By KEVIN NEVERS

A man wakes one morning to find himself 50, his most vigorous years behind him and in their place unaccustomed pains and twinges, the rheumatic badges of bread-winning and child-rearing, and maybe he wonders where the time has gone and how much more he had and marvels at the relentlessness—and even more at the imperceptibleness—with which age consumes youth.

The man has done everything he was supposed to do—he’s loved his wife, punched the clock, sacrificed for his family—yet late at night, when sleep refuses to come, he may ask whether it was enough.

Some men—it’s a cliché but no less true for that—develop a taste for sporty cars and sportier women. Others do what Barry Veden has done, not indulging but challenging themselves, physically as well as spiritually, and discovering in their exertions, in their very bone-weariness, that the gray years have become green again.

Veden, a Michigan City resident and NIPSCO retiree, both sought and found himself on the Appalachian Trail, the 2,160-mile footpath which cuts across mountain and wilderness from Maine to Georgia. Hikers have been trekking the A.T. for the better part of 80 years, since forester Benton MacKaye proposed in 1921 the development of a “strategic camping ground” along the “Appalachian Skyline,” a refuge were city folks might enjoy the “outdoor community life” and “reduce the day’s drudgery.”

Hiking the A.T. is hardly a cake walk, though. Its precipitous heights, the extremes of temperature and weather, the sheer daily mileage required just to hit the next shelter by night fall, make it a grueling test of muscle and stamina for even the fittest. Still, in his new book, Coming of Age on the Appalachian Trail, Veden makes a strong if unstated case that, in some profound way, youth may be wasted on the A.T.

Coming of Age resists easy classification. It’s part memoir, part fiction, part meditation, and nothing at all like Veden’s previous book, My Heroes, a moving account of the men—his father among them—who spent the most miserable winter of their lives fighting Hitler’s Panzers in the Battle of the Bulge.

For those who hiked the A.T. when young, Veden told the Chesterton Tribune, the experience tends to have been a seminal one. It may have been their first great adventure, or their last one before joining the workaday world, and they can still recall the weight of their packs, the ache in their legs, the hunger pangs, the exhausted exhilaration after a good day on the trail—or the frustration after a hard slog—as though they’d awakened to a Great Smoky sunrise only just yesterday. But Veden came to the A.T. somewhat later in life, in 1993, when he was 50, after hearing a prominent hiker give a talk one night at the old Trailhead Outfitters in Chesterton. “He just overwhelmed us.”

That first hike Veden made with his wife and he quickly learned he knew nothing about hiking. “We were ill prepared,” Veden said. “We weren’t physically up to the challenge. We carried too much gear.”

Since then Veden’s made seven hikes—usually alone, and alone is how he prefers it—and over the years he’s picked up a thing or two he never needed to know when he was riding a desk at NIPSCO. Caught once on the top of a mountain in a snowstorm, Veden was forced to make a snow cave for shelter. He misplaced his way (“I wasn’t really lost, I just wasn’t sure how to find the shelter I was looking for”). He’s hiked injured. He’s hiked sick. “When you’re by yourself on the mountain, a lot of things can happen to you,” Veden said. “Literally your life is in your own hands. Do you know where you’re going? Have you prepared yourself? Have you brought enough food? Suddenly you find yourself doing all sorts of things you’ve never done before in your life because you’ve never had to. I’ve discovered I’m tougher than I ever thought I was. And more capable.”

So the A.T. has a way of hardening a man grown soft. Yet Veden’s learned something else along the way. The A.T. has a way too of softening a man grown hard, calloused by responsibility or ambition or care. Thus, on the side of a mountain one cold night in 1997, Veden felt the knot inside himself uncoil. “The eclipse began slowly,” he writes, “with the darkness of the earth’s shadow touching the side of the late winter moon now filling the clear March sky. As the light slowly began to fade, a chill swept over the woods and everything in it as if something dreadfully evil was about to occur. But that didn’t happen. Instead, what I experienced in the darkness of the Appalachians was the enlightenment and joy that come with the realization that we are not alone.”

“I don’t want this to sound hokey,” Veden said. “I’ve never been a very religious person. But I found this out about myself: it’s a part I need. There really is a supreme being, and now and then you need the spirit in your corner.”

For Veden the lessons learned on the A.T. came hard, some of them, but not too late. “I wish I’d been a better person,” he said. “I wish I’d been a better friend. I think I am now. I’m just sorry it’s taken me so long to learn what life is all about. I’ve become more aware of what I have in my life and how much they mean to me, my wife and kids and grandkids. They all mean more to me.”

In short, Veden said, the A.T. is a lot like life itself. “You’ll never see it from the highway. You have to experience it one step at a time. I went to the Trail in search of myself and I found the person I was looking for.”

Coming of Age on the Appalachian Trail and My Heroes are both available on amazon.com

Posted 3/4/2008