A number of people have asked me some version of: “Why would you leave a lovely family and a perfectly comfortable home to traverse the East Coast by foot for half a year, climbing every mountain along the way?” To answer that question, I need to share a piece of personal lore that might at first seem unrelated, but I promise I’m going somewhere with it.
The day I asked my wife to marry me, I didn’t wake up knowing that’s what would happen that day. If I could travel back in time to the year 2000 and meet myself five minutes before I proposed, young me would have been very surprised to learn that in six minutes he would be engaged.
The day we got engaged, we were in Europe, me and my future wife, touring Schloss Nymphenburg in Munich. Her parents are both originally German, though they met and settled in New York state, where Christina grew up. We were picking them up in Munich and then meeting her older siblings in Südtirol, the German-speaking part of the Italian Alps. I’m sure there are many people who knew there was a German-speaking part of the Italian Alps, but I wasn’t one of them until that trip, nor did I know there is a particularly German definition of “hiking” that involves eating a lot of bread and cold cuts and then walking a couple of kilometers uphill to an alm where you are served even more bread and cold cuts, along with heaps of wurst and shots of the most potent homemade kirsch imaginable. They uncorked that schnapps bottle and we could smell it across 200 meters of edelweiss.
But all that hadn’t happened yet. It was early August and hot and we were both dusty from wandering around the gardens of Nymphenburg, killing time in Munich before we met her parents to drive south into the mountains. I had a headache and wanted an iced coffee, so we went to the overpriced tourist cafe. I got a coffee and we sat at a wire patio table. Midafternoon, and the place was nearly empty. We were minutes from getting engaged. We chatted a bit. Seconds from getting engaged. Neither of us knew it yet.
In a way, though, we both knew it already. We had talked about getting married in general terms. I mean we’d talked about getting married to each other, so the terms weren’t all that general. No one had said “will you,” but we were in agreement that it would happen at some point. We were both 18 when we met, freshman year of college. We lived in the same dorm, her hall was directly below mine. At a freshman mixer, before classes even started, I was charmed by her Doc Martens and her long blonde hair and her glamorous stories of backpacking across Europe alone and seeing Nine Inch Nails at Woodstock ’94. She remembered a good joke I made at that mixer, but it wasn’t until we’d been married for more than a decade that she realized it was me who’d made it. I had to work a little harder to capture her attention than she did to capture mine.
In the six years that elapsed between the freshman mixer and that afternoon in the cafe, we had been together for 1½ years, then not officially together for about three years because I was callow and indecisive, and then back together for another year and a half. In all that time, though, neither of us was closer to another person than we were to each other. We knew we would be together because we’d tried being apart and it didn’t work.
That day, the conversation turned to the German relatives I would soon meet for the first time, and Christina said, “It doesn’t feel right introducing you as ‘my boyfriend.’ It sounds too casual for our actual relationship.”
This was the moment. I know I’m going to ask her soon, I thought, so if not now then when? I have no plan, no ring, but we’re in Europe! That’s inherently romantic. We would probably want to buy the ring together anyway. And this is maybe the best conversational opening I’m ever going to get. This is the moment, just do it.
“You could call me your fiancé,” I said.
“Ha ha —” she said, then she looked at my face, and said “Oh!”
I think I said the actual words, then: Will you marry me? And I think she said yes. But that part of the memory is fuzzy. What I really remember is: “ha ha … oh!” Her sudden realization that I was serious mirrored my sudden realization that this was the moment, that it had arrived seemingly out of nowhere on a day that didn’t begin with any portentous signs or omens. We secretly bought some champagne and told her parents we were engaged a few days later, on her father’s birthday, and he cried. Her mother told me that the first time she met me she didn’t like me, but that she liked me now. We bought a handmade engagement ring from a tiny jeweler’s shop in a side alley in Venice.
The point of this long anecdote with only the flimsiest connection to hiking is that I believe that life is essentially arbitrary, and the only trick to it is being in the right place at the right time. But no one knows what the right time will be, so you just have to find the right place and wait, staying alert for the right time to present itself.
Christina has always been a combination of amused and annoyed that the way we got engaged makes such a charming story, despite my seeming lack of preparation. But I’d been preparing for six years. I was so prepared that when the opportunity presented itself, I was able to recognize it, and I didn’t need to think about it. I could just take it.
The most truthful answer to the question of why I’m doing this hike is: I saw the opportunity, and I took it. I’ve been personally and professionally restless lately. The Appalachian Trail has lurked in my imagination for decades. Mica, the oldest of my three kids, is the only person I think I could hike the whole trail with, and he happened to be graduating college at the right time to start south. I happen to have the kind of job that I could just decide to take six months off from, and the kind of job I can plausibly hope to do a version of on the trail.
I can post hoc you a lot of propter hoc, and I will. But the most honest reason I’m going is that I saw the necessary pieces come into the correct alignment. It didn’t feel like making a decision, it felt like recognizing what was going to happen. The only questions I asked myself were all aimed at determining whether this recognition was correct, whether it truly was possible for Mica and me to attempt this now. I didn’t really even wonder why.
In his seminal work about one of antiquity’s greatest hikers, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus writes of a different major life decision: “An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it.” He’s not talking about marriage proposals or through-hiking, but important decisions are all similar. The decision to attempt this hike was prepared within the silence of my heart, during a lifetime spent in love with the outdoors. I know this isn’t a very satisfying answer, but it’s the truth, and if I can’t be completely honest, what are we even doing here?
On our last practice hike, Mica told me, “I just realized that you’re doing this instead of having a mid-life crisis.” I said that was a very generous way of expressing it, but he’s not wrong. I’m in mid-life, and I’m not in crisis. I think what I’m having is a mid-life opportunity.
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