In 1983, at the age of twenty-four, I was working as the entire overnight shift at a gas station in New Haven, Connecticut. The endless nights dragged on. I gradually came to feel trapped, living in a tiny world where it always was nighttime. By mid-April I was fed up. The next morning, I gave my two weeks’ notice. Two weeks and a couple of days later, I was hiking the Appalachian trail.
I found myself in an immense world full of beauty, adventure, and challenge. I was not in good physical shape, and I was not very experienced, but I managed to complete the two-thousand-mile hike. All of this I documented in my book, Then the Hail Came, self-published on Amazon.
Decades later in 2021 I became homeless for the first time in my life at the age of sixty-two. It was a combination of factors, including the covid epidemic and the long, slow decline of my health. At that point, I needed multiple operations but had no health insurance.
In October of 2021, the only thing I had left of any real value was an old Subaru in decent shape. After four weeks of sleeping in that car, I was finally given a space at a homeless shelter. After my first night there, I walked out in the morning to find that car and many of my remaining possessions were gone. Hours later, the police still had not arrived to take my report. By the time I gave up and left, my car was probably in a chop shop and the possessions were likely in a dumpster. They were not worth much, except to me.
The “upside” of having nothing in America is that you are finally poor enough to get health insurance. I spent the week of my sixty-third birthday in a hospital where they took a piece of one of the bones of my right foot to biopsy. At the end of that week, they told me the biopsy came back negative and released me. There followed months of repeated infections, which I attributed to sleeping in that homeless shelter and walking for miles around the city in the daytime. If you are not familiar, most adults do not live in homeless shelters. You sleep there and they require you to leave early in the morning and not return until the evening.
Eventually I wound up in the Emergency Room of a different hospital with the same infected foot and leg. That was when I found out for the first time the doctors had been lying to me for months and the biopsy had been positive for a bone infection. The result of this was the loss of part of a bone in my foot that left my second toe detached from the rest of my skeleton.
While all this was going on, an old friend from the 1983 Appalachian Trail hike and beyond, Alan Strackeljahn, took it upon himself to get my giant thru-hike story mentioned earlier into book form and published on Amazon’s self-publishing platform and available for purchase in their store. The modest royalties helped me through the final months of homelessness and beyond.
As I went through the surgeries and subsequent recoveries, I started to feel better than I had in many years and I took over the book, revising it a dozen or so times and promoting it on social media sites. I also scanned around eight hundred of my forty-year-old Kodachrome slides into digital images and spent hours cleaning them up. I had nothing but time. I also found an affordable Web hosting company and created a site for a photographic story of my hike and to help promote my book. This led to an interesting several months stretch where I had a website but no home.
Waiting for the rain to stop under the pavilion in Library Park, Waterbury, Connecticut. April 6, 2022, 6:59 AM. During my homeless period.
Just before my foot operation I was finally placed in permanent subsidized housing: a rundown apartment in a neighborhood of aging houses and apartments, old factories and toxic cleanup sites where other old factories once stood, but it beat sleeping in a homeless shelter. Two more operations dealing with other health issues followed over the course of that year. As I recovered, I had way too much time on my hands, so I promoted my book on social media and met lots of nice people along the way.
A funny thing happened as I spent hours with the words and pictures from my Appalachian Trail hike while recovering my health. At first, I was depressed at the contrast between the giant world I inhabited in 1983 and the mean, tiny world I was stuck in now. Gradually, as I recovered from the surgeries and then slowly restored all the physical conditioning I lost during the recovery I began to feel I could do it again more than forty years later.
I now had a modest social security income. I would need to live very small for a while longer and concentrate for the moment on getting into shape, getting some twenty first century gear and putting a little aside for expenses. I would have to put getting a job and eventually a car again on hold, but I could do it.
As I navigated the world of twenty-first-century backpacking equipment I had the benefit of good advice from several friends who are fellow long-distance hikers. In addition to Alan, I would like to thank Darryl Gesner, Kent Wilson and Charles Winchell. All four of them provided excellent recommendations. Navigating this world would have been so much harder without these four gentlemen.
The sacrifices have been made. The adventures begin again in April. I look forward to leaving this small mean world behind and once again walking through a giant world where thunderstorms chase you across open ridge crests and massive autumn forests spread out beneath you forever under a deep blue autumn sky. It is not always a fun world, but it is seldom boring and never small. John Muir famously said, “Going to the mountains is like going home.” This spring I am finally going home.
The autumn forests of the North Maine Woods with Mount Katahdin rising from the background. Shot from the Whitecap Range. September 28, 1983.