Description
Nathan Townsend is hiking the Appalachian Trail. Unlike the other through-hikers who attempt to walk the entire 2,100-mile long footpath, however, Nate isn't traveling for adventure or challenge – he's walking to escape. With each mile on the trail, he steps further and further away from the people and events that have irreparably scarred him. As he crosses paths with a barrage of fellow hikers and townspeople, each character carrying their own wounds, he must revisit step-by-step the events that put him on the long trail from Maine to Georgia. Eventually, Nate must make a dramatic choice between walking away from others and walking toward others, including the one woman desperate to rescue him and help him find his trail's end.
Written with allusions to The Canterbury Tales and other classics, Appalachian Trail is a piece of literary fiction set among America's backbone, its most beautiful and most primitive footpath. Populated with unique and widely varied characters, it's a story of coping with unimaginable pain and finding redemption in both nature and people. The impetus for Nate's flight to the woods is slowly revealed through flashbacks in each chapter, and the ultimate shocking cause isn't fully revealed until its climax, resulting in a riveting page-turning story.
As Nate begins his pilgrimage from his home in Maine, he flashes back to his family's departure from his birthplace in the remote hills of Eastern Tennessee when he was just eight. Once arriving at the trail's beginning, he almost perishes in the cold due to his distraction and poor planning.
As he travels through the mountains of New England, he meets the best and worst of humanity – and the one young woman, nicknamed Teapot – who will eventually save him. In Virginia, he is attacked and almost dies, only to find the unexplained call of his pilgrimage as a source of strength and recovery.
As he returns to Tennessee and his birthplace, he is reintroduced to Teapot, the woman he thought he'd left behind on the trail, and the woman who falls in love with him as he struggles to open up to her about the horrific murder-suicide that took his wife and daughter from him. In a dramatic climax, Nate leaves the trail to kill himself on top of the graves of his murdered wife and child, only to be rescued by Teapot and nursed back to physical and spiritual health at the story's end.