Natalie Hanemann

My purpose for doing a solo backpacking trip began with wanting to swipe my arm across the desk of my daily life. I ran on the wheel of tasks and to-dos and needed a temporary pause. Somewhere along the line, my mind had disconnected from my body.

Without meaning to, I’d gotten too comfortable. Coffee with oat milk at just the right temperature; Amazon purchase for this or that; Binge watch this series; Take that vacation…

Something about getting what I wanted left my soul restless.

I had long been inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s famous quote from Walden:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

Don't get me wrong. I’m happy with my life. Yet, a hidden desire rose in the quiet moments, a longing to get in my car and drive to the middle of nowhere, park on the side of the road, and just start walking.

As an introvert, I require time alone in my head. But more important is getting a break from thinking and instead, simply be. I imagined backpacking would let me “front only the essential facts of life” and rely solely on myself.

The backpacking trail bisected the Land Between the Lakes State Park at the border of Tennessee and Kentucky. This would be my first solo trip — and second-ever backpacking trip of any sort. All the other times I’d hiked or camped, I’d been with my now ex-husband, a guy who confessed after we were married that had he not met me, he’d have hiked the entire Appalachian Trail and maybe made a life of that.

My background with the woods amounted to occasional camping trips where I slept in the backseat of the car because hard ground was uncomfortable and the dampness triggered my asthma. Waking to a raccoon scratching at my nylon tent two feet from where my head rested horrified me.

So the idea of disperse camping — i.e. setting up camp 50 feet from the trail , not in a formal campsite— intimidated the hell out of me. I would need to find a relatively flat ground that didn’t have precarious limbs dangling over it, clear the leaf debris, which may or may not have spiders and snakes, then fashion a fire ring out of rocks. I’d need to assemble my tent, hang my food bag on a limb 20 feet away, and attempt to sleep with at least a dozen other animals as roommates.

Since this was my maiden solo voyage, I gave myself permission to stay at a basic campsite where I could find anonymity amongst other campers.

Before setting off, I stopped in the Welcome Center to inquire about possible wildlife I’d encounter. I’d been fixated on what I would do if I ran into a bear or cougar. I felt the only outcome would be my gory demise. Is there a worse death to imagine than being mauled to death by a bear? And yet…a fire inside fueled my courage and hardened my resolve to not let fear keep me from having an adventure.

“We have feral pigs but they mostly leave you alone, unless they have piglets around,” the park employee said.

“So no bears or cougars?”

“No bears or cougars. Now, we do have bobcats and coyotes, but they’ll mostly leave you alone.”

Mostly.

This news buoyed me. Pack situated, hiking stick in my right hand, bear spray in a holster, I stepped from the pavement onto the sandy Tennessee clay.

A few logistical details pop up when a backpacker is resolute to stay in a campground. I scrutinized the trail maps to find an eight-mile stretch that would drop me near a basic campsite. The problem was, the backpacking trail wasn’t near the campsites because most backpackers disperse camp. I hastily selected my best choice, the Telegram Trail, on the Fort Henry section at the southern end of the park. I would enter the trail via a connector that would drop me on the trail eight miles from the Boswell campground.

Telegraph Trail uses a numbering system as trail markers. The numbers didn’t indicate mileage, simply let the hiker know they were still on trail. My plan was to hike from trail marker #10 to #3, then divert onto the Picket Loop, which eventually intersected with the place I’d sleep for the night.

Rain from the storms the night before meant I side-hiked the edges of the trail in several portions. But the sun shone brightly with no humidity on a 72-degree May day. The forest floor danced with patches of dappled light streaming through the leaves. The scent of honeysuckle rode on the breeze.

My backpack weighed 34 lbs. because I was carrying my drinking and cooking water, which needed to last me two full days as Boswell had no access to drinking water. Unfamiliar with carrying so much weight, I concentrated on keeping my balance when leaning over.

I carried a printed map folded in my pocket, along with my phone and driver’s license. The farther I got from my parked car, the firmer my resolve became. When I got to trail marker #9, I pulled my phone out, and instantly realized I no longer carried my driver’s license. Damn. Maybe some kind soul would find it, throw it in an envelope, and I’d receive it in the mail five days from now. Or maybe someone with bad intentions would know much more about me than I knew about them.

The trails varied from narrow to wide, the narrow parts peppered with long grasses, a convention center for ticks. Like magnets, my wool socks attracted them by the dozen. I used my hiking stick to flick them off so as not to risk toppling over. In my home environment, a tick bite was cause to freeze, dart for the tick tweezers, extract, then clean with peroxide. Here, I flicked my wrist without slowing my gait.

Also in abundance, toads, later identified as Fowler’s Toads. Hopping underfoot, these critters created a few opportunities to leap out of my skin. The forest has a strange way of processing sound. In 2024, two broods of cicadas were resurrected from the soil, more than any other year since 1803, so the shells of molted bodies hung on tall grasses, trunks of trees, and the tips of leaves. Also ever-present was the rising and falling of their constant buzzing.

The entities surrounding me rested largely in silence: tall trees, fallen logs, bright-green undergrowth, butterflies, and weeds with bright pink, purple, or yellow petals. So when a sudden crunch of leaves moved close to my ankles, I assumed Copperhead!, while my veins flooded with adrenaline. The first time this happened, I felt the blood rush to my face, my ears muffled like a speaker with the bass up too high, and a few seconds later, my hands trembled as the residual fight/flight chemical dissipated.

Strangely, the second time I leapt at the sudden rustling of leaves, a new after-effect surfaced: my eyes began playing tricks on me. I would round a bend and see a dark tree trunk the height of a human and jump, mistaking it for a person. An odd shape up ahead would morph into a threatening image — a stick lying flat on the trail with one end bent up would look like a snake ready to strike.

A friend told me after the fact that my mind had shifted into “lizard brain.” This primal brain controls involuntary behavior patterns in situations where we sense our survival is threatened. This mindset is why the human race still exists.

After a time, I came to a wooden bridge stretching across a shallow stream. The sound of burbling brook felt like a gift after the intense emotions of the past hour. I took off my pack and ate a smashed peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich that tasted like filet mignon.

A couple miles in, I realized it had been a while since I’d passed marker #6. I pulled the trail map from my pocket — and from that point on, it didn’t leave my hand until I saw the sign for Boswell. It provided me a distraction, looking at it a dozen times a minute, tracking my progress with my fingernail, assuring myself that just one more minute and I’d see #5. I also began to wonder why I hadn’t encountered any other backpackers on the trail.

Where was everyone?

Twenty minutes later, I came upon marker #5 and made a hard left to follow the directing arrows. The trail went deeper into the forest, the light dimmed, and the width of the trail narrowed drastically. I hit a section with a steep decline, where the vestiges of previous rain had carved out the earth in the shape of a throat swallowing copious amounts of liquid.

At the sight of #3, a surge of jubilation hit me. It was here I would veer right, off Telegraph and onto the Picket Loop. I estimated being two or so miles from camp. My stomach growled with the thought of the sweet potato curry freeze-dried meal I’d have later…and the idea of sitting by the fire, sipping the Amaretto I’d stashed in a used sports drink bottle.

I marched until I was stopped in my tracks at what can only be described as a tree graveyard.