Over the years the term “shell shock” was replaced with “combat stress reaction” (CSR), also known as “battle fatigue.” But it wasn’t until 1980 that the American Psychiatric Association’s third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders named the mental condition as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This new diagnosis came about because the field of psychology and psychotherapy had grown and new research had occurred. After the Vietnam War and the enormous numbers of veterans returning with PTSD, fresh research and the use of new technology in treatment improved our understanding of the human brain and how it reacts to and changes as a result of trauma.
Although many advances have been made in the past few decades, PTSD continues to carry a weighty stigma for today’s veterans. Back in Earl Shaffer’s time, few veterans sought help for their condition. Instead, Earl attempted to walk off the war along the length of the Appalachian Trail. His plan was to move north with the spring, “with no definite day by day goals but never tarrying long, as weather and terrain permitted.” He hoped an early start from the south would give him at least six months to reach “the timberline of New England.” As he wrote in his journal: “And now the time had come. Why not walk the army out of my system, both mentally and physically, take pictures and notes along the way, make a regular expedition out of it. It will benefit me at a time of very low ebb.”
THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL WAS THE DREAM OF FORESTER BENTON MACKAYE, who also conceived the idea of the Interstate Highway system in the 1940s and collaborated with Gifford Pinchot, the first chief of the US Forest Service, to establish the country’s system of national forests and parks. The trail was completed and designated by the Appalachian Trail Conference (ATC) in 1937 (renamed the Appalachian Trail Conservancy in 2005) after twenty-five years of planning and construction. Today, the ATC is a confederation of many local hiking clubs that organize thousands of volunteers to build and maintain the trail as well as 225 three-sided log shelters positioned approximately a day’s walk apart. Shelters offer protection from weather and are usually located near springs to provide drinking water for the night. The war effort had taken away the trail maintainers, and while servicemen wreaked havoc on US enemies overseas, the green briar and the blowdowns wreaked havoc on the Appalachian Trail.
Armed with compass, roadmap, a pith helmet, and his army gear, Earl began the trail in Georgia and headed north, often walking sockless in his army boots. He searched for the two-by-six-inch white blazes painted on the trees that pointed north. According to his journal, Earl spent much of his journey searching for the trail, sometimes looking for signs that it even existed. He wrote about these challenges, and between the lines there was evidence of how nature seemed to be healing him.
Earl described his first night in North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains: “I fell asleep to the lullaby of the wind in the trees and the somewhere calling of a whip-poor-will.” He wrote about the countless chance meetings with locals who administered “trail magic”—feeding him, giving him a bed for the night, and providing much-needed conversation and company. These encounters fed Earl’s soul. When he stepped into a dark old-growth forest to make his camp for the night, he “heard for the second time in [his] life the awesome sound of a giant tree falling somewhere in the stillness.” When he found his way at night to Speck Pond in Maine and the comfort of a shelter by following the sound of the singing tree frogs, he wrote: “Ever since, when the homeland meadows are turning green and the silvery lilt of those tiny peepers livens the night, I think of the time when they helped me ‘come to port’ on the Long Cruise.”
In addition to experiencing some aspects of healing through the kind and helpful strangers he encountered, he felt safe enough to enjoy beautiful things: a presence of the Divine in old-growth forests, the skies, and a healthy rhythm from the daily and seasonal cycles. Despite the challenges of an unmarked and unmaintained trail, weather extremes, and physical hardships, hiking on the Appalachian Trail was right where Earl wanted to be. He was coming to port, walking back to peace, to himself. In his journal he never mentioned what occurred in the war; rather, he focused on the present moment, working on the task at hand, walking to Maine, his war memories fading into the past.
Decades before “mindfulness” became a buzzword used by mainstream therapists, Earl was intuitively a practitioner of this form of therapy. The state of having an open, expansive awareness and living in the present was associated with Buddhists at the turn of the nineteenth century. These religious men sought a heightened state of consciousness, but Earl was mindful out of necessity. On the trail he needed to stay acutely aware of his surroundings, as well as what lay at his feet, to find his way. He realized he could not expect to reach Maine if he hiked mindlessly.
THE PAGES OF EARL’S LEATHER JOURNAL ARE COVERED WITH EXPRESSIVE cursive handwriting, scribed with a fountain pen that bled through some of the pages, probably when the night was damp. In the back of the journal are Earl’s poems—he was a poet as well as a long-distance backpacker. His feelings, his grief about the war, his joy and love of the natural world pour forth through his poetry. It is possible to follow his thoughts while he was composing, since he crossed out words in search of better ones to describe his feelings. Reading these poems, you can almost smell his musty tent and the wetness of the Appalachian woods, as he likely set down his words by candlelight.
Go ye out to the mountains
Far far from a town
Stretch yourself on the clean forest floor
Gaze aloft through the canopy
To frown and remember your troubles no more
The Smithsonian archives contain a cover letter Earl wrote to Doubleday Books introducing his poems for possible publication. He did not think of having the story of his Appalachian Trail journey published at that time, but he had hopes for his poems, which he described to the publisher in detail:
Many of these verses were written under the most difficult conditions, often by firelight, flashlight, candlelight or moonlight, and sometimes key phrases were scribbled blindly during total blackout. I carried the ever-growing collection with me all over the Pacific, in and out of customs, on shipboard, in planes, hunched in mosquito bars, on mail sacks, in pup tents. The results are not calculated to be sophisticated but rather are meant to record a portion of the intricate pattern of global conflict, as seen by a soldier who was a minute part of it.
Through poetry, it seems, Earl processed the emotions and the experiences he had endured in combat. He grieved the situations, experienced the anger, the horror, the sadness, and the guilt, rather than remaining stuck in avoiding uncomfortable emotions. “My purpose in writing,” he further explained in the letter to Doubleday, “is to help provide some understanding of what I and my buddies experienced, in the hope that such knowledge will be of value in shaping a better future.” Unfortunately, his poems are not included in the Smithsonian collection. The archive historian I spoke with had no idea what had become of them. However, his Appalachian Trail memoir, Walking with Spring, was eventually published by the Appalachian Trail Conference in 1982.
Even though Earl and I had been pen pals for more than a dozen years, I didn’t meet him in person until 1995, when he was seventy-five years old. He looked closer to fifty—strong, well-built, glowing from a life of living healthy—and he had maintained the same weight for fifty-five years, never needed a doctor, and took no medications. At his home in rural York County, Pennsylvania, Earl raised chickens and goats, kept bees, grew his own organic food, and maintained an orchard. A hand-dug, spring-fed pond was his water source, and a hand-laid-stone road through a swampy field led to his property. Living a simple lifestyle close to the earth and working the soil with his hands, Earl found a therapeutic way to live.
Earl innately