Writing With My Boots on

by John Hatcher
Chronicle of Higher Education
March 9, 2007

I pulled on my boots on a recent winter morning and went for a hike. The trail was one I had never walked before. It traced the hillsides overlooking Duluth, Minn., where I'd moved just a week before to start a new job as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.

A light snow fell as I picked my way across an ice-covered creek and then up toward the ridge through stands of birch and evergreens. The city below and Lake Superior in the distance were but vague outlines.

I tried to keep my mind on the hike, the woods, and the silence, but I was distracted and restless as I thought about the next journey. I had wanted this walk to pay tribute to a man who had been my muse during the grueling final stretch of my dissertation.

In 1948, Earl Shaffer put on a backpack and walked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine as a way of putting his experiences in World War II behind him. He followed a footpath that, in places, was no path at all. These days, thousands of hikers set off each summer on the trail from its starting point near Springer Mountain in Georgia. In Shaffer's time, it had never been done.

I had become intrigued with Shaffer in the spring of 2005 when I spent a week hiking the Appalachian Trail with my stepfather. He has hiked the entire length of what is affectionately called the AT, and he gave me a copy of Shaffer's book, Walking With Spring, when we finished our hike.

What struck me about the book was that it was free of ego, unlike so many other outdoor and adventure books I had read. Shaffer recounted in a matter-of-fact way his four-month journey.

His approach was straightforward: Get up every day and walk. That's it. Walk. Every day.

Along the way, he encountered people who tried to coax him off that routine. There was a pair of hikers he met near the Smoky Mountains who decided to get off the trail and enjoy the luxuries of a hotel, hot baths, and good food. There were countless people who offered to take Shaffer in so he could have respite from a life outdoors. In most cases, he declined and kept walking.

Shaffer endured endless days of cold rain. He ate dreadful food. He reckoned with boots and a backpack that had none of the features of today's high-tech gear. And he spent most of his time in complete solitude with his own thoughts.

After reading his book, I set it aside and didn't think about it again until fall when I began my dissertation in earnest. I remember the day I met with my adviser. As I was rising to leave and talking about my trepidation, she said something that triggered my memory.

"Just make sure you do something every day," she said.

When I got home, I went upstairs and found Shaffer's book. I did some more research and found a Web site devoted to Shaffer, who had died in 2002 but not before hiking the trail again at the age of 79. On that site, I found a comment attributed to Shaffer that offered advice to others thinking of embarking on a long-distance hiking journey:

Good planning, a sturdy physique, exceptional determination, and ingenious adaptability are essential on a long and strenuous foot journey. Above all, do not underestimate the difficulties involved or overestimate your own capabilities.

I copied those words onto a piece of paper next to a picture of Shaffer. I put one copy on my office wall and one in a notebook I carried with me. I did my best to follow his model. Every day I got up and I wrote. Well, most days.

I began to understand that, like backpacking, scholarship -- at least a long-term project like a dissertation -- isn't accomplished in inspired bursts of energy. It's less glamorous. The work can be tedious and grueling. There is always something more interesting to do. I saw that completing the task would have less to do with my intellect and more to do with my determination -- nourished by the support of so many people who kept me moving down the trail.

At times, I wondered whether I would join the countless before me who never finished. I had to forgo time with family and friends. Diversions such as hiking were going to have to wait.

Hiking a trail from Georgia to Maine and completing a Ph.D. are similar in that they are selfish endeavors. The year I spent immersed in my dissertation felt as lonely a trek as Shaffer's solitary journey along the spine of the Appalachian mountain chain.

My dissertation defense was more than a month behind me when I walked along the trail above Duluth that January day. What made me restless was wondering if I could ever feel the same passion for scholarship that Shaffer had continued to feel for hiking. He had reached the top of Mount Katahdin -- the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail -- on August 5, 1948. As he walked toward the end of his journey, he felt not a desire to be finished, he wrote, but a wish that the trail would never end.

I could not work out in my own mind how my dissertation had made me feel about scholarship and the lifetime of research I knew I would have to embrace if I was going to survive the pressures and expectations of a tenure-track position.

But as I walked, I found myself thinking. At first the noise in my mind was just anxiety about my new home and my new academic life. But as the miles passed and my pace quickened, my thoughts turned to ideas and projects and, I suppose, to all the paths I could follow as a scholar if I was still willing to get up every day and write. And, apparently, walk every now and then.

John Hatcher is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Minnesota at Duluth. He received his Ph.D. in mass communications from Syracuse University last December.