Preface
The limericks and pictures in this volume owe their existence to an invitation from a friend in 2007 to spend a weekend hiking a few sections of the Appalachian Trail. I’d never really done any serious hiking; nonetheless, I accepted. That invitation has developed into a fourteen-year journey that now extends from sixty miles south of the Delaware Water Gap to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, a yearly ritual that begins in late spring and usually culminates in early September. And the journey continues… Each of my summers since 2007 has been punctuated by two-day sectional hikes in a growing number of states (seven as I write this) along with many shorter ones revisiting favorite stretches of the AT. As an initial set of painful excursions followed by days of aching muscles quickly developed into a passion, I began thinking about recording the journey in some way. So, how does a literature professor and literary critic with little to no talent for writing poetry go about such a task? Sonnets are far too challenging and require too much skill, so, naturally, it would have to be something far simpler. At some point (and I actually don’t remember the moment), the limerick came to mind as a way of giving expression to my experiences. And I’ve discovered so many varied experiences out there in the woods, so many little things that one can encounter in such close proximity to nature. One only has to be walking for a short time and the muscles in one’s shoulders to relax, the mind empties, one boot follows the other. As Melville described it , the “great flood-gates of the wonder-world” swing open. And then something invariably happens precisely when one is no longer looking for it. Sometimes it’s an animal, other times it’s a leaf or a flower or an unexpected glimpse into the distance, and other times it’s slipping on a wet rock or log and falling face first in the mud.
At the center of it all is an ongoing encounter with Nature. I capitalize Nature without any intended endorsement of Emerson because nature is brutal too and one’s experience with it can be fraught with danger as well as comedy (not infrequently both at the same time on the AT). Emerson took it all too seriously. It’s this encounter with nature, both the wondrous and comic aspects of it while hiking, that interests me. And this is another reason why I choose the limerick. Appropriately, it began as a joke, and I’ve been torturing my wife and son for years with my limericks. I’ve also tortured anyone else foolish enough to listen, but most have been wise enough not to encourage me. My friend and hiking partner Keith can’t stand them and usually politely ignores my emails when I send them to him in the days following one of our excursions. Over time, I’ve come to take my limericks more seriously, and the form is more apt to recount hiking experiences than I initially realized. First, they’re obsessively focused on place names, and there are so many places along the Appalachian Trail: creeks and brooks and streams, gaps and valleys and notches, campsites and shelters and lodges, ridges and ravines and overlooks, lakes and ponds and swamps, and hills and mountains and summits (always farther away than you think). Second, they’re focused on people. And the people who hike the Appalachian Trail come from all over, and each has his or her own story and reason for doing it.
Many of these limericks are about actual experiences that I’ve had while hiking, places that I’ve seen and visited along the Appalachian Trail and real or imagined events connected to those places. All of them are an effort to say something about the experience, and I’m proud to say that they’ve provided me with my trail name (Limerick). And then there are the photographs. Like the limericks, my interest in photography grew out of my experiences hiking, and the idea of taking pictures was a result of an encounter with two bears on the AT in Northern New Jersey. Afterwards, I regretted not having a camera, so I acquired one, enrolled in some introductory photography classes and began bringing the camera with me on hiking expeditions. All of the photographs in this volume are my own and were taken at the location described in the limerick or somewhere on the Appalachian Trail.
If you don’t like the limericks, I hope you like the photographs. I have no talent for photography, so the camera had to be expensive enough to do most of the work for me. It can get really heavy after being around one’s neck after five or six hours, so please be kind and include effort when you grade my photos. Trust me. There was a lot of effort! It’s hard to describe how difficult it is to get to some of these places. If you’ve hiked on the Appalachian Trail, you know what I mean. If you haven’t, I hope that my limericks or photographs will inspire you to try. Hiking has changed my life for the better in more ways that I can say. In some cases, I’ve had to return to limerick locations to get a photograph. I wish I could write limericks on location, so I would know what to photograph, but, sadly, it doesn’t happen that way. All of my limericks seem to take their origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. It makes it all that much harder, but hiking is never easy even when you aren’t writing limericks about it.
Yours Truly,
Limerick
