March Forth: Brittany Comins Hikes Her Way to Healing
Brittany and Brian spent one sweet and loving year of marriage before Brian suffered a heart-attack and left Brittany a widow at age 28. It was an unimaginable loss. Brian had been healthy, active and full of life, the thought of a fatal undiagnosed condition seemed impossible. Last year, Brittany bravely documented her journey through grief to a deeper sense of faith as she did what she and Brian loved to do together — she went hiking. And she really went for it. She quit her job and set out alone on the Appalachian Trail. In a two-part conversation, Brittany shares her experience hiking through the valley of the shadow of death.
Part I
How did you make the decision to hike the Appalachian Trail?
I had wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail for a long time. In fact, right after I got married, I tried to talk my husband into doing it for our honeymoon, but his voice of reason said the bills needed to be paid.
Then, a year after we got married, he passed away. I dove into work, immersing myself in it until I reached a tipping point and realized I needed to take a different approach.
I left for the Appalachian Train on what would have been on Brian’s 40th birthday, March 4th. I thought to myself, this is the perfect way to “march forth” in my own life. So that’s what I did, I started walking north.
Four and a half months, 2000 miles, that’s one incredible adventure that you hiked primarily on your own. How did you do it?
I hiked solo, but people do it different ways. Some people meet up with others and they form what is called a trail family and they might hike together for a long period of time, or maybe the whole trail. For the previous few years, I had been following the direction of others, what others expected me to do, and I needed the freedom to follow what my heart was telling me to do. I met some incredible people and a lot of us hiked at the same speed, so we crossed each other’s paths. We got to know each other really well and we still stay in touch today.
But at the end of the day, I set out every morning with my own agenda.
The common saying on the trail is “Hike your own hike.” Everyone makes fun of it at some point, but it’s so true. We get so focused on pressures that are coming in and what other people’s miles look like, or what other people’s trials and tribulations are. At the end of the day, we were out there to hike our own hike and take the path that was going to work for our journey.
How did it feel being out in the vast, wide open all alone?
In some ways, it’s so much easier than just being out in the world, because everything on the trail is fixable, because it has to be. If something happened to my tent, I had to fix it, or I’d be cold and wet that night, and that’s not really an option. If my food got messed up, I had to fix it. The priorities in my life became elevated. As long as I had food, water and shelter, I was good. My needs were met. Everything else was just the cherry on top.
I thought about that so much after I got off trail. What if I just focus on the bare bones things that I need to survive in this world? Then everything else just seems like more of a blessing. And it also made it a lot less intimidating to be out there solo. When I was walking out there alone, there were a lot of things that could have gone wrong. Everything from physically to emotionally to mentally to… just go down the list. But when I was focusing every day on maintaining my bare necessities and being satisfied as long as I had food, water and shelter, it was a much easier challenge.
Is that something that you come back to regularly? How often do you think about the trail and what you experienced out there?
Every single day.
How does it influence your life now?
I moved from a four bedroom house into a one bedroom apartment. I sometimes still feel like one bedroom is too big. It shifted my focus from being so concentrated on work and putting myself in a good position for the future and all that stuff. When I let the idea of controlling the future go, then I had all this freedom to explore. I had the freedom to do what really brings me joy, which is getting outside. Now I don’t have to spend my weekends mowing the lawn. I can spend them out hiking.
It was a huge life transformation for me to be okay with less. There’s so much satisfaction that comes with that because it’s so easy to get wrapped up in material stuff. I was reading a book about hoarders and it explained that hoarders don’t necessarily just love stuff. It’s that every piece is tied to a memory and that’s how some people’s memories are triggered.
My memories aren’t triggered by material things and I struggled with that after Brian passed away. Sometimes his family wanted to hold onto physical pieces of him, and to me it was about memories and experiences and photographs, rather than his old high school jersey or a shirt he wore. As soon as I started to understand that about myself — that I was okay breaking away from some of those things, letting go of them — it was a much more powerful frame of mind.
That makes me think of Cheryl Strayed in Wild when she’s trying to set out on the trail and she can’t lift her backpack, so she ends up leaving most everything in the hotel room.
Exactly. It’s funny because I relate to that so much. I started and thought I needed so much stuff. I had a bowl for my food, but after carrying my pack for a while I realized, I can eat straight out of the pot. I don’t need all this extra weight! I started breaking it down to the essentials.
My pack started at about 40 pounds, and now I can carry 10 days worth of food at 28 pounds. I learned what I actually needed and what was just a luxury. As soon as I really just pared it down to only what was needed, I could go farther and really get to some cool places. It’s kind of a cool thing to think about in life too– what if you really just strip out all that extra stuff? Where can you go?
I love that. How did your faith impact the hike and how did the hike impact your faith?
I would do the Appalachian Trail a million times over. I would do it every year if I could, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t parts of the experience that were just really hard. It’s hard to describe how much my feet hurt. It took almost a month after getting off trail before I could stand up out of bed, and I would have to hold on to the edge of the bed and try to walk.
There’s a verse in 1 Thessalonians that says we’re called to be grateful in all things and I applied that to the trail, but also in grief I’ve taken that up as a kind of calling, if you will. God never asked us to be grateful for everything that happens. I never have to be grateful for the fact that I lost my husband at 28 years old. I didn’t have to be grateful that my feet hurt every day. God never called us to be grateful for those things. He asked us to be grateful in all circumstances. While I can’t be grateful for the fact that I lost my husband, I can be really grateful for the things that he gave me. As soon as I started turning my attitude towards that of gratitude, the whole world shifted for me.
I found gratitude in the fact that grief gave me boldness. I don’t know that I would have hiked the Appalachian Trail had I not realized that at 36 years old, like Brian, you could have a heart attack when you’re otherwise healthy. Life changes in an instant — middle-age can’t be 36, retirement can’t be when you wait to do the things that you’ve been dreaming of your whole life, because you don’t know if something could happen when you’re 36. Or if at 58, you get rheumatoid arthritis and all of a sudden, all that stuff is taken off the table. Those are things that we have to grasp onto now. And that’s a new reality that I am extremely grateful for.
Was there a specific epiphany moment for you on the trail?
One of the moments that really hit me was in the Great Smoky Mountains, near the beginning of the trail, down in Tennessee. There’s this peak called Charlies Bunion. Brian and I had hiked it years ago, and we had a perfect day for it. We climbed up to the top and got to this little knob and could see the world. We could see the entire world. It’s like sitting on top of it. It’s gorgeous. It’s perfect.
I’d been looking forward to this view for the first 200 miles of trail. And I camped two miles from it so that I could get up right away and see it at sunrise. I planned my mileage for weeks. I set up my tent that night thinking “this is going to be great, I get to see Charlies Bunion. Tomorrow it’s going to be emotional because I miss that Brian wasn’t there to see it, but this is gonna be great.” I woke up and it was a blizzard. I mean, a complete blizzard. I couldn’t see 10 feet in front of me. There were six inches of snow on the ground. I couldn’t see anything.
As they say, I had to keep hiking on, so I packed up everything thinking maybe it would clear up by the time that I got there. I arrived at Charlie’s Bunion and could hardly even see the edge of the cliff. I was emotionally devastated. I asked God, ‘Why can’t you just give me this one thing? This is what I have been looking forward to for so long. Why? Why do you have to make all of this harder?’
I was alone, and the world was quiet. When snow is laying on the ground it insulates all noise. Animals aren’t out and there’s a beautiful silence after a blizzard like that. I hiked out of Charlie’s Bunion and I kept thinking about missing that view. All of a sudden the storm started to clear and the clouds were barely parting, and I could see the outline of the snow covered trees. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. And I thought you know what? Nobody else has this view. Because who in their right mind would go out into the middle of a blizzard?
Then it popped into my head, oh, I get it. This is what God means. I don’t have to be grateful for all of this. But I can find gratitude in the fact that I got that view. I carried that with me the whole trail. Once the snow went away, it started raining and when you can’t go inside to dry off, you’re just constantly soaking wet. I hated that rain, but nobody else got to see how bright the leaves were when it’s raining outside. I wouldn’t have otherwise gotten to see what happened when the rain dries up that next morning. I woke up and saw the edges of the evergreen leaves were bright green because they grew overnight from the rain. That growth, it’s just absolutely amazing. That was one of the big spiritual lessons that I took with me.
One of the other verses that always stuck out to me is Hebrews 12:1, where we’re asked to run the race before us with endurance. A lot of people will put that verse on their mirror or on t-shirts. I have a shirt that I run in and I wore a bracelet that said it too. But then I started picking up on a really key part of that phrase, which is, we’re not just asked to run with endurance, we’re asked to run the race set out before us with endurance, right? We don’t necessarily know what that path is gonna be. We’re just asked to keep running through it. It was a really important moment for me to see we don’t necessarily determine the path. God determines that path. He gives us the tools to make sure we can get through it.
And in Northern Virginia, when I was getting really tired and was 1000 miles into the trail, it was a great reminder that endurance is not for no sake. There’s a purpose to this. There’s a northern end that we’re going to and we can apply that to our faith journey. Mount Katahdin is that sense of eternal life. God put us on the path that heads north, heads towards that eternal place. We don’t get to determine what that path looks like. We’re just called to be on it and push through it and bring as many people as we can along on that journey.
Part II
I learned that a forester started the Appalachian Trail and he hadn’t conceived that it would be for recreational hiking, it was meant to be a connector trail for cities to farms. He came up with the plan while grieving the death of his wife.
I didn’t know that. There are so many people on the trail grieving in a lot of different ways. There are certainly people out there who are grieving because they lost spouses. I hiked with a woman who had just lost her husband. We all get trail names out there and her trail name was Dash. She had this story — your headstone marks your birth date and your death date, and you really live in the dash, that’s how she got her name. I hiked with another man who had lost his wife just six weeks before leaving for the Appalachian Trail. This was really a healing time and we were all at different stages in our grief and we could talk about it. Sometimes it’s hard to find people who can connect on something like that, particularly at our age. People don’t lose their spouses in their 20s and they aren’t still dealing with it in their 30s.
All of a sudden, I was in an environment where a lot of people were carrying grief. Some people lost children. Some people were grieving their careers. They had just entered retirement, and were in a whole new life, their children left home and they were grieving the fact that they don’t have young kids at home anymore. We often apply grief to death. But grief happens to all of us in a lot of different ways. A lot of people on the trail were veterans and some of them were grieving for their friends, but a lot of them were grieving the fact that they lost the lifestyle, the sense of community they had in the military.
I met people and went deep with them into these topics right away. It wasn’t something that people skirted around. It was so refreshing, because people said, ‘Listen, my life is messed up. This is why I’m out here.’ That’s how we were introduced and I realized a lot of people’s lives were messed up, it wasn’t only mine.
What a beautiful, elemental way to work through the grieving process.
It was really refreshing. I think people find solace in nature because of the utility of it. Sometimes a stream didn’t have a very strong current and so I needed to create my own spout to fill the water bottle. We would take rhododendron leaves, which are long and pretty sturdy. We would create a spout with leaves, because that’s what we had access to. That was easiest for us to grab, to take all the chaos that’s happening in the water and bring it down into one place.
When chaos happens in our lives, what’s on that lowest shelf, what do we make easiest for us to grab? That was another realization I had out there. We don’t have control over what chaos comes into our lives. But when we’re falling down, we do have control over what we have pre-decided to put on our lowest shelf. I’ve thought a lot about that since coming off trail, what am I putting on that lower shelf?
There might be multiple things on that shelf, but if faith isn’t part of it, it’s easy to skip over when bad things happen. I was fortunate that when my husband died, I had a very strong Christian community around me. My pastor was at my house every single day for months, making sure that faith was on that lower shelf so that as I was struggling I could always grab onto my faith.
There were a lot of questions that came up all of a sudden again. I had grown up Christian. I had always believed, but it hadn’t been real. It had been this beautiful story of how Jesus died and rose for us. Then all of a sudden, I was faced with the very real tangible question — do I believe that my husband who I loved very, very much is truly in heaven and what does that look like and what do I think that is? Because I wanted to know where he was. We all want to know where our loved ones are, whether they’re here or not. All of a sudden I was faced with the question of how much should I really believe all this stuff? Do I believe enough where I can sleep at night knowing that he is in heaven? And that was a real question for me and something that I had to face head on.
Once again, being grateful in all circumstances, I’m very grateful that I had that community around me that made sure that faith, as I was grasping for those answers, was on that lowest shelf. I tried to make sure that when I came back, I set up my life in a way where faith was there. I got an apartment that was closer to my church so there were no excuses on Sunday morning about sleeping in, even small changes like that. I’m keeping my Bible out, rather than putting it away every day. It’s a reminder, it’s sitting on my coffee table.
It’s striking how on the trail and throughout incredible loss, you’re getting up and walking every day. You didn’t stay frozen in the blizzard, you walked through it. Your story makes me think of Micah 6:8 ‘What does the Lord require of you, to act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’ Your willingness to walk the path is inspiring especially right now when the world feels very uncertain. What would you say to someone who is struggling with grief and uncertainty?
There’s a saying on the trail: ‘the trail is going to provide’ and it happens so much, I saw it in very tangible ways. My fourth night on trail it was seven degrees, and I was sleeping outside right on the ground. I can’t describe how cold it was. I was thinking ‘I hope I make it through tonight.’ The cold dries out the skin, my lips were so chapped they were bleeding. I got to a road crossing and a random man pulled over. He asked me if I’m hiking the trail and if I need food or anything. Then he gave me his brand new stick of chapstick. We call it ‘trail magic,’ the trail provides. It would happen like that all the time. People would say, ‘I’m so thirsty,” and turn a corner and some ‘trail angel’ had left out gallon bottles of water. How did that happen? But God does that exact same thing.
When we come to Him, when we ask Him for help, perhaps He knew before we were even going to ask and He had already sown those seeds to deliver us comfort or provide for us in our time of need. To give us that chapstick. God provides, just as so many of those times the trail provided what we needed. It comes down to the question — what do we actually need in life? Jesus talks about it a lot, about us focusing on the wrong things. If we really just focused on what we need in our lives, which at the foundation is faith, but let’s not kid ourselves, we all need food, water, shelter, too, right? God has promised to provide for us. So even in the times of trial, when we don’t really know how it’s going to move from one day to the next, that’s when that faith comes out.
So many times when hard times come we shell up. We don’t want people to know we’re struggling and we put up walls, we put up guards. That cuts off some of the tools that God made to deliver comfort and help to us. I think the more that we can be open, the more that we can put out that we’re struggling and try not to hide from it so much, accept when people talk and share their own struggles, the more we can reach out and be the messengers that we’re supposed to be.
God is such a relational being. He built relationships quite fundamentally. And yet we shut them down all the time, as humans. God was the one who founded our relationships, and our interactions with Him are based on a relationship. He created direct communication through prayer as the fundamental way that we can communicate with Him. And then the first thing that we often do when we’re going through a hard time, this is me speaking for me, is to cut off that line of communication, whether it’s to God or to other people. I cut that off. I shell up. I’m a tough lady right? I can do this, we’re gonna get through it. I’m going to find my own way. But God just sent three ships full of supplies and you turned them all down because you wanted to be strong enough to do it on your own?
We have to lean on the belief that God foresaw this. There are so many indications of that in the Bible where God says, ‘Hey, listen, I gave you all these hints. I set up all of these ways that I could speak to you. Why are you so surprised when I speak to you?’ I think about that a lot when I’m going through hard times. God knew every hair on our head before we were even born and He has put tools in our lives to give us comfort, to help heal us.
This interview originally appeared in Root & Vine.
