Madison writer Cary Segall tells other people’s stories in his Appalachian Trail memoir – Isthmus

There are plenty of Appalachian Trail memoirs. Some have achieved the status of legend (Grandma Gatewood’s Walk). Some have been made into movies starring Robert Redford (Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods). 

I got hooked on the genre when I read Walking Home: A Woman’s Pilgrimage on the Appalachian Trail by Kelly Winter, a former Madisonian who’d hiked the trail (and had the misfortune of publishing her book on Sept. 11, 2001). At the time, I interviewed Winter for a piece in Isthmus.

And here I am, 23 years later, interviewing another Madisonian about another book about an Appalachian Trail through-hike.

Madison writer Cary Segall’s Appalachian Trail narrative, A Talk in the Woods: Voices Along the Appalachian Trail ( Back Burner Books) cleverly plays off the title of Bryson’s book, possibly the best known these days of the AT sagas. 

Segall’s take is a bit different from most trail memoirs, which usually focus on personal transformation along the route, as well as the amount of physical endurance that’s required to hike the 2,190-mile trail that goes from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine.

Segall, a former Wisconsin State Journal reporter, and outdoor sport enthusiast, didn’t start his through-hike with the idea that he would write a book about it. “That’s because there had been many memoirs written about Appalachian Trail hikes, many of which I’d read, and I didn’t think I’d have much to add,” Segall writes in the introduction. But as he began hiking, his reporter’s instincts kicked in, and his encounters with the many other people he met along the trail sparked his curiosity: “But I’m a reporter at heart, and after discovering in just a few days that there are a lot of great stories on the AT, I wanted to write them.”

A Talk in the Woods is primarily about other people, though there is plenty of info about the nuts and bolts of Segall’s hike, too, though he calls that info just “a little about me and my hike to tie the stories together.”

The result is a book that keeps moving along, because there is always a new story to discover. In that way, it can feel very much like you’re hiking on the trail with him — without the inconvenience of blisters, of course.

Before he started hiking the AT, he says in a phone interview, “I read lots of [trail memoirs], because I wanted to read what other people’s experiences were.” As far as he knows, no one else “has ever hiked the trail and talked to people and integrated the people’s stories into a book.”

It’s not generally info you’d find out about your fellow hikers just by hiking with them, Segall says. Around the campfire at trail shelters at night, “People talk about what they did that day, but they generally don’t talk about their pasts. Maybe if you get to know someone really well,” they might, but “people don’t ask the questions that a reporter would ask,” says Segall. “People don’t generally talk in detail about their lives.”

He took a “zero day” about 60 miles after starting, and found a public library to write up some of his notes, sending it out to an email list of friends and colleagues. 

His fellow hikers were remarkably forthright with him about their motivations, challenges and goals, especially a Black woman hiker and doctor who told him about her experiences being one of the few people of color on the AT.

A key figure in the book is a young mother (“Mama Bear”) and her twins, age 3 when they started hiking the trail. Mama Bear turns out to be sort of a bellwether on the trail and in the book, as it seems everyone has heard of her and everyone has an opinion.

Segall didn’t grow up hiking, but got into canoeing and backpacking through the Hoofers at UW- Madison. That included a trip to the AT in North Carolina for a week, where he first thought he might want to do the whole trail someday. He did do section hikes over the years, but “never had the time to plan a through-hike. I always thought I’d do it, but I didn’t get around to it until I was 64.”

In the end, between timing, bad weather, illness and some knee trouble, it took him four years to hike the whole trail. He finally finished in 2018.

He didn’t try to count how many people he talked to, a few hundred, he estimates, at least briefly. 

Did people want to know his own trail story? “Mainly I was asking the questions,” says Segall. “The most common question I got asked was what was my trail name.”

It took three years before someone gave him a trail name — Scoop. “But most of the time my name was just Cary.”

Segall will read from and talk about the book with Wisconsin State Journal reporter Samara Kalk Derby at Lakeview branch public library on Sept. 20 at 6:30 p.m.