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On the Trail, Souls Are Freed. Leave the Cooking to Us

Jerry Parker '73

The server is served: Jerry Parker ’73, who started “trail magic” on Easter weekend on the Appalachian Trail 27 years ago, gets his omelet from Jackie Evans. (Photo by Elizabeth Leland ’76)

Hikers knew him by his Appalachian Trail nickname, “Tar Heel” — a 28-year-old pharmacist from North Carolina with a mop of curly brown hair and blood-red blisters on his feet.

Each step hurt so much that Jerry Parker ’73 considered giving up his dream in 1979 of hiking from Georgia to Maine. But as he stumbled along disheartened through Cumberland Valley, Pa., strangers took him in. They let him bathe in their tub and fixed him Spam and eggs the next morning.

“That act of kindness kept me going,” Parker said.

And so, on Easter weekend for 27 years, Parker has paid his good fortune forward with his own version of “trail magic.” Helped by an army of friends and family, he surprises hikers on the Appalachian Trail as they pass through Deep Gap, in the Nantahala Forest not far from the town of Franklin.

On Saturday, the volunteers serve pulled pork and baked beans prepared by Tom Crawford ’72 (JD). On Sunday, they cook omelets.

Line of hikers eating

When comfort, food and encouragement are dished out, the lines are long. (Photo by Elizabeth Leland ’76)

They set up the banquet deep within the forest, at the end of a one-lane dirt road that twists and turns up the mountain for nearly six miles until it dead-ends at the trail. This year, when their caravan of trucks and cars arrived, 25 people already were waiting. A hiker who’d passed through on a previous Easter had spread the word.

Melissa Haber, 48, a social worker from Plattsburgh, N.Y., hobbled up to the gathering in tears. Each step hurt her knees so much that she was considering surrender after hiking 84.8 miles from the start of the trail at Springer Mountain, Ga.

“It’s the first day I ever cried on the trail,” she said. “I have not thought about quitting until today. I was nauseous from the pain. It was hell for four miles.”

Sitting by the campfire, buoyed after eating a pulled pork sandwich with coleslaw and beans, Haber still wasn’t sure if she would make it. Only one in five hikers do. She would decide in the morning whether to push on.

“This is amazing,” she told Parker. “Everybody is so nice, and the food and the drink and the fire. …”

“The trail will provide,” he assured her. “It’s sort of like life. Your experiences on the trail are a metaphor for life.”

Parker has a reflective moment off the trail

Parker has a reflective moment off the trail — beside him is the backpack he used to thru-hike it in 1979. (Photo by Elizabeth Leland ’76)

And then he told her about his own worst day on the Appalachian Trail.

Parker grew up in western North Carolina but not hiking. After graduating from Carolina, he accepted a pharmacy internship in Waynesville. The pharmacist there, Weaver Kirkpatrick ’66 (’71 BSPHR), regaled him with so many tales of hiking that Parker decided to try it. Alone in the woods for the first time, he felt a spiritual connection to the wilderness around him.

On the day in Pennsylvania when he contemplated quitting the Appalachian Trail, he reflected on the wonders he had experienced. He wrote:

 

Have you walked in early morning fog,

Sat in shimmering moonlight,

Shivered in the evening chill,

Listened to a mournful whippoorwill,

Cowered beneath lightning’s stabbing fire,

Awakened to dawn’s dazzling light,

Been kissed by the falling dew,

Tripped over the tentacles of some hidden root …

Dreamed of mountains yet to climb, or just gazed upon God’s green earth.

Have you set your soul free?

 

Parker set his soul free.

With his feet bandaged, he scrambled over rocks, ducked through mountain laurel tunnels and soaked his aching muscles in cold streams. After 163 days, he finally crested Mount Katahdin in Maine, completing the 2,190-mile journey. Since then he has sought out other peaks to explore, including circumnavigating the Annapurna Massif in Nepal and hiking up Grossglockner, the highest mountain in Austria.

But his favorite time in the woods is Easter weekend. In 1991, the first year he handed out food to thru-hikers, he sat by himself with a camp stove, a frying pan and a pot of water. The menu was simple: Scrambled eggs or hot dogs.

“In the early years, I might see 10 or 12 or 14 people on Easter morning.”

This Easter weekend, 200 hikers were fed, first at Deep Gap and later on Sunday afternoon at nearby Rock Gap.

Melissa Haber

Melissa Haber savors her breakfast and her decision to press on after a physically agonizing bout with the trail in Georgia and North Carolina. (Photo by Elizabeth Leland ’76)

The menu has expanded, too: Omelets and hash browns, sandwiches to go on homemade bread with assorted homemade cookies, fruit and cheese. The fillings for the omelets include 10 pounds of ham, 10 pounds of cheese, four gallons of mushrooms, four quarts of peppers, five quarts of onions, three pints of ramps and four bags of spinach.

They cook so many eggs — 300 by last count — that Parker’s crew of volunteers call themselves the Omelet Angels.

After sleeping under a full moon, they began setting up for breakfast on Easter morning. A stream of hikers soon followed.

Jesse Heirigs, 38, of Austin, Texas, was walking down the trail when he stumbled across a plastic egg filled with candy. Heirigs figured that was a good sign. It only got better. As he came over a slight rise, he spotted a sheet of poster board announcing: “Trail Magic.”

A few minutes later, his plate overflowing with hot food, Heirigs said: “This is amazing. I am overcome by this amount of kindness. It is acts like this that keep us going.”

While other hikers arrived and filled their plates, Melissa Haber lifted her pack onto her back. After a night’s rest and a hot breakfast, she had decided to keep going.

“I feel a lot better,” she told Parker. “I have eggs in my stomach now. It just lifts your spirits. Thank you so much. I was in a pretty bad spot yesterday.”

“We like to revive people who are in an emotional funk,” Parker said. “That’s what happened to me when I was thinking of quitting. Someone’s act of kindness made me want to finish, and I walked on.”

— Elizabeth Leland ’76


 

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