c. 2008 Religion News Service

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. _ On his first night, alone in the dark forest along the Appalachian Trail in Virginia last fall, Luke Ponder found himself dodging around his tent, fending off a hungry black bear with just shouts and the beam of his flashlight.

The next day, the tail end of a hurricane swept through, and Ponder hiked all day in the rain.

On the third day, the trail crossed a highway and Ponder noticed a fresh “Wanted” poster tacked to a tree. An armed murderer was believed to be in the area, perhaps hiding out on the trail.

“It was a real tough mental start,” Ponder said as he leafed through pictures of his monthlong hike. “The whole experience was tougher than I thought it would be.”

On the other hand _ he told himself on mornings when he wondered how he’d shoulder his heavy pack one more time _ he did not have to contend with a youth group that day.

Ponder, 39, the associate pastor in charge of youth activities at First Presbyterian Church of Hunstville, used a six-week sabbatical to escape the demands of programs and people and confront the primal demands of the wilderness.

Many ministers use sabbatical time for study or writing, or for mission work or traveling. Ponder wanted to use his to try to get some perspective on his work and ministry.

“I’d been so busy just doing the work that I needed concentrated time to evaluate my ministry here, whether I should move on,” said Ponder, a former high school science teacher. “What I learned on the trail is that I feel my work is not done here yet.”

As a teenager, Ponder had read Bill Irwin’s classic, “Blind Courage.” Irwin, who is blind, hiked the trail with only his guide dog, Orient, for company. Since then, Ponder had felt the lure of that 2,168-mile trail that traces the backbone of the mountains of the eastern United States.

On solitary camping trips during the last seven years, Ponder learned to ignore spooky nighttime stirrings and tempered his terror of snakes into, he says, a more manageable fright.

His parents, who agreed to back him up by camping at sites along the way in their RV, gave him a ride to Pearisburg, Va., near the portion of the trail that travels along the Shenandoah Valley.

Then he walked into the woods alone.

The first 10 days, he saw no other human being. Though the trail tends to follow ridge lines, because of the dense forest he couldn’t tell if he was on the mountaintop or in the valley. Along with his supplies, he took only a journal to write in and a Bible.

And he carried the bag of questions about his own life and his seven years of ministry. The sabbatical gave him the time and space to consider where he was and where he was going on his life’s path. Each day he arose with the single task of getting on the trail and continuing. And each day the trail gave him a piece of insight on his own life, rather like the sudden vistas that would open to him when he’d round a corner of the trail and find himself on a rock overlooking the valley.

“That was one of the things that spoke to me,” Ponder said. “There were beautiful views, but I couldn’t see them because of the trees all around me. The lesson for me was that a lot of times we are on the mountaintop, and we don’t even know it because there is so much around us.”

The trail itself became a kind of metaphor for the church universal _ a path lovingly maintained by volunteers over generations for the feet of others they’d never know.

But the main lesson Ponder learned on the trail is that a person needs company.

Ponder had come off the trail for a day to visit with his parents, whom he’d meet for supplies every week or so. When he went back on the trail, he felt ready to quit.

A nagging tendinitis in his feet _ a problem that would eventually end his hike a couple of weeks early _ was beginning to flare up. Neither of his two cell phones could pick up a signal for a conversation with his sister or friends. The grandeur of the old-growth forest had become oppressive. The startling brightness of odd mushrooms along the way were a monotonous distraction. Trail markers showed him that his pace wouldn’t have made a turtle pant.

He was getting nowhere.

Then he began to hear a rustling and whining behind him. Something was following him _ coyotes, he figured. He began to do what he’d learned years ago: He talked directly to what he feared.

At the sound of his voice, what tumbled out of the forest was no hungry coyote, but a russet-spotted puppy just old enough to be weaned.

The puppy began following him, despite his trying to shoo it away. He soon figured it had been dumped _ he was a day’s hike in any direction from people. By the first day’s end, the puppy had joined him, sharing his re-hydrated beef stew for supper. By bedtime, when she curled up on his backpack, he had named her “Attie,” for “A.T.,” the hiker’s term for the trail, and he knew he had a hiking buddy.

“After that, it was easy,” Ponder said. “She kind of got me through a painful period. Just the fact that I had her to talk to _ it didn’t feel as crazy as talking to myself.”

The puppy, which hiked with him for the next 70 miles of the trail, became the most enduring lesson he took from his weeks in the woods.

“She made me appreciate how much we need each other _ we need that balance between solitude and community,” he said. “It’s a good metaphor for the church _ we can try to do it alone, but we don’t get very far.”

(Kay Campbell writes for The Huntsville Times in Huntsville, Ala.)

KRE/PH END CAMPBELL950 words

Photos of Luke Ponder and Attie are available via https://religionnews.com.