Seventeen dollars and a train ride out of New York City left me in Pawling, New York.
My backpack felt light, and I floated out of town, feet barely skimming the asphalt. After too many months sedentary in Mexico, staring at a laptop and trying to build a future, it felt good to be moving again, even if I had no idea what I was doing.
On the road walk out of town a coyote crossed in front of me, unconcerned by the cars. It emerged from the tall white Queen Anne’s Lace crowding the guardrail, a trickster at ease in both wilderness and suburb. My spirit animal, reminding me that the line between worlds is always thin.
Two and a half miles along Route 22, then another six on trail to Wiley Shelter. It felt like a steady climb, five hundred feet of elevation was enough to leave me sweating, lungs straining in my out-of-shape body. But every turn of trail came back to me from fifteen years earlier. The bend of a hill. The edge of a field. The worn shape of exposed rock underfoot. The Appalachian Trail was the first place I ever thought of as home. The first place I felt like I belonged.
I night-hiked the last miles by flashlight, swallowed in the canopy’s own kind of darkness. By the time I reached the shelter the spring was dry. I hadn’t thought to check the water update, and I’d skipped the water sources earlier because it was already dark. Half a liter left, gone in a single gulp I hadn’t known I needed until it hit my lips.
At the shelter a Ukrainian man and his son had started a fire long before I arrived. When they saw the water source was dry, they ordered a case of bottled water on Uber Eats, delivered to the trail. Not exactly remote camping, but the AT has always had a reputation for pizza delivery at lean-tos, and I was grateful when they shared.
I ate peanut butter M&M’s for dinner and again for breakfast. A lemonade electrolyte packet fought off the cramps that knotted my calves through the night, muscles twitching from the repair work already underway.
Despite, or perhaps because of the challenges, it felt good to be back on trail.
#appalachiantrail #wandering