ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, September 26, 1996 TAG: 9609260012
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO BETH MACY
You're a 35-year-old engineer. You have a stressful job as a manager of a 40-member department.
You have a wife and two kids. Your extended families live far away on the East Coast, and you miss them.
You live near Minneapolis, where it is so cold people carry their car batteries inside at night.
Also, the terrain is flat as a snake's butt in a wagon rut.
The absence of mountains weighs on you. A constant reminder of your lifelong dream to hike the Appalachian Trail, this flatness tugs on your psyche, as if to whisper: You are not at home.
Go.
Take your hike.
Jim Merritt heard the whispers for three years. A veteran outdoorsman, he had hiked every mountain peak in Colorado over 14,000 feet - all 54 of them. While in college, he bicycled coast to coast. He was once a member of the volunteer Rocky Mountain Rescue group, which assists lost or injured climbers.
As his wife, Susan, puts it: ``He'd turned from a mountain man into an executive, and it wasn't the lifestyle he really wanted. What he really wanted to do, what he's always wanted to do, is to hike the Appalachian Trail.''
But four-month, 2,100-mile hikes are hard to take when you have family responsibilities, a house and a high-paying job. ``The hardest part was just quitting, making the break,'' Jim recalls. ``You go from stability and a good job and pay and a house and friends and family, to actually giving that up for the time being to pursue a dream.''
Last winter, they put their house up for sale. While Jim headed for Springer Mountain, Ga., to begin the trail in the spring, Susan packed up the kids and moved in with her parents in Clarksville, near the Virginia-North Carolina border.
They figured they'd hold off on the job search until the hike was finished. But meeting up with her husband near Troutville, Susan eyed a classified ad for an engineer with Roanoke-based Innotech Inc., a company that manufactures eyeglass machinery and materials.
It offered the kind of high-tech work Jim wanted. There was just one problem: He still had half the trail to hike.
Also: Hiking gear does not make for suitable interview attire.
Susan wrote the resume and cover letter, faking her husband's signature. When the company called for an interview, she picked him up at a trail-road juncture near the border of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and ferried him back to Roanoke.
``She had to bring a suit, and I had to get hosed off and shaved up,'' he recalls.
``So one day I was hiking the trail, the next day I was being interviewed, and the next day I was back on the trail.''
Not your typical job-search routine.
But Innotech's Bill Kokonaski, the engineering director who interviewed him, maintained an open mind. ``I think it's always impressive when someone has personal goals and they achieve them,'' he says. ``That carries over on the professional front, too.''
Kokonaski remembers extending the job offer - via mail - to Jim's sister-in-law's home in New Jersey. He remembers the risk the company took, knowing they needed to wait for Jim to finish the trail to start work. ``We didn't want it to always be in the back of his mind if the trip were cut short,'' he says.
Jim reached the summit of Mount Katahdin 10 days ago, returned to his mother-in-law's home in Clarksville, then prepared to move his family to Roanoke. Realtor Jay Metcalfe spent last weekend showing the Merritts houses in Roanoke and Botetourt counties - those with a full mountain view, of course. On Monday, Jim started his new job.
He's thrilled that he'll be driving-distance from his favorite spots on the trail: Dragon's Tooth, McAfee Knob, Tinker Cliffs and - his supreme favorite - The Homeplace Restaurant in Catawba. Well-known to be the best food on the trail, he says, ``Just think, I'll be able to go there any time I want!''
With the harsh winters behind him and an ever-present view of the Blue Ridge ahead, Jim Merritt has hiked through his so-called midlife crisis - and landed himself right in the middle of the mountains he'd dreamed of for so long.
Asked what his wife gets to do to fulfill her dreams, he said, ``I don't know, but I'm sure I'll find out - probably while we're house-hunting with Jay will be my first clue.''
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: The Merritt family - Susan and Jim with daughters Amandaby CNB(left) and Alexa - at the Appalachian Trail's Virginia 311 crossing
on the crest of Catawba Mountain in Roanoke County. color.2