It also struck me how the work that the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) has done these past few years has helped to keep people connected and engaged, even when they could not be physically together out on or along the Trail. Visitors from all over the world stopped by the ATC’s booth, in front of the soon-to-be-open Damascus Trail Center, to let us know how excited they were to be back and engaged with the A.T. and its community. Some were previous hikers, reconnecting with their fellow hiking class members, while many were currently undertaking long sections or attempting to thru-hike the entire Trail. Our international visitors were excited to finally be able to travel to the U.S. for their adventure; many had been waiting two plus years to undertake their hike. And then there were all the other festival attendees, some new to the idea of the Trail, and some familiar and looking to connect with fellow dreamers. It seems as if the isolation we have gone through the last few years only strengthened people’s desire to experience all the A.T. has to offer. And it is a testament to the ATC’s work that we have been able to keep people connected virtually until we were once again able to come back in person.

A.T. – Shenandoah National Park, Virginia. Photo by Raymond Salani III

The ATC is one of nine organizations selected for funding from the Olo for Good Fund, which was created in 2021 by Olo, a leading open SaaS platform for restaurants, as a part of their Pledge 1% commitment. Olo provides digital ordering and delivery programs that connect restaurant brands to the on-demand world.

Danny Cramer and I ran track and cross country together at Swarthmore College from 2009 to 2010, the year I graduated. Danny was in his sophomore year. Swarthmore is not exactly an athletic powerhouse, but it’s a great place to run around in the woods. The campus is an arboretum with miles of wooded trails and the surrounding streets are lovely in a genteel, mainline, Pennsylvania way. Through the Crum Woods and over a bike path is a Quaker retreat that Danny and I liked to visit.

I have a photo of the two of us, and the rest of the men’s cross-country team from fall 2009 that I cherish. When I look at that photo today, what I see, 12 years later, is a lot of men touching each other affectionately. I like that we’re mostly barefoot. During the height of the pandemic, I ached for this kind of intimacy, and I looked at this photo with pain. And when Danny died by suicide in September 2014, I didn’t know what to do — I didn’t “know where to put my hands,” as the singer Mitski says — so I posted it on his Facebook wall with the caption: “missing one of ours today.”

“How can that be?” I asked my dad with wonder and intrigue as he pointed south and explained to me that the trail we were standing on extended to Georgia. Then he switched arms, pointed north, and explained that it also stretched to Maine.

We were traveling in the Berkshires in western Massachusetts and had stopped at an Appalachian Trail road crossing to ceremoniously set foot on the A.T. I was a young boy with an inherent love for being in the woods and a growing sense of geography. I paused and further pondered that this line in the woods made up of dirt, rocks, and roots extended all the way to places I had heard of, but not yet been to. Georgia and Maine seemed so far away, how could it be possible that a trail connected them?