The Appalachian Trail at Manassas Gap – Reminiscence of the Wanderbirds Hiking Club – How the club expanded my experiences – The effects of the virus on the club – An extrapolation of such effects on a national level – A family conference – Evening statistics
I met with AD and several other Wanderbirds members to go along the Appalachian Trail from Manassas Gap (where Rte. 55 intersects the AT) to High Knob Rd. and back: 10 miles and about 2000 feet. The weather was all but perfect, pleasantly cool in the morning, when we completed the longest ascent, and never overly hot even in the mid-afternoon. The highlight of the hike was a beautiful meadow at the top of the first hill, strewn with wildflowers such as wild geranium and yellow snapdragon. After the hike we snacked together very much in the style of the hikes that were held before the virus forced the club to disband the bus rides we used to travel to the trailheads.
This is not the first time that I have mentioned the Wanderbirds club in these notes. It has been clamoring for greater exposition for some time; and If I go into detail at this point, it is not merely for the sake of self-indulgent reminiscence (although there may an element of that in what follows) but to explain how certain clubs and groups can affect people generally and how the coronavirus has made inroads into an important element of the lives of many men and women.
I had been hiking off and on ever since I can remember but when I turned 40 I tried to do it on a more regular basis, realizing that if I did not increase my physical activity my life would become sedentary to the point of unhealthiness. I bought some books that described the trails in areas such as Shenandoah National Park and in other parts of Northern Virginia, and investigated some of the hikes there. Much of this hiking was solitary. I did join the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, but although that club organizes hikes its primary purpose is trail maintenance. Its membership is very large and, consequently, I rarely met the same people on more than one hike. But after some years of this regimen, a co-worker who was a member of the Wanderbirds persuaded me to join the group.
It proved to be a benefit in several ways. To begin with, the membership of the Wanderbirds is relatively small – at its largest its numbers never exceeded 300 – and because we traveled together in a bus we were naturally thrown into each other’s company for a considerable amount of time. Several members were “regulars” who managed to attend the hikes every week, so that it was easy to become acquainted with them. Finally, since all of the hikers went at their own speed and did not all arrive at the bus for departure at the same time, it was the custom of the club to snack together on the food and drink provided by the leaders. In the beginning the fare was limited to pretzels and potato chips, but by the time I joined the club the food provided was considerably more elaborate – in fact, virtually every hike ended in a kind of party. The club also sponsored annual events such as a picnic hike in summer, a Christmas party in winter, and so on. As I made friends with many, various sub-groups would undertake other activities outside of the club’s official ones. Thus in one year I went to Georgia with seven or eight others to hike in the vicinity of Springer Mountain, another in the Smokies, another in the German Alps, etc. And there were various other leisure activities bands of us would do together as well. It is not surprising, then, that the club came to form a large component of my social network.
But membership in the club had an additional effect. It provided a striking illustration of how a group can aid a person in developing skills and acquiring self-confidence. Previously, for instance, I handled long steep ascents very badly. I was continually stopping to rest and recover my breath – except that the stops that lasted two or three minutes did not offer much in the way of restoration. The Wanderbirds provided instruction of the best kind: by example, without being aware that they were providing instruction at all. From them I learned that a much better approach is to maintain a continuous motion, slowing down if necessary but never coming to a complete stop and thereby losing momentum. I still do not handle the steepest ascents as well as I could wish, but I am much more proficient at them now than I was before I joined the club.
Then, too, the effect of the club was to prod me into undertaking activities I never would have done on my own. When I first joined the club, I looked upon a 14-mile hike as the absolute maximum that I would ever be able to perform. Now I was associating with people who would hike 11-13 miles in a day as a matter of course, and would sometimes do considerably more. Sometimes hikers would, with the leaders’ permission, go ahead to do “extra” – go off along detours that added a mile or so to the total length of the hike. The Wanderbirds had a rather interesting reputation even among other local hiking groups. The age level of the group is somewhat higher than the average; it is one of the “grayer” groups. But it is also considered one of swiftest. Once, when I was walking on a trail with some other members and we overtook a few other hikers on the same trail, they asked about the route we were taking and the group with which we were associated; when we told them that we were with the Wanderbirds, their reaction was, in effect, “Oh! no wonder.”
Thus I would be hiking at longer distances than what I had formerly believed to be the maximum amount of exertion earlier, and at a faster pace. And as time went on the club gently propelled me into more ambitious projects. In 2009 one of the club members discussed the Hike Across Maryland, which I have mentioned earlier: the bi-annual event in which hikers attempt to traverse the 41 miles of the Appalachian Trail that run through Maryland in a day. He would up by saying to me that I should try it. At first my reaction was: Impossible! I had never completed a hike of half that length. But then others joined in, saying, yes, you should try it, you can do it. And they said it often enough that eventually I thought – well, maybe I could. And so I did, and I managed to acquit myself creditably enough. But I never would have attempted it without such a suggestion coming from the outside.
In that way I have gone on to do many activities that I could not have imagined myself doing in the days when I was hiking on my own: laboriously ascending “14-ers” (mountains whose summits are over 14,000 feet above sea level) in Colorado, participating in the annual One-Day Hike (a hike that covers 100 kilometers, or slightly over 62 miles, of the C&O Canal towpath in a day), clambering up a rock wall by means of metal cables in a section of the Via Ferrata in the Dolomites, straddling a knife-edge ridge that divides two great volcanic valleys in Oregon, going up and down Mt. Washington and other mountains of the Presidential Range in New Hampshire, among others: no extraordinary feats, perhaps, but considerably more than I would have been capable of without the beneficial stimulus that the Wanderbirds provided.
In mid-March the hikes that the Wanderbirds undertook together had to be put on hiatus. Setting up hikes that involved rides on a chartered bus with 40-50 people sitting side by side for two hours was out of the question once the coronavirus began to expand in the country. There are now small sub-groups of Wanderbirds members coordinating hikes in which others can participate, but the hikes are less ambitious, the numbers are much smaller, meeting a core of regulars from one week to the next has become more problematic. What we have at the moment are mere echoes of the activities that the club did before the virus forced it to abandon them. There are hopes that it can be restored to its former structure once the virus has been controlled and riding in transport vehicles such as buses is reasonably safe again, but that will not occur until spring of 2021 at the earliest.
Many clubs have affected its members in the same way, being forced to put their normal activities on hold and wait for better times to come – not hiking clubs, necessarily, but organizations such as choirs, ballroom dancing groups, local sports leagues; any group, in short, that depends on numbers of people performing activities while in close physical proximity with one another. And with this loss of such an important source of person-to-person interaction, we are losing a degree of social cohesion. It is no coincidence that sales of at-home alcohol since the pandemic have increased by 27% as of June or that several states are reporting a dramatic increase in opioid overdoses. As the virus continually pushes people back to fall upon their own resources, we are seeing a vivid illustration of Samuel Johnson’s words about the ill effects of self-isolation: “Solitude is dangerous to reason, without being favorable to virtue: pleasures of some sort are necessary to the intellectual as to the corporeal health; and those who resist gaiety, will be likely for the most part to fall a sacrifice to appetite; for the solicitations of sense are always at hand, and a dram to a vacant and solitary person is a speedy and seducing relief. Remember that the solitary mind is certainly luxurious*, probably superstitious, and possibly mad: the mind stagnates for want of employment, grows morbid, and is extinguished like a candle in foul air.”
(NOTE: “luxurious” is here used in the sense that the word had in earlier usage, when it meant “given to sensual self-indulgence” instead of “elegant or expensive”)
Our own family has done its best to combat the worst effects of this isolation. Today my brother organized a Zoom meeting so that various family members (including some who live in Chile and one who is currently in New Zealand) could get in contact with each other and update relatives with their current status. We spoke together for about an hour and, considering how unfamiliar some of us are with the technology, it was a success. My aunt in particular has been displaying great resilience under the current circumstances; despite having past her 90th birthday and despite having been deprived of meeting with the greater part of her immediate family, she remains as active as ever, getting out every day and staying in excellent physical shape.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 27,275,286; # of deaths worldwide: 887,094; # of cases U.S.: 6,458,987; # of deaths U.S.: 193,214. There were actually less than 30,000 new cases today and less than 400 deaths, which is an encouraging sign. India’s case count now exceeds Brazil’s; it is second only to the U.S. now.