week of 3/20/02
 
 
 


One step at a time
Appalachian Trial thru-hikers begin making their way through WNC
By Scott McLeod
Morning Glory feels pretty lucky.

Ten days into his attempted thru-hike of the 2,168-mile Appalachian Trail, he’s eating real food at an outdoor restaurant in Franklin on a sunny 70-degree day, feeling healthy and making adjustments to life in the woods.

And ruminating on his good fortune.

“Sometimes I really think that this is amazing,” said the 22-year-old Maryland native. “In this fast-paced world where you are told that you have to work your entire life, it’s acceptable to get away for five or six months and do this. In fact, people tell you they are proud of you.”

Morning Glory’s real name is Matt Andrews, and he’s one of the 1,000 or so people the Appalachian Trail Conference estimates will attempt a thru-hike this year. About 300 will make it. He started early, way earlier than most books and trail guides recommend. He and others are now making their way into Franklin, one of the first towns near the trail.

Morning Glory was walking to the post office to pick up a box of food and other items. He took what his pack would carry and sent the rest to a drop point further along the trail.

Andrews wants to finish by July or August, take it easy on the trail and not get caught up in the competition among many who struggle to do 20 miles a day. If there is a mentality that’s just right for completing a hike that breaks most people, Andrews, at 22 years old, may possess it. He knows that the foot-after-foot tedium of the hike drives just as many people off the trail as do injuries and equipment problems.

“I’ve been studying meditation, and I lived in India for a while,” said Andrews. “I’m here to learn how to walk and do nothing else. Your mind is always reaching for something external, but I want to reach a place where it’s just the walking. That’s what I’m looking for.”

And so Morning Glory — so named because he has the habit of rushing out of his sleeping bag each morning to relieve himself — and three friends are 103 miles into a trip they talked about taking since high school. It was always 2002, the year after they were to graduate from college, that they would try to AT, he said. Injuries nearly wrecked their rendezvous with the trail, but the University of Massachusetts graduate who spent the last year in California’s Sierra Nevadas and his friends managed to get it together and go for it.

Four days after the group left Springer Mountain in Georgia, Morning Glory learned one of the first lessons of the trail — pack light. At a post office in Hiwassee, Ga., he sent home 17 pounds, reducing his packed load — with water — to 43 pounds. He plans to drop more when he gets to Fontana Village. Among the items he sent home was a hardback volume of the poems of Walt Whitman.

“It weighed too much. I had to get rid of it,” he said.

He kept a small paperback, The Zen Teaching of Huang Po.

Already, Andrews says, the people have been “amazing.” Like the woman in Hiwassee who lectured him about carrying a light pack. She had already hiked the entire trail, and this year was trying to go up to Maine and back in one season. She carried 22 pounds of gear. Then there was another man who heard Morning Glory complaining about his sore back and asked him if he had hiking poles. He did not, and the man went out to his truck and offered him two hand-made bamboo poles. Since then his sore back has gone away, and he has been “cruising.”

And there’s Dr. Delaware, a 77-year-old retired doctor who is hiking with GPS equipment. He’s hiked the AT four times, and he claims to be the first person to do a thorough GPS survey of the trail. He records the distance between streams and shelters, and each night his wife picks him up and he stays in a hotel.

“He’s the trail doctor, helping some of us handle our injuries,” said Morning Glory.

He’s been wet, cold, hungry and hurting as he gets used to life in the woods, but Andrews says he’s learning valuable lessons.

“I was a competitive swimmer growing up, and I’ve been working at losing that competitive mentality. There are intense people out there who want to ‘do the AT’ or ‘get to Maine,’” said Morning Glory. “I’m not doing this to get to Maine or to finish the AT. I’m doing it to walk, to be alone, and I feel grateful to have the opportunity to do it.”