Checking in from the Appalachian Trail: The First Leg
Hello friends, family, mentors and loved ones!
I have included all of you on what I hope will be a bi-weekly email with some reflections from my time on the Appalachian Trail. Some of you didn’t know that I was hiking the Appalachian Trail until right now—my apologies for that! Characteristically, my pre-departure was hectic and busy and left me with less time than I would’ve liked to check in with the people I care about. Many of you have asked to be included on these emails, others I have included here under the assumption that you’d like to read these updates. If you don’t want to receive these, please let me know! I won’t be offended in the slightest. We all have so much to read these days and the longform email itself is not a universally beloved genre of update.
The Trip Down: How Does Joe Manchin Win in West Virginia?
This is a far too ambitious subtitle for a short section about a road trip down to Georgia, but hear me out. I travelled down to the Southern Terminus of the Appalachian Trail (Springer Mountain, GA), via Matewan, West Virginia—a tiny mountain town with a population of less than 500 people that lies about 7 hours out of the way of Springer Mountain. It also happens to be home to a fascinating place, the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, which was what brought me and my good friend Hannah Freedman there on our first day on the road.
The Museum examines the history of organized labor in the West Virginia mining industry in the first several decades of the 20th century. The “Mine Wars,” refer to a series of violent encounters, ranging from small skirmishes to massive battles involving the US Army Air Corps, between union members and coal corporations.
A brief bit of context: West Virginia coal mines, more so than Kentucky and Pennsylvania mines, drew a remarkable cross-section of Black, native-born white and European immigrant laborers. The UMWA (United Mine Workers Association) and its earlier progenitors were created in West Virginia by these workers.
We’re all likely familiar with the grade-school horror stories of these mines: boys as young as 7 working in the mines full time; frequent explosions and mass death; brutal long-term, adverse health effects; employees paid in company currency (scrip) which was only valid at company-owned stores in town.
Left out my grade school education was the, you know, entire reason any of this changed? Organizing! It’s a bit like how Eric Ward—a Black activist and scholar of anti-Semitism and white nationalism—describes the myth of Rosa Parks: “one day, this woman just happened to be so fed up that, on a whim, she wouldn’t give up her seat. Hooray!” Absent from the story is Rosa Parks years of organizing Black women survivors of sexual abuse throughout Alabama (shouts to Aaron Dockser) and the trainings she attended at the Highlander Folk Center (shouts to Harris Wofford and Ram Manohar Lohia) that led her to join a coordinated direct action campaign to protest segregated buses. Oh yea and Claudette Colvin.
I digress. Highlighting the power of organizing in these stories is important precisely because the absence of coordination and organization from these histories is in fact a hard-earned victory of the entrenched powers that be. If you rolled your eyes at that last sentence consider the fact that the Governor of West Virginia (pro-Big Coal Homer Holt) threatened to withhold New Deal funding from any West Virginia municipalities or counties that used history textbooks that included descriptions of the UMWA or Mine Wars in public schools. A good rule of thumb for the left is that if right-wing kleptocrats are doing insane things to repress a piece of information, we should probably study and talk about that piece of information a lot.
So why all this fear? Well it largely has to do with the scale and nature of these direct actions. These men were not simply wielding non-violent tools like work slow-downs, stoppages and strikes. They were also arming themselves and fighting to secure a living wage, a pension and safe working conditions.
In fairness to them, much of this armed violence was in direct response to armed attacks on union members from the gunmen of the Baldwin-Felts agency, henchmen deployed by the coal companies to intimidate, coerce and if necessary, use force to stop unionization. A similar mercenary force was deployed against the teenage girls of the ILGWU on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
The small and large skirmishes eventually culminated in the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, in which 10,000 armed union members marched on Blair Mountain, the site of a mountain-top removal mine. 3,000 armed company henchmen fought the union force and were eventually re-enforced by 27,000 federal troops and members of the West Virginia National Guard. President Warren G. Harding threatened to and eventually did send MB-1 Bombers from the Army Air Corps to bomb several Union strongholds on the mountain. In total, about 100 union members, 30 paid gunmen and 3 Army soldiers were killed.
The direct aftermath of the conflict was disastrous for the UMWA, which saw its membership plummet. But the conflict has generally been viewed as a Pyrrhic victory for Big Coal, which eventually lost the unwavering support of the federal government during the Roosevelt administration and, of course, had to contend with the might of the National Labor Relations Act. Historians of the labor movement argue that the Battle of Blair Mountain helped create the political momentum for that sweeping change a decade later.
So what am I—a liberal, Elizabeth Warren-supporter—to make of this from a strategic standpoint? I must admit, it’s a bit uncomfortable to reckon with the role that armed workers' rebellion played in securing future victories for the labor movement. It’s the unspoken tension that the liberal perspective doesn’t really want to engage with. 750,000 Americans dying in the Civil War was a tragedy, but for the purpose of freeing 4 million people from bondage? No brainer. That’s perhaps an easier moral judgement than a nebulous series of labor disputes, but still, you get my point. Where’s the line when violence becomes not only permissible, but necessary in the fight for justice? If anyone comes up with a good answer, please let me know.
So how the hell does any of this relate to Joe Manchin? Well as I was exploring the Museum’s website, a section called “Awards” caught my eye. In 2015, the Museum received a civic recognition from none other than US Senator Joe Manchin. No other West Virginia politician is listed as having anything to do with the museum, which got me thinking: is this perhaps a useful symbol for how Manchin continues to win there?
On our drive into and out of Matewan, we saw flooded and destroyed roads and homes, abandoned buildings and many, many Trump flags/stickers/signs. “Trump Digs Coal,” was perhaps the most recurring. These are folks with a very low material quality of life, but with a deeply felt and well-earned sense of pride for the most recent industry that brought them anywhere near a decent material reality. Trump was eager to play to that pride with a ridiculous, camp Pro-Coal performance (i.e. wearing the coal helmet at rallies).
Manchin, I suspect, plays to that pride too, but in a much different way. He’s the closest thing to a pro-life Democrat that exists in today’s party. He constantly signals moderation and independence from the rest of the caucus. And yet, when push comes to shove, Biden proposed a $1.9 trillion stimulus package and we passed...a $1.9 trillion package with Manchin as our most conservative vote. Sure, Manchin displayed last minute hesitation and negotiated a lower income threshold for the stimulus checks. But you know what he didn’t negotiate down? The massive price tag for shoring up pension plans for workers whose pensions had all but evaporated. The workers who were in particularly bad shape in this regard were folks who had worked for companies that were now bankrupt...like coal companies.
So what's my theory as to how one wins statewide in WV? Well if Trump’s strategy is performative, cultural solidarity, then I'd call Manchin’s a genuine, material solidarity.
This leads nicely into the Pennsylvania Democratic Senate primary which will include a fascinating mix of both cultural and material solidarity in the form of moderate Congressman Connor Lamb (who won an endorsement from the UMWA in 2018 for fighting for miners healthcare and pensions) and John Fetterman, hyper-progressive, 6’8” man’s man from Braddock who could probably snap the rifle of a Baldwin-Felts henchmen with one hand.
But that’s a whole other can of worms.
Photo from West Virginia Mine Wars Museum:
Llewellyn Wood: An Unexpected Chapter of Family History
As we left Matewan, my brilliant friend Hannah shared a thoughtful insight with me. Baked deep inside of me, she said, from years of societal messaging and cultural depictions, is a strong belief that the white people of rural Appalachia are backwards and stupid. It was a vulnerable thing to admit, but I was grateful she did because it immediately resonated with me. On a subconscious level, the second I hear the voice of a white, Appalachian I make assumptions about their intelligence, their politics and their moral values.
With one simple sentence, Hannah had made me realize that I hadn’t reflected at all on what this sort of ingrained prejudice meant for my journey, you know, on the freaking Appalachian trail.
I am, to be clear, deeply ashamed that this is true, but it is! My progressive education at an expensive, private university gave me plenty of tools to examine racism I have internalized over the course of my upbringing; my experience living collectively with queer folks and women gave me plenty of tools to examine misogyny and structural patriarchy; but wouldn’t you know my very expensive university with very low socio-economic diversity didn’t give me a very strong class analysis. Go figure!
This line of thinking led me back to an outstanding podcast series called “Dolly Parton's America,” produced by Radiolab/WNYC (shouts to Emily Quigley). I was quite skeptical at first that such a topic warranted 9 episodes, but my skepticism was proven wrong. I’ll spare you all the details, but I highly recommend it to any and all interested in American history. In one episode, a social historian of Appalachia makes a compelling argument that goes something like this: the urban centers of power in the United States and Europe extract wealth in the form of natural resources that power their cities, their hubs of culture, education and finance. The parts of the country (and the world) that produce this wealth, do not keep any of it, they are neglected and divested from, socially and materially, which leads to lower achievement in education, lower material quality of life, etc. The cultural realities that emerge from these places then become the subject of mockery and ridicule amongst...you guessed it, the wealthy, well-educated elites of the urban centers. The scholar argues that we can analyze Appalachia (or other parts of rural America) in the same way that we analyze resource-rich countries of the global south. They are poor because they are kept poor; their poverty then becomes further fodder for social and cultural disdain on the part of the US and Western Europe.
This was all very much on my mind as we drove down I-26 and saw signs for Johnson City, Tennessee, a place that holds great weight in the Wofford family. It’s the site of two magnificent mansions, originally built by the Wofford and Harris families who I descend from. I had contemplated a visit before starting the trip, but I figured it wouldn’t be that interesting.
Now, with Hannah’s comment and this larger Dolly Parton-informed analysis front of mind, I felt a strong and unexpected need to see Llewellyn Wood, the mansion owned by the Wofford family.
Hannah, rockstar that she is, was totally up for the change of plans. She looked it up and realized we were only five minutes away.
After getting ourselves lost on Llewellyn Wood Road (the grounds of the estate were sold and subdivided for other homes by a later owner), I spotted the house I had remembered from so many pictures and a childhood visit.
As it happened, Robert Walker, the son of the late owner, was out front talking to a landscaper. “Hi there, my name’s Andrew Wofford,” I said. Robert, a tall, ruddy-cheeked man in his 60s had a half-smoked cigar in one hand as he held out the other to greet me. “Your Harris’ grandson,” he replied in a deep, subtle Tennessee drawl. Not a question, a statement! He pegged me immediately.
As it turns out, Robert is an avid golfer, a hobby which had brought him up to a golf tournament in Saucon Valley, Pennsylvania in the early 90’s. For some reason, sitting US Senator from Pennsylvania Harris Wofford was in attendance at the golf tournament (the image of Harris, for those of you who knew him, attending or playing in a golf tournament makes me laugh for some reason). Robert walked right up to him and said “I’m Robert Walker and I grew up at 1 Llewellyn Wood.”
Robert said Harris was so thrilled to meet him, and characteristically spent a good deal of the afternoon getting to know him and exchanging stories about Johnson City.
Robert was a generous host and he invited me and Hannah into the house for a tour (with masks of course). We met Judy, Robert’s stepmother, who is the current owner of the house as far as I could tell.
As we walked through the house, Robert gave me a much needed refresher on some of the history of the Wofford/Harris families. The house was built in 1927 and owned by George Torrey Wofford and Florence Potter Wofford (aka MaFlorence). George Torrey Wofford, my great-great grandfather, was the son of Octavia Torrey Wofford and Col. Jefferson Llewellyn Wofford, who together owned one of the larger plantations in Mississippi which enslaved, at its peak a little under 300 people. Jefferson Llewellyn Wofford was a Colonel in the Confederate Army and an early friend of Jefferson Davis, future President of the Confederate States of America.
This latter part of the history I knew all too well as it had been the subject of research I did throughout my undergraduate African American History major.
What I didn’t know, was much of anything about the Harris family, from whom Harris Sr. and Jr. get their first name.
MaFlorence was the daughter of William Pond Harris and Ida Florence Potter. The Harris family, Robert explained, came to Johnson City with the aim of producing wagon wheels at scale. This was the second half of the 19th century, and wagon wheels were a booming business. What they found, however, was that the great Oak Forests of Tennessee and North Carolina produced wood that was more desirable for upscale flooring than for wagons.
The Harris Lumber company became one of the primary retailers of Oak Hardwood Flooring across New York City. To this day, Robert claims, most pre-war apartment buildings in Manhattan and Brooklyn have Harris Oak for floors.
This business, the deforestation of the Great Oak Forests of Appalachia to produce the beautiful hardwood floors of Manhattan, made the Harris family one of the wealthiest families in Tennessee, Robert explained. I was beginning to think Hannah’s comment was the skeleton key of my entire desire to hike the Appalachian trail in the first place. I also was beginning to wonder if I was in fact a character in Richard Powers’ beautiful novel about forests, The Overstory.
The Wofford family in Johnson City built a solidly successful insurance business, Wofford Brothers' Insurance; but it was nothing in comparison to the Harris Lumber business. It’s for this reason—as I walked from the breakfast room (you know, where they exclusively eat breakfast) with ornate Italian marble carvings on the ceilings, to the massive mahogany library, through to the sunroom, then to the other sunroom via the kitchen and servants’ cooking area—that I suspected the financing of Llewellyn Wood may have been a product of both the Wofford and Harris fortunes. Those rooms were just on the first floor by the way.
I’ve spent a great deal of time digging into the many ways my ancestors were involved in the plantation economy, slave holding and slave trading (biggest of shouts to Dr. Kendra Field). I’ve also spent a great deal of time researching the ancestors of mine who illegally settled on and eventually annexed Cherokee land in the 18th century, land which today is only a few miles from the Appalachian Trail (biggest of shouts to Dr. Jim Rice).
But I’ve spent barely anytime thinking about this other aspect of my family’s story in the South: the extraction of natural resources for profit. This third category of family history felt eerily similar to the history Hannah and I had learned in West Virginia the day before.
Consider this 1917 quote from Frank Keeny, a folk leader, miner and union activist in West Virginia:
“I am a native West Virginian and there are others like me working in the mine down here. We don’t propose to get out of the way when a lot of capitalists from New York and London come down here and tell us to get off the earth. They played that game with the American Indian. They gave him the end of a log to sit on and then pushed him off that. We don’t propose to be pushed off.”
The Harris family weren’t necessarily industrial capitalists from New York City, but they also weren’t working class folks from Tennessee. William Pond Harris was from Massachusetts and Ida Florence Potter was from Illinois. More to the point, their daughter MaFlorence was born in 1874 in...New York City!
My point is that these were Northerners who came to Tennessee; they extracted wealth from natural resources that went largely to themselves and wealthy cities; many of their children left Tennessee to get university educations in Northern cities and most of them never came back.
It was that foundation of prosperity that allowed my grandfather Harris Llewellyn Wofford Jr. to lead a life of adventure, curiosity and exploration. And to be clear, I’m very glad he did! I’m not saying I have some grand moral theory for how to make sense of any of this. I’m just surprised that it really hasn’t ever been something I, or anyone else in the family, has really thought about. Most notably, Harris himself.
There’s a story I’ve heard that when Taylor Branch first published his magisterial history of the Civil Rights Movement ‘Parting the Waters’ (of which Harris is a semi-major character), Harris felt that it was inaccurate that Branch described him as “the scion of a wealthy southern family.”
I suspect there are family members who are reading this right now that would dispute this description. Here’s all I’d say: I would bet that if my grandmother Emmy Lou Lindgren were alive today, the child of a stockyard worker who survived the Great Depression, she’d take one look at the breakfast room with ornate Italian marble carvings and she’d laugh out loud at the idea that Harris didn’t come from a wealthy, southern family. We can argue about semantics, but what I saw at Llewellyn Wood is exactly what generational wealth looks like. If you visit the home that Harris grew up in in Scarsdale, New York, you’ll get the same picture.
I share all of this because in a way, these experiences on the trip down felt like they were revealing the reasons I was hiking the trail. Or at the very least, they gave me a more tangible connection to the place I’d be traveling through over these next few months.
Photos of Llewellyn Wood:
The Trail: Evangelicals and Lesbians
I started on the trail on March 17th, sent off by my dear friend Hannah. As we walked together to the southern terminus, the first white blaze of the trail, we met my first fellow thru-hiker. A 66-year-old white man from Central Pennsylvania named Preacherman. After we walked by, Hannah turned to me and said “maybe you’ll be Rabbi?!” Indeed, she was prescient. As of today, I go by Rebbe Mo', though that’s a separate story.
I made it to a shelter after 10 miles of hiking on my first night, just barely escaping a torrential downpour. I found myself in the top loft section of this shelter with a kind, soft-spoken 26-year-old named Anthony and a loud, very confident, very Christian, former military commando and Pastor named Preacherman. Yep, same guy.
When I told him I was from outside of Philly, he said “oh boy, I heard there was a Philly boy up ahead and I thought we were going to have trouble, but you don’t look like a Philly boy,” with a smile. I had no idea what this meant, but my best guess is that he was referring to the fact that I wasn’t Black, I guess?
Either way, Preacherman had a lot to say. About Jesus, to be sure, but about the trail as well. What was at first friendly advice turned to borderline interrogation and display of expertise. Turns out he was section hiking, meaning he’s been hiking the trail in about 200 mile increments since 2016. At one point I asked if he had done the approach trail (an 8.8 mile approach to the terminus that isn’t technically a part of the AT itself), “boy I’m 66 years old what do you think I did? I didn’t do the damn approach trail.” Trying to be polite and self-deprecating, I laughed and said “well if it makes you feel any better, I’m 25 years old and I didn’t do the approach trail either.” Wrong move Rabbi.
“It don’t make me feel any better, I know who I am,” Preacherman responded.
Good lord, what the fuck have I gotten myself into.
Later I asked, “are you hoping to hike the whole thing eventually?”
“Oh, I’m doing the whole thing. Hoping is a synonym for quitting.”
So much for the humility and faith of religious life.
Preacherman was not going to settle into silence easily. Fortunately, another talkative character walked in, a 6”4’, 67-year-old, lesbian woman named Debra from West Virginia. Debra also had a lot to say about the trail, do’s and don’ts, all of them unsolicited. Eventually, Preacherman seemed to feel that his corner was being threatened. Some small dispute about an upcoming water source led Preacherman to ask skeptically, “have you done much of the trail before?”
“Oh I’ve thru hiked it twice before” Debra replied politely. Preacherman nodded and finally went to sleep. Thank you lord for bringing me Debra, lesbian savior of my first night’s sleep!
I lay in my sleeping bag trying to fall asleep with Preacherman by my side loudly cramping up and slamming his legs against the floorboards—when I opened up a poem that my good friend and mentor Caleb Brooks wrote years ago in Sierra Leone. “This is why I cannot quit,” he writes. “The deprived glory. The profane little majesties...At each corner the sense that life has been flayed before you and laid bare, trembling. An old feeling coming back again new. The familiar bafflement.”
I love those lines so much. The profane little majesties, is that not the perfect description of the night I had just spent with Preacherman and Debra? Those words gave me some solace as I fell asleep amidst the scurrying mice and the rainfall on the tin roof, eager to begin my first full day of hiking.
Photos from my first day on the trail:
Joy Cometh in the Morning
Speaking of the Bible, US Senators and Georgia: I was reminded of how Reverend Raphael Warnock ended his victory speech on the night of January 5th. “I remember my dad, in this moment. He used to wake me up every morning at dawn. It was morning, but it was still dark. It's dark right now. But morning comes and Scripture tells us that weeping may endure for the night, the joy comes in the morning. Let us rise up. Greet the morning and meet the challenges of this moment. Together we can do the necessary work and win the future for all of our children.”
I have thought often of this quote while hiking because the morning is, without question, the most joyous and beautiful moment of my day on trail. That will likely shock my family, and frankly it still sort of shocks me, because I have a remarkable proclivity for late sleeping. I set the all-time record at my high school for lates in a year, then went on to break the record for lates in a four-year career! Needless to say I was very close with the attendance keeper Ms. Havens.
What happens in the morning is the great challenge and great reward of my day. I wake up in a warm sleeping bag to the awful realization that I and everything I have with me is unpacked inside of a tent or tied to a tree, in a world that is usually about 30 degrees, sometimes as low as 20. I must stare down the factual impossibility that within 60-90 minutes, I will have food and coffee in my stomach, everything I have with me will be in my pack, and I will be walking, once again, up the trail.
I say factual impossibility and yet, every day without fail, I arise and everything I just described happens. Even so, every morning I wake up, and believe the task to be impossible. Maybe it’s this cycle of encountering what feels impossible and achieving it over and over again that stokes the joy. But I think it may be something slightly more ineffable, captured only by writers far more thoughtful than me. Two come to mind, Andre Dubus (shouts to West Foster and Janet Kobosky) and Jack Gilbert (shouts to Caleb Brooks).
Here’s Dubus in his beautiful short story, ‘A Father’s Story:”
“I go to bed early and sleep well and wake at four forty-five, for an hour of silence. I never want to get out of bed then, and every morning I know I can sleep for another four hours, and still not fail at any of my duties. But I get up, so I have come to believe my life can be seen in miniature in that struggle in the dark of morning. While making the bed and boiling the water for my coffee, I talk to God: I offer Him my day, every act of my body and spirit, my thoughts and my moods, as a prayer of thanksgiving.”
Indeed, my life on trail can be seen in that struggle in the dark of morning. It’s a peculiar joy that builds slowly as I pack up and then washes over me as I round the corner to leave camp and get back on the trail. And what I am most grateful for is that I experience it every day. Which leads me to Jack Gilbert’s great insight in his poem 'Highlights and Interstices':
“We think of lifetimes as mostly the exceptional
and sorrows. Marriage we remember as the children,
vacations, and emergencies. The uncommon parts.
But the best is often when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child almost without
noticing and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with the other woman. What if she
could keep all of that? Our lives happen between
the memorable. I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko. What I miss most about
her is that commonplace I can no longer remember”
The sacredness of the ordinary is something both Dubus and Gilbert reflect on frequently. And probably thanks in large part to their writing, the sacred ordinary is something I’m very attuned to on the trail.
Photos/videos of sunrises/sunsets:
Trail Magic: A Tale of Two Ministries
Friends who have thru-hiked before (shouts to Yoni Segev, Sophia Spooner and Anna Kaplan) had tried to explain trail magic to me before, but I couldn’t really understand the concept. Essentially, so I was told, folks from the communities near the trail will set up a station of free, delicious, often hot food at a road crossing just for thru hikers.
It didn’t seem implausible, but it seemed like such a significant undertaking that I would rarely be lucky enough to encounter it on my hike. Lo and behold, on my third, fourth and fifth mornings, I encountered three different forms of trail magic.
The first encounter was amazing. I ate two hot breakfast sandwiches (sausage, egg and cheese), had some coffee, refilled my water and had great conversations with the folks there. They were there representing “Benchmark Adventure Ministries,” and although my Jewish spidey senses (it’s pronounced Speed-ah-man!) made me reluctant at first, it really was a great stop. They didn’t proselytize at all, they didn’t ask me about religion, they just wanted to know about the trail and offer me food. I met one guy, Jeff (huge shouts to Jeff!), who was perhaps the nicest person I’ve encountered on trail so far. Jeff, or J-Stroke, thru-hiked a few years ago and he gave me some great advice: “don’t quit on a bad day.” Basically, if the sun is out, you’ve got enough food and things are going fine and you want to quit? Okay, fine quit. But don’t quit cause it’s raining or cause you’re hungry, those are circumstances that can and will change.
Jeff told me about some of the experiences and challenges on his thru hike and then just gave me a bit of a pump up talk. As I was leaving, he fist bumped me on the chest like Greg Poppvich did to Kawhi in the 2014 NBA Finals (shouts to Skyler Mueller).
Incidentally, Jeff had also given me a bandanna from the ministries group. As he handed it to me he went out of his way to say “it’s got some bible verses on it, but if you don’t want it you should ditch it at the next hiker box no worries.” I actually appreciated this a lot, because it didn’t feel like he was forcing anything on me, just trying to be helpful. Little did I or Jeff know that this bandana would play a big role in my well-being over the next 24 hours.
See here’s the thing about eating two sausage egg and cheese sandwiches and drinking strong coffee after you haven’t had those kinds of foods in awhile—it can do some strange things to your digestion. Or in the words of my beloved grandfather, “I’m having tremendous bowel movements!”
To spare you all the details, the bandana served a crucial purpose of protecting some very sensitive skin (my inner butt cheeks) from chafing as I hiked. The bandana was playing this role throughout day four, which is when I hit my second trail magic, Echo Ministries.
This second group was not so subtle about their mission, but equally as generous with their food. I ate two cheeseburgers, a hot dog, a full salad, a serving of broccoli, a bag of chips and a cookie. It was awesome.
As I stuffed this food into my face, I was approached by a very handsome, charismatic man who looked to be about 50 years old, named Greg. As far as I could tell, Greg was running the operation. He asked me where I was from, how my hike was going. I asked him the same, he was from Maine but had settled in northern Georgia for work years ago. I thanked him profusely for the generosity which is when he said:
“Well you know the reason we are out here is because we want to celebrate our lord and savior Jesus Christ. And we want as many people as possible to have a relationship with Jesus. Are you a believer?”
As he posed this question, I was holding a half-eaten cheeseburger in front of my face, mouth-agape.
Goddamnit, I thought to myself. I’ve got three options here.
1) Lie and say yes, minimal guilt, maximum shame.
2) Tell the truth and explain that I’m Jewish and it’s not that we don’t love socialist Palestinian Jews like Jesus it’s just that we don’t think he was like, the one, you know? Maximum dignity, but likely would have to have a theological debate.
Or 3) Say something vaguely neutral that would leave the door open a crack but would also allow me to go back for seconds.
I went with 3: “I’m not,” I said, “but I am a believer in the power of human beings. And this right here (gesturing around at the food tent) shows me that that power is real.”
“Okay, amen, that’s wonderful,” Greg said, as he started to make his way to another bearded thru-hiker.
Phew, nailed it!
But this was not the final hurdle, because as I was leaving, Greg caught me and asked if he could pray for me.
Though this made me deeply uncomfortable in concept, I figured I should just say yes as a sign of respect so I mustered a smile and said, “sure!”
He closed his eyes, looked down and put his left hand on my shoulder. “Dear Lord Jesus, please watch out for my brother Andrew, please give him the strength to hike this trail and the wisdom to stay safe.”
He took a breath. I thought, okay that wasn’t so bad and as I looked up, he continued.
“And though he says he is not a believer, dear lord, please use your mighty powers to wow my brother Andrew, show him your glory and your majesty as he hikes this trail. Provide him with the experiences that allow him to see that you are with him at all times, that your words are inside of him.”
It was this last phrase, “that your words are inside of him,” that almost broke me. At that moment, I remembered that I had a bandana covered in bible verses shoved up my ass. A huge smile, but fortunately no laughter, came over me as Greg finished the prayer and looked up at me. “Thank you Greg, that means more to me than you know.”
With that, I was on my way, saved from butt chafing by the words of God, deep inside me. Thank you God for the lesbians, for the trail magic and for the skin care!
Photo showing my love of god from our zoom seder for Passover:
The trail has been full of stories like these so far, but I will stop there for now. What I will say is that the trail has been a fascinating cross-section of red and blue, young, old, queer, religious, leftist and conservative. I have yet to have a truly negative interaction with a single person on trail. Not even Preachermabn who later told me he considers me a part of his “tramily.” LOL.
As a young, politically undecided thru-hiker from Michigan (who’s surrounded by a lot of QAnon people in his life) told me, “I think it’s because we’re all the same kind of crazy, wanting to be out here on the trail, that makes everyone so willing to support each other.” I like that, we are all sort of the same kind of crazy, at least to a degree.
I am 165 miles into the trail taking a day off at Fontana Dam, North Carolina. I start the roughly 70 mile section of Great Smoky Mountain National Park tomorrow which should be fun. I might get some snow!
One last thing, my trail name is Rebbe Mo’, a combination of two trail names that I had “Rabbi” and “Molasses.” I had Matzah on trail for Passover and somebody called me Rabbi, then I started saying “Sweet Molasses!” whenever I stretched at camp. An older thru hiker from Rochester heard people call me Rabbi and Molasses and suggested I go by Rebbe Mo.’ Remarkably, this is a name that friends had suggested to me earlier on the phone (shouts to Anna Kaplan and Aaron Kay).
The trail works in magical ways.
Some finals photos/videos:
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