Walking Matters Beyond Fitness

Most episodes of Why Walking Matters: The Science Explained focus on research and the science behind walking. But this episode is different.

Today, we explore a powerful coming-of-age story set on the Appalachian Trail — a story about uncertainty, growth, identity, and the unexpected ways walking can change us.

Because sometimes walking isn’t just exercise.

Sometimes it becomes reflection, transition, and transformation.

In this episode, I read and reflect on Coming of Age on the Appalachian Trail from Backpacker Magazine.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome back to Why Walking Matters, The Science Explained. I'm Tatiana, your host. Most episodes of this podcast focus on research, behavior, and the science behind walking. But sometimes the most powerful explanation for why walking matters is a story. Today's episode is different. It's about growing up, about uncertainty, about movement changing more than just your body. And it's about the Appalachian Trail, a place that has transformed people for generations. Today I'm reading Coming of Age on the Appalachian Trail from Backpacker magazine. It's thoughtful, reflective, and captures something I think many walkers understand deeply. Sometimes walking isn't about fitness. Sometimes it's about becoming someone new. I hope you find it as interesting as I did. Trail stories from Backpacker dot com coming of age on the Appalachian Trail. From this trip I thought self reliance might grow. If it did, exploring would not be far behind. Parents through hiking with their kids isn't just a social media age phenomenon. In this nineteen eighty one narrative from the Backpacker Archives, Jeffrey Codswell relates the story of a family hike up the Appalachian Trail with his and his wife's six-year-old son Michael in tow. It's a fascinating, occasionally harrowing look into life on the AT forty years ago and raises questions about the benefits and the hardships of a childhood on the trail. Adam Roy, Editor in Chief What would you think of hiking the Appalachian Trail? I asked Rena. On her face appeared the same expression I had seen several years before when I told her I wanted to sail a homemade Polynesian canoe across the Pacific Ocean. It's been done, she observed, but I was ready for that. Not by anyone like Michael. Her expression slipped a notch. Michael? Sure, why not? Well, he's terrified of elevators and insects and anything that bonks in the night. He's thin and timid, and he's six years old. Good start. I had thought about all those things, and they were in large part why I wanted to make the trip. We'll just ask him, okay? Her smile returned. Sure. She knew he would say no. I smiled too on the inside. Ida already asked him. The idea became a plan, then a project, and I was delighted. Through hiking the Appalachian Trail had been done, as Rena said, by lots of people, but not many families had through hiked the twenty one hundred miles together, and no six year old had ever done it. If Michael completed the six month journey, he would walk into the record books. That was an appealing prospect. But there was something else involved. Michael was intelligent, normal, and loving, but he was timid and failed to explore many of life's new offerings. From this trip I thought, self reliance might grow. If it did, exploring would not be far behind. So our long walk took shape, formed most strongly by my own enthusiasm, and aided by the mind shriveling heat of the Miami summer. By the time the spring approached, we were counting days on the calendar. I have not mentioned thus far that none of us had ever backpacked. At the time I did not see that as a major obstacle. We read some backpacking books, and the methodology seemed obvious. How hard after all could walking be? We learned the answer to that question quickly. On Springer Mountain, the first ten miles of the Appalachian Trail, we discovered a major design failure in our backpacks. They had to be carried. Mine weighed sixty pounds, Raina's was thirty five, and Michael's was eight. They were more than enough. City soft, strangers to pain, we trudged along in our private miseries, learning the first commandment of backpacking. Carry nothing extra. That climb took us ten hours. In the evening, as we ate, I said, twenty miles a day might be a bit much. Nicely casual, a kind of just to see what your thoughts are remark. Raina groaned. Michael was too tired to move his lips. Maybe four a day, she said. Four has a nice short sound. We can do it that way, though. Why not? Snow later on in New England. It'll close the trails. We have to get there first. They nodded and kept on eating, but I did not feel as though they really heard my words. I was too tired to press the issue, and that night, too sore to sleep, I was afflicted with a hard case of the woods worries. On the trail at night, especially deep into night, woods worries harry your mind when it has none of the clamor and foolishness of the city to distract it. You focus clearly on matters of real import. In other words, and that can keep anyone awake. What for instance were we going to do if we could not hike our daily quota? What was I going to do with Michael, who in one day had elevated whining to a new level of artistic expression? What could I do for Rena, who suffered magnificently in silence? How on earth were we going to cover the two thousand remaining miles of rugged trail? As I lay there, I was not sure we could, but I finally fell asleep with that comforting reassurance that things always get better. The next weeks proved how inestimably wrong human intuition can be. Things did not get one bit better. They deteriorated rather rapidly. Our physical condition hobbled us. We became walking wrecks with cherry red blisters all over our feet and knotted muscles and fatigue fogged brains. We had emptied our packs of clutter, but only the trail could tear clinging fat from our bodies, and it did, day after painful day with relentless efficiency. In thirty days it stripped twenty pounds from me and the count went on. Fat was not the only thing stripped away. Illusions began to slew off at an alarming rate as well. We had expected the Appalachian Trail to be an idyllic path through golden glades and flower sprinkled meadows and past emerald waterfalls. We were prepared for wilderness, pristine and silent. It was not. As we traveled, it became apparent that we were part of a vast parade heading north. The trail overflowed with bombing packs of all colors, and these were serious folks, driving hard for Maine, walkers of the twenty miles a day or die school. They flowed past us constantly, making us feel not only crowded but slow. Of the first sixty days on the trail, we spent only two out of sight and hearing of other hikers. And wilderness. Our unhappy discovery was that the Appalachian Trail was just not wilderness anymore. This will seem heresy to those who have never explored our populous east on foot, but simple pressure of human numbers has made the forests busy. The trail crosses roads and constantly runs near towns, and you can almost always hear the growls of civilization. We kept going, but these things bore down on us as heavily in their own ways as the sheer fatigue of pushing day after day up to and beyond the limits of physical endurance. There was little fun. We would rise before dawn, eat hastily while the sun rose, pack up pots and gear, and head off for as many miles as we could hope to make. At day's end we camped and ate, too numb to taste the food or talk much about the things we had seen. It was hard labor, and none of us liked it much. We would probably have been able to endure it, the physical part, but for the boar and the rattlesnake, the boar first. We had settled into the Spence shelter in North Carolina to wait out an early spring snowstorm. Michael grew restless and went out for firewood. Minutes later, a blood chilling scream cut the snow. Certain that some ultimate trail horror had befallen him, we rushed from the shelter. He was standing in a clearing not far away. His eyes were squeezed shut and he was still screaming. Three yards from him a wild boar, unquestionably one of nature's great uglies, was scratching its rump on a log and watching Michael. We froze. Neither of us had weapons, and we did not want to startle the boar, but the encounter obviously shook it less than Michael. Moments later it ambled away, intent on its own boar business. Back in camp, I tried to explain in best calm father tones how the warty thing was just wild pork chops on the hoof. I wanted a small laugh for my line, but there were only sniffles. That day we made few miles, and not many more the next. The experience had obviously unnerved Michael, and his fear was not easily dispelled. It carried over into his walking and made him agonizingly slow wherever the slightest hazard presented itself. Still, it might have been alright except for the rattlesnake. We were walking near Hot Springs, North Carolina and surprised a four foot timber rattler sunning itself across the narrow trail. Both Michael and Raina stepped right over it without seeing it. I came along third in line and spotted it just in time because it looked tired of having heavy boots whizzed by its delicate head. I could not blame it for that and gave it a wide berth. We walked away from the snake, but we could not walk away from the residual uneasiness such an encounter leaves. We had heard the unpleasant buzz of disaster. Although rattlesnake bites rarely kill adults, they can be fatal to children. No one said anything, no one had to, and after that we walked with a new unwelcome companion, fear. It came to seem as though a design worked against us. Still in North Carolina, we were crossing Round Bald near Elk Park. A thunderstorm caught us on top of the bald mountain. It was so fierce that we couldn't hear each other speak. Lightning struck all around us, and we could feel the shock through solid rock. We could not run because the footing was so slick. There was, as they say, nowhere to hide. It was an unsettling experience and on top of the recent close calls, particularly ill timed. After that, our mileage began to slip, and whatever fears I harbored about main snow quickly disappeared, replaced by new ones. We were falling farther and farther behind schedule. Michael was sullen, Raina was suffering. The days were lengthening, which meant more time for walking, and fear for our schedule made us irritable rather than fast. Without really saying it aloud, we all began to believe that the trail had failed us. Too many days went by like that, and I began to feel less humorously inclined toward the wood's worries. They were cutting into my sleep, which was bad, but they were doing something worse as well, whispering to me that we might not finish this walk. I did not like that, and after one particularly long day decided it was time to be done with it. Around the dirty dinner pots, as evening chill nibbled at us, I said So how are we doing? They knew it should be better, and they knew that I knew it. Michael, in particular, showed the hurt because he knew the question was aimed at him. His boots were falling off his feet, his pants were tattered, his legs hurt, and his face showed the signs of impending breakdown. I resented that. On the trail I had begun to feel as though we were towing Michael behind us like one of those wave bound stingies you see astern of sailboats. The effort was a strain for him as well as for us. We're doing all right, Michael said, without enthusiasm. We're way behind schedule. I know it was not easy. His face took on that peculiar, milky quality that precedes tears, and Rena too, seemed about to cry. I felt cruel enough as it was, for having dragged them over rocky mountains through storms and freezes and fifteen mile days, but the trail had worked its way inside me, and I hated the thought of quitting. Yet the terrible strain of all the miles covered and the weight of miles as yet unwalked was undoing us. I could see it in their faces, and I knew they could see it in mine. The trail had sucked our energy, whipped our spirits, we were bottomed out. I don't see how we can make it this way, I said. Maine will be buried long before we get there. The trails will be closed off. What about money? Raina asked. I had been thinking about that too. Our reserve cash was nearly gone, and we were not yet halfway. An infinite variety of petty expenses had cost more than we imagined, another obstacle. I don't know, I said. Raina threw her tears and Michael with an odd expression I had not seen before. So I said and waited. Michael sniffed, and his eyes glistened. The pain of hundreds of miles of hard trail began to work through his face. It was not pleasant to watch, but it was fascinating, like a film sequence where makeup artists add years and years to a youthful actress's face. You can't stop, Michael said, in the strangest voice, almost commanding. What? I wasn't sure I'd heard him correctly. Raina too was staring at him. I said you can't stop. His intensity was shocking. There was fierce protest in his voice. Neither of us had expected it, but we knew what he felt, and I understood. He wanted to be a two thousand miler. He had come far enough to know what the trail demanded in return for its prize, and now he was demanding the child the chance to pay its price. You want to keep going? I asked him. We have to walk faster. We won't be able to help you or wait for you. If you can't keep up, you'll have to catch a Miami bus. It was blunt, but there was no time for delicacy. You walk as fast as you want, he said, and that was that. He was speaking for all of us, and telling us how it would be. All right, I said. Michael, fighting for an ideal we had lost, had made the decision for us, and in so doing, had pushed us all over an important threshold. In that singular moment, we became three adventurers, not just two parents with a child. We had learned perhaps the hardest lesson of all about the outdoors, that adventure has many faces and not all of them are pleasant to behold. We moved on and walked into spring, entire mountainsides erupted with color, red trillium, violets, purple ironweed, white locust, dogwood, blood root. Trees shot out clouds of leaves, and animals appeared in droves, nesting junkos, squirrels, browsing deer, night rustling raccoons. Quitting was never again a serious consideration. We encountered obstacles, seventy miles per hour winds, and minus fifty degree temperatures on Mount Washington, for instance, but were always able to see beyond them. The walk finally took us eight months and we finished three days before Christmas. But of course we were not really finished. It is never as simple as that. Things had changed and would never be the same. I was fifty pounds lighter, Raina was tan and slender, nearly beautiful. Michael lost not a pound the entire trip, but he was hard and fit, and his reward was even greater. It was captured best, perhaps in a conversation with an official of the Appalachian Trail Conference in his offices after our through hike was over. What did you learn from the trip? He was asked. He thought nearly five minutes before answering. I learned, he said, that anytime I can't do something, all I have to do is try harder. Precious knowledge, hard won by a six year old man. That was coming of age on the Appalachian Trail from Backpacker magazine. One thing I love about stories that Like this is that they remind us walking is really just physical. A long walk can become a reset, a transition, a way of understanding yourself differently. And while most of us may never through hike the Appalachian Trail, I think the deeper feeling is familiar. That sense that movement creates clarity, that walking changes the pace of thought, and that sometimes the simple act of continuing forward changes you. Now I know some people might find it controversial to hear a story about a six-year-old on the Appalachian Trail for eight months, but even that angle to the story makes it interesting conversation. If this episode resonated with you, be kind, share it with someone who loves walking, hiking, or trail stories. And if you enjoy the podcast, you can follow Why Walking Matters The Science Explained on your favorite podcast platform. Or you can connect to Why Walking Matters The Science Explained at whywalkingmatters.com. Until next time, keep walking listeners.