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End in sight.

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Hello from Stratton, Maine! I am just under 200 miles from Mt. Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. It is a somewhat surreal feeling to be in Maine—“I’m walking to Maine,” is almost a fantastical phrase when you say it to people in Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. Then, in a blink, it becomes reality. “In a blink” is fitting because the record of this blog will show that I wrote a post when I was in Duncannon, Pennsylvania and then leaped ahead to Stratton, Maine. In between was most of Pennsylvania, its coal mining history, its brutal rocks and its Wawas; New Jersey, its stellar delis, its many bears that are desensitized to humans and my beloved Granny; New York, with similarly stellar delis, fewer bears and the city skyline in sight for many miles; Connecticut, its boarding schools, quaint villages and surprisingly stunning vistas; Massachusetts, with its marijuana dispensaries, its losing NBA basketball team and its pocket of boreal forest; Verm...
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Across the Mason-Dixon Line.

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Hello from Duncannon, PA! I had hoped to write a post last weekend after arriving in Harper’s Ferry, but alas, too many good friends in Baltimore distracted me from the task. A very nice problem to have. After two full days off, I pushed on into Union territory and eventually across the Mason-Dixon Line into my home state. I make those references only half-jokingly—one reason it’s taken me so long to write a post is that the last few weeks of hiking have given me much to think about with regard to contested Civil War memory, Lost Cause ideology and it’s unavoidable reverberations through our current political and physical landscape. As I hiked through the final few hundred miles of Virginia, through West Virginia and Maryland, then into Pennsylvania, I was listening to David Blight’s ‘Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory’—a fitting companion that opened my eyes to the quiet battle over the War’s meaning still unfolding throughout the valleys, ridge lines and gaps that the...
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