AUGUST 2007—FEBRUARY 2008
Two weeks after swearing off relationships, I spent some time with my brother and his former college housemate. As much as I love my brother, I never thought that I would fall for one of his friends. But, after spending one afternoon with Brew, I knew that he was the best man I would ever meet. It was love at first hike.
Even so, a part of me still wanted to hold on to the “single and focused” plan. In fact, after Brew and I went on our first date together, a three-mile walk, I said good-bye, got in my car, and immediately started to vent.
“Really God? What about our plan?” I was both confused and unbelievably happy.
My fists were tensed, and adrenaline coursed through me. In a fit of excitement and frustration, I drummed on my steering wheel with sweaty palms.
Then I looked over and realized Brew was still standing in the parking lot, watching me. He smiled and waved. I turned beet red, slunk down in my seat, and drove off as quickly as possible.
Despite my friends’ warning that Brew was a rebound boyfriend, and knowing that two weeks prior I had sworn off relationships, everything about being with Brew felt right. Typically, I was the queen of internalization, self-talk, and weighty dilemmas, but I had no doubts about my relationship with him.
Brew and I connected spiritually and emotionally, and we played together really well. In fact, we skipped the traditional dinner and movie ritual and instead spent our one-on-one time on “play dates.” We got to know one another sweating on the tennis court, trash-talking under a basketball net, battling over board games, and conversing on the trail. It was a fun, active, and competitive courtship. Everything seemed to be perfect. We both loved sports, we loved the outdoors, and we both loved hiking. Well, Brew thought he loved hiking.
Brew was a recreational hiker. He liked to take his time, smell the roses, and venture out in relatively good weather. After a week of dating, Brew and I spent Labor Day climbing Mount Mitchell, the tallest mountain east of the Mississippi River. Of course, I picked the longest, most difficult route to the top. We made it to the summit and back down to the trailhead just as dusk turned into darkness, and when we reached the parking lot, I had a huge toothy grin on my face. However, Brew was groaning, limping, and cradling his groin to prevent further chafing.
“We did it!” I exclaimed.
Brew replied, “I have been praying that I would meet a girl who was outdoorsy, but I didn’t mean this outdoorsy!”
Despite our different approaches to hiking, Brew always encouraged my trail pursuits. It never bothered him when I spent a day running and hiking on trails by myself or planned an overnight on my own. He was content to have a general idea of where I was going, when I would finish, and when he could see me again.
However, his enthusiasm wavered after John and Irene Bryant, an elderly couple from my hometown, were killed on a hike in the Pink Beds area of Pisgah National Forest west of Asheville. Brew became concerned for my safety and I couldn’t blame him, even though I knew that statistically I was safer hiking down the trail than driving down the interstate. So, for the first time since I started backpacking, I began looking over my shoulder.
I felt scared and violated. I hated knowing that two people had been murdered on a trail where I had enjoyed outings as a child. Someone had damaged my emotional connection with a place that I associated with good friends, open meadows, and a rare and very beautiful pink water lily. I would never again be able to hike the trail, play in the meadows, or look at those lilies without thinking of the murders that took place there.
Even though the deaths of John and Irene Bryant happened in my backyard, they didn’t hit home like the murder of Meredith Emerson. Meredith went missing on New Year’s Day in 2008. She had gone hiking with her dog on Blood Mountain, Georgia, and when she didn’t come home, the newspaper headlines throughout the southeast read, “Twenty-Four-Year-Old Female Hiker Missing Near A.T.” Because I was twenty-four years old and frequently hiked on and near the Appalachian Trail, friends began calling me to make sure I was not the woman who had gone missing.
I initially felt connected to Meredith because of our age and gender, but as the details of her life were released, I was startled to realize how much we had in common. Our studies, hobbies, and faith paralleled one another. For the next five days, every morning I would go in to work and read the online headlines about Meredith’s disappearance. The authorities concluded early on that she had been forcibly abducted. And as new details emerged each day, I would read the updates with tears streaming down my face. I had never experienced a news story that seemed so personal. I felt like Meredith was a close friend, and I didn’t understand how this could happen to her. There was a sick emptiness in my stomach that said it could easily have been me.
The day that the authorities found Gary Michael Hilton and announced that he had in fact murdered Meredith, a deep ache consumed my core. I needed to cry and clear my head, and I needed to hurt. I went for a long, difficult hike. But even in the forest, something didn’t feel right. The birds and the squirrels were quiet and still. It was as if all of creation were grieving.
To me, it seemed like Meredith’s life was taken at the worst possible time. I knew the potential of a twenty-four year old; the potential of a new career and the opportunity to explore the world and see new places. The potential to fall in love, get engaged, and have your father walk you down the aisle—the hope that one day you would have children of your own. It was as if Gary Michael Hilton had robbed the world of a flower that was just about to bloom.
In the following days, as the news continued to unfold, it became clear that authorities had not simply happened upon Gary Michael Hilton. Meredith had left a path for them to follow. She had physically and mentally fought her captor at every turn. She used self-defense to fight him on Blood Mountain, which resulted in evidence that police used against him. She provided the wrong ATM pin number at several different locations to create an electronic trail. She had done everything right. She demonstrated a rare bravery and intelligence under those extreme circumstances.
Once Hilton was apprehended, he was charged with the murders of John and Irene Bryant near Asheville, and that of Cheryl Haines in a Florida national forest. He also became a suspect in several other missing person cases throughout the southeast. Meredith may not have been able to save herself, but she was responsible for saving the lives of many others and bringing some peace to the families of the victims.
I am grateful that the media decided to follow Meredith’s story beyond her death, because it became clear that her legacy and influence had not ended. I know that it allowed me—and many others who felt like they knew Meredith—to heal.
I believed that because Meredith was a fighter and because she loved hiking and the wilderness, she would never have wanted her story to be something that kept other people from experiencing nature. Meredith reinforced my desire to get other people outside. She also reinforced my personal longing to explore the trails. So I decided that I would still try to set the women’s speed record on the Appalachian Trail that summer, and I would do it in Meredith’s honor.
To get ready for Appalachian Trail, I knew I needed to complete a substantial training hike, and I needed to practice hiking long days in hot weather. But in the months of January and February, that was all but impossible in North America. I had saved up money and vacation time, and I decided that at the end of January, I would travel to Australia and complete the six-hundred-mile Bibbulmun Track.
The problem with traveling halfway around the world to hike a trail without cell-phone service is that it made my boyfriend of five months extremely nervous. However, as an unmarried woman, I had to uphold certain standards in my relationship. And I refused to compromise or delay any adventures unless I was engaged.
In my previous relationship, Nightwalker had begged and pleaded for me not to go without him on a two-week hiking excursion to Peru. But he could not give me any date or idea of when he would be free to go, so I went on my own. Looking back, if I hadn’t taken the initiative and traveled without him, I probably never would have gone to Cotahuasi Canyon or Machu Picchu, the sacred city of the Incas. And I would have regretted it.
So despite the fact that the past five months had seen several trail murders, and knowing that Brew would be worried sick about me while I was away, I disregarded the overwhelming feeling that I didn’t want to be separated from my boyfriend for even a second, and I booked a four-week trip to Australia.
It turned out to be one of the smartest things I had ever done, because the week before I left, Brew gave me a ring.
He didn’t want to be left out of my planning or my adventures ever again.
Hiking is, by definition, simply walking in a natural setting. But in reality, it is far more than that. It is a time of preparation and renewal. And in my opinion, the more fast-paced and over-stimulated the world becomes, the more important it will be to take a walk in the woods.
Traveling to Australia was heart wrenching because it put me 12,000 miles away from the person I loved most. But hiking the six-hundred-mile Bibbulmun Track was one of the best things I could have done for Brew, for myself, and for our impending marriage. Five months is a short time to date before getting engaged. But instead of spending the first month of our engagement worrying about a wedding, I simply thought about marriage. I mourned the loss of my singleness and I contemplated the full meaning and commitment of matrimony.
Contemplation came easily, as the Bibbulmun Track was the most solitary trail I had ever hiked. Most Australians refuse to hike the footpath between December and February because of the one-hundred-degree heat. But after hiking through the southern California desert on the Pacific Crest Trail without any shade and very few water sources, the high temperatures on the Bibbulmun Track, which were often diffused by a forest canopy or ocean breeze, did not prove to be a problem for me.
During one stretch along my journey, I went three full days without seeing another person. A few years before, and certainly before I started hiking, that level of solitude would have made me really uncomfortable—or it simply would have driven me crazy. But now, I embraced the isolation and I embraced the crazy.
For three full days, I talked to animals instead of people.
The kangaroos were not very good conversationalists. They hopped off before I could even finish a sentence. In my first few days on the trail, I was constantly startled by the sound of them bounding through the underbrush. They were stronger, taller, and much faster than I expected—not nearly as quaint and cute as they’d been in the books I read as a child. But because I saw between fifteen and thirty a day, I quickly grew accustomed to them.
There were plenty of other critters. The emus reminded me of the ostriches that I had seen after climbing Kilimanjaro in Africa, but they were far more skittish. I usually spotted them near berry bushes, and as soon as they felt my presence, they panicked and sprinted off. The spiders in Australia were very large, but I actually preferred these giant arachnids to the smaller U.S. varieties because I could spot them from yards away, which kept me from hiking into so many webs. And then there were the lizards. They were so huge, colorful, and primitive that I was convinced I might also spot a dinosaur hiding in the forest.
Most of the human interaction I had occurred when I would reach a town and could call Brew on a payphone. He knew that I could call at any time, most likely during the middle of the night, so he didn’t get very much sleep while I was on the Bibbulmun Track.
Hiking to hear Brew’s voice encouraged me to hike longer days and higher miles. The reward for all my hard work was no longer reaching a warm shower or hot meal, but simply hearing my fiancé’s voice. We both valued our time apart and recognized its significance in our relationship, but at the same time, we hated it.
One day toward the end of my hike when I reached the small town of Pemberton, I called Brew. It was late at night in the States, but I could tell his voice was weighed down with more than fatigue.
“I’m worried about this summer,” he said.
“About the A.T.?” I asked hesitantly, knowing the answer.
In our brief planning session before my departure, we scheduled our wedding for June 8, right after Brew finished teaching and twelve days before I wanted to start the Appalachian Trail. I had told him on our first date that I was planning on a record attempt that summer, and I didn’t want to give it up, especially now that I had dedicated it to Meredith. But looking down, I noticed the shiny new ring on my finger, and I realized I would have to try something that I wasn’t very accustomed to—compromise.
Brew continued, “I just want to be able to see you as much as possible on the trail, and I can’t imagine seeing you hurt or hungry or cold or wet, without being able to help you.”
I took a deep breath. One thing Brew wanted assurance of before we got engaged was that I loved him more than hiking, and that I would always put him above the trail. In my mind— and my heart—there was no comparison, but he still needed to hear that.
“I want to do what is best for us,” I said. “If that means that I don’t get to hike the A.T. this summer, then I’ll deal with it. But I’ve been dreaming about this trail record for months and working toward it. We are going to have our entire lives to be together and hike together, and I may not have the time or the ability to go after this record in the future. So I’d really like to do it now. Remember, you are robbing the cradle.”
Brew’s solemness eased, and he let out a laugh.
I liked to tease him that I was his trophy wife. I also liked to remind him of our five-year age difference and of the fact that he’d had his entire twenties to travel and explore. Marriage would certainly be our greatest adventure, but I still wanted to have some smaller exploits along the way.
“Well, what if we did a supported hike?” Brew asked.
“You mean you’d help me the whole way?”
I had never done a supported hike before. I had always traveled on my own with everything I needed on my back. In a supported hike, Brew would take our car and meet me at points where the trail crossed a road. I could limit my pack weight and have daily access to food, dry socks, and my husband. I loved the solitude and self-sufficiency of traditional backpacking, but I loved Brew more. It made sense that this would no longer be my hike, but our hike.
“I’m going to be following you and worrying about you anyway, so I might as well help you. What do you say? Want to try a supported record?”
And from half a world away I said, “I do.”
