The journey of a lifetime -- Racinian returns from hiking the 2,174-mile Appalachian Trail

By Janine Anderson

Sunday, October 22, 2006 2:10 AM CDT

When he got off the train Thursday in Sturtevant, Torin Kexel's father offered him a ride home. He offered to take the pack his son carried on the hike of more than 2,000 miles that he finished Sunday.

But Torin declined. Instead, he left his family at the station and walked the six miles back to his home in Racine, still carrying his pack. He got funny looks from drivers. No one asked if he needed assistance.

"What I thought about more than anything was my family," Kexel said. "My parents, wanting to be with them. For me, it was kind of important to link the walk with walking back here."

After more than six months on the Appalachian Trail, it took Kexel 2 hours to get home from the train station. The journey started in Georgia and the portion on the trail ended in Maine.

During those hours while hiking home, traversing roads he used to run during cross country practice, he noticed the differences between life on the trail and life at home.

"We need to live gently on the earth," he said. "It's such a stark contrast, my hike with the walk from the station to here (home). There I was surrounded by woods. From Sturtevant to here I was surrounded by cars and stores and advertisements. It's so obvious when you've been in the woods for six months."

Kexel came off the trail with a great sense of gratitude for everyone who helped along the way: From parents and siblings to other hikers and "trail angels" who looked out for them when they needed it most.

"You really get to see how important everybody is," he said. "You can't do it without their support. When I was getting close to the sign - you can see it from a few hundred feet away - this little triangle on top of the mountain, I started sobbing. I had this feeling of having all these people with me."

The person who helped Torin most was with him, though: His fiancee, Alice Gruhn. Before the two decided to tackle the trail, they had gone on shorter backpacking trips, but nothing nearly as strenuous as the 2,175-mile journey through the Eastern mountain ranges.

Gruhn did much of the research that allowed them to successfully complete the trail, Kexel said. They managed to whittle their total pack weight down to about 50 pounds, less for two people than some hikers carry for themselves. They spent months preparing enough dehydrated food to carry them for 6 ½ months. They ended up with enough food to share with other hikers, becoming favorites for other hikers to follow, Kexel said, because their homemade meals tasted so good. Being able to share their excess food with other hikers was one of the simplest ways they repaid the kindness others showed them.

"It's noteworthy the kindness people show you along the way," Kexel said. "You hear about it, but it still takes you aback when so many people go so far out of the way to help you.

"They say, `This is what I owe. People did it for me.' " Complete strangers let them into their homes, swim in their pools, do their laundry, gave them dinner. They ignored the hiker stink and gave them a bit of rest from the trail. Each of those "trail angels" helped them get to the end together.

"It helped me to be out there, to live with just your necessities and to do it in such a beautiful, natural setting," he said. "The combination lends itself to insight and soul-searching. Even though we were there as a couple, and walked within 20 steps of each other, there is solitude. You talk the first hour of the day and you're silent for the next 10 hours.

"Everything in you, your anxieties and neuroses, your dreams and goals comes out in your mind."

On the trail, surrounded by trees and grass, there was a sense of fitting into nature instead of pushing it aside, he said. There were achingly beautiful views, terrifying lightning storms and the fear of encountering something dangerous.

"There were nights I stayed up all night thinking bears were outside the tent," he said. "I was holding my breath, listening to every crackle. A beetle on your tent sounds like a dinosaur. Then you see a bear and it runs away like a rabbit. You go out and learn to do it yourself, despite your fears and other people's fears."

Before Kexel and Gruhn left, his parents tacked a map of the trail up on a door in the house, using a pushpin to measure the hikers' progress. Postcards from the trail arrived and joined the map on the door. When Kexel got home, he saw the map, the trail marked out in red, the line he and Gruhn walked together, the line he walked to get back home.

"The map looked so much larger to me before," he said. "You go a half-inch at a time. In six weeks you only get this far on the map," he said, holding his thumb and index finger about 2 inches apart. "How will we ever be on the last section?

"It's amazing what you can accomplish when you do it little by little."

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