In 1845, writer and activist Henry David Thoreau entered the woods near Walden Pond “to live deliberately.” I recently hiked part of the Appalachian Trail to start my version of living deliberately: retirement from life as a D.C. lawyer. Thoreau lasted at Walden for just over two years and two months. I walked the trail for about 700 of its almost 2,200 miles, for a bit over two months. I like to think we both found what we were looking for.
Thoreau was an inspiration when I began considering retirement. After all, in addition to his time at Walden Pond, captured so vividly in Walden, Thoreau spent his life walking in and observing the natural world around Concord, Massachusetts, and elsewhere in New England. I started walking the trail less than three weeks after my last day in the office, to exorcise the constant emails and phone calls that had dominated my professional life. My family supported the plan. At age 65 I was still in decent shape and had sporadically hiked and camped for years. My colleagues at the law firm didn’t know what to make of this, other than it was different from the usual program of foreign travel and visiting grandchildren that most of our retirees spoke about. And so on a cool day in April, I headed north from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, with a 30-pound pack.
A popular misconception of Thoreau is that he lived as a hermit in his tiny cabin at Walden. As Laura Dassow Walls of Notre Dame has shown, the stay at Walden was an intensely social time for Thoreau, with a steady stream of visitors and lots of questions from his neighbors about how he was living out there by the pond.
To my surprise, life on the trail was very social as well. Most hikers stay most nights at the system of wooden shelters and organized campsites that dot the length of the trail. Out of about 60 nights, I camped alone exactly once, at a so-called “stealth” site away from a shelter. The shelters are the social centers of the trail. Anybody who shows up at one with a pack on their back is hailed as a fellow traveler, stranger or not. And the fellow travelers don’t stay strangers for long, especially because those walking at a similar pace tend to camp at the same shelters for several nights in a row. So the trail generated a mosaic of fun, warm, searching, annoying, superficial and cool conversations, which for this introvert ended up taking about as much energy as the actual hiking.
In Walden, Thoreau combined detailed observation of nature with startling social commentary. My experiences were less profound, but I was happy to be immersed in an environment of forests, hills and farms, along with other hikers.
I marveled watching a mama bear and two cubs wander on a ridge near the trail in New Jersey, though I was troubled to hear at that night’s shelter that the bears had gotten hooked on ice cream from a farm stand in the valley below. Whippoorwills, birds mentioned in Walden, kept me on edge one night in Pennsylvania with their loud electronic-sounding calls. A fellow hiker and Air Force retiree also stayed up, oblivious to the birds but identifying low-flying jets by their engine noises.
Most surprising was the number of snakes on the trail, notably rattlesnakes sunning on rocky ledges. Of all natural dangers, snakes seemed to be most respected by hikers: “Live and let live” were easy words to recall as we scuttled away from any snakes we saw or heard.
Thoreau proclaimed in Walden that “the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.” That desperation seemed suspended for long-distance hikers. Almost everyone talked about their problems, but while on the trail, the immediate problems were discrete and tangible, like sore feet and leaky tents. I’m sure that many hikers spent time contemplating their past and future lives, but the trail granted an interval of grace from the desperation that Thoreau saw so clearly.
Walden featured Thoreau’s views on a barely accepted minority group of the 1840s, Irish immigrants, as well as his antislavery views. The trail didn’t lend itself to such commentary except in the broadest strokes. Nowhere was there diversity as I was used to experiencing in Washington. There were few hikers of color. Economically, most hikers seemed middle class. There were more men than women hiking, and there were other fairly identifiable subgroups, such as younger people taking time off after school or their first jobs and military retirees, often in their 50s. A Japanese hiker in his 70s told me that he took English lessons as part of his training for the trail in order to “hike my dream.”
I was an anomaly on the trail as an older person and a lawyer. I met only one other hiking lawyer, who conducted a business call from his hammock one night. The call was an annoyance because his hammock was close to my tent, but it reminded me why I retired in the first place.
Generations of Walden readers have been shocked — shocked! — at the revelation that Thoreau left his cabin regularly, to dine in town, have his laundry done and to pick up mail. Long-distance hikers, however, get it. The longer a hiker must be self-sufficient, the more food and fuel they must carry, and the heavier their pack will be. The Appalachian Trail for me was a series of three- to six-day hikes, punctuated with mail pickups, “real” food and much-needed showers in towns like Pawling, New York, and Bennington, Vermont. I hope Thoreau enjoyed his visits to Concord as much.
Thoreau left his cabin by Walden Pond “perhaps” because he “had several more lives to live.” I left the trail in Hanover, New Hampshire, also out of a sense that it was time to move on. Hints from family members that they missed me were enough to point me toward home. Similar matters influenced Thoreau, who agreed to watch over Ralph Waldo Emerson’s family in Concord while Emerson, his mentor, lectured in Europe.
Thoreau, of course, used his Walden experience as the framework for one of the masterpieces of American thought. I can claim no similar achievement or even aspiration. However, my time on the trail, like Thoreau himself, launched me into the next life that is mine to live.
William Maher has lived in Alexandria, Virginia, since 1985. He spends as much time outdoors as possible.