I was 56 when I made my 2016 AT thru hike attempt. I had been legally married to my husband for 12 years, and we’d been together for 9 years before we jumped over the broom in Ottawa, Canada on July 2, 2004. I had been openly gay, at work and in life, since I was 18 or 19. I actually marched in most of the big LGBTQ rights marches in DC and was active in LBGTQ rights organizations and volunteered as a nurse practitioner in HIV clinics for years. I felt I was very comfortable with being who I was. Just ask me and I would tell you so.
Well, there is one point there that I had not considered. It is easy to be out to my extended family that tends to be liberal to very liberal to extremely liberal. It is easy to be out when you live in the middle of a liberal coastal city like DC or even a big city like Phoenix that is embedded deeply in a fairly red state. What I had not considered was how easy or not easy was it to be out to a group of people, in the middle of the forest, who I had just met and, at least to my judgement, seemed 100% heterosexual.
The AT thru hiking community is heavily testosterone driven to say the least.
I kind of froze for a few days in my own fear of being out and hating that I was afraid and hating that I was talking around my marriage, husband, and my life. It was not so much that I wanted to scream ‘I’m gay’ as I wanted to be honest about myself as doing less is just being a liar.
On about Day 3, I was setting up my tent when one of my new friends, Dude Man, came and whispered to me, “Wazo, a few of us are going to leave about midnight, cross Blood Mountain, and go to Mountain Crossing at Neel Gap. Why don’t you come with us?” First, I have to admit that I was feeling very honored to be invited by the guys who were clearly the cool kids in our portion of the early bubble to skip camp in middle of a vety cold night to get away from an annoying hiker (yes, there are a few here and there but not many at all). They, the cool kids, were in their 20s and I was in my 50s, and on the nerd scale, I was doing better than most. My response, and I remember it like it was 5 minutes ago was, “hell yeah, I’ll go!”
At some point well after hiker midnight, Dude Man came and quietly got me up. We got our stuff packed, slipped out of camp, and headed north. We arrived at the top of Blood Mountain just as the sun was coming up. It was a great moment, one that I will never forget.
Before we got to the top of Blood Mountain, I figured I had to be open about who I was. Oddly, it really made me nervous. All that marching and volunteering and Gay Pride Day going, seemed to fade into a neurotic bowl of quivering jello. So, I bit the bullet and told them. The first response was one of the guys saying, “My father-in-law is gay and we spend just about every weekend with him and his partner.” I was so nervous that I could not connect the gay with the father-in-law and had to ask him to explain. By the time he was done, I was laughing at myself and felt that I was now one of the cool kids on the AT. On that trip that unfortunately ended just under 500 miles due to an injury, I learned that the thru hiking community was about as much a live and let live group of people I’d ever met. It is a beautiful social norm on the trail.
Our little group grew by quite a few more people. Some where long section hikers but most were thru hikers. Here is the statistical smashing fact. Of my tramily, I was the only member who did not make it to make to Maine. One guy,who started out as a section hiker transformed into a thru hiker after a long and very difficult weekend in Gatlinburg with his wife. My tramily rocked.
I am convinced that who you hang out with, cool kids or not, has a big impact on your likelihood of getting to Katahdin. Your tramily is, well, your family on the trail and, like it or not, we are to some degree the product of our families.
Tripping Along The Trail 