The Appalachian Trail officially opened in 1937, but 11 years passed before the first person thru-hiked it from Georgia to Maine. That inaugural intrepid soul was named Earl Shaffer, a WWII veteran of the South Pacific, who undertook the entire 2,000-mile journey as a way to “walk off the war.”
Post-traumatic hiking is nothing new. The early Greeks had nostos, the long journey home after war, and most cultures have some form of homecoming journey for warriors after military service. For centuries, religions have codified these transitional moments by instituting rituals of pilgrimage, healing and reintroduction to peacetime living.
As recently as WWII, transportation limitations provided the necessary decompression, reflection and group processing time to help soldiers make the transition from the theater of war to their hometown theaters on the square. Yet with the advent of air travel, sol- diers, airmen, seamen and marines since the Vietnam War have gone from down range to down home in a matter of hours, creating a kind of soul-lag, as Nick Hunt calls it in his essay, “Traveling at the Speed of the Soul.”
