Thanksgiving 2021

As I’m sure many of my readers also were, I was captivated by the story in the paper last week about Dr. M. J. Eberhart, age 83, the retired eye doctor from Alabama also known as Nimblewill Nomad who hiked both into Dalton, Massachusetts, and into the record books last week by becoming the oldest person known to have hiked the entire Appalachian Trail. It’s not a trifling accomplishment; the trail is about 2,200 miles long, stretching out between Mount Katahdin in Maine and Springer Mountain in Georgia. It’s a long walk. If you read Bill Bryson’s terrific account of his effort to hike the trail, A Walk in the Woods, published by Broadway Books back in 1998, you’ll understand something of Dr. Eberhart’s accomplishment. (The movie version starring Robert Redford as Bryson was good enough, but I found the book far more entertaining and way funnier.) The reason he ended up in Massachusetts rather than Maine or Georgia is because he walked the trail in stages and ended up at one point traveling north in a car to Maine and then walking south from Ketahdin to the precise spot at which he could legitimately say that he had completed the whole thing. That, of course, hardly diminishes his accomplishment. To say the least, I am impressed.

His story is interesting in its own right and his accomplishment, impressive and laudable. But the reason I thought of writing about Dr. Eberhart in my pre-Thanksgiving letter this year is because of an off-hand comment I heard on the radio a few days ago that struck me as worth pondering as we approach our best American holiday. The host was discussing the story of the doctor’s accomplishment and wondering aloud what could possibly have prompted a man his age to undertake that kind of test of his own stamina. The host, who was maybe a third Nimblewill’s age (if not younger), suggested that the reason must have had to do with the need we sometimes feel to demonstrate to the world something we know about ourselves but have no way of proving other than by doing it out loud and in public “He must have known he could do it,” the nice young man opined, “and that’s why he did it—to show to the world something he already knew.”

I don’t know the man. I have no idea why he took this on or what he hoped ultimately to accomplish. But I’d like to think the real story is the precise opposite of what the young radio guy thought: that the man didn’t undertake the hike to show the world something he already knew about himself, but to discover something about himself that he himself didn’t know. In other words, I’d like to think that this was not about a senior citizen showing the world how healthy and remarkably fit he was so everybody could then shower him with praise, but rather about a man finding the courage to test himself, to put his hand to the fire, to learn something about himself that could only be found out conclusively through the doing of the deed under consideration. In other words, what impresses me about Dr. Eberhart’s is the degree to which it is interpretable as an expression of one of the best parts of our American ethos and, as such, something more than worthy to contemplate as Thanksgiving approaches.

As I understand it, this willingness to grow, to test ourselves, to see if we can successfully summon up the inner strength necessary to reach for something that lies just beyond our grasp—this refusal ever to accept that we have already done all we can in life and have no specific reason to try to do even more is the most American of all virtues.

The story of Thanksgiving is usually reduced to the great feast of 1621 at which the fifty-odd surviving Mayflower passengers joined together with about ninety Wampanoag under the leadership of famed King Massasoit to share in a late-autumn meal. (There had been one hundred one board when the Mayflower landed a year earlier, but about half died in the course of their first year in North America.) That feast—described by William Bradford in his Of Plymouth Plantation and by Edward Winslow in his Mourt’s Relation—has its own complicated background and legacy: to read it as a celebration of the degree to which tolerance and mutual respect were the foundation stones upon which the Europeans who eventually came to occupy all of North American built their new country rings especially hollow in the wake of the truth about the horrific deaths of more than a hundred native American children in a federally-operated boarding school in Nebraska between 1884 and 1934 coming to light. (For more details, click here. To set this in context by comparing the fate of these poor children to the more than four thousand Indian children who died in the residential school system in Canada under the joint auspices of the Catholic Church and the Canadian government, click here. To add Australia and the more than 100,000 aborigine children forcibly removed from their families and mostly never heard from again to the story, click here.)

But to abandon Thanksgiving because of the horrific fate of the native people who possibly thought the future would bring peaceful co-existence when they sat down to their meal of venison and wild turkey is at least a little to miss the point. That part of our nation’s past, so long ignored by adults and left untaught to our children in school, needs to be brought to the fore if the kind of national contemplative consideration that could possibly lead to atonement and reconciliation is ever to take place. But the notion of a nation coming into being to see if the lofty republican ideals the Founders embraced could actually serve as the foundation upon which a democratic nation could come to exist—something that had occasionally been attempted, but never actually accomplished  before their time—that notion is what animates Thanksgiving for me.

Dr. Eberhart could not possibly have known if he could complete the Appalachian Trail when he set out. I suppose he thought he might be able to, but he can’t have known for sure. How could he have? But what he did surely know was that the only one way to find out was actually to go into the woods and start walking. And so was it with our nation at its inception: none could have known if the lofty ideals our Founders learned and embraced could actually be brought to bear in the formation of a modern nation-state. I suppose they must surely have hoped that would be the case. But they can’t have known it with any certainty until they set forth, one step forward at a time, towards independence.

When Thoreau withdrew to Walden Pond in 1845, he had the same notion in mind: to see if he could do something he had no idea whether he could accomplish:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms....

I don’t know if high school students still read Walden these days, but they should. The spirit that brought the Pilgrims to Plymouth and Thoreau to Walden is the same spirit that brought Dr. Eberhart to the Appalachian Trail. I like to think that I can add my name to that list, at least a little: I didn’t know if I could spend a lifetime preaching and teaching without succumbing to despair or uncertainty about my vocation until I set to it and found out. That notion of not knowing if you can do something and then plunging forward into life precisely to find out—that is the idea that strikes me as the most quintessentially American of virtues. Nimblewill Nomad is just our latest, and very impressive, example! And with that thought in mind, I wish you all a very happy and self-challenging Thanksgiving.