Serenity Park

Appalachian Trail (AT)

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, ActiveStyle, Pages 23, 28 on 04/28/2008

Packing light

It means something else when the trip is a 2,000-mile hike

By Kyle Brazzel

Monday, April 28, 2008

LITTLE ROCK — In mid-March, Curtis Bowman, a Little Rock lawyer, gathered his friends around his backyard swimming pool for a send-off party. A few days later, he would leave on a six-month sojourn. To collect well-wishes for the trip, he spread a piece of fabric and asked partygoers to add an inscription, as if the cloth were a high school yearbook or a cast where cheerful embellishments distract from the broken bone underneath.

“Happy trails,” one friend wrote.

“Stay strong - watch for bears,” cautioned another.

Bowman’s favorite message was penned by his wife, Debbie: “Don’t give up - stay gone the whole time.”

Somewhere along the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, a greenway of more than 2,000 miles stretching from Georgia to Maine, Bowman is striving to heed Debbie’s good-natured admonition and give his wife her full six months.

In doing so - an achievement to be marked by the hiker’s ascending the peak of Maine’s Mount Katahdin by mid-October - Bowman would join the ranks of nearly 30,000 people who have “thru-hiked” the Appalachian Trail.

Thru-hikers make the trail, and the outposts of civilization along the way, their home for the length of the journey.

Along the way, Bowman has posted updates to his wife as well as to Dee Engelbey, his assistant at the law firm Cauley, Bowman, Carney and Williams, where Bowman specializes in securities fraud. Before leaving, Bowman pre-packaged several replenishments of supplies, such as trail-friendly freeze-dried meals, and left them with Engelbey to mail to him at post offices along his route.

In a recent dispatch on www.trailjournals.com, where Bowman files progress reports in the “Currently Hiking” section under the username “Sweat Hog,” he relays that he is a little past Gatlinburg, Tenn. Tennessee is one of 14 states through which the trail meanders.

“Can’t believe I’ve made it this far,” Bowman wrote. “Today was the worst; winds blowing about 50 knots per hour (well it seemed like it) and sheets of rain.”

Given the weather report from Gatlinburg, Bowman’s collection of bon voyage bon mots ought to have come in handy. The signatures were inked on the waterproof cover Bowman is using to shield the gear on his back from the elements.

What’s underneath it, of course, will be key to the completion of Bowman’s trek. Before leaving, the adventurer faced not only the question of what he would need - and what he could reasonably carry - for six months in the wild, but also what gear would offer him the most reliable and companionable performance.

Unlike, say, travelers packing for a couple of weeks in Europe, a process replete with forecasting outfits appropriate for strolling through museums, romping through ruins and breezing into bistros all in the same day, thruhikers don’t have the luxury of syncing stylish apparel to a stuffed itinerary.

One of the only ways Bowman planned to accessorize his trail wardrobe was with a bandanna he would knot at his neck to absorb sweat and wipe down his cooking dishes. Bowman selected the scarf not for the flair it would add to his ensemble but for its duality of purpose: In addition to mopping his brow and his mess kit, the linen serves as a billboard for a hiker’s intentions for citified interludes. On one side, the scarf reads “Hiker To Town,” a signal for drivers inclined to transport a temporary escapee from the trail within proximity of hostels, laundries, Internet cafes and convenience stores. On the other side, it reads “Hiker To Trail.”

But just because thru-hikers are not slaves to fashion does not mean that they are not slaves to labels. Bowman’s brand-name choices are carefully chosen and, in hiking circles, carry just as much cachet as a Phillip Lim or a Louis Vuitton.

The labels on Bowman’s back these days sound less sumptuous and, well, closer to the ground: Osprey, Steripen, Roclite, Big Agnes.

A few days before his departure, Bowman laid out his gear for inspection. Repeating the hiking maxim that a pound carried on one’s feet is equal in burden to five on the back, he described his recent conversion to lightweight Roclite 390 boots.

Originally designed for paragliding, the boots have been embraced by hikers for their ankle support and feather weight.

“There’s no reason to usea real heavy last-your-lifetime boot,” Bowman said, disavowing the muscular footwear he terms “waffle stompers.” In the event the Roclites couldn’t withstand the wear of 2,000 miles, Bowman prepared to have Engelbey ship him a new pair a third of the way through the hike, and another fresh pair for the final third of the way.

Though his feet are shod in a new find, for his pack Bowman had opted for an old friend. His Osprey Aether backpack, in a variety offering around 3,700 cubic inches of fillable space, had already seen him through other treks. (Prior to the Appalachian Trail hike, the longest Bowman had spent in the solitude of a trek was two weeks in the Canadian Rockies, but that trip, he notes, was a true span of self-isolation, while along the busy Appalachian Trail, which crisscrosses national parks and steers hikers to towns for recharging, it is unlikely he will go a day or two without encountering another person.)

“This is the one thing I didn’t want to change,” he said of the pack. “It’s the perfect size and fits me good.”

Bowman planned to pack about a week’s to 10 days’ worth of food, mostly freeze-dried entrees he mail-ordered from www.rei.com, a gear source popular with hikers. (Typical menu item: Veggie Pad Thai, prepared by pouring boiling water into the package, from the brand Backpacker’s Pantry.) Bowman prepares the items with a collapsible, low-maintenance stove fueled by denatured alcohol.

Accounting for variables like drought in northern Georgia, Bowman hadn’t determined how much water he would try to carry. But for purifying stream water, he would first stir the contents of his 32-ounce Nalgene bottle with a device that serves as something of a hiker’s swizzle stick. The Steripen Adventurer resembles a thermometer that, when pointed into a container of water, emits ultraviolet rays that destroy bacteria and protozoa in a matter of seconds. (Some hikers first filter the water to get rid of silt and muck; Bowman said he might or he might not: “Actually, I don’t mind drinking dirt.”)

The Osprey would also haul Big Agnes, the brand name of Bowman’s sleeping bag. Big Agnes bags are quilted with down on the top and are thinner and down-free on the bottom; for cushioning, an inflating sleeping pad slips into a sleeve sewn into the bag (which eliminates the problem of rolling off the pad while asleep).

Other accessories include walking poles of the Leki Super Makalu variety. The poles telescope down to the proportions of an oversize ball point pen, clippable to a backpack. “I swear by them,” Bowman said. “Especially going downhill. They give you something to do with your arms.”

And he carries a seven-megapixel digital Olympus with a tripod he can affix to a tree - “so I can take plenty of pictures of myself.”

Bowman intends to post those pictures at his trailjournals.com berth as well as on a blog about his journey that he intends to establish, with the help of Engelbey and Internet cafes and public libraries along the trail, at www.serenity park.org, the Web site of the Little Rock alcohol abuse recovery center Serenity Park.

Bowman conceived of his hike in part as a personal challenge but also as a fundraiser for the women’s center added to Serenity Park’s Roosevelt Road campus as one of the last undertakings by Joe McQuany, the program’s founder, before his death last year. Bowman was a friend of McQuany and an admirer of his “Recovery Dynamics” playbook for recovering alcoholics.

McQuany understood, Bowman said, that his program would likely be funded not through hefty endowments but through nickels and dimes. A full 28-day session at Serenity Park costs $3,500, but, in his day, if an enrollee had only food stamps to offer as payment, McQuany would accept them. In turn, he used the stamps to buy food to feed patients.

“A lot of people got sober there,” Bowman said, “but everybody gained weight.”

As a tribute to McQuany’s respect for the accumulation of small change, Bowman collected pledges from his law partners and other friends for a nickel or dime per mile of the journey. Some made up-front, one-time donations, but he said before leaving that he wondered whether pledgers would check the mile count on his blog with trepidation.

“I think the people pledging by the mile are betting on me not to finish,” he said.

So far, pledgers are only watching their investment grow. Engelbey reports that she has completed four mail drops to replenish Bowman’s food and supplies. And the hiker checks in with his wife even more frequently.

“It’s working out great,” Debbie Bowman says, summarizing her conversations with Curtis about his mind-set as well as his gear choices. “He had one

Right before leaving a home he, if things went well, wouldn’t see again until the end of September, Bowman mused on what would run across his mind in his new occupation as a fulltime walker.

“Depends on the time of day,” he said. “The stars. A cheeseburger. A hot shower. Getting out of the rain. Self-contemplation. The next five years. My parents. My kids. A lot of times, it’s so strenuous it’s just taking the next step. Sometimes, you go into that zone, like a runner’s high.”

Bowman had just trimmed his salt-and-pepper beard for what he expected to be the last time in half a year. By the time he returns, packs away the Osprey and Big Agnes and settles back into his life, there will be a stack of securities frauds to prosecute and a glut of McCain-versus-Whomever campaign ads blithering from the television.

“I’ve already thought about that,” he said of the coming culture shock. “The noise and busyness. Until then, my life will be centered on the primitive - walk, eat, sleep.”day where it was a little damp. He’s right in the middle of it all. He’s still excited.”

On April 23, Bowman accessed a sufficient signal from his BlackBerry to type out a few responses to questions about the performance of his equipment. He described a striking changeover from winter to spring traversing from the Nantahala Outdoor Center in western North Carolina (where it snowed two days in a row) to wildflowers blooming at his feet in the approach to the Fontana Dam - the tallest dam in the Eastern United States - on the southern edge of the Great Smoky Mountains.

“Equipment is holding up perfectly,” Bowman related by BlackBerry, in a hiker’s shorthand. Asked to cite a piece of gear proving surprisingly useful, he mentioned two: “Water filter and simple light - a little head lamp which I wear on wrist at night.”

The sense of mission Bowman has used to heighten the stakes of his hike hint at another prized piece of equipment he had to pack away for the journey: persistence.

ActiveStyle, Pages 23, 28 on 04/28/2008