Walking Toward Peace. Cindy Ross

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       CHAPTER 4

      TOM GATHMAN

      US MARINE CORPS, 2006 – 2010

      THE FIRST THING THAT STRIKES you when meeting Marine veteran Tom Gathman is his happy-go-lucky nature. His goofball antics, infectious sense of humor, and frequent laughter are not typical personality traits of a combat veteran. How can this Marine, who served two tours in Iraq, during the most intense time of the war, appear so unscathed? His first deployment was in 2007. On foot patrol at a security post, he was run ragged doing intense, exhausting, grueling work. On his second tour (with his buddy Adam Bautz, profiled in the preceding chapter) Tom performed clandestine operations in a surveillance and target-acquisition platoon. He saw some horrible shit in Iraq and did some things he isn’t proud of, but he appears to have figured out the way to happiness. In a roundabout way, the Marines led Tom to the trail and the life it provides.

      In high school Tom was on a path of self-destruction. As young as thirteen, he began running with a bad crowd; in fact he was the ringleader. At eighteen, he took his father’s car to a local university frat party, and after a full day of consuming alcohol, he laid on the gas pedal and ran the car through the state representative’s garage. Subsequently tried as an adult, he was put on probation for “driving under the influence.” While on probation, Tom did not pay his fines and continued to drive despite his suspended license. After three years of this downward spiral, his actions reached a boiling point. At twenty-two, Tom was sentenced to forty-three days in jail.

      Sitting in jail, Tom thought about the direction his life had taken. “How did it come to this?” he wondered. Could he change? He had a good family, but his parents could not help him; he had pushed them away. He was in a revolving-door system. “I needed to get out of it now!” Tom approached his probation officer and the judge, asking, “Can I do this another way, so there is a light at the end of the tunnel? Can I join the Marines?” To his surprise, they agreed: “If you prove that you will give your ass to the military, and graduate, we’ll squash your record. You’ll be a free man.” As Tom tells it, “I needed to do something I could be proud of; something to give me discipline and a good life. My parents tried everything on me. The same things that worked for my siblings did not work for me. They were very loving parents. They always wanted the best for me. I don’t know how they did it. I put my mother through a depression. She had three good apples and one bad one.” Six months after his release, Tom was on a bus to Parris Island, South Carolina, where he attended the Marine Corps School of Infantry, graduated with honors, and was promoted two ranks. He had turned his life around.

      In 2013, I met Tom right before he and his hiking partner, veteran Adam Bautz, began their first thru-hike on the Appalachian Trail. At the time, Tom worked retail at an outdoor outfitting store in his hometown of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. After six months spent hiking the AT, Tom had returned to a job at Appalachian Outdoors, a store in State College, surrounded by backpacking and camping gear. He went from living outside and using all that gear to working inside eight hours a day, selling it to others who were going to get out and use it themselves, which he found frustrating. Tom enjoyed his job and coworkers, but “being indoors needed to end, and end fast.”

      After another month of work, he gave his two weeks’ notice. He got rid of most of his possessions, put the rest in storage, moved out of his home, ditched his vehicle—all in an effort to downsize and live simply. He wanted to continue hiking long distance. ”I am not the kind of person who has the patience to wait years and years for the things I desire,” he said. “I knew that if I wanted to make a life of this, I needed to find a way to make a name for myself so that I could, hopefully, one day make a living by backpacking.”

      OVER THE NEXT FEW YEARS, TOM ACCOMPLISHED A LOT. HE COMPLETED the 3,100-mile Continental Divide Trail (CDT), 600 miles of the Florida Trail, half of the 2,600-mile Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), the 500-mile Colorado Trail, and the 800-mile Arizona Trail. In 2016 he set out for another thru-hike on the Appalachian Trail, this time in the dead of winter. As we had in 2013, Todd and I rendered some trail magic to him, for ten nights straight when Tom came through Pennsylvania. Every morning, we dropped him off at a trailhead and every evening we picked him up, fifteen to twenty-five miles farther along the trail. He enjoyed the warmth of our living room woodstove, delicious organic dinners, and fresh-baked pie and ice cream for dessert. Lounging on our sofa in the evenings, he made himself comfortable. During this time we really got to know Tom, and he became family.

      Tom had chosen a winter trek on the AT for multiple reasons. “This hike was about conquering a fear I had of backpacking in the winter alone in harsh conditions.” He had only hiked in the summer and wondered, “Can I succeed and not die out there?” Tom didn’t see a single footprint in all 280- plus miles of Maine. Although the AT is the most traveled, highly populated trail in the United States, he didn’t encounter another long-distance backpacker until he reached Pennsylvania. “I’m hiking in the winter because I need risk in my life,” he explained. “I get the adrenaline rush I grew used to feeling in the military which seems normal.” He realized that hiking in the winter made him happy. “It makes me feel alive. The risk is worth the reward if I can overcome it. It is better than living a dull life.”

      With every step, Tom learned to make peace with pain. He hiked more than three hundred miles on stress fractures, and dozens of miles on torn cartilage in his knee after a hundred-foot fall on an icy trail. “I’m also hiking through the winter to be alone with myself,” he said. “Every single day it is just me. There is nothing to distract me from myself. In the Marine Corps, we are taught to internalize many things. Walking helps me process things. I miss my Marine buddies. I lost forty guys. I don’t have any regrets about what I did over there. I had suicidal thoughts before the Marines. The Marines gave me the opportunity to change my course: one hundred percent I would be dead or in jail without them.”

      For Tom, the winter journey along the AT was the culmination of a long-distance-hiking lifestyle that had evolved from his passion into an occupation and a new identity. Back in 2013, the farther along the trail he progressed, the more he fell in love with the hiking life. The simplicity and freedom are what he loves most. “Hiking really appeals to me because there is something very special about experiencing a new place on foot at a speed of two to three miles per hour,” he said. “When you walk through land for months, you absorb so much more of it. It becomes part of you. You have a connection to it. You get rooted, so to speak.” The winter hike made him learn to appreciate everything. He saw beauty everywhere and learned to feel gratitude. He embraced all that the winter wilderness threw at him— darkness, pain, and loneliness. He was experiencing the gifts of peacetime living—beauty, gratitude, new things. “My worst day on the trail,” Tom said, “is still better than my best back in normal society.”

      TOM GOT HIS START ON THE APPALACHIAN СКАЧАТЬ