Holy Week on the AT

I Can’t Wait to Soak My Feet

After 13 miles of hiking, I stop to take off my trail runners. I’m somewhere in North Carolina (or is it Tennessee?), and my feet are talking. Begging me with every step to stop and soak them in the stream.

I do so a ways down from the water source, where a fellow hiker named Tumbleweed stops too.

Young and long-haired, he has a prominent tattoo of a cross on his forearm. When I ask him about it, he reads the words “His will, his glory.”

I stare down at my feet, gloriously shocked now by the cold rush of water. I think of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, and the startling gift of that.

Why Today?

Today is Maundy Thursday in the church liturgical year. I know that my colleagues will be washing their congregants’ feet this evening.

They will kneel down with bowls of water and towels at The Reformed Church of Bronxville (NY), where I was privileged to serve for the past 12 years.

“This is the first year I probably won’t be in church on Easter,” Tumbleweed says.

I look up and say, “Yeah, me too.”

Our church last Easter.

You Can Take the Minister Out of the Church, But…

It’s hard to take the church out of the minister.

Especially during Holy Week. Especially if you put her in the woods and surround her with a million sermon illustrations in nature.

This is the first year that Holy Week has come (and almost gone) and I haven’t spent a single hour in a service of worship.

It’s hard to plan anything definite on the trail, but tomorrow is Sunday and I’m in a town and I bought an Easter dress at Dollar General just in case.

“Easter dress” is a generous term here, but it feels fancier than walking into church in my sweaty Smartwool.

The church greeter quickly ushers us to the “hiker pew,” so my dress is fooling exactly no one

Here Is What I Didn’t Expect

Most of Holy Week I may not be in church, but the church is still in me. And a part of me wishes I could be there.

It’s more than religious duty or missing my job. It’s surely not missing high heels. My trail feet wouldn’t even know what to do with those.

It’s the feeling that a sacred event is taking place, and I’m not there to lead it or receive it.

The Reformed Church of Bronxville (NY), where people taught me how to minister.

There are faces and voices and stories I don’t get to be with this week. There are kids dressed in their best pastels and seersuckers I don’t get to take pictures with, meals of roast beef and mimosas I don’t get to feast on.

But it’s more than that. Being a pastor isn’t like any other job. Episcopal priest and professor Barbara Brown Taylor writes:

“I learned to perform baptisms, marriages, house blessings, and funerals. I learned how to name and handle all the ritual items involved in Holy Communion. As an alchemist of God’s grace, I was allowed into the most private rooms of people’s lives, which gave me a more spacious heart.”

Officiating communion for the first time, at my ordination in 2007—alongside mentor Rev. Molly Dykstra

A Spacious Place

So often the biblical writers speak of being delivered into a spacious place. This is what my soul needed on the Appalachian Trail.

But not even the heart-stopping beauty of nature can take the place of the rooms of people’s lives in a faith community, and that spaciousness of heart.

I know this hasn’t been everyone’s experience. I meet a lot of people who are disillusioned with religion, and I get that. Churches and church leaders let people down. Those claiming to speak for God often speak for things I don’t believe in.

Still.

There’s something so dear about the way my church walks with me on this trail. They have poured out prayers and packages and parties for me. They have sent me fresh ginger and old sleeping bags. One bought an Easter lily in my name and another planted a tree. They know about the alchemy of God’s grace.

The last time I celebrated communion, on my final day at RCB.

This Is What Holy Week Looks Like on Trail

Maundy Thursday

On Maundy Thursday I hike mostly alone. I think of my grandmother, who died a number of years ago on Holy Thursday. That night I preached at church about Jesus’s words to his friends: “Later you will understand.”

I think about all the things I wanted to better understand out here. The space I needed for the “later” to happen.

What happens this day is that I hike more miles than I ever have, thanks to a lighter pack.

Max Patch.

Go with the Flow

A fellow hiker named Flow, an ultralighter (someone who carries very lightweight gear and very little of it), gave me key advice the night before. It’s a conversation I will never forget.

As a 5-foot, one-inch, 110-pound woman, I am smaller than most thru-hikers. Flow and I talked about the physics of what it means to carry a pack that’s nearly a third of your body weight. It means stress on the joints. It means fatigue and exhaustion. It means low morale. And it can mean what no thru-hiker wants to hear: having to leave the trail.

Packing Our Fears

“We pack our fears,” says Flow.

I can’t stop thinking about this as I later turn over in my sleeping bag. What fears am I packing? Sure, I have the obvious desire to avoid hypothermia and hunger and danger, but Flow said something else.

Flow and his enviably compact pack, hiking the PCT last year.

He said we rob ourselves of what we came for when we pack all those “necessities” on the gear list. We try to create a bubble of comfort to buffer ourselves from the very nature we came to experience.

At an elemental level you just need to be safe, fed, and warm. You don’t need to recreate your life back home. Hiking lighter teaches you to make peace with lack.

And from another thru-hiker named Monk:

“If hiking is what you came to do, then make the bulk of your day enjoyable through a light pack. If you’re slightly less comfortable at camp, so be it. You have to ask yourself, ‘Am I a thru-hiker? Or a thru-camper?'”

I want to hike lighter and free.

In the Name of All That’s Holy

The word holy means “set apart,” or “sacred.” Maundy Thursday feels holy because I sent home nearly seven pounds of gear at Standing Bear and now I’m flying through the miles. It’s like aging backward ten years in a day.

My knees thank me. My feet weep with joy. What if it’s more than gear? What if I’m free to off-load other fears too—around belonging, aging, and my unconventional path of adulthood?

Jesus says, “Come, all you who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble of heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

First time I hike over 15 miles and make it to camp before dark!

Good Friday

This day shows rain. All-day kind of rain. Thankfully the forecast doesn’t predict temperatures below 45, but it’s not going to be easy. Big elevation changes, and nearly 18 miles to town.

Soon I am joined by Adam and Radagast and we hike most of the day together against the wind and sleet and mud. But the beauty of the rain is how it cushions the earth for your knees, and makes you move quick to stay warm.

Rain? What rain?

Trail Friendship

I have not hiked with these two before but soon we are like old friends, talking about nutrition, CrossFit, cycling, and travels. Which leads to family and loss and why we need to be here.

Radagast and I actually met earlier but as he says, “Sprout!* I didn’t recognize you without all the sunscreen.”

It is almost noon when we stop at a shelter for a snack. I think about the Good Friday service my church is having at this moment and the song that will be sung—Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?

I think about one Simon of Cyrene who joined on Jesus’s hike to Golgotha. How he found it in himself to carry Jesus’s cross for a spell. Showing up alongside someone in the rain to carry something heavy, uphill, on the way to death. That is friendship.

On the trail we carry for each other the weight of what we brought out here with us. “Free therapy,” says Adam.

He is section hiking this weekend after thru-hiking two years ago. “This is a great place to heal,” he says. “The mountains and trees have heard it all. They don’t care where you’ve come from or what you want. But they’ll listen to everything you tell them.”

Trust Among Strangers

The three of us arrive in town late that afternoon and share a room. We wash and hang our clothes on a line of cord strung from the door knob to the kitchen cabinet. We buy each other avocados and beer and get the guitar player at the restaurant to let us sing Jackson by June and Johnny Cash.

Me, Adam, and the guitar guy on the right.

It’s hard to describe the way the trail builds trust between strangers. It’s not just the time spent together, or even the talking. It’s the terrain. The weather. The blisters and wet food and ripped packs.

It’s the fact that we already have so much in common just by being here. We are doing something hard and lovely and unpredictable, and are literally walking each other through it.

I wonder what it would look like to create opportunities like this in the wider world. Spacious places apart from class and geography and politics and age and all the categories that divide us.

Where we could hike together and brave the weather and hold space for each other’s stories.

The eastern mystic Ram Dass says, “In the end, we’re all just walking each other home.”

Odie the hiker yearbook guy with the bus! He started that after thru-hiking some years back, and wanting to find a way to stay in touch with people.

Holy Saturday

I have never known what to do with this day. Church-wise, nothing happens. It’s silent Saturday. For clergy it’s a brief buffer between three days of planning and preaching and putting on the right stole.

In town today there is more rain. We are taking a zero day with all rest and no miles.

Adam wishes he could stay but he has to leave and go back to work in his small North Carolina town. I hesitatingly offer to pray for him—he has a lot ahead. So the three of us—strangers just over a day ago—sit at the kitchen table and briefly bow our heads.

When Adam’s ride comes to pick him up, I don’t think I’m imagining it—that Radagast and I both blink back a tear.

Because part of the trail is always saying goodbye. Leaving and letting go and blessing these brief but significant connections.

Radagast and Easter brunch.

They are like the gift of a butterfly on the trail that lands on your hand while you stop for a snack: you marvel at its delicate beauty and want to take a picture, but then, just like that, it flies away.

Which doesn’t make it any less beautiful.

Salamander finds a broken butterfly.

A Trail Family Reunion

I head down the road to the outfitter shop to pick up a package and as I stand at the counter, out of nowhere someone comes up from behind and hugs me high up off the floor.

I turn around and laugh: it’s Tree-beard, from my first trail family. He is here with 50/50 and all the rest—Moonpie, Freight Train, Megan, and Jim.

I thought I would never see them again, figuring that they were miles ahead! When we reunite I feel such fierce affection for them and the way they got me through my first two weeks. They were so patient and fun and caring.

Reunited with Doppler and Q too!

“In a little while you will see me, and then in a little while you will see me no longer,” Jesus told his friends before he left them.

I wonder if he wanted to teach them about impermanence. About savoring the gift—but not clutching it.

Pippy and Salamander at Standing Bear Hostel; photo bomb by Redbeard.

When it comes to trail friendships, I can so relate to the disciple Peter. In this one scene in the Gospels, he’s hiking with Jesus and two other friends and they have this epic moment on the mountain: ghosts of prophets past, lightning storms, spiritual revelation—the works.

Peter says, “Let’s keep this thing going! Let’s hang out here and freeze time and set up tents and never let it end.”

But that’s not the way it works – not in the Bible and not on the trail. Jesus says, “Nope. We’re leaving.” People move ahead. Others stay behind. Injury and illness come. Weather detains. Priorities change.

Then later we arrive in town and reunite when we least expect it, and there is all this outsized joy.

Grubber on his 25th birthday—with Dean and me

Easter’s Around the Corner

On Friday night two places in town have live music. We dance in our flip-flops and hiker skirts to a loud cover of Paul Simon’s “If you’ll be my bodyguard, I can be your long lost pal…”

Shoelace laughs, “Sprout, you look like a normal person!” Which means I have showered and put on a patterned shirt.

We are dancing because the rain is over. We are dancing because our feet made it down the mountain. We are dancing because it is holy, all of this holy, and we’re here together for just this sacred sliver of time.

We make it to Easter Sunday in Hot Springs!

*Sprout—I got renamed from the original Jolly Green Giant. Too many syllables to say, plus people who heard it kept expecting a big guy in a green coat to show up.

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Comments 16

  • Waring "Roadrunner" Porter : Apr 22nd

    Sounds like a powerful Holy Week to me. Love your reflection, “It’s hard to describe the way the trail builds trust between strangers…It’s the fact that we already have so much in common just by being here. We are doing something hard and lovely and unpredictable, and are literally walking each other through it.” A great picture of what God desires for His people in the Church…if only we could experience it as you describe on the trail. I am enjoying reading your blog, and am envious of your experience on the trail. Enjoy & keep writing. Peace.

    Reply
    • David Vanderlinde-Abernathy : Apr 22nd

      Cari, what a delight it is to follow you up the tail. As a retired pastor in UCC and hiker of AT (competed trail in 2014 after five years of section hiking) your post are inspiring, funny and poignant. I am headed out again on the AT May 2. Though I will be hundreds of miles behind you, I will keep reading your reflections for inspiration. Interestingly, you preached last year in the church I served for 28 years in Barre Vermont. It is such a small world.

      Reply
      • Cari Pattison : Sep 23rd

        Dear David, belated thanks for this! I am honored that a fellow pastor found meaning in this. How was your AT journey this year?? I am guessing you have already summitted by now? And also I love the Barre UCC church connection! They told me about you when I guest-preached there! I didn’t get the job (that I was neutral-pulpit preaching for, during the interview process), but that allowed me to do this instead! Perhaps I will make my way back to ministry in VT one day in years to come. Blessings, Cari

        Reply
    • Cari Pattison : Sep 23rd

      Dear Waring “Roadrunner” – Belated thanks for this! I am honored that you read my blog and followed my journey. Keep the faith! Blessings, Cari

      Reply
  • Collin Adams : Apr 23rd

    From one pastor to another, I envy your time. So many amazing moments. Thank you for your honesty and openness. I love to read about your pilgrimage.

    Reply
    • Cari Pattison : Sep 23rd

      Dear Collin- belated thanks for this! I love that another pastor out there can connect. Thank you for following my journey. Peace, Cari

      Reply
  • Tupac : Apr 23rd

    I know you previously said you don’t read the comments. Since I don’t believe you…

    You sent home 7 pounds of stuff? Do tell….

    Reply
    • Cari Pattison : Sep 23rd

      Tupac lives!! And I finally read the comments!! Belated thanks for this, and for following my journey. That particular send-home shipment included the crocs (camp shoes), some stuff sacks, extra food, some first aid and toiletries, and honestly I forget what else… oh! A sleeping pad (thermarest). The only thing I ended up missing of those 7 pounds (true number!) were the crocs. I replaced them later with flip-flops, and ultimately Hoka recovery shoes (flip flops with support) which were my favorite. Happy hiking, Cari

      Reply
  • Jen : Apr 23rd

    Thanks for this, Cari. For sharing all this with those of us who know and love you and are praying for you as you walk into your future. Love to you, sister. Happy Easter!

    Reply
    • Cari Pattison : Sep 23rd

      Belated thanks, Jen!!

      Reply
  • Chickasaw : Apr 23rd

    Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance. Romans 5:3
    Enjoying your trek as a faithful Presbyterian and AT thru hiker in 2022. Godspeed.

    Reply
    • Cari Pattison : Sep 23rd

      Dear Chickasaw- belated thanks for this!! Love that verse from Romans. And happy to meet a fellow Presbyterian and future thru-hiker!! hope to cross paths on the trail someday! Blessings, Cari

      Reply
  • Matt "Smokey" Davis : Apr 24th

    Great writing. I was hoping you were going to wash that hiker’s feet at the stream. Oh well. Happy Trails.

    Reply
    • Cari Pattison : Sep 23rd

      Hey Smokey- belated thanks for this! And gee, that’s a great idea- I coulda shoulda done that! Tumbleweed was a cool guy and I didn’t see him much after that. Not sure he would’ve taken to the idea of a stranger touching his feet right then and there near Max Patch, though…

      Reply
  • Janice Brinson : Apr 26th

    I would love to see your posts compiled together into a book after you complete your hike. Your writing and insight and joy are gifts.

    Reply
    • Cari Pattison : Sep 23rd

      Thank you for the encouragement, Janice! I really appreciate that.

      Reply

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