Becoming Odyssa - Jennifer Pharr Davis [14]
So when Sarah handed me the journal, I paused. There was so much I wanted to say. I was uncertain about how to express my expectations for this adventure and, more significantly, I was unsure who I would become over the course of this journey.
Finally, I pressed the pen to the paper and wrote:
I’ve always heard New England is nice; look forward to being there this summer.
—Odyssa
I was a Classics major in college, and over the past four days, I had compared the Appalachian Trail to Homer’s Odyssey several times. One hiker suggested that my trail name should be Odysseus. But I didn’t want to be a guy; there were too many guys out on the trail already. So I decided to re-gender the name and call myself Odyssa.
I thought about what the name meant. Maybe I was a wanderer on a long journey back to my home. But then what was I walking away from? And did I really even have a home? After all, I no longer lived with my parents, and I was out of school but without a job. I didn’t even know what the word “home” meant anymore. Maybe that was why I was out here. Maybe I was searching for a home.
I shook my head to clear my thoughts. I wasn’t a three-thousand-year-old Homeric character, I was just a girl who wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail. I closed the book, looked at my friends, and together we walked back down the trail to the parking lot.
4
ADVENTURE
UNICOI GAP, GA, TO THE NANTAHALA
OUTDOOR CENTER, NC—84 MILES
Just when you start to gain confidence on the moderate hills of northeast Georgia, you enter North Carolina and find your first real mountains. Several of the summits are home to fire towers, which, on clear days, provide stunning views of the dark blue peaks reaching out to the north. Much of the trail is lined with rhododendron thickets, and clear creeks cross the path every few miles. A long descent to the winding waters of the Nantahala River and the welcome amenities at the Nantahala Outdoor Center mark the end of the section.
The lessons of the first fifty miles were abundant. After reaching Springer Mountain, I decided to spend a week at home to regroup and repack, and then return to Unicoi Gap to start hiking north toward Katahdin.
I made a lot of changes after spending several days on the trail: I replaced my heavy Nalgene water bottle with an empty Gatorade bottle to save weight, I left a wool sweater at home but added a lightweight fleece jacket and an extra pair of socks, and I put more food in all of my mail drops. But more than anything, I repacked my thoughts. After the first fifty miles, I’d realized that hiking the trail wasn’t going to be recreation; it was going to be hard work.
By hiking the section from Unicoi Gap to Springer Mountain, I had completed just two percent of the entire trail, and it had been substantially more difficult than I had expected. In spite of that, I was surprised how much I missed the trail when I got home. I was only at my parents’ house for six days, but they seemed to drag on endlessly. When I wasn’t repacking, I was sharing stories from my first fifty miles with my friends and family. And at night I would lie in bed trying to imagine the adventures that awaited me.
The night before I returned to the trail, I struggled to sleep, and when the morning came I got up eagerly and gathered my belongings. I went upstairs to find my father sitting on the edge of a chair with a steaming mug of coffee in his hand. Together we loaded up his white pickup and started our three-hour drive to Unicoi Gap.
Most parents would not be thrilled if their twenty-one-year-old