Stress exacerbates depression. I had gotten my depression under control by reducing my daily stress, first in 2005 by exchanging a solo pastorate for an associate pastorate, then by retiring from full-time pastoring in 2008 in order to build straw-bale cottages for my brother and sister-in-law and for Nancy and me. This and good therapy allowed me to stop taking meds and counseling in 2007, so that by the time Nancy and I began to hike the Appalachian Trail in June of 2011 (we started in New York and headed north) I had managed my depression med- and counseling-free for four years. I thought I was cured.
Long-trail backpacking places great demands on one's body. To hike twelve miles with a thirty-pound pack daily stresses one's body in various ways, not the least of which is one's dietary requirements. Simply to maintain one's body weight at that level of demand requires 4000 calories per day, an amount impossible to get in the back country. So in addition to the raw, physical demands on one's muscles and joints, a backpacker is constantly hungry and losing weight. By the time we entered New Hampshire's White Mountains, Nancy and I had been on the trail for seven weeks and had lost almost all our body fat: we had trail legs for sure, but we had almost no energy reserves in our bodies. I was down to 160 pounds from my pre-hike weight of 180. I was starving all the time.
We left the Mt. Madison hut - one of eight or nine hiking hostels scattered along the AT through the Whites that offer bunk beds and hot meals to short-term hikers but that also let through-hikers "work for stay" - on a morning of steady, fifty-mile an hour wind and dense fog that reduced our visibility to about thirty feet. Though the hut is only at 4000 ft. or so, this far north it's just in the tree-line: the AT immediately leaves the tree-line on its way up Madison's side. The AT climbs rocks and boulders for the next half mile, gaining about 1000 feet in altitude: hikers describe this rate of climb as going "straight up." The wind made climbing (and that steep a grade was more climbing than hiking) difficult, especially as it increased the higher we climbed. The fog (we were in the clouds, actually) made finding the trail a matter of stopping at one rock cairn and squinting and pointing until we had spotted the next rock cairn, usually twenty to thirty feet further along the trail, then trying to keep the second cairn in sight as we climbed between the two. Slow-going, you see.
By the time we summitted (it probably took us an hour to climb that half-mile), the wind was steady at 90-100 mph (we subsequently learned) and gusting higher. Nancy was having a hard time keeping her feet. Madison's summit is a smallish cone, maybe ten feet higher than the mountain's shoulder, so I hollered to Nancy that we could skirt around the cone on the leeward side and get a break from the wind. As we climbed around to the far side, we found we were not alone: an older couple (in their mid-sixties) from Kentucky whom we had met last night at the Madison hut was just summitting, and though he was holding his ground pretty well, all 95 pounds of her were struggling to stay upright through the wind.
I'm a paternalistic hiker: I tend to feel responsible for those we're hiking with, even though, like Nancy, they're quite capable of hiking on their own. Honestly, I was having little problem with the wind or the visibility: I'm built stocky and short, with a high body mass and strong legs. A gust of 120 meant I'd have to hunker down low and grab a boulder, but the steady wind, though tending to force one off one's direction, was no problem. Yet the progress of our new group - being in what most hikers would call a dicey situation, we'd automatically coalesced into one group of four - became painfully slow: I'd move forward about twenty feet, then turn and point out the best (in my opinion) route to Nancy, I'd wait until she had caught up, then we'd both wait until the Kentucky couple had gotten close enough to see us move on. All the while the wind was howling and the fog impenetrable.
On the north side, Madison descends in a series of step-like plateaus - maybe a hundred feet or so long ending in a steep downhill of thirty to fifty feet - that follow the knife-edge point of a ridge. The wind was coming at us from the northwest, that is, perpendicular to our route, constantly trying (and succeeding) to blow us off our feet and, I feared, off the ridge. The cairns were getting harder to identify, as if the clouds were thickening, and all the time I'm hoping it won't start raining: the one piece of good luck we had was that the temperature was in the mid-fifties - great for hiking so long as we stayed dry, but if it began to rain potentially dangerous. We slowed to a crawl, struggling to stay on our feet, the Kentucky gentleman seeming more interested in keeping up with me and Nancy than ensuring his wife, who was lagging behind, made it safely. After the third or fourth plateau - each one teasing us with a downhill section that ended in another plateau instead of continuing directly to tree-line, where I was sure we'd get a break from this wind - as I'm crouching forward waiting for the three to scrabble their painstaking way among the boulders, anxiously feeling the wind for the first pinpricks that presage rain, all my attention was suddenly focused on one thought: I could leave these people.
Of course, I didn't leave them, but I thought it, and one of "them" was Nancy. Stuffing that thought back into my head, I returned to my self-appointed guide duties, redoubled my efforts to ensure we were all together and moving purposefully, and by two or three more plateaus we caught a glimpse of the tree-line through a break in the clouds: actually quite a majestic sight, we could clearly see the ridge descending to a thick blanket of trees no more than half a mile away. Rejuvenated, we climbed down through lessening wind and longer breaks in the clouds, so that by the time we made tree-line the wind was a mere whisper and we were shedding clothes to cool off in the sudden heat. As we shared lunch, the Kentuckians and we celebrated our successful crossing and made plans to ride together (they had a car parked at a road crossing nearby) into town and share supper together.
Six days later, crossing into Maine, I warned Nancy that I was getting depressed. Two days after that, I was doubled over on the trail, weeping and unable to continue the hike. At a road crossing, we hitched a ride into a town eight miles away, spent the night at a hostel and called a friend of Nancy's from Portland, who came to pick us up and take us to the airport. As soon as we got home, I got a prescription for antidepressants from my primary care physician and scheduled an appointment with my psychiatrist. And my four years of being "cured" were over.
Looking back, I'm convinced the stress of crossing Mt. Madison brought on my relapse. Again, I was depleted, almost no body fat, no reserves of energy, and I'd never been in wind that severe before. Worse, at the moment I felt most responsible for three people I thought of leaving them behind and getting myself safely down the mountain. And even though we took two days to recover in town, eating extravagantly as only through-hikers can, all too soon we were back to our fourteen mile days, back to our hunger and deprivation, back to backpacking's daily stress on body and soul. Like the wind on Mt. Madison, since last August my depression has been unrelenting. Thank you for reading.
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