Читать книгу Walking Toward Peace - Cindy Ross - Страница 11

Four and a half years of army service, more than half of it in combat areas of the Pacific, without furlough or even rest leave, had left me confused and depressed. Perhaps this trip would be the answer . . . [the hike] would be a kill or a cure; it would either make me worse or make me better.

—Earl Shaffer’s journal (1918–2002)

I FINGERED THE SMALL BLACK leather journal in my palm and brought it up to my nose to inhale its scent. More than seventy years old, the journal’s soft cover was worn by the fingerprints of a great man, a hero, and a leader. Earl Shaffer, the first person to hike the entire Appalachian Trail in a continuous stretch, carried this journal on his epic journey in 1948, through snow, rain, and baking sun along a huge mountain range. In the archives of the Smithsonian Institution’s American History Museum in Washington, DC, I searched through Earl’s writings to learn his story as a veteran walking America’s iconic trail, attempting to heal. A fellow Pennsylvanian and an Army veteran of World War II, Earl got on the trail to walk off his war. He is the father of long-distance-hiking culture, my pen pal, and a dear friend who directly influenced me as both a writer and a backpacker.

As a communicator in the Army Signal Corps, Earl served in the Pacific Theater and struggled with bouts of depression. According to his biography, A Grip on the Mane of Life, written by David Donaldson, Earl once admitted to a Pennsylvania soldier that “if it wasn’t against the Bible, I’d commit suicide.” In 1947 he returned home from the war feeling hopeless and broken-hearted. He had lost his childhood friend Walter Winemiller in Iwo Jima. Since their adolescence, the two had tramped the Pennsylvania woods until they were both deployed in 1941. They had planned to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail when the war was over. For two years Earl wandered about feeling unsettled. Attending college on the GI Bill was not an option Earl entertained because, as he wrote, “he feared it would force him into the same mold as everyone else.”

About that time, Earl read in a magazine that the Appalachian Trail had suffered serious neglect since he and Walt had first sprouted their dream. During the war, maintenance had ceased, and many considered an end-to-end hike impossible. No one had ever thru-hiked the trail, and now it was in real danger of disappearing. Earl saw it as a personal challenge. “I’ll do it to get over the Army,” he later wrote about the decision. “I’ll take pictures and keep a notebook so I could write a book about it.” He hoped his hike would generate publicity and rekindle interest in restoring the entire Appalachian Trail. He set off alone, bringing Walt along in his memory.

AFTER WORLD WAR II, SUFFERING VETERANS WERE TREATED A LITTLE better than their World War I counterparts. Some veterans in that earlier generation experienced truly grisly responses to their trauma: shot by their own for cowardice or enduring electric shocks applied to their necks, cigarettes put out on their tongues, or hot plates pressed at the back of the throat to make them snap out of their distress.

The suffering of World War II veterans was better understood by doctors as a mental disorder they called “shell shock.” Passed in 1946 and signed into law by President Harry Truman, the National Mental Health Act included the creation of VA medical centers that treated mental health problems associated with war and were the start of psychological counseling for veterans. Electric shock was then considered the best available psychiatric therapy for treating depression and disturbed behaviors. Antipsychotic or antidepressant medications did not yet exist, nor was there advanced technology like MRIs (magnetic resonance imaging) or supermicroscopes that help doctors understand and evaluate psychological and physical trauma to the human brain.

Over the years the term “shell shock” was replaced with “combat stress reaction” (CSR), also known as “battle fatigue.” But it wasn’t until 1980 that the American Psychiatric Association’s third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders named the mental condition as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This new diagnosis came about because the field of psychology and psychotherapy had grown and new research had occurred. After the Vietnam War and the enormous numbers of veterans returning with PTSD, fresh research and the use of new technology in treatment improved our understanding of the human brain and how it reacts to and changes as a result of trauma.

Although many advances have been made in the past few decades, PTSD continues to carry a weighty stigma for today’s veterans. Back in Earl Shaffer’s time, few veterans sought help for their condition. Instead, Earl attempted to walk off the war along the length of the Appalachian Trail. His plan was to move north with the spring, “with no definite day by day goals but never tarrying long, as weather and terrain permitted.” He hoped an early start from the south would give him at least six months to reach “the timberline of New England.” As he wrote in his journal: “And now the time had come. Why not walk the army out of my system, both mentally and physically, take pictures and notes along the way, make a regular expedition out of it. It will benefit me at a time of very low ebb.”

THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL WAS THE DREAM OF FORESTER BENTON MACKAYE, who also conceived the idea of the Interstate Highway system in the 1940s and collaborated with Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the US Forest Service, to establish the country’s system of national forests and parks. The trail was completed and designated by the Appalachian Trail Conference (ATC) in 1937 (renamed the Appalachian Trail Conservancy in 2005) after twenty-five years of planning and construction. Today, the ATC is a confederation of many local hiking clubs that organize thousands of volunteers to build and maintain the trail as well as 225 three-sided log shelters positioned approximately a day’s walk apart. Shelters offer protection from weather and are usually located near springs to provide drinking water for the night. The war effort had taken away the trail maintainers, and while servicemen wreaked havoc on US enemies overseas, the green briar and the blowdowns wreaked havoc on the Appalachian Trail.

Armed with compass, roadmap, a pith helmet, and his army gear, Earl began the trail in Georgia and headed north, often walking sockless in his army boots. He searched for the two-by-six-inch white blazes painted on the trees that pointed north. According to his journal, Earl spent much of his journey searching for the trail, sometimes looking for signs that it even existed. He wrote about these challenges, and between the lines there was evidence of how nature seemed to be healing him.

Earl described his first night in North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains: “I fell asleep to the lullaby of the wind in the trees and the somewhere calling of a whip-poor-will.” He wrote about the countless chance meetings with locals who administered “trail magic”—feeding him, giving him a bed for the night, and providing much-needed conversation and company. These encounters fed Earl’s soul. When he stepped into a dark old-growth forest to make his camp for the night, he “heard for the second time in [his] life the awesome sound of a giant tree falling somewhere in the stillness.” When he found his way at night to Speck Pond in Maine and the comfort of a shelter by following the sound of the singing tree frogs, he wrote: “Ever since, when the homeland meadows are turning green and the silvery lilt of those tiny peepers livens the night, I think of the time when they helped me ‘come to port’ on the Long Cruise.”

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. Despite the challenges of an unmarked and unmaintained trail, weather extremes, and physical hardships, hiking on the Appalachian Trail was right where Earl wanted to be. He was coming to port, walking back to peace, to himself. In his journal he never mentioned what occurred in the war; rather, he focused on the present moment, working on the task at hand, walking to Maine, his war memories fading into the past.

Decades before “mindfulness” became a buzzword used by mainstream therapists, Earl was intuitively a practitioner of this form of therapy. The state of having an open, expansive awareness and living in the present was associated with Buddhists at the turn of the nineteenth century. These religious men sought a heightened state of consciousness, but Earl was mindful out of necessity. On the trail he needed to stay acutely aware of his surroundings, as well as what lay at his feet, to find his way. He realized he could not expect to reach Maine if he hiked mindlessly.

THE PAGES OF EARL’S LEATHER JOURNAL ARE COVERED WITH EXPRESSIVE cursive handwriting, scribed with a fountain pen that bled through some of the pages, probably when the night was damp. In the back of the journal are Earl’s poems—he was a poet as well as a long-distance backpacker. His feelings, his grief about the war, his joy and love of the natural world pour forth through his poetry. It is possible to follow his thoughts while he was composing, since he crossed out words in search of better ones to describe his feelings. Reading these poems, you can almost smell his musty tent and the wetness of the Appalachian woods, as he likely set down his words by candlelight.

Go ye out to the mountains

Far far from a town

Stretch yourself on the clean forest floor

Gaze aloft through the canopy

To frown and remember your troubles no more

The Smithsonian archives contain a cover letter Earl wrote to Doubleday Books introducing his poems for possible publication. He did not think of having the story of his Appalachian Trail journey published at that time, but he had hopes for his poems, which he described to the publisher in detail:

Many of these verses were written under the most difficult conditions, often by firelight, flashlight, candlelight or moonlight, and sometimes key phrases were scribbled blindly during total blackout. I carried the ever-growing collection with me all over the Pacific, in and out of customs, on shipboard, in planes, hunched in mosquito bars, on mail sacks, in pup tents. The results are not calculated to be sophisticated but rather are meant to record a portion of the intricate pattern of global conflict, as seen by a soldier who was a minute part of it.

Through poetry, it seems, Earl processed the emotions and the experiences he had endured in combat. He grieved the situations, experienced the anger, the horror, the sadness, and the guilt, rather than remaining stuck in avoiding uncomfortable emotions. “My purpose in writing,” he further explained in the letter to Doubleday, “is to help provide some understanding of what I and my buddies experienced, in the hope that such knowledge will be of value in shaping a better future.” Unfortunately, his poems are not included in the Smithsonian collection. The archive historian I spoke with had no idea what had become of them. However, his Appalachian Trail memoir, Walking with Spring, was eventually published by the Appalachian Trail Conference in 1982.

Even though Earl and I had been pen pals for more than a dozen years, I didn’t meet him in person until 1995, when he was seventy-five years old. He looked closer to fifty—strong, well-built, glowing from a life of living healthy—and he had maintained the same weight for fifty-five years, never needed a doctor, and took no medications. At his home in rural York County, Pennsylvania, Earl raised chickens and goats, kept bees, grew his own organic food, and maintained an orchard. A hand-dug, spring-fed pond was his water source, and a hand-laid-stone road through a swampy field led to his property. Living a simple lifestyle close to the earth and working the soil with his hands, Earl found a therapeutic way to live.

Earl innately realized it back then, although research had not yet discovered that an antidepressant microbe, Mycobacterium vaccae, that lives in soil boosts happiness levels in humans. The microbe mirrors the effect that mind-altering drugs like Prozac have on neurons in the brain, causing levels of cytokines (cell-signaling molecules) to rise. Gardeners manipulate the soil, which releases the bacterium they touch and inhale. The cytokines stimulate the release of serotonin and norepinephrine, two neurotransmitting chemicals that make people relaxed and happy. The druglike effects of this soil bacterium were accidently discovered in 2004 by Mary O’Brien, an oncologist at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London. She created a serum from the microbe in hopes of boosting the immune system of lung cancer patients. Instead, it boosted their moods.

Neuroscientist Christopher Lowry at the University of Colorado Boulder, along with Lisa Brenner, the director of the Veterans Affairs Rocky Mountain Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center in Denver, are conducting research using Mycobacterium vaccae with veterans suffering from PTSD and mild traumatic brain injury. Today, national nonprofit programs such as Warriors That Farm, Veteran Farmer Coalition, and Veterans to Farmers help vets heal through farming, gardening, and beekeeping. Earl was onto something, but the science was still a mystery at the time.

Besides growing much of his own food, Earl earned a great deal of his income from peddling goods at flea markets, a livelihood that paralleled his beliefs in recycling and reusing. In his youth, he paid for his clothes with money made from trapping furs, often with his friend Walter, and selling his handiwork. The freedom he found walking off the war from Georgia to Maine became such a need that he devised ways to support himself and weave that freedom into his everyday life.

Earl and I had a lot in common. After I completed my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 1979, we wrote long, handwritten letters to each other. Hiking the trail had coaxed the writer out of me, and as it had been for Earl, the trail was a great source of inspiration. I shared the manuscript of my first book, A Woman’s Journey on the Appalachian Trail, with him, and he offered generous feedback. Handwritten in calligraphy and illustrated with 125 ink-and-charcoal drawings, that book was published in 1982, the same year as Earl’s Walking with Spring, and both are still in print.

The Appalachian Trail Conservancy’s publisher, Brian King, told me that for years Earl would stop in at ATC’s headquarters whenever he was in the area. The two men would sit and chat, and Earl would still tear up, decades later, when he spoke about the loss of his friend Walter. Perhaps what was most therapeutic for Earl after hiking the trail was how he designed his life. He had realized that finding a sense of purpose larger than himself was critical for healing. It is especially important for those who suffer with depression, which often accompanies PTSD, along with low self-esteem, finding little to no pleasure in anything, and holding at best a dim sense of hope for the future.

After his journey on the Appalachian Trail, Earl went on to build, maintain, and relocate the trail; construct shelters; organize trail clubs; and share advice with new and fellow hikers. Hiking the trail gave Earl his life back, and in turn he devoted his life to the trail. In 1965, feeling “restless and at loose ends,” Earl successfully hiked the entire Appalachian Trail a second time. And at the age of seventy-nine, on the fiftieth anniversary of his first thru-hike, he hiked it a third time. A lot of trail magic was extended to him on that third hike, for Earl had since turned into a trail hero. Earl died five years later, after a lifetime of paving the way for long-distance hikers, many of whom are veterans.

THE DESK ON WHICH I WROTE THIS BOOK WAS A GIFT FROM EARL. IT SITS in the hand-hewn log cabin that my husband, Todd, built for me. During a visit to Earl’s home, Todd and I were invited to explore his barn of refinished antiques and found a perfect American chestnut table with thick turned legs that he had stripped of paint. Countless times, I’ve slid my hands over the table’s smooth wooden surface, knowing that Earl’s hands rubbed oil into its grain. Since Earl thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail in 1948, more than twenty thousand hikers have completed the same journey. He helped to create a whole culture of people, including America’s veterans, who go to our trails seeking health, rejuvenation, and peace on their own terms. The trail provides.