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CHAPTER 4

TOM GATHMAN

US MARINE CORPS, 2006 – 2010

THE FIRST THING THAT STRIKES you when meeting Marine veteran Tom Gathman is his happy-go-lucky nature. His goofball antics, infectious sense of humor, and frequent laughter are not typical personality traits of a combat veteran. How can this Marine, who served two tours in Iraq, during the most intense time of the war, appear so unscathed? His first deployment was in 2007. On foot patrol at a security post, he was run ragged doing intense, exhausting, grueling work. On his second tour (with his buddy Adam Bautz, profiled in the preceding chapter) Tom performed clandestine operations in a surveillance and target-acquisition platoon. He saw some horrible shit in Iraq and did some things he isn’t proud of, but he appears to have figured out the way to happiness. In a roundabout way, the Marines led Tom to the trail and the life it provides.

In high school Tom was on a path of self-destruction. As young as thirteen, he began running with a bad crowd; in fact he was the ringleader. At eighteen, he took his father’s car to a local university frat party, and after a full day of consuming alcohol, he laid on the gas pedal and ran the car through the state representative’s garage. Subsequently tried as an adult, he was put on probation for “driving under the influence.” While on probation, Tom did not pay his fines and continued to drive despite his suspended license. After three years of this downward spiral, his actions reached a boiling point. At twenty-two, Tom was sentenced to forty-three days in jail.

Sitting in jail, Tom thought about the direction his life had taken. “How did it come to this?” he wondered. Could he change? He had a good family, but his parents could not help him; he had pushed them away. He was in a revolving-door system. “I needed to get out of it now!” Tom approached his probation officer and the judge, asking, “Can I do this another way, so there is a light at the end of the tunnel? Can I join the Marines?” To his surprise, they agreed: “If you prove that you will give your ass to the military, and graduate, we’ll squash your record. You’ll be a free man.” As Tom tells it, “I needed to do something I could be proud of; something to give me discipline and a good life. My parents tried everything on me. The same things that worked for my siblings did not work for me. They were very loving parents. They always wanted the best for me. I don’t know how they did it. I put my mother through a depression. She had three good apples and one bad one.” Six months after his release, Tom was on a bus to Parris Island, South Carolina, where he attended the Marine Corps School of Infantry, graduated with honors, and was promoted two ranks. He had turned his life around.

In 2013, I met Tom right before he and his hiking partner, veteran Adam Bautz, began their first thru-hike on the Appalachian Trail. At the time, Tom worked retail at an outdoor outfitting store in his hometown of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. After six months spent hiking the AT, Tom had returned to a job at Appalachian Outdoors, a store in State College, surrounded by backpacking and camping gear. He went from living outside and using all that gear to working inside eight hours a day, selling it to others who were going to get out and use it themselves, which he found frustrating. Tom enjoyed his job and coworkers, but “being indoors needed to end, and end fast.”

After another month of work, he gave his two weeks’ notice. He got rid of most of his possessions, put the rest in storage, moved out of his home, ditched his vehicle—all in an effort to downsize and live simply. He wanted to continue hiking long distance. ”I am not the kind of person who has the patience to wait years and years for the things I desire,” he said. “I knew that if I wanted to make a life of this, I needed to find a way to make a name for myself so that I could, hopefully, one day make a living by backpacking.”

OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS, TOM ACCOMPLISHED A LOT. HE COMPLETED the 3,100-mile Continental Divide Trail (CDT), 600 miles of the Florida Trail, half of the 2,600-mile Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), the 500-mile Colorado Trail, and the 800-mile Arizona Trail. In 2016 he set out for another thru-hike on the Appalachian Trail, this time in the dead of winter. As we had in 2013, Todd and I rendered some trail magic to him, for ten nights straight when Tom came through Pennsylvania. Every morning, we dropped him off at a trailhead and every evening we picked him up, fifteen to twenty-five miles farther along the trail. He enjoyed the warmth of our living room woodstove, delicious organic dinners, and fresh-baked pie and ice cream for dessert. Lounging on our sofa in the evenings, he made himself comfortable. During this time we really got to know Tom, and he became family.

Tom had chosen a winter trek on the AT for multiple reasons. “This hike was about conquering a fear I had of backpacking in the winter alone in harsh conditions.” He had only hiked in the summer and wondered, “Can I succeed and not die out there?” Tom didn’t see a single footprint in all 280- plus miles of Maine. Although the AT is the most traveled, highly populated trail in the United States, he didn’t encounter another long-distance backpacker until he reached Pennsylvania. “I’m hiking in the winter because I need risk in my life,” he explained. “I get the adrenaline rush I grew used to feeling in the military which seems normal.” He realized that hiking in the winter made him happy. “It makes me feel alive. The risk is worth the reward if I can overcome it. It is better than living a dull life.”

With every step, Tom learned to make peace with pain. He hiked more than three hundred miles on stress fractures, and dozens of miles on torn cartilage in his knee after a hundred-foot fall on an icy trail. “I’m also hiking through the winter to be alone with myself,” he said. “Every single day it is just me. There is nothing to distract me from myself. In the Marine Corps, we are taught to internalize many things. Walking helps me process things. I miss my Marine buddies. I lost forty guys. I don’t have any regrets about what I did over there. I had suicidal thoughts before the Marines. The Marines gave me the opportunity to change my course: one hundred percent I would be dead or in jail without them.”

For Tom, the winter journey along the AT was the culmination of a long-distance-hiking lifestyle that had evolved from his passion into an occupation and a new identity. Back in 2013, the farther along the trail he progressed, the more he fell in love with the hiking life. The simplicity and freedom are what he loves most. “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,” he said. “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.” The winter hike made him learn to appreciate everything. He saw beauty everywhere and learned to feel gratitude. He embraced all that the winter wilderness threw at him— darkness, pain, and loneliness. He was experiencing the gifts of peacetime living—beauty, gratitude, new things. “My worst day on the trail,” Tom said, “is still better than my best back in normal society.”

TOM GOT HIS START ON THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL IN 2013, BUT IT WASN’T until he hiked the Continental Divide Trail the following year that he realized he had fallen in love with wilderness. “All the pieces started to fit, and I felt truly at peace. It was a magical experience that I will always cherish as being a coming-of-age moment for myself. Lewisburg will always be home to me, but the trails now feel like my new home.” His love of movement pushes him to constantly crave different scenes, which the trail provides:

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. I experience so many good things and so many bad things all at once and yet stretched out over hundreds of miles and countless hours, I always seem to land on my own two feet with a smile on my face at a perfect sunset-facing vista. All the rainy, cold, exhausting, crappy twenty-mile days are worth those moments. And they are fortified by the strangers that become your lifelong friends that you are experiencing all this with.

THERE IS SCIENCE BEHIND THIS MIND-SET OF “FULLNESS” THAT TOM EXPERIENCES while on the trail. In addition to exercising his body, his brain is also getting a workout, according to Dr. Michael Merzenich, professor at the University of California, San Francisco, and a leading researcher in brain plasticity. In Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life, Merzenich explains that contrary to walking on flat, even ground, navigating a hiking trail forces the mind to assess and reassess the environment. Hikers have to watch the ground to determine where to place their feet, evaluate weather, and regulate their body heat and nutrition. A hiker needs to be aware of the surrounding landscape, scan for novelty, unpredictability, surprises such as wild animal encounters, approaching storms, and so much more. To navigate a trail, a hiker must function in a super-charged state. This hyper-engagement with the environment is actually exercising the brain—the complete opposite of a life spent indoors focused on screens and electronic devices. The latter seems to breed disorders like depression and anxiety, whereas hiking in wild areas feeds both the body and the brain like vitamins.

Another ingredient that feeds the soul, of course, is strong family support. Tom’s mother adores him, and Tom adores his mother. She laughed as she told stories about what a challenge he was to raise, her only hope was that he would reach his eighteenth year alive. Tom’s parents and family showered him with unconditional love. Because of their active presence in his life, he was able to forgive himself when he returned home from Iraq, silence the voices that murmured in his ear, dismiss any nightmares, love himself, and move on. “I could go through hell and back, experience all kinds of horror,” Tom said, “but since I have been blessed with a loving support system waiting for me back home, and have a positive outlook, I can continue to go into nature, walk and heal, and find great joy.”

On Tom’s winter hike along the Appalachian Trail in 2016, his probation officer jumped into his mind out of the blue. He thought about how far he had come, how good his life was now, and decided it might be fun to reach out to the officer when he returned home. When he was in jail, Tom was a clean-cut eighteen-year-old. Today, he has a long beard and even longer hair, but he has his act together. More than staying out of trouble, he has succeeded professionally as a long-distance hiker and created a brand for himself as “the Real Hiking Viking.” He has served as a Trail Ambassador and a gear tester. To his surprise, when Tom finally reached the probation officer on the phone, the officer asked, “Is this the Real Hiking Viking?” He had been following Tom’s adventures and success on Facebook and Instagram for years!

Not long ago, Tom serendipitously ran into the judge who sentenced him. Everyone in the system supposedly disliked the short, elderly woman for doling out tough-love sentences. Tom told the judge all the good things that he had accomplished since jail. “I believe that jail was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “It moved me in the right direction. I knew I could do more with my life. You gave me that chance and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.” The judge appeared shocked that Tom approached her and shared his message, but she was equally shocked, in a pleasant way, that he had benefitted so positively from her sentence.

From jail to life in the Marines to finding peace on the trail, it hasn’t always been easy, but Tom has some advice for other veterans: “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. This life of the trail is what I need. It works for me and it could work for you. I could be happy anywhere as long as I’ve got my pack with me.”