  Ibid., 6. 99. Ibid.



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100.  Ibid., 136. 101. William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), 87. 102.  Frederick Law Olmsted, “Preliminary Report to the Commissioners for Laying Out a Park in Brooklyn, New York: Being a Consideration of Circumstances of Site and Other Conditions Affecting the Design of Public Pleasure Grounds,” in The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, 87. 103.  Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 83. 104. Mildred Lewis, Colin Higgins, Charles Mulvehill, Ruth Gordon, Bud Cort, Vivian Pickles, Cyril Cusack, Charles Tyner, and Ellen Geer, Harold and Maude (Paramount Pictures, 2000). 105.  Jeffrey L. Marion, Leave No Trace in the Outdoors (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2014), 97. 106.  Jeffrey L. Marion, Leave No Trace in the Outdoors, 99. 107.  Ibid., 97. 108. Ibid. 109.  Ibid., 98. 110.  Ibid., 99. 111.  Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Macmillan Co., 1967). Buber, Martin. I and Thou. 112.  Martin Buber, I and Thou, 53. 113.  Ibid., 56, 109, 112. 114.  Ibid., 62. 115.  Ibid., 62–63. 116.  Ibid., 67. 117. Kevin W. Hector, Theology without Metaphysics: God, Language, and the Spirit of Recognition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 27. 118.  Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 62. 119.  Belden C. Lane. The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, 62. 120.  John 3:30. 121.  Matt 8:20, Luke 9:58. 122.  Mark 6:8–9. 123.  Belden C. Lane. The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, 62. 124.  Ibid., 63. 125. A former student of mine, Kelly Garner, coined the phrase “technological tether” in a paper titled “What We Bring With Us into the Wilderness: Exploring Heidegger and the Technological Tether,” written for a Virginia Humanities Conference panel titled “What Is Human and Where is Nature? Reflections on the Age of Technology from the Wilderness,” delivered in March 2005. The year before he served as one of my assistants in an undergraduate class, hiking the Wonderland Trail around Mount Rainier in Washington. As we looked out over the slopes, we contrasted our approach to this place versus the hunter-gatherers who at one time roamed this same ground. Our packs allowed us to range through the area without needed provision from the land. Our tether to culture allowed us to have minimal impact.

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126.  Belden C. Lane. The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, 65. 127.  Ibid., 9. 128.  Ibid., 10. 129. Laozi, Tao Te Ching (New York: Vintage Books, 1972).

Chapter Five

Wilderness as Sacred Space

Sacred places serve as conduits between human beings and the Holy. Pilgrimage involves humans traversing various environments and landscapes in search of sacred encounters associated with particular places. In describing human recognition of the power of place, Leeuw writes that space: is no homogeneous mass, nor a sum of innumerable spatial parts. . . Even to the animal, indeed, a locality is not some arbitrary point in space, but a resting-place in universal extensity, a “position” which it recognizes and towards which it directs itself. Parts of space . . . have their specific and independent value. They are “positions”; but they become “positions” by being “selected” from the vast extensity of the world. A part of space, then, is not a “part” at all but a place, and the place becomes a “position” when man occupies it and stands on it. He has thus recognized the power of the locality, he seeks it or avoids it, attempts to strengthen or enfeeble it; but in any case he selects the place as a “position.” Some locus becomes set free and declared so: liberates et effatus; power resides within it.1

These places of power mediate sacred communication wherein sojourners engage in embodied praying, meditating, and contemplating as they pause during their movement across land and sea. Along sacred journey routes, pilgrims encounter the holy through images, icons, social relations, architecture, landforms, wildlife, and other varieties of symbolic communication rooted in concrete experience. Pilgrims sojourning along the Camino de Santiago open themselves to the Holy. Sacred encounters are by no means necessitated by a pilgrimage, but those who open themselves wait, and in the waiting sometimes the Holy gives itself. Long-distance hikers are comparable to pilgrims. Though there is no established religious tradition associated with the AT, long-distance 187

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hikers sometimes search for a connection to the sacred, engage in embodied prayer, meditation, and contemplation. As discussed in chapters 1 and 4, wilderness has a rich rhetorical history. In this chapter, I will explore wilderness as sacred space. I will describe religious practice in relation to sacred space and place, then connect that to the role of the wilderness in mythology. An interlude will follow wherein I describe the Camino de Santiago as sacred journey. Finally, I will return to wilderness in the American context, showing the relation to traditional pilgrimages. WILDERNESS IN MYTHOLOGY Leeuw writes that “the first affirmation we can make about the Object of Religion is that it is a highly exceptional and extremely impressive ‘Other.’ . . . this Object is a departure from all that is usual and familiar; and this again is the consequence of the Power it generates.”2 In his exploration of this Power he writes “it reveals itself spontaneously” and therefore “the comparison of Power with the electric current loses its applicability.”3 Technology has given humanity the ability to manipulate electricity. This is a power, but the Other is a transcendent Power. One is the power that can be harnessed, the other, a Power that cannot be controlled. Rudolph Otto writes that the human response to this Power, the Wholly Other, is “the emotion of a creature, submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.”4 Otto elaborates, describing the Power in terms of the tremendum and two other characteristics, mystery and fascination.5 The Wholly Other remains a mystery and religious systems such as Scholasticism or attempts to classify myth “are methods by which the fundamental fact of religious experience is, as it were, simply rolled out so thin and flat as to be finally eliminated altogether.”6 Our fascination draws us to the Wholly Other. We long for union with the sacred Power. Mircea Eliade writes of humans becoming aware of sacred otherness when the sacred shows itself “as something wholly different from the profane” a “manifestation of something of a wholly different order.”7 The sacred is “saturated with being” and “equivalent to a power.”8 In archaic societies humans lived “in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects” whereas humans have more recently desacralized their world “and assumed a profane existence.”9 In addition, Eliade writes that “the manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world . . . the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.”10 Consecration rituals mediate human interaction with sacred Power. Human beings participate in the constitution of sacred power

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founding the world. Pilgrimage is an act of consecration that flows out of sacred stories, myths, and myths depict sacred encounters in particular locations, sacred places. Myth and the Shepherd-Farmer Wilderness appears as an important space in various myths and becomes especially meaningful in both the Jewish and Christian traditions. Paul Ricoeur writes, “In losing its explanatory pretensions the myth reveals its exploratory significance and its contribution to understanding, . . . its power of discovering and revealing the bond between man and what he considers sacred.”11 In this way myths, as discussed in chapter 2 and 4, are like dreams that manifest a preconceptual and meaning-making experience. Myths, understood this way, measure us, act upon us, giving us a world of meaning. Wilderness in this context is the mythic space where Moses first encounters the Holy. English Bible translators used wilderness most often for the Hebrew midbar and the Greek erēmos, in addition to other Hebrew and Greek words meaning desert, barren, and solitary places. Max Oelschlaeger calls attention to the meaning of midbar that nomadic peoples ascribed to their dwelling beyond the cultivated fields of more fertile lands. He writes: The shepherd-farmer mythology “bespeaks a deeper psychic conflict” than any simple antipathy between herders and farmers. It represents a persistent opposition to civilization. In this mythology the wilderness assumes a deep symbolic meaning, representing both (in Genesis) the shepherd’s departure from the detested city (itself symbolic of the high cultures) and the exodus from slavery into the desert to face Yahweh’s challenge.12

Judaism was birthed in the wilderness of the Fertile Crescent where Nomadic tribes, “shepherd-farmers,” inhabited this space beyond the cultivated lands. Moses The myth depicts Moses leading his people away from the high culture of Egypt and through the solitary space of midbar, a temporary situation or sojourn. The people who live in the midbar, the shepherd nomads, had sheltered Moses during his own exile from Egypt. These shepherd nomads would not have referred to their own dwelling place as midbar. The point of view of the myth comes from people of high culture who are venturing into a perceived wasteland. This perspective is evidenced within the myth. The people of Israel complain to Moses, who has led them to the midbar to die. In their anguish they cry out for civilized food: the fish, melons, leeks, garlic

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and onions of Goshen. The myth describes God feeding them with something called manna, which appeared each day and was collected from the ground on the day it was to be eaten. The manna was not well received. The people complained, desiring the rich food they had eaten in Egypt. Clearly, they were not living from the land, not eating the foods of the shepherd nomads nor growing their own food. These sojourners were not domesticating the midbar. The wilderness was, on the other hand, changing the people, measuring them. The midbar is liminal for the Hebrews, a land beyond their dwelling and enslavement in Egypt but not a permanent dwelling in the future promised land. In measuring them, the liminal midbar transforms the Hebrews, who become the Chosen People, ethically bound in a relationship with the God of this wild space. Moses had met this God during his original exile. While living with the shepherd nomads and leading a flock into the wilderness, he “came to Horeb, the mountain of God,” where an angel appeared in a burning bush.13 Moses, drawn to this hierophany, hears the voice of God call him. Eliade writes that “the manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world. . . the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point, a center.”14 This mountain, Horeb, also known as Sinai, becomes the place of meeting. The mountain is mythically set apart as a place of Power, becoming an axis mundi. Eliade writes, “communication is sometimes expressed through the image of a universal pillar, axis mundi, which at once connects and supports heaven and earth.”15 In the communication, really a conversation, Moses hears a voice sounding from the fire, proclaiming, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.”16 In a playful exchange where Moses attempts to discover the name of this God of his ancestors, he asks, what if the Israelites ask for your name? “What shall I say to them?”17 The voice answers, “I am who I am.”18 This is not a name but a returned playful response, a way of saying, “I see your game. You don’t name me.” It is from the verbal construction of I am, within the phrase “I am who I am, ehye ’ăšer ’ehye (‫שר אֶ ֽ ְה ֶי֖ה‬ ׁ ֶ ֣ ‫)אֶ ֽ ְה ֶי֖ה ֲא‬, that the Hebrew YHWH is derived. When the Torah is read by devout Jews, YHWH is not pronounced, instead the reader says, Adonai. This continued tradition underscores an interpretation of God’s self-revelation to Moses, that the God of his fathers does not have a name, or that the Holy self-disclosure remains nameless. This Holy manifestation coupled with the place of revelation highlights the meaning of midbar. This place, Mount Horeb, is located in the wilderness, a vast empty space. Empty from the perspective of Egypt but not shepherd nomads. Moses’s father-in-law, Jethro, is the priest of Midian, a religious person familiar with the terrain. But the mythic perspective does not come from Jethro. The revelation comes in stark contrast to Egypt and its culture and religion. The gods



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and goddesses of Egypt have names and forms. They rule over the fertile Nile River basin and delta and its high civilization. The God manifested on Mount Horeb has no name, no civilization, no fertile fields. This Other belongs to nobody yet promises to shepherd and guide the people who have come out of slavery in civilization. This Other resists being coopted, used to prop up anyone else’s agenda, even Moses’s. The creation by Aaron and the Israelites of a Golden Calf as their new god illustrates an attempt to form a relationship in which humans might have a little more control, something similar to the religion of Egypt. The God of the wilderness only appears in a pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day. The course and timing of the journey are undisclosed, just as the land is trackless. In addition to remaining nameless, the self-revelation discloses another wilderness connection, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Their story gives context to this meeting with the God of the wilderness. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob Abraham left Ur of the Chaldeans, in the civilization of Sumer, and dwelt in Haran, where he received a call to leave and go to the land of Canaan. 19 In this he became a kind of pilgrim in the wilderness. George Greenia writes: When Yahweh called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees to found a great nation (Genesis 12:1–3) whose people would be as countless as grains of sand or the stars in the sky (Genesis 22:17), this first of Jewish patriarchs was being summoned to pilgrimage. Abraham’s signature test of faith [came] when Yahweh ordered him to slaughter his first-born son Isaac as a ritual offering. . . The entire biblical drama is staged as the centerpiece of pilgrimage into the wilderness, to enact a special act of worship.20

Canaan was a mountainous region, referenced as wilderness and situated between the two ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt. In this way, Canaan is a kind of liminal space in the context of the story. Abraham witnesses an appearance of God, a hierophany, and builds an altar, marking the place.21 Mircea Eliade writes, “the cosmicization of unknown territories is always a consecration; to organize a space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods.”22 The altar becomes an axis mundi the place of communication between Abraham and his God. The altar is in the mountains of Canaan. Eisenberg uses another term for a sacred point of communication, world-pole, “For the Canaanites, the world-pole was the Mountain: the wild place sacred to the gods, the font of life-giving water. For the Mesopotamians, it was the Tower: the ziggurat that rose in the midst of the city.”23 This then is the precedent that later generations under the leadership of Moses will follow.

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Instead of turning away from the ziggurat, Moses and the children of Israel turn from the pyramids. Sacred places of the shepherd patriarchs are established beyond the influence of civilization where human constructed towers serve as the communication points between heaven and earth. Building an altar is not the same thing as a tower. The altar sets a place apart whereas the tower creates a place. The mountains of the wilderness provide places from which God manifests. Another mountain becomes a key place in the mythology of Judaism. When Abraham and Sarah are well past childbearing age, they have a son, Isaac, whom God had promised. When Isaac is still young, God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac in the land of Moriah, “on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”24 As Abraham was about to kill his son on the altar he had constructed, God spoke, telling him not to harm Isaac. Just then a ram appeared, caught in the brush. From this story God is seen as provider and this mountain becomes the place of provision. According to tradition, the mountain of provision is Mount Moriah.25 Another story wherein wilderness is depicted as sacred space has Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, fleeing from his twin brother Esau after a sibling confrontation.26 Jacob was on route to Haran, seeking refuge from his brother’s wrath. While journeying through the wilderness, Jacob makes camp, sleeping with his head on a stone. He dreams of a ladder connecting heaven and earth with angels ascending and descending. Eliade writes, “Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different.”27 The dream revealed to Jacob a message similar to the one given to Abraham concerning the land. Jacob wakes from the dream and says, “Surely the Lord is in this place (ba-makom); and I did not know it. . . How awesome is this place (ha-makom)! It is none other than the house of God and this is the gate of heaven.”28 Eliade writes, “The symbolism implicit in the expression ‘gate of heaven’ is rich and complex; the theophany that occurs in a place consecrates it by the very fact that it makes it open above—that is, in communication with heaven, the paradoxical point of passage from one mode of being to another.”29 So Jacob “took the stone which he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it,” calling the place Bethel, the house of God, and thereby establishing it as sacred ground.30 In painting the rock with oil, Jacob is marking the place in such a way that it might be found later. This sets a precedent for pilgrimage, a return journey to the Holy place, the house of God. Jacob is involved in a second story taking place in the wilderness, which gives him a new identity. Jacob is a trickster, deceiving his family: including his father Isaac, his brother Esau, and his uncle Laban. Jacob means “trick-



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ster, supplanter, heel grabber.” Throughout his life, Jacob relies on his cunning, his wits, which seem to elevate him with various rewards and status. As this second story unfolds, long after fleeing from his brother’s wrath, Jacob returns to pay the piper, to reap the fruits of his double-dealing and trickster life. Approaching the dwelling place of his brother, he needs to make peace, not knowing whether he will be received. He employs a cunning plan to measure his brother Esau. His tricky ploy involves sending gifts in order to find favor with Esau. When he remains alone on the other side of the river Jabbok, he is confronted by “the man.” Jabbok means emptying or pouring out. The river pours out, empties into the Jordan. But it is also the place where Jacob the trickster empties himself, as he contends with God. He has come to an end of himself, alone on the other side of Jabbok, not knowing the mind and heart of Esau. In his emptiness he wrestles with God, he strives, throws all that he has left into the match. After prevailing in the match, he receives his new name, Israel, meaning “strives with God.” Here striving with God and emptying oneself occurs in the same instance. Jacob the trickster, the one who through his own devices works out his status in the world, is emptied. His ego is laid low. Jacob is wounded, crippled, and limps for the rest of his life. But at the same time, he receives his new name and is remembered, honored as Israel, the one who strives with God. This all unfolds in the wilderness, the place of emptying and transformation. Later, when Moses hears that he is speaking with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, these stories merge with the exodus of the people who left Egypt to journey in the wilderness. In this Holy place they will be emptied, transformed, and receive a new identity. God instructed Moses to bring the people of Israel from Egypt to this mountain.31 Here the people who had been living in the cultivated lands of Goshen will be reacquainted with the God of their shepherd patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the wilderness. Here the people will be sheltered from the oppression of Egypt and at the same time measured in the ordeal of the wilderness. Here they will wrestle with God. Lane outlines the Judaic perspective of wilderness being rooted in religious history and providing a topos of meaning: “Yahweh is a God who repeatedly leads the children of Israel into the desert, toward the mountain. . . Having once been taken to the edge, they view all succeeding passages into the wilds of unpredictability in light of that metaphorical paradigm.”32 Wilderness, as a space isolating Israel from civilization and its arable landscape, removes their reliance on the culture of Egypt. The golden calf, created by Aaron and the Israelites, was destroyed in the midst of the wilderness, preserving this space as void of permanent human culture. Artifacts that order reality in domestic lands hinder adaptation to desolate places beyond the boundaries of civilization. Wilder-

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ness as sacred space orients Israel to a relationship with the Holy. As noted earlier, Otto has characterized the Holy as mysterium and tremendum, “that which is quite beyond the sphere of the usual, the intelligible, and the familiar, which therefore falls quite outside the limits of the ‘canny,’ and is contrasted with it, filling the mind with blank wonder and astonishment.”33 The wilderness of the Sinai is an experiential geography producing feelings of nothingness, of astonishment in the vast spatial field of barren rock, sand, and sky. Wilderness is a liminal place, a place of ambiguity, a bewildering place where nothing is as it seems because there are no points of orientation. Turner writes that “liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.”34 Its ambiguity manifests in the shattering of domestic order. Human constructed boundaries are erased. Lane writes, “you quickly come to the end of what you have depended upon to give continuity and meaning in your life. . . In short, the liminality of desert and mountain terrain redefines every boundary giving shape to one’s life.”35 Urban and agrarian cultures view wilderness as a wasteland. It is from this perspective that the mythology unfolds. The Israelites, having come from Egypt, perceive themselves entering a wasteland. Moses’s in-laws, Jethro and kin, on the other hand, would not view the place of Moses’s revelation as a wasteland. The descendants of the patriarchs, raised in Goshen, want to return to the arable landscape of Egypt. After only a few days in the harsh climate and difficult environs of the desert they cry out: “We remember the fish which we ate freely in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic, but now our whole being is dried up.”36 An alternative Hebrew word translated as wilderness, tsiyah, may also be used to reference a barren, dry land. A related word, tsisyiy, may mean wild beast or nomad. The space beyond civilization was perceived as a vast land of desolation. Those humans who dwelt there, like Jethro and his kin, carried the same name as the wild animals therein. Jesus and John the Baptist Greek culture, as evidenced by their mythology, also viewed wilderness similar to those urban and agrarian Egyptians, evidenced by Greek mythology. Roderick Nash elaborates on the mythological characterization of a space that evoked fear: Greeks who had to pass through forests or mountains dreaded an encounter with Pan. Indeed, the word “panic” originated from the blinding fear that seized travelers upon hearing strange cries in the wilderness and assuming them to signify Pan’s approach. Related to Pan were the tribe of satyrs–goat-men of a



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demoniacal character devoted to wine, dancing, and lust. They were thought to appear only at night and then solely in the darkest parts of the forest. According to Hellenic folklore, satyrs ravished women and carried off children who ventured into their wilderness lairs. Sileni and centaurs completed the Greek collection of forest spirits. These monsters had the torso and head of a man and the body and legs of a goat or horse. Usually, they were represented as carrying a club in the form of an uprooted tree which also served as a reminder of their favorite habitat.37

At the time of the writing of the New Testament, Hellenism had great influence. Wilderness, as depicted in the Gospels, can be understood from both a Greco-Roman standpoint and the Jewish tradition of the time. Wilderness has a prominent role in the gospels. Jesus ministers in this space “where nothing separates Him from God and which He therefore seeks when He wants to escape the crowds or when He tries to find a place of quiet for His disciples.”38 Jesus goes into the wilderness for forty days of fasting after being consecrated by John the Baptist. In this way, Jesus could be alluding to the mythology of the patriarchs, to the wandering liminality of Israel’s sojourn. They are in the wilderness for forty years of testing, of formation; he is there for forty days. They are fasting from high culture while they eat manna; he is fasting from food. This is Jesus’ liminal period between his baptism and his ministry. The Theological Dictionary of the New Testament defines the Greek term erēmos as an empty place, without inhabitants. It may also mean abandonment.39 The lexical entry goes on to elaborate in relation to Jesus’s various sojourns in the wilderness, noting that this is the place “where nothing separates Him from God and which He therefore seeks when He wants to escape the crowds or when He tries to find a place of quiet for His disciples.”40 All three synoptic gospels describe this first sojourn. Mark’s account has the Spirit driving Jesus into the wilderness, while the other two describe Jesus being led by the Spirit. It is not until the culmination of the forty days that three temptations come. The interlude of fasting remains a mystery, just as the wilderness transcends our knowing. The wilderness is the space of transformation, or wrestling, of being poured out. In addition, Jesus travels throughout the land, a precedent for later pilgrimage. Greenia writes, “Jesus’s earthly career of preaching and miracles can easily be read as a prolonged circuit pilgrimage through the Holy Land, terrain made holy by His passage and witness, functions that all Christian pilgrims feel themselves repeating as they transform their own trails into highways of faith.”41 John the Baptist preaches in the wilderness. He follows in the tradition of Hebrew prophets. John wears camel’s hair secured by a leather belt. He survives on wild honey and locusts. His message is simple, repent.42 All of

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this resonates with the wilderness narratives described above. John calls his own generation out of a symbolic Egypt. He identifies with the shepherd patriarchs, wearing their clothing and eating their food. He speaks from the ancient sacred space, the wilderness, the primal point of communication for the children of Abraham. Generations later, another journey symbol rises from within the Christian tradition. Christianity is, early on, steeped in the pilgrimage tradition of Israel, rooted in their wilderness narratives. The annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem during the festivals of Pesach (Passover or Feast of Unleavened Bread), Shavuot (Weeks or Pentecost), and Sukkot (Tabernacles or Booths), are rooted in the wilderness sojourn of Moses and Israel, where they found refuge and received the law. Jesus is described as engaging in these pilgrimages. “Every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of Passover. Jesus was also in Jerusalem during other festivals: teaching in the portico of Solomon during the Feast of Dedication (Hanukkah),43 teaching in the temple during the Feast of Sukkot,44 and teaching in the temple during Pesach.45 Later, Saint Helena, mother of Constantine I of Rome, would go to the Holy Lands and establish sacred places associated with Jesus and the Gospel stories. Christian pilgrims would later follow, venerating these sites. In the medieval period, other sites in Europe would also play a prominent role in Christian pilgrimage, Santiago de Compostela being one of the three most prominent, Jerusalem and Rome being the others. INTERLUDE The Camino de Santiago Pre-Christian legends are rooted in the Celtic culture of Galicia. The geography of the coastal city of Finisterre, about eighty kilometers west of Santiago, presents the pilgrim with mountains giving way to a low-lying peninsula, which rises again at the end of the point, Cabo Fisterra, the location of a lighthouse. Here, the Celts believed, was the gathering place of the souls of the dead before their final journey across the ocean. They would follow the sun to their final rest. Finisterre is also thought to be a cultic center for Venus. Her scallop shell is still one of the central symbols associated with Santiago. During the Christian era, Galicia was a frontier between the conquering Moors and the Holy Roman Empire. According to tradition, the remains of Saint James were discovered in 835 by the Bishop of Iria Flavia, Theodomir (Teodomiro in Spanish), in the principality of Asturias. James was the first of Jesus’ disciples to be martyred, executed by Herod Agrippa as noted in Acts 12:1-2. James is described in the gospels as one of three disciples



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who witnessed the transfiguration of Christ.46 Tradition holds that after his death, James’ body was placed on a boat and transported to Iberia. Theodomir claimed to have been guided by a star to where the remains lay entombed. Concerning the historicity and legends of Saint James, Coffey and Dunn write: The texts that narrate the life of this first martyred apostle are limited. There are great gaps between the manuscripts that tell of his beheading in Jerusalem and those that tell of the flourishing of his cult and the pilgrimage to his tomb in the northwestern corner of the Iberian Peninsula. Many of these documents offer only cryptic allusions.47

Concerning the gap between James’s beheading and manifestation on the Iberian Peninsula, he does not appear in early Christian writings that associate him with Spain. The first text connecting Saint James and the Iberian Peninsula comes in the Breviary of the Apostles (sixth century), wherein he is said to have gone “to the western parts of Spain and preached” before being killed by Herod.48 In addition, the text locates his burial in Achaia marmarica. Coffey and Dunn note that this reference to the place of his burial in this text “begins the quixotic search for the meaning or place of ‘Achaia marmarica,’ variously interpreted as a geographic place, the location of James’s sepulcher, or as a description of his tomb.”49 Other early texts connecting Saint James to Spain: On the Birth and Death of the Fathers by Isidore of Seville (c. 560–636); “Song on the Altars of the Twelve Apostles” by Aldhelm of Malmesbury (c. 639–709); O Word of God Revealed by the Mouth of the Father by Beatus de Liébana (c. 730–c. 800); Martyrology by Usuard (d. 877), the first of the texts “to tell of the translation of James’s body to Galicia”; Martyrology (c. 900) by Notker Balbulus (c. 840–912), here his body is said to be buried in Galicia and “a cult of followers was established”; Letter of Pope Saint Leo Anonymous (ninth or tenth c.); Pasionario Hispánico Anonymous (pre-eleventh c.); Agreement of Antealtares Anonymous (c. 1077), “the first written record of the inventio (discovery) of Saint James’s tomb that occurred in 830.” Coffey and Dunn write, “during the ninth and tenth centuries, the cult of Santiago and the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela had become established and well-know.”50 In the Antealtares the discovery of the tomb of Saint James is said to have occurred during the reign of Alfonso II of Asturias (c. 760–842, r. 783 and 791–842). “The tomb is revealed by angels to the hermit Pelayo who lived nearby.” Other persons see strange lights in the sky. They deliberate and bring the bishop of Iria, Teodomiro, who after prayer finds the sepulcher of the apostle. The bishop goes to King Alfonso II and reports the finding.51

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The origin of James the Matamoros follows. In 844 during the battle of Clavijo, Saint James is reputed to have been seen riding at the head of the army and leading the Spanish against the Moors. Various shrines were built in Santiago over the ensuing years. One of these shrines was destroyed by the Moors in 997. The relics of Saint James were authenticated in the 1884 Bull, Omni Potens Deus, of Pope Leo XIII. But Roman Catholic scholars are ambivalent concerning the true identity of the person entombed. One theory concerning the identity of the remains entombed in the shrine involves Priscillian, Bishop of Avila, who was beheaded as a heretic at Treves, France around 385. In addition to scholarly research on the history and legends of Saint James, I have also had the great privilege of listening to well-educated pilgrims give oral dissertations in this regard. For example, while exiting Burgos in 2008, I was accompanied by a teacher from Spain whose field is history. He had been the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to study in the United States Just after leaving the albergue, I asked him about El Cid, the famous eleventh century Castilian knight whose statue is a focal point in the Plaza del Mio Cid, Burgos. He proceeded to give me a grand history lesson, starting with Ferdinand I of León and proceeding through the split of the kingdom between his children: sons Sancho, Alfonso, Garcia, and daughters Elvira and Urraca. The lesson spanned our walk from Burgos to Hornillos del Camino, twenty-one kilometers distance. On another occasion I received a lecture, starting with the rise of the first Camino, the Primitivo, through its evolution and shift to the French route. I was walking the Primitivo in 2016, starting in Oviedo on June 26, and four days later stopped in Campiello for the night. My pilgrim companions, John and Leo, with whom I had walked the first two days of the pilgrimage, had skipped ahead. I saw them in Campiello, staying at Casa Ricardo, one of the albergues in the village. They invited me in to meet the owner of the albergue, Rui Portugal Ribeiro. Rui was a very friendly, outgoing man. Sitting at a table in his café, drinking cerveza, we listened to Rui lecture on the history of the Camino. While speaking, Rui drew diagrams and maps on the table’s paper placemats. Rui began with Oviedo and Alfonso II of Asturias, El Casto, the king who reigned in the ninth century. After receiving news of the Saint’s revealing, Alfonso II travelled to where the tomb of Saint James was reported to have been discovered, about 320 kilometers. He venerated the bones and built a shrine. Upon returning to Oviedo, he sanctioned the pilgrimage and people started walking to the tomb. At the time, Asturias was the only principality of the Iberian Peninsula not conquered by the Moors. The route across the mountains to the tomb of Saint James ran along the contested border. Rui



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called our attention to the mountains. To the east of Oviedo, the majestic Los Picos de Europa rise up as part of the larger Cantabrian Mountain range. This range served as a barrier between the principality and the Moors, a natural wall of defense for Asturias. King Alfonso II then invited the French to immigrate to Asturias, populating the land adjacent to the route to Santiago de Compostela. He offered free land, no taxes, and no obligation to military service. This way he established a populated border, creating an infrastructure with both military garrisons and hospitals built along the way: medieval hospitals along pilgrimage routes were the accommodations pilgrims used for shelter and meals. As the struggle with the Moors pushed the border south, kings who followed practiced the same strategy. Along the current French route, the same invitation to immigrants was offered. So, we find many place names, including towns, and cities, with French names. These political leaders of medieval Spain realized the importance of cultural capital. As pilgrims from all over Europe streamed through Spain on their way to visit the tomb of Saint James, they brought with them knowledge, art, architecture, and other forms of cultural wealth. Pyrenees, Gateway to Spain The pilgrim’s experience walking the Camino de Santiago, like any journey wherein sojourners spend an extended time in the direct influence of seasonal weather conditions, will change daily and even hourly in some locations such as the Pyrenees. The pilgrim who walks in the spring will encounter cold, wet weather, even snow in some places. Late summer and early fall will be for the most part hot and dry. I will be describing a walk that takes place between mid-June and late July, but my description cannot capture the full experience of other pilgrims who have walked under differing conditions. St. Jean Pied de Port is a medieval city at the base of the Pyrenees in the far southwest of France. The foothills of the Pyrenees cradle the city on the west, north and east while the great mountain range itself rises immediately to the south. The narrow-cobbled streets of the city limit the pilgrim’s view of the surrounding landscape, but climbing the old fortress, the citadel, within its medieval walls affords a view beyond the streets, across the suburbs that have grown from the fields that once supplied food to the city’s inhabitants where modern houses swallow up outlying villages, and ultimately to the hills and mountains that encircle the city. Most pilgrims arrive via train or bus on the day before their journey begins. They find a bed at one of the many refuges, also known as albergues, pilgrim hostels that will provide shelter on the long journey to Santiago de Compostela some 800 kilometers to the west. The first afternoon and evening thrusts

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the pilgrim into an unknown place, this gateway to the journey where people from around the world gather in final preparation for a walk that will take more than a month. In many cases, the sheltering hostel, the albergue, will offer a communal meal for the pilgrims therein. Here people from divergent backgrounds become acquainted around a table and food. A celebration of the feast. In the early morning, the hosts of the albergues offer coffee, tea, bread; sustenance for the twenty-kilometer climb to the summit of the Pyrenees. Pilgrims leave their shelter and begin walking up the cobbled street toward the mountains, which are not visible from the narrow urban road. The old buildings look down and witness another day wherein pilgrims begin their long journey to the tomb of Saint James. Individuals and small groups make their way up the street, walking through a gate in the city wall and entering the suburb. The wall is the only indication that there is a distinction between the city and dwellings of the suburb. The street widens in the suburb. Cobbled stones give way to dark asphalt. Homes are no longer built right on the street, only a narrow sidewalk mediating their distance from the flow of traffic. Trees stand in the place of the old two and three storied buildings in the urban center. The suburb itself gives way to farm fields after less than a kilometer of walking, and the mountains stand clearly before the sojourners. The narrow confines of urban center transition to the more open space of suburb and then the wide, open space of agricultural fields appears and makes itself felt. In 2008, the atmosphere was clear as I left the urban center, and the green of distant fields and trees contrasted with the blue sky of early morning. In 2010, rain was falling as we walked through the gate and into the suburbs, clouds obscured the distant view and the road glistened with the water of lightly falling rain. Though both journeys began with a mood of excited anticipation and uncertainty as to what lay in the future, the sunny morning of the first sojourn helped to foster an optimism and positive wonder with the clear, blue sky arching above, whereas the rainy morning of the second pilgrimage gave rise to an inward groan and gloomy mystery shrouded the future. The weather in the Pyrenees changes often and rapidly. In various other years, I have experienced dense fog, rain, wind, and clear blue skies. Pilgrims are warned of the dangerous way across the summit and into Spain. The urban center and surrounding suburbs with their numerous signs directing traffic or indicating some marketplace establishment soon give way to agricultural fields, farm dwellings, and barns. The fields and pastures are void of such signage. Though human culture is present in the mowed or freshly planted fields with rows of sprouting plants reaching for the sky, or in the occasional house and barn, or in the form of fence posts and wire delineating the boundary between pasture and path, the countryside seems less influenced



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Figure 5.1.  Climbing the Pyrenees Out of St. Jean Pied de Port, France, and Looking Back. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

by human habitation than more densely populated areas in the lower valleys. Informally painted yellow arrows begin to appear with regularity along the Camino and comfort the sojourner, a rustic sign that she is on the right path. The Camino continues to climb into the mountains via an asphalt road for most of the fifteen kilometers before the way becomes an earthen path. The paved road winds back and forth through small valleys between summits in the lower elevations. About six kilometers after leaving the confines of the urban center the path leaves the road for the first time where a switchback trail leads up a steep incline. Pausing to rest and turning to look back down into the lower elevations reveals a vast valley, lush with trees and pastures, hay lots ready to be mowed or with cut grass drying in the fields. See figure 5.1. Cows and sheep mill about in some of the pastures, eating the fresh, green grass or chewing the cud. Their slow, easy manner fits the scene, and the rhythm of the countryside seems to influence the beat of one’s heart and the pulse in the pilgrim’s veins. Two blond milk cows, just beyond the fence that separated field from road, arrested my attention on the 2008 sojourn. One cow lay on the grass, belly resting on the earth and front legs folded in a kind of cross-legged fashion. See figure 5.2. She was looking away from the road and toward a small hillock that was covered with trees several hundred meters away. The companion stood above the prone cow and proceeded to groom her by licking her shoulders. The

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Figure 5.2.  Two Blond Cows. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

upright cow wore a large bell, attached to her neck by means of a wide strap. As she slowly licked the prostrate cow, her bell sounded off in a steady ringing rhythm. In the distance, at the base of the hillock to which the two cows seemed to be looking, a group of sheep were grazing in the lush mountain grass. Their bells were also ringing, though at a higher pitch and with more rapidity. The cow bell sounded a base note with steady slow beat while the sheep bells filled the air with music. I noticed that birds were also singing, creating a melodic addition to the sheep and cows. I turned back to the road and saw pilgrims walking up the mountain having just passed me. I heard their banter as they chatted, and their footsteps created another rhythm as they stepped along the way. Turning back to the two cows, I was awe struck at the happening. I felt a power emanating from these cows. Some holy presence was manifesting itself in the action of these cows, one slowly caressing the other, grooming her companion without a care in the world. There seemed to be perfect peace and overwhelming power all at once. It was as if lightning had struck the cows and bounced to the sheep, the birds, my fellow pilgrims and then to me, filling us all with its energy. These cows had become sacramental, transforming this place into a sacred pasture. I could understand how humans might bow down and worship the cows or set up some shrine in this holy place. I walked away from the field in an attitude of awe, not the person who had earlier left St. Jean Pied de Port on pilgrimage. A switchback pathway requires more effort as the easy incline of the paved road gives way to the footpath. Gravity tugs at the pilgrim’s body, seeming to pull from behind, as if a massive chain were being dragged upward. The



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mountain makes itself felt, manifests its verticality in an interaction with the human body. Viewing mountain scenery from a car pullout, a chalet, or a village nestled in the valley below, not to mention from the page of a glossy magazine or a computer screen, presents a mere prospect, an alienated and objective perspective. Walking up the mountain opens the pilgrim to its mass, planted on the earth below and resisting gravity as it rises into the heavens above. Large birds of prey and vultures play in the updrafts of wind that sometimes caress and other times slap the upward reaching slopes. Their flight between heaven and earth accents the loft of the mountains as the winged creatures seem to be free from the pull of gravity. We humans also exist between heaven and earth but lack the soaring freedom of flight. We crawl over the earth, not rooted as the trees, shrubs and grasses, our bodies move slowly, long legs under torso and arms swinging for balance. We move nearly always in contact with the soil beneath our feet and feel the tension between the valley below and the mountain peaks above. Along the footpath, local vegetation grows closer to the pilgrim’s passing body. Large chestnut trees arch over the trail, wildflowers such as foxglove bloom within arm’s reach, and grass grows alongside the barren ground, worn by so many feet plodding upward. A pile of rocks forms a cairn just beside the foot-beaten path, each stone placed carefully by passing pilgrims as an additional indication of the way and a gesture of prayer. The cairn communicates the connection between humans, who engage in contemplative prayer, and the earth. Prayer is often symbolized by smoke rising up to heaven, but here prayers are rooted in the soil and rise via stacked stones. Just near one of the cairns, a stone about the size of a backpack bears the marking of the Camino, a painted yellow arrow pointing up the rising slope. It proclaims, “this is the way.” After the steep climb up the switchback trail, the Camino rejoins the pavement. In 2010, we climbed into the clouds at this point in the journey. The rain had ceased to fall as we inched our way up toward a rough ceiling of clouds. Below that ceiling we could see out into the valley, farms stretching to the horizon, delineated by distant hills to the north and west. Each field boundary clearly indicated by trees and in some cases a wooded section between farms. Columns of mist rose out of the ground at various locations among the hills in the valley below. See figure 5.3. The mist seemed to be caught in updrafts and swirled toward the overcast sky. The base of these cloud columns seemed rooted to the ground as the sky pulled the mist upward forming shapes that continually changed. As we broke through the ceiling, the valley disappeared and visibility was reduced to several meters. About eight kilometers into the walk and just beside the road is the Albergue Orisson, wherein the already weary pilgrim may purchase a refreshment at the café. On cold rainy days, there is hot tea or coffee and a temporary shelter from the weather inside the café. On warmer sunny days, refreshment may be taken

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Figure 5.3.  Mist Rising in the Pyrenees, France. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

on tables just outside the café and along the road. Here is a place for pilgrims to rest and talk about the journey thus far. These cafes will become important places in the vast space surrounding. Symbolic artifacts, more elaborate than the rock cairns, appear as well. We are again walking on the pavement about three kilometers beyond the café at Orisson. We crest an incline and there a few hundred meters in the distance, just beside the Camino, a rocky knoll rises above the grassy summit. Green grass and gray rock are the dominant earth colors surrounding us on all sides. In 2008, the brilliant blue sky arced overhead, whereas in 2010, we had climbed into a cloud that had just started to part. The parting cloud revealed the little rocky knoll and just above, the cloud continued to obscure the over arcing sky. Some artifact stood on the rocks at the top of the highest point on the little knoll. Its color contrasted with the green and gray. As we neared, I could see that it was a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus. Upon her head was a crown and she wore a white robe with its front fringed in bright blue. The baby Jesus wore tan clothes, his back against the Virgin’s breast; he faced the oncoming pilgrims with both arms outstretched. Just below the statue were numerous artifacts left by passing sojourners. The rock below the statue formed several distinct crevasses, wherein were placed objects of devotion. A bouquet of artificial flowers, several crosses, a water bag, rosary beads, pieces of cloth and a scallop shell were scattered there in the grass growing between the jutting rock.



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We lingered in this place. Its semi-level field of grass leading up to the rocky outcrop beckoned us to stop, invited us to stay and rest, to enjoy the view of the valley below and feel the wind rushing over the surface of the earth. To the south and east, the earth dropped away forming a great gulf several hundred meters deep between this rocky perch and the next range of mountains. The perch itself was formed by jagged limestone rock that jutted up like so many teeth from the grassy knoll. Irregular parallel lines created interesting patterns on the pastures dropping steeply away below. These lines were really the paths of cows and sheep that graze on the incline. Sitting amongst the jagged rocks, listening to the wind sounding off as it brushed the surface of the earth, our gaze spanned the canyon, and we joined the great birds soaring on the updrafts. Having dropped our packs, gravity seemed to lose its grip on us, we almost floated up to the rocky perch. We imagined floating over the valley and along the ridges of the distant mountains. This special place enshrined the Virgin and Holy Child, as well as giving us a sense of freedom. We have climbed above the cares of the marketplace. We are no longer ruled by the rigid structures of society. Even our identity becomes open for change as we stand so close to heaven. We follow the currents of the wind, rising up along the ridges and rushing through the narrow valleys. Off to the west and south, the Camino continues to follow the asphalt road up a gentle rise. The open pastures provide a distant view of the way rising, swerving, and undulating in the play of the land. Rocks form patterns in the fields revealing veins of minerals that resist erosion. Far off in the distance sheep graze, and we see that it is difficult to distinguish sheep from stone, their color and pattern against the grassy backdrop blends the distinction between beast and mineral. We slowly close the gap and approach a large flock of sheep scattered on both sides of the road. Several of my companions are walking between the two groups of sheep separated by the road. Their bells ring out as they graze in the green grass. Suddenly the group of sheep on the left of the road, higher up the hillside, begin to move downhill and across the road. They run causing their ringing bells to sound out the altered and rushed pace. My friends become an island in a river of undulating sheep. Humans and sheep are wandering across this mountain slope, but the sheep are home, and we are sojourners passing through. The sheep take their sustenance from the grass beneath their steps, while we must carry our food in sacks upon our backs. Just beyond these sheep, the way leaves the asphalt road, and an earthen path leads us between two rocky, mountain peaks. A stone cross marks the transition from pavement to pathway, religious artifacts lay about its base where an inscription reads “Je suis le chemin,” a scallop shell and a small wooden cross hang from its top. Turning back to look at the road just traversed reveals a sweeping view of the mountains and the lowlands far below.

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We stand on top of the world, yet the climb is not yet finished. As we pass between the two peaks, we are met by a barbed-wire fence. This fence differs from those that lined the way in the lower pastures and reminds us that these high elevation fields are only delineated by rock. This particular fence is supported by rough cut wooden posts, planted only a few meters apart and has five strands of wire. It is well built and seems to be fully maintained. Rather than a border between pastures, this is the frontier between France and Spain. It reminds us of civil authorities and the imposition of human structures. We walk beside the fence for about a half of a kilometer before crossing into Navarra, the first province in Spain. At this frontier crossing is the fountain of Roland where pilgrims may refresh themselves with the cold mountain water. The fountain’s namesake reminds us further of the imposition of human structures, of the struggle between cultures to impose their ideologies on each other. Roland was one of Charlemagne’s lieutenants, his exploits handed down to later generations in the classic “The Song of Roland.” According to legend, Roland was killed in battle in Roncevalles, about eight kilometers from this fountain. His story relates the intrigue and ambition of nation building and armies clashing over territory. An ancient fortress crests the top of one of the mountain peaks overlooking the fountain and the frontier. See figure 5.4. My companions and I left the Camino and climbed one of the higher mountains to gain a greater perspective of this border region. We see the earthen ramparts that formed the base of the fortress walls on a mountain top a few kilometers distant. The fortress adds to the strategic importance of this way through the Pyrenees. We are reminded that this pass through the mountains is also known as the route of Napoleón, which was the way his army rode into Spain. These fields of green pasture where sheep, cattle, and horses graze have also been a gateway for violent conflict. Just as we begin to descend the mountaintop a cloud moves over us, and we are suddenly enveloped in a thick fog. Minutes ago, we could see far distant mountains, snowy, jagged peaks to the east. Now we can only see a couple of meters in the distance, even the green of the grass is obscured. In addition to being a gateway for human violence, this pass ushers great storms through its precipitous sentinels. Soon after the frontier we enter a thick beech forest. Under the overhanging branches the sun rarely penetrates. The deeply shaded way is now a pathway of mud. Our feet sink into the muck and our pace is slowed considerably. Among the trees I notice some old concrete bunkers, machine-gun emplacements left from twentieth century wars. Here is another reminder of the border and lines drawn that reflect human ideology.



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Figure 5.4.  Ancient Fortress Atop a High Mountain, Pyrenees, France. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

The small village of Roncesvalles is cradled by the steeply dropping, thickly wooded heights of the Pyrenees. Wildflowers proliferate in the forest and occasional clearings: the bright yellow of gorse, the dark pink of foxglove, and various others. We join the Rio Arga and enter the village. The foothills of Navarra lay before us to the south and east. Foothills of Navarra The foothills of the Pyrenees extend from the base of the range at Roncesvalles, about thirty-five kilometers northeast of Pamplona, to Burgos, more than two hundred kilometers to the west, and give the pilgrim a unique sense of space where humans have dwelt for thousands of years adapting to this environment and then altering the environment through the domestication of plants and animals. This is Basque Country, the architecture is unique, and evidence of the language can be seen on street signs, written in both Spanish and Basque. The mountains no longer present a giant barrier, rising up into the heavens. The way tracks through several villages, but farmland dominates the valleys through which the Camino passes. We cross over streams and the Río Erro before climbing above the valley and walking among pine trees. We notice that oregano and strawberries grow wild just beside the trail. At

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Zubiri the Camino joins the Río Arga. Puente de la Rabia is a medieval bridge leading into Zubiri, a Basque word meaning village with a bridge. Legend says an infected animal crossed the bridge three times and was cured of rabies. A former leprosarium is just across the bridge. We walk along the riverbank and cross over it, back and forth on bridges for about thirty kilometers before arriving in Pamplona. We encounter sheep, cows, and horses just as in the Pyrenees, but here they are feeding in smaller fenced pastures. An occasional wheat field appears beside the way, grain ripening under the sun and contrasting the green pastures with golden grains. Above the valley floor on both sides of the river, the forested hillside rises toward the sky. The hilly slopes are not steep here. The valley is sheltered by the foothills, and the sublime prospects of the Pyrenees fade into the east. Pamplona is the first large city along the way. We enter its suburbs about five kilometers out from the medieval walls. We cross the Río Arga once more at Arre and walk through urban streets until glimpsing the cathedral standing above the great walls of Pamplona. We cross a bridge and climb up and through the ramparts leading into Pamplona. Pamplona’s cathedral is an austere Gothic structure with a neo classical façade. The north bell tower has the second largest bell in Spain, cast in 1584. Pamplona was a Roman city, said to have been founded by Pompey. Charlemagne destroyed the city in 778. It was avenged by the Basques at Roncesvalles. Leaving the city requires walking another five kilometers through urban streets, and just as at Arre, the village east of Pamplona has melted into the city, Cizur Menor is nearly indistinguishable from Pamplona to the west, a few wheat fields separate the two cities. Beyond Cizur Menor, we climb up toward Alto del Perdon. Before reaching the summit, Zariequiegui appears almost out of nowhere. Its Romanesque church, the church of Saint Andrew, San Andres, accentuates the village. Past the village the ridgeline is dominated by wind turbines and at the summit is a wrought iron sculpture of pilgrims passing. There is an inscription, “Where the path of the wind crosses that of the stars.” Vast wheat fields lay on both sides of the mountain and present open vistas. From the top of Alto del Perdon the pilgrim sees a great valley below, stretching nearly twenty kilometers in the distance to the west. The Camino can be traced through the villages of Uterga, Obanos and finally Puente la Reina. Looking back down toward Pamplona in the east, the pilgrim sees the way just traversed and dozens of pilgrims walking along the rocky dirt road and climbing to the high point. The city of Pamplona sprawls out on the plain and is surrounded by fields of grain. Beyond the fields to the east, mountains rise sharply, and the Pyrenees can be seen looming over the scene in the distance.



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The cradling valley through which the Camino made its way along the Río Arga shows itself as well, and we see how Pamplona sits at the edge of a more rugged section of the foothills. To the west of Pamplona, the hills spread out and make room for fertile, undulating, and hilly plains. The Pyrenees can be seen continuing to the north and run toward the west making a great barrier between this place and the sea. Though we are still in the foothills of Navarra, after Pamplona the valleys spread out between the hills and become large plains. The domed sky takes up more of our perspective and the fields present views to the distant horizon. The foothills to the east of Pamplona cradled the Camino, and here the vast plains expose pilgrims to the sky and push the horizon far into the distance. The roadbed changes as well. Earthen trails are dominated by river stones in this region. The small, rounded stones make walking more difficult, and our ankles are easily turned when stepping along the stony footpath. There is a side trail, about two kilometers long, leading to Eunate, the twelfth century Romanesque Church of Santa Maria de Eunate. This is a Templar church and one of two octagonal structures on the French route. There is no village in the area. The church stands alone, surrounded by agricultural fields, its solitude magnified by the environmental situation. I make it a point to visit this place on my pilgrimages. One year a unique happening changed the place for a short time. I sat in the spartan, Romanesque sanctuary praying. It was quiet, dark, and cool. Only a few other pilgrims had walked the side trail out through the wheat fields, and they were also sitting in silence, letting the place manifest itself and point, in a unique way, to Christ. Suddenly people started streaming into the small church, filling it completely. The rush of moving bodies and the din of voices overwhelmed the place. Within ten minutes the group had exited. We were again in silence, but the disturbance lingered. We had just experienced a tour of pilgrims who were visiting sacred sites via bus. Even if one among the crowd had resisted the frenetic visitation, sat quietly on one of the simple benches, there would not have been time to still the soul. Their experience was dominated by the visual. Ours, by contrast, involved the whole body. Our footsteps resonated on the dusty farm road in walking from Muruzabal to Eunate, the chapel growing in stature as we approached. Circumambulating the building on twelfth century stones, our steps echoed from the building and mingled with the song of nearby birds. Our bodies were swallowed up as we entered the octagonal structure. We felt the cool air touch our skin, breathed in the musky vapor, the lingering aroma of incense. We sat and waited, let our thoughts be silenced. As we departed and walked across the fields to Puente la Reina, the chapel followed us. See figure 5.5.

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Figure 5.5.  Romanesque Church of Santa Maria de Eunate, Spain. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

I recognize that not all people are capable of a walking pilgrimage. For them the bus can be a true blessing. In addition to airlines dropping pilgrims off near sacred sites, buses facilitate visiting such places. Pilgrims no longer need walk great distances, and in many cases, walking has been reduced to just a few steps. Pilgrims exit their transport in a car park on the very site of a sacred shrine, traverse the few dozen meters across pavement, and venerate the holy place. But unless the proprietors of these pilgrimage tours prepare their participants for the sacred journey in brief, visiting holy sites is no different than a vacation, a veneration of the god of electronic capitalism at a theme park. Along many of the bus routes in Israel, merchants sell souvenirs, credentialing pilgrims with proof of visiting the sacred shrine. The Camino in Spain is also becoming popular for bus pilgrims. There is a name for them, Busegrinos, which is the joining of bus with the Spanish word for pilgrim, peregrino. Puente la Reina or Queens Bridge is a Romanesque bridge from the eleventh century. The city takes its name from the bridge. See figure 5.6. It is one of the many bridges constructed in the wake of the pilgrimage moving from the Primitivo to the French Way. Charlemagne was said to have stayed here after a victory over the Moors. There is a unique German cross brought here by a pilgrim. Just beyond the city are several villages, appearing in the medieval style, built on a hillock. In this area are several remnant Roman roads and one Roman bridge. Villages of Mañeru, Cirauqui, and Lorca rise from surrounding



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Figure 5.6.  Puente la Reina, Spain. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

fields, built on hills. Now vineyards and olive trees appear along with wheat fields. Estella is a city with many churches, monasteries, and palaces. Río Ega runs through the city, and kayakers can be seen running the waters. Pilgrims who stay in Estella may cool and sooth their feet in the river. At Irache, just beyond Estella, a wine fountain greets pilgrims, provided by the Bodegas winery. Pilgrims may choose water or wine from the fountain. Just beyond we see Villamayor de Monjardin with castle on the conical hill. Just below is the thirteenth century Fountain of the Moors, Frente de Los Moros with its double arches of Mozarabic influence. There is a beautiful Romanesque church with Baroque tower. Los Arcos may be a stopping point for many. Its cemetery has a stone with caption reading “you are what I once was, and you will be what I am now.” Beyond Los Arcos is Torres del Rio with an octagonal Templar church and Roman structures. Logroño is the largest city since Pamplona and here we cross into a new province, La Rioja. Logroño has many churches, including the cathedral of Santa Maria la Redonda, which has Riojan baroque towers. Santa Maria del Palacio is Romanesque and Gothic with an eighteenth-century needle or eight-sided spire. The largest sculpture of the Matamoros, Saint James the Moor slayer, is high up on the façade of the Iglesia de Santiago in Logroño. He is depicted riding a war horse, rearing up on hind legs, front hooves hovering over the heads of Moorish soldiers who lay prostrate underneath. Saint James himself is dressed in customary pilgrim robe and wears a wide brimmed hat. Scallop shells adorn his garments. Instead of a water gourd on the end of a staff, the

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typical accoutrement of Saint James the pilgrim, this version of the saint wields a sword, raised above his head and ready to strike the soldiers clinging to the earth underneath his horse’s hoofs. The sculpture is inspired by the legend of Saint James’ appearance at the Battle of Clavijo. I found it difficult to find meaning in this depiction, a Christian saint engaged in killing human beings, leading a nation in battle against another. I interpreted the image as an idol of ideology and political aims rather than a religious icon. My interpretation began to change later in the journey. Texts such as the Matamoros are symbols rather than signs. The Turners write, “signs are almost always organized in ‘closed’ systems; while symbols, particularly dominant symbols, are themselves semantically ‘open.’”52 Symbols invite participation. The open-endedness, or the excess of meaning communicated is magnified because of the liminality of the journey. Participants engage in an interpretative process that is performative. The performance along the Camino, whether one is religious or secular, involves ritual within the context of a particular religion, a ritual that is not liturgically rigid but thrusts the participant into a liminal journey, a particular pilgrimage focused on a Christian saint. As the pilgrimage unfolded, I encountered other texts and icons that interacted with the Matamoros. Images of Saint Michael slaying Satan appeared. In addition, Saint George appeared slaying the dragon. Saint Paul’s words in his Epistle to the Ephesians came to mind, “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”53 I saw a parallel between the scripture verse and walking here in Spain, the inner struggle that all pilgrims experience. Each pilgrim, religious or not, has dragons to slay, personal demons to banish. The daily battle our bodies endure becomes meaningful in the exteriorized mysticism of the journey. Preconceptions of spirit-body dualism evaporate. Every bodily pain is also spiritual. The Turners write that in pilgrimage “the weariness of the body is submitted to hard, voluntary discipline, loosening the bonds of matter to liberate the spirit.”54 In this case, the body symbolizes the tangibility of personal struggles. A new interpretation of the Camino arose, the Matamoros as a vision of the saint coming to help us in our personal struggles. He struggled to the death, was beheaded by Herod, and laid in a grave. Pilgrims all walk toward a grave, and struggles happen along the way. With discipline and courage, we help one another until death meets us all, just as death will meet us at the tomb of Saint James. Just beyond Logroño, leading up to alto Grajera, the path tracks beside one of the first shrine fences, which in reality is a typical chain link fence just beside the way, separating pilgrims from a major highway. Here pilgrims add hand crafted crosses to the fence stretching for nearly a kilometer. Some



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of the crosses are made from grass pulled up just beside the path. Others are scraps of wood forming crosses. Still others are made from rubbish. Flowers occasionally adorn the crosses. Beyond the heights, Navarette can be seen. At the beginning of the hilltop town is a cemetery gate removed from the ruined hospice of San Juan de Acre. One of the capitals depicts the battle between Roland and Ferragut. The next city is Najera, capital of the kingdom of Navarre in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Monasterio Santa Maria de la Real is the burial place of many illustrious kings, queens, and knights. Don Garcia found the statue of the virgin in a cave here. The monastery is situated at the base of an escarpment, where the cave is now enclosed by the building containing a shrine. Just beyond Najera are more wheat fields as well as grazing sheep. Leaving Najera in the early morning, before sunrise, pilgrims climb through a gap in the escarpment and come up to rolling hills extending many kilometers west. We walk past barns with sheep inside. We hear their bleating, seemingly calling to be let out onto the rich pastures. Behind us the sun crests the ridge and casts its rays upon the surrounding fields. Poppies raise their red heads just above ripening wheat and greet the sky. Other wildflowers grow on the sides of the path, making the way a walk along wild and domestic landscapes. About five kilometers into the wheat fields, the Camino climbs a hill. Nearing the top, I turn and see the way traversed this morning. I can see all the way back to the ridge that rises above Najera. The long dirt road between wheat fields that characterizes the Camino in this section extends toward Najera, its winding course evident. I see pilgrims walking singly, in groups of two or three, and some groups of five or six. They move toward me. Those in the distance look like ants. This experience of seeing so many pilgrims sharing the way would never be had on the AT where the thick forest hems the trail, making invisible those walking under the canopy of trees. As I crest the hilltop, I see a village just ahead. There are very few trees, and the buildings stand out. There is something very strange about this place. All the structures seem new, and the architecture nearly uniform. It is so unlike any town or village on the Camino thus far. As I walk through the place, I see that the streets are new and void of human beings. There is a park that has clearly been designed for the residents but visitors walking through the area are cut off. A large chain-link fence keeps us out. The grass is manicured. I feel as though I’ve entered a Twilight Zone urban center. This is Cirueña. The town center is as large as any village through which the Camino has passed thus far, but there seem to be no residents. The Camino passes through many small, aged villages that have seen depopulation as residents leave for economic reasons. Everything is new here, but where are the inhabitants? It seems to be modeled on some suburban design rather than having organically come alive through the decades or centuries.

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The model reminds me of Jacque Ellul’s idea of technique or Martin Heidegger’s characterization of technology.55 The architecture cuts us off from the wholeness of Creation and plunges us into the marketplace that has been formed by technique. It has distilled all that is counter to technique and discarded it in a wastebin somewhere far away. I reflect on the gardens in Puente la Riena; each urban house had its own luscious vegetable garden. Here there are only lawns, no gardens that grow food. Both places are cityscapes and have geometric form, so the alienating aspect of the architecture is not its geometry. There are vacant lots here in Cirueña, the Twilight Zone, but they are unlike the grassy fields surrounding one of the ruins back in Estella. There, the empty lot was green, a horse grazed in the grass, and wild shrubs grew near the falling walls. The vacant lots here are a true waste waiting to be covered by concrete. These lots are vacuous hemmed fields that do not belong; their wild grasses do not fit. The ruin, on the other hand, has a field not intended as part of the design of the urban space, yet it feeds a horse and does not seem to contradict the architecture of the surrounding area. I thought of a Japanese garden, especially bonsai, as modeled on Creation yet subtly imposing something human. What analogue works to make this dead urban place meaningful? Only the Twilight Zone? Another analogue did come to mind. In C. S. Lewis’s third science fiction book in the Space Trilogy, That Hideous Strength, there is a modernist, scientistic-oriented group at a place called Belbury attempting to take over the world. Filostrato, one of the leaders at Belbury, articulates the vision for recreating the world, the end which justifies all means: “It is for the conquest of death: or for the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing. It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature.”56 In describing this new life that is not organic, Filostrato looks at the moon and says, “There is cleanness, purity. Thousands of square miles of polished rock with not one blade of grass, not one fibre of lichen. Not one grain of dust. Not even air.”57 He describes the artifice that would be earth saying, The forest tree is a weed. But I tell you I have seen the civilized tree in Persia. It was a French attache who had it because he was in a place where trees do not grow. It was made of metal. A poor, crude thing. But how if it were perfected? Light, made of aluminum. So natural, it would even deceive. . . I foresee nothing but the art tree all over the earth.58

The model of Cirueña could be the dead and vacuous moon with artificial landscaping, painted plastic grass, nothing organic so as to preserve the hygienic features desired by those who would trade soil for concrete. This place



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would not stand out in the suburbs of the United States. I thought of those suburbs and felt a sympathetic depression for the poor souls who have been lured by marketplace designs to live in such horrid places, no inspirational form to lift one’s spirit. Is Filostrato really alive, the chief architect of suburban design? After exiting this weird place, we cross more fields and descend into Santo Domingo de Calzada. We see it in the distance below us. Many architectural styles merge and church spires jut into the sky above the rooftops. Here is the home of the miracle cock and hen. Some pilgrim family from the medieval period stayed here for the night. The young daughter of the proprietor where the family found lodging became attracted to the son of the family. He did not reciprocate her advances, so she hid some valued object in his sack. While leaving town, the boy was accused of thievery, found guilty, and hanged. When the family returned, after finishing their pilgrimage, they came to collect their dead son’s body. A miracle occurred, and they found their son alive. When the bishop heard this, while he was about to eat a chicken meal, he proclaimed something along the lines of, “If your son is alive, so is this bird.” The chicken returned to life, ran off, and crowed. There is a cage in the church here that contains a rooster and hen. Legend says that when a pilgrim enters the church and hears the rooster crow, there will be a blessing. Grañon is about six kilometers further. A small town, it contains a donitivo albergue, San Juan Bautista, behind the Church of Saint John the Baptist. This is a parochial albergue associated with the church. The priest often visits with pilgrims who stay here. It is a rustic place; some pilgrims will sleep on mats laid out on the floor. They offer a communal meal; all the pilgrims participate in preparing the food. Twenty kilometers further, over the rolling wheat fields, is Belorado, a good-sized town. On the way the Camino crosses into the next province, leaving La Rioja and entering Castilla y León. There are a number of albergues to choose from in Belorado. I always chose the most rustic, Santa Maria, just next door to the church, Iglesia Santa Maria y San Pedro. The building housing the albergue is the old theatre, where plays were performed. The stage is now a kitchen that overlooks the dining area, which also functions as a welcome room. This is another parochial albergue and is staffed by volunteers from Switzerland. From Belorado the Camino climbs, first gently up to Villafranca, then precipitously, four-hundred meters in about three kilometers. At the summit is a peace memorial, marking the place where victims from the Spanish Civil War were taken from their homes in Burgos, out into the forest, and shot. From here it is close to ten kilometers through a pine forest along a dirt road to San Juan de Ortega. There is no village there, just an old monastery and church, as well as the tomb of the place’s namesake.

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There is a museum display in the albergue that has taken over the monastery. It gives a statistical table showing the number of pilgrims completing the journey since 1970. There were sixty-eight peregrinos that year. 1971 was a Holy Year so the number leaped to 451, then dropped in successive years: 67, 37, 108, 74. 1976 was another Holy Year, this time with 243 peregrinos. Then the numbers drop again: 31, 13, 231. Something happened around 1979 to bring the numbers up. The 1982 Holy Year brought the numbers up to 1868, then the next year it dropped to 146, the last time it would go below 400. In 1986 it rose to 1801, following with 2,905, 3,501, 5,760, 4,918, 7,274, 9,764, and the Holy Year off 1993 it exploded to 99,436. By the next Holy Year, 1999, there were 154,613 peregrinos and the next, 2004 brought 179,944. My first year walking the Camino, 2008, brought 125,141. Coffey and Dunn write that in 2016 there were 278,232, which was declared a Year of Jubilee, attracting large numbers of peregrinos. From San Juan de Orgega it is twenty-six kilometers to Burgos. On the way, the Camino passes by Atapuerca, a UNESCO World Heritage site, the place where the earliest human remains in Europe were discovered. Humans are evidenced to have occupied the area going back 1.2 million years. There are two ways of entering Burgos, the Camino splitting a little over five kilometers before the city, near the airport. The way to the left, which I always miss somehow, enters along the Río Arlanzón. The way to the right goes through an industrial section. The surrounds of the cathedral are beautiful. The cathedral itself, de Santa María, is a thirteenth-century Gothic structure. A pilgrim could spend a whole day inside and out and not gather in all the beauty. Burgos is a bustling metropolis and has many plazas, cultural, and artistic treasures. There is a grand statue of El Sid, and his famous treasure chest is in the cathedral. But pilgrims are not tourists, and the call of Santiago draws the peregrino out into the Meseta. Meseta The Meseta extends from Burgos to León, about 185 kilometers, taking about nine days to walk. It is a long relatively flat geographical feature that dominates northern Spain. The mountains surround the Meseta, but the area is so large that pilgrims won’t see the mountains when they are in the middle of the plain. It is really a large, flat-bottomed bowl. The plain is very high, slightly rising and falling from 800 to 900 meters in elevation. Being so high, the nights are cold, even in the middle of summer. From Burgos and for about seventy kilometers, pilgrims see mountains in the north, the Cantabria, their jagged teeth silhouetted against the sky. Mountains can also be seen in the south, and the hills of Rioja are in the east. The Meseta seems to shift the experience of the pilgrim from physical to spiritual, or some might say



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Figure 5.7.  Gothic Ruins of San Anton Convent, Spain. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

emotional. Distant mountains slowly recede from sight as the pilgrim moves further into the vast flat space, making it difficult to judge distances walked. From Burgos through Hornillos del Camino and to the border of the province of Palencia, just across the Río Pisuerga, the terrain is composed of mesas and arroyos. The mesa tops are vast, flat wheat fields. Crushed limestone forms the pathway, poppies and other wildflowers grow on the sides and in some cases out in the fields. Coming to Hontanas, pilgrims don’t see the village ahead. It seems that the flat table extends uninterrupted to the horizon. Suddenly the pilgrim comes to the edge of the mesa, without warning and hiding in the little valley, the buildings of Hontanas come into view. Just five kilometers past Hontanas, and down in the arroyo, the Gothic ruins of San Anton Convent appear. The tall walls still reaching for the sky, window emplacements empty of glass, no roof, the paved road that has become the Camino passes under one of the side arches. See figure 5.7. The arroyo opens up into a larger low lying plain here. Castrojeriz can be seen five more kilometers in the distance, nestled at the base of another mesa. A ruined castle protrudes from the top directly above the city. The final mesa rises just west of Castrojeriz, a steep one-hundred-meter climb to the top. I have always tried to time the climb with sunrise. I reach the summit and look back down on Castrojeriz, the sun is rising over the mesa leading to Hontonas. This mesa top, Alto de Mostelares, is only about two kilometers in diameter. We reach the west rim and look down on the wheat fields leading

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to the Río Pisuerga. On the other side is Itero de la Vega, and a small double mesa is just to its west, and beyond that, hidden, is Boadilla del Camino. Having walked this way six times, I am familiar with the winding road that the Camino uses for its route. I can follow it with my eyes and see where it crosses the shallow pass between the two short mesas ten kilometers to the west. As we descend to the plain, the sun’s rays strike the waving wheat heads from an oblique angle, painting the field in brilliant colors. Fromista is twenty kilometers further. Fromista, has a beautifully preserved Romaneque church, Iglesi de San Martín, said to be the finest example of such in Spain. The Meseta flattens now, staying at around eight hundred meters in elevation. The Church of Santa Maria la Blanca in Villalcazar de Sirga is another thirteenth-century Templar church. There is a café just across the plaza, and we drink our café con leche while gazing at the beautiful architecture. Carrion de los Condes is just five kilometers to the west, a city built beside the Río Carrión. I choose to stay at the parochial albergue, Santa Maria, where a group of Augustinian nuns give pilgrims wonderful hospitality. They gather those interested and sing with them in the entry way of the albergue in the early evening. They also share a communal meal, pilgrims contributing and helping in preparation. There is also a convent albergue, Santa Clara. Just past the river, the Camino uses the old Roman road, the Calzada Romana or Via Aquitana. This is the flattest section of the Meseta. Nothing protrudes on the horizon. The grain fields extend as far as the atmosphere allows our eyes to see. The way is straight. It becomes difficult to gauge the distance walked. The green tunnel on the AT became a monastic cell, tightening the visual field to a few meters, inducing a kind of meditation. Here the wide, flat plain and the arrow straight road bring about a different kind of meditation. Instead of being hemmed in a cell of shrubs, the arcing sky and expanding vista induce a kind of disorientation. Pilgrims who have tracked their progress in a narrower visual field feel as though they are walking without getting anywhere. A pilgrim told me of a German who was walking here. He had come all the way from France, walking the Camino. Here along the Via Aquitana, this German pilgrim went mad. He walked off the path and into the fields, dropped his pack, sat down, and wept. His companion went out after him and brought him back by holding his hand and leading him. They both left the Camino. Calzadilla de la Cuez is about fifteen kilometers to the west. Like Hontonas, we can’t see it till we’re right on it. This village is not down in an arroyo. It hides in a shallow riverbed. Just to the west of the riverbed is a shallow ridge covered by green trees, mostly oaks. At Terradillos de los Templarios, the terrain begins to roll. If the atmosphere is clear, one can look to the west and see the Mountains of León just poking up above the horizon. Now we will have something in the distance to mark our progress.



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Sahagun is the halfway point. Just to the west the Camino splits. One way is the senda, the footpath following the highway through several villages. The other way takes the pilgrim to the north and far from any roads. It is sometimes referred to as the wild way. Calzadilla de los Hermanillos is about ten kilometers into the rustic route. It is a sleepy place with a small albergue. I discovered the Comedor Vía Trajana on my first Camino in 2008. At the time it was the home of the cook and her husband. The dining tables, two of them, were in the family dining room and living room. She was an amazing culinary artist, serving a variety of local dishes. We were all pilgrims. She was not cooking for some highbrow clientele. She simply poured out love and skill into everything cooked. As I returned each year, I found that the family continually added onto their house. Now there is a restaurant and hostel. I have made it a tradition to sleep out in the fields beyond the village. It is twenty kilometers to the next village, Reliegos. So, sleeping under the stars in these fields has no light pollution. The Camino is famous for being the path under the Milky Way. Yet pilgrims never see the cluster of stars stretching out across the night sky. There are no opportunities to sleep out in the open. So, I make time and space for this. I cowboy camp to be exposed to the canopy above. The Milky Way does not really appear till around 1 a.m. Legend says pilgrims follow the Milky Way to Santiago’s tomb. Another “New Age” story says that the power of the Camino rests in what are called “ley lines.” These lines are supposed to line up with the Milky Way. I can say that after seeing the Milky Way on many occasions from out on the Meseta, the Camino does not follow the path of the stars. That is, the French route does not follow that path. The Vía de la Plata, tracking north from Cadiz up through Zamora, does follow the Milky Way. But that way is much less traveled. Since the French way does not follow the Milky Way, neither are there ley lines that line up with it on this part of the Camino. Nevertheless, the real power for me is lying on the earth and watching the Milky Way stretch across the night sky. Just west of Reliegos is Mansilla de las Mulas, a small walled city on the Río Esla. The cool, fast-moving waters of this river soothe pilgrim aches. One of my favorite albergues is here. It is a municipal albergue run by a wonderful hospitalera, Laura. She has a very dry sense of humor. She is also medically astute. She runs a foot repair clinic every day from the beautiful interior courtyard, its walls set with blooming geraniums. The pastel color of the walls, the green of the plants, the brilliance of the flowers, and the many pilgrims resting make for one of the most beautiful albergues on the Camino. Laura comes out to heal pilgrim feet with a saw and a stick. She gives you the stick to bite for the pain. She then begins to saw your leg off as a remedy for blisters. After the show, she brings out a state-of-the-art medical kit, cleans and adjusts pilgrim blisters, and bandages everyone up.

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Mountains of León León is twenty kilometers to the west and the technical end of the Meseta. In 2008 and 2010, the most dangerous place on the Camino was in these twenty kilometers. First, just before Puente Villarente, the Camino tracked along the highway. The bridge into town crosses the river as it arcs to the left. Pilgrims had to use this bridge even though there were no shoulders. If cars were coming from both ways, there was almost no room to stay out of their way. We feared for our lives crossing this bridge. Now the Camino tracks off the highway and goes over a footbridge. Just before León, in the adjacent town of Puente Castro, the way crosses a major highway, two lanes in each direction. Pilgrims had to climb over a guard rail, dash across two lanes, climb another guard rail in the median, and then dash across two more lanes. León is a major city. So, traffic is extremely busy. This road crossing was touch and go. Now there is a skybridge and all the danger has passed. León, like Burgos, has amazing architecture, a gothic cathedral (thirteenth century) and a building designed by Antoni Gaudi, La Casa de Botines. The plazas are buzzing with both locals and tourists. In 2008, before there was an admittance fee for the cathedral, we had been walking with a German couple. The woman was a university professor of music and voice. She made it a practice of entering churches, finding the acoustic sweet spot, and singing something acapella. When I was visiting the cathedral in León, she and her husband happened to also be there. They stood in the sweet spot and started to sing. Every voice in the cathedral silenced, and we were treated to the majesty of the place, its acoustic magnificence harmonizing with the visual brilliance of light streaming through the windows. West of the city the Camino begins to rise into the Mountains of León. At first gently, up to Astorga and its Roman ruins. Just a few kilometers east of Astorga is a rustic café. David, a Spanish man, occupied an old barn in 2010. It is in the wheat fields just beyond a forest of oaks. Pilgrims climb a hill after exiting Santabinez and enter a patchwork of oak groves and wheat fields, rising and falling in the ridges and valleys. The last climb opens out onto a mesa and the barn appears small in the distance, about five-hundred meters to the west. The Mountains of Leon rise in the distance beyond the barn. David established a small café stand next to the barn. He decorated the exterior walls of the barn with slogans, invitations to feast on organic foods and drinks. I have received David’s hospitality in subsequent years, 2013, 2015, and 2017. His café is liminal, no running water or electricity. David draws water with buckets from a well located about 500 meters from the barn. He does not require compensation, offering everything gratis. He has a box for donations but will not call attention to it. His café transcends the marketplace.



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Figure 5.8.  Shrine Fence, Via Crucis, near Rabanal del Camino, Spain. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

He fellowships with pilgrims in liminality. The fields surrounding the barn are utilitarian but pilgrims passing by live out another economy. Astorga’s cathedral combines Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque styles, superimposed one upon another. Its stones have a red hue. Just next to the cathedral is another building designed by Antoni Gaudi, the bishop’s house. This is now a museum of the Camino. Just beyond Astorga, the Camino begins to rise to the mountains. This takes the pilgrim to the highest elevation on the Camino. The geography here is similar to the American southwest with few trees and great views of mountain features. The same type of shrine fence that was beside the way just west of Logroño lines the rugged climbing trail here. Called the Via Crucis this rustic ritual feature on the upper slopes of the Mountains of Leon is about two kilometers before Rabanal del Camino. See figure 5.8. In a profane, marketplace reality, it is merely a livestock fence and shorter than the chain link fence near Logroño. The Camino here takes pilgrims through an oak forest. The crosses placed in the fence are hand crafted, made of the same material on both fences, but here on the slopes of the mountains, the forest and earthen trail tread give the Via Crucis a more rustic appearance. The atmosphere, quiet under the shade of the trees, induces contemplation. Rock shrines appear along the fence as well. In addition to crosses, I have also seen a rock mosaic creating the yin and yang symbol. See figure 5.9.

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Figure 5.9.  Rock Art at the Shrine Fence, Via Crucis, near Rabanal del Camino, Spain. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

These shrine fences and rock cairns exemplify call and response, a liturgy in walking the Camino. The Cruz de Ferro at Puerto Irago, 1505 meters in elevation, marks the high point on the trail, where pilgrims leave stones on a large pile around the base of the cross. From high up on the eastern side of the range the pilgrim can see far out into the Meseta and trace several days of their journey. After cresting the mountains and walking down the western face the pilgrim sees the great wine valley near Cacabelos, El Bierzo. The distant coastal mountains that mark the gateway to Galicia appear across the valley, some forty kilometers distant. At the bottom of a steep descent is Ponferrada and its templar castle, Castillo de los Templarios, twelfth century. Templars ruled here from 1180 till 1312. Cacabelos and Villafranca del Bierzo are among the towns and villages in the valley. Galicia The Camino climbs steeply from Bierzo into the mountains at the entrance into Galicia. The pilgrim experiences a distinct shift in geographical features climbing the moisture laden coastal mountains of northwestern Spain. Large chestnut trees arch over the trail as one walks up into the clouds on the rich green slopes to O’Cebreiro. From this Celtic village situated on the crest of the mountains, pilgrims look out over the rich hilly farm country of Galicia.



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The features are more like looking out over Ireland or southern Scotland than anything thus far experienced in Spain. The people here are also culturally akin to those in the north and west of the British Isles. Sarria marks the city closest to one-hundred kilometers distance from Santiago de Compostela. The officials who organize the Camino have determined that pilgrims who walk the last one-hundred kilometers may receive a Compostela, a certificate of authentication, a sign of one who has completed the Camino. At each albergue and in many churches, pilgrims receive a stamp in their credentials, certifying their presence and testifying to their accomplishment. Officials in Santiago will inspect this credential in order to determine whether or not the pilgrim will receive the Compostela. From Sarria the way becomes crowded with pilgrims. Many pilgrims start in Sarria, knowing they need only walk the last one-hundred kilometers. I make it a practice to stay in Santiago de Compostela for several days, to reflect on the long journey, to celebrate with fellow pilgrims who are also completing their journey. In the morning I sit in the Plaza de Cervantes, the former town square, just a little more than a hundred meters from the Plaza del Obradoiro fronting the Baroque façade of the cathedral. I watch pilgrims passing by the fountain, Cervantes looking on as these sojourners find themselves steps away from their goal. I wrote the following poem while watching pilgrims walk through this part of the city with its narrow, medieval twisting streets. Pilgrims enter the city of the saint, the culmination of a long, grueling trek. Their eyes are focused toward the cathedral even though the spires are not yet in view. They are spent souls. Some smile with excitement, anticipating the final step. Others’ faces are etched with pain as their legs shout a protest with every step. They all limp, hiding the pain and determined to be strong. Some can hardly walk, legs bandaged, leaning heavily on staves. Many have lost focus and are driven by an external agent. There are eyes void of emotion, numbed by the rhythm of footsteps, waking early, eating, sleeping, washing, walking. Some walk in groups actively chatting, either sharing some joy or masking the confusion of emotion. The joyful seem energized, a spring in their awkward pilgrim gait. Their faces shine, bodies spring, pushing the pain temporarily aside. All these pilgrims walk to meet Santiago, whose tomb, whose death lies beneath the cathedral. They have all been engaged in an exercise counterproductive from the point of view of a utilitarian economy. Their action has been of sacrifice and death, of fasting and feasting, of abandoning themselves to an alternative valuation, a discovery of meaning wherein each loses their sovereignty and gains the other as companion.

Earlier in the chapter I described the AT journey as participating in the meaning of wilderness rising from ancient and modern mythologies. Pilgrims enacting a liminal journey become ritual participants, dramatizing myth.

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Greenia writes, “Pilgrimage is prompted by a mythic sense of a latent ingathered essence waiting to be recovered from beyond the landscapes we normally inhabit, including the social ones.”59 In addition, “Pilgrimage is a journey to recollect, travel that reactivates a mythic knowledge still buzzing softly as a background to consciousness, an implied structure on which the chaos of daily life can fumble about secure.”60 The journey is a foray into a mythic reality. Ricoeur defines myth as “a traditional narration which relates to events that happened at the beginning of time and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of men of today and, in a general manner, establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world.”61 The myths giving rise to both the Camino and the AT fit this definition with the exception of a reference to an event happening at the beginning of time. The events do, however, relate to mythic time through their connection with the patriarchs in the case of wilderness, and in the case of the Camino their connection to the Apostle James, through him to Christ, and through Christ to the Christian interpretation of sacred history rooted in the creation and fall narratives of Genesis 1-3. In the ritual action of the Camino, pilgrims participate in walking to Santiago and interacting with and among a complex field of concrete mediated symbols that create meaning, extending from the ritual to the world beyond. One way of interpreting this extended and embodied ritual, consistent with its connection to Christianity, is through the Eucharist. The believer receives bread and wine, which are the body and blood of Christ. Believers eat the body and drink the blood, taking the elements into their own body, thereby communing bodily. The myth is enacted at the Mass as participants enter the church and become liminal during the liturgy. In pilgrimage, on the other hand, the ritual participant walks through the myth bodily and for an extended time across a vast space, body surrounded by the earthen elements of communion. In the Eucharist, the sacred is male, entering the believer’s body, the female, whose womb receives the life-giving seed. In pilgrimage on the Camino, the sacred is female receiving the pilgrim into herself, surrounding the participant’s body with earthen elements. The pilgrim’s life-giving seed manifests in a profusion of artifacts born from the womb of God the Mother. This description has shown the dense and complex culture along the Camino through which pilgrims walk. The greatest contrast between the AT and the Camino is culture versus wilderness. Though the wilderness along the AT has cultural evidence, the vast space through which long-distance hikers walk does not evidence culture. The same liminality and communitas manifests on both routes. But the Camino is a journey through culture, eating in cafes, sleeping in albergues, and walking through great cities and ancient ruins. The stories rising in conjunction with the Camino stretch back a thousand years and continue to manifest. The AT is rooted in ancient and modern myth, but the trail itself is not yet a century old.



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WILDERNESS AND AMERICA The Puritans identified with Israel’s sojourn, their exodus from Egypt and wilderness wandering that transformed the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob into a nation. The Puritans departed from England with an understanding that their experience was similar to Israel’s departure from Egypt and entrance into the wilderness. Though the wilderness of New England has completely different geographical features when compared to the desert of Sinai, a reading of the English Bible by these European Puritans gave them an interpretative lens for experiencing wilderness that was undifferentiated from Israel’s. That is, the English colonists experienced their new place of dwelling through the symbolism of Biblical narratives. New England was both wilderness and promised land. Peter N. Carroll traces this dramatization of the wilderness as a place of refuge and potential promised land, which at the same time was considered the dwelling place of the devil, the home of “savages.” Their understanding that the place was a sanctuary kept them crossing the Atlantic.62 The Tyndale Bible was the first translation into English between 1522 and 1536. At this time there was little wild landscape in England. Wilderness came into the cultural imagination through Hebrew mythology. Translators needed to find English terminology to communicate the meaning of several Greek and Hebrew words for a land beyond the boundaries of civilization. Midbar and erēmos, mentioned above, are two of more than a dozen Greek and Hebrew words that were translated as wilderness. The Hebrew word tohuw, sometimes translated as wilderness, is coupled with bohuw in the Genesis creation myth forming a poetic repetition of formless and void. Emptiness, confusion, and nought are ideas associated with tohuw. Erēmos in its adjectival form is attached to topos becoming desert in early English translations. But when erēmos is substantive, wilderness becomes the translation. English Bibles became available to the public with the Coverdale Bible, completed in 1535, and the Geneva Bible, completed in 1560. Wilderness soon after became a rhetorical commonplace. The Puritans’ experience of wilderness as a place of trial dominated their early rhetoric. In his description of the Puritan arrival to New England, William Bradford sees Israel’s exodus into the terrors of the wilderness as their own experience: What could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men? and what multitudes there might be of them they knew not. Neither could they, as it were, go up to the top of Pigsah, to view from this wilderness a more goodly country to feed their hopes; for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to the heavens) they could have little solace or content in respect of any outward objects.63

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J. Robert Cox notes a similar experience for Europeans coming to America, encompassing both physical and spiritual alienation. “Nature in the wild was a deception, a false reality and, accordingly, had no value except as a place of testing for God’s chosen people.”64 This fear of wilderness did not stop landhungry settlers from moving west, further into the wilds. Europeans moving west, beyond parish and familiar cultural habitat, either imposed a European agricultural order or adopted some Native American techniques for survival.65 In adopting new ways of dwelling there arose mythic figures such as Daniel Boone. The American imagination began to incorporate something extrabiblical in relation to wilderness. James Fenimore Cooper and others expanded the mythological theme. Cooper compares civilization and wilderness living with his “Leatherstocking Tales,” including The Pioneers (1823) and The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Natty Bumppo, the central figure in Cooper’s stories, seems to be inspired by Daniel Boone. These books, depicting a mythic account of the frontiersman, come into American culture as the real character dies in 1820. Recall the discussion previously concerning the influence of Transcendentalist literature and the Hudson River School of painters. Thoreau epitomizes the former and Thomas Cole becomes the first among American landscape artists. Wild landscapes were the dominant themes for followers of Cole such as Thomas Moran, Asher B. Durand, Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt, George Inness, John Kensett, and Jasper Francis Cropsey. These writers and artists gave urban masses further extrabiblical views of the wilderness. This new view of wilderness, facilitated by the paintings, poetry, and prose helped to soften the age-old hatred that urbanites have had for wild places. Recall Thoreau’s claim that “in wildness is the preservation of the World,” making wilderness a new kind of sacred space.66 Whereas the wilderness of Sinai became a space of salvation for the children of shepherd nomads, Thoreau points to wilderness in the abstract. Cox writes that Thoreau held nature as both “a concrete phenomenon and as a mirror of spiritual truth.”67 These Transcendentalist claims are consistent with Eliade’s description of sacred space, “Whatever the extent of the territory involved, the cosmos that it represents is always perfect.”68 Eliade points out that the territory could be as large as an “entire country,” or as small as “a sanctuary.” Cox writes, that Transcendentalists believed spiritual truths are “most clearly revealed” in wild nature.69 Later John Muir would write, “The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest Wilderness.”70 I also looked to writers and artists of the romantic period while discussing the aesthetics of wilderness journeys. We read Edmund Burke’s ideas of the sublime related to landscape. We saw that an experience of the sublime, evoked by wild places, destabilizes human reliance on an artificially con-



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structed world, revealing transcendent value. This is consistent with the biblical narratives encompassing Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Jesus. This biblical wilderness symbolism reemerges in the industrial age. In our own mass communication age characterized by digital reproduction, where traditional symbols of a Transcendent Other are co-opted by a tendency to make them profane through mass production and commodification, wilderness appears from beyond human ordering. In the modern age of reason, with the countering postmodern fragmentation of meaning, an era of mass production and consumption, wilderness is oppressively silent and obscure. It has not yet been subsumed by human ordering. Wilderness standing beyond human ordering, speaking from beyond culture, reveals something other than humans at the center. TIME AND THE SUBLIME Another aspect of wilderness as sacred space, a liminal space, manifests on the AT as an alternative sense of time. The chronology of America’s highly technological society succumbs to the sky—a rising and setting sun and the vast array of star fields seen on clear nights, the change of the seasons—and the repetitive rhythm of hiking through the wilderness. One hiker wrote the following about the theme of time: I would have no sense of time if I did not write it down. I really understand this whole idea of time–or lack of time–out on the trail. When the sun comes up, I get up and eat. When the sun is high and I am hungry, I eat lunch. When we would get to camp, we would eat dinner and go to bed–same thing everyday, yet everyday was so different. What I see, who I talk with, what I think about makes each day so new.71

Another hiker, Siren, 2002, elaborates in great detail concerning her experience of time on the Trail: When you take a walk on the AT, you take a walk inside yourself. Inner-contemplation is a regular happening out there, and it’s easy to not even realize you’re meditating until the little epiphany or understanding (or sometimes the next question) emerges. Devices aid this along. The trail journals provide more than just a running log of who stopped where and ate what and did however-many miles so far. They provide a shared scripture through the expression (whether it be writing, quoting, or drawing) of the day’s meditative outbursts. These books are a most basic link into the greater community and its spirit, for looking inside them is literally reading the minds of your comrades. On the third day out, I put in my journal, “There’s suddenly so much time to think and so much to

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think about!” The sheer enormity of that statement shook its way out my hand as I wrote it on the page. In the outside life, time for thinking does not exist. Certain times disguise themselves as meditative (like bathing, cooking, driving), but cannot truly be due to the environment in which they exist. In a world full of eyes glazed, fixated on the calendar and the future it brings, all thoughts of inner-contemplation exist [sic] embracing thoughts of planning. Even in church, where it is easier than most places to drop out of the worldmind, you still oftentimes find yourself planning, “after this, we’ll have lunch at Shoney’s, then do the grocery shopping, then maybe try to relax and catch a movie or go fishing, then tomorrow . . .” In this world, even relaxation is planned. However, on the AT, there is nothing to plan (save water stops). Life happens nature’s way. Wake with the sun, eat by the fire, walk on the earth, rest, repeat, sleep with the sunset. With nothing to plan, there is only to think upon all these new awakenings brought on by going inside the mountains.72

As indicated by Siren, time makes room for introspection, meditation, and prayer. In making room, time and space reveal themselves as intertwined. In this intertwining of time and space sojourners join the human throng who have sought solace for eons on the pilgrim way. The view from Whitetop Mountain, Virginia, and the rocky peaks near Mount Rogers, Virginia, induce an experience of the sublime. Looking out over the vast landscape from the vantage of these mountains reinforces the symbolic action of the AT as a liminal space. Here is a space of social antistructure, standing in opposition to the human world below, its chronological and spatial structures. Boundaries of time and space are not visible and experience of them is shattered. Lane writes, “you quickly come to the end of what you have depended upon to give continuity and meaning in your life. . . In short, the liminality of desert and mountain terrain redefines every boundary giving shape to one’s life.”73 This evocation of the sublime reveals the transcendent Other through what Mircea Eliade indicates as an axis mundi, the place where communication between cosmic levels occurs: The three cosmic levels–earth, heaven, underworld–have been put in communication . . . this communication is sometimes expressed through the image of a universal pillar, axis mundi, which at once connects and supports heaven and earth and whose base is fixed in the world below.”74

The wilderness of the AT is both a symbol of transcendent value and an actual space wherein hikers experience the sublime. Wilderness symbolizes those spaces that have a potential to ground culture in that which has ultimate value: for example, life itself can be conceptualized in terms of a time and space of ultimate value, and wilderness serves as a symbol of life.



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NOTES   1.  Gerardus Van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, 393.  2. Ibid., 23.  3. Ibid., 56.  4. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, Trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958) 10.  5. Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 26.  6. Ibid., 27.  7. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1987), 11.  8. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 12.  9. Ibid., 12–13. 10.  Ibid., 21. 11.  Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 5. 12.  Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 48–49. 13.  Ex. 3:1–2. 14.  Mircea Eliade. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, 11. 15.  Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 36. 16.  Ex. 3:6. 17.  Ex. 3:13. 18.  Ex. 3:14. 19.  Gen. 11:31–12:9. 20.  George D. Greenia, “What is Pilgrimage?” International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage (Vol. 6: Iss. 2, Article 3), 7–8. 21.  Gen. 12:7. 22.  Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1987), 32. 23.  Evan Eisenberg, The Ecology of Eden (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 70. Eisenberg clarifies his use of world-pole writing, “Although I have used ‘worldpole’ because it is plainer than Mircea Eliade’s axis mundi, I would almost rather say ‘world-pipe,’ for the act of connecting heaven and earth would be meaningless if stuff could not move from one to the other. Like the trunk of a tree, the world-pole is something through which life flows” (71). 24.  Gen. 22:2. 25.  See the discussion of ha-makom in chapter 2. According to tradition, this is the same place where Jacob dreams of the ladder to heaven. See Amir Eshel, “Cosmopolitanism and Searching for the Sacred Space in Jewish Literature,” Jewish Social Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring, 2003): 121–138. 26.  I referenced this story in chapter 2 in relation to an aesthetic of solitude. 27.  Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 26. 28.  Gen. 28:16–17. 29.  Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 26. 30.  Gen. 28:18.

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31.  Ex. 3:12. 32.  Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 43. 33.  Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1958), 26. 34.  Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1995) 95. 35.  Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, 38–39. 36.  Num. 11:5–6. 37.  Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 11. 38.  Gerhard Kittel, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 658. 39.  Ibid., 657. 40.  Ibid., 658. 41.  George D. Greenia, “What is Pilgrimage?” International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 8. 42.  Matt. 3:1–4. 43.  John 10:22 44.  John 7:14 45.  Mark 12:41, Luke 21:1, and John 8:2 46.  Matt. 17:1–9, Mark 9: 2–8, Luke 9: 28–36. 47.  Thomas F. Coffey and Maryjane Dunn, The Miracles and Translatio of Saint James (New York: Italica Press, 2019), XXI. 48.  Ibid., XXIX. 49. Ibid. 50.  Ibid., XXXIII. 51.  Ibid., XXXVI. 52.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 245. 53.  Ephesians 6:12. 54.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 95. 55.  Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, Trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967). Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Trans. William Lovitt, (New York: Harper, 1977). 56. C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 177. 57.  C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups, 175. 58.  C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups, 172. 59.  George D. Greenia, “What is Pilgrimage?” International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 11. 60.  George D. Greenia, “What is Pilgrimage?” International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 11. 61.  Ricoeur, 5.



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62.  Peter N. Carroll, Puritanism and the Wilderness: The Intellectual Significance of the New England Frontier, 1629–1700 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1969), 10–14, 18. 63.  William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, in American Literature: Tradition and Innovation, Eds. Harrison T. Meserole, Walter Sutton, and Brom Weber (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Co., 1969), 43. 64.  J. Robert Cox, “Loci Communies and Thoreau’s Arguments for Wilderness in ‘Walking.’” The Southern Speech Communication Journal 46 (Fall 1980): 8. 65.  See William Cronon’s Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983) for and extensive examination of the interplay between ecological practices of Native Americans and European colonists. 66. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Portable Thoreau, Ed. Carle Bode (New York: Penguin Books, 1975), 609. 67.  J. Robert Cox, “Loci Communies and Thoreau’s Arguments for Wilderness in ‘Walking.’” The Southern Speech Communication Journal, 9. 68.  Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 42. 69.  J. Robert Cox, “Loci Communies and Thoreau’s Arguments for Wilderness in ‘Walking.’” The Southern Speech Communication Journal, 10. 70.  Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness, 177. 71.  Anonymous, personal correspondence, August 2002. 72.  Siren, personal correspondence, August 2002. 73.  Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, 38–39. 74.  Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 36.

Chapter Six

Spiritual Rambling Walking in Wilderness as Spiritual Practice

Pilgrimage clearly involves the spiritual practice of walking, and in the case of the Camino de Santiago, long-distance walking. The Camino is also a religious pilgrimage, and more specifically, a sacred journey within the Christian tradition. In the last thirty years, as the popularity of the Camino de Santiago has increased, people of different faiths and no faith at all have walked to Santiago de Compostela. In response to this phenomenon, a certificate has been designed and given to those who walk the Camino for cultural rather than religious reasons. As has been indicated earlier in this book, the AT is a National Scenic Trail and therefore secular, or without religious affiliation. Yet, hikers sometimes begin their journey on the AT for religious reasons. Others begin with no religious feelings or agendas and discover something profound that can only be understood from a religious orientation. In this chapter, I will explore the practice of religious walking, or spiritual rambling, as it manifests on the AT. But first, I need to clarify what is meant by the terms religious and spiritual. Over the past forty years, I have heard people make a distinction between the spiritual and the religious. This same distinction is made by hikers on the AT. When I encounter long-distance hikers who say their experience is spiritual and not religious, I listen carefully, attending to the descriptions given in making these distinctions. I want to understand the hiker’s perspective in this matter. Contemporary literature has arisen making this same distinction. The distinction has become so prominent in popular culture that a name has appeared: SBNR (Spiritual but Not Religious) or SBNA (Spiritual but not affiliated). Similar to some advocates of SBNR, I have noted another group who practice within well-established religious institutions but claim not to be religious. SBNR advocates often practice their spirituality outside of traditional religious institutions. So, people who claim to be spiritual and not religious 233

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can be found both within traditional religious institutions and beyond any organized religion. If we understand the practitioners of religion and spirituality to fall on a continuum, the middle of the line would be characterized by people who perceive themselves within a longstanding understanding of religious and spiritual practices overlapping. Those persons on the extremes, on opposite ends of the spectrum, would be, on one side, SBNR advocates and on the other side people who practice a traditional religion but claim not to. Many contemporary Evangelical Christians fall on that extreme side of the line. They claim that Christianity is not a religion but a relationship. I bring this up because I have found that hikers perceive themselves falling along this entire continuum. If I am to be clear in this chapter on the practice of spiritual walking, I must give some description here. My research approach does not make a distinction between religious and spiritual experience or practice. I simply attend to the descriptions hikers give. One of the distinctions made by proponents of SBNR and consistent with some hikers is that of the spiritual relating to an interior experience and religion being institutional, an outward expression. When I question these hikers, I often discover that they have very little understanding of religion. In 2002, a hiker whose trail name was Popsicle made a strong assertion that walking the AT was not religious. I was at Vandeventer Shelter in northern Tennessee. Popsicle dug into his backpack and retrieved a six-pack of beer that he had hiked with for about ten miles, from Hampton, Tennessee. He said that the trail was a party and not religious. I wondered, “what reasoning led Popsicle to think that having a party with a six-pack of beer was inconsistent with religion?” I did not verbalize my question. In the following days, I became better acquainted with Popsicle and discovered his motivations for thru-hiking the AT. He had been kicked out of college just short of his junior year, “dumped” by his girlfriend, and fired from his job. He thought he would have more fun if he were still in college rather than being out here on the AT. He thought there must be more to life than what he had experienced thus far. Clearly, he was having a spiritual crisis and had come out on the trail to do some soul searching. His understanding of religion was so narrow that he thought drinking beer and having a good time were anti-religious. Another hiker who I chatted with at Lost Mountain Shelter, southern Virginia in 2002, Sandelman, a gruff middle-aged man on his second thru-hike said, “There isn’t anything religious about this trail, it’s just man and nature. Out here you don’t have to worry about anything except getting to the next shelter. There is no stress, it’s very peaceful.” This comment shows a misunderstanding of religion. We have seen that the liminal aspect of ritual is very much centered on a person being stripped of past structure. Being stripped of structure, the person becomes immersed in a less mediated interaction with



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the environmental milieu. Sandelman’s terse definition of an AT hike fits well with the practice of spiritual walking on the AT. Another more common understanding expressed by hikers is that being religious means belonging to an organized religion and that spirituality happens within the individual not in some institutional practice. When I take college classes out on the AT for research trips, we gather stories like these and then discuss them at the end of each day. As a professor of philosophy and religion, I approach discussion with my students unlike gathering information from hikers. I am careful when talking with hikers to listen and only give my opinions when pressed. When I teach my students, I employ scholarly criticism and dig for meaning as it manifests during the investigation. My study of religion has thus far found no distinction between spirituality and religion, which so many hikers and proponents of SBNR claim. William James, in his study published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, writes, “Religion . . . shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.”1 James clearly indicates that religion is deeply integrated into the interior life, the feelings, experiences in solitude, as well as the exterior, the acts. He describes the interior religious expression writing, “In the more personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the inner dispositions of man himself which form the centre of interest, his conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness.”2 James’s description fits neatly into the commonly held belief in and articulation of spiritual versus religious experience, but he is indicating that it is all religious experience. In relation to organized religion James writes, “Churches, when once established, live at secondhand upon tradition; but the founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of their direct personal communion with the divine.”3 It would entail messy scholarship to claim that all religions started from the fount of spiritual experience and then moved away from that to become religious. James’s point is more in line with a tension between personal or interior religious experience and the organizing of a religious community. These are some of the texts I read with my students in trying to understand how a long-distance hike on the AT might be religious, even religious for a non-religious hiker. Another way to help tease out the meaning of spirituality and religion comes through carefully looking at definitions. In approaching this exploration phenomenologically, I resist using definitions as they produce a conceptual frame, hindering the manifestation of the thing being investigated. When I teach varying religion classes, I start with a working definition, setting the conceptual in clear view to make it easier to bracket and allow the given to give itself from beyond the conceptual frame. My working definition starts, “Religion is the relationship humans

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have with a transcendent and ultimate authority/power.” This will include atheistic religions. In Theravada Buddhism, the ultimate authority would be the four noble truths. These truths are ultimately real for all. The second part of my working definition is that religion gives humans a system of values, ideas, and practices which provide culture with a cosmos, an ordered reality. Peter Berger writes in the Sacred Canopy that religion is “the establishment, through human activity, of an all-embracing sacred order, that is, of a sacred cosmos that will be capable of maintaining itself in the ever-present face of chaos.”4 The final part of my working definition, in conjunction with parts one and two, religion is the practice of maintaining cosmos. This working definition facilitates an understanding of walking the AT as a pilgrimage, a sacred journey, spiritual rambling. What follows is an exploration of hiking the AT as spiritual practice that falls within the experience of non-religious hikers. EXEGETING AND RESCRIPTING A LIFE-STORY When European medieval pilgrims set off on spiritual journey, their Lebenswelt, their lifeworld, their ground of being in the world, was, in comparison with contemporary Europeans, Americans, Africans, and Asians much more coherent. Their occasion for setting forth on pilgrimage was most likely the alienation felt as a result of sins committed in a social and religious context: the Turners write, “On such a journey one gets away from the reiterated ‘occasions of sin’ which make up so much of the human experience of social structure.”5 After piling up such “sins,” and the burden is no longer bearable, the pilgrim sets out on the journey. The guilt felt can no longer be “relieved by the parish confessional, especially when the priest himself may be party to some of the conflicts.” 6 Contemporary pilgrims from around the world may still feel the need to expunge guilt and in response go on a sacred journey, but another occasion for such journeys overshadows personal guilt. The contemporary situation, our Lebenswelt, is much less coherent. Put another way, fewer people share the same lifeworld even though they may live near each other. We live in an age where the perceived ground of being is less manifest as a shared lifeworld. The twentieth century, with its two world wars and drawn-out cold war, its revolution in technological advancements, and its mass communication and transportation have fragmented any overarching shared coherent lifeworld. In Oneself and Another, Paul Ricoeur writes, “construction of a life-story is necessary to give shape and meaning to one’s experience.”7 In exploring Ricoeur’s writings, Mark I. Wallace notes:



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each life is a medley of inchoate events waiting to be told in a comprehensive format; each life is an incipient story waiting to be rendered intelligible by a narrator. In scripting a life-story as one’s own, a self is born in possession of a refigured identity. To write a life, or to tell a life, is to wager that an exegesis of the self’s untold story will pay rich dividends in one’s quest for authenticity and integrity.8

Long-distance hiking can be a way of exegeting one’s life story, and an act of scripting a new story in the quest for meaning when a coherent worldview is lacking. A hiker whose trail name is Uncle Rip experienced this exegesis and rescripting during and after his journey. While on the trail, Uncle Rip examined his life and decided to change his trajectory. He was to return to his job in a shipyard, where he had a very good situation. However, after the hike he quit the job and volunteered for AmeriCorps. He wanted to serve his community in a new way. After serving two years for AmeriCorps, he enrolled in law school. After graduating from law school, he set up a practice serving clients who needed legal representation but did not have sufficient funds. He attributes this rescripting to the long hike on the AT. He wrote, “The hike this summer changed my life. It has helped me to reevaluate my priorities.”9 Interacting with Heidegger’s Being and Time, Riceour applies the idea of projecting “our ownmost possibilities” to hermeneutics writing, “What is to be interpreted in a text is a proposed world, a world that I might inhabit and wherein I might project my ownmost possibilities.”10 In projecting ourselves into the text, we distance ourselves from the everyday, the natural attitude: “the world of the text of which we are speaking is not therefore the world of everyday language. In this sense, it constitutes a new sort of distanciation that we can call a distanciation of the real from itself.”11 New possibilities arise as hikers distance themselves from the natural attitude. The trail moves them beyond the reach of the marketplace reality and becomes a kind of sacred text. The text is both presented and inhabited.12 Ricoeur writes, “Through fiction and poetry new possibilities of being-in-the-world are opened up within everyday reality.”13 The same happens in sacred journeys. The spatiality of a journey far from home, an inhabited text, distances pilgrims from their everyday reality. As the journey proceeds, their life story might be opened up and examined, a kind of hermeneutic of the self. As with pilgrimage, the practice of long-distance walking on the AT distances hikers from the natural attitude, which I refer to as the marketplace reality, and opens them to new possibilities. While this hermeneutic of the self facilitates hikers projecting their ownmost possibilities, they might begin rescripting their own life-story. The “distanciation of the real from itself” breaks conceptual frames of reference. Our experiences are framed by preconceptions, formed in the

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unfolding of our life-story. The practice of spiritual walking on the AT facilitates a kind of phenomenological approach, a return to the things themselves as co-constitutive of meaning. This involves reduction, bracketing conceptual frames of reference. On the AT, the things themselves constitute the immediate milieu. LONG-DISTANCE DISTANCING VERSUS OTHER WALKING VARIATIONS As discussed in earlier chapters, there are multiple ways of hiking the AT. The degree of distancing changes depending on whether a person is day, section, or long-distance hiking. Recall that trail conditions themselves might be experienced in divergent ways as day hikers and section hikers target parts of the trail, optimizing aesthetic experiences. These hikers will also choose more pleasant weather conditions, not an option for long-distance hikers. Solitude and companionship manifest uniquely as well. Clearly, day hikers and section hikers are distanced from their everyday lifeworld, however, long-distance hiking separates the hiker over a longer period of time. A brief time frame may not be enough distance for the hiker to shake off the marketplace. The novelty of walking does not overcome the challenge of rock, root, mud, steep ascents and descents. Short-term hikers never get past feeling awkward. The hiker has not attuned themself to insects or the weight of the pack tugging, rubbing, and tearing at the body. Months of walking in the wilderness changes the hiker’s perspective as the constituents of the ecoplaces along the trail become more familiar.14 Familiarity may either numb the hiker, causing a loss of attention, or enhance the details of being fully present, opening the hiker to encounter versus experience.15 Familiarity might result in complacency, taking the repeated exposure to wilderness constituents for granted. Hikers fail to engage the world as a curious child, hungry for a discovery of meaning and thirsty to find connections. Thoreau writes, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”16 He points to deliberate engagement and being present in the moment. This opening of self to learning what another has to teach is the beginning of dialogue. In dialogue with the other we might begin to rescript an authentic life story. Thoreau’s essay on walking gives insight into encounters that give rise to meaning-making in the context of a long-distance hike. Thoreau’s advice, that the walker enter the woods fully when stepping therein, shows the contrasting degrees of encounter that deliberate walks afford. His description also indi-

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cates that distance in time and space affect the quality and focus of the hike, separating sojourners from distractions. Thoreau writes: Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the wood bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?17

Thoreau’s description brings attention to the spirituality of hiking. Getting there in spirit refers to the hiker’s full and wholistic attention focused and embodied in the hike. When a hiker’s full and wholistic focus attends walking in the wilderness, mind-body dualism disappears. Hikers and other upright and embodied beings constitute the particular environments in what I have referred to as ecoplaces. Being fully present in the situation, distractions excluded from consciousness, the hiker may experience what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as flow. Thoreau points out that a walk in the woods does not necessitate being fully present. Distractions such as concerns of the village, or what I refer to as the marketplace, occupy the hiker’s attention. The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela is another long-distance hike wherein the flow experience may happen. However, the proximity to more familiar landscapes, towns, villages, and cities differs greatly from a wilderness ramble. Much of the pathway on the Camino is conducive to pilgrims walking with fellows side by side. The conversation mediates experience. The two fellows may indeed be present to one another but fail to also be present to the constituents of the ecoplaces through which they walk. The trail tread allows pilgrims to either converse with fellows or withdraw into deep reflection. Wilderness walking on the AT requires full attention on the trail tread. Wilderness rambling will be shown to be more conducive to flow. FLOW AND MEMORY Flow The Turners claim that pilgrimages survive in part “because they provide eminently satisfactory frames for the flow experience, in both the journey to and the exercises at the pilgrimage center. Asceticism has its joys—the joys of flow. And flow can serve to reinforce the symbols and values with which

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its frames are associated.”18 Flow rarely happens and involves the merging of action and awareness.19 Because of this merging, describing flow can be very difficult. That is, with the joining of action and awareness, the hiker becomes so involved in the wholistic movement that thoughtful reflection does not happen. Lewis writes, “This is our dilemma—either to taste and not to know or know and not to taste—or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. As thinkers we are cut off from what we think about.”20 In describing flow, the hiker is outside the experience and must employ memory. Several years ago, I attempted to describe an experience of walking in flow as it happened on the AT in the context of a long-distance hike. While writing, I was enacting a memory. I wrote: I was aware of all the surround, of a woodpecker calling from the canopy above, and tree branches thrust into the hovering sky. I gazed at the beautiful trillium and other wildflowers that covered the slope under the dense forest and seemed connected to each bloom. I heard and saw rivulets of water coursing across the trail and down the mountain. The sun, low on the eastern horizon, peeked through the trees, and its radiance brightened the atmosphere as the light diffused in the mist, turning everything golden.21

I then shifted the account, the enactment of memory, to a present telling, moving into present tense as if the memory were spilling forth into the moment of writing, “I step up and up and up, onto and over large rocks, the tread of the trail, leg muscles flexing, heart pounding, blood pulsing, chest heaving as my lungs fill with sweet air and then release the exhaust.”22 In attempting to clarify the memory I moved back to past tense and added, “My thoughts, while climbing this day, did not reflect on any of this description; I only write this after the fact. My thoughts ran like a river.” I then shifted into the present tense again, “this rock, this tree, this birdsong, this purple, this bit of blue sky.” Then back into the past tense, “And as these thoughts coursed, I was acutely aware of my muscles, heart, breath, the feel of the trail tread beneath my feet.” Finally, I introduced a conceptual frame, “This unique experience does not often happen; it is the merging of action and awareness, what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to as flow.”23 Memory A few years later, I was writing another paper for publication, trying to delve deeper into flow as it manifests in long-distance hiking, what I now refer to as kenotic walking, or walking self-emptying. I realized that my earlier description needed revision. I needed to enact the memory anew. After at-

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tending more closely to the phenomenology of kenotic walking through an enactment of my memory I wrote, “Since no thoughts manifested in language while flow was happening, there is no immediate way to describe the moment by moment unfolding between the hiker and the place. Looking to memory and setting it forth in thought shows what Hans-Georg Gadamer writes about language, that it conceals ‘one’s whole relationship to the world.’”24 Gadamer goes on to write, “One of the fundamental structures of all speaking is that we are guided by preconceptions and anticipations in our talking in such a way that these continually remain hidden and that it takes a disruption in oneself of the intended meaning of what one is saying to become conscious of these prejudices as such.”25 As we enact memories “we are guided by hidden preconceptions.”26 For example, the memory of flow, described in the first publication, demonstrates the hidden preconception. In that publication I wrote, “My thoughts ran like a river; this rock, this tree, this birdsong, this purple, this bit of blue sky.”27 In enacting the memory anew for the second article, I wrote, I never had a thought of “rock,” “tree,” “birdsong,” “purple,” or “blue sky.” When I recall the memory and describe it, these words I am accustomed to using easily fall into place and the memory seems clearly articulated. But that is the result of a preconception that remains concealed until I disrupt the intended meaning. In questioning the articulation of the memory through contemplation, I disrupt the intention that looks back through the memory. I bracket the descriptive terms, “rock,” “tree,” “birdsong,” “purple,” and “blue sky.” As a result, I recall the memory more carefully and realize that, indeed I did see a rock, a tree, some purple and some blue sky; I did hear birdsong, but I did not think those words.28

Using these words thematizes, grasps the memories’ images and organizes them according to a preconception. Language Thematizing happens when we describe. We order the memory so that our thought becomes meaningful in the present. Susanne Langer writes, Every process we perceive, if it is to be retained in memory, must record itself as a fantasy, an envisagement, by virtue of which it can be called up in imagination or recognized when it occurs again. For no actual process happens twice; only we may meet the same sort of occasion again. The second time we “know” already what the event is, because we assimilate it to the fantasy abstracted from the previous instance.29

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We assimilate the process using language that orders the fantasy, language drawn from preconceptions, as Gadamer writes, that remain hidden.30 Levinas helps us here writing, “To become conscious of a being is then always for that being to be grasped across an ideality and on the basis of a said.”31 The “said” is Levinas’s reference to what happens when language thematizes.32 Similar to Langer, Levinas writes that in intentionality “the given enters into a thought which recognizes in it or invests it with its own project.” However, Levinas adds, “and thus exercises mastery over it.” 33 This is what Levinas refers to as the play of consciousness. If we couple the assimilation of the immediate perception with the imaginative memory and apply Gadamer’s claim that language conceals as it is guided by preconceptions, we see that memory itself is a complex interplay of envisagement, language, and preconceptions. Leeuw similarly writes, “We experience things twice, first directly in actu, the second time in an image, as form; the first time as uninterpreted life, the second time as transformed life. Only what stands before our eyes as image, as form, as figure, has meaning for us, only that confronts us as power.”34 Image, form, and figure when meaningful are thematized happenings. But, uncovering the event prior to thematization and detecting the given in a happening of memory as a way of reinterpreting and discovering a transformed life, according to Gadamer, requires a “disruption in oneself of the intended meaning of what one is saying to become conscious of these prejudices as such.”35 Just as I have described two enactments of the same memory, any enactment of memory may come forth with or without disruption. Persons and Place In addition to envisagement, language, and preconceptions, memory also intwines with persons and place. The philosopher William Ernest Hocking calls our attention to the phrase, “Here we are,” pointing to a relational expanse of three: “I exist,” “we exist,” and the “meeting ground,” the “here” of “here we are.” David Rodick writes, “Within this ‘meeting ground’ or ‘zone of adhesion,’ we breathe intersubjective, native air.”36 Gabriel Marcel in commenting on the meeting ground, the “here we are,” and alluding to the intersubjective air of which Rodick points, writes, “In all of these situations the encounter does not take place in each of the participants, or in a neutral unity encompassing them, but between them in a most exact sense, in a dimension accessible to them alone.”37 The intersubjective encounter happens in a place that also cooperates. Think of Plato’s khôra, mentioned in chapter one, the spatial womb from which we spring. The “I exist” and “we exist,” Heidegger’s Dasein, unfold in a particular place that is the spatial womb. This springing forth is a situational event wherein envisagement, language, preconceptions, per-



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sons, and place make the unfolding meaningful. Yet memory also plays a part in meaning- making. The happening of memory brings together myself—my envisagement, preconceptions, and language—others who are present, their language contribution, and the “here,” the place. This happening continues to spiral out across time through language enactments. These enactments of language continue to interact with myself, other persons, and place. Memory is sometimes depicted on a timeline or as a cycle of time. The event recalled happened at a particular point in the timeline running from beginning toward some horizon; or, in the cycle of time that repeats itself. Both of these depictions of memory show the event in the past to be stable, repeatable if carefully recalled. Recalling would be an enactment like accessing some data from a recording device. A sound recording such as a vinyl record repeats the event as the needle scratches the surface of the disc. A camera records the image of an event, repeated each time the viewer observes the picture. Writing allows the reader to repeat the same words the author placed on the page. But we know these records do not necessarily give us access to the complexity of the event they seem to capture. Think about the craft of writing, of how it takes years of practice, of how professors work with students in order to lay down words on a page that clearly depicts an event. Think of your own writing practice, of crafting draft after draft of some essay and still not finding the language needed to communicate the event of memory. The line or circle analogy to memory does not give a good account of the complexity of recall, of communicating the memory in an enactment. As Gadamer noted, it takes a disruption in oneself of the intended meaning in order to work through the complexity of an event that continues to become a memory. Poetic Versus Prosaic Enactments This disruption unfolds when I dialogue with another who has shared with me an event and whose memory does not match my own; or, when I visit the site of happening and find that the place has changed. Poetic versus prosaic enactments may also bring to presence this disruption. Owen Barfield writes that “the purely prosaic can apprehend nothing but results. It knows nought of the thing coming into being, only of the thing become.”38 The prosaic can be likened to the recording device that seems to capture an event point on a timeline or cycle. Barfield continues, writing that the prosaic “sees nature—and would like to see art—as a series of mechanical rearrangements of facts. And facts are facta—things done and past.”39 In relation to the poetic and prosaic, Ernesto Grassi writes that “from Plato on, in the Western world, rational language became preeminent for determining beings and thus reality.

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Each word, in consequence of its rational definitions, aims at “fixing,” out of space and time, the meaning of a being.”40 That is, abstracting the event point on the timeline or revisiting the point on the cycle as though these were recordings. Grassi also notes Heidegger’s thesis that “reality cannot originally be unveiled in its meaning through a rational process.”41 Barfield contends that the rational principle can in no sense . . . be said to expand consciousness. Only the poetic can do this: only poesy, pouring into language its creative intuitions, can preserve its living meaning and prevent it from crystallizing into a kind of algebra. “If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character,” wrote William Blake, “the philosophic and experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round.”42

The poetic, on the other hand, writes Grassi, “unveils originally the calls of the Being that emerge within the various existential situations.”43 Unveiling is not enacting a recording but exposing ourselves to some unknown through an enactment. John Prine, in reflecting on a live performance of his music, said, “The second you sing a song for someone, it changes.” The song written at some point in the past and enacted through performance, changes the music, bringing together persons and place anew. “Grassi continues, “the historicity of history consists in Being which is in the process of becoming.”44 Not an enactment of a recording but of the happening in flux. Poetry, writes Grassi, is “the unveiling of the Being in what is its intimate alienation from us and at the same time intimacy with us. . . [not] the manifestation of an abstract truth through the rational process, but in a revelation, a saving from oblivion (a-letheia), a referral to indicative and not demonstrative signs.”45 The enactment comes forth from the person speaking or writing as intimacy with that person, but the happening precipitating the event is Being’s intimate alienation from the person. Grassi notes that “Poetic metaphors connect sensory appearances in order to assign unexpected meanings to them which would be unattainable for rational thought.”46 The unexpected meaning is a disruption of our intended meaning. Grassi continues, “Poetry has the power to lead human beings beyond the senses so that a discrepancy arises between what the senses perceive and this new revealed truth.”47 The discrepancy, if attended to, reveals the disruption in our intended meaning, opening us to new meanings, to insights that remain hidden when we take language for granted. Poets, he writes, “use elements of the sensory world in order to reach what transcends it.”48 This difference between prosaic and poetic enactments is also articulated by Merleau-Ponty:



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Language bears the meaning of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body. The empirical use of already established language should be distinguished from its creative use. Empirical language can only be the result of creative language. Speech in the sense of empirical language—that is, the opportune recollection of a pre-established sign—is not speech in respect to an authentic language.49

On the other hand, poetic enactment may become sedimented and lose its power to disrupt and discover the hidden. Barfield writes, “without the continued existence of poetry, without a steady influx of new meaning into language, even the knowledge and wisdom which poetry herself has given in the past must wither away into a species of mechanical calculation.”50 But if poetic enactment remains creative, it disrupts and reveals. Gadamer writes, “the work of art is the absolute present for each particular present, and at the same time holds its word in readiness for every future. The intimacy with which the work of art touches us is at the same time, in enigmatic fashion, a shattering and a demolition of the familiar. It is not only the ‘This art thou!’ disclosed in a joyous and frightening shock; it also says to us; ‘Thou must alter thy life!’”51 Through this foray into memory, language, poetic versus prosaic enactment, and the influence of persons and place, we have uncovered the complexity of both flow and giving an account thereof. Poetic uses of language have overlapping characteristics shared with flow. The prosaic or rational discourse, may attempt to thematize and thereby conceptualize that which cannot be explained in this manner. Never-the-less, social scientists have attempted to theorize, describing flow in prosaic form. While keeping in mind the complexity and difficulty of describing flow, I now turn my attention to one of those theoretical studies as a way of exploring and understanding flow unfolding on the AT. FLOW AND THE AT: A BRIEF LOOK THROUGH THE LENS OF THEORY Csikszentmihalyi writes that the “feeling” of flow is closely associated with “painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.”52 That Thoreau found it difficult to “shake off the village” highlights different experiences that might occur in long-distance hiking. Flow happens to those who have moved beyond the village more than spatially. The challenge of long-distance walking on wilderness tracks like the AT measures hiker capacities, enveloping them in both novel situations and discovery only if the village has been shaken off.

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A short hike in the park involves less risk than a long hike in the wilderness where bear encounters are a real possibility. Carrying everything one needs in a backpack and walking between fifteen and twenty-five miles over difficult terrain, day after day, brings with it a more intense challenge and some pain in comparison with a five-mile hike in any environment. Looking closely at the elements of Csikszentmihalyi’s description of flow further clarifies these differences: day hiking, overnight backpacking, walking the Camino de Santiago, or long-distance hiking on the AT. Goals Clarity of goals is an important element of flow.53 Demands of life in the marketplace involve contradictions and uncertain purposes. Long-distance hikes on the AT give hikers clear goals. Both the AT and Camino de Santiago demand long and short-term goal setting, in contrast to day hiking that only brings with it a short-term end. In a six-week hike across Spain or a fivemonth hike on the AT, the long-term goal of finishing pushes hikers each day. On the other hand, each day has more immediate goals and both long and short-term ends that interact with each other. Some of the short-term goals appear in the negotiation with elements in ecoplaces along the way: climbing Bigelow Mountain in Maine, finding water from a spring at Beaver Brook Shelter in New Hampshire, or negotiating a ford at the West Branch of the Pleasant River in the hundred-mile wilderness. Secondary goal accomplishment brings immediate feedback, a second element of flow. In the marketplace, feedback is less immediate. Feedback while hiking occurs at the moment of success or failure.54 The marketplace reality involves us in a myriad of activities with competing goals, often confusing feedback. The rhythm of hiking the AT sets in after several weeks, focusing the hiker’s attention on the present task. The rhythm manifests clearly and without complication: wake in the morning, prepare a meal and eat, get the backpack ready for the day, walk, find water and drink, prepare another meal and eat, more walking, stop and make camp, prepare yet another meal and eat, and crawl into the bag and sleep. The regular act of walking reinforces this rhythm.55 Hikers engage in walking most of the day. Goals and feedback are accomplished in succession and hikers are further distanced from the contradictions and unsure purposes of the marketplace reality. Challenge As alluded to earlier, an important difference between day hiking and longdistant hiking manifests in the accompanying challenge: physical, mental,



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and emotional. Steep ascents and descents, picking one’s way through rugged terrain, continuously walking, mile after mile and day after day with no end immediately in focus, only the hope of either Katahdin for the AT or a tomb in Santiago de Compostela measures one’s fully embodied commitment. Csikszentmihalyi writes, “in everyday life we sometimes feel that the challenges are too high in relation to our skills, and then we feel frustrated and anxious. Or we feel that our potential is greater than the opportunities to express it, and then we feel bored.”56 Shorter hikes do not involve the same intensity of challenges, though shorter walks do allow for contemplation. Csikszentmihalyi writes that the “balance between challenge and skills” facilitates a merging of action and awareness. In everyday life, what I have been referring to as the marketplace and Thoreau’s village, “our minds are disjointed from what we do.”57 Day hikes fail to fully distance hikers from disjointedness. Weekend hikes, likewise, do not facilitate flow. Along many day use trails, well-manicured pathways are easy to navigate. Without a fully loaded backpack, hiking the AT by day involves less rigor. Most of the AT tread demands one’s full attention: stepping over rock and root, sloshing through muddy bogs, climbing over and sliding down large boulders, and occasionally falling. In Maine, I fell an average of three times each day, and that after having been on the trial for almost five months. Hiking for only a weekend does not provide enough conditioning for the hiker to acquire “trail legs.” Both the challenge and longevity of long-distance hiking on the AT, and in some cases on the Camino, lead to emplacement. The hiker’s consciousness reorients to the wilderness ramble, or the hike through Spain. One popular phrase rising out of the experience of pilgrims on the Camino is that of coming to be “en Camino.” This descriptor captures what happens when the pilgrim finds emplacement, when she has become attuned to the journey. This acquired consciousness facilitates “shaking off the village” as attention is focused over time and space. From these conditions, hikers happen into flow. Duration Some hikers who practice spiritual walking cannot embark on a long-distance hike. They might make a habit of walking each day for an hour or so. In addition to long-distance hiking, I practice spiritual walking on a four-mile trail along a tidal creek in Isle of Wight County, Virginia. My early morning walk has become a spiritual discipline, a time of prayer and meditation. However, the hour and a half duration seldom results in a happening of flow. The forest along Jones Creek envelopes me in beauty, as well as providing a somewhat wild ecology. Occasionally I see a farm field appearing through the

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trees, across the fluxing tidal estuary, but there are only a couple of houses in view along the entire route. I continually see and hear wildlife along the way, as well as smell the salt marsh and other scents: woodpeckers (mostly heard), heron, osprey, geese, and ducks are but a few of the many creatures encountered. In the spring, frogs sing, attracting their own kind in some mating ritual. I see tracks in the pathway after a rain or in fresh snow: rabbit, raccoon, opossum, and deer. Tides shift in a continuous progression, following the moon’s influence and changing weather conditions. When northeast winds blow, high tides rise above normal limits and sometimes cover the trail. Fidler crabs come up from the tidal flats in summer and scurry across the pathway. The ever-shifting shoreline follows the water’s ebbs and flows. After a rain shower the scent, petrichor, fills the air making the atmosphere manifest through a bodily sensation not often referenced. An hour and a half each day is a blessing, but compared to long hikes, is not sufficient to clear my thoughts of marketplace impulses and self-consciousness, making difficult “shaking off the village.” It fails to produce a sustained distanciation of the real from itself. Self-Appearance Csikszentmihalyi writes, “in everyday life, we are always monitoring how we appear to other people; we are on the alert to defend ourselves from potential slights and anxious to make a favorable impression.”58 This monitoring of self-appearance is less common among pilgrims and thru-hikers. This characteristic of thru-hikers really came home for me while I was standing in a grocery store checkout queue in Pennsylvania. I was in town for a resupply, and after having been on this wilderness ramble for several months, was not accustomed to the buzz of the marketplace. I was about two persons deep in the queue and not focused on anything, mind wandering, almost in a daze. I glanced at the magazine rack next to the checkout counter. There on the cover of one of the glamor magazines was the picture of a female model. Without conscious intervention, I felt revulsion. A thought just popped into my head, “she looks hideous.” Then consciousness came into the reflective mode, and I caught the thought in a net of questioning. “Wait, she can’t look hideous. She is a model. The picture has been airbrushed. It appears on the cover of the magazine to attract purchasers. She is supposed to be the epitome of beauty.” Then a number of images rolled through my memory, faces of the female hikers with whom I had shared the journey: True Grit, Pebbles, Coconut, Scribbles, Yinz, Ridge Runner, Colorado, Lady Sherpa, and Baby Ruth. Their faces were dirty, hair disheveled, no makeup altered their appearance. Some were cut and bleeding, bruised. In each one, I saw beauty. Months of being



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on the trail with these women had changed my perception of female beauty. I don’t mean to be biased in describing women versus men. I have never looked at a man and attached the word beauty to his appearance. That is my experience thus far in life. In any case, being on the trail had transformed my perception of female beauty. I now looked at the picture of this glamor model with revulsion. I then thought, “How disgusting it is to impose this hideous ideal of beauty on women.” When Levinas calls our attention to the face, it does not mean a mask. In relation to the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, entrance into holy sites is not prohibited based on appearance. Pilgrims are often dirty, clothes disheveled, and dressed in hiking clothes. In places like Rome or Israel, dress codes are strictly enforced. These same pilgrims in Spain would not be allowed at Holy sites in Rome, Jerusalem, or Capernaum. It is the lack of self-monitoring in this way that may be in part responsible for the moniker, “hiker trash,” given to long-distance hikers as mentioned earlier in the book. Attention shifts away from the ego as hikers involve themselves fully in walking, present to the constituents of the journey. Rather than monitoring their own selves, hikers and pilgrims attend fellows as well as the inhabitants of the ecological milieu, including flora, fauna, and geologic features. Csikszentmihalyi writes, “we have stepped out of the boundaries of the ego and have become part, at least temporarily, of a larger entity.”59 Consistent with Thoreau’s admonition, hikers shake off the village and fully enter into the walk, attention arrested. Each step amplifies and focuses the pilgrim’s action and awareness. Monastics and Mystics Csikszentmihalyi’s study of the flow included a variation of persons performing a number of different activities, “athletes, artists, religious mystics, scientists” and others.60 Pilgrims and long-distance hiker have similar characteristics of both athletes and religious mystics. Athletic activities involve embodied challenges that compare with pilgrims and long-distance hikers. The same applies to religious mystics. Csikszentmihalyi writes, “It is quite obvious that certain states of rapture which are usually labeled ‘religious’ share the characteristics of flow with play and creativity.”61 Recall the traditions of the Desert Fathers and Mothers mentioned in chapter two in relation to an aesthetic of solitude, among the first monastics of the Christian faith. Their practice illustrates a connection between flow and religious contemplation. In addition, through the discipline of prayer, meditation, and contemplation, sometimes resulting in a happening comparable to flow, the fruits of solitude manifest.

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Thomas Merton points out that the fruit of the Desert Fathers and Mothers was characterized by the Latin, quies, or “rest”: “The ‘rest’ which these men sought was simply the sanity and poise of a being that no longer has to look at itself because it is carried away by the perfection of freedom that is in it.”62 The similarity between quies and flow is in transcending self-consciousness, whereby a felt freedom occurs in the merging of action and awareness. Merton goes on to describe quies writing Rest, then, was a kind of simple no-whereness and no-mindedness that had lost all preoccupation with a false or limited “self.” At peace in the possession of a sublime “Nothing” the spirit laid hold, in secret, upon the “All”—without trying to know what it possessed.63

In being carried away and entering rest, quies, the agent acts with an absence of self-awareness. That is, rather than mindfulness, quies is “no-mindedness,” a negation of being aware of self-awareness. The same happens in flow. Csikszentmihalyi writes, “While involved in the activity, this feeling of control is modified by the ‘ego-less’ state of the actor. Rather than an active awareness of mastery, it is more a condition of not being worried by the possibility of lack of control.”64 The consciousness of the actor focuses away from itself, also away from techniques leading to the action. Like quies, the happening of flow is an action of no-mindedness. The actor is fully merged with the action, also resulting in a no-whereness, an absence of consciousness toward the self in a place, or awareness of the place as a structure enveloping the actor. Not an exclusion of the locus, a withdrawal inward, negating an awareness of the elements of place, rather, a heightened awareness of the constituents of place participating in the action. Csikszentmihalyi writes, “most states of religious ecstasy are reached by following complex ritual steps, yet for flow to be maintained, one cannot reflect on the act of awareness itself. The moment awareness is split so as to perceive the activity from ‘outside,’ flow is interrupted.”65 The actor’s awareness is not perspectival. There is no scenery as there would be if awareness included an abstracted perspective of being in a place. The actor is not aware that their actions are perceived from the point of view of the medium of space gazing at them, nor do they perceive themselves from beyond themselves. Yet, the constituents of the ecoplace become co-conspirators in the action, mutual agents in the happening. Religious ecstasy in the context of a long-distance hike on the AT rises out of a full merging of the hiker’s awareness in an action that unfolds in cooperation with the constituents of the immediate ecoplace through which they walk. Hikers become so fully merged that the constituents of the ecoplace seem immediately present but at the same time nowhere. Further, the ecoplace, in which the constituents dwell, is not, in the awareness of the



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hiker, one of many ecoplaces, nor is it one part of a larger whole. The hiker in the happening of flow seems to be no-where and no-minded, that is, if we were to characterize the happening from the perspective of an examination of the happening. While the happening is unfolding the hiker is not reflecting on the action from any perspective. The long-distance hiker as a kind of religious ecstatic comes into rest in the distanciation from an ego-constructed reality, as well as an opening up of a co-constituted world, an authentic community. Quies or rest, the fruit of prayer, meditation, and contemplation, consistent with that of the Desert Father and Mothers as Merton writes, is a cornerstone of monastic life and continues today, “What we would call today contemplative prayer is referred to as quies or ‘rest.’ This illuminating term has persisted in Greek monastic tradition as hesychia, ‘sweet repose.’”66 Hesychia can also be translated interior stillness or peace. This is yet another way of understanding flow. William Harmless writes that this stillness was “a graced depth of inner stillness.”67 Stillness is also a distancing of the monk from the ego constituted reality. Quoting Abba Rufus, “Interior stillness [hesychia] means to remain sitting in one’s cell with fear and knowledge of God, holding far off the remembrance of wrongs suffered and pride of spirit.”68 Holding far off is a distancing from the wrongs suffered, from the pride of spirit. Hesychia illustrates flow happening in contemplation. The contemplator’s character flaws are purged in the “furnace of Babylon.”69 The furnace points to the solitary cells of Christian monastics. The comparison extends to the aesthetic of solitude discussed in chapter 2, the ordeal of a long-distance hike within the wilderness of the AT. Monastic Cell As discussed in chapter 2, the AT has been referred to as the “green tunnel.” Winding through dense forest, hikers become enveloped in tunnels of shrub. The tunnel is not a spatially confined monastic cell. Rather, hikers walk through a seemingly endless green cell that limits sensory input, quieting stimuli. Csikszentmihalyi writes, “Merging of action and awareness is made possible by a centering of attention on a limited stimulus field.”70 Recall the Turners’s description of pilgrimage as “the great liminal experience of the religious life. If mysticism is an interior pilgrimage, pilgrimage is exteriorized mysticism.”71 We focused on Saint Teresa of Ávila’s mystical, interior journey in chapter 2. Long-distance hiking as spiritual journey becomes exteriorized mysticism, the fruit of stillness—quies, hesychia—happening in movement that is other than intentional, opening the hiker to mystical union. The buzz of the village, the pull of the marketplace, the noise of contemporary life is quieted and replaced by the stillness and sounds within the wild while

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walking therein. Stillness saturates the hiker’s whole person in the process of walking through this habitat of undomesticated life. Hikers return to their senses, the very thing for which Thoreau longed in his desire to get there in spirit. Spirit does not imply eliminating the senses, escaping the body in pursuit of some transcendent reality. Rather, in this context spirit is being fully present with the constituents of the ecoplace. The “green tunnel” distances hikers from the village, the marketplace and domesticated world, and places them in the furnace of an uncontrollable fire. Domestication is the result of an ego constituted world. The village is a world created in the image of the human in isolation from healthy relations with extra humans. The village as a domesticated world casts extra humans as means to an ego constituted end. In wilderness as the “green tunnel,” technology as a tool of mastery is limited to the contents of one’s pack. A new rhythm manifests, not a domesticized rhythm. This new rhythm is a sensuous dance with the constituents of the wilderness through which hikers become reoriented to a more than human world. This rhythm, as a dance with the other, is a dialog including everyone present. Greenia likens the pilgrimage trail to a “dance floor” where “the sojourner willingly steps in sequence with his or her pilgrim partners.” He continues describing the dance writing, “This communal choreography of the pilgrim band imposes rhythms that engage the whole organic structure of the traveler, that demand nutrition and rest, and which help achieve the desired goal of enacting the sacred while reaching toward it.”72 All those present in the dance become co-constituents of the ecoplace within which the hiker dances as she walks. The long-distance hiker and her co-constituents become a temporary authentic community, temporary because the community must be continually maintained through ritual action. One ritual action, consistent with prayer and meditation, could be described as a kind of repeated mantra. Bird songs repeat, sounding with high intensity in the morning and continuing with less intensity but still filling the forest in the afternoon. Wind brushes tree boughs, on some days a gentle rustling and on others swallowing up all other sounds. Along streams water spills over rocks. Larger rivers produce a thundering sound, and smaller streams a song mingling with the breeze in the trees. While drawing water from a spring, the faint bubbling of water is heard making its way to the surface of the earth. Footsteps become percussive, drumming from varying soils, sand, rocks, roots, and logs. They all become a mantra, a communal prayer, an offering of worship. Thomas Merton points out that in traditional monasticism “quies is a silent absorption aided by the soft repetition of a lone phrase of scriptures—the most popular being the prayer of the Publican: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner!’” also repeated in short form, “Lord have mercy (Kyrie eleison).”73 All along the AT, this



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silent absorption happens through interacting with the iconography and living presence within creation, the co-constituents of undomesticated ecoplaces. Hikers may not repeat specific religious prayers, the prayer of the publican for example, but they discover “silent absorption.” Repetition, the rhythm of walking, as well as deliberate movement through particular landscapes, or ecoplaces, aids the happening.74 Hesychia might happen while practicing spiritual walking on the AT. Recall the discussion of Marion’s distinguishing idol and icon in chapter two. I wrote that the icon gazes at our gazes, thereby rendering our vision passive. We receive the one who saturates us with meaning. Iconography involves the person in an interaction of prayer, of receiving from the other who saturates us with meaning. The prayer of silent absorption brings hikers into a communion with the constituents of the ecoplaces through which they walk. The faces of these creatures, as well as the possibility of a communion with God, manifests through a prayerful interaction with various icons. Another analogy to the monastic experience can be made by the backpack. Monk’s needs, both spiritual and physical, are fully met through the order, the community of monks all working together in the modest place of their dwelling. Food, clothing, shelter, and water are provided through their interaction in the setting of the order. Quies and hesychia are the fruit of the order, the aesthetic of solitude, in conjunction with each monk’s discipline in that order. The distractions of the marketplace, Thoreau’s village, vanish as all attention focuses on contemplation and prayer. The order does require a rigorous daily routine involving the discipline of work. Monks are freed from the cares of the world, the tyranny of the village, in their co-constituted community. The backpack functions in a similar fashion for the long-distance hiker. Hikers are released from the same cares and tyranny. All that is needed for basic living—food, clothing, shelter, and water treatment—is carried on the hiker’s back. The discipline of work, in this case hiking and living in the wilderness, manifests itself in the daily walk and camping practices. Long-distance hiking does not require hunting or gathering food, which frees hikers to engage in contemplation and prayer if desired. One discipline required involves carrying one’s backpack while walking. KENOTIC WALKING In addition to being distanced from marketplace concerns and from a reiterated focus on self, the AT’s challenges have conditioned the hiker’s body and soul. In the ecstatic dance of flow, a more intense koinōnia unfolds, a mystical union with the constituents of the ecoplaces. Leeuw characterizes the mystic

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finding union writing, “He ceases to experience anything whatever as objective, and likewise to be influenced or determined by anything as an object; both object and subject blend in formless and contentless fusion. Ecstasy . . . induced the emptying of the self and the possibility of its being filled with some ‘Other.’”75 In chapter 2, I discussed this ecstatic, mystical union in relation to an aesthetic of fellowship or koinōnia. In chapter 1, I outlined koinónia in relation to fellowshipping with those who dwell within the wilderness. In showing the connection between dance and ecstasy, Leeuw writes, The dance, by its very nature, is ecstatic. It makes man beside himself, lifts him above life and the world, and lets his whole earthly existence perish in the maelstrom. . . Intoxication and the dance belong together. When the dance is genuine, one can no longer speak of an action which one performs, but of a dance which sweeps one away.76

Both flow and dance, as ecstatic, do not happen through willful action. Instead, the ecstasy comes upon the mystic, or the hiker, as an eruption. Not a self-awareness of being lifted “above life and the world” or being “swept away,” it comes as an eruption of immediate awareness. Eruption is a descriptive term applied after the happening, a result of reflection. Recall the difficulty describing flow. The mystic hiker is engulfed with such intensity that she is “swept away,” swept beyond self-attending. She is thoroughly infused in action, emptied of the consciousness of herself, self-reflection negated, beside herself in a full and undivided participation with the constituents of the immediate spatial surround. Undivided participation, communion, koinōnia, is analogous to an orchestral action. An unseen conductor directs the musicians, all of the participants in the spatial surround. Fellow musicians collaborate, producing something beautiful that transcends any one of them. The hiker, as one of the musicians, steps onto and over various instruments, her feet in contact with elements of earth resound. The sounds of feet striking log, stone, gravel, mud, and water resonate with other bodies of the forest. Sounds of other musicians—birds, wind, trees, streams—harmonize, interact with countering tones. The music reveals eddies in the invisible atmosphere, the visible is saturated by the invisible manifesting a world inaccessible to the eye alone, a world inhabited by those in undivided participation. An older form of orchestral action also comes into play, the dancing place. The hiker in rhythmic stepping dances with the others present. A grouse, startled by the approaching hiker, leaps into the air from its hiding place just beside the trail, only a meter away. Wings beat furiously creating a rapid thumping, which in turns surprises the hiker. She responds to the grouse by changing her stride, or maybe she pauses and watches the grouse disappear



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into the forest. She continues down a slope, gravity and trail tread give her pace a boost. She is almost floating, lightly touching the earth with each step. At this pace she rounds a large boulder, the trail hidden on the other side. Her pace slows in the turn, lowering her center, she feels gravity increase its pull. Suddenly there is a log, fallen across the trail, knee high, and she must adjust her step, measuring the distance to the tree trunk. She thrusts one foot upward, raising her center with it, pushing off of her planted foot. Over the log now, her forward foot finds earth again, knee bending, absorbing the shock of landing. Her other foot must now find a suitable few inches of trail to bring the whole leap home. Through all of this she feels connected to the boulder, the log, the grouse, the very small patches of earth where her feet have briefly trod. In this move and counter move, in her responding to the movement and place of the others, they have each been dancing with one another. This ecstatic walking, this being lifted above life and the world in a dance does not separate the hiker from her emplacement. Rather, it reinforces her communion with the others present. On the other hand, the hiker has lost all connection to the rhythms of the marketplace, has shaken off the village. She has been lifted above the life and world of the village. In this kenosis, the hiker is truly liminal. In addition, and following from this mystical participation, the hiker is free from effort, from the constraints of learning. Flow is effortless and cannot happen when attention is aimed at acquiring a skill. Leeuw’s use of the word “hovering” describes this dance, “here man does not subjugate the world by mastering a rhythm, but by being himself caught up in and ruled by this rhythm.”77 While being caught up, hikers just as dancers, “forget themselves: they lose the heaviness of being bound to earth.”78 Attention is highly focused on each step, carefully placing a foot in the correct position in relation to stones, stepping over obstacles such as logs, navigating through a wind fallen tree. After weeks or months of walking in these conditions, acquisition of skills does not press the consciousness, dividing attention between how to negotiate and the actual bodily negotiation. Just as with dancing, once the steps are internalized, they flow without attention to the steps themselves. In this way hikers open themselves to the ecstasy of flow. Leeuw writes, “It is as though, in rapture, closed doors are opened, and all hindrances disappear, particularly those of the body: lightly and freely the ecstatics soar away.”79 These instances of the happening of flow can be characterized as experience. Flow itself is referenced as an experience. Yet, referring to this mystical participation and emptying of self-consciousness as an experience is fraught with hidden preconceptions. As a personal memory, the hiker recalls it, describing it as an experience, as I outlined earlier in this chapter. If the hiker more carefully attends the memory, she finds a preconception or a

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theme. Helpful in a careful scrutiny is Levinas’s distinction between saying and the said. Walking in flow is a saying that has not yet congealed into the said. Levinas writes that “saying does move into language, in which saying and said are correlative of one another, and the saying is subordinated to its theme.”80 When we recall a memory, saying is subordinated into a theme, becoming the said. Saying arises prior to being thematized. Kenotic walking precedes thematizing, being prelinguistic, communication unfolds diachronically into language. In recalling the memory, the prelinguistic happening of the body moving along the AT is forgotten, sedimented under the said. What of the hidden preconception, the theme that subordinates? Levinas writes, “I can, no doubt, have an experience of another and ‘observe’ his face, and yet the knowledge gained in this way would be, if not actually misleading, nevertheless truncated as if the relationship with another were lost in the knowledge.”81 The relationship with the other, lost in knowledge, has been thematized, buried under the sedimentation of a knowing through the said. But what of the happening that precedes the experience, a relationship giving rise to what Levinas refers to as empathy (Einfühlung)?82 Is this not knowledge? Levinas writes: What we take to be the secret of the other man in appresentation is precisely the hidden side of a meaning other than knowledge: awakening to the other man in his identity, an identity indiscernible for knowledge, thought in which the proximity of one’s fellow is a source of meaning, “commerce” with the other which cannot be reduced to experience, the approach of the other, of the first comer.83

While flow unfolds as a happening, the hiker does not throw a net of knowledge over the event. It has not yet become an experience. Yet, when we recall the event, describing it as an experience in the presence of others who were also present in the event, it seems we look back through a net of knowing. Afterall, we remember it. Unfolding in the event prior to being recalled is another kind of knowing, a communion, a mystical participation. As noted in chapter 1, Saint Paul, writing his letter to the Philippians, expresses a desire to know (gnōnai) Christ and the fellowship (koinōnia) of his suffering.84 Here is a knowing unlike the knowing that thematizes, what Levinas points to as “the hidden side of meaning other than knowledge.”85 Saint Paul’s “knowing him” (gnōnai auton) is participating (koinōnia) in his suffering. This knowing as participating, this koinōnian, is pre-intentional. In order to describe the happening I must reflect, recall the memory, which is an intentional act. If care is not taken in describing the recollection, I will translate the happening into an experience, a thematization removed in meaning from the

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unfolding of the event, exchanging one knowing for another. In his discussion of substitution and applicable in this examination, Levinas writes: it cannot be defined in terms of intentionality, where undergoing is always also an assuming, that is, an experience always anticipated and consented to, already an origin and άρχή. . . The given enters into a thought which recognizes in it or invests it with its own project, and thus exercises mastery over it.86

In reflecting on the happening of flow and describing it as experience, I mischaracterize the unfolding, placing myself at the center. I am the one whose project shapes the event’s meaning. I am the author of the description. How do I convey the happening that precedes its origin, its άρχή prior to becoming thematized knowledge? While the event unfolds there is no author and no project. I am fully aware of the constituents of the immediate surround. I am conscious but my consciousness is not directing the event. There is no consciousness of, no intentionality. In addition, there is no self-consciousness. Kenosis This emptying of one’s self as a center, negating one’s self-directing project, subjecting one’s self to others is a form of kenosis. Saint Paul’s epistle to the Philippians describes self-emptying through Christ’s subjecting himself to death on the cross. Believers reading the epistle are encouraged to do the same. Saint Paul writes: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself [heauton ekenōsen (ἑαυτὸν ἐκένωσεν)], taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.87

Christ empties himself of authority, being “in the form of God,” and takes on the form of a slave, one without authority, subject to others, not directing his own project. From a mythological perspective, Christians are encouraged to be of the “same mind.” That is, empty the authority given in the creation account, being made in the image of God and having dominion “over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”88 This mythological emptying, places humans as servants of other creatures. That is, humans put other creatures’ interest before their own. We all become fellows. Our relationship takes the form of Buber’s I and Thou, unmediated, wherein no intervening purpose places one person over the other.

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However, self-emptying in this context might be interpreted as a willful act, a self-emptying of one’s self, and thereby a humbling of oneself. I interpret Saint Paul’s admonition from another point of view. Rather than an action of self-emptying, kenosis comes upon the one who passively waits, no anticipation, no self-directing project aimed at receiving something. As with the fruit of aesthetic solitude found with the Desert Fathers and Mothers, kenosis is a resting, a stillness, a waiting. Waiting in this context is passively ceasing to act, of being emptied. As a hiker, I lay down my intention, my self-directed desire to discover beauty, which would reach out and inscribe beauty from a theme, a preconceived frame imposed upon the surrounding wilderness that is now a landscape. This waiting is being open to receiving a gift, no anticipation precedes. Waiting lays down its future gaze and rests in the present. It is also being open to give, no strings attached, giving without agenda. If I willfully submit, I retain some control. Even the mere act of submission is holding onto some control. As noted earlier, Levinas recognizes the given entering thought and being subjected to a person’s project, thus exercising “mastery over it.”89 What of the intermediate and long-term goals of a long-distance hike? Do these goals make kenosis impossible? If I continue walking day after day toward Katahdin, is that not a willful act overarching the entire endeavor? If I am out of water and have an intermediate goal of finding the next spring, is that not moving me to act with self-interest? How is resting and waiting possible with so many of these goals manifesting throughout the day and then the next for months at a time? The answer, in part, is in the ephemerality of kenosis. It may last seconds, minutes, or even multiple hours, but no willful intervention changes the happening. The point of letting go of control is in not making kenotic walking one of the intermediate goals. When kenosis does happen, its occurrence and duration are not affected by a willful action. On the contrary, willful imposition brings kenotic walking to an end. When kenotic walking does happen, pilgrims find themselves waiting, resting while walking. In passive waiting, with no thought intervening, the given gives itself from itself. Marion writes, “Thinking about . . . is one mode of givenness; it is another one altogether to find oneself in the presence of—what gives itself.”90 Reaching out, even with thought, to take the gift, negates the gift as we take possession, make the gift our own. Grace is a gift to be received passively, else it ceases to be grace. Kenosis as a gift does not originate or arrive from the self but is given from another who is gifting the self with a new form. The self is being emptied by another, offering death on the cross. As Christ passively submits to the gift of his death on the cross, he gives the gift of salvation to another. He lays down his life in submission and receives death



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that others might live. In following Saint Paul’s admonition, we are emptied of ourselves. If we enact an emptying of ourselves, we are still there in the act. Being there, we remain in the Heideggerian dasein. Levinas writes that subjectivity begins on the hither side of being. When we are self-emptied, we receive the form of “the-one-for-the-other,” which is not dasein but “otherwise than being.”91 Kenosis understood as “otherwise than being” does not void or annihilate the self in a move toward mystical union. As discussed in chapter two, Buber outlines two forms of mystical union where the I and Thou no longer remain. One is an “immersion or descent into the self” and in the other “the self is to be understood as the One that thinks and is.”92 The former view supposes that God will enter the being that has been freed of Ihood or that at that point one merges into God; the other view supposes that one stands immediately in oneself as the divine One. Thus the first holds that in a supreme moment all You-saying ends because there is no longer any duality; the second, that there is no truth in You-saying at all because in truth there is no duality. The first believes in the unification, the second in the identity of the human and the divine. Both insist on what is beyond I and You: for the first this comes to be perhaps in ecstasy, while for the second it is there all along and reveals itself, perhaps as the thinking subject beholds itself. Both annul relationship.93

The self, emptied of itself in kenosis, becomes open to a relation with another. Levinas quotes Buber writing, “Man can become whole not by virtue of a relation to himself but only by virtue of a relation to another self.”94 The other self, an alterity, is neither the self-same nor a thematized other. Recalling the distinction Buber makes between experience and encounter, he writes, “Those who experience do not participate in the world. For the experience is ‘in them’ and not between them and the world. The world does not participate in experience.”95 In contrasting Buber and Gabriel Marcel, Levinas points out a nuanced distinction in participation. For Marcel participation “is an intersubjective nexus deeper than the language that is torn away . . . from that originative communication.”96 While flow is unfolding the hiker is not directing participation. In flow language has not petrified living communication, the hiker’s walking precedes language in participation, an intersubjective meeting deeper than language, an originating communication in cooperation with the constituents of the ecoplace.97 As Csikszentmihalyi notes, the one for whom flow is happening is “not aware of awareness itself,” and therefore does not yet have an experience.98 After flow, in reflecting on the happening, the hiker thinks and describes it as an experience. This description comes after projecting the reflection on the memory of the happening. Buber distinguishes between the “internal” experience and an encounter.

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Encounter happens in the relation between I and Thou, in what Marcel refers to as the meeting. The happening of flow is a pre-intentional encounter. Just as flow is a happening, the meeting of encounter “cannot be found by seeking.”99 The meeting unfolds as a “deed of my whole being,” unmediated.100 Buber characterizes the encounter as “concentration and fusion into a whole being” as “never accomplished by me,” but “never accomplished without me.”101 Experience, on the other hand, is mediated by the ego: “The I of the basic word I-It appears as an ego [eigenwesen] and becomes conscious of itself as a subject (of experience and use).”102 The It, as experienced, is a means to some end, a use for the ego. The It, in this case, is sought for some ego centered end. The I, in this mode of experience and use, does not participate in the world, does not discover a meeting, remains remote from other subjects. The remote I, with only objects orbiting and not meeting, fails to encounter, remains aloof from any meeting. In encounter relations unfold between persons reciprocally: “My You acts on me as I act on it.”103 Buber narrates a personal account between himself as a youth and a horse, illustrating the distinction between encounter and experience. The account shows first the meeting between Buber and the horse and then the slippage of relation from I and Thou to I and It. Buber, in his youth, loved this horse and expressed the love by stroking its neck. He alludes to a mystical participation and a meeting with the horse calling it a “deeply stirring happening.”104 The horse is characterized as Thou by referring to it as an Other: “the immense otherness of the Other, which however, did not remain strange like the otherness of the ox and the ram, but rather let me draw near and touch it.”105 Both Buber and the horse participate, making the encounter unfold reciprocally. Buber further describes the participation writing: the life beneath my hand, it was as though the element of vitality itself bordered on my skin, something that was not I, was certainly not akin to me, palpably the other, not just another, really the Other itself; and yet it let me approach, confided itself to me, placed itself elementally in the relation of Thou and Thou with me.106

They became fellow-conspirators and Buber felt approved of by the horse. The encounter shifts into experience on another occasion when Buber becomes conscious of his hand stroking the neck of the horse. He writes, “I do not know what came over the child, at any rate it was childlike enough—it struck me about the stroking, what fun it gave me, and suddenly I became conscious of my hand.”107 Could the consciousness of his own hand stroking the horse’s neck be the beginning of transforming the Other into a theme, of throwing a net of knowledge and making the Other an object of use, even using the horse for the pleasure of stroking its neck? At this point, Buber and the



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horse ceased to be conspirators as self-consciousness and intention manifest in the situation. Levinas comments on Buber’s theory of knowledge in relation to the IThou and I-It pairing: The I-Thou relation consists in confronting a being external to oneself, i.e., one which is radically other, and in recognizing it as such. This recognition of otherness, however, is not to be confused with the idea of otherness. To have an idea of something is appropriate to the I-It relation.108

Having an idea involves the objectification of the other, conceptualizing. Two ways of interacting with the other confront us, encounter the radically other or self-consciously experience the other, wherein we transform an alterity into an object of understanding. Levinas continues: The being who is invoked in this relation is ineffable because the I speaks to him rather than of him and because in the latter case all contact is broken off with the Thou. To speak to him is to let him realize his own otherness. The IThou relation, therefore, escapes the gravitational field of the I-It in which the externalized object remains imprisoned.109

William Cavanaugh shows us this relational matrix as it happens in pilgrimage: The pilgrim preserves otherness precisely by not seeking otherness for its own sake, but moving toward a common center to which an infinite variety of itineraries is possible. If God, the Wholly Other, is at the center, and not the great Western Ego, then there can be room for genuine otherness among human beings.110

Kenosis in the context of pilgrimage or what I am calling kenotic walking makes possible an authentic meeting between pilgrim and pilgrim as well as between those walking and the resident constituents of the places through which pilgrims and long-distance hikers walk. Distinction from Mindfulness Meditation Comparing kenotic walking with mindfulness meditation shows much in common. Lane discusses some aspects of wilderness backpacking applicable to mindfulness.111 He gives an account of hiking in the Ozarks while interacting with Thich Nhat Hanh, practicing mindfulness. In one qualifying statement, Lane shows an aspect of wilderness walking that is distinct from mindfulness writing, “Contemplative prayer is what gets you out of your head

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entirely . . . The mindfulness that wild terrain evokes is actually a sort of ‘mindlessness,’ an end-run around rational analysis that seeks an immediacy of presence.”112 This distinction between mindfulness and mindlessness is also applicable to kenotic walking. In his book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, Thich Nhat Hanh describes mindfulness, “I’m being completely myself, following my breath, conscious of my presence, and conscious of my thoughts and actions. There’s no way I can be tossed around mindlessly . . .”113 In elaborating further he writes, “When walking the practitioner must be conscious that he is walking. When sitting . . . conscious that he is sitting . . . thus, the practitioner lives in direct and constant mindfulness of the body”114 Recall that a key element of kenotic walking in relation to the happening of flow is that of “no conscious intervention on our part.”115 What is the difference between mindfulness and mindlessness? Is “no conscious intervention” distinct from being “conscious that he is sitting,” or “consciousness of himself sitting,” or conscious of one’s presence, or conscious of one’s thoughts and actions? In outlining four characteristics of mindfulness in relation to wilderness hiking, Lane gives: first, “welcoming of awareness”; second, “intentionality”; third, “non-attachment”; and forth, “engaging the body.”116 Lane’s discussion of mindfulness is, for the most part, consistent with kenotic walking. However, the role of consciousness in mindfulness needs further clarification. Mindfulness, according to Thich Nhat Hanh, follows from practiced technique and the knowledge following. In this regard, he writes, “practice mindfulness in order to build up concentration,” and “You should know how to breathe to maintain mindfulness.”117 Continuing in this vein he writes, “Your breath is the wondrous method of taking hold of your consciousness . . . Learn to practice breathing in order to regain control of body and mind, to practice mindfulness, and to develop concentration and wisdom.”118 This shows a method practitioners use to regain a conscious control of themselves, to take hold of their consciousness, a practice sustained through willful action. In a carefully crafted reflection Lane shows a difference consciousness plays for our distinguishing mindfulness meditation from kenotic walking: “Mindfulness is the fleeting instant of awareness we experience just before we begin to conceptualize reality and make judgments about it.”119 Thich Nhat Hanh describes mindfulness as a practiced and sustained awareness, helping the practitioner control conceptualizations and make judgments, not a “fleeting instant of awareness.” Kenotic walking may unfold in fleeting instances but can also unfold over the course of an hour, or even a number of hours. Kenotic walking is ineffable in that it can be both long-lived and ephemeral, as well as happening in connection with no technique. The happening simply comes upon the hiker without warning. Kenotic walking cannot be willfully



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sustained, and there is no “taking hold of consciousness,” though consciousness is intensely focused and merging with the action. Long-distance hiking is not a technique for producing kenotic walking. Rather, it opens hikers to this intense awareness. Kenotic walking only happens after hiker’s have been on the AT long enough for the hike to condition the whole person. An extended hike in the wilderness facilitates flow and kenotic walking. SAINT TERESA OF ÁVILA AND KENOTIC WALKING We find another example of a similar religious happening, following from discipline but not technique, in Saint Teresa of Ávila. Recall my discussion in chapter two, wherein I was contrasting pilgrimage as exteriorized mysticism while exploring Saint Teresa’s interior vision. In that example, the focus was on an aesthetic experience. I will now turn to Saint Teresa’s account to explore kenotic walking rising not from technique or complex ritual steps but in waiting, or a waiting in walking. Recall that Csikszentmihalyi noted religious “states of rapture” sharing “characteristics of flow with play and creativity.”120 He writes: most states of religious ecstasy are reached by following complex ritual steps, yet for flow to be maintained, one cannot reflect on the act of awareness itself. The moment awareness is split so as to perceive the activity from “outside,” the flow is interrupted.121

Reading Saint Teresa’s account of her ecstatic encounter with God, “His Majesty” in her words, shows that she follows no complex ritual steps. She is not self-aware but becomes absorbed in “states of rapture.” She writes, “The senses are all occupied in this enjoyment in such a way that not one of them is at liberty to be able to attend to anything else, either outward or inward.”122 Attending would be splitting consciousness, or awareness. In her careful attention to description, she brackets conceptual frames and attends the encounter itself. There is a long history among Christian theologians and some mystics that explore ecstatic encounters through conceptualization, and so give the reader an experiential account with the emphasis on the theme constructed by the one who experiences. Saint Teresa’s account, though in some cases describing her experience, reveals the encounter as a meeting. She goes out of her way to distance herself from constructing an explanation, from thematizing. She writes, “It is sometimes said that the soul enters within itself and sometimes that it rises above itself; but I cannot explain things in that kind

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of language, for I have no skill in it.”123 Free from conceptions, or as Levinas references another kind of knowing, she writes of absorption: When His Majesty wants to suspend understanding, He busies it in another way and sheds light on a knowing so far above what we can achieve that He leaves it absorbed, and then, without knowing how, it ends up better instructed than all of our strivings to hold it still.124

Leaving one’s understanding “absorbed” transcends conceptual frames. Absorption resists thematizing. In this regard, she writes that the soul “should not try to understand what this state is.”125 Again, Saint Teresa is distancing herself from explanation. She writes, “How this prayer they call union happens and what it is, I cannot explain. Mystical theology explains it, and I am unable to use the proper terms.”126 Is she really not capable of explaining, or approaching the encounter from a point of view other than one of explanation? She acknowledges that her description could not be understood from an analytical or explanatory point of view. It could, on the other hand, find mutual understanding with someone who also shares such experiences: “by those who have experienced it.”127 She points out that others have charted the course but that she is not able; I just noted that she indicates having “no skill in it.”128 Remember the distinction between rational and poetic speech that we read in Barfield, Grassi, Lanigan, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty.129 She even sheds doubt on her own knowledge of the proper path writing, “there is no reason why we should expect everyone else to travel by our own road, and we should not attempt to point them to the spiritual path when perhaps we do not know what it is.”130 Saint Teresa is engaging in a kind of phenomenological bracketing, opening herself and the reader to the thing described giving itself from itself. Recall Marion’s final formulation of phenomenology, “as much reduction, as much givenness.”131 Her discussion of the complexity of understanding calls attention to Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of phenomenological description, “To turn back to the things themselves is to return to that world prior to knowledge of which knowledge speaks.”132 The state of absorption in mystical writing has been thematized so that practitioners may follow complex ritual steps to attain the experience. The theme, a “state” of absorption, communicates a knowledge that speaks of a conceptually framed experience. Saint Teresa returns to the world prior to knowledge, to the happening preceding experience, to absorption giving itself from itself rather than through conceptions. Saint Teresa’s careful description of encountering her divine “Majesty” is accompanied by negating complex ritual steps. These steps are techniques for obtaining ecstasy, rapture, or flow. She writes, “Do not suppose that the un-



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derstanding can attain to Him, merely by trying to think of Him as within the soul, or the imagination, by picturing Him as there.”133 Rather than technique, she emphasizes prayer practices that open the practitioner to communion. She does point to “excellent” meditation practices “founded upon a truth” of God being “within us.”134 However, the prayer she describes “is quite different.”135 It is not a technique leading to absorption, “not a question of our will—it happens only when God is pleased to grant us this favour.”136 Those who practice complex ritual steps, an art of prayer with the aim at attaining union with God, place themselves in the center and the aim of practice becomes an object of manipulation. Long-distance hiking and pilgrimage may or may not involve techniques, complex ritual steps. If the steps are set aside, the hiker becomes open for the other to reveal itself from itself. Saint Teresa is pointing to a waiting for the revelation of the other who chooses to reveal rather than being pressed into revealing. She writes, “One preparation for listening to Him, as certain books tell us, is that we should contrive, not to use our reasoning powers, but to be intent upon discovering what the Lord is working in the soul.”137 Similar to the happening of flow, the person who looks back on the memory discovers there had been an encounter. The memory is clear, but contemplation requires careful attention if a description would show the revealing of the other, whether Saint Teresa’s Divine “Majesty” or fellows along the AT. Saint Teresa’s careful attention and description reveals kenosis, an ecstatic negation of self-consciousness, an egoless passion. She surrenders her own desire for the “greater glory of God” and receives not the conception but immediate union: the very effort which the soul makes in order to cease from thought will perhaps awaken thought and cause it to think a great deal . . . how can a person be forgetful of himself when he is taking such great care about his actions that he dare not even stir, or allow his understanding and desires to stir, even for the purpose of desiring the greater glory of God or of rejoicing in the glory which is His?138

The “hidden side of meaning other than knowledge” happens when the soul ceases its effort. The soul, she writes, should try “without forcing itself” . . . “to put a stop to all discursive reasoning, yet not to suspend the understanding, nor cease from all thought.”139 She recommends suspending steps toward knowing but remaining open, waiting. Waiting, remaining open to thought, shows that she is not recommending self-oblivion but an approach to nondiscursive communication. Kenotic walking opens hikers to remaining fully aware while walking without discursive thought, without self-generated thought.

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Even though Levinas writes that the mystic project is “idealist, solipsist, amoral,” his account of substitution illuminates Saint Teresa’s discussion of absorption.140 Her absorption is similar to Levinas’ account of proximity in contrast to knowing. We visited this in chapter 2 in our exploration of koinōnia is a happening of mystical participation. Levinas writes, In starting with sensibility interpreted not as a knowing but as proximity, in seeking in language contact and sensibility, behind the circulation of information it becomes, we have endeavoured to describe subjectivity as irreducible to consciousness and thematization. Proximity appears as the relationship with the other, who cannot be resolved into “images” or be exposed to a theme.141

Levinas refers to “this relationship irreducible to consciousness obsession.”142 It “overwhelms” consciousness, undoing “thematization, and escapes any principle, origin, will, or άρχή, which are put forth in every ray of consciousness.”143 Obsession inverts consciousness and is a “passivity beneath all passivity. It cannot be defined in terms of intentionality.”144 In intentionality, “the given enters into a thought which recognizes in it or invests it with its own project, and thus exercises mastery over it.”145 In this way, “The for itself in consciousness is thus the very power which a being exercises upon itself, its will, its sovereignty.”146 In obsession, “the consciousness is affected, then, before forming an image of what is coming to it, affected in spite of itself . . . being called into question prior to questioning.”147 Levinas goes on to write, “Substitution is not an act; it is a passivity inconvertible into an act.”148 Kenotic walking like absorption or rapture is an act of ceasing to act, resting, waiting. Saint Teresa’s account emphasizes the passivity that Levinas points to. She notes that the encounter happens “when a person is quite unprepared . . . and not even thinking of God, he is awakened by His Majesty.”149 Not waking oneself but moved from beyond into wakefulness. The call to awaken comes from one who is not me. The call is not my own inner voice but another. She writes, “the soul is aware that it has been called by God . . . it begins to tremble.”150 The soul, aware that the wholly other calls, trembles and is encompassed by rapture, “so clearly conscious is it of the presence of its God.”151 In the encounter the person “is conscious of having been most delectably wounded, but cannot say how or by whom but it is certain that this is a precious experience and it would be glad if it were never to be healed of that wound.”152 She could be alluding to Saint Paul’s letter to the Philippians. Here she participates in a mystical koinónia, a communion, fellowshipping with Christ in suffering and death. Truly, a long-distance hike on the AT involves pilgrims in a type of suffering and a symbolic death to their inclusion in the marketplace. Kenotic walking comes upon hikers, opening them to a



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reflection after the happening. The reflection points to communion happening in the meeting between themselves and others, both human and extra-human. There is yet another prayer practice proceeding not from a passive waiting but an active negation of self-centeredness. FASTING AS PRAYER ON THE AT Fasting has been used as a technique by religious people from across faiths and practices. One of the goals of fasting as a religious technique is purification. Some have adopted this technique outside of religion and engage in fasting as a health technique with the goal of purification, of cleansing the body. However, fasting is presented as other than technique and aimed at giving out of one’s own abundance in Isaiah. The first instance of fasting, using it as a means to some desired end, a way of appealing to God for some gift, is contrasted in Isaiah with the fast that orients people toward God, of giving to others who have more need than the one fasting. The people who practice fasting as technique cry out, “Why have we fasted . . . and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not noticed?”153 God answers the question noting that even though the people fast, it leads to quarrels, strife, and violence. God does not listen to this kind of prayer. The proper fast is then outlined; the fast God has chosen, presented as a question, what should the fast entail? to loose the chains of injustice    and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free    and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry    and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe them,    and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?154

Here then is the true fast, to abstain from some needed good so that the surplus good following is given to those in need. A similar admonition is given in Hosea: “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.”155 Jesus quotes this passage when the religious leaders of the day question his association with sinners, “go learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’”156 Rather than performing a religious ritual aimed at getting God’s attention, we are encouraged to practice giving to those in need as an act of love and devotion. In this way, one draws closer to God. Showing mercy, fasting to

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produce surplus for others, these are prayer practices pointed to by Isaiah, Hosea, and Jesus. So how does this translate to fasting in relation to a religious walk on the AT? First, let us look closely at the act of fasting. In most cases its meaning carries with it abstaining from food or drink. If we limit fasting to abstention of food and drink, I think we have lost its religious meaning. As we saw in the Isaiah passage, this kind of fast failed. So, what is the deeper meaning? In much of the world today, consistent with the conditions with which Isaiah, Hosea, and Jesus would have been familiar, access to surplus food is limited to a wealthy elite. Many of us in highly industrialized and technologically elaborated societies have an abundance of food, a surplus of many days in our homes. The markets and grocery stores in our towns and villages carry more of this surplus. Fasting in this context has little impact on our surplus. But for those whose surplus is limited, fasting does reduce surplus. How is this possible? The idea of the fast in a religious context is to abstain from eating to draw closer to God. To reiterate, abstention from food is not what God desires, according to Isaiah. Drawing closer, deepening relationship is the point. Loosening the chains of injustice and sharing food with the hungry are acts that draw the worshipper closer to God. So, how does doing without food deepen the relationship? Cultures where surplus is lacking require a large proportion of energy to produce, gather, and prepare food. Fasting reduces energy, which in turn reduces productivity, which then reduces surplus. Fasting makes no sense in such a situation unless relationship with God is more important than productivity and wealth. Recall our discussion of shalom in chapter 2. I noted that shalom involves a change of environment, rootage, belonging.157 Fasting brings with it shalom. Those practicing the fast realize their blessing in being freed from a slavery to productivity and a transformation of the meaning of wealth. Wealth rises out of sharing our limited surplus with those in need. Jesus says that we cannot live on bread alone, but our sustenance comes from God.158 Fasting in the context of a lacking surplus induces freedom from toil. In addition, the time spent producing, gathering, and preparing food is reallocated toward prayer and giving. In prayer, one realizes shalom, realizes rootage and belonging to a community. The community learning and giving shows mercy, one to another. Fasting is not about the individual petitioning God; it is a communal prayer practice. So, the act of fasting frees us from self-focus in a marketplace reality that conditions us to hoard. Instead of accumulating surplus, we are freed to share, even if we have no surplus. There are always those who have more need than do we. This sharing happens on long-distance hikes. Backpacks can carry only so much surplus. In many cases, the hiker is hyper conscious of how much their food sack weighs, how many days, or hours, of food is left before



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a resupply. Yet, when a stranger appears in need, hikers will give out of their poverty. This is one of the great religious practices unfolding in a long-distance hike and consistent with what takes place on the Camino de Santiago. Fasting can be extended beyond food. Pilgrims fast from their houses, their beds, their kitchens. On the AT, hikers are fasting from the convenience of toilets and hot showers. There is an albergue on the meseta, about forty kilometers west of Burgos, at San Antón, where there is no village, the nearest being Hontanas, five kilometers east, and Castrojeriz, five kilomters to the west. San Antón is a ruin, what was once a convent. In the ruin there is a very rustic albergue. I have enjoyed the hospitality of this albergue a couple of times. As pilgrims arrive, the hospitaleras inform them that there are no hot showers, no village for food shopping, just this ruin. Most pilgrims decide to move on to the next place. The AT presents the same rustic living. At least San Antón did have a toilet! Fasting from these common goods releases their hold on us. We realize that we don’t need the things that a marketplace reality insists we do. Not having to produce, gather, and prepare (minimal preparation is required on the AT) food frees hikers to walk without worrying about where their next meal will be found. Freedom in this way opens hikers to dialogue, which may be extended toward fellow hikers, extra-humans along the way, or God. In this way, shalom manifests. Fasting on pilgrimage also includes what the Isaiah passage points to: acting out justice, setting the oppressed free, sharing with those in need, providing the poor wanderer with shelter, clothing the naked, and not turning away from kin. I interpret this admonition broadly. Justice should be extended to environmental concerns, realizing that I have an impact on the condition of streams and rivers that flow toward other beings, for example. Who are the oppressed I might set free? Potentially anyone who is a stranger could be oppressed. How shall I approach the stranger? As one who might offer freedom from oppression. First, I should abstain from oppressing them. Next, I should discover how I might help them obtain freedom. This extends to human and extra-human strangers. I already discussed sharing with those in need. I might bring this attitude home with me after the pilgrimage, maintaining this shalom. SOCIAL MEDIA AND PRACTICING SPIRITUAL WALKING ON THE AT Why address social media in this chapter on spiritual rambling rather than the chapter focused on the social/spatial? Social media in the context of spiritual rambling not only interferes with the social/spatial aspect of the journey, which will be touched on now, but eliminates spiritual practices.

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What happens with media in spiritual rambling? As has been discussed, religious pilgrimages such as the Camino de Santiago are heavily mediated with religious symbols, iconography, art, architecture, and spontaneous shrines. In addition, I have explored wilderness paths such as the Appalachian Trail also being mediated journeys but void of traditional religious symbols and artifacts. Long-distance hikers experience the wilderness through the mediation of trails created by volunteers, painted blazes, and constructed shelters. In addition, pilgrims and hikers use equipment such as backpacks and sleeping bags that also function to mediate an experience along established pilgrimage routes or in wilderness. Travel books have been a part of pilgrimage, especially the Camino de Santiago, for more than five hundred years. Many pilgrims discover their desire to venture to the shrine of a saint after reading some account. The same is true with long-distance hiking, which has been increasing in popularity since the late twentieth century. Film has also influenced pilgrimage and long-distance hiking. Technological advances in communication have very recently begun to alter these pilgrimage and spiritual journey experiences. With the advance of smartphones, cellular coverage, and Wi-Fi, pilgrims and longdistance hikers are incorporating such technology into their activities. Pilgrimage and spiritual rambling are better understood in light of a spectrum of mediated experience. Buber’s idea of encounter as unmediated relations is at one end, involving minimal mediation, and the highly mediated experience of social communication technology is at the other end. Highly mediated experience involves layers of media separating the pilgrim from what Buber refers to as an I-You relation. In addition, these layers of media create an experience of the subject being surrounded by objects, making it difficult for the I to break out of self-consciousness.159 In oral communication the relation unfolds through speech that connects those in dialog through sound that surrounds and penetrates bodies. Those persons who communicate are in each other’s immediate presence. Humans and extra humans have this in common. Though extra humans may not communicate through speech, some sound out their communication. Books alter communication so that speech becomes an internal monologue. The reader provides the voice of the writer, communication interiorizes. The other is mediated by the book. Cell phones do allow voice but the body of the person on the other end of the line is not present. The electronic device mediates. As we listen to the voice on the other end of the transmission, we silence those who are immediately present and privilege the mediate voice or the text message. Play itself can be interpreted from this same frame of understanding. The rules of play themselves mediate encounter or experience. Huizinga writes, “the rules of a game are absolutely binding and allow no doubt. . . as soon as the rules are transgressed the whole play-world collapses.”160 These rules



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mediate and create a new order.161 But when the player is in flow, she is unaware of the rules though highly aware of everything that constitutes the present situation. If the rules of any game interfere with a player’s ability to focus, the rules constituting multiple layers of mediation or a complexity too difficult to navigate in the game, that player will less likely experience flow. Most recent advances in communication technology—smartphones, cellular coverage, and Wi-Fi—add an extra layer of mediation to the intensity of media at the high end of the spectrum, moving toward an interference with the experience of religious walking or hiking in the wilderness. Recall Thoreau’s admonition to shake off the village, to be fully present when we walk in the woods, to get there in spirit.162 Getting there in spirit can be understood as a merging of action and awareness or an absorption. Spiritual rambling involves the hiker in an embodied, wholistic and fully attentive walk. A dual action of minding one thing while bodily doing another splits consciousness and absorption ceases. So it is when one becomes selfconscious. At play or on a walk, self-consciousness is an occupation once removed from the sensing moment. Huizinga references such play experiences as “proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an absorption, a devotion that passes into rapture.”163 Ritual acts are described by Huizinga as having “all the formal and essential characteristics of play . . . particularly in so far as it transports the participants to another world.”164 Huizinga implies religious experience in his description of play. Pilgrimage and spiritual journey are two ritual activities, sometimes overlapping, wherein participants experience these characteristics of play. Absorption, rapture, flow, transport to another world, and journeying as an end in itself is an experience consistent with walking to Santiago de Compostela or long-distance hiking on wilderness trails. Recall the discussion on the tradition of the Desert Fathers and Mothers as outlined by Thomas Merton. This tradition highlights an overlapping experience of play and flow and compares to the experiences of pilgrims and longdistance hikers. In addition, we explored Saint Teresa’s description of her own mystical encounter highlighting the ecstatic negation of self-consciousness, the ego-less action of the actor, as well as actions void of techniques conducive to producing the encounter. Consistent with Huizinga’s description of play as well as negating the role of techniques leading to an encounter, Saint Teresa calls the illumination of the “soul’s knowledge” a “state of absorption” which cannot be attained by its own effort.165 Just as players engage one with another, encountering one another through the sensuousness of the game, so the religious mystic as described by Saint Teresa encounters the Wholly Other through a fully embodied and conscious experience. Both the religious mystic and the pilgrim who experience this kind of absorption encounter others as

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subjects, enter into sympathetic relations, Einfühlung. In this absorption one’s consciousness with the other as sentient subject reveals the other as conscious rather than as an object of self-interest. However, self-consciousness removed from the encounter and focused on a consciousness about the other, a positing of them as object, holds the other as an object orbiting the ego. My journey with a group of students to the Highlands of Scotland in 2006 introduced me firsthand to the effects of digital media on spiritual rambling. I had been leading research trips on the AT and on the Wonderland Trail at Mount Rainier for several years. Up through 2006, there had been very little cell phone coverage on the AT, and I had not noticed MP3 players. Unlike Scotland where we stopped in occasional pubs for lunch, and where students could recharge their electronic devices, wilderness trails isolate hikers from towns and there are no opportunities to charge a battery. The class in the highlands caused me to think more closely about communication and entertainment technologies on these trails, not just in relation to my students, but the effects such technology has on hikers. In addition to wilderness journeys, I have completed six Caminos with students: 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019. I also completed two Caminos on my own, the Primitivo in 2016, and the Portuguese route in 2020. As has already been outlined, the Camino is clearly mediated by more than a millennium of Christian iconography. During my first three trips there were relatively few Wi-Fi hot spots. I allowed students the use of cell phones to pacify worried parents. Because of the presence of religious art, I also made an exception to the MP3 rule. However, in 2015 I noticed that almost all the cafes, even in small villages, had free Wi-Fi hot spots. Pilgrims taking advantage of Wi-Fi access were from every age group and nationality. This has given rise to reconsidering the exception I made to the rule on communication and entertainment media. It also exposed me to the pervasive effects of current communication technology on spiritual journeys. As outlined previously in this chapter, spiritual rambling and pilgrimage are liminal journeys providing frames for play and flow. Cavanaugh writes, “The term peregrinus, from which ‘pilgrim’ is derived, recognizes this liminal status: the meaning of the term in Latin includes foreigner, wanderer, exile, alien, traveler, newcomer, and stranger.”166 Entertainment media, Wi-Fi, and mobile phone technologies tend to erase the liminal aspects of pilgrimage, making one feel “at home” in any setting where the traveler has phone service or a charged battery. The hiker can bring her own circle of friends to the journey through interactions on Facebook or through live chats via Skype, FaceTime or any number of apps available. She can surround herself with her favorite music and cut off the local sounds via her earbuds. She can watch her



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usual video feeds, television programs, or movies. She has become a colony in a strange land and erected borders to preserve her sovereignty. In addition to the erasure of liminality, these communication technologies separate the hiker from dialogic encounters with the local constituents, especially the extra-human life world. David Abram writes concerning alphabetic media, “The efficacy of these pictorially derived systems necessarily entails a shift of sensory participation away from the voices and gestures of the surrounding landscape toward our own human-made images.”167 If the alphabetic media shifts our sensory participation in this way, electronic media engulfs us even more. Abram writes that the aleph-beth created a new distance between human and extra-human beings.168 That distance has only increased. Communication media connect us with persons who are not immediately present. So much of this exploration has shown pilgrimage and long-distance hiking to bring participants more fully into the presence of those who are in immediate proximity, to engage authentically with those who are present. Pilgrimage and spiritual rambling can be interpreted as rituals wherein participants encounter the other authentically, where the other is transformed from object to fellow. The Highlands of Scotland We had been walking for three days through the Highlands of Scotland. Scottish folk refer to the practice we were engaged in as “wild camping” along the West Highland Way. Each day we pitched tents in some place conducive to such and then continued the next day along the trail. The class was designed to explore the connection between a wilderness environment and the spirituality of walking therein, for an extended time and distance. This trip happened in 2006, and I had been leading such journeys on other trails for five years. On the third day I noticed something new. A student walking in front of me was listening to an MP3 player. This was the first time I had seen one of these devices. I was familiar with an older technology, the “Walkman,” but the MP3 is smaller, light weight, and the music is stored digitally, facilitating the enjoyment of music while engaging in such activities that restrict the number of items one can carry. I watched my student walking and listening. I approached and asked what he was listening to. He described the music giving him inspiration and filling him with energy. I could relate having experienced the power of music. However, something troubled me. We were supposed to be interacting with the local environment. Each grove of trees, the vast expanses provided by the moors, Loch Lomond, feeling the gravity of a mountain climb, listening to birds, these were the soundscapes and unmediated, or lesser mediated, encounters with land that we were to

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find. We were supposed to feel the terrain draining our energy rather than be infused with inspiration from music whose culture lay across the Atlantic. I wanted to forbid the use of MP3 players for the rest of the trip but realized that the present ordeal was too much for the students if I were to impose a rule unanticipated, an added layer of mediation to counter the MP3. They would have resented the “intrusion,” most likely their interpretation in such a situation. I decided to make it a topic of discussion. The class ended up exploring the effects this media imposed on the journey. As Abram notes of the alephbeth, this music media separated us from the local constituents. A second similar insight into communication technology came from the same trip after about eleven days. More than half the class suffered from what turned out to be salmonella poisoning from Cadbury chocolate bars. A week after everyone recovered, there was a national recall on these candy bars. My wife and two children were also participating in the hike, and both Caroline, fourteen, and Caleb, twelve, were sharing the same illness and the suffering as my students. Sarah, my wife, who was not sick, guided the ill on a bus trip to Fort William, some two days further up the trail. When they all reached Fort William, it was necessary to board a local bus and travel two miles to find a hostel for their convalescence. Upon arrival at the hostel, they all sprawled out in the lobby of the hostel as Sarah was checking the whole crew in. It turned out that there were just enough beds for everyone. At this point one of the students raised his head and asked the receptionist if there was an internet computer in this hostel. The receptionist answered yes but it was not working at the moment. It would be fixed in a day or two. Immediately the students reacted and announced that they would not be able to stay in this hostel. They had been hiking for ten days without internet, but now that they were in a town, they felt it was a necessity. Sarah responded that she and the children would stay in this hostel. The sick group boarded another local bus and searched the town for a place with internet. A few days later, I arrived in Fort William and heard this story. I then realized how dependent these students were on communication technology. They felt an overwhelming need to reconnect with family and friends who were across the Atlantic Ocean. They obviously had not been able to find any communion with the local constituents along the trail. I altered the syllabi of my journey classes because of these experiences. Students are not allowed MP3 players on these trips. They may bring a cell phone for emergencies only. The one exception has been my class involving a phenomenological and ethnographic study on the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Because of the distance, 800 kilometers, and time, six weeks of walking across Spain, I have allowed students to use their phones to contact parents during the trip. I have noticed that students take advantage of this allowance, resulting in altering the liminality of the pilgrimage.



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In addition to separating us from the extra-human constituents, cell phones and other communication media hinder relations with fellows. As already mentioned, Wi-Fi is relatively new to the Camino experience. At least my students in Scotland were able to have about ten days without internet. On the Camino, since the advent of Wi-Fi, pilgrims don’t seem to be able to do without cell phone service for more than two hours. Leaving the albergue in the early morning I see pilgrims updating their status, checking on the status of friends on another continent, touching bases with friends who are far away. After two hours of walking, we normally stop in a village and have coffee and toast. On one occasion, I had been waiting for my toast, standing at the café bar, and heard a customer approach the counter then ask first for the Wi-Fi code and then order their coffee. This happens regularly. I turn toward the dining area and see pilgrims around a table with seats for six or eight persons. All of them look straight down to their phone. Sharing the same space, they do not connect with one another, but communicate with someone thousands of miles away. Prior to the advent of Wi-Fi, these six persons would have been engaged in a conversation. Pilgrims regularly become friends with people from other cultures. They find a way to communicate even though no common language is shared. This practice is being swallowed up by a small electronic device. The same is true on the AT. In 2005, my AT class was up on Iron Mountain Ridge in northeast Tennessee. One of my students twisted her ankle and needed a medivac. A thru-hiker walked around the ridgetop, holding his cell phone up and eventually found service. It was difficult to find cell service in the mountains. More than ten years later, AT thru-hikers find it much easier to obtain cell service in the mountains. At many shelters, where hikers used to fellowship with each other, people look down at their phone rather than into one another’s eyes. How is it possible to enter into a self-emptying happening when our communication devices mediate our emplacement? If media technologies place users in the center of their experience, how can they open themselves to meeting with someone else? Is there ever a real meeting with the person on the other end of the cell phone? The smart phone aims its gaze back at the user, who becomes aware of the gaze, which in turn brings about a more intense self-focus. One discipline of spiritual walking on the AT, a kind of fast, is putting the phone in the bottom of the pack, if it must accompany the hiker at all. CONCLUSION Flow makes room for new interpretations, a rescripting of one’s life story, more integrated with fellows who share the way, a collaboration. In the discipline of a long-distance hike, in its askesis, the pilgirm’s ego becomes decentered and the self is emptied of itself, kenosis. Quies, silent absorption,

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bring hikers to interior stillness, “sweet repose,” hesychia, fruits of an aesthetic of solitude. In the rescripted story, the old marketplace reality has also been decentered and replaced by shalom. The mystical participation of the journey becomes a foundation for realizing healthy relations with fellows, both human and extra-human. NOTES   1.  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: University Books, 1963), 31.  2. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, 29.  3. Ibid., 30.   4.  Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 51.   5.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 7.  6. Ibid.  7. Paul Riceour, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, trans. David Pallauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 13.  8. Riceour, Figruing the Sacred, 13.   9.  Uncle Rip, personal email, August 6, 2004. 10. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 43. 11. Ibid. 12.  See chapter 5. In the interpretation of the embodied ritual of pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago, we compared the Eucharist as an embodied ritual to the text of the Camino as both presented in outward form and inhabited by the pilgrim. 13. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 43. 14.  Recall from chapter 2: I am using this term in order to underscore the particularity of the milieu through which pilgrims and hikers walk. Nature is replete with abstract associations and thereby void of the integral particularity that constitutes places wherein hikers and pilgrims walk. Environment implies a medium out of which life evolves, or a complex of constituents that give rise to life, but is again too abstract and thereby removed from the specific experience and encounter along the route. Ecoregion is defined as a “relatively large units of land containing a distinct assemblage of natural communities and species, with boundaries that approximate the original extent of natural communities prior to major land-use change” by David M. Olson, Eric Dinerstein, Eric D. Wikramanayake, Neil D. Burgess, George V. N. Powell, Emma C. Underwood, and Kenneth R. Kassem, et al. 2001. “Terrestrial Ecoregions of the World: A New Map of Life on Earth.” Bioscience 51, no. 11: 933. Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost (accessed January 10, 2017). 15.  See footnote 3 in chapter 1; also, in chapter 2 under the heading of An Aesthetic of Fellowship.



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16.  Henry David Thoreau, “Walden,” The Portable Thoreau, Ed. Carl Bode, (New York: Penguin Books, 1957), 343. 17. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Portable Thoreau, Ed. Carl Bode, (New York: Penguin Books, 1957), 597–598. 18.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 139. 19.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperCollins Publ., 1997). 20.  C. S. Lewis. “Myth Became Fact.” God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 65. 21. Kip Redick, “Spiritual Rambling: Long Distance Wilderness Sojourning as Meaning-Making,” Journal of Ritual Studies, Vol. 30:2 (2016), 41. 22. Kip Redick, “Spiritual Rambling: Long Distance Wilderness Sojourning as Meaning-Making,” Journal of Ritual Studies, 41. 23.  Ibid. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. 24.  Kip Redick, “Kenotic Walking, Wilderness Sojourning, and Hospitality,” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2021): 121–122. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Man and Language.” Philosophical Hermeneutics, 92. 25.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Man and Language.” Philosophical Hermeneutics, 92. 26.  Kip Redick, “Kenotic Walking, Wilderness Sojourning, and Hospitality,” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience, 122. 27. Kip Redick, “Spiritual Rambling: Long Distance Wilderness Sojourning as Meaning-Making,” Journal of Ritual Studies, 41. 28.  Kip Redick, “Kenotic Walking, Wilderness Sojourning, and Hospitality,” Journal for the Study of Religious Experience, 122. 29.  Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 146. 30.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Man and Language.” Philosophical Hermeneutics, 92. 31.  Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 89. 32. Ibid. 33.  Ibid., 91. 34.  G. van der Leeuw. Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, 306. 35.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Man and Language.” Philosophical Hermeneutics, 92. 36.  Henry Bugbee and David W Rodick, Wilderness in America: Philosophical Writings (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 125. 37.  Quoted in Henry Bugbee and David W Rodick, Wilderness in America: Philosophical Writings, 125. 38.  Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, 168–169. 39. Ibid. 40.  Ernesto Grassi, “The Originary Quality of the Poetic and Rhetorical Word: Heidegger, Ungaretti, and Neruda.” Philosophy Rhetoric 20, no. 4 (1987): 248. 41.  Ernesto Grassi, “The Originary Quality of the Poetic and Rhetorical Word: Heidegger, Ungaretti, and Neruda.” Philosophy Rhetoric, 249. 42.  Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, 144.

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43.  Ernesto Grassi, “The Originary Quality of the Poetic and Rhetorical Word: Heidegger, Ungaretti, and Neruda.” Philosophy Rhetoric, 253. 44. Ibid. 45.  Ibid., 254. 46.  Ernesto Grassi and John Michael Krois, “Can Rhetoric Provide a New Basis for Philosophizing? The Humanist Tradition,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 11 (2) (1987), 76. 47.  Ernesto Grassi and John Michael Krois, “Can Rhetoric Provide a New Basis for Philosophizing? The Humanist Tradition,” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 78. 48.  Ibid., 82. 49.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Richard Calverton Maccleary, Signs, Trans. with Intro. Richard C. Mccleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 44. 50.  Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, 181. 51. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Man and Language.” Philosophical Hermeneutics, 104. 52.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 110. 53.  Ibid., 111. 54. Ibid. 55.  Walking on the AT is not easy. The terrain can be extremely challenging. But no matter the challenge, hikers still engage in this most basic of human actions, walking. 56.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 111. 57. Ibid. 58.  Ibid., 112. 59. Ibid. 60.  Ibid., 110. 61.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Play and Intrinsic Rewards,” 44. 62. Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, Trans. Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions Book, 1960), 8. 63.  Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, 8. 64.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Play and Intrinsic Rewards,” 50. 65.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Play and Intrinsic Rewards,” 45. 66.  Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, 20. 67.  William S. J. Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2004), 228. 68.  William S. J. Harmless, Desert Christians, 228. 69. Ibid. 70.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Play and Intrinsic Rewards,” 47. 71. Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1978), 7. 72.  George D. Greenia, “What is Pilgrimage?” International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, 12. 73.  Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert, 20. 74. Landscape in this context relates to long distance hikes in places like the Camino de Santiago where daily walking takes the pilgrim across a mostly agricultural setting. The pilgrim sleeps in villages, towns, and cities and travels across fields



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where visual experience dominates. Ecoplaces relate to such hiking routes as the AT where the rambler remains fully immersed in an environment where the sensual field is does not privilege the eyes. Landscape is a visual field of experience whereas ecoplace is a fully embodied encounter in dialogue with the constituents of the particular place.   75.  G. van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art, 493.  76. Ibid., 29.  77. Ibid., 24.  78. Ibid., 25.  79. Ibid., 488.  80. Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2002), 6.   81.  Emmanuel Levinas, “Beyond Intentionality.” Philosophy in France Today, 108.  82. Ibid.  83. Ibid., 109.  84. Phil. 3:10.   85.  Emmanuel Levinas, “Beyond Intentionality.” Philosophy in France Today, 109.  86. Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 91.  87. Phil. 2:5–8.  88. Gen. 1:26–28.  89. Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 91.  90. Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Giveness, Trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press, 2002), 29.  91. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise that Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2002).  92. Martin Buber, I and Thou, 131–132.  93. Ibid., 132.  94. Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 66.  95. Martin Buber, I and Thou, 62.  96. Emmanuel Lévinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 27.   97.  Levinas notes that “Marcel opposes language understood as the element of the Meeting; he opposes the very term Relation, preferring ‘meeting’ or ‘tension’” (Emmanuel Lévinas, Outside the Subject, 27). I will use both Buber and Marcel’s terminology.   98.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Play and Intrinsic Rewards,” 45.  99. Martin Buber, I and Thou, 62. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid. 102.  Martin Buber, I and Thou, 111–112. 103.  Martin Buber, I and Thou, 67. 104.  Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, Trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Macmillan Co., 1967), 23.

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105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid. 108.  Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 64. 109. Ibid. 110.  William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publ. Co., 2011), 83. 111.  Belden C. Lane, Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 112.  Belden C. Lane, Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice, 98. 113.  Nhất Hạnh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: an Introduction to the Practice of Meditation, Trans. M. Ho (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), 4. 114.  Nhất Hạnh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: an Introduction to the Practice of Meditation, 7. 115.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Play and Intrinsic Rewards,” 45. 116.  Belden C. Lane, Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice, 102–108. 117.  Nhất Hạnh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: an Introduction to the Practice of Meditation, 15. 118.  Nhất Hạnh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: an Introduction to the Practice of Meditation, 22. 119.  Belden C. Lane, Backpacking with the Saints: Wilderness Hiking as Spiritual Practice, 103. 120.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, “Play and Intrinsic Rewards,” 44. 121.  Ibid., 45. 122.  Bernard McGinn, The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 116. 123. Teresa, Interior Castle, 40. 124.  Teresa “Fourth Mansion: Chapter Three.” Interior Castle, trans. George Greenia. Email correspondence, October 29, 2020. 125. Teresa, Interior Castle, 43. 126.  Bernard McGinn, The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, 116. 127. Teresa, Interior Castle, 75–76. 128.  Ibid., 40. 129. Ernesto Grassi, “The Originary Quality of the Poetic and Rhetorical Word: Heidegger, Ungaretti, and Neruda.” Philosophy Rhetoric, 248. Barfield, Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, 144. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Richard Calverton Maccleary, Signs, 44. Richard L. Lanigan “Merleau-Ponty, Semiology, and the New Rhetoric.” The Southern Speech Communication Journal, 140). (Lévinas, The Levinas Reader, 89–90). 130. Teresa, Interior Castle, 29. 131. Jean-Luc Marion. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 17. 132.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “What is Phenomenology?” Cross Currents. 6 no. 2 (1956), 60.



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133. Teresa, Interior Castle, 41. 134. Ibid. 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid. 138. Teresa, Interior Castle, 43. 139. Ibid. 140.  Paul Rigby “Levinas and Christian Mysticism After Auschwitz,” Theological Studies, 72 (2) 2011: 309–334. 141.  Emmanuel Levinas, The Levinas Reader, 89. 142.  Ibid., 90. 143.  Ibid., 91. 144. Ibid. 145. Ibid. 146. Ibid. 147.  Ibid., 92. 148.  Ibid., 107. 149. Teresa, Interior Castle, 76. 150. Ibid. 151.  Ibid., 77. 152.  Ibid., 76. 153.  Isaiah 58: 3. 154.  Isaiah 58: 6–7. 155.  Hosea 6:6. 156.  Matt. 9:13. 157.  David Brown. God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience, 156. Quote comes from W. Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise, and Challenge in Biblical Faith 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), 197–201. 158.  Matt. 4:4. 159.  See David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 2017), 77–92. 160.  Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1950), 11. 161.  Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, 10. 162. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” The Portable Thoreau, Ed. Carl Bode, (New York: Penguin Books, 1957), 597–598. 163.  Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, 8. 164.  Ibid., 18. 165. Teresa, Interior Castle, 43. 166.  William T. Cavanaugh, Migrations of the Holy: God, State, and the Political Meaning of the Church, 82. 167.  David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 97. 168. Ibid., 100.

Chapter Seven

Veterans, Healing, and Long-Distance Hiking

We left the paved highway and walked, backpacks brimming, loaded for a long-distance hike into the wilds of Bumpass Hell, Mount Lassen Volcanic National Park. The route chosen would take us through undomesticated forest and be our approach to the Pacific Crest Trail. Having been discharged from the Marine Corps just a few months earlier, John and I were familiar with navigating unexplored terrain, and being Marines, we took the route less traveled and most difficult. Compass and topographic map in hand, we were now setting forth on a journey of healing, of transformation, of searching for meaning in a world that had turned in some direction we did not understand. See figure 7.1. We did not consciously recognize it at the time, but the volcanic environment we were traversing mirrored the trauma that brewed in our souls. Here in Bumpass Hell, boiling mud pots belched, heated by steam far below the surface and releasing gas as bubbles burst. But like so many other veterans, we were keeping our turmoil within, repressing the steam being heated so far below the surface, medicating ourselves with illegal drugs. John had intuitively grasped the healing power of the wilderness and challenged me to find an alternative to medicating. Many veterans feel disconnected from society after separating from the military. Even though they have been serving their nation, that sense of structure and duty does not translate easily into civilian life. The transition from civilian to warrior, though shrouded with legendary ordeal, is in the long run less difficult than the reverse. I was seventeen upon enlistment, going to recruit training right after high school. At the time of my discharge, I did not really know what it meant to be a civilian. My journey with John ranged over a greater distance and a longer period of time than I anticipated when we embarked. After hiking some of the Pacific Crest Trail, we took to the paved 283

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Figure 7.1.  The Author Heading Out on the Approach to the PCT, Mount Lassen Volcanic National Park, California. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick

road and hitched across the continent. We lived on the road, nomads seeking solace. Several years later, I transferred the journey to university and continued my education in becoming a civilian citizen. The trail, the road, and the university all facilitated a reconnection to society, a healing, and a discovery of my place in the world. Veterans separating from the military since about the mid twentieth century have increasingly been distinct from those who left such service when returning home meant going back to the farm, small village, or even the neighborhood of one of the larger cities. An eighteen-year-old leaving the farm and entering the service had already been integrated into a meaningful and timehonored lifeworld prior to entering the military. Most youths since the midcentury have not been integrated into such a life situation. High school and college are preparatory institutions in a much more ambiguous and complex technical journey whereby youths move toward integration. In this current period, youths entering the professional world will have an estimated six careers in their life. The lifeworld of the farm, small village, or even the urban neighborhood a century ago was vastly different from the professional lifeworld today. Upon discharge from the service, veterans today leave a highly



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structured and honored situation for the fluid professional world. So many of my fellow Marines couldn’t wait to enter civilian life, to be free from the structure and rigid discipline, only to reenlist within a year after separation. In many cases the structure and discipline of the Marines provided more peace and security in comparison to the professional lifeworld. In other cases, a personal identity had already been formed in the Marines. Entering civilian life meant reshaping identity, something very complex in contemporary society as compared to the lifeworld a century ago. About twenty years ago, I began thinking about the veterans who would be coming home from their service in Iraq and Afghanistan. I had been focusing my own scholarship on the transformative potential of long-distance hiking on the Appalachian Trail, interpreting the activity as spiritual journey. While conducting my research I came across many Vietnam veterans whose experience on the AT mirrored my own on the Pacific Crest Trail. I approached several of my colleagues in psychology about the potential of interpreting longdistance hiking as therapy. I began to read through the literature and came across many excellent studies.1 Recently, Cindy Ross has published her own research after becoming involved with veterans’ search for healing through wilderness hiking. She reflects on the “staggering numbers” of veterans who suffer with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and “never seek help and have never been diagnosed. An average of seventeen veterans . . . die by suicide every day, totaling almost sixty thousand veterans since 2010.”2 She goes on to point to the need for “alternatives to traditional therapies and prescribed medications to treat veterans with PTSD, depression, and anxiety.”3 She gives one such alternative known as ecotherapy, an approach I started reading about in my initial research. Though ecotherapy has been helpful and follows sound methods, I found that the studies involving this approach did not satisfy my own desire to understand the phenomena surrounding veteran needs for healing. My discussions with colleagues at my own university did not resonate with my research approach. They were employing methods to explain the phenomena as social scientists and psychologists, whereas my orientation is rooted in the humanities, philosophy and religious studies more specifically. After a couple of years dialoguing with my colleagues in the Psychology Department, and feeling like a fish out of water, I had an epiphany. Religion has offered rituals of cleansing and healing to returning warriors since ancient times. Ancient myths show purification happening in rituals of restoration. After Apollo kills the python at the base of Mount Parnassus, he is exiled from Olympus until purified. Killing the python carried with it an association of blood pollution that required cleansing and expiation. Apollo served Admetus for nine years after killing the Python at Delphi. Once the purification was complete, Apollo took possession of Delphi. The oracle retained the memory

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of the python as the prophetess was called the Pythian. As has been shown in chapter five, a long-distance hike in the wilderness has deep roots in religious mythology and ritual. Gilgamesh, Odysseus, and Aeneas, mythic heroes I read about during my undergraduate education, were all warriors who partook in journeys that transformed them. John and I had been enacting these myths without knowing it when we set out on our journey. We had been performing a ritual of transformation, purification, and healing. I decided to incorporate veterans and healing into my research interpreting long-distance hiking on the AT as enactments of religious ritual, sacred journey, and pilgrimage. I conducted a seminar for veterans and others suffering from PTSD at the Appalachian Long Distant Hiker Association Gathering in 2010. In 2011, I presented “Time to Heal: Bridging Technologies of Transport as Therapy,” my first paper on the topic, at the Virginia Humanities Conference, held that year at Bridgewater College in Virginia. In the summer months I conducted informal interviews amongst veterans who were out on the AT, gathering information and stories. Since beginning this research, I have noticed more veterans attempting to walk through their trauma. MORE THAN A WALK IN THE WOODS Those of us who have engaged in long-distance hiking, climbing mountains, camping in remote and wild places, fording rushing streams, and exposing ourselves to all kinds of weather, know that such journeys involve more than a mere walk in the woods. As has been noted throughout this book, longdistance hikers take to the wilderness for countless and divergent reasons. We hike our own hikes, but we share a bond and common experience. We may go into the woods for reasons unknown to each other, but we emerge from the mountains knowing each other and the places the trail takes us. Veterans have this in common with hikers. Those who join the military come from varied backgrounds, but upon separation from the service they share a bond with one another. Concerning the brotherhood of fellows who served together, one veteran writes, “I did not pick these men. . . But I know them in a way I know no other men. I have never given anyone such trust.”4 Like long-distance hikers who return from months on the trail to a home where friends and family cannot relate to the journey, those who have separated from the military also return to a home where few can share the experience. A key difference and of primary importance to the point of this writing, we who return from the trail can look back on the journey as a time of healing, cleansing, transformation, in short, a positive life altering experience. Those who return from military service may have performed great deeds of sacrifice, which may be



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positive for their country, but the trauma associated with this service needs purging; the veteran needs transformation in order to become a civilian. A long-distance hike on the Appalachian Trail can provide such an opportunity. This need for healing, cleansing, and transformation is nothing new, veterans have returned from war since time immemorial. Earl Shaffer, whom we met in chapter two, the first person to thru-hike the AT and a veteran of WWII, found healing on his own long-distance hike. Ross, who knew Shaffer personally, writes, “In addition to experiencing some aspects of healing through the kind and helpful strangers he encountered, he felt safe enough to enjoy beautiful things: a presence of the Divine in old-growth forests, the skies, and a healthy rhythm from the daily and seasonal cycles.”5 In addition to healing, Shaffer like other veterans, sought solace in a new identity, distanced from violence and rooted in authenticity. In this regard, Ross writes, “he was walking back to peace, to himself.”6 When we think of the trauma associated with military service, violent images come to mind. We think about the horrific things women and men in uniform witnessed and sometimes performed. Yet, there is another trauma, an inward violence, the learned identity associated with killing, producing a volcano building up within. Ross writes, “You go there to kill. You are trained to kill and you want to. . . It goes against all human nature. Your lines of normality and what is reasonable are blurred from day one.”7 Clearly, dissonance arises as two contradictory values become instilled in the person who enters military service. On the one hand, we are taught to love one another, to lay down our lives for our fellows. Indeed, many enlist out of a sense of duty rooted in this kind of love: for one’s family, for one’s neighbors, for one’s country. This value is leveraged during training as enlistees learn to give themselves in protecting kin and country. On the other hand, in order to fulfill this love, enlistees are taught to kill. The training is so effective that as the quote above indicates, “you want to” kill. I recall this kind of training in the Marine Corps. The most visceral came during close combat training. We were taught to use a bayonet, and if no traditional weapon were in hand, to use anything, a spoon would do. If no weapon could be found, we learned to kill with our hands and feet. As we practiced with these weapons and in using our hands, we chanted with each thrust, “kill, kill, kill.” One veteran notes that combat training dehumanizes “the enemy, which is done to get the soldier to kill and increase his own chances of staying alive.” Ross quotes psychologist Dave Grossman, “Humans have natural inhibitions about killing. . . We have to become good at training people to kill as a reflex and creating coldblooded killers.”8 So, the dissonance builds within, waiting for some outlet and destroying the person who keeps it to themselves.

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I recall the day I experienced an epiphany that opened me to this trauma that was building in my soul. I had received a sanction for a violation of the rules. Part of the sanction was being restricted to the barracks for thirty days. I had to attend formations and go to work each day but was forbidden to take liberty. Sitting there in the barracks, I began to practice meditation. In the quieting and distancing of meditation, I thought about an instance when another Marine stole my electronic music player, worth a hundred dollars. I did not know the identity of the thief but envisioned myself crushing the mystery person’s head with a pipe. This thought of killing another human for the crime of stealing my property gave me pleasure and some satisfaction. If I were to catch the person, I could be fully satisfied. As I meditated on this past event, a new perspective opened to me. I thought, “You wanted to kill someone because they took something worth a hundred dollars. You place less value on a human being than on the music player.” This epiphany disturbed me. I knew my desire to kill was twisted. I began to ask myself if my desire to kill in the line of duty were not also twisted? How could I know that my country would send me off to a just war and that the enemy was not some innocent person sacrificed on an altar of selfishness and greed? Months after my discharge from the Marines and hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail, I decided to act on the epiphany and become a pacifist. I went so far as to become a vegetarian, not wanting to harm any living thing. Yet, I could find no peace in my pacifism nor my diet. No matter how I practiced nonviolence, I was culpable for the death of other living beings. Plants are living. The water I drink is filled with microbiota. The act of eating and drinking made me a killer. I decided to try to live from sunlight, photosynthesis. I nearly starved. It took several years for me to work through the trauma, the inner volcano that could not be satisfied. My soul mirrored Bumpass Hell. Healing required time and distance. These elements are integral to hiking in the wilderness, which also provide fellowship as indicated in chapter two. One veteran wrote, “Aggression gets instilled in you in the military, but on the trail, I could focus on something peaceful and gentle like looking for wildflowers. I definitely think my mental health is better now.”9 Recall from chapter 2 Olmsted’s belief that public parks should be restorative, conducive to health through an “unbending of the faculties.”10 Olmsted understood the healing benefit of what is now called ecotherapy, “scenery offering the most agreeable contrast to that of the rest of the town.”11 Ecotherapy begins to do the work of unbending the soul, of quenching the fires in Bumpass Hell. Ross writes that one veteran “learned to truly see the beauty in flowers, cloud formations, and faraway vistas. He learned to focus on wonder and creativity.”12 Recall, also from chapter 2, our exploration of the coupling of aesthetics with journey, of integrating beauty with our pilgrimage. As the



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veteran engages in a long-distance hike on the AT, she discovers beauty in the extra-human surroundings as well as sharing that discovery with fellows, an aesthetic of fellowship. Ross writes that the veteran “has learned to notice beauty, he has learned new things that are not related to survival, and how to share them with others—all aspects of peacetime living.”13 One veteran said, “You need to replace those bad memories with newer, happier memories.” Ross writes of this veteran, “He longed to clear out the destructive voices in his head and replace them with the sound of the wind, birdsong, and spring peepers.”14 Recall that the aesthetics of fellowship and solitude, discussed in chapter two, are important contributors to spiritual rambling. In chapter six we explored fellowship and solitude as a frame for exegeting and rescripting a life-story, to discovering an ecstatic connection with the constituents of wilderness and with fellow humans. One veteran says, “On the trail I experience an overwhelming feeling of fullness—the fullness of life, the feeling that I am where I am supposed to be, doing exactly what I am supposed to be doing, like looking at a view that only God could have made just for me in that specific moment in time.”15 Another veterans says, “All of a sudden, on the trail, I woke up in my mind. I became more aware of everything. I noticed animal scat and could smell a bear. I listened to the wind; I could hear hikers approaching.”16 Ross writes, “He remembers the very place on the trail where this awakening happened.”17 This becoming present, this awareness and remembrance exemplifies kenotic walking as explored in chapter six. In addition, the reflection after these ecstatic encounters is where exegeting and rescripting take place. One veteran says, “Hiking really appeals to me because there is something very special about experiencing a new place on foot at a speed of two to three miles per hour.” “When you walk through land for months, you absorb so much more of it. It becomes part of you. You have a connection to it. You get rooted, so to speak.”18 As this veteran points out, getting rooted takes months of walking within the wilderness. A long-distance hike provides both time and space for healing, cleansing, and transformation. VETERANS, LIMINALITY, AND RETURN The means and time frame of the return, or reintegration into society, distinguish contemporary veterans from their predecessors. Up until our era of mass transportation, veterans spent weeks or months returning home. With the advent of cellular communication, contemporary veterans also have more immediate contact with loved ones. Where letters may have taken weeks, a phone call connects immediately. Walking used to be the primary mode of

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travel. In the weeks or months traveling home, there would also be limited, if any, communication. The walk home provided time and space to process, interpret, and evaluate one’s life-story. One veteran says, “In the Marine Corps, we are taught to internalize many things. Walking helps me process things.”19 The intensity of one’s experiences while serving could be assuaged. With immediate communication and a return home in days or hours, experiences remain within and at the boiling point, the mud pots of Bumpass Hell burst, spilling out in a time and place not conducive to healing. In addition, our pluralistic and increasingly urban society has in many cases jettisoned important rituals of healing, cleansing, and transformation. The time and space of return is collapsed and the healing infrastructure at home is almost vacant. Finally, our complex technological culture makes it difficult to find meaningful work when compared to the duty and honor saturated experiences of those engaged in military service, where work might translate as a team struggling together in life threatening situations. A long-distance hike on the AT involves each of these. The time spent on the trail makes room for cleansing, for purging the trauma, for transformation. When veterans return from places of conflict and arrive home after mere hours instead of weeks or months, there is no time for such purging. Recall our exploration of distancing in chapter six. Without distance in time all the emotions, thoughts, and embodied experiences are thrust into a situation that has little resemblance to the dynamics of the place of conflict. Veterans are out of place, out of sync. The experience can be jarring and add to the trauma already present. Time spent away from both the military and a “normal” civilian life, while long-distance hiking, creates openness to reflection and perspective. Recall Ricoeur’s interpretive frame, referenced in chapter six, where the world of the text constitutes what he calls “a distanciation of the real from itself.”20 That is, a time and space where new possibilities arise, a truly liminal time and space. In religious rituals, as noted in previous chapters, this in between time is called liminality, after the Latin term for a threshold. Those engaged in ritual transformation are liminal, they become liminal personae. In a society where religious rituals have been waning, a long-distance hike can be experienced as a ritual of transformation, a spiritual journey. As has been outlined in previous chapters, walking in this threshold state becomes meditative and conducive to healing. In addition to being set apart in time, the AT also creates a space that is beyond both military and civilian worlds. Recall our previous discussion of the wilderness as a liminal place where journeys of transformation become available. None of the artifacts of society present themselves to distract. The mountains, forests, rivers, and meadows become places set apart from the hustle and bustle of human worlds. Even though these beautiful places in the wilderness provide tranquility, hikers still experience obstacles, discover



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awe. Ross writes, “Awe makes us feel small, in relation to something larger, so it humbles us and diminishes any feeling of entitlement, arrogance and narcissism.”21 Wilderness is beyond the rhythms of human centered structure, presenting great challenge. Those who have served in the military are most often people whose personality thrives on challenge. One veteran of Vietnam with whom I talked about thru-hiking said that climbing those difficult and nearly vertical pathways along the AT required his full attention. As he huffed and puffed, sweated, and cursed all the way up the mountain, not a thought of the war came to mind. Those difficult parts of the trail purged him of the war, at least temporarily. On my own thru-hike in 2011, I came across a fellow Marine veteran at the Lost Pond Shelter in Vermont. He had finished his 2,000-mile trek a couple of years before, after having served in Iraq. Upon discovering that I was an older veteran, he opened up and shared his struggles and the role the AT played in his own transformation. After his discharge from the Marines, he enrolled in college, only to fail miserably after a short time. He was prone to violent outbursts and abusing alcohol. He decided to thru-hike. The trail helped him gain focus, to find meaning. After completing the AT he gained admittance to another university, and was at the time of our conversation, nearly finished. On this particular trip to Vermont, he was introducing his girlfriend to the trail, trying to share his life-changing experience with her. He credits the AT with his healing and transformation. All of this rings so true for me personally as well. As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, months after my own discharge from the Marines I started a long-distance journey on the PCT. Though I did not finish that trail, I spent a great deal of time immersed in the wild. My friend and brother Marine, John, convinced me to spend my disability money on backpacks and start a hike on the PCT up in the northern Sierras. See figure 7.2. Our long-distance journey lasted for several years and brought great healing. I ended up hitching across the continent six times and lived on the North Shore of Hawaii, all the while living out of that backpack John convinced me to buy. More than twenty years later, I found myself up on the AT doing research to discover the spirituality of long-distance hiking. I wondered if John and I were among few or many who experienced wilderness hiking as transformational. The place and the community of the trail manifested themselves as powerful and having great potential for persons seeking a spiritual transformation. I have been writing and conducting university classes on the AT and in other places for more than twenty years now. Understanding the transformative and healing power of long-distance journeys has been the focus. Almost a decade ago, the ATC contacted me and informed me of the Warrior Hike

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Figure 7.2.  The Author at the Entrance to Mount Lassen Volcanic National Park, PCT, California. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick

and of their “Walk Off the War” program. In the summer of 2012, two Marine Corps veterans, Sean Gobin and Mark Silvers completed a consciousness raising thru-hike focused on eliminating the trauma and other negative effects associated with war. Their goal was and is consistent with so many other long-distance hiking veterans, but they publicized the journey and seem to be getting the message out. In addition, they started a scholarship program to help support veterans on a long-distance hike. In the years following, the Warrior Hike has continued and expanded to other trails. As mentioned earlier, walking used to be the way veterans returned home from service. Until recent history they traveled for weeks, months, or even years on the return home. Odysseus spent ten years journeying home from war. Charles Frazier’s 1997 novel, Cold Mountain, chronicles a confederate soldier, W. P. Inman, walking home from the war across North Carolina. His months long journey to Cold Mountain and Ada Monroe alludes to Homer’s Odyssey. Extended journeys can be understood as periods of cleansing and expiation, of healing the trauma war brings upon the human soul. Contem-



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porary soldiers arrive home after only hours or days of travel from the war. Time in this case collapses the opportunity for rituals of cleansing, expiation, and healing. Pilgrimage could be an option for such rituals. The journey also involves transformation, the warrior is transformed into a civilian. Contemporary rapid transportation moves the warrior from the battlefield to home in a matter of hours. Though most warriors desire a speedy return home and the euphoric reuniting with loved ones, the collapsing of time and space interferes with important rituals of transition. In addition, the movement of population from rural to urban further erodes traditional rituals of transition as communities are fragmented and individuals become more autonomous. Each war of the twentieth century seemed to give rise to increasing numbers of mental and emotional injuries amongst warriors returning home. It was Vietnam that seemed to focus attention on the mental and emotional trauma of war after soldiers were reintegrated into their civilian life. In conjunction with Vietnam the shift in population from rural to urban exploded, moving from about ten percent of the population living in cities to about fifty percent. As young people moved from rural to urban centers, they moved away from supporting institutions and traditional family units. Spiritual rituals of transition, associated with those supporting institutions and family units, were also left. Has anything replaced them? In addition to the move from rural to urban, the shift in population and the mixing of people from diverse backgrounds in an increasingly pluralistic society is also important to note when thinking about rituals of transition. In many cases those who leave land and family also leave traditional religious affiliation and seek fulfillment in alternative spiritual activities. Many of these alternative activities have not yet developed the kind of rituals of cleansing and healing that are appropriate for warriors returning home. The way military units are composed is another factor related to the pluralistic society. During WWII, many military units were composed of warriors from the same towns, villages, counties. As they returned home, they continued to support one another through the bonds they created during the war. Vietnam saw units composed of warriors from divergent backgrounds, cities, and counties. The Veteran’s Administration has attempted to take on the complications of a shifting demographic, composition of military units, and transition to civilian life. However, the VA cannot create rituals of transition that are found in traditional communities. This results in veterans creating their own institutions. The VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) is one such institution whose chapters are seen in towns across the country. But local churches, synagogues, mosques, and other places of worship provide an organic synthesis of a healthy community. Veterans need more than an isolated social structure such as is created by institutions like the VFW. Veterans need a complex organic community.

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Also, important when considering rituals of transformation for veterans is the importance of addressing meaning that is associated with professions and spiritual activities. Many who enlist in the military are motivated by a strong desire to serve their nation. Such service in conjunction with traditions in the military that reiterate patriotism move those who serve toward meaning fulfillment at some level. Even stronger is the meaning that individuals experience through the camaraderie of working in tight units to accomplish sometimes dangerous goals. Intense training prepares individuals to work in close-knit groups where the flow experience is common. Recall from chapter six Csikszentmihalyi’s description of feelings of flow associated with “painful, risky, difficult activities that stretched the person’s capacity and involved an element of novelty and discovery.”22 Important associations were intense focus on the present, clarity of goals, and challenge, all found at different points while serving in the military and also discovered on an AT hike. In this regard one veteran says, “In this society, I have to mentally try to stay positive and focused . . . It is easy when I hike. The trail placed me in the present. When I am not hiking it is easy to become full of doubt and question myself and my path through life.”23 Another veteran notes, “On the trail, I woke up every day with a purpose, a mission, to walk north.”24 Upon separation from the service, veterans have difficulty finding the same existential meaning beyond the military. Ross writes, “They struggle with guilt and confusion over a sense of purpose.”25 One veteran says, “Hiking from Georgia to Maine gave me a new mission.”26 A long-distance hike on the AT provides veterans with meaning-making experiences that resemble the camaraderie of the military. In this regard, Ross points out that several veterans “were taken by surprise by the intense brotherhood that exists on the trail among long-distance hikers.”27 She continues, “Being part of a hiking/outdoor community helps replace the missing brotherhood, which so many returning vets experience. No longer having a close sense of community is one of the great losses when returning to civilian life.”28 One veteran says, “I used to think that no one but fellow vets could understand me or how I feel, but I have changed this belief. I have such wonderful friends from the trail, and they are really there for me.” Ross writes that this veteran “found a new tribe on the trail, and his relationship with them was similar to the one with his battle buddies.”29 Another veteran writes, “My trail family became my new brotherhood.”30 Those who join the military are often persons who seek high intensity challenge and desire deeply meaningful experiences. The all-volunteer military attracts persons who are motivated by challenge, service to country, and close-knit comradeship. Initial training, referred to as “boot camp” is itself a liminal ritual of transformation and recruit trainees experience communitas. It thrusts the recruit into an extremely challenging and highly rigorous routine.



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The recruit joins a team of fellows who are all separated from the outside world and familiar relations, they are liminal in every way. At the end of two or three months, a transformation has taken place. A civilian has become a sailor, marine, soldier, or airman. Upon separation from the military, there is no similar ritual of transformation. Ross writes, “In bootcamp your sense of being an individual is stripped away and you are built up as part of a unit. Take that unit away, take that buddy away, and you experience tremendous loss.”31 One hiking veteran writes, “You go into the Marines and throw your hat in the air when you graduate, but when you get out, you are absolutely lost. You don’t know what to do, and if you take the wrong road you’re fucked. You learn out here to accept, not forget what happened in the military.”32 Another veterans says, “In this civilian world, in this society, I did not fit in at all.”33 Missing is the liminal time and space required for transformation, the clearly defined goal that provides a challenge, the comradeship accompanying the challenge, and the meaning associated with serving a cause greater than the individual. The veteran is simply thrust into the civilian world and expected to adapt. None of the bonds of communitas are there, no comrade to share the experience. The new challenge is often not experienced or understood as a challenge. With no guide, such as a drill instructor or company commander, the one going through transition experiences frustration rather than challenge. Finally, serving the nation does not translate easily to service in a civilian enterprise; many experience a loss of meaning. Ross writes, “Returning to civilian life without a civilian career that has a strong sense of purpose—such as counselor, educator, or community responder—can leave returning veterans with little sense of meaning and purpose.”34 RITUAL AND MEANING-MAKING Long-distance hiking through wilderness environments such as the AT offers veterans a ritual of transformation, a movement through identity change from military to civilian. As has been described in previous chapters, such treks along trails in the wilderness may be interpreted as spiritual journeys, giving hikers an experience similar to religious pilgrimage. Wilderness walking has been shown to provide goals and accompanying challenge for which veterans seem to be self-selected; they did voluntarily join the military seeking challenge and adventure. Ross writes about one veteran, “just labeling herself a thru-hiker gave her a renewed sense of purpose—she was committed to a huge goal, no matter how challenging it would be or how long it would take.”35 As noted in chapter five, the Turners describe pilgrimage as an ordeal, involving challenge: “the weariness of the body is submitted to hard, voluntary

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discipline, loosening the bonds of matter to liberate the spirit.”36 Throughout this book long-distance hiking has been shown to be conducive to liminality, communitas, and flow; veteran health can benefit from this journey. The AT, a nearly 2,200-mile journey, takes months to accomplish, creating time for a liminal experience. Hikers often report deep connections with each other and the surrounding environment whereby they feel integrated, part of a greater whole, in short, the hike involves meaning-making, something crucial for veterans in their reentry to civilian life. Meaning-making arises out of the convergence of important human acts, desires, and needs. There are key moments in life where meaning-making thrusts itself upon us and must be attended. To ignore the weight of these opportunities for meaning-making could result in alienation, complacent attitudes, depression, or crises in self-understanding. Community and value provide foreground and background for meaning-making and give the individual a sense of belonging to some integral part of a greater reality or whole, a cosmos. As has been shown, challenge and adventure are motives in human actions. Each aspect of human action, desire, and need—self-identity, community, goals, values, challenge, and adventure—is experienced through symbols and myths. Marines, taken as an example of military culture that employs symbols and myths to create identity, become steeped in symbols and myths from the beginning of recruit training and throughout time in service. Marines learn that the red stripe on the dress blue trousers worn by non-commissioned officers (NCOs) symbolizes the blood spilt in sacrifice that NCOs gave during the Battle of Chapultepec during the war with Mexico in 1847. They learn that the quatrefoil, a braided cross, on the barracks cover of Marine officers symbolizes the identifying mark worn by Marines who boarded ships so that their comrade sharpshooters stationed high in the rigging could distinguish them from the enemy. Marines are known as “Leathernecks” because of the leather collar worn to protect the neck from slashing blades during battle. One amongst many Marine Corps myths—keep in mind my use of the term myth is consistent with Vico’s idea that myth is true narration37—is that of the Battle of Belleau Wood during WWI. It is from this particular battle that the moniker “Devil Dog” arises; according to the story, the German soldiers referred to the Marines with this term. This battle also calls attention to a transformation for the Marine Corps from a force primarily fighting on Navy ships to one with more versatility. So, the myth depicts a new identity for the Marine Corps, consistent with the function of myth in general. Throughout this book, I have explored the journey on the AT as a kind of ritual action, sometimes religious, that interacts with myth and symbol. Susanne Langer writes that symbol making



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is a primary need in man, which other creatures probably do not have, and which actuates all his apparently unzoological aims, his wistful fancies, his consciousness of value, his utterly impractical enthusiasms, and his awareness of a “Beyond” filled with holiness. . . The symbol-making function is one of man’s primary activities, like eating, looking, or moving about. It is a fundamental process of his mind, and goes on all the time.38

The military leverages this primary activity to transform young women and men. These young persons have brains that are plastic organs ready to be conformed to the model presented in recruit training. This training is never merely technical but always accompanied by the traditions conveyed by myth and ritual. As we used push-ups for both conditioning and discipline, we chanted “loyalty sir” while lowering our bodies to the deck and “discipline sir” when raising ourselves. Langer goes on to write, the brain is not merely a great transmitter, a super switchboard; it is better likened to a great transformer. The current of experience that passes through it undergoes a change of character, not through the agency of the sense by which the perception entered, but by virtue of a primary use which is made of it immediately: it is sucked into the stream of symbols which constitutes a human mind.39

Langer calls the symbolization of events “fantasies.” Like all symbols, fantasies are derived from concrete experience. The original perception is abstracted, used symbolically to make sense of one’s ongoing life. Rollo May notes that through symbolic behavior one experiences themselves “over, against, and in relation to, a world of objects.”40 Using symbols opens humans to transcending their immediate concrete situation through abstraction and living toward a possible situation.41 He writes that “symbols and myths are an expression of man’s unique self-consciousness.”42 Goal-driven behavior requires symbolic action, which bridges the gap “between outer existence (the world) and inner meaning; and it arose out of man’s capacity to separate inner meaning and outer existence.”43 We cannot use language as a set of propositional truths to induce transformation. May writes, “What is important to see is that a ‘hard fact’ or a description of a ‘hard fact’ can by itself never bridge that gap; all the objective, intellectualized talk in the world with words which have become signs and have lost their symbolic power” cannot make meaning.44 Recall the discussion contrasting prosaic versus poetic enactments in chapter six. Barfield contends that the rational principle cannot expand consciousness.45 Grassi claims that through poetic metaphor we discover unexpected meaning, which is unattainable for rational thought.46 Simply using “hard facts” in identifying our problems does not bring us to a resolution. Religious institutions have used symbolic action in bringing about healing and transformation for centuries. In the wake of the fragmentation of reli-

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gious institutions, alternative symbol-rich actions could become meaningful for people who have little grounding in religious tradition. A long-distance hike, like pilgrimage, is a deeply symbolic journey, a performative dramatization that facilitates making connections and resolution of alienation. May comments on our own societies failure to employ symbols in the meaning-making process: A Society furnishes means for its members to deal with excessive guilt, anxiety and despair in its symbols and myths. When no symbols have transcendent meaning, as in our day, the individual no longer has his specific aid to transcend his normal crises of life, such as chronic illness, loss of employment, war, death of loved ones and his own death, and the concomitant anxiety and guilt. In such periods he has an infinitely harder time dealing with his impulses and instinctual needs and drives, a much harder time finding his own identity, and is prey thus to neurotic guilt and anxiety.47

May comments on the contemporary situation noting that humans suffer from “the deterioration and breakdown of the central symbols in modern Western culture.”48 In the transition between serving in the military, an institution that uses symbols in a highly effective way in the meaning-making process, to becoming a civilian, there is a similar breakdown of symbols. Many backpackers sometimes go onto the AT to find new symbols, to seek meaning beyond their confused experience and the failing culture. Spiritual journey as a separation from the marketplace, the buzz of the world, provides space for symbolic action to take place; liminality opens the way for symbol making, mythic discovery, and meaning-making. The journey is a walk into the time and space of rich symbolic action, an action consistent with religious ritual. Michael Graves notes that the journey is “one of the most pervasive symbols in religious literature, and perhaps the key central symbol in Christian mystical literature, the journey symbol has the ability to compress and express many levels of meaning.”49 Journey symbolism is pervasive historically, cross culturally, and throughout many religious traditions. One of the earliest-known narratives, the Epic of Gilgamesh, involves spiritual journey. After battling Humbaba and witnessing the death of his comrade Enkidu, Gilgamesh set out on a wilderness journey searching for lost meaning. Many veterans struggle with the same feelings evident with Gilgamesh. Ross writes that the veteran must learn to accept “the really awful reality that loved ones can get hurt and die, and you can’t do a thing about it.”50 One veteran says, “I couldn’t change a thing. . . I needed a new way of thinking, a way to accept my past.”51 Homer gives us the story of Odysseus journeying home after the war with Troy; ten years of travel serve to expose Odysseus to many ordeals, trails, and testing. Virgil spins the story of Aeneas who leads a contingent of Trojan exiles across the Mediterranean seeking a new home and experiencing both the transformation of self and nation. Graves notes that deterministic and



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mechanistic views of reality do not integrate well with journey symbolism, which “amplifies the view that natural processes or occurrences reflect an overall plan or purpose where human decisions have real consequences.”52 Veterans moving back into civilian life will be forming a new identity. Ross writes about one veteran, “He began to cultivate a new identity. He was finding new purpose, a new normal.”53 Part of this new identity involves projecting oneself into a new life while in the midst of the liminal journey, discovering oneself in a new role. Rose writes in relation to one veteran, he “learned peacetime living skills on the trail.”54 As discussed throughout this book, the ritual action of spiritual journey is conducive to identity formation. The journey itself, as a liminal process, involves hikers in taking on a new and temporary identity. One manifestation of new identity while on the AT comes in the form of a trail name. Recall that hikers who share the liminal state sometimes discover their new trail name because of some experience along the way. Others receive their names from fellow travelers as a result of shared ordeal or another situation. One journal entry by Siren from 2002 illustrates this trail identity, a parallel to identity formation that happens in the liminality of military recruit training: On the AT you are stripped down until there is nothing left but the true you. There are no real names, no jobs, no school; no responsibilities to family, bill collectors, or government. Thus, there are no pre-conceived notions there to bind what you present (in your unshaven, un-showered, introduction) with what they perceive. I’ll always remember balancing on the rocks by the waterfall at Laurel Falls, talking to a guy called Werewolf over a Snickers bar and a smile. He had been traveling since Easter, nearly two months earlier. Since Georgia, Werewolf had been hiking with three other men near his own age and fitness, as well as philosophic, level. He didn’t know any of their real names.55

The same hiker elaborates on the connection between trail names and understanding the AT as a pilgrimage: The trail names were one of several trail rituals utilized in gaining an understanding of people—spiritually. After all, how else (especially in America) does one answer the question, “who are you?” other than, “I am so-and-so, from here, working there, going . . . where?” These responses do not exist on the AT, making introductions is instead something more intimate, and therefore spiritual. Naked to all the outside world’s titles and stereotypes, scrubbed clean from its vices, technologies, and decorations, people share more of their soul, their honest inside, and appreciate each other and the atmosphere surrounding them.56

Again, the same hiker explores identity in relation to both religion and gender: In a trail journal at Laurel Fork Shelter, Mountain Goat wrote, “I am here to discover myself the way God intended me to be—not with all the negative skew

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I have put on myself.” God did not intend for him/her (even Mountain Goat’s gender is shielded by a trail name’s protection, furthering my response to his/ her message, his/her philosophy, his/her aura, instead of appearance, etc.) to be defined as an outer thing, but rather something radiating from within.57

Another hiker, Teach, 2003, brings communitas as social antistructure to bear on identity and gender: In society, women are still seen as inferior to and weaker than men, superficial beauty is still more important than any other characteristic and unfortunately, competition among women over men, and appearance has not dissipated. On the other hand, men in society fit a totally different set of stereotypes which also encourage negative competition: strength, appearance, female attention, and sexual ethics. As both genders struggle to overcome society’s ridiculous expectations, they hit the trail with the opportunity to truly discard those misconceptions and experience removal from social structure.58

The liminality of a long-distance hike on the AT opens hikers to identity reformation, to discovering themselves in a rescripted life, to an authentic engagement with life. Consistent with our exploration of the aesthetic of solitude in chapter 2 and the meaning-making potential of a journey on the AT, one veteran says: I began to be alone for a few days and there was no one to talk to. I started to spend more time in my head with my thoughts. I reviewed my past, thought about things people have told me . . . I started to look at myself without the façade. People use façades—it is how we present ourselves to the world. This was not a pleasant thing, seeing myself for the first time without the façade.59

In this aesthetic of solitude, the veteran ceases to repress, allowing the pressures of Bumpass Hell to bubble up to the surface. This liminal space of wilderness and the accompanying journey provides the veteran with a way to process these unpleasant thoughts. This hiking veteran goes on to say, “By stripping away that façade, you see your real self.”60 FINAL REFLECTION Though my approach to researching and understanding veteran experiences as they reintegrate into civilian life differs from my colleagues in the social sciences, I acknowledge their great contribution toward bringing healing. I also acknowledge grass roots organizations, like Cindy Ross’s River House PA, that contribute toward healing and reintegrating veterans into their new lives beyond the military.61 I acknowledge that in some cases, traditional



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medicine relieves the pain and suffering associated with veteran reintegration. I recognize the value of the Veterans Administration and the various hospitals and other infrastructure established to help with reintegration. I benefitted from the VA’s Vocational Rehabilitation Program, which fully supported most of my undergraduate education, as well as my first graduate program. But, before I was ready for university, I had years of alternative therapy. My research indicates that alternatives to traditional medicine might be employed to benefit those who need healing. Some alternative therapies mentioned by Cindy Ross, though not within the purview of my research approach, are noteworthy. After much research in this area, Ross writes that there is much “dissent among medical professional[s] when it comes to natural health, and many refuse to entertain the idea that healing involves more than pharmaceutical chemicals.”62 She found that pharmaceuticals in some cases seemed to have a negative outcome. In referencing a specific veteran, she writes, “The drugs issued to him through the VA made him feel lethargic and groggy.” This veteran writes, “I feel these demons that I try to drown grabbing at my neck. I see a dark figure in my dreams call to me to the dark depths of a cold, endless doorway.”63 Another veteran, in contrasting traditional medicine with the alternative provided by ecotherapy, and specifically a long-distance hike in the wilderness, writes, “it wasn’t a masking agent like drugs or alcohol.”64 Another veteran, contrasting traditional medicine with the alternative of wilderness hiking, comments on the effects of multiple long-distance forays into the wild writing, “After every trip, I return happier and more humble. I find more peace. . . The VA tells me not to do these trips, because it is too strenuous for my body. . . Out here is my medication and I don’t do these trips for myself.”65 In her research, Ross discovered the benefits of what some reference as “forest bathing.”66 She writes: medicinal aerosols that the evergreens were releasing into the air . . . these airborne organic compounds called phytoncides, or wood essential oils, have antibacterial and antifungal properties and prompt the body to boost the immune system by stimulating the production of NK (natural killer) cells, which attack infection and guard against disease.67

Recall from chapter 2 Benton Mackaye’s essay on the healing effects of the mountain forests. Revisiting the quote, he wrote that the trail would provide possibilities for health and recuperation. The oxygen in the mountain air along the Appalachian skyline is a natural resource (and a national resource) that radiates to the heavens its enormous health-giving powers with only a fraction of

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a percent utilized for human rehabilitation. Here is a resource that could save thousands of lives.68

In addition to references to specific healing effects of the forest, some veterans contrast the frenetic pace of contemporary society with the peace found on a forest trail. Others point to the importance of getting outside. One veteran says: No matter what you are struggling with in life, you can find peace in the outdoors. You may not ever fully heal from whatever issues you are having, whether it is post-traumatic stress, moral injury, or just the anxiety of everyday life. You can find a healthy break from all of this by getting outside and unplugging from the craziness that is our modern society.69

Another comments on healing in relation to a transformed view of fellow human beings. Recall Levinas’s description of relating to the other, which may be human or extra-human, writing, “To think the infinite, the transcendent, the Stranger, is hence not to think an object.”70 In so many instances, the veteran had been trained to harm the other, who had been cast as an enemy. Recall how combat training dehumanizes the enemy. Also noted earlier in this chapter was the required intense combat training to reset what might be called a natural orientation, not to kill but to save a life, to do no harm. Until veterans have been transformed, they may be viewing strangers as potential enemies and, in this way, thinking them an object. How does one unlearn the propensity to view the other as a potential enemy, to be ready to kill the other? How do we “unbend” the soul? A long-distance walk in the wilderness helps the veteran see the stranger as a fellow, to discover koinōnia. One veteran says, “hiking has restored my faith in humanity and helped me with trust issues.”71 Remember Earl Shaffer coming to understand the kindness of strangers he encountered.72 Alternative therapies falling within religious practice, and especially rituals of pilgrimage, healing journeys, have been my focus. Ross does allude to these alternative religious therapies in her book. She writes concerning Earl Shaffer, “Decades before ‘mindfulness’ became a buzzword used by mainstream therapists, Earl was intuitively a practitioner of this form of therapy.”73 Ross also describes one of the veterans’ renewed vision after his hike, “He believes that all life is sacred.”74 However, once the journey is complete, the pilgrim needs to find a place in the local community, complete the reintegration. Those lessons learned while on the journey need to be practiced as pilgrims find their place in community. As noted early in this chapter, local churches, synagogues, mosques, and other places of worship form organic communities. As explored in chapter 6, David Rodick points to a “‘meeting ground’ or ‘zone of adhesion,’” wherein “we breathe intersubjective, native air.”75 The community is grounded in a “meeting ground.” We also noted



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Gabriel Marcel in this regard where the “here we are” “does not take place in each of the participants, or in a neutral unity encompassing them, but between them in a most exact sense, in a dimension accessible to them alone.”76 Again, this dimension happens in the “meeting ground” where the intersubjective encounter cannot be understood apart from the place that also cooperates. The local place of worship becomes a complex organic interaction, the place where I meet the stranger who becomes my fellow, and together, in that place, we learn to grow in community together. We learn to share. As Ross noted, sharing with others—all aspects of peacetime living.”77 The veteran I met at Lost Pond Shelter in Vermont was sharing his experience with his girlfriend. In this way, veterans are actually participating in healing their communities. We cease living as our fragmented society seems to project us to be, as autonomous agents. Rather, we enter into fellowship, even with the stranger. Many pilgrims, after reaching Santiago de Compostela, acknowledge that their pilgrimage actually begins at the terminus. The Muslim mystic poet, Rumi, writes of such a journey. His story titled “In Baghdad, Dreaming of Cairo: In Cairo Dreaming of Baghdad” finds the pilgrim being called to journey through a dream.78 “In a dream he heard a voice, ‘Your wealth is in Cairo. Go there to such and such a spot and dig, and you’ll find what you need.’”79 After journeying to Cairo and being thrown in jail, the pilgrim comes to realize that his treasure is back in Baghdad. The last stanza of the poem shows what the pilgrim to Santiago is saying, that the journey actually begins at the terminus, “The water of life is here.” That is, at home. “I’m drinking it. But I had to come this long way to know it!”80 One veteran notes that after completing the journey, “I also didn’t feel like I was finishing the AT. I felt like I was starting the rest of my life.”81 The veteran’s desired thing, a healing, is at home waiting, always there in Baghdad. But the pilgrim needed to journey to Cairo in order to discover this truth. Consistent with the various spiritual practices outlined throughout this book that give rise to healing, veterans could benefit by engaging in long-distance hiking on the AT, then returning home and enacting the lessons learned in a community. NOTES 1.  The literature is far too much to cite here. I have chosen four good examples taken from psychology or adventure education: Magdalena Gawrych and Robert Słonka, “Therapeutic Mountain Hiking in Psychiatric Rehabilitation,”  Psychiatria i Psychologia Kliniczna (Journal of Psychiatry & Clinical Psychology) 21, no. 1 (January 2021): 65–70. Olivia Lewis, Jonathan Ohrt, Thomas M. Toomey, Kathryn Linich, Brooke Wymer, and Therese Newton, “A Systematic Review of Nature-Based Counseling Interventions to Promote Mental Health and Wellness,” Journal of Mental

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Health Counseling 44, no. 3 (July 2022): 191–208. Ryan F. Reese, Sabrina Hadeed, Hannah Craig, Alia Beyer, and Marjorie Gosling, “EcoWellness: Integrating the Natural World into Wilderness Therapy Settings with Intentionality,” Journal of Adventure Education & Outdoor Learning 19, no. 3 (September 2019): 202–15. Martin Jordan and Hayley Marshall, “Taking Counselling and Psychotherapy Outside: Destruction or Enrichment of the Therapeutic Frame?” European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling 12, no. 4 (December 2010): 345–59.  2. Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails (Seattle: Mountaineers Books, 2021), 12.  3. Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 13.  4. Ibid., 124.  5. Ibid., 20.  6. Ibid.  7. Ibid., 112.  8. Ibid., 122.  9. Ibid., 55. 10.  Frederick Law Olmsted, “Preliminary Report to the Commissioners for Laying Out a Park in Brooklyn, New York: Being a Consideration of Circumstances of Site and Other Conditions Affecting the Design of Public Pleasure Grounds.” The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, 86–87. 11.  Ibid., 87. 12.  Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 117. 13.  Ibid., 41. 14.  Ibid., 122. 15.  Ibid., 46. 16.  Ibid., 84. 17. Ibid. 18.  Ibid., 46. 19.  Ibid., 45. 20. Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred, 43. 21.  Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 85. 22.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity, 110. 23.  Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 56. 24. Ibid. 25.  Ibid., 159. 26.  Ibid., 115. 27.  Ibid., 101. 28.  Ibid., 102. 29.  Ibid., 159. 30.  Ibid., 115. 31.  Ibid., 124. 32.  Ibid., 39. 33.  Ibid., 52. 34.  Ibid., 105. 35.  Ibid., 54.



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36.  Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage, 95. 37. Joseph Mali, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s New Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Also note Paul Ricoeur’s description of myth, “In losing its explanatory pretensions the myth reveals its exploratory significance and its contribution to understanding . . . its power of discovering and revealing the bond between man and what he considers sacred.” From The Symbolism of Evil, 5. Ricoeur also writes in relation to the symbolic function of myth as opposed to history, a particular myth is not merely a myth, “something less than history” but has “more meaning than a true history.” “The meaning resides in the power of the myth to evoke speculation.” From The Symbolism of Evil, 236. “The symbol gives rise to thought.” “The myth anticipates speculation only because it is already an interpretation, a hermeneutics of the primordial symbols . . .” In the case of the Marine Corps, these stories reveal a sacred bond that the individual Marine comes to realize. 38.  Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 40–41. 39.  Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, 42. 40.  Rollo May, ed., Symbolism in Religion and Literature (New York: G. Braziller, 1960), 20. 41.  Rollo May, ed., Symbolism in Religion and Literature, 20. 42.  Ibid., 33. 43.  Ibid., 22. 44. Ibid. 45.  Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning, 144. 46.  Ernesto Grassi, and John Michael Krois, “Can Rhetoric Provide a New Basis for Philosophizing? The Humanist Tradition,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 11 (2) (1987), 76. 47.  Rollo May, ed., Symbolism in Religion and Literature, 33. 48.  Ibid., 22. 49. Michael P. Graves, “Stephen Crisp’s Short History as Spiritual Journey,” Quaker Religious Thought 81 (1) (1993): 5. 50.  Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 124. 51.  Ibid., 159. 52. Michael P. Graves, “Stephen Crisp’s Short History as Spiritual Journey,” Quaker Religious Thought, 6. 53.  Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 116. 54.  Ibid., 117. 55.  Siren, personal correspondence, August 2002. 56.  Siren, personal correspondence, August 2002. 57.  Siren, personal correspondence, August 2002. 58.  Teach, personal email, August 2003. 59.  Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 83. 60.  Ibid., 85.

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61.  Ross has listed many grassroots programs in her Appendix: Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 209–214. 62.  Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 161. 63.  Ibid., 123. 64.  Ibid., 115. 65.  Ibid., 160–161. 66.  See the following for a list of a sampling of research on forest bathing: Emily J. Flies, Chris Skelly, Sagri Singh Negi, Poornima Prabhakaran, Qiyong Liu, Keke Liu, Fiona C Goldizen, Chris Lease, and Philip Weinstein, “Biodiverse Green Spaces: A Prescription for Global Urban Health,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 15, no. 9 (2017): 510–16. Sus Sola Corazon, Ulrika K. Stigsdotter, Maja Steen Moeller, and Susan Moeller Rasmussen, “Nature as Therapist: Integrating Permaculture with Mindfulness- and Acceptance-Based Therapy in the Danish Healing Forest Garden Nacadia,” European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling 14, no. 4 (December 2012): 335–47. Min Ho Chun, Min Cheol Chang, and Sung-Jae Lee, “The Effects of Forest Therapy on Depression and Anxiety in Patients with Chronic Stroke,” International Journal of Neuroscience 127, no. 3 (March 2017): 199–203. K. Meyer, and R. Burger-Arndt, “How Forests Foster Human Health – Present State of Research-Based Knowledge (in the Field of Forests and Human Health),” The International Forestry Review 16, no. 4 (2014): 421–46. Anna Lena Phillips, “A Walk in the Woods: Evidence Builds That Time Spent in the Natural World Benefits Human Health,” American Scientist 99, no. 4 (2011): 301–2. Kenneth Helphand, “Prescribing the Outdoors: A Model Hospital Garden,” SiteLINES: A Journal of Place 15, no. 1 (2019): 10–12. 67.  Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 148. 68.  Benton MacKaye, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning.” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 9 (Oct. 1921): 325–330. Quoted from http://www.appalachiantrail.org/atf/cf/{D25B4747–42A3–4302–8D48-EF35C0B0D9F1}/MacKaye.pdf. Retrieved November 8, 2002. 69.  Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 48. 70.  Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, 49. 71.  Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 150. 72.  Ibid., 20. 73.  Ibid., 21. 74.  Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 86. 75.  Henry Bugbee and David W. Rodick, Wilderness in America: Philosophical Writings (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 125. 76.  Quoted in Henry Bugbee and David W Rodick, Wilderness in America: Philosophical Writings, 125. 77.  Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 41. 78.  Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī. The Essential Rumi. Translated by Coleman Barks, A. J. Arberry, and John Moyne. New expanded ed. (New York: HarperOne, 2004). 79.  Rūmī, 209.



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80.  Rūmī, 211. 81.  Cindy Ross, Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails, 55.

Chapter Eight

Summiting Katahdin and Coming Home

Climbing out of Gorham, New Hampshire, long-distance hikers approach the final state line. The initial ascent, about 1,500 feet in two-and-a-half miles, would have presented a challenge early in the hike. Now it has become commonplace. After Mount Hayes at 2,555 feet in elevation, the trail rolls over mountains of similar size. Mount Success is the last in New Hampshire at 3,565 feet, less than a mile from the New Hampshire/Maine border at 2,972 feet and 281 miles from Katahdin. The hike will be complete in less than 300 miles, but southern Maine presents the most challenging terrain of the entire AT. I hiked into Maine alone, arriving at the Carlo Col Shelter, less than a mile from the state line, in the late evening. No other hiker came to the shelter that night. In the morning I set out for the notorious Mahoosuc Notch, about seven miles north. I did not want to hike through the notch alone, but there was no other choice, unless I stopped hiking and waited. I did linger at Full Goose Shelter, eating and hoping someone would catch up to me. I eventually hiked down into the notch and started the most difficult mile on the AT. The Mahoosuc Notch is extremely narrow at the bottom and giant boulders create an obstacle course. See figure 8.1. These boulders have fallen here from the heights above, evidence of the ancient Appalachians slowly eroding, boulders calving off from rock faces and tumbling into the depths of the valleys. There is no path in the notch. Hikers simply scramble over these massive stones laying every which way at the bottom. Think of New York City after an earthquake. You’re trying to walk down what was 5th Avenue, but it no longer exists as a street. Instead, large chunks of tall buildings lay in broken folds. You must pick your way through the rubble. See figure 8.2. The sun barely shines down in the bottom and hikers have reported ice deep down between the stones in late summer. When you lay down, prone 309

Figure 8.1.  Mahoosuc Notch, Maine. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick



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Figure 8.2.  Mahoosuc Notch, Maine. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick

on the stones, and you will have to do this during the scramble, the sound of water running beneath rises from the depths. There are more white blazes down in the notch than on other parts of the trail. Hikers must locate a blaze just meters away and pick their way to it. Then locate another blaze, a few more meters away, and again, climb or crawl to it. I fell in the notch several times, once from about six feet. I was trying to negotiate through the rocks, coming to a drop, and I stumbled, plummeting down onto the rock slab below. The weight of my pack made the fall feel worse. I rose to my feet, pain reverberating from my knee and shin. Wearing shorts, I could see the gash as blood ran down my leg. A few meters later, I came to a house size boulder with a blaze painted on it at eye level. Some of the markings in the notch are accompanied by arrows, pointing in the direction of the next blaze. This one didn’t have a directional arrow. I looked around, trying to discover the route. I noticed a small entrance to a hollow under the boulder. I bent down, looked, and discovered a tunnel under the stone. No human made this passage. The enormous boulder rested on irregularly shaped stones below, forming a slight gap between them. See figure 8.3.

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Figure 8.3.  Mahoosuc Notch, Maine. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick

I prostrated myself and crawled on my belly. The mass above me seemed ready to crush me. If the earth shifted, I would be entombed here. Had I walked 1,919 miles to end the journey here? I found the wilderness in this place, the essence of wilderness focused in the vortex of the Mahoosuc Notch. After about five meters of crawling, the passageway became so tight that my pack rubbed on the slab above. I had to crawl backward, find room enough to remove my pack, and then drag it through. This same procedure repeated itself at another point. It took me an hour to complete the mile long Mahoosuc Notch. I was beaten, bruised, and bleeding. I sat down at the base of the Mahoosuc Arm, the next mountain, more than 1,500 feet of elevation gain in a mile and a half, and ate an apple and some peanut butter, my favorite lunch on the trail. I was rattled and exhausted. If I had done this with a companion, we would have bolstered one another. Here was a manifestation of the aesthetic of solitude. The climb up the arm left me breathless. There were no switchbacks. I was told that fire wardens chose the routes when the AT was first constructed. The fastest way to get to a fire is a straight line. So, the AT used to track straight up and straight down these mountains. Most of the AT has been rerouted and switchbacks added. This helps both the hiker and the environment. Erosion is alleviated when the trail switches back and forth. Here at the Mahoosuc



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Figure 8.4.  Trail Magic, Grafton Notch, Maine. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick

Arm, that truth was manifest. The trail here tracked straight up the mountain. The soil was eroded down to bedrock. The sides of the trail showed erosion, earth walls five and six feet high with tree roots protruding. The trail up the mountain was a slot that ranged from four to six feet wide. I would grab some of the roots to keep myself from falling back down into the notch. This is southern Maine. It does this every day. If wilderness is anywhere, it is here. In five more miles, the AT drops down into Grafton Notch, crossing Maine Highway 26. When I arrived, the parking revealed someone doing a hiker feed. A couple of veteran thru-hikers provided surf and turf, grilled hamburgers and lobster. I received the last lobster. See figure 8.4. Here enjoying the feast were about six of my fellows. Where had they been when I hiked through Mahoosuc Notch? These were the first humans I had seen in two days. After eating, I packed up and headed for the Baldpate Leanto, my camping destination. Climbing 1,000 feet in two miles was a breeze. I felt that good, rich food kick in, giving me extra energy. After months of walking on the AT, hikers become very attuned to their bodies. Ingesting a good meal is quickly felt. In the morning, I left the shelter before anyone else woke and climbed Baldpate Mountain, 3,662 feet and 264 miles from Katahdin. The treeline continues to drop as we move north. The balds in the south are not above

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the treeline. They are covered in grasses. Here the earth bed is solid rock. Climbing some of these mountains means walking on great slabs of stone. After a rain, the trail tread becomes slippery. Further north, near Monson and the beginning of the hundred-mile wilderness, the stone is slate. When wet, slate is like walking on ice. After Baldpate Mountain, the AT drops to 1,095 feet in Sawyer Notch then climbs steeply up to Old Blue Mountain at 3,600 feet, 244 miles from Katahdin. For the next twenty-eight miles the trail rolls at elevations of 1,500 to 2,500 feet. The AT then crosses Maine Highway 4, which is nine trail miles east of Rangeley, a popular resupply town. After Rangeley the trail continues in the same manner until Saddleback Mountain at 4,120 feet and 214 miles from Katahdin. For the next five miles hikers remain above 3,000 feet, near the treeline. Spaulding Mountain, at 4,010 feet, is about twelve miles north. The trail drops down to 2,100 feet at the Carrabassett River, where there is a ford. In Maine, many of the river crossings are fords rather than bridges. The winters are very hard on bridges. Crossing rivers can be difficult as rain swells the water’s depth, and these swift streams can sweep hikers off their feet. At Chandler Mill Stream, just before the highway crossing leading to Rangeley, I found a log jam. Dozens of dead trees had washed down the stream, forming a dam. It had been raining, and I was worried that the stream would be too swollen to cross. I saw some hikers I did not recognize trying to use the log jam as a bridge. I forded the stream, not wanting to risk the danger of a log jam shifting while I was crossing, resulting in my body being crushed. From the Carrabassett hikers climb South and then North Crocker Mountains, at 4,040 and 4,228 feet in elevation, less than 200 miles to Katahdin now. Bigelow Mountain and Avery Peak is fourteen miles north at 4,090 feet and 180 miles south of Katahdin. I reached the peak with Jedi and Truckin. It was a brilliant day. The atmosphere was as clear as it gets, not a cloud in the sky. We could see all the way to Katahdin, nearly 200 miles by trail to the north. See figure 8.5. The sight filled us with excitement. We found out later that one of our companions, Sparkplug, who was about a week behind, fell when she was negotiating the trail here. She ignored her injury for the next twenty-five miles. When she stopped at Harrison’s Pierce Pond Camps, Tim, the proprietor, insisted on taking her to the doctor. Turns out that Sparkplug had a broken rib. She stopped hiking for a couple of weeks and then returned to the trail, finishing her thruhike. I met Sparkplug down in Pennsylvania, just north of Duncannon. There was a rock scramble wherein a rattlesnake had nested. I almost stepped on the snake myself. She was about an hour behind me that day and when the snake gave its warning, she stepped backward, stumbled, and fell. She was taken to the hospital after hiking down to the next road crossing. Her arm was broken. She insisted on not having a plaster cast, but only a splint secured by an ace wrap. She was on the trail the next day.



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Figure 8.5.  Looking Toward Mount Katahdin, Bigelow Mountain, Avery Peak, Maine. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick

After Avery Peak, the AT descends to below 2,000 feet for the next thirty miles. The Kennebec River and ferry crossing is 4,90 feet and 151 miles south of Katahdin. Finally, hikers reach Monson, Maine at 1,215 feet and 114 miles from Katahdin, the entrance to the hundred-mile wilderness. I entered the wilderness with Soul Slasher and Truckin. I had been at Shaw’s, a hostel in Monson, where I ate a huge breakfast. We were shuttled out to the trail and started walking together. After lunch, near Long Pond Stream Lean-to, Soul Slasher decided to stop for the day. Truckin and I continued. The weather was turning, and as we climbed Barren Mountain, 2,670 feet, the rain and wind fell on us. Arriving at Cloud Pond Lean-to, we were soaked, and the temperature was hovering in the forty-degree range. I hung my wet shirt and shorts, put dry clothes on, and climbed into my sleeping bag. In the morning, the storm had passed, but the wind was up, and the temperature was still in the forties. I changed into my cold, wet shirt and shorts. Climbing up to the ridgeline, exposed to the wind, I was chilled to the bone. I had to get out my rain shell to break the wind. Through the hundred-mile wilderness the AT does not climb above 3,000 feet until White Cap Mountain, 3,654 feet and seventy-two miles to Katahdin. From the top, if the weather cooperates, a grand view of Katahdin can be had. Truckin and I enjoyed the sight, knowing we were only a few days away.

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After this, hikers drop down into the flats, getting as low as 500 feet at Antlers Campsite, fifty-one miles from Katahdin. In the summer months, this low elevation area has a lot of mosquitoes. I took a class here in 2007 in late June and early July. Coming down off of White Cap Mountain, we were greeted by a cloud of mosquitos. We encountered a few SOBOS who had started their thru-hike just days before. They referenced the area as “mosquito alley.” Black flies are also notorious in this area. When Truckin and I reached the lower elevations, it was mid-September, and we were free from flying blood suckers. We stopped at Crawford Pond for a swim, 1,240 feet in elevation and sixty-two miles from Katahdin. We slept at Nahmakanta Lake that night. I described our experience there in chapter 2. In the morning we climbed Nesuntabunt Mountain, at 1,520 feet, receiving a clear view of Katahdin just thirty-six miles away. The morning clouds hovered over the lake below, a stunning view. Rainbow Lake is eight miles north and the AT skirts the long shoreline. During my 2007 class, we camped at Rainbow Spring Campsite, twenty-six miles from Katahdin. On that trip we experienced rain that day. I jumped into the lake and swam to the middle, where I encountered a couple of loons who swam right up to me. After exiting the hundred-mile wilderness, Truckin and I went on to Abol Bridge Camp-

Figure 8.6.  Mount Katahdin Reflected in the Pond at Abol Bridge, Maine. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.



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Figure 8.7.  Drinking from Thoreau Springs, Mount Katahdin, Maine. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

ground for the night. Many of our friends were there that night. We could see the mountain reflected in the lake there, just fifteen miles away. See figure 8.6. Truckin and I encountered Miss Janet here.1 We enjoyed the evening together before our last full day of hiking on the AT and summiting Katahdin. The next day we only had a ten-mile hike to the Birches Campsite, where we would spend our last night on the AT. We were the only two hikers on the trail that day and had the campsite to ourselves until late that night. A few NOBOS came in after a night hike. They had a late-night party, but Truckin and I slept through it. In the morning, as we left camp, the partiers lay on the ground around the burned-out campfire. Empty beer cans were strewn around the camping area. The last 5.2 miles presents the most challenging climb on the entire trail. The first and last mile involve little elevation gain. Katahdin Stream falls is 1.2 miles from the camping with nearly a 500-foot elevation gain. From here the trail begins a very steep ascent. There are many challenging rock scrambles. At a couple of points rebar has been driven into stone to create hand and foot holds. From the falls to the Tablelands is an elevation gain of 3,100 feet in 2.4 miles. Thoreau Springs is in the Tablelands and provides a refreshing cold drink of water. See figure 8.7.

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Figure 8.8.  Summit of Mount Katahdin, Northern Terminus of the AT, Maine. Source: Photo taken by Kip Redick.

The springs are one mile from the summit, 641 feet of ascent left. Baxter Peak is mile 0.0 and its sign rests at 5268 feet of elevation. I have summited Katahdin five times, twice in 2003, twice in 2007, and once in 2011. Each time I witnessed great emotion exuding from the hikers who were completing their thru-hike. Truckin was laughing and crying for the final one hundred meters. He had no control of his emotions as they spilled out on the mountain. We sat at the top, savoring this time and place for a little over an hour before other hikers began to arrive. It was a clear day, and we could see far into the distance for 360 degrees. See figure 8.8. We then descended. Climbing down was as challenging as ascending. At the bottom my legs were shot, knees ached, but satisfaction pervaded. We shuttled to Millinocket and spent the night at the AT Lodge, where we shared the evening with others who had completed their long-distance hike. Some of the group reveled in their accomplishment, others were retrospective, remaining quiet. We took the shuttle out to Medway the next morning. Here we boarded a bus for Bangor. I flew down to Tennessee, continuing my research on the AT, getting back on the trail at Clingmans Dome and walking to Springer Mountain. I wanted to discover the experience of a SOBO.



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LEAVING THE TRAIL AND COMING HOME Reaggregation refers to the initiand’s reentry into a status-occupying mode of behavior, no longer “betwixt-and-between.” The AT hiker has a homecoming, a movement back into social structure where the pilgrim is recognized as having accomplished the quest. The ATC labels those AT hikers who journey the full distance of the pathway “2000 milers,” but those who belong to the group call themselves thru-hikers. Whether traveling the full distance or journeying for some lesser extended distance, the pilgrim returns to society a changed individual and a member of a new group. This reentry has its own challenges. In 2010, after finishing the Camino de Santiago with my students, I sat at a café table with and British woman and fellow pilgrim. We shared a few words about the experience of walking across Spain, and she started to weep. We sat without words for some time when suddenly she burst out, “I just can’t process it.” She repeated this one more time. I sat with her, holding her hand in silence. We shared communion in completing a life transforming journey and there were no words, just raw emotion. I knew that she would go home to London and over time find a way to articulate clearly what the journey meant, how it changed her. But in that moment the unmediated emotion and the intimate bond we shared had a power that could not be captured in words so close in proximity to the end of the journey. Her slow processing of the meaning of the journey would take weeks, months even. Those friends and family who remain at home, and in whose company pilgrims return, will not be able to empathize with the intense processing, the discovering of meaning in reflecting on the journey. If the pilgrim does not find space for processing, the beautiful life altering journey will be buried, thematized and sedimented in catchy phrases meant to communicate to those who have never journeyed. Some of those themes conceal the actual memories under this sedimentation. Recall Gadamer’s claim that language conceals hiding the truth.2 Recall my own attempt to disrupt the intended meaning in my description of kenotic walking.”3 During my own journey on the AT, I became aware of this tendency to bury our memories in the sedimentation of catchy phrases. The rocks of Pennsylvania, already mentioned in chapter 3, are an example. Some characterize Virginia as less mountainous than other states, which is far from the truth. Others remember Georgia and North Carolina as much more difficult than they are because of the lack of physical conditioning when hikers begin their journey. It is no wonder that pilgrims and long-distance hikers experience post journey depression. The meaning of the hike gets buried. Coming home can be difficult. In 2004, I was at Saunders Shelter in southern Virginia. I met Froggy Pete, a sixty-six-year-old thru-hiker. He was actually on his second thru-hike.

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The year before, 2003, he came to the AT in the wake of losing his lifelong companion, his wife, to cancer. The AT was to be a journey of healing. He struggled the whole way. He said it was the most challenging thing he had ever done, overwhelming to his whole person. He wanted to quit on most days but friends on the trail encouraged him and he finished. We discovered that he was climbing Katahdin on the same day as me on October 9, 2003. He went home, actually he was near home, as he is a resident of Maine. He did not want to think about the AT again, just leave it in the past. During the winter, he began to experience an urge to be back on the same trail that nearly killed him. By spring he was itching to get back out there. So he did. I met him 480 miles into his second thru-hike. That day on Katahdin, October 9, 2003, as I descended the rock scramble just below the Tablelands, I saw a friend laying on the rocks one hundred meters down from me. Baltimore Jack lay on his back.4 As I drew closer, I noticed a gash on his lower leg, blood covering his shin. Just a few meters downhill from his rock bed, there was a pause in the steep descent where the stones formed a small saddle before the ridgeline dropped again. There were two other persons, a man and woman, sitting in the saddle. I approached Jack and asked if he needed help. He called out in his usual slightly gruff way, “I’m fine, she’s the one whose hurt.” He pointed toward the woman sitting there in little saddle. Just then, the woman attempted to stand. As she reached her feet, her body crumpled, and falling back to earth, her head struck one of the large stones. It sounded like a watermelon being crushed by a baseball bat. Baltimore Jack yelled, “I told you to stay down.” This woman, who was a section hiker, had imbibed some alcohol on top of Baxter Peak, celebrating with friends. On the descent, she lost her footing and twisted her knee badly. I asked Jack how she would be rescued. He indicated the impossibility of carrying her down the mountain given the required semi-technical navigation of the rock faces. She would have to be extracted via helicopter. However, the protocol required a park ranger to climb the mountain, assess the situation, and call for a helicopter. I continued down the mountain and saw the rangers ascending. They were looking for the injured woman. After reaching Katahdin Stream Campground, I went to nearby Daicey Pond to spend the night. As I reached the pond, I saw a ranger who was listening to his communication device. I asked what was happening. He said there was a woman needing rescue on the mountain. I acknowledged this, telling him my story of the situation. I joined him on the dock where we could see Katahdin silhouetted in the night sky. His communication device was on speaker. We listened to the helicopter pilots attempting to rescue the woman. The winds were blowing at sixty miles per hour up there now. The helicopter made pass after pass, pilots attempting to hold it steady in the gale, trying to get this woman off the mountain. This story serves as an extended



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symbol, communicating the difficulty of being on and leaving the AT. Some hikers need rescue in their reentry to life off trail. Other hikers might serve as helicopter pilots, helping to bring their friends from the trail and facilitating a new way of living. Most fall in between these two extremes. Just as those of us at the AT Lodge—Truckin, El Flaco, and others—expressed our feelings of accomplishment in divergent ways, so those who return from their journey process it uniquely. SUMMING IT UP Throughout this phenomenological exploration of the Appalachian Trail through the lens of pilgrimage, spiritual rambling, or sacred journey, I have drawn attention to the unique contribution that America’s wilderness has made. Clearly, wilderness has played a strong role as a significant space in ancient mythic journeys. Myths arise from human imagination, in the interplay between human beings, extra-human beings, and their environmental milieu. Myth provides frames for ritual and symbolic action. In the wake of an emerging landscape aesthetics and the colonization of America by religious pilgrims, wilderness began to be reimagined. Americans such as James Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau engaged in mythopoeic writing, while Thomas Cole, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Frederic Church, Asher Durand, and Albert Bierstadt depicted this reimagined wilderness. John Muir took to the wilderness on long rambles and contributed to its reawakened mythic quality. At the same time that America’s National Parks began to be established, Benton Mackaye imagined a trail that spanned the Appalachian Mountains. But in 1948, Earl Shaffer hiked the entire length of the AT in one go, reimagining this wilderness space as the site of a potential walking ritual of healing, a way to shake off the trauma of WWII. A long-distance hike on the AT has become for many, a pilgrimage through the wilderness, an American Camino. Our exploration has shown that as hikers share their journey with wilderness constituents, they are brought together in mutual preservation. Their journey and the fellowship manifested in this peregrination eclipses all preconceived notions and gives birth to reimagined relations. As Thoreau alluded, many hikers discover the preservation of us all, human and extra human, in the wild. Some are initially motived to hike in response to environmental concerns, a leading issue of our time. They want to discover ways of simplifying their lives, to connect with core values. But as their journey unfolds, they realize much more. They discover a profound and intimate fellowship through a complex of aesthetic interactions, the landscape transformed into a living habitat. During encounters within the living habitat, the hiker discovers that the constituents are in their own dwelling places. These places may be

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experienced by hikers as spatially liminal because the hiker is not home. Hikers are located between the raw wilderness and domestic landscapes. The trail is the in-between place. Raw wilderness appears in the distances where the trail does not traverse. Landscapes, on the other hand, are experienced through an aesthetic wherein the hiker is the center, the origination of the perspective. In contrast, liminal spatiality gives the hiker a path through wilderness wherein she is not the center and far from home. But sometimes the liminal distance is collapsed. The hiker happens into a mystical encounter where communion interrupts the walk. Hiking, in this way, manifests an ecstatic interaction. The sojourner feels she has become one with the constituents of surround. In this light, we discovered that these aesthetic interactions mirror the practices of monastics and mystics, religious folk who sought solace in wilderness or in the solitude of an intimate community. Common to both spiritual rambling, or kenotic walking, and the practices of monastics and mystics is in giving and receiving hospitality. Fellowship in its most palpable form involves hospitality. Through this complex of aesthetic interactions and in giving and receiving hospitality, the wilderness rambler discovers communication through various sense ratios: olfactory and tactile senses just as readily as the visual and auditory. Along these lines, through an exploration of kenotic walking, we discovered through Gadamer’s statement, that “in truth we are always already at home in language, just as much as we are in the world,” needs modification.5 Likewise, Mugerauer’s statement, “language and environment always already are given together,” should be reconsidered.6 While kenotic walking happens, the hiker engages in a communication that precedes language, a mystical participation. Afterward and in reflecting on the experience, the hiker does return to language, and both environment and language are given together. If attended carefully, the hiker realizes a new relation. The aesthetic configuration of the hiker’s circuit with the surrounding milieu changes further as she goes into her homeless journey through the wilderness. Fellowship becomes a fully embodied communion, a profound sharing that results in a reimagined community. I open myself to the stranger. I give way and let the stranger speak from beyond my net of conceptions. The following examples illustrate this summation of our exploration of the American Camino. They are from registers or journals. The trail name is listed, along with the year of the hike. Some examples are from long-distance section hikers and others from thru-hikers. Percy, 2002. I did not start the trip to be a pilgrim to visit the Holy Places of Palestine like early Christians set out to do or even to run away from past sins and burdens as many passengers felt it time to do. I did not consider the dangers or the ludic time (play time) that would take place. I just wanted some adventure and free-



Summiting Katahdin and Coming Home 323

dom. When the hike was over I realized that I did not become a liminar on a pilgrimage but I started out as a liminar on a pilgrimage.

This reflection shows that a non-religious motive for hiking in the wilderness can be transformed. It also mirrors what Rumi wrote about the pilgrim who travels from Baghdad to Cairo and back. “The water of life is here.” That is, at home. “I’m drinking it. But I had to come this long way to know it!”7 Percy had to start an adventure that was not a pilgrimage in order to become a pilgrim and then take that home. Pseudo G, 2002. I still think about the AT every day. I smile at sunsets. I daydream about campfires, walking alone for hours. . . Now, I appreciate nature, hitchhikers, and a bit of dirt, too.

Pseudo G has learned to give place to strangers, to welcome them on their own terms, true hospitality. The spiritual practice of walking on the Appalachian Trail has been shown to be similar in many ways to the religious pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela known as the Camino de Santiago. Truly, a long-distance hike on the Appalachian Trail is an American Camino. I’ll leave this last journal entry as the final word in our exploration of the American Camino and its contribution to the spiritual practice of walking. Teach, 2003. I am compelled to include my own reflections on the trail and the communitas which I experienced. In no other situation, thus far in my life, have I ever been affected to the extent in which the AT has changed my life. The following is an excerpt from my trail journal a week after returning to society: Nothing has ever had such a profound effect on me [the AT]. I love that I did it alone but wasn’t lonely- that I didn’t have any friends with me, but came home with many friendships. If I were to die tomorrow I’d die knowing that I have been given a small piece of knowledge, insight into the world around me and that has offered me peace and understanding which is so profound that my entire perspective of the world and more importantly myself, as an individual and within the world, has changed.8

NOTES 1.  Miss Janet was referenced in chapter 3 in a quote from a trail register as Ms. Janet. She is a trail angel, who travels with the largest bubble of thru-hikers giving support. 2.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Man and Language.” Philosophical Hermeneutics, 92.

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3.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Man and Language.” Philosophical Hermeneutics, 92. 4.  Baltimore Jack was referenced in chapter 3. He was both a hiker and a trail angel. 5. Gadamer, “Man and Language,” Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 63. 6.  Mugerauer, “Language and the Emergence of Environment,” Dwelling, Place, and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World, 58. 7.  Rūmī, 211. 8.  Teach, personal email, August 2003.

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Index

Abraham, 85, 191–93, 196, 225, 227 Abram, David, 273. See also social media Achaia marmarica, 197. See also James, Saint Acts (of the Apostles), 197. See also Christ; James, Saint Addison, Joseph, 45. See also Burke, Edmond; Homer; Ovid; Virgil adequate idea, 160. See also Plato Adonai, 190. See also midbar; Moses; Torah; Revelation; Yahweh Aeneas, 16, 42, 286, 298. See also journey, spiritual; mythology; sojourn aesthetic: interactions, 90–1, 321–22; object, 47–8, 99; orientation, 32–53; sojourner, 55, 58; of solitude, 76–7, 249, 251, 253, 276, 300, 312 (see also monastics); tourism, 39, 43, 65; value, 45, 47, 163 aestheticians, 45, 48, 75 aesthetics, landscape 45, 53, 76, 99, 321. See also landscape tradition, English albergue, 198, 200, 215–16, 218–219, 223, 269: orisson, 203; donitivo, 215 alterity, 44, 104, 107, 158–59, 162–63, 180–81, 259, 261 animal laborans, 168. See also homo faber

Anthony, St., 57. See also monastics; Egypt anticity, celestial, 157, 174. See also Thoreau, Henry David aphorism, 23, 64, 78, 175–76, 180 Apollo, 285 apophatic: contemplation 178; ethic, 180; spirituality, 176–77; theology, 160–61, 177. See also negation; via negativa; aporetic, 157–59. See also culture; individual; social; wild; wilderness Appalachian: Mountain Club (AMC), 116, 125; Mountains, 2, 10, 23, 27, 50–2, 100–02, 122, 321; Trail Conference (ATC), 51–2, 160, 291, 319; Trail Conservancy, 51, 119; Trail Museum, 121 Aquinas, Thomas, 169 Arendt, Hannah, 167–68, 170. See also homo faber Aristotle, 99, 165–67 Arnold, Matthew, 81. See also poetry asceticism, 239. See also Turner, Victor, and Edith askesis, 77–8, 80, 275. See also pilgrimage attitude, natural, 89, 158–59, 237 Avery, Myron, 3, 51, 160

335

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axis mundi, 26, 190–91, 228. See also Ricoeur, Paul

Index

Carroll, Peter N., 225 Casey, Edward, 12 Cavanaugh, William T., 261, 272 Backhaus, Gary, 12 Celtic, 28, 29, 196, 222. See also Ball, Martin W., 86 Camino de Santiago baraka, 127–29. See also Leeuw, Charlemagne, 30, 206, 208, 210 Gerardus van der Chaucer, 101 Barfield, Owen, 25–6, 243–45, 264, 297 Christ, 9, 31, 129, 197, 209, 224, 252, Bataille, Georges, 139 256–58, 266. See also Acts (of the beautiful and the good, 55. See also Apostles) kalós kai agathós chronos, 137. See also kairos Being and Time, 237. See also Church, Frederic, 321 Heidegger, Martin; Ricoeur, Paul Coates, Peter, 164–69, 173. See also belonging, 20, 26, 86, 88, 90, 174, 235, natura 268, 296. See also koinōnia Coffey and Dunn, 197, 216 Berger, Peter, 236 Cole, Thomas, 48, 226, 321 Bernini, 54 communion: of belonging, 68, 86, 90, bethel, 85–6, 192. See also Jacob 99, 147, 254; of creatures, 27, 29; Bible, 189, 225 ecstatic, 53–4. See Teresa of Ávila, Bierstadt, Albert, 226, 321 Saint; elements of, 31, 224; of hikers, blaze, white, 11, 43, 115, 124, 311. See 129, 150, 159, 255, 274, 319, 322; also terminus mystical, 91, 235, 253, 256, 265–67; body-subject, 55, 68–70, 75, 88, 171–72. with nature, 169, 253; terminus of, 56 See also Merleau-Ponty, Maurice communitas, 5, 29, 32, 101, 106, 147–51, bohuw, 225. See also tohuw 224, 294–96, 300, 323: community; Boone, Daniel, 226 Appalachian Trail, 14, 101, 136, Bradbury, Ray, 77 144–45, 149, 151, 227, 291, 294, Bradford, William, 225 322; civic, 100, 237, 295, 302; as Brown, David, 28, 86. See also liminality communitas, 69, 101, 147–48, 174, Brown, John, 119 293. See Buber, Martin; nature of, 86, Bruni, Leonardo, 99 16, 251–52, 268, 296, 303; political, Bryant, William Cullen, 49 99 (see also Aristotle); religious, 55, Buber, Martin, 5, 69–70, 101, 103, 105, 68, 77–9, 135, 253, 322 107, 127, 176, 179, 259–60, 270 conservancy, 51, 119, 153 Bureau of Land Management (BLM), constitution, 165, 167, 188. See also 175 phúsis Burke, Edmond, 45–7, 226 Constitution, United States, 4: Amendment, First, 4; The Camino de Santiago, 4, 13, 17, 23, 27, Establishment Clause, 4 32, 53, 68, 76, 140, 187–88, 196, 199, Cooper, James Fenimore, 226, 321 233, 246, Cox, J. Robert, 226 269–70, 319, 323. See also James, Creation, 43, 57–8, 166, 170, 214 Saint; pilgrimage creation, mythic, 26. See also Campbell, Joseph, 27 mythopoeia Canaan, 11, 191 Creator, 177



Index 337

Cronon, William, 33n1 Cropsey, Jasper Francis, 226, 321 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 239–40, 245, 247–51, 259, 263 cult of the picturesque, 46 dance: of flow, 253 (See also koinonia); of life and death, 138; of spatial inhabiting, 22, 148, 252–55. dasein, 242, 259. See also Heidegger, Martin Derrida, Jacques, 128–129 desacralized, 27, 188 desert fathers and mothers, 78. See also Egypt; monastics dialogic, 14, 128, 159, 273 Divine, 54, 56, 235, 259, 287: action, 186; hospitality, 181; love, 80; Majesty, 54, 264–65; oneness, 70, 259; power, 127; release, 159 domestication, 43, 207, 252. See also tunnel, green Douglas, Justice William O., 53 dromenon, 136. See also rite; ritual Durand, Asher, 48, 226, 321 EarthBody, 12; See also implacement Eco, Umberto, 53 ecological, 14, 18, 68, 161, 249 ecosystem, 16, 18, 21, 49, 76, 90, 110, 180 ecotherapy, 285, 288, 301. See also Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Egypt, 189–91, 193–94, 196: culture of, 189, 193; exodus from, 225; Israel in, 181, 193; landscape of, 194; Mesopotamia and, 191; monastics in, 57; religion of, 191. See also St. Anthony; creation; desert monastics; Moses Einfuhlung, 106, 171. See also MerleauPonty, Maurice Eisenberg, Evan, 11, 172, 191 Eliade, Mircea, 5, 27, 188, 190–92, 226, 228

Elijah, 82 Ellul, Jacque, 214 embodied: action, 20, 22–3, 26, 187–88, 239, 271; being, 19–21, 107; experience, 12, 18, 49, 91, 150, 158–159, 290; participation, 2, 247; practices, 18, 24, 224, 249; spirituality, 51, 81, 322 embodiment, 3–4, 19–20, 23, 57, 224. See also meaning-making Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 167 enactments, 243–44, 297 enfleshment, 4, 12, 57. See also embodiment; monastics Enlightenment, 4, 166, 168 epistemology, 86 erēmīta, erēmitēs, erēmos, 76. See also hermit Eshel, Amir, 85 ethic, 140, 174–76, 179–81. See also Golden Rule Eucharist, Christian, 31, 224 existential, 3: indicators, 137; meaning, 24, 26, 172, 294; metaphor, 172; mutuality, 150–51; nature, 4; situation(s) 25, 81, 172, 244; expedition(s), 48, 50 extra-human: beings, 3, 25, 105, 174, 179, 267, 269, 273, 276, 302, 321; co-inhabitants, 178; constituents, 104, 179, 275; inhabitant(s), 88, 103, 179; surroundings, 289 fantasies, 297. See also symbol; symbolization fasting, 77, 79, 195, 223, 267–69. See also monastics; pilgrim fauna, 3, 14, 69, 162, 179–80, 249. See also flora feast, 136–40, 147, 196, 200, 220, 313. See also fellowship; festival; pilgrimage fellowship, aesthetic of, 68–9, 75–6, 289, 321; understanding, 13, 70, 139, 160, 322; hiker, 2, 9–10, 13, 31, 55,

338

Index

99, 119, 125, 130, 134, 136, 144, 148, 275, 303, 321; as koinōnia, 9, 68, 99, 103, 129, 254, 256; with the wilderness, 11–2, 68, 74, 90, 103, 158, 180–81, 288 festivals, 130, 136–37, 140–41, 196. See also feast field, co-constitutive, 12 flora, 3, 14, 58, 69, 162, 179–80, 249. See also fauna Francis of Assisi, Saint, 168 Frazier, Charles, 292 Frome, Michael, 33n1, 161

Grossman, Dave, 287 Grove, Noel, 31 Gurwitsch, Aron, 15

haáretz, 171–72 habitat, 15, 89–90, 104, 178–80, 195, 226, 252, 321 habitus, 15, 178–79 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 136–137, 139 Hayden, Ferdinand, 48, 50 Hector, Kevin W., 177. See also apophatic theology Heidegger, Martin, 4, 24–6, 165, 170, 171, 181, 214, 237, 242, 244 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 18, 25, 241–43, Hellenism, 195. See also gospels, 245 wilderness Galicia, Spain, 23, 30, 196–97, 222. See hermeneutic, 5, 15, 237 also Camino de Santiago; James, hermit, 32, 43, 55, 76, 78, 197. See also Saint Anthony, Saint; monastics garden, 43, 50–1, 83, 126, 136, 141, 169, Herod Agrippa, 196. See also James, 214 saint Garvey, Ed, 53. See also hiker hesychia, 251, 253, 276. See also Gatewood, Emma “Grandma,” 52, 142, Merton; quies 160. See also Laker, Dorothy hierophany, 188, 190–92. See also Moses Geb (earth god), 172. See also Egypt; hike: thru-, 2–3, 13–5, 23, 28, 39, 41, Nut (sky goddess) 52–4, 59–60, 63, 64, 67, 72, 111–14, genius loci, 3–4, 14. See also 116, 121–22, phenomenology 124–25, 129–30, 134–36, 140, 142–43, Gennep, Arnold van, 28 145, 147–149, 151, 160, 164, 234, geological, 3, 14, 69, 122, 161 248, 275, 287, 291–92, 295, 313, 316, gestalt, 12, 15, 19, 24 318–20, 322; your own, 23, 78 Gilgamesh, 16, 42, 286, 298 Hiker, 1–5, 7, 9–10, 13, 15–6, 20–4, Gilpin, William, 47 27–8, 31, 40, 54–5, 58–9, 61, 63, Glasscoe, Marion, 80 67–9, 76, 101–02, 104, 106, 108–09, Golden Rule, 176 111, 114–15, 117–19, 121, 123, 125, Gombrich, E. H., 45–6 127, 130–31, 133–35, 138, 143, 145– Good, 56. See also telos 46, 148–49, 151, 159, 162, 163, 174, gospels, 195, 197 176, 178–80, 227, 234–35, 237–41, government, 299: federal, 4, 110, 119, 247, 251–52, 254–56, 258–59, 260, 299 262, 265, 268, 271–73, 275, 286, 299, graffiti, 140, 140 300, 309, 312–13, 319–22: trash, 140, Grassi, Ernesto, 25–6, 81, 243–44, 264, 249 297 hiking, long-distance, 11–2, 16, 63, 65, Graves, Michael, 298 83, 86, 100, 102–03, 130, 237–38, Greenia, George 85, 191, 195, 224, 252 240, 244–47, 251,



Index 339

253, 263, 265, 270–71, 273, 283, 285–86, 290–92, 295–96, 303. See also peregrination; pilgrimage Hobbes, Thomas, 166–67 Hocking, William Ernest, 242 Holy Grail, 30 Holy Other, 68, 70. See also fellowship, aesthetic of Homer, 45, 292, 298 homo faber, 167–68. See also animal laborans Horeb, 82, 190–91. See also Moses Hosea, 267–268 hospitality, 73, 79, 89–90, 100, 111–12, 126–129, 145–57, 162, 181, 218, 220, 269, 322–23. See also trail magic; trail angels Hostel: Green Mountain House Hiker, 141; Kincora, 83, 133, 143–44, 145. See also hospitality Hudson River School, 11, 48, 226 Huizinga, Johan, 270–71 Husserl, 159 icon, 74–5, 212, 253 ideatum, 160 immersion, embodied, 51, 259 implacement, 12 incarnation, 4, 9. See also Christ India, 42, 164 indigenous peoples, 169, 179 inhabiting, 20, 22, 68–9, 75. See also ecosystem; wilderness intentionality, 69, 75, 159, 242, 257, 261, 266. See also mindfulness; welcoming of awareness intersubjective, 2, 15, 49, 76, 139, 178, 242, 259, 302–03 Isaac, 191–93, 225, 227: God of, 85, 190. See also Abraham; Jacob

James, Saint, 13, 53, 68, 196–99, 211– 12. See also Camino de Santiago; pilgrimage James, William, 235 Jefferson, Thomas, 167 Jerusalem, 196–97, 249 Jesus, 42, 77, 82–3, 177, 194–96, 204, 227, 252, 257, 267–68 John the Baptist, 77, 177, 194–95, 215 Johnson, President Lyndon, 3 journey, spiritual: hiking as, 5, 16, 27, 99, 126, 163, 251, 270, 285, 290, 298; mystical, 32, 55, 298–99; pilgrimage as, 5, 28, 30–1, 126, 236, 271; versus aesthetic tourism 39, 42. See also pilgrimage Julian of Norwich, Saint, 80 Jung, Carl 162 kairos, 137. See also chronos; time kalós kai agathós, 55. See also beautiful and the Good kalós, summetría, alethéia, 56. See also Plato; Socrates Katahdin, Mount, 3, 7, 10, 13–4, 59, 84, 86–9, 89, 102, 110, 121–26, 147, 174–75, 247, 258, 309, 313–18, 315–18, 320 kenosis, 255, 257–59, 261, 265, 275. See also liminal; liminality khôra, 19, 22, 30, 242. See also Plato Knight, Richard Payne, 47 koinōnia, 9, 69–70, 74, 88, 90, 99, 103, 129, 253–54, 256, 266, 302. See also mystical participation; Buber, Martin Köster, 165–166. See also phúsis

Laker, Dorothy, 52, 160. See also Gatewood, Emma landscape tradition, English, 45, 48. See also aesthetic object Lane, Belden C., 19, 25, 57–8, 79, 81–2, Jackson, William Henry, 48 177–79, 193–94, 228, 261–62 Jacob, 16–7, 83–86, 191–93, 225, 227: Lanigan, Richard, 55, 264. See also God of, 190. See also Abraham; Isaac aesthetic sojourner

340

Index

Langer, Susanne, 241–42, 296–97 Leave No Trace, 174–80. See also Tunnel, Green Lebenswelt, 16, 236. See also pilgrimage Leeuw, Gerardus van der, 5, 15, 55–6, 81, 127, 137–38, 187–88, 242, 253–55 León, 30, 18, 220–21. See also Camino de Santiago Leopold, Aldo, 64–5, 75–6 Levardi, Tom, 146. See also hostels Levinas, Emmanuel, 5, 9, 44, 69, 72, 75, 104, 127, 158–59, 162, 174, 242, 249, 256–59, 261, 264, 266, 302 Lewis, C.S., 18–9, 26, 80, 91, 105, 165, 170, 172, 214, 240. See also Coates; Natura limen, 28 liminal, 28, 126, 129, 138, 140, 290 liminality, 5, 28–30, 90, 101, 129, 136, 138–39, 147, 159, 194–95, 212, 221, 224, 228, 273–74, 289, 290, 296, 298–300. See also pilgrim; pilgrimage liminars, 29 liturgy, 56, 222, 224. See also pilgrimage; rite lived-body, 12, 151 locus amoenus, 43–4, 48 logos, 170. See also poiesis longing, 55, 57, 127, 176. See also Socrates Longinus, 45 Lorrain, Claude, 45–7, 74, 163: Claude glass, 47, 74, 163 ludic, 136, 322

Marion, Jean-Luc, 74–5, 80, 89, 128–29, 158, 258 Marx, Karl, 167 May, Rollo, 297 McLuhan, Marshall, 20 meaning-making, 10, 12, 18–9, 22, 28, 159, 162, 189, 238, 243, 294–96, 298, 300 meditation, 80, 180, 218, 228, 247, 249, 251–52, 261–62, 265, 288. See also hermit; monastics; quies memory, 3, 151, 239–43, 245, 248, 255– 56, 259, 265, 285. See also flow Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4, 19–22, 24, 44, 55, 68, 106–07, 122, 158, 171, 244, 264 Merton, Thomas, 78–9, 250–52, 271. See also hermit; monastic Meseta, 30, 216, 218–20, 222, 269. See also Camino de Santiago; James, Saint midbar, 163, 189–90, 225. See also wilderness Midpoint Sign, 120, 121 mindfulness, 250, 261–62, 302: welcoming of awareness meditation, 261–62. See also engaging the body; intentionality Minimum Impact Camping, 175. See also Leave No Trace Land Ethics mode of being, 27, 29, 69, 192 monastic, 29, 78, 218, 251, 253. See also Anthony, Saint; hermit; quies monastics, 5783, 249, 251, 322. See also desert fathers and mothers Moors, 196, 198–99, 210–11 Moran, Thomas, 48, 226 Mackaye, Benton, 3, 51, 99, 160, 321 Moses, 189–94, 196, 227. See also Egypt makom, 85–6, 88, 192. See also shalom Mother Nature, 168, 171 manna, 190, 195. See also Egypt; Moses Mugerauer, Robert, 18, 23 Manwaring, Elizabeth, 46–7 Muir, John, 11, 48–9, 51, 164, 169–70, Marcel, Gabriel, 69, 242, 259–60, 303 226, 321 margin, 28. See also liminality, limen Muller, Max, 26 Maria della Vittoria, Santa, 54 mutuality of encounter, 3 Marines, 283, 285, 288, 291, 295–96 mysterium, 194. See also tremendum



Index 341

mystery, 127, 137, 160, 188, 195, 200, 288. See also The Wholly Other mysticism, 30, 53–5, 70, 176, 212, 251, 263 mystical: encounter, 80, 91, 177, 271, 322; participation, 9, 69, 251, 254–56, 260, 266, 276, 322; union, 251, 253–54, 256, 259; writings, 55, 57, 181, 264, 298 myth, 25–6, 29–31, 56, 80–1, 157, 161– 62, 170–71, 188–90, 194, 223–25, 296–97, 321 mythology, 19, 26–7, 157, 160, 162–63, 170–71, 181, 188–89, 192, 194–95, 225, 286 mythopoeia, 26, 170, 172. See also Thoreau mythopoeic, 18, 25–8, 80, 171–72, 321 narrative, 30–1, 40. See also myth Nash, Roderick, 33n1, 68, 161, 194 National Forest, 113, 116–17 National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), 175. See also Leave No Trace Land Ethics National Park: Great Smoky Mountain, 107–08, 110; Service (NPS), 52, 175; Shenandoah, 72, 110–11, 118. See Leave No Trace Land Ethics National Trail System Act, 4, 52 natura, 165, 169, 171. See also Coates; Lewis Navarra, Foothills of, 207, 209 Neels Gap, 40–1, 100–01 negation, 160, 250, 265, 267, 271. See also apophatic theology; via negativa New Testament, 9, 177, 195 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 45 No-Trace Camping: Wilderness Manners, 175. See also Leave No Trace Land Ethics NOBO, 40, 102, 111, 131–33 nómos, 166

non-attachment, 262. See also intentionality; mindfulness; welcoming of awareness Norberg-Schulz, Christian, 3–4, 17 Nut (sky goddess), 172. See also Geb (earth god) objectification, 47, 67, 74, 99, 159, 163, 261. See also aesthetic object objectivism, intellectual, 69 Odysseus, 16, 42, 286, 292, 298 Oelschlaeger, Max, 189. See also midbar Olmsted, Frederick Law, 12, 48–51, 288 ontological, 27, 53 ontology, 69–70, 86 Ortega y Gasset, Jose, 43–4, 47, 75, 162–163 Otto, Rudolph, 81, 161, 188, 194 Ovid, 45 painters, 11, 43–5, 48–9, 163, 169, 226 painting, 44–50, 55, 163, 172, 192, 218. See also aesthetics, landscape Pan, 194–195. See also myth Paul, Saint, 9, 99, 212, 256–59, 266 peregrination, 9–10, 321. See also pilgrimage peregrino(s), 210, 216. See also pilgrim personification, 165–166, 172 phenomenological, 4–5, 14, 44, 17–18, 103, 122, 158, 164, 238, 274, 321 phenomenologists, 4, 44 phenomenology, 5, 13, 70, 89, 158, 241, 264 Philippians, epistle/letter to the, 9, 256–57, 266 philosophers, 9, 166, 168 phúō, 173 phúsis, 165–67, 173, 179. See also Köster physiognomy, 15 pilgrim, 4, 17, 23–4, 28, 30–31, 42–3, 56, 126–127, 140, 145, 157, 191, 228, 236, 247, 252,

342

Index

261, 270–72, 302–303, 319, 322–23; Camino de Santiago, 196, 198–200, 203, 207–08, 210–212, 215–219, 221–224 pilgrimage, 5, 13, 16–8, 23, 27–32, 41–42, 52–6, 68, 77–8, 101, 106, 126–27, 136, 140, 158, 187, 189, 191–92, 195, 233, 236–37, 239, 249, 251–52, 261, 263, 265, 269–74, 286, 289, 293, 295, 298–299, 302–03, 321, 323; Camino de Santiago, 196–200, 202, 210, 212, 215, 224 place(s): sacred, 5, 32, 187, 189, 192, 196; wild, 11, 43, 47, 51, 57, 163, 226, 286 plaque, 7, 8, 9–11, 68 Plato, 19, 25, 56, 81, 243. See also beauty; kalós kai agathós; kalós, summetría, and alethéia; paideia; Socrates poetry, 1, 25, 27, 81, 88, 140, 169, 226, 237, 244–45 poiesis, 170. See also logos Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), 285–86. See also ecotherapy; Marines Poussin, 46–47 pretender, 42–43. See also hiker Price, Uvedale, 47 Protagoras’ maxim, 181 Pseudo-Dionysus, 57. See also embodiment; Plato PUDS (pointless ups and downs), 67 Pyrenees, 23, 30, 199–201, 201, 204, 206–09, 207

refuges, 199. See also albergue religion, 4–5, 30, 188, 191, 212, 234–36, 267, 285, 299 revelation, 4, 17, 23, 75, 80–1, 86, 190– 91, 194, 244, 265 Ricoeur, Paul, 25–7, 30, 189, 224, 236–37 rite, 136–137 rites of passage, 5, 28 ritual, 28–31, 128, 136–40, 174, 178, 191, 212, 223–24, 234, 248, 250, 252, 263–65, 267, 271, 286, 290, 294–96, 297–99, 321 Rodick, David, 242, 302 Roland, 30, 206, 213. See also Charlemagne Romanticism, 169 Rosa, Salvator, 46–7 Ross, Cindy, 285, 287–89, 291, 294–95, 298–99, 301–03 Rumi, 303, 323

sacrifice, 139–40, 192, 223, 267, 286, 296. See also Abraham; Isaac; monastics Santiago de Compostella, 30. See also James, Saint; pilgrimage SBNA (Spiritual but not affiliated), 233 SBNR (Spiritual but Not Religious), 233–35 Schmidt, James, 99 Scholasticism, 81, 161, 188 Scotland, Highlands of, 272–73. See also Camino de Santiago; James, Saint; pilgrimage quest, 42, 53, 55, 57, 173, 179, 237, 319. Shaffer, Earl, 3, 52, 160, 287, 302, 321 See also embodiment; Plato; Pseudo- shalom, 86–8, 268–69, 276. See also Dionysus makom quies, 250–253, 275. See also Merton Sheldrake, Philip, 28 Shepard, Paul, 26 rambling, spiritual, 12, 140, 233, 235–36, Shepherd-Farmer, 189 269–73, 289, 321–22 Sinai, 190, 194, 225–26. See also Moses rapture, 54, 249, 255, 263–64, 266, 271. slackpacking, 111–12, 144 See also mysticism Smokies, 100, 110–12, 130, 150 reaggregation, 28, 319 Snyder, Gary, 140–41, 178



Index 343

SOBOS, 316 social antistructure, 29, 147, 228, 300 social media, 83, 269. See also tether, technological societas civilis, 99. See also Bruni, Leonardo Socrates, 55–6 sojourn, 15, 20, 42, 53, 68, 173, 189, 195–96, 200–01, 225 sojourner, 16, 23, 55–7, 65, 91, 201, 252, 322. See also hiker; pilgrim soul, 45, 54, 56–7, 76, 78, 80, 82–83, 87, 159, 209, 253, 263–66, 288, 292, 299, 302 space, sacred, 26–7, 187–89, 191–92, 194, 196, 226–27 spaces, wild, 12, 24, 44, 48–49, 58 Springer Mountain, 7–8, 10–11, 14, 39–40, 59, 61, 65, 68, 84, 100, 106– 07, 110, 118–19, 125, 130, 134, 141, 145, 318 standing-reserve, 181. See also Heidegger, Martin survivalist, 159, 162–63, 179 symbol, 29, 49, 57, 140, 149, 196, 221, 228, 296, 298, 321 symbolization, 297. See also fantasies

tether, technological, 185n125. See also social media thematizing, 69–70, 241, 256, 263–64 Theodomir, Bishop of Iria Flavia, 196–197 theologian, 80–1, 160–61, 177, 263 theology, 160, 177, 264 Thich Nhat Hanh, 261–262 thin places, 28 Thoreau, Henry David, 11, 42, 48, 157, 159–60, 162, 166, 226, 238–39, 245, 252, 321. See also anticity, celestial; aporetic relation; wilderness time of grace, 137–38. See also chronos; kairos tohuw, 225. See also myth; wilderness Tolkien, J.R.R., 26, 127, 170. See also myth tour, 41–3, 47, 209. See also hiking; pilgrimage touring, 16, 42–3, 47, 53, 58, 65 tourism, 16, 39, 41–3, 63, 65, 74. See also journey, spiritual, versus aesthetic tourism trail: angels, 101, 125, 127, 149; magic, 14, 125–27, 129, 150, 313; transsubjective language, 18. See also hospitality Tao-Te-Ching, 180 transcendental, 106. See also Thoreau, Tausigg, Jeff, 141 Henry David Taylor, Mark, 136 transcendentalist, 226. telos, 56, 167. See also beauty and the transfiguration, 77, 197. See also Christ Good trauma, 283, 286–88, 290, 292–93, 321. templum, 26. See also axis mundi; space, See also post traumatic stress disorder sacred (PTSD); Marines tempus, 138. See also chronos; kairos; tremendum, 188, 194. See also mystery; time of grace Wholly Other Teresa of Ávila, Saint, 53–4, 68, 86, tsiyah, 194. See also wilderness 251, 263–65, 271. See also mystical tsisyiy, 194 communion; mystical encounter; Tuan, Yi-Fu, 22–23 mystical union tunnel, green, 24, 43, 58, 67, 103–104, terminus, 7, 11, 14, 39, 56, 134, 174, 207, 218, 251–252. See also 303, 318 domestication

344

Index

Wallace, Mark I., 236. See also Ricoeur, Paul U.S.: Fish & Wildlife Service, 175; Wholly Other, 176, 188, 261, 266, Forest Service (USFS), 131, 175. See 271 also Leave No Trace Land Ethics Wilderness: Ethics, 175: hundred-mile, 14, 86–8, 124, 147, 246, 314–16; Vaux, Calvert, 50 Manners, 175. See also Leave No vehicle of Mystery, 127. See also Trace Land Ethics hospitality; Tolkien, J.R.R.; Trail wildness, 11, 48, 157–59, 166, 169–70, Magic 226 Venus, 196 Winemiller, Walter, 52 Via: Aquitana, 218; Crucis, 221, 221–22; Wirzba, 67, 165, negativa, 177; de la Plata, 219; 173 Romana, 30 work for stay, 116 Virgil, 45, 298 Virgin Mary, 204 Yahweh (YHWH), 190–91, 193. See also Adonai walking: kenotic, 240–41, 253, 256, yellow blazers, 42 258, 261–63, 265–66, 289, 319, 322; yogi-ing, 121 spiritual, 4, 28, 30, 173, 234–35, 238, 247, 253, 269, 275 ziggurat, 191–92 Turner, Victor and Edith, 16–7, 28

About the Author

Dr. Kip Redick is professor of philosophy and religion, past chair of the Department, 2013–2022, and director of the Pre-Seminary Studies Program at Christopher Newport University (CNU). He is a Marine Corps veteran and has been teaching at CNU since 1991. In 2002, he started leading an annual class on the Appalachian Trail and has led other study-away classes: circumnavigating Mount Rainier on the Wonderland Trail; the hundred-mile wilderness in Maine along the Appalachian Trail; treks on the West Highland Way, Great Glen Way, and Isle of Skye in Scotland; six pilgrimages on the Camino de Santiago from France; across Spain; and to the Atlantic Ocean. His professional interests include pilgrimage studies, spiritual journey, spirituality of place, environmental studies, aesthetics, and film studies. His specific research interest centers on the study of wilderness trails as sites of spiritual journey.

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