My “Walk in the Woods”

Bill Bryson chronicled his attempt at thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail in the book “A Walk in the Woods.” This mission is not for the faint of heart; in its entirety the trail is  more than 2100 miles long and takes upwards of 6 months of torment to complete. The dangers are real, but generally anyone who attempts a thru-hike should be aware of the dangers. According to Bryson, only 10% of those who begin the trail will ever be able to claim they completed it. Bryson asked many people why they quit the trail and most said, “it’s not what I thought it was.” What did they think it was? A walk in the woods? They knew better than that. They knew they would have endless hours trapped in their own thoughts, many nights soaked through with rain, countless days walking on blistered feet with too heavy a pack. Yet they attempt it because who doesn’t want to say “I did it!”?

There are also those who complete the trail who “‘shoulda quit but didn’t. [One guy] was coming off the trail. He’d walked from Maine on his own. It took him eight months, longer than it takes most people, and I don’t think he’d seen anybody for the last several weeks. When he came off he was just a trembling wreck…just fell into his wife’s arms and started weeping. Couldn’t talk at all…I’ve never seen anybody so relieved to have anything done with, and I kept thinking, ‘Well, you know, sir, hiking the Appalachian Trail is a voluntary endeavor.'”

Bryson set out to thru-hike the AT and ended up section-hiking less than half of it. He quit. Not because it wasn’t what he thought it was, but because he learned about his goals, needs, and purposes from it. And none of those required completing what he set out to do.

In a way, I think signing up for the Peace Corps was my attempt at thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. You could say that I ended up with a walk in the woods. Not because it wasn’t what I expected, but because I learned enough about myself in the process to know when pride would have been the only thing keeping me going. It was something I felt like I needed to do: live in a village with the people I was trying to help catch up to development and improve their health for 2 full years. In my mind, 2 years was what gave this process legitimacy and sustainability. Anybody can go live in an entirely different culture for a few weeks or a few months. But it takes a special person to do it for 2 years.

I spent 4 weeks in Pretoria pondering what it would mean to go to a new village and continue on my Peace Corps journey, to finish what I set out to do. I considered the possibility of living with regret for not staying. And last Tuesday I made the most difficult decision of my life. I would return home from South Africa. I would quit.

My thru-hike was not meant to be. I could have “stuck it out” like so many other PCVs do just to say “I did it!” But more important than sticking it out to me was my safety, my sanity, and most of all, using my gifts on this earth. Never do I want to be the person who “shoulda quit but didn’t.” I have learned very intimately what my strengths and limitations are as a human being. I am a nurse. I’m a NURSE! I am proud of that and I am blessed to have had the opportunity, education, and experience to be a great nurse. It took this experience to assure me that this is the right field for me. I am gifted for this field, not for community development, sexual behavior change or youth program management. I am not a gardener or an entrepreneur. I am a nurse, and the bottom line that I never wanted to draw is that Peace Corps was not for me. (The other side of that coin is that South Africa is far from what I hoped it to be and it’s quite possible that I would have come to an entirely different conclusion if I was placed in East Africa. I just trust that God is using all of this to lead me in the direction where I can serve the world best.)

“So do you feel bad about leaving the trail?” Katz asked after a time.

I thought for a moment, unsure. I had come to realized that I didn’t have any feelings toward the AT that weren’t confused and contradictory…

I have regrets, of course…But I got a great deal else from the experience.

It turns out that I went to the end of the Earth to learn that I already know who I am and what I am good at and to fall in love with Afrikaners and fellow Americans. And that is a road worth traveling.