photograph courtesy anna traverse
The author outside Asheville, North Carolina.
My dad told a story about a career aptitude test he and his classmates were given in middle school. As he remembered it, he was asked a long series of questions about his likes, dislikes, abilities, and so on. Once tabulated, the test pronounced that he’d be well-suited for a career as a forest ranger. Evidently, an awful lot of his peers got the same result: If they’d followed the advice, this country would have even more out-of-work forest rangers.
We can’t all grow up to be forest rangers, but we can learn something from the realization that so many of us would be happier, more peaceful if we spent our days walking the woods. I know that’s true of me. When walking outside, especially on unpaved earth, I’m more grounded (literally), less anxious, more in touch with my lungs and heart and muscles. It’s rare, in this phase of life, that I can devote more than an hour or so to a walk — but when the chance arises, it’s marvelous. Once I find the cadence of my stride, it feels like I could go on walking forever. Maybe I could.
A 2023 study found, hilariously, that nearly 50 percent of men surveyed fully believed they would be capable of landing a passenger plane if the need arose. (Only 20 percent of women thought they would pull it off.) Safely landing such a large craft requires hundreds of hours of training and a complex series of steps. Sure, it’s possible — with the help of Air Traffic Control (if they were not furloughed that day) — that some percentage of untrained people would manage it. But I can’t imagine feeling confident I would be among that group. Nor can I imagine that close to half the men I know would get it done. (My dad absolutely would have.)
I’d like to remember Dale’s attitude as my own days slip past: Stay in the moment, but don’t stay in one place. Keep moving. Keep going.
Landing a commercial aircraft and hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT) don’t share many obvious elements in common, but both are arduous undertakings that would thwart most of us. The AT, if you aren’t familiar, is a path stretching some 2,199 miles, from Georgia all the way to Maine. Portions of the trail are manageable by casual day-hikers, while other stretches pose great difficulty: rocky scrambles, elevation switches, isolation from aid, the works. Yet every year, about 3,000 individuals set out to hike the entire thing — a “through-hike,” in the parlance of the AT. Only about 20 to 25 percent succeed. Presumably the vast majority of those who set out — hiking poles in hand, packs carefully stocked — do so with the intention, the belief, that they will be among the 20 to 25 percent. It doesn’t take any statistical expertise to see the valley between expectation and probable outcome.
I don’t for a second think I could land a passenger plane. But I earnestly believe I could hike from Maine to Georgia.
I’m in my early 40s, though. Dale Sanders, whom I interviewed for our cover story, the day before he left for the AT, is 90 years old. As you read this — “God willing and the creeks don’t rise,” as Dale likes to say — he’s still out there, in a valley or atop a ridge, taking one step and then another toward what would be a world record-breaking hike. He’s got a careful plan for his journey, and a rock-solid crew of helpers around him, but as he reminded me, we each have to hike our own hike. No shortcuts. Just keep walking.
In the end, there’s no magic trick to a quest like Dale’s. He prepared as thoroughly as he could, and he’s uncommonly fit for his age — for anyone’s age, I suspect. Those things help. But he’s also simply someone who finds it in himself to keep moving, to keep walking, endlessly forward. I’d like to remember Dale’s attitude as my own days slip past: Stay in the moment, but don’t stay in one place.
Keep moving. Keep going.
