“The trail always wins.� This, in sum, was his commentary on the three of us eating in an outhouse. But Tony didn’t mean “winning� in the sense of an athletic contest. The corollary wasn’t “The hiker always loses.� Far from it. Looking at Frodo and me in the corner, Tony explained, “I heard an Appalachian Trail guru speak once. He said, ‘We stop expecting the trail to be what we want and we start accepting the trail as it is.’�
