Opinion Election Day in the woods, in a nation of cruelty and grace
"On the Appalachian Trail, the shelters are welcoming, but there are wasps in the walls.
Election Day was another clear, chilly day in an unbroken string of clear, chilly days that stretches back as far as I can remember. Since Virginia, maybe? In my last column, I wrote about realizing that I wouldn’t be able to hike the entire Appalachian Trail this year, so Mica and I decided on Plan B: After we took a break for a wedding in Virginia, I would jump ahead to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and continue south from there, while Mica would keep going from New York.
But as I arrived in Harpers Ferry, Hurricane Helene was wrecking the trail and, much worse, trail communities throughout southern Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee. Rockfish Gap, just south of Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, was the farthest south I felt I could safely go this year. So when I reached that point on the trail, I pivoted to Plan C: Return to Harpers Ferry and head north, finishing the Mid-Atlantic section I had planned to skip. That is how I came to be hiking northeast along the ridgeline of Kittatinny Mountain in New Jersey, which I’d first climbed onto back in Pennsylvania.
That day, the trail was quiet; I didn’t see much of anyone. I passed the office and visitors center at High Point State Park and stopped to get water and charge my power bank. The office was closed — for Election Day, I guess — but I found an outlet behind the building. I ate my lunch at a picnic table in the sun and listened to squirrels rustle through leaves. A truck groaned up the steep hill. In the silence after it passed, a crow called somewhere across the road.
As I walked that day, I thought a lot about what we’re doing when we elect a president of the United States. This country is the most powerful and arguably the most violent empire that has ever existed, and to the extent that we have an emperor, it’s the president. Through policy choices at home and military action abroad, every president kills people. It could be thousands of people or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions, depending on circumstance and their inclination. Killing people, choosing who will die both here and abroad is a fundamental part of the job. It is the job. Whatever else the president does, they do on their own time. Is “Emperor of the Violent Hegemony” the kind of job that’s possible to be a good person in? Is it the kind of job where anyone, however well-intentioned, can effect positive change?
Past the High Point, the trail turns 90 degrees and descends the shoulder of Kittatinny Mountain to follow the New York/New Jersey border southeast. The rocks underfoot ease up and there are long stretches of smooth trail through open lowland forest, dark tree trunks standing unusually straight. All of this land, all of America, was taken from its original residents in a campaign of genocide so sustained, vicious and ultimately successful that most of us can live our whole lives pretending it didn’t happen, if we choose to. The wealth and power we still enjoy today derives directly from the stolen labor and stolen lives of enslaved Black people. Our electoral system is a machine created by enslavers to ensure their own safety and power was never threatened by the human beings whose lives they consumed to build their wealth. We eventually ended slavery, kind of, but the machine they built is still working. How do you create change within a system designed to prevent the exact kind of change you are trying to create? The tips of my hiking poles steadily punched little holes in the dirt on either side of me as I walked, and I imagined a fat drop of blood welling up from each one.
That night I stayed at the “Secret Shelter,” a little cabin on private land just off the trail that the owner leaves open for hikers to use. I had seen reports that it had a wasp problem, and so it did. I sat on the little porch in the early dusk and watched the wasps industriously coming and going from their nest in the outside wall. They didn’t seem interested in me, and I didn’t see any of them inside the cabin. I shined my headlamp all around the inside but aside from some old mud dauber nests up near the ceiling, I didn’t see any evidence that they had been inside.
The grass around the cabin was long and tufted and didn’t look good for tenting, so I decided to risk sleeping inside. I saw only one wasp inside — it landed on my phone screen while I was eating dinner and watching a TV show. It was oddly sluggish, crawling slowly up the screen in black silhouette. I carefully pinched it in a handkerchief until I felt its carapace crunch. Belatedly, I worried that killing it might release some kind of pheromone signal triggering the rest to attack, but they didn’t. I slept on my inflatable pad on the floor, with a wall full of wasps behind my head.
It gets dark at 5 p.m. now, so I was asleep before any state even closed the polls. I woke up around 10, and it was too early to know anything. I woke up again at 12:45, and Donald Trump was clearly winning. I had no sense of what had been counted and what hadn’t, but it didn’t look good. It took a long time to go back to sleep. I woke up for good at 4:30, and although no one had officially called the race yet, it was obviously over. I felt strangely empty — nothing like the shock and terror of 2016, when I hadn’t seriously considered the possibility that he might win. I didn’t think he was going to win this time, but I also didn’t think America was going to elect a Black woman to be president. One of those impossible outcomes would have to happen. Apparently it was this one.
Another hiker had arrived in the evening and set up a tent outside. She was a young woman who had flip-flopped up to Katahdin from Delaware Water Gap and was only about 50 miles from finishing her hike. She’d stored her food in the cabin overnight, and when she came in to get it our eyes met just for an instant and we both made the same face, not quite a grimace but not quite not a grimace. I knew she also knew. Neither of us said anything — I’m a middle-aged White guy with a beard, so I’m sure she didn’t want to hazard a guess at what my politics might be, and I don’t blame her. I didn’t say anything because I just didn’t really want to talk about it.
A couple miles north of the Secret Shelter, a short road walk brings you to Horler’s deli in Unionville, New York. I was walking along the road into town when a work truck coming toward me slowed and stopped and the driver leaned toward the open passenger window. This isn’t that unusual. When people see I’m a thru-hiker, they often want to talk to me or give me a snack or ask whether I need anything. It wasn’t the first time someone had pulled a car over to talk. I looked in the window, saw thick fingers holding a cigarette.
“How long have you been out?” he asked.
I looked up at his face — older guy, maybe late 50s. A lifetime of labor. Then my eyes caught his red hat. “Make America Great Again.” I imagine my expression visibly changed. I knew what was coming.
“Trump won,” he said. Not in any particular tone, not gloatingly or sadly. Just a fact.
“I just didn’t know if you knew. If you have radio out there or anything.”
“I already knew,” I said and walked away.
I’ve thought a lot about this exchange, and I think he was having a nice morning and wanted to do me a favor and share the news with someone who might be yearning to know it. He was living in an imaginary world where someone in the woods couldn’t know the news. But we all have phones, like him, like everyone. I already knew.
To hike the Appalachian Trail is to constantly need help from strangers and to receive it for no other reason than need. A ride to town. An invitation to fill up your water bottles at a home or a business. The convenience store clerk who put a banana in my bag of food after she rang everything up without even asking me. Two huge coolers stocked full of food and drinks near a trail kiosk in Connecticut. There were days in Pennsylvania when my only water came from caches of gallon jugs left at road crossings by a local who made it their business to provide water on an otherwise dry section. A private cabin left unlocked and entrusted to the use and care of whoever might be hiking past.
Even more, the entire trail exists as a gift from volunteers. Every night that I’m warm and dry inside a shelter, it’s because of the hard work and organization of the volunteer trail clubs who build and maintain them. I’ve hiked past trail crews at work on the trail itself, and it is hard physical labor, digging holes in unyielding mountain earth and moving rocks with human power and simple rigging.
The trail isn’t just a path through the woods, it’s a society organized around some of the best and most characteristically American virtues: spontaneous helpfulness, neighborly concern for a stranger, collective work for the common good. These virtues aren’t restricted to the trail; I’ve seen them all over the country. I’ve lived in Massachusetts, Maine, Virginia, D.C., San Francisco. I’ve driven across the country several times. Everywhere, people are friendly. If you need help, someone will help you. I’m sure we can all think of exceptions, but they are exceptions — we’re famous around the world for our outgoing cheerfulness and willingness to drop everything to help someone we just met. These aren’t just “small-town virtues.” I’ve watched half a dozen New Yorkers, all unknown to each other, convene an impromptu colloquy on a busy sidewalk to determine the optimum route for a lost tourist to reach his destination. In Union Station in D.C., I saw an elderly woman fall and cut her face and a dozen passengers hurrying for their own trains stop to help her. Everywhere, as individuals, this is how Americans act.
In Maine, there’s a lake camp just off the trail where the owner feeds hikers every morning. For $12, he’ll make you eggs, sausage, coffee, juice and a stack of 12 pancakes, if you can eat them all. If you can’t eat them all, he’ll give you a Ziploc bag to take the leftovers. If you can’t pay, or don’t want to, he’ll feed you anyway. He has a fund of money from other hikers who’ve paid extra just for this purpose, but he says it never gets any smaller. He doesn’t do this for money. He doesn’t get anything out of it but extra work, along with a little company in the morning. He had a son in the military who died, but he doesn’t like to talk about it. When you go inside the camp building you pass a huge Trump 2024 flag hanging on the wall outside. It’s tempting to imagine that the person who would feed a group of strangers every morning just because they’re camped at his doorstep and hungry is somehow different than the person who would vote for deportation camps. But they’re the same person. We’re all the same people.
How can we reconcile living our lives with such openness, such abundant kindness and governing ourselves with such fear and hate? I don’t know. It’s another clear, chilly day in America. I guess I’ll keep walking."
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