Hot Springs, NC —> Off-Trail —> Rockfish Gap, VA
The next day I couldn’t walk. The boys told me they hiked half a mile down to the shelter from a parking lot so I hiked up there. After an excruciating half mile I arrived and had to borrow someone’s phone to call a hostel because mine had no service. The hostel owner picked me up and took me back to the Creekside Paradise B&B in Robbinsville, NC. That shuttle was the most expensive emergency Uber ever at $200. That alone is incentive to never get injured on trail.
I paid $10 a night to camp on their lawn. It was a new hostel and the owners didn’t know much about thru-hiking so they were less friendly and accommodating than most. I hid in the bathroom and tried to muffle my cries so I wouldn’t disturb the other guests while I cried and called all of my close friends asking for advice and support.
My friend Natalie, who took me on my first ever backpacking trip sent me this poem by Mary Oliver:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
My friend Kate was emotionally reassuring and supportive, and my friend Tom told me that if I did decide to keep hiking that no matter what, wherever I was on trail, no matter how far, if at any point I decided I could not continue, he would come get me without a second thought. Simply knowing that someone would rescue me if I was truly in danger freed me to be able to try. A weight was lifted and I didn’t feel trapped anymore. I would try again.
I hadn’t solved the problem of my debilitating fear of loneliness in the woods, however. Exposure therapy is effective but sometimes we have to acknowledge when we can’t do something alone and I realized I simply couldn’t do this alone. I chose to start my thru-hike alone in the first place to build community on trail with other hikers. I couldn’t do that if there were no other hikers. I didn’t know how to solve this problem so I reached out to a prominent hiker I had been following from the hiker publication The Trek named Stacia Bennet. I explained the issues and she said I could flip-flop. I had never heard of that before. She said jump up to the bubble in Virginia, hike north, then come back to the point I got on and hike south to the point I hurt my knee at. This was a brilliant plan! Everybody wins! So I started planning.
I stayed at the hostel a few days until my kind, selfless teammate from college, Lulu drove three hours round trip from Knoxville, TN to rescue me. I stayed with her briefly until she took me to the Greyhound bus station where I rode up to Charlottesville, VA and my friend Tom picked me up. I stayed at his apartment for a week, bedridden, while my knee healed. I couldn’t walk because if I could I would have been on trail. I saw a physical therapist in town who prescribed me painkillers and a knee brace. After a week it still hurt but I decided I would rather my knee hurt on trail than in bed.
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