Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 1, 1990 TAG: 9007010049
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
And now he's seeing 2,110 of the most scenic miles in America, the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine.
Bill Irwin, however, is blind - at least as defined by those with sight - and halfway toward becoming the first blind person to hike solo the entire trail.
Although the 49-year-old North Carolina resident is accompanied by his seeing-eye dog, Orient, and occasionally has friends join him for parts of the hike, his is mostly a solitary journey.
It also is a carefully plotted one. Irwin listens every day to tapes of friends reading from a trail guide book, memorizing the details of the upcoming day's walk. He feels trees and posts for the indented, painted blazes that mark the winding path. He goes to sleep every night, in trail shelters or his own tent, with his head pointed in the direction he'll take the next morning.
"It's very rigorous physically to go up and down mountains every day," the sandy-haired and muscular Irwin says, with characteristic understatement. "But it's fun. I don't even want to think about it ending."
There have been times, though, when he has thought about turning back. During the first days on the trail, he tripped more than 50 times a day as he and Orient negotiated the unfamiliar terrain. He has been through freezing rains and slippery rocks, bouts of hypothermia and poison ivy, and about 10 miles of getting lost. He has done it all with a 60-pound pack - plus the 17-pound one on Orient, which he once had to carry as well when it impeded the dog's gait.
"There've been moments when I would have to say, `God, I know you won't put more on me than I can stand, but we're getting real close,' " he says, with a good-natured smile.
Usually, there's help to be had from fellow hikers, who remain in touch with each other via the grapevine and registers at various shelters.
"This really is a mobile community," he says of this fellowship of feet, the estimated 1,000-plus "thru-hikers" who have registered to walk the full length of the trail this summer. "It's a representative cross-section of America."
About one-tenth of those who start are expected to actually finish, and Irwin expects to be among them, hoping to reach Maine by October after seven months on foot. His confidence, though, is not in his own powers but in God.
Irwin, a chemist turned counselor, is walking the trail to bear witness for the faith he discovered 2 1/2 years ago. A born-again Christian, he believes he was called to bring the word of God to fellow trekkers.
And in a way, his faith seems entirely at home in the cathedral of green that is his church for the summer. In the stretch he hiked last week, from just past Harpers Ferry, W.Va., into Maryland, leafy trees soar from each side of the trail and meet overhead in a pointed arch. Sunlight streams through the leaves, freckling by the time it reaches the ground as if through stained glass.
You silently wish the blind hiker could see this. But you shouldn't.
"I just perceive it differently than sighted people do," he explains in his quiet, Southern-accented voice. "I ask people what they see, then I know what I see, so I get a double shot.
"No one asks me what I see, though. I see the beautiful smells and hear the birds sing and feel the breeze."
"I try to camp by streams when I can," he adds as he cocks an ear to the sound of water rushing over rocks, a frequent companion on this part of the trail as it crosses the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers.
It's an idyllic stretch: wide, shaded and the most level two miles of the entire trail.
"This is like a stroll in the park," Irwin says delightedly. "But of course I had to walk 1,000 miles to get this treat."
It's also a last bit of respite before a 1,232-foot rise into South Mountain of western Maryland. But even that daunting uphill is nothing compared to the craggy terrain at either end - the Smoky Mountains in the south that he's already scaled and Mount Washington in New Hampshire that lie ahead.
He crossed into Pennsylvania Thursday morning, and expected to hit the halfway point of Pine Grove, Pa., on Saturday. That would put him in the Cumberland Valley today and Boiling Springs, Pa., on Monday.
Irwin and 3-year-old Orient trained for the trip by walking 20 miles a day in Burlington, N.C., and taking a college course on how to survive the trail. Now on his third pair of hiking boots, Irwin averages about 15 miles a day, and takes two days off every 12. He started the trail March 9, several weeks before most thru-hikers.
"I was the fourth person to leave Georgia, and my goal is to be the last person to get to Maine," he says. "That way, I get to meet everybody."
As much as he's enjoying the trail, he does miss what he has left behind: his friends, but they write or visit, and his flower garden, but this trail does have mountain laurel and wild azaleas instead. That leaves only one thing for which he can accept no substitutes.
"The thing I miss the most is my hot tub," Irwin says with a laugh. "I dream about it at night when my toes ache, my feet ache, my back aches."
by CNB