I had just showered for the first time in three days and 50 miles. That’s a lot of miles, but only a fraction of the roughly 2,200 that make up the Appalachian Trail, which I was attempting to hike in its entirety.
My hair damp, I was sprawled on one of two couches in a Pennsylvania church basement that had been converted to a hostel, complaining to my hiking companion about the brutal July heat.
A blond guy on the other couch looked at me as if he knew me and said, “Where are you from?”
That’s how it started — he recognized my Appalachian accent. It turned out we had grown up less than 30 miles apart in rural Virginia.
Thru-hikers rarely identify by their real names, choosing to adopt trail names. His was Tuna, a nod to his goal to catch a trout in every state along the trail (trout is colloquially called “mountain tuna”). Mine was Holy Roller, a reference to my evangelical upbringing and a comical downhill fall I’d taken earlier on the trail.
When people asked where I was from, I never gave the name of my hometown, certain they had never heard of it. It was the kind of place that only made headlines about opioid overdose statistics and coal mine shutdowns. My father worked in a rock quarry. My mother was a kindergarten teacher.
And I, anticipating a life of motherhood and Christianity, was engaged at 16. I had planned to marry after I turned 18, but my engagement ended shortly before our wedding day when my fiancé was arrested and charged with possessing child pornography.
When that dream evaporated, I needed a new dream, so I decided to go to college, something my fiancé had discouraged. Partly out of spite for his low opinion of me, I applied to Harvard and was somehow accepted. Off I went, but the culture shock was extreme. I struggled but graduated, unsure of what was next.
There was so much about Tuna that I liked other than the comfort of having grown up practically next door to each other. His chipped front tooth. The red in his beard. The fact that he played the banjo, carried a miniature fly rod in his backpack, and was a recovering alcoholic who was hiking the trail to celebrate one year sober. He was distinctly Appalachian, yet also an outsider, different from most people we had grown up around.
As we talked, a thought bloomed: “This is my future.” Followed by another thought: “Oh no.”
Because the hiker I had originally been talking to on the couch when I met Tuna was a guy I’d been with for months. We met the first day of our thru-hikes and had shared water bottles, pots of ramen and occasionally hotel rooms.
Three and a half months is not a long time to be with someone — unless you spend every waking moment hiking with them. By the time we arrived at the Pennsylvania hostel, we had walked 1,300 miles across seven states, through snow, hail and blistering summer sun. We had seen each other fall, puke, bleed and cry.
So I felt loyal to him. And there was plenty I liked about him, too. His wanderlust (he had lived on four continents), hobbies (skiing and scuba diving), accent (British) and helpful nature, which had earned him the nickname “Lookout” because, as another hiker observed, he was always looking out for others.
But the electric mix of coincidence and chemistry between me and Tuna made me breathless. The feeling was catastrophic. I had never been so struck by anyone.
“Come hike with me?” he said.
I hesitated. After everything Lookout and I had been through together, how could I leave him for someone I’d just met?
Months earlier, I had prepared for my thru-hike by planning for every imaginable contingency. Tick bites. Bear encounters. Ice storms. Can you guess what didn’t make the list? Love triangles. I hadn’t factored romance into my adventure because I had planned to hike alone. I had hit the trail at a crossroads of grief and uncertainty a few months after my father’s sudden death of a heart attack at 53, and mere weeks after dropping out of a graduate program. I was 25 and aimless. I figured that 2,200 miles of solitude would give me the healing and self-reflection I needed to figure out my life.
Instead, I had spent almost every mile with someone’s (gorgeously accented) voice in my ear. And now I was falling in love with someone else.
The kindest thing I could have done was to be honest about my feelings. Instead, I waffled. I hiked on with Lookout but invited Tuna to join us. I knew there was no scenario in which this would end well. But I didn’t want to choose.
One morning Tuna and I found ourselves falling behind Lookout, so we carried on together, just the two of us. For 18 miles I was keenly aware of our proximity. We were so wrapped up in each other that we stumbled within 20 yards of a foraging black bear. Tuna went around in a wide, careful arc; I followed. It was erotic to step on the same pieces of earth where his feet had just fallen.
Later that night, Lookout came to my tent. “I can tell he likes you,” he said. I could sense what he didn’t say: I can tell you like him, too.
Feeling guilty, I told Tuna I couldn’t be around him anymore. I hiked on with Lookout but agonized about it, struggling to picture us together beyond the trail. We were different in all the ways Tuna and I were the same.
Tension sizzled every time we three crossed paths in the woods. Lookout and Tuna would barely acknowledge each other. Lookout would study me to see if anything about the way I was glancing at Tuna indicated lingering interest. Tuna would give me a wounded look that said, I’m still here, you know.
And I would shrink in shame, bewildered that what was supposed to be a journey of therapeutic self-discovery had turned into this. A soap opera lived out of backpacks.
Every time I saw Tuna fishing a creek or playing banjo on a hostel porch, I grew a little more lovesick. But then I would ford a river or traverse a boulder field with Lookout, and we’d emerge on the other side laughing. When I ran into Tuna resting beside the trail, we would exchange smiles that made me weak.
Eventually Lookout and I made it to the worn wooden sign in Maine marking the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail. I invited him to come with me to Virginia for a few days before flying back to London.
Back home, I emptied my backpack and left my trail journals on my bedroom dresser. The night before his flight, Lookout told me he had read them.
He didn’t seem angry or even surprised. My journals contained the truth of how strongly I felt about Tuna. They also contained the truth of my feelings of loyalty and kinship for Lookout. But I understood then that he deserved more than half my heart, and he understood that he would never have it. Our relationship ended there, before Lookout even got on his plane.
How had I been brave enough to sleep alone in the woods, climb boulders and tiptoe around bears, but not brave enough to be honest with myself and others?
After Lookout was on the other side of the Atlantic, I wrote him a novel of an apology. I also apologized to Tuna, whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in weeks, for all those flirtations that had gone nowhere.
Tuna, to my surprise, replied: Let’s talk.
I nervously drove across the two mountains that separated our houses. After knowing Tuna only in the woods, it was strange to see him showered and wearing jeans. We sat at his patio table; he was rightfully cool.
“I figured you’d be in London right now,” he said.
“I made a mistake,” I said.
Tuna thawed a little. Unlike me, he couldn’t hide his feelings. For all our similarities, this was not one of them — until, suddenly, it was. I started gushing everything I had held in for months. How deeply I had cared for Lookout but how much I had wanted Tuna from the moment we met.
As I was leaving, he softened and asked if I wanted to meet up that weekend. I said yes, and yes to the next weekend, and the next.
A year later, when he asked me to marry him, I said yes again. At our wedding, we wore our old hiking shoes, which were falling to pieces, caked with dirt from our past, and walked into our future.
Emilee Hackney’s first book, “All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir,” publishes July 28.
Modern Love can be reached at [email protected].
To find previous Modern Love essays, Tiny Love Stories and podcast episodes, visit our archive.
Want more Modern Love? Watch the TV series, sign up for the newsletter and listen to the podcast on iTunes or Spotify. We also have two books, “Modern Love: True Stories of Love, Loss, and Redemption” and “Tiny Love Stories: True Tales of Love in 100 Words or Less.”
The post I Hadn’t Planned on a Love Triangle appeared first on New York Times.
