Walking With Spring

Walking With Spring by Earl V. Shaffer

“In the woods somewhere.”

I need to remember this guy.

“In the woods somewhere,” is what Earl Shaffer replied when someone asked him where he’d sleep that night. I bet if you were in town and met a scruffy guy with ancient boots, old clothes and a surplus Army pack and he said that you’d think “bum”. The axe and sheath knife might give you pause.

But ditch the hardware and change the clothes to something colorful by Colombia, the boots to trail runners and the pack to an Osprey and you’d know he’s a hiker. Well, so was this Shaffer. He made the first thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail in 1948, walking south to north when experts believed it was not possible. Luckily, he kept notes.

He makes me remember that when I was a kid I never bought a backpacking tent. I used a poncho as rain gear and shelter. Not one of those silnylon things that wet-through if you yell “RAIN!”, but one of those heavy, coated Army surplus ones that kept me dry and could be used as a ground cloth on gravel and not get a pin hole. And that I often froze and I wore cotton clothes and I was often wet and my pack was too heavy and my shoulders ached and I probably risked hypothermia and I had a ball.

Earl Schaffer joined the U.S. Army in 1941 and was already training when Pearl Harbor happened. He was in the signal corps. Built radio and radar installations. Sounds safe. But he did this, and worked as a forward radioman, on Pacific islands, often where there were still Japanese soldiers. He did this until the war ended, often alone and in danger, in the bush, for years. His pre-war hiking buddy, the man he planned to hike the Appalachian Trail with after the war, his close friend, was in the landings at Iwo Jima and died there.

I’ve seen many pictures of Shaffer from well after he was recognized, his many books were published and he’d become an icon. Old, trim, tough. Experienced. It was a shock to see pictures of him during the war and when he made the first thru-hike of the AT. He was a kid.

Now, I knew a man who when he was a kid joined the Marines and served two tours in Vietnam. He was an excellent Marine. He killed well. He was comfortable in the bush. He came home with PTSD and could not live like his neighbors. He made a camp in some woods. It was comfortable. When a judge asked him where he lived he told him and said, “Wanna’ come to dinner?”

I don’t know if Shaffer suffered PTSD. But he was stressed by the war, and his solution was the thru-hike, alone. In some ways the hike may have been much like his Army experience. He wrote, “The man insisted I come into the house, despite my soggy condition. He and his wife began to feed me coffee and cookies. He had been in the pacific too, in the Marines, and on some of the same islands as I. He knew a bit about hardship himself.” Perhaps it was by transforming chosen hardship into something peaceful that Schaffer healed himself.

And perhaps also healing was the reception he received. Now it’s called trail magic, when someone helps out a thru-hiker and expects nothing in return. Such people are often called Trail Angels. Schaffer made his trip less than 10 years after the slow end of the Great Depression of the 1930’s, when bums traveling wandering about and sleeping somewhere in the woods was not rare. But time after the time, he was befriended, and early on by a Ranger who invited him into his lookout tower, fed him and gave him a place to sleep and sent him off with a good breakfast.

Then all through the Shenandoah National Park, for hundreds of miles ahead of him, news of Schaffer’s voyage was passed from ranger to ranger. They expected him, welcomed him, supported him and envied him.

“Afterward, Ranger L. Y. Berg approached. He also had heard about me from Pete Johnson. Ranger Berg offered to do anything he could to help me along, adding wistfully that he had long wanted to try the trip himself. This is typical of the men who live and work in the parks. The ones I have known love the wilderness and the creatures that roam there. To them, cutting a tree is almost like killing an animal and neither should be done without good reason. Their busiest time is during the tourist season so they get no chance to tour themselves or take long hiking trips.”

That Shaffer would appreciate Rangers’ respect for the outdoors is typical of him in this book. Before Leave No Trace and political correctness, Shaffer appears a conservationist, not out of a desire to save natural resources or make sure there are wild areas for future generations, but more out of self respect and a love for other living things. He mourns the loss of a stand of beautiful pines and notes that the war effort “was the excuse.” He warns to drown out campfires, and reports: “When I left, the signs of my presence were so slight that the next rain would remove them. Like the Indians, I say ‘Where I go, I leave no sign.’”

Shaffer’s luck in meeting important AT personalities is astounding. In Virginia, for example: “Morning brought rain and a farming community, and a man burning trash. This was C. S. Jackson, retired after long service in the U.S. Forest Service, and the man who first marked most of the Trail in the Holston District.” And in Connecticut: “…one of them (was) John Vondell, president of the New England Trail Conference, vice-president of the Green Mountain Club, president of the Metawampe Club, and member of the Board of managers of the Appalachian Trail Conference. Yet he somehow managed to be a university professor, the only job that paid anything.”

That quote is a good sample of his writing, somehow both sparse and full, and of his dry humor, which he often directs at himself. I found it quite something to read about Shaffer’s experience s of places I have also hiked. He fills in the back stories of geography and Native American history that add to the richness of those places, rather than seeming like detours down side trails.

Today someone planning a thru-hike with Shaffer’s gear list would be encouraged to stay home, and perhaps urged to seek some psychiatric help. He used a surplus Mountain Troop rucksack, which he also sometimes called a frame pack. These packs were designed for American ski troops and are part of the ancestry of the ALICE pack. It had a tubular metal frame attached to the pack, a waist belt of sorts, and three outside pockets, one rather large. Frames were rare in the military in those days, and given what he had to choose from The Mountain Troop pack was probably a good pick.

Besides the pack, he started with a Marine Corps poncho, and Air Corps survival tent, a thick and heavy “paper mill” blanket, a sheath knife, a hand axe, a frying pan, flashlight, old military boots, a rain hat, a set of clothes and that’s about it. Oh, and a camera and notebook.

He modified the pack and ditched the seven-pound tent the first week to save weight. He was, within the limits of his era, kin to modern light weight hikers. “We discussed hiking gear and the light loads they were carrying, about thirty pounds each. I recalled seeing a toothbrush along the trail in Georgia. ‘Hmmm,’ says the guy, ‘thought I heaved that into the brush.’ My toothbrush, by the way, was not thrown away but did lose its handle. Inevitably, a long-distance hiker must choose between traveling light and not traveling at all.”

But he wasn’t a fanatic about it. “A ride on a lumber truck got me to Bryson City. Besides color film I bought a small spoon and spatula, which would work much better than my axe for turning pan bread. After all, you can only go so far for simplification.”

But simple was his food. Corn meal, flour, brown sugar, raisins, oatmeal, canned milk were stables. Sometimes they were breakfast, lunch and dinner, all cooked on camp fires. Occasionally something fresh, like eggs, or something else canned. But often, something home cooked by a trail angel.

Like many, Shaffer fell in love with the trail. He worked on it, wrote about it, championed it all his life. He made two more AT thrus, a SOBO is 1965 in only 99 days, and his last in 1998 when he was 79 years old.

He was a poet.

Walking With Spring by Earl V. Shaffer. ©1995 by Earl V. Shaffer, Appalachian Trail Conference, Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, 152 pages, $8.95

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Walking With Spring by Earl V. Shaffer

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