Hiking Through Appalachia, Following Stories Old and New

This is part of Iconic Passages, a collection of stories celebrating America and the many ways we move through its vast and diverse landscapes. Read more here. I took a wrong turn and got quite lost on a hike once, when I was 10 years old. We hiked often as a family on the forested ridgetop trail a few miles from our house in the highlands of western Pennsylvania. The trail near us wasn’t part of the main Appalachian trail, though it belongs to the same broader region of forest trails in northern Appalachia. The two trails share the same tremendous hemlock and pine trees and red oaks that have held steady for over 300 years. Idra Novey is a poet, novelist, and translator who grew up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a former steel town in the Allegheny Highlands of Appalachia. There is a mythic sense of deep time that happens while hiking under centenarian trees and knowing they have outlasted all the wrong turns humans have made beneath them. The vast, dense forests of Appalachia—held apart as a separate realm operating according to a cultural logic of its own—also occupy a fabled place in the American imagination. I suspect part of the allure of hiking through Appalachia has to d