In 1943 three men escaped from a POW camp in the deserts of Africa.

They walked out the main gate wearing stolen uniforms and using a stolen key. Their goal was not some distant country across the dunes where their old freedom might be found again, but a freedom of a different kind.

Their goal was Mount Kenya.

At seventeen thousand feet, Mount Kenya was the second highest mountain in Africa after Mount Kilimanjaro. It stood grand and unreachable against the skyline beyond the prison camp, its ice-capped peaks visible between the strands of barbed wire.

The prison camp was located deep within the African desert, so that even if a prisoner were to escape the fences of the camp they would perish on the merciless sands long before they reached safety. So, a plan was hatched in secret among the prisoners; if the camp couldn’t be escaped, perhaps the mountain could be climbed.

The architect of this daring plan was Felice Benuzzi, an athlete and mountaineer who, along with two other prisoners, assembled improvised climbing gear from the materials of their prison. They hoarded rations, traded cigarettes for extra food, and stitched together spare blankets to make climbing suits. They unraveled cords from sleeping cots to braid into climbing rope. On a secret forge they turned a purloined hammer into an ice-axe. They cut barbed wire from the very fences penning them in and reshaped the metal to make crampons to grip the ice of the mountain.

Their only map was a label they peeled off a can of tinned meat because it bore a tiny outline of the mountain as a logo. They wrote a note and placed it inside of a small bottle to leave at the summit as proof of their ascent, and a homemade flag made of three handkerchiefs sewn together.

On a Sunday in January, they donned disguises and, beneath the eyes of watchful sentries, boldly walked right out of the front gate.

So began an eighteen-day adventure of starvation, wild beasts, and terrors of incredible heights. It is a story of daring and disobedience, of the mind's inexplicable need to be unbound. It is a story not of running away from death, but toward a mountain, and life.

My prison, like most in this world, was a prison of the mind, and mostly of my own creation. A prison of boredom and timeclocks and restless days spent dreaming. My mountain was a trail that spanned the coast of a country.

In April 2019, I was working in a cabinet factory in north Georgia, a cobwebby building where the air was an eternal haze of sawdust and varnish fumes. Everywhere was half-assembled cabinetry leaning against workbenches and dollies stacked high with wooden boards. It was the latest in a sequence of temporary and unfulfilling jobs that had stretched across most of my twenties in a chain of odd-hour shifts and crumbling industrial parks. Only weeks before I had almost lost the four digits of my left hand when I had stayed late to help a coworker complete her tasks, working on a machine I was unfamiliar with. It had only been luck that my hand had been sucked into the conveyor belt rollers sideways. The fat part remained wedged between the spinning wheel and metal roller-housing, like a piece of meat too big to pass through a grinder. My hand wasn’t trapped for long, only a few seconds, but long enough for me to catch the smell of friction-burned skin mingling with the factory’s baseline smells of oil and cut wood. Long enough for normal time to disappear. Luckily, I was able to wrench it free before it was pulled all the way through. Weeks later, it was still bruised and pulpy, and occasionally my entire arm would go numb from the nerve damage that the doctors said might never go away. Ever since the accident I had been plagued by feelings of fear and anger that followed me everywhere like a veil of smoke. What wrong paths had led me here, to a life of daydreams and disfigurements? What truer path was there to lead me somewhere else? I didn’t know. All I knew was that quitting wasn’t hard.

The Appalachian Trail had been in my life forever, but only ever seen from afar.

I grew up in Jasper, Georgia, a small town at the southern end of the Appalachian mountain range. Springer Mountain—the official southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail—was one of the many wooded playgrounds of my childhood.

The Appalachian Trail runs approximately 2,190 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, spanning almost the entire eastern seaboard of America. It is often described by listing the things through which it passes; fourteen states, two national parks, eight national forests. However, there is an element of the trail which these datapoints fail to capture, a significance not captured within its technical parameters. For many hikers, the Appalachian Trail exists in the mind as a beguiling unknown. To these people, and I was one, the trail is not a simple footpath, but a way to escape life’s familiar patterns, a corridor of unknowns. A secret alleyway through the wild places of the world.

Millions visit it each year, and a few attempt to walk it in its entirety during a single season. These people are called thru-hikers. A thru-hiker carries everything they need on their back: shelter, food, clothing. For four to six months the trail becomes home, community, occupation, and identity.

I am not sure when the desire to attempt it hardened from fantasy into necessity, I only know that by the spring of 2019, staying felt more dangerous than leaving.

My mom and stepdad let me store all my stuff in a shed behind their barn, and the process of moving filled the days between quitting my job and starting my hike. It was the first weeks of April and the Dogwoods were in bloom, and pollen coated the world like a wash of pale gold. Blackberry Winter had come and gone.

It was a time for leaving.

At the visitor’s center of Amicalola State Park, I said goodbye to my mother and grandmother, who had driven me here to see me off. They have already begun to cry before we even hug. It is hard to see the women who have cared most for you cry as you leave them behind, to do dangerous things for no good reason. I think they sensed, as I did, that this was for me something more than a trip, and if I came back at all I would not come back the same.

I step through the doorway at the back of the center and approach the stone archway where the trail begins.

I stand before it and take a deep breath, looking around one last time.

Here there is no grandiose regalia, no words, ceremonies or adornments. Just an archway made of stone and a sign beside it listing the miles to go. Springer Mountain, 8.1, Katahdin Maine, 2,180.

It is a moment soft and immense, its significance belied by its silence and your own solitary observance of it. You pause beneath the arch for a breathless moment to see if the world will manifest some sign or omen to acknowledge the magnitude of the undertaking on which you are about to embark.

It does not, and you begin.