Success in Surrender

From our very first step, I felt like I was walking in the wrong direction.

It was as if my insides were telling me to turn around and hike north, the only way that they had ever known.

As if I was driving down a one-way street, colliding with the oncoming traffic.

The trains that were on their way to Maine.

The thru-hikers that had dreams of making it to Mount Katahdin.

Just like I had, four years before.

And they, they, were going in the right direction.

New Jersey was supposed to come before New York.

I saw them in the distance before they approached us. I could pick them out of the crowd. Their savage. Their stringy, greasy, longish hair. And their backpacks, their backpacks just hit different than the other ones. Their packs were bigger and they were dirtier and they wore their miles for everyone to see. And their bandanas were stained with mustard and sunscreen, and they were soaked with the day’s rain. Their bandanas were tied tightly around their foreheads in twists so that their sweat didn’t drown their eyes while they walked. And their pain. They wore their pain on their faces and in the sores that formed across their torsos, deep beneath their hip belt straps. I knew that those sores were there. I remembered them. I remembered that exact type of pain. I recognized it in their hobble, and I could feel it in their grimaces. Thru-hikers may not be poetic, but we are purposeful. And as each soldier of the Appalachian Trail northbound class of 2025 came towards me, fighting in the opposite direction, I remembered what it was like for Maine to be my only aspiration.

Each of them were plowing over the exact same path that still held my tears and my mustard stained sweat from the summer of 2021.

And now, now I was just another section hiker chirping the obligatory, “Happy Trails!”, as the true warriors sidestepped around me.

I felt like I was in their way.

“You thru hiking too? Going Southbound?”, each one of them greeted us as they passed by with an impetus, with intention. They had chiseled thighs and sunken-in cheeks and sun-kissed skin that they had been carrying for 1,300 miles. That they had been carrying with them since they left Georgia.

I missed that kind of momentum.

The kind where my blisters were only a match for my badassery and where my mustard doubled for eye black.

“No, I’m just doing Jersey…”, I wanted so badly to tell them that I was one of them, that I had done the “thing” too.

But I surrendered to humility.

Because silence speaks loudly.

And I honed in on my “why”.

Why was it so difficult for me to let them think that I was a novice?

It was all ego.

And I tried to keep mine close to the vest.

Because simple is classy.

And because I knew.

I wanted that to be enough.

Until one very chest-out, shoulders-back, very high on himself kinda-dude challenged me, “Why, why, would you ever section hike New Jersey?! Jersey fucking sucks. There are so many more beautiful places to see on the Appalachian Trail. You should try a thru-hike."

I paused.

I inhaled a big slice of humble pie through my nostrils, and I pursed my words behind my lips.

They were beating against the roof of my mouth, “Let me out!!”

And then I surrendered.

To my ego.

“Serendipity, class of ‘21. Pleasure to meet you.”, and I reached for his hand.

And then big-chested Billy surrendered to his own.

“Starve the ego, feed the soul.”

— Author, Kiely Graves

Let’s let go of our need for external validation and try to thrive from the inside.

I missed being a thru-hiker, gradually getting into extreme situations without truly realizing how extreme they actually were because they came in doses. I missed being a thru-hiker because our hopes of tasting Mamma Katahdin gave us the strength to swallow our struggles whole.

The struggles that I was about to surrender to.

The heat index was 109 degrees.

And during this thirsty third week of June, New Jersey was the landing pad for the spawns of the devil himself. Mosquitoes. They bit. And they bit. And they unrelentingly continued to bite. Through our clothing and through the tubes of our socks. Through our bug nets and into our ears. Through the mesh of our tents, they nipped at our hands. We scratched our skin until we bled through our sleeves.

Overnight, I could stay within the four walls of my tent when nature called.

If I urinated into a Ziplock baggie on all fours.

That is when I started to cry.

And my bug net clung to my face with my tears. And with my sweat. And with my mosquito borne blood.

That was after I fell and broke one of my ribs. The slate was vertical and it was wet with rain, and I was trying to save my hands from a cluster of thorny bushes. That is when I lost my grip, and also my footing. And I face-planted on a boulder with the weight of my pack on my back, pinning me, and only my chest to break my fall.

But that was before I split my shorts.

I didn’t know that it was categorically possible to split Lycra shorts up the ass.

But somehow, I managed to find a way.

And then there were “times of the month” without any “times of the month” types of things on hand.

But with the kindness of a Trail Angel with crossed eyes and a rusty muffler adorned minivan, we found ourselves at the ACME Market off of NJ Route 206 on a wing and a prayer.

And I bought $67.00 worth of tampons.

And one 19.2 ounce can of beer.

We were all dehydrated. And we took turns having funky kinds of heart rhythms. And nerve palsies. And we were knee-deep in bogs. And we were sunburnt. And there were thunderstorms. And we had lots of foot problems. Like, the blistery, bleeding kind. And there were ticks.

There were a lot of ticks.

When Pitch and I took a wrong turn and found ourselves lost in some type of sleepy hollow haunted-scape, we stopped to check our coordinates. And when we stopped moving, the spawns of the devil blitzed.

“FUCKKKK YOUUUU!! You stupid motherfuckers, get the fuck OFF of me!!”, I screamed and I slapped and I pinched every inch of my body, trying to smash them into sludge and allieviate the pain.

“You stupid fucking ASSHOLE!!”, Pitch seemed to be addressing one mosquito in particular.

The one that had gotten into her pants.

When we found ourselves in God’s creation shouting profanities at insects, we knew that it was time.

It was time to surrender to our week in the woods.

Pitch, Graydog, Ken, Roast Beef and I waved our white flags to the state of New Jersey.

Like, to the actual U.S. territory, but also to its grave conditions.

And surrendering completely sucks.

Surrendering felt foreign.

“There is a family next to me at the store. I just heard the dad say to his kid: “Well, it’s brave to go on a roller coaster. And it’s also brave to say you don’t want to go on a roller coaster.”

If one wants to ride and does, that’s brave. If one does not want to ride and doesn’t, that’s brave. Brave is doing, on the outside, whatever your insides want to do.

No single action is inherently brave- the honoring of the inner compass instead of outer expectations is the braveness.

Brave can never be judged by the crowd. Sometimes we are the only one who knows we’ve been brave.

And that is enough.

That is everything. ”

— Glennon Doyle

I wanted to get off of the trail.

That is what my insides wanted to do.

And in ways, it was more difficult for me to withdraw from what I set out to accomplish and share that with all of you than it would have been to stay out there and be consumed while alive by mosquitoes.

Sometimes we are the only one who knows that we’ve been brave.

And that can be enough.

Perhaps our misfortunes began when Ken forgot to pack his hiking attire.

Nothing that a trip to Goodwill and a pair of pink flamingo swimming trunks couldn’t fix.

And my parents, they surrendered too.

They surrendered to the 45 steps and the 54 years that they spent in the space that they have called home since they were just two kids trying to make a start for themselves. A home filled with music boxes and egg sandwiches on toasted Thomas’ English muffins and gobs of green shag carpeting. A home filled with laughter and also its fair share of tears. A home with a Christmas tree that lived on top of their coffee table in the living room window year round, my Mom decorating it for every single calendar holiday while my Dad bitched the entire time. All the while, his television remote in his hand.

My parents surrendered to changing and to aging.

And to things like dishwashers, driveways and garbage disposals.

“Modern amenities”, as Dad likes to call them.

An air conditioning thermostat can be downright frightening with all of its arrows and options and voice activated wall mounts.

Surrendering is scary.

Clearly.

“Nobody is going to come save you, that’s your job. Save yourself. If you don’t like where you are, get out of there. The object is not for them to like you, it’s for them to listen to you. Nobody knows what you want except you, and nobody will be as sorry as you if you don’t get it. Your family is just what you came from, it’s not what you are. Wanting some other way to live is proof enough that you deserve it. Having it is hard work, but not having it is sheer hell. ”

— Marsha Norman on Lillian Hillman

“I’ve tried to address the beckoning of a blinking cursor many times over the last few months, but I have come up short each time.”, Mary Leavines, my friend, Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, and author, shared in her latest piece, “Creation is an act of resistance, the world still needs your art.”

You have to tell the truth.

“But I don’t know if I am brave enough. I…I just don’t know if my skin is thick enough. To put my story out there to the world, for the critics to read. For the blowbacks. I need to talk with you honestly about not wanting to write my book anymore.”, I wrote to my friend and mentor, Mills Kelly, earlier this spring.

I wanted to surrender to vulnerability, to fear.

To publishing.

“You are one of the fiercest women that I have ever met, my friend. If I was remotely worried about you being able to take any blowback, I would tell you to turn around and walk away. But I seem to remember hearing about a woman, a nurse anesthetist, and an AT thru-hiker actually, who conquered the northern half of the Vermont Long Trail by herself in the snow and finished with a badly broken finger. That woman, that woman is fierce. Actually, I think that ‘badass’ was the term that I used at the time.”, Mills retorted.

“When you speak of bravery, I hear tales of my physical bravery. When I speak of bravery, I am referring to my emotional bravery. Allowing other peoples’ opinions of me to become my business, that is my Achilles Heel. It is difficult to accept that you are the villain in someone else's story. Despite hiking to Canada in the snow with a broken finger, and all alone, I still feel like an 8 year old little girl dressed up as a grown up.”, I trusted Mills with my inner workings.

“Dips, some people are going to read what you write, roll their eyes, and say ‘What a dork.’ or ‘What an asshole.’, or “What a loser.” But way, way more people are going to read what you write and say, “Wow, she is brave. That woman is brave. If she could do it, then I can do it too. She is giving me a new way to think about my own life.”, Mills kept rapping, he believes in me.

And he went on, “I think that finishing your memoir will help you in ways that you still can’t measure. Once its done, you can decide if you want to publish it or if you don’t. Write like you are that only one that is going to read it. Tell the truth. And also, for what it’s worth, I could never do what you are doing. I am not as brave as you.”

Risk being “not enough”.

Risk being “too much”.

And remember, surrendering is success.

Peaks and Valleys