February 9, 2026

The snow disappeared after a few days in the sloppy, dirty stage. It came to five inches here, more than enough to cripple this town for three days. So the landscape was white, briefly. It’s winter, after all. Sunlight arrived, then faded behind pale, tired clouds. Then it rained.

It’s a season of bad news. Some of it followed us, in the middle of the Southeast Asia trip. Sandy went to a hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The doctor and her staff were skilled and helpful. We have a nice photo.

Still, the two weeks of sunshine and smiles roused us. We gained heart watching Vietnamese and Cambodian people working their farms, shops, open-air fresh food markets, full of energy and purpose, improving their lives in those still-developing countries.

The trip overrode the bleak national news and the local stream of medical anecdotes, the senior citizen emergencies, appointments, procedures, tests, test results. At home the natural order plays out: we readjust, as if we never left the chill, the bare landscape, the dark mood.

Then a woman at the YMCA, riding a spin bike, saw the “Happy Trails” on Sandy’s teeshirt and asked is she a hiker. Sandy pointed at me. The woman walked over. “I saw the ‘Happy Trails,’ I had to ask, because I’m hiking the Appalachian Trail,” she announced, smiling.

“North or south?” I asked.

“Northbound. I still have New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine—New England.”

We talked a bit about the AT, what I know of it, provisioning, hydration, rest, Maine’s 100-Mile Wilderness.

“I’m Bricey,” she said. “I’m planning on starting again around April. I should get you to come with me!” Her bright eyes flashed. She got back on the bike.

The AT. A “bucket-list” thing for some outdoorsy people. I used to do one-day 20-mile stretches of it, north and southbound, from Virginia’s Markham trailhead. Either way it was climb, climb, climb. Now I only want to get through the cold without slipping on ice. And the AT experience isn’t what it used to be. Thousands are on the trail half the year. At some points columns of hikers back up. Campsites and shelters fill up. The full AT hike costs more than a trip to Europe.

But Bricey is setting goals and pursing them. It wasn’t just talk. She had done Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, or “Rocksylvania,” up to Connecticut.

She was probably a couple of decades younger than me, early- or mid-fifties. Not a newbie, but still full of pep and determination. She had tramped the trail, felt the exhaustion, the daily pain. The hard parts hadn’t stopped her. She wanted to finish, to climb Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus, and find joy in her achievement.

We said “good luck,” she pushed hard on the bike. If I see her again I’ll decline her invitation to join her. Regretfully, more or less. But I keep my membership in the Virginia Happy Trails Running Club (Sandy’s teeshirt).

It’s been two years since I entered a VHTRC event, but the club is going strong, now calling for volunteers for the Reverse Ring, a 71-mile ultra-trail race in Virginia’s Massanutten Mountains in late February, when it’s still cold. I finished it twice, that was ten years ago.

Trail-running/hiking is still out there. It’s a kind of therapy, a positive thing that offers a sense of taking on something hard and, you hope, completing it. Some jog city streets or parks, enter 5K and 10K races, take aerobics and yoga classes, pursuing personal fitness goals. Same thing.

Fitness is how we battle physical decrepitude: heart disease, high blood pressure, loss of muscle mass, osteoporosis, which threaten relentlessly as the years pile up. The fitness path is an inward mission, pursued for self, for those close to us. The point is achievement beyond health: the satisfaction—the thrill—of accepting a challenge, overcoming hardship, discomfort, pain. Like Bricey and the AT.

Another mission calls us to step forward for others, beyond self, for humanity.  The prerequisite is a commitment to help, to be of use, teaching, coaching, working at a food bank, Habitat for Humanity, raising funds for charity. It may mean doing difficult, time-consuming things. It may mean, in some way, sacrifice.

We may well venture here beyond signing up for a church charity event. Every quiet waking moment offers the potential for epiphany.  We could one day feel a calling outside ourselves, some mystical or spiritual awakening that gives birth to a social conscience.

That could be recognition that nobody pays people to shoulder most of the country’s social needs. Every church committee, every food bank, every charity, depends on volunteers. Volunteers visit nursing home and assisted-living residents, bringing them joy by being present.

In this city Habitat has built more than 400 homes. It helps low-income people with financing to purchase them, enabling them to escape shabby, overpriced apartments in dangerous neighborhoods. Much of the construction is a volunteer mission: raising walls, shingling roofs, painting, cleaning, the unskilled grunt work.

Stepping forward for others can build on personal achievements. You can do your fitness class or play your pickleball match, then put in time at the food pantry or teach English as a second language. You go home tired, but you’ve created goodness for other persons. 

We make our lives richer by going out of ourselves, overcoming self. In America here and now, the need is urgent, critical, it never ends. “Public service” now is an alien concept in our lowlife federal government, which looks perversely, obsessively inward. We all know it.

We need our YMCA exercise classes, our 5Ks, our ultra-trail challengers. Bricey will inspire others to seek greatness when she summits Mount Katahdin. We all can find our way to inspire. We can be with those who need us, to lift their spirits as we lift our own.