More than eight years ago, Michael Neiman embarked on an excursion 15 years in the making – hiking the Appalachian Trail. Now, he’s recently published Hello My Name is Sharkbait: A 2,000-Mile Adventure on the Appalachian Trail, his new book detailing the experience in the spring and summer of 2018.
Fortunately for Neiman, a Minnesota native who now lives in Connecticut, he didn’t have to dig too deep into his memory for the details; he had to revisit the blog that he used as a trip journal.
“When I got on the trail, it was a daily journal,” Neiman said. “I wanted to share it with family who weren’t there with me, and I knew in the back of my mind that I was probably going to want to write a book about this experience. I’d read a bunch of other ones, and there’s no way I was going to remember it all.”
Neiman had been planning the hike since 2002, something he said he didn’t want to divulge when he spoke with TC Jewfolk before he started the hike.
“I probably downplayed it in real time because that makes me sound like a crazy person,” he said. “And if, like, after a week, I decided I didn’t like it and came home with my tail tucked between my legs. I didn’t want to overplay it at first. But the reality is, I really have been spending most of my adult life around thinking, planning, and building towards it. It was almost like every year I thought I was going to do it, and then a reason came not to do it. And so it just built up until we got to that moment.”
For all of the years of planning that Neiman put into the trip, he learned quickly that nothing goes to plan.
“You’ll see I had built out whole daily agendas, like every place I was going to stop along the way,” he said. There were a few reasons for this, in no small part because he wanted to know everything he was going to do along the route. But also, there were family considerations: His father was joining him on a pre-determined place on the trail to hike a section, he had to meet his wife at a wedding, and he had to be back in Los Angeles because he and his wife were moving to the East Coast.
“The very first day, it all got thrown out the window because I’m sitting at LAX airport, and I was supposed to have a flight early in the morning that would drop me out there early afternoon,” he said. “I’d be able to get to the trail. I’d be able to have dinner with people; all these things I had planned. And my flight was delayed eight hours.”
Neiman’s pacing on the trail also got quickly thrown off.
“One of the things I really wanted was this community of hikers that was going to become your trail family,” he said. “And so I met with this group right away, and we became a family. We were hiking week over week, like every day together, and it was awesome, but they had a slower plan than I did, and I kept on getting further and further behind what I thought I needed to do.”
He then realized that, about four days before he was meeting his father, he was 150 miles away.
“There’s no chance,” he said.
Neiman’s book details the steps taken to meet his dad on the trail, when he flew home, and making up missing ground.
The book also strikes a middle ground between memoir and how-to guide.
“I tried to find a really cool balance,” he said. “I’ve read a lot of these books in the past, and they typically follow one of two paths: self-realization and personal emotional transformation, or the other ones are like Wild or A Walk in the Woods, which is just overly dramatic, all these horrible things that could happen.
“I did not have this, like, life-changing perspective or problems emotionally that I was working through. I just love hiking.”
Neiman hasn’t done a hike quite like the Appalachian Trail since having two young children makes it hard to take four or five months away from home. But yearly, two of his friends he grew up with in Minneapolis, Adam Rosen and Max Puchtel, do a one-week hike each summer to national parks like Yosemite, the Grand Tetons, or Denali.
“I think what I want people to know most of all is, if there’s something that you’ve always wanted to do, don’t wait for it to happen. Make it happen yourself,” he said. “I waited 15 years to do this, which is a long time. A lot could have happened in those 15 years. And I never want to regret that I didn’t get to do something I wanted because life got too much in the way. You have to make it happen.”