Izzy Ampil
Little Green
non-fiction
To drive the length of Vermont, you can take one of three main highways. They carve straight up the state’s borders and its spine, occasionally splitting east or west to reach one another, stretching their pavement limbs over the Green Mountain Range. Route 100 crawls along the eastern base of the mountains for which Vermont is named. Driving up 100, past the damp red of the rusting barns, past the Moose Crossing signs, you can watch the mountains glow different shades of green as the sun crosses over them, imagining yourself gliding along the bristling rim of trees while your car speeds on.
Today’s dream of the American thru-hike started here. Vermont’s Long Trail, which spans 282 miles from Massachusetts to Canada, right through the heart of the Green Mountains, was the first of its kind. Building it was a twenty-year project that inspired the creation of the “Triple Crown,” America’s three most iconic long-distance hikes: the 2,180-mile Appalachian Trail, through the Appalachian Mountains; the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail, which traces the Sierras and Cascades; and the 3,100-mile Continental Divide Trail, which follows the spine of the Rockies.
But it’s not about the numbers. The mere existence of these trails, their potential for adventure and transformation, have a much broader hold on the collective imagination. In bestselling books, on the big screen, they have this unshakable glamor. This ubiquitous mystery. They seem both impossible and totally ordinary.
A friend of a friend asked me recently if she could interview me for a class. “You ready?” she asked, tapping the record button in her Voice Memos app. “Can you tell me about a time you almost died?”
I thought immediately of the four weeks I’d spent on the Long Trail, late in the summer before my sophomore year of college. One morning—I spent a couple hours toiling up the side of Bolton Mountain as it started to thunder. The wind snapped back the branches of the trees so sharply it sounded like a glass dome was shattering around me. The rain came down in thin little beads. The trail at this point ran up against this huge mossy cliff marked occasionally by white blazes, but as the trail swerved from muddy swaths to bare rock and back again, I kept trudging forward. There was no other way but up. It occurred to me that I was racing up to the summit only to have to race down again, that all I was doing was climbing closer to the chance of lightning. My hiking partner, Silas, was way ahead of me and had our GPS locator strapped to his pack. I couldn’t turn back; I probably shouldn’t wait it out. I knew what to do in theory, but I was regressing, retreading an old American Girl book about surviving thunderstorms, losing the threads of my Wilderness First Aid training. I felt the drumbeat of anxiety rattling. More than anything it was inertia that got me up there, the unstoppable rhythmic strain contracting in my legs.
“Is that it?” asked my friend-of-a-friend.
There’s a scene in the 2014 movie Wild where Reese Witherspoon, groaning extravagantly, peels off her boots, then her socks, then the big toenail of her right foot while she sits at the edge of the Pacific Crest Trail. She rocks back into her pack for support; her pack slips, knocking the boot; we all watch in horror as it somersaults down the cliff, slamming against the rocks below. The trees glow green. The mountains stretch long and blue into the distance. It’s the only scene I remember from the time I watched it, years before it occurred to me that I’d want to try such a thing myself. It’s gory and dramatic, the fleshy red nail cutting to cloudless blue sky; it makes you wonder if you could stomach such a thing yourself.
When I lost them, my toenails were blue-black, not red. They popped free from my toes to reveal shiny pink skin beneath, and I held the little blue chips in my palm like lost baby teeth, strange little treasures.
I began to view my body from a distance, watching it suffer the consequences of trail life,. Wiry armpit hair and blue, bumpy bruises at my hips. Waterlogged feet that emerged white and impossibly wrinkly from their socks, opening into sores and blisters at nine different places. For the first two weeks, I spent twenty minutes every morning cutting, wrapping, and taping sheets of gauze around my toes and heels. When I showered for the first time after the trail, I barely recognized the sight of my naked body below me. The curve of my stomach felt wrong. The water ran brown, and my hair came free from my head in matted clumps.
These are easy marvels for the uninitiated, good gross-out stories once off-trail. I told these stories with a nonchalance to match my audience’s disgust, but, really, I’d loved proving my body’s resilience. I was thrilled by how casual such goriness had become to me, and I cherished all the hidden souvenirs the trail had left me. I’d read in bed and run my fingertips along the calluses of my heels, feeling nothing through the thick yellowed skin. I contemplated the hair under my arms—longer than ever before—for twenty minutes in the mirror before shaving it. My pimples flattened in a matter of days, and my muscles gave up their aching. I mourned this in the back of my mind once I returned to school; I wanted to radiate the evidence of change. Even my skin was light, protected in that month by the leafy cover of Vermont.
Back on campus, I felt ordinary. I’ve never stopped trying to tell this story because, I suspect, I want to know: Why didn’t this change my life?
Perhaps because I never actually completed the trail. I’d set an ambitious itinerary for us right out the gate—sixteen miles a day starting at the Massachusetts border on my unpracticed feet. We’d planned to make it one-hundred-fifty miles—a little past halfway—before meeting up with my parents to collect the next week’s food and rest for a day in town. But, after a week of falling further and further behind our plans, Silas and I re-mapped our route to skip fifty miles and get back on track.
On August 27th, 2018, we sat in the back of a beat-up taxi, headed north on Route 100 from Manchester Center toward Williston, where we were going to rejoin the Long Trail. My seat had long ago lost its seatbelt. Our driver’s arm dangled through the window into the dwindling afternoon. I’d been feeling embarrassed all week about my abandoned plans and my limited body; Silas had been stressing all day about getting in and out of town. That unspoken anxiety thickened the humid summer air. Through the crackle of the radio, the celestial choir of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” simmered to life. It was so literal we had to laugh—yes, okay, we over-planned. Yes, I wanted to be stronger and faster, but I wasn’t. Silas wanted to be calmer, more spontaneous, but he wasn’t. Mick Jagger’s warble filled the car. Our stress unraveled as the light grew purple.
Mostly I remember silent woods. I could rarely spare the battery for listening to music, so I tromped along to birdsongs and whatever I could re-construct of Joni Mitchell’s Blue. It’s a short album—just thirty-five minutes, forty-one seconds—and I had most of the songs memorized down from Mitchell’s clear, fluttering soprano to the twang of the bass guitar. I understood very little of the heartsickness of the album, but I loved the grandeur it lent to the life I was living. The album opens with the words, “I am on a lonely road / and I am traveling, traveling, traveling, traveling,” and Mitchell’s voice grows warmer, more desperate, with each repetition. Mitchell is on the cusp of disbelief for most of the album, a stung romantic almost succumbing to sadness. But her sadness felt important to me—I’d never had a relationship that I felt deserved that depth of haunting. I wanted to do enough to earn her wisdom; she sings of the Northern lights, of Amsterdam and Rome, of living long enough in Paris to grow bored with its rigidity. I’d never seen any of those places; I’d never strayed that far alone.
“The Last Time I Saw Richard,” the last song on the album, is just Mitchell and a long, churning piano under her breathy voice. It’s my favorite song off Blue, and the one I thought about the most on the Long Trail. In it, she remembers fighting with Richard in a candlelit café about the rising tide of cynicism in their lives. He accused her of naïveté—I think about this line all the time—“You think you’re immune. / Go look at your eyes, / they’re full of moon.” Mitchell fights her losing battle for hope, but as the song unfolds, Richard gives into domesticity, to loveless marriage, to the private alcoholism of suburban life. And Mitchell is still dreaming.
Ever since I can remember I’ve been scared of getting old and jaded. I loved the trail for the inescapable thrill of being alive, for the many strange and daring retirees I met, for the feeling that I could build my own excitement in life. I loved Mitchell, swollen with wonder, and in the idyll woods of Vermont, I felt that I, too, was overcome with hopefulness but not yet so much that it could hurt.
Meanwhile Silas played me rock and country, the music of the woods as we’re supposed to know them, some of the exact music on the soundtrack of Wild. Joni Mitchell reminds me of hiking alone in the thicket of my own yearning to be someone braver. But the flip side of these memories is Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road” and its young, verdant piano, the warm whine of its harmonica. Listening to it feels like sitting at the steps of a little trail cabin watching the wind shake silver from the undersides of leaves.
What I really wanted was to leave the Long Trail with the right to call myself adventurous, and I believed if I still felt ordinary by the end, it’s in part because I was trying so hard to prove I wasn’t. I wanted badly to be the kind of person this sort of adventure came naturally to. I didn’t want to be the novice. I carried bear spray because my dad wouldn’t let me go without it, but I never said a word about it in Vermont—I’d read on the Appalachian Trail’s online forums that real thru-hikers found bear spray ridiculous. I bought two SmartWater bottles in Williamstown because my friend who had hiked the John Muir Trail the previous summer told me everyone used them. I knew the weight of my new tent to the tenth of an ounce, but I’d never slept inside it. I’d only backpacked once before I hit the Long Trail, and I’d spent much of the summer researching every possible logistic, camped out in the corner of the office I was working on at the heart of Stanford’s campus. I thought a trip like this—a real long-distance hike on a historic trail—would earn me some universal merit. By the end, though I knew so much more and had tried so much more, of course I still felt ordinary. I didn’t believe I was ready for the trail until suddenly I’d finished it.
So much of this self-doubt is rooted in the hypermasculinity of outdoor culture. The self-flagellating pursuit of “crushing miles” and the glorification of physical pain is omnipresent on the trail. Sometimes it can feel silly and communal. Like when you’re sitting around with other hikers at the end of a long day, so united in resolve to keep going that, even as you trade tirades about the mud and rocks and roots, you all know you wouldn’t rather be anywhere else. Sometimes that competitive spirit feels incredibly daunting. If you can’t hike this fast for this long with this much weight, this life isn’t for you. Of the 365 people who took The Trek’s Appalachian Trail Thru-Hiker Survey for 2019, 59% identified as men and 95% as white. Stepping into that culture as a tiny Asian girl unnerved me more than I let on. I knew what I was running from: the look of the untested city girl, the misled dreamer. The Wild cliché.
Wild is the kind of movie thru-hikers love to hate. It’s based on Cheryl Strayed’s account of her thousand-mile trek in 1995. She set out fueled by year-old grief and a fresh divorce, seeking freedom but ignorant of the trail’s demands. She legally changed her name to Strayed from Nyland to cement her adventurer status. She wrote a book about it. That chafes, I think, to the woodsy types—to the average dad seeking disconnection, to the teens trading self-consciousness for impenetrable secrecy, to the grandparents long past the pursuit of fame.
Wild’s inspiration for an episode of the 2016 Gilmore Girls revival might best capture why thru-hikers hate it. In the episode, Wild drives suburban, high-maintenance Lorelai to a trailside motel, surrounded by colorful gadgets and brown REI bags, the tag on her overflowing pack still front and center. In the night, she packs and re-packs and suffers increasingly cartoonish explosions of her useless things. It somehow never occurs to her to take her spork out of its packaging. When she stumbles out of the motel in the morning, she careens straight into a swarm of overpacked white women in crisis.
“I even brought an extra pair of boots to toss over the side,” says one.
“Ooh, just like Reese!”
We pan to Lorelai.
“Book or movie?” asks another flannel-clad, middle-aged white woman. “Which one are you, book or movie? They’re movie.” This with a finger pointed at the passing boot-tossers.
An exasperated park ranger warns the crowd that, with the storm coming in, it will be a “brutal first day,” and that they will probably all die. There’s another book-or-movie joke and another boot-tossing joke. Almost all the women leave, except Lorelai, who trips over her shoelaces, then gives up.
There’s more, but the gist of the joke is that Wild is the chick-lit of hiking. It’s for people who care more about looking outdoorsy than being outdoors. The tragic parallel of the Gilmore Girls scene is the Instagram-induced national park deaths, the arrogant commitment to an aesthetic of adventure that romanticizes the unprepared. That’s what Wild has spurred, we suppose. It’s all the thrill of watching someone else hike for people who don’t actually like hiking. Gilmore Girls isn’t targeting an audience of hikers, so it would be a stretch to say this episode represents the kind of exclusion that outdoor culture suffers from. Still, the episode rings of a reflexive self-deprecation, a beat-you-to-it delivery of a joke: hiking’s not for moms, but, hey! They don’t want it anyway.
Mostly the trail feels distinct from the gendered constraints of civilization. But ruggedness is so traditionally masculine in American literature, and aesthetics so feminine, that buying into trail culture feels like rejecting womanhood in a way that doesn’t sit quite right. There’s a thick layer of condescension built into the whole thing. God, did you see those day-hikers at the top of the summit in their flip-flops? They didn’t earn it. You know I saw this woman come up the trail with her phone flashlight swigging water straight from the stream? She definitely got giardia. Not that it’s safe or sustainable for people to continually enter the wilderness with that disregard for preparation. But it strikes me as arbitrary, this conviction that athleticism, competition, and grit are the heroic pillars of hiking, while aesthetics and domestic comforts are the realms of the ignorant. It seems just as well that loving hiking might be about loving its beauty. But the culture we’ve built in these woods is for the competitive and the masculine.
I love the deliberateness with which people step away from self-consciousness and toward joy, the de-aestheticizing of life. But there’s a sneaky little segment of the culture, present in some of the outdoorsmen I’ve met, crawling toward condescension. It was the spirit that kept me off the trail at first, then the spirit I adopted in trying to feel like I was part of the community. Ah, this idiot’s gonna ask how many bears we saw today... what, should we tell him? Twenty?
More often the people we met were tough and lonely. There was Kermit, a tiny British grandmother with close-cropped white hair and saggy cheeks. She laughed and laughed, listening to Silas stream curses at full volume after having stubbed his toe. Her voice was high and squeaky, and as she shuffled around the lean-to in her Crocs, she never mentioned kids or partners. She was living on her own in a van making her way south through North America. She tucked herself in by sundown, but while we made mac ‘n’ cheese, she kept calling out from her bunk in her cartoon voice to tell stories about Canada or ask questions about us.
There was Achilles, who appeared, noiseless. He was towering, blocking the light of the barely settled dusk when he ducked in through the doorway. He’d been the captain of the Williams College cross-country team until he graduated the year before. All his limbs swung quickly through the air just to do normal things—drop his pack, lose his shirt, assemble his stove. He was scruffy and lean in a way that made his body seem stretched taut rather than caved in. But he had the stubborn quasi-laziness of youth in him, shrugging as he told us he’d lost his contact solution the week before, railing against some other hikers who’d asked him not to smoke his weed, recounting every time he’d hitchhiked into town, starving, only to eat too fast and puke the meal up instantly. It was like it didn’t occur to him to change any of this.
Silas and I never got trail names, which thru-hikers give each other to commemorate little moments of trail life or striking personality traits. I imagine Achilles got his name just from looking hot and athletic; Kermit from her voice. The best I ever heard was “Edward Shitter-hands,” though I never got the story and wasn’t sure I wanted to. I’d wanted a trail name—an alter ego to step into, more proof of my wild existence—but as the trail emptied out to just the two of us, the chance never came.
Anyway, the absence of one now seals my anonymity. On the ATC’s website, you can check the list of 2000-milers from each year, listed by their real names, trail names, then home state. I scoured it for the names of people we’d met and found just one: Gunslinger.
Slinger was a gruff old vet from Virginia a year out from quitting opioids cold turkey. He’d been placed on them seven years before following a surgery that replaced then fused three of his vertebrae, but they’d driven him completely crazy, as he said.
“Sometimes, I still wake up from nightmares and have no idea where I am,” he told us one night, sitting in his shallow sleeping bag and smoking a cigarette.
Slinger had a long list of idiosyncrasies in his hiking lifestyle. He woke up at eight but stayed at camp until eleven, long past the sunrise departure of most AT hikers. He carried a sixty-to-seventy-pound pack with extras of everything: two more hip belts, headlamps, more socks than I remember being reasonable. (Compare that to the recent trend of “ultralight backpacking,” which aspires to a “base weight” of 10 pounds, meaning all your gear except the food, fuel, and water weighs about as much as a large watermelon.) Yet he carried a sleeping bag so light it was rated 55º Fahrenheit, i.e. it will keep you alive at 55º Fahrenheit (“So would a goddamn pile of leaves,” said Slinger). He still had two packets of oatmeal left over from Georgia, 1700 miles ago (“Every morning, I wake up, I tell myself I’m going to eat it, I take the oatmeal out, I stare at it for five minutes, and I decide it’s not worth it.”), he chain-smoked relentlessly, did bicep curls with his backpack in his hotel room on nights he slept in town (“When I saw my wife for the first time in Virginia, I’d lost fifty pounds, and she said, ‘Gross!’”), despised Clif bars (“The next time I see a fucking Clif bar, the apocalypse will be upon us.”), and regaled us with some weirdly intimate stories, one about ordering a seafood platter from a pizza place on his birthday, from the bath, only to spend the next three hours of his birthday on the toilet.
My most vivid memories of a thru-hiker are of Slinger, this wild, hilarious, near-seventy-year-old man in much better shape than I was. Seeing his name on the ATC website I was tempted to do a little Googling. But it felt invasive to root out the rest of his life’s history two years out. I didn’t want any more of him than I’d had back there in the shelters we shared; just knowing he was out there soothed me
Maybe I felt so ordinary post-trail because our adventure ended so bizarrely. Or maybe it was the other way around—leaving the trail was so disconcerting it could have felt no other way but alien. At the northernmost end of the trail, just south of the Canadian border, is Journey’s End Shelter. It was newer than the rest of the shelters we’d stayed in, the wood pale and Sharpied with stray quotes, rather than water-stained and notched with fifty-year-old initial carvings. Silas and I arrived by two p.m., much earlier than we’d ever made camp, and recoiled from the darkness of the four-walled shelter (also somewhat rare among the Long Trail’s three-walled lean-tos). We opened all the latched windows and ate the last of our oily cheese and pepperoni at the table littered with local newspapers with their puzzles filled in wrong. There were so many hours stretching between us and the taxi meeting us at the trailhead the next day at noon. It was too early, the shelter too clownish. We had too much time to stew in the end. Hikers ending their journey peeked inside and sprang on by, moving, moving. The voices of wide-eyed beginners floated in as they started south. I did crosswords in the doorway in the slick yellow sun while Silas finished his book. We were here. We’d done it.
A family arrived: two young kids, a distracted dad, a jittery mom. They filled the noiseless air with chattering, the kids chasing each other while the parents snipped about the food or the fire. Their untamed nervousness crackled around us while we tried to reminisce, sipping glutinous tea from our leftover pasta water on the shelter’s stairs. An owl hooted in the background.
“Sorry,” said the dad, scooting past us on the stairs. “I was going to sleep outside, but there are some crazy noises! Yikes, what is that?”
Silas and I just looked at him, unimpressed.
By the time we went to sleep, we still felt unfinished, unceremonious. I dreamed gray dreams, so unlike the vivid films that usually spring to life in the backcountry, when you’re living undistracted.
Sometime in the middle of the night, we heard a scream outside. I jumped up, banged my head on the top bunk, and fumbled for my glasses through the pulsing pain. I saw the dad leap out of his wooden bunk bed and run to the door.
“Stay here!” he hissed at the kids, before jumping out into the moonlight. To my left, the kids sat shaking in their bunks, whimpering.
Silas, beside me, was sitting up on his elbow. “What’s up?” he asked. My heart was pounding. I said nothing. Silas rolled back over and went to sleep.
I was in a headrush of confusion, still half-dreaming and sure that a night hiker had broken their leg coming in. The door opened again. The dad limped in, his wife draped over his shoulder and crying, forming broken little sentences. He was soothing her. I watched unabashedly.
“She saw a squirrel,” the dad told his kids. “It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”
I took off my glasses, still sitting up, my heart slowing gradually. They returned to bed, while the mom blubbered something about growing up in these woods, never being scared before. I fell asleep wishing I were still somewhere deeper in the mountains, surrounded by people who would make me braver. Here the fear was nearer than I liked.
When we parted at the airport the next afternoon, there was a single moment when I thought Silas and I might kiss. Instead, it turned into a strange, encumbered hug, weighed down by our seventy-liter packs. That flight home, watching the silhouettes of the mountains that I could now recognize and name, I couldn’t help feeling the anticlimax of our friendship.
Before I left, my friends had teased me relentlessly. “If you don’t hook up on the trail, I’ll...bake you a cake. I don’t even know. Obviously, you’re going to.” “This will be such a good story when you fall in love!” And on and on. The last day I was home, one friend came to visit and showered me with condoms. “For the trail!” she said, running out the door.
We never talked about that in Vermont, even to joke about the possibility. We did date, after all, for several months, starting a few weeks after we left the trail. And then, three months after we broke up, a year after we stood at the Canadian border watching the green sprawl endlessly before us, we admitted it: maybe we shouldn’t have.
I don’t regret it. Dating at the wrong time is, at least, so consistent with our ambitious headlong dive into backpacking that I couldn’t see us evading the possibility. But while we were reflecting, I couldn’t help remembering a moment on the trail, at the end of week three. Silas and I were sitting in the caked mud, about a mile from Route 15 and its small highway graveyard bounded by chain-link fences and sparse bursts of graffiti on the cement. My damp fleeces were strewn across the loose, yellow grass. The sun was hot, and we were arguing. The whole trip, Silas had been reading Algorithms, a book about the predictability of human behavior, the reducibility of all our decision-making to economic principles. That day he’d read in it a story about Charles Darwin making a list of pros and cons before deciding to marry his wife. I found it crass; he found it funny and wise. I insisted that no love so measured could be true; he insisted there was no other way to choose but to weigh the good against the bad. We stood pacing among the sweaters and the scrub while other hikers passed us by, so ferociously unable to understand each other, but so playful in the way we spoke, so easy; we knew we were different. By the end of it, we’d admitted to nothing. But we sat in the dusty hill still smiling, content by then to have said our pieces, to have disagreed so well.
The trail had made us love each other, just not the way I thought it would. I came to love the work of understanding him; it felt like a better-earned reward. The endless cycle of backpacking is one of finding yourself stuck and frustrated, only to emerge triumphant at the moment you most need to, at the perfect vista, wrapped in nearly seamless streaks of blue. It felt like that with him sometimes: the burst-of-pressure joy of making it work, right up until it didn’t.
The tallest mountain in Vermont is, all things considered, pretty short. The Chin of Mt. Mansfield—so named because the mountain’s silhouette allegedly looks like the face of a man lying on his back in profile—reaches 4,395 feet above sea level. It’s nothing in comparison to the Sierras’ 14000-foot peaks and still lesser than the White Mountains in nearby New Hampshire. But climbing the Forehead—the southernmost tip of Mt. Mansfield—with a seventy-liter pack means squeezing yourself between thirteen-foot boulders and tiptoeing up wooden ladders lashed to the cliff. It’s sheer, and you rise above the tree line quickly; soon it’s just you and the bare rock and the valley growing bluer and wider beneath you. The sun was relentless, and every so often I tried to crouch beneath a stunted evergreen for shade. I felt myself trusting the friction of my boots on the stone, rounding the brow of the Forehead like I was walking the sphere of the Earth. Lichens burned in neon reds and greens around my feet.
It’s quiet above the tree line—the sky cloudless, birdless. The view expands so far around you that you feel like you could call clear across the state and see your voice break into sonic ripples against the horizon. Just the occasional whisper of wind; no branches to snag on.
Izzy Ampil grew up in New York, studied English at Stanford, and now lives and writes with her partner in Los Angeles. You can find her on Twitter @izzyampil or at www.izzyampil.com.