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Baker Publishing Group - Paul Stutzman

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149 pages

English

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Description

After Paul Stutzman lost his wife to breast cancer, he sensed a tug on his heart--the call to a challenge, the call to pursue a dream. Paul left his stable career, traveled to Georgia, and took his first steps on the Appalachian Trail. What he learned during the next four and a half months changed his life--and will change readers' lives as well.In Hiking Through, readers will join Paul on his remarkable 2,176-mile hike through fourteen states in search of peace and a renewed sense of purpose, meeting fascinating and funny people along the way. They'll discover that every choice we make along the path has consequences for the journey and will come away with a new understanding of God's grace and guidance. Nature-lovers, armchair adventurers, and those grieving a loss may not be able to hike the AT themselves, but they can go on this spiritual pilgrimage with a truly humble and sympathetic guide.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Travel writing

Memoir

Informations

Publié par	Baker Publishing Group
Date de parution	01 mars 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781441238115
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0230€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

© 2010, 2012 by Paul Stutzman
Published by Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com
Original edition published 2010 by Synergy Books
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-3811-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
The internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided only as a resource; Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content or permanence.
To protect the privacy of those who have shared their stories with the author, some details and names have been changed.
To Mary
Our family still misses you so much,
and we look forward to the day we’ll be reunited.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Prologue
1. The Big C
2. The Plan
3. The Narrow Path
4. The Narrow Way
5. My New Life
6. A Cold, Rainy, Miserable Mess
Photos 1
7. Butterflies
8. The Smoky Mountains
9. Let’s Go Left
10. Words Have Meaning
Photos 2
11. Instead, I’m Happy
12. Choices and Consequences
13. It Is What It Is
14. Chasing Dreams
15. The Storm
Photos 3
16. Pilgrim’s Progress
17. Summer Solstice
18. The Pharmacy Shelter
19. Kindness and Courage
20. The Path to Freedom
Photos 4
21. Golden Days
22. The White Mountains
23. The Maine Event
24. Trials and Tears
Photos 5
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Back Cover
Author’s Note
A dditional photos from my Appalachian Trail adventure can be viewed at my website, www.hikingthrough.com . I hope they add to your enjoyment of this book.
In this book, I’ll only be using “real” trail names if their owners have given me permission. This gives all you hikers opportunity for plausible denial when your spouse reads some of these adventures and says, “Hey, honey, that sounds like you. You did what ?” You, my guilty trail friends, can just act innocent and say, “Nope. Not me. I would never do anything that dumb.”
Prologue
C autiously, I stepped on the narrow boards traversing the bog. Two weeks of almost constant rain had brought the water to the top of the wooden walkway, and at several points the path was completely submerged. A tenuous passage, this was the only route available through the swamp that stood between me and the peak of the mountain.
I was nearly to the top of Mt. Success in New Hampshire, and after crossing this bog and summiting the mountain, I would be less than two miles from Maine, the fourteenth and final state in my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail.
The click , click , click of my hiking poles was the only sound I heard as I crossed the shimmering quagmire. Over the years, rain had accumulated here and created a primordial soup of water five feet deep, seasoned with decaying trees, vegetation, and insects. As I planted my left hiking pole on a half-submerged board, the tip of the pole slipped away and the momentum of the thirty-pound pack on my back destroyed my precarious balance. I heard my own shrill scream of “Oh God, no!” and the bog added a weary hiker as another ingredient in its murky depth.
I sank up to my backpack in the muck. Like a drowning man flailing for a lifesaver, I scrambled to escape, grabbing the board where I’d been walking just seconds earlier, leaning forward over its steadfastness, slowly wriggling my body out of the bog’s grasp. As I lay frightened and gasping on the narrow wooden path, I saw the picture of myself covered in decaying muck and slime, and muttered, “Congratulations, Mom and Dad, it’s a boy.”
I lay there for several minutes, contemplating the journey that had brought me to this lonely spot where I was exhausted, indescribably filthy, and facing who-knows-what around every bend. I could have been warm and dry and well-fed at home. I could have been back at work, in a safe routine, productive, earning a paycheck. Oh, wait I gave all that up so I could be out here alone in this cold, rainy, godforsaken bog.
I t always happens to someone else. A knock on the door late at night while parents lie in bed wondering why a child is not yet home. A call from the hospital saying a spouse is waiting in the emergency room and heart-wrenching decisions must be made. For me, it had always happened to someone else; death’s bony finger had lifted people out of my sphere, but so far that grim reaper had only worked at the periphery of my life.
That all changed with one phone call.
My wife, Mary, called me at the restaurant I had managed for seventeen years. Her strained voice said, “It’s malignant.”
My mind raced benign, malignant which was good news, which was bad? I couldn’t remember.
“What does that mean?”
“I have cancer.” The words jerked out between sobs. I told Mary I was coming home, hung up the phone, dropped my head into my hands, and for the first time in years, wept.
The daily calendar on my desk caught my eye. On that day, August 30, 2002, the meditation came from the lyrics of an old song I had often sung growing up in the Conservative Mennonite Church, “God of Grace and God of Glory.”
I ripped off the calendar page, thinking that I was indeed going to need the wisdom and courage spoken of in the song; but I did not know how desperately I would need help in the coming months. That page is still tucked away in my Bible.
At home, Mary and I held each other and determined to battle the disease together my wife, with her faith and spirit, and me beside her every step of the way.

After my high school graduation in 1969, I worked as an orderly at a local hospital. Every morning, the night shift gave us reports and updates on the patients in our care. The charge nurse’s habit was to use the letter C whenever cancer was in a report, so that became our lingo, never using the actual word cancer.
That word strikes fear in people from all walks of life and all economic brackets. However, if caught early and given proper treatment, many types of cancer can be cured or controlled; a diagnosis of cancer today is not always a pronouncement of imminent death. For Mary, it was breast cancer, and we would soon become all too familiar with its statistics. One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer. It sounds more optimistic to say that seven out of eight women will never suffer with this disease. Yet almost everyone will surely know someone maybe someone dear to them diagnosed with breast cancer.
Unfortunately for Mary, the diagnosis came too late. With cancer in her family history, she had been faithful in yearly checkups and mammograms. Several years before, her mammogram showed a spot, but we were told it appeared to be only a calcium deposit. In retrospect, we should have sought another opinion, but regrettably we did not. We were oblivious to the growing danger, until menopause reared its ugly head.
Mary’s difficulties during menopause had become frustrating, so she sought the counsel of a doctor recommended as an expert on menopause. But the menopause nuisances suddenly became secondary when the doctor learned about the abnormality in Mary’s latest mammogram. She immediately ordered another test, followed by a biopsy.
And now the results were in: that big C was written on the chart of Mary’s life. My wife was now that one woman in eight.

Our children must be told. The two oldest were living at home and were soon informed. But our youngest daughter was three hours away, at college, and Mary decided to drive to western Ohio and spend the weekend with her. Realizing that mother and daughter needed the time together, I decided to stay at home.
That meant a weekend apart from my wife, and we’d been dealt a numbing blow. I found myself reverting to one of my own stress-relievers, dreaming about hiking in the woods without a care. For years, one of my favorite daydreams had been about thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT). I nursed the dream tenderly, but never thought it could become reality. Mary knew how much I loved hiking, and I had often shared my dream with her. So with my wife’s blessing, I did more than daydream. While she visited our daughter, I spent my weekend at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the headquarters for the AT.
Harpers Ferry is where abolitionist John Brown raided the U.S. Armory in his fight against slavery. Today it is also the location of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. The state of West Virginia has only four miles of the 2,176 that make up the Appalachian Trail, and those four miles of trail go right through this little town.
I explored a small section of trail in both directions from town. A short distance south is Jefferson Rock, a high stone outlook where Thomas Jefferson once stood and admired the view of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers rushing together in the valley below. I walked a little farther south to where U.S. Highway 340 crosses the Shenandoah River. There, the Appalachian Trail disappears up into the surrounding hills. What was up there, around the next bend, over the next mountain? I stood for a long time, contemplating what it would be like to hike the thousand miles from Harpers Ferry to Springer Mountain, Georgia, the trail’s southern terminus.
I promised myself that one day I would come hiking out of those woods and down into Harpers Ferry. I’d cross town and follow the trail across the footbridge over the Potomac River and hike along the C&O Canal Towpath northward into Maryland, exploring every bend in the trail, soaking up every scene, with my sights set on the AT’s northern terminus, mighty Mt. Katahdin in Baxter State Park, Maine.
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