Trail Magic in Virginia

This fall, I hiked a three-hundred-mile section of the Appalachian Trail, from Damascus to Waynesboro. I'm sixty-one. I've wanted to do it since I was twenty.

It was hard. Every day was up and down, up and down, over rocky ridges in the rain. My knees complained constantly. My feet were covered in blisters.

But the trail had a gift I didn't expect: "trail magic." Strangers who just appear to help hikers. One morning, I came down a mountain to a road crossing and found a retired couple with a cooler full of cold sodas, a grill of hot dogs and a sign: "Hikers welcome." Another day, someone had left a box of fresh apples at a shelter with a note. A woman in a small town drove me twenty miles to a post office and refused to take gas money.

They never wanted anything back. They'd just say, "Pass it on."

I finished in Waynesboro twenty-six days later, twenty pounds lighter. I've already bought a cooler. Next spring, I'm setting up at a road crossing with cold sodas and a sign.