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Hodding sets off—for the second time—on the 100 Mile Wilderness trail in Monson, Maine.
(Photo: W. Hodding Carter)
Hodding sets off—for the second time—on the 100 Mile Wilderness trail in Monson, Maine.
Hodding sets off—for the second time—on the 100 Mile Wilderness trail in Monson, Maine. (Photo: W. Hodding Carter)

How a Grueling Backpacking Trip Helped Me Stop Drinking

Published:  Updated: 

As part of a long struggle with alcoholism, I decided to jump-start my recovery with a serious physical challenge: hiking 100 miles of the Appalachian Trail

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A lot of people got divorced during the COVID-19 years, and a lot of people fell deep into their addictions. Being an overachiever of sorts, I did both.

As the pandemic worked its way through the U.S. in the first six months of 2020, my three adult daughters, one of their boyfriends, my niece, and my son, who was a high school senior, were all living with me and my wife, Lisa, at our home in Camden, Maine. We sewed masks, worked out in the basement, cooked elaborate meals that sometimes took all day, baked better sourdough bread than 95 percent of you, played Scrabble and Boggle, and got into massive arguments during episodes of Jeopardy! As we stayed safely hidden away in mid-coast Maine, it was a never-ending summer-camp-cum-house-party.

Perhaps inspired by this atmosphere, we also drank. Some of us more than others—well, me mostly, and way more. I drank fancy drinks in the evening with my kids, and I also drank alone in the afternoons from a bottle hidden in the garage. The pandemic was the perfect excuse for increasing the everyday drinking I was already doing.

Lisa would occasionally suggest that I take a break, especially after catching me downing a slug of gin or smelling like alcohol in the early afternoon. I, however, wasn’t worried. I didn’t drink in the morning. I was fine. More important, to my way of thinking, I still had a choice about whether to drink or not.

But as the months went by and my own private party continued unabated, that first gulp of the day occurred ever earlier. By June, I was drinking before noon, and even I knew I had to do something. It wasn’t uncontrollable, I told myself. I just needed to stop for a while, and I decided to do it with help from an outdoor adventure. Setting an impossible physical task, getting in shape, and then achieving it—this was how I had operated for decades.

Illustration of two hikers looking opposite directions
(Illustration: Caroline Tomlinson)

The is not the hardest section of the Appalachian Trail’s 2,190 miles, but it is the most remote. Set in the dense forests of central Maine, with seven peaks rising above the woods, it had beckoned to me for years. My plan was elegant in its simplicity: carrying all my gear and food, I’d start in the town of Monson and hike for the recommended ten days, ending my quest atop the northern end of the AT—Mount Katahdin, which is just north of the 100-Mile Wilderness—thus adding a peak, roughly ten miles, and maybe an extra day. What could go wrong?

I ordered a map, and that, I must admit, was the extent of my preparation. I didn’t make a packing list or even think much about how I’d feed myself. Instead of putting in miles on the myriad hiking trails in my area, I unwisely decided that drunkenly wailing on my basement punching bag was all I needed.

“What are you going to eat?” my youngest daughter, 22-year-old Helen, asked two days before I set out. “Don’t you want more freeze-dried meals? I can help pick them out. You need them each day.”

“Look how fat I am!” I boasted, patting my swollen belly. “I can live off this the whole time.” I’m six-foot-one, and normally I weigh around 175 pounds. At the time, when I was drinking an extra thousand calories of booze a day, I came in at nearly 210.

Helen didn’t laugh.

“I’ll have enough rice for seven nights, some onions, garlic, oatmeal packets for breakfast, and lots of granola bars and trail mix, and three freeze-dried meals,” I went on, trying not to slur my words. “Listen, sweetie. I need to get back in shape. This is the best way I know how.”

“OK, Dad,” she responded. “But I really think you should pack lighter and take more freeze-dried food. Are you really ready for this?”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. Of course I’d be fine! In college, I was an NCAA DIII swimming champion. I once ate 135 oysters in 15 minutes. I retraced the path of the Lewis and Clark expedition in an inflatable boat. I sailed a Viking ship through the Arctic. I crossed the Everglades pushing a canoe past saw grass and alligators for days upon days.

I ordered a map but didn’t make a packing list or even think about how I’d feed myself. I unwisely decided that drunkenly wailing on my basement punching bag was all I needed.

I woke up at 1 A.M. on the morning of my departure, my gear sprawled across the bedroom floor, and thought: Maybe this little trip isn’t such a good idea. I took a swig from a bottle of gin. Then another. And another. By two, I’d stuffed everything into my pack and felt pretty damn good about things. I passed out until six, when Lisa and I began the 2.5-hour trip to the trail. Lisa drove.

By that point, our nearly 30-year relationship had long followed a workable formula when it came to my adventures: I’d go off on crazy outings half-cocked and Lisa would cheer me on, roll her eyes, and hold down the fort. Underneath this routine, there was a real marriage with divided familial roles and years of unresolved tension. We were teetering on the edge of divorce, and yet here we were.

My pack weighed a little more than 50 pounds, and I asked her about an adventure we’d done together in the past. “Didn’t our packs weigh that much when we hiked the Smokies? I’ll be fine, right?”

“Of course.” She didn’t point out that we’d done this hike 20 years ago.

When we got to Monson, I realized that I didn’t know where the actual trailhead for the 100-Mile section was, but we found the AT itself.

“It’s weird that there’s no 100-Mile sign,” I said after strapping on my pack.

“Well, it says it’s the AT and we’re in Monson,” she said. “You’re going to have an amazing time. It’s going to be fine.” She really wanted me out of her hair.

The author on the trail in Maine
The author on the trail in Maine (Photo: W. Hodding Carter)
A typical no-frills campsite
A typical no-frills campsite (Photo: W. Hodding Carter)

It was a cool July morning, but within minutes I reeked of stale booze and my shirt was soaked with sweat. Worse, I fell twice in the first mile, thanks to my wobbly ankles, and my shoulders and back ached. Yet I still marveled at the ridiculously large leaves of the striped maples I rested against to catch my breath. This is what I need to get myself back on the right track, I thought. I can do this. No problem! Finally, around noon, the trail intersected a small parking lot alongside a highway. This was the actual trailhead—the beginning of the northbound route through the 100-Mile Wilderness.

I’d started 3.3 miles too soon.

I refueled with a Nalgene of water, ate some granola bars, and talked with a trio of through-hikers who let me know that I was looking a little pack-heavy, like a hairy old male version of Cheryl Strayed when she headed out on the Pacific Coast Trail. Thirty minutes later, I came upon a somewhat narrow plank that crossed a stream. I made it halfway before I lost my balance, spun a 180, and crash-landed on the bank below. Then, slowly, inexorably, my pack pulled me backward until I splashed into the water, flailing and supine like an overturned turtle.

The next 2.5 miles can be summarized thusly: I fell three more times, once clinging with all my strength to a well-placed elm sapling, my body hanging over a ten-foot drop-off. By the time I got to a trail lean-to around 4:30 P.M., I’d gone a little more than six miles. I was covered in abrasions, dirt, and blood, and my legs shook uncontrollably. I had an overwhelming need for the privy.

Everything will be OK, I told myself. I have diarrhea because I overdid it and my pack is too heavy. I tossed about two pounds of onions into the woods.

Too tired to cook, I crawled into my sleeping bag long before sunset. That’s when the mild shakes turned into violent twitching. Even lifting my headlamp off the shelter floor was difficult, because my arm was moving spasmodically. I was too beat to read, but I needed the lamp to stumble to the outhouse. Repeatedly. All night long.

Around 1 A.M., I had to face reality. The upset stomach, achiness, tremors, and muscle spasms—all were classic withdrawal symptoms. I’d had no idea I’d been drinking enough to have this reaction, and I immediately cursed myself for not bringing a pint of gin. I could have used it to taper. Of course, I would have ended up chugging the whole thing, so maybe I was better off suffering.

As I flopped around like a fish on asphalt, feeling both regret and self-pity, I resolved that no matter what, I would make the best of this. The trek would be my detox. I’d get sober and stay that way. (Doctors would later tell me that, at my level of addiction, detox is best done in a hospital, and I was lucky I didn’t have a stroke.)

I didn’t sleep all night.

By chance there was cell service, and in the morning I let my family know that I wasn’t feeling so well. I told them I’d probably drunk some bad water. I’d need a resupply 30 miles later at an intersection with a logging road, because I planned on tossing out even more food. I told them it would take me at least three days to get to the drop point.

This turned out to be wishful thinking. The diarrhea and tremors continued throughout the second day and night, and all I could manage was to drink a little water.

When I crawled out of my bag on the third morning, my stomach had settled down and I could walk without feeling like I was in an earthquake. I slowly packed my gear, minus about five more pounds of food. I heated some water and ate about half of a freeze-dried breakfast. This wore me out, so I sat on the edge of the lean-to, gathering my strength for about an hour—until the outhouse beckoned.

When I finally set off, I made it about 400 yards before calling it quits. I texted Lisa to say I was too weak from the “food poisoning.”

“Don’t stop now. You’ll be sorry later,” she urged. Then I told her I was in withdrawal. She said she’d meet me in five hours.

I don’t remember the number of times I fell on my way back to the trailhead, but I do recall crawling on my hands and knees. And I definitely remember the moaning and the loud, bellowing outbursts. Passing hikers headed north looked at me with fear and pity. I was a living, breathing cautionary tale—bloated, overloaded, sweaty, old, and broken.

Illustration of a hiker climbing a mountain of bottles
(Illustration: Caroline Tomlinson)

Clearly, I am an addict. Not a big surprise, considering that I was a toddler the first time I got drunk. Apparently, I’d found some leftover old-fashioneds at the end of one of my parents’ parties in Greenville, Mississippi, in the 1960s. I downed them and proceeded to do handstands and somersaults. This was always told as a funny story.

I was in high school before I really started drinking, and I didn’t do it often, because I was a competitive swimmer. Still, almost every time booze touched my lips, I drank to the point of throwing up or passing out. In college I experienced countless blackouts, including one time when I got so drunk that my friends tied me to my bed. I continued along these lines in the Peace Corps—including a couple of nights binge-drinking with a KGB agent, which almost got me in big trouble—and throughout a brief first marriage in my late twenties in New York. In the winter of 1991–92, a friend—fed up after I’d drunkenly poured beer into her risotto, to help make it “taste better,” and ruined her dinner party—pretty much demanded I get help.

Destroying a risotto isn’t a typical red flag, but I’d known something was wrong for a long time. Both of my grandfathers had died from complications related to their alcoholism, my parents had alcohol issues, and one of my sisters had been a full-blown alcoholic since her midteens.

In January of ’92, I started an eight-month intensive outpatient recovery program. Thanks to three days a week of men’s group therapy, I slowly began to address my more uncomfortable feelings—like, all of them. My wife and I, married only 18 months, separated. On the surface, this happened because she had found someone else, but I knew it was because I was impossible to be around: hypersensitive, jealous, arrogant, and determined to be right in any argument. And I needed all her attention to feel OK about myself.

In short, I had a lot to talk about. Doing this didn’t come easily, but I got there after watching all the other men—a carpenter, an art historian, a banker, a couple of famous actors, and a comedian—open their hearts before me.

Most addicts have buried trauma we’re trying to self-medicate. As much as I wanted to be different in this regard, I wasn’t. To understand the sources of your trauma, you have to peel back the layers. One of mine went like this: I grew up in a family that was despised by most of the white people in Mississippi and throughout the South, because both my and served as editors of the Delta Democrat-Times and wrote forward-thinking editorials about racial injustice beginning in the 1940s.

The hatred directed our way was nothing compared with what Black people in that era were made to endure, but my family was the target of frequent death and kidnapping threats and endless vitriolic phone calls. The Carter men drove around with guns under their seats, and in the mid-sixties my mom supposedly confronted, with a shotgun, a group of teenagers who intended to set up and then burn a cross on our lawn. While I was a pretty oblivious kid, I grew up with a siege mentality.

Around 1 A.M., I had to face reality. The upset stomach, achiness, tremors, and muscle spasms—all were classic withdrawal symptoms. I immediately cursed myself for not bringing a pint of gin.

And here’s another layer: in 1973, when I was 11, a man entered our home and held my mother hostage at gunpoint. Not knowing better, I had let him in through the front door. He took her into the living room and sent us kids to our rooms. Somehow my mom called a family friend, who came over and managed to disarm the man by showing an honorary police badge. No one was harmed, and soon the intruder ended up in Whitfield, a state mental institution.

A week later, a neighbor walked me through the house, directing me to lock every window and door, and told me that when my dad wasn’t home—which was often, because he was having an affair—I was the man of the house. There were a total of 23 windows and doors, and from then on I checked them every night. I also started sleeping with a shotgun under my bed.

I was just a scared little kid pretending to be tough, and to this day I have frequent nightmares about getting attacked, attacking others, or running for my life.

A few years later my dad left my mom, and I was packed off to an all-boys boarding school in New Jersey. One day, after a semester of crying alone in my dorm room, crying to my housemaster, crying when other boys were mean to me, and making weekly phone calls begging my dad to reunite with my mom, I abruptly decided that I was done with crying. From then on, I wouldn’t show or feel sadness or fear or even anger. Anything considered weak I hid from the world—and myself.

Near the end of my outpatient treatment, I met and fell in love with Lisa while we ate wild strawberries together in a mutual friend’s backyard. I was happily sober, and after we got married in 1995, we spent the next ten years building a life. Most of our time was spent with and for our four kids. Instead of climbing the workplace ladder, we hiked local hills with them, played Poohsticks in streams, and held their hands as they fell asleep. Lisa managed to create a solid legal career while I wrote.

I also slowly let my old buddy alcohol creep back into my life. The work I’d done in rehab certainly helped keep my addiction in check, but it was the role of being a father—more to the point, not wanting to be the kind of father my dad had been—that really kept me straight. Still, I eventually went through days, sometimes weeks, when I fell back into drinking.

While our kids mostly thrived during this period—all parents damage their children, and I have no illusions that I didn’t do the same—our marriage faltered. Lisa and I separated in 2004, and we both saw other people. We regrouped about a year later and worked hard at reconciling, but in retrospect our marriage was never the same. I wasn’t sure we should be together anymore, but not wanting to follow in my dad’s footsteps, I kept my mouth shut. It seemed like the best thing to do for our kids.

Instead of talking with my wife about how I really felt, I kept right on drinking, sometimes mixing in prescribed painkillers. For a surprisingly long time, the better part of a decade, I “only” binged and didn’t think of myself as an alcoholic. Very slowly, though, my dependency became habitual. By 2015, I was drinking half a bottle of wine a day, four or five times a week—and occasionally a lot more. In 2017, while I was working on an article for this magazine—one that involved retracing Benedict Arnold’s attempt to sack Quebec for the Continental Army—I started downing nightly shots of rum with my fellow adventurers (in the spirit of historical accuracy, I told myself). I also had an affair with a friend, just as my own dad had done. Lisa and I weathered it—without enough talking and with no therapy—and I continued to drink. Every day, and eventually, during the pandemic, all day long.

The author after his fourth fall on Day 6. He averaged three falls a day.
The author after his fourth fall on Day 6. He averaged three falls a day. (Photo: W. Hodding Carter)
The author both happy he’s made it up yet another summit and confused as to the why the trail had to go up yet another peak
The author both happy he’s made it up yet another summit and confused as to the why the trail had to go up yet another peak (Photo: W. Hodding Carter)

When Lisa arrived at the trailhead parking lot to pick me up, I was slumped against a tree, exhausted but also animated by new plans. Now that I was almost detoxed, I told her, I was going to train and attack the trail again in a couple of months. I’d stay sober, clean up my act, and have my revenge on the trail—all in one fell swoop. I was now on the kind of quixotic journey I could wrap my mind around. I’d always been driven by goals, and this would be no different. All I had to do was get back in shape and my life would follow suit.

I began hiking five or six times a week. At first I started out with ten pounds in my pack; after about a month, I could cover the same distance in less time shouldering thirty. Knowing I needed more than physical training, I also found a therapist. I was going to turn things around.

Then, in late August, I slipped on a boulder and sprained my right ankle. An ER doctor ordered me to stay off my feet, with my ankle iced and elevated. After five days, I was still using crutches to get around, so I would not be conquering the 100-Mile Wilderness anytime soon. I remember suddenly wanting some chips one afternoon and hobbling off to the local market. Without a second thought, I threw in two bottles of wine. It would be a lot easier staying put with a little buzz, I told myself.

I kept drinking, even more than before, and on a random day in September, I finally told Lisa I wasn’t happy. That I felt we’d stopped growing a long time back. We ran a good house together, but beyond family management and conversations about politics or literature, we mainly bickered. We slept in separate beds. We hardly kissed anymore. I loved her, but as an old friend. I still didn’t, or couldn’t, say what I really wanted.

Finally, that November, I told Lisa I needed to move out. It was a rough couple of days. We had a screaming fight after dinner, held each other, fought some more, and said things we both regretted. Eventually, we agreed that I would wait until after Christmas, since our children were still home because of COVID-19. When we did tell them, their responses ranged from “OK, Dad, if you think this is best” to “Does this mean you’re getting divorced?” They didn’t seem surprised.

I moved into an apartment about five miles from home and began seeing a woman named Monica. Starting something new was admittedly ill-timed, but I liked her too much to pretend otherwise. Meanwhile, my drinking got worse. I became well acquainted with the local gas stations that sold booze, rotating my purchases to avoid anyone knowing how often and how much I was consuming. Often I’d drink two or three shots in the morning and then “fall back asleep.” I wouldn’t drink for the rest of the day so I could coach high school swimming in the late afternoon. Then I’d hurry back to my apartment and start again.

The few friends I hadn’t completely pushed away were concerned. My response was to lie and lean hard into being a self-righteous ass.

“You don’t get it,” I ranted one night to Monica after we’d argued about drinking. “I’m like a tragic hero out of Shakespeare. You have to fall down. Do the same thing again and again, and then when it’s too late, you dust yourself off and stay the course. I can stop drinking any time I want. I just don’t want to.”

I thought I was so clever—and so right.

“Whatever, Hodding,” she said. “There’s nothing heroic about falling in the same hole over and over again. It’s just fucking stupid.”

One night in early May 2021, my daughter Eliza and my son, Angus, came for dinner. I was stumbling before they arrived, and I’d forgotten to cook. The one thing I’d always done, nearly every day of their lives, was make fun meals for and with them. I started crying and said I wasn’t doing well. Scared and unsure what to do, they asked me to come home for the night.

Of course, I snuck vodka into my bag, and then proceeded to lie around one or another of my kids’ rooms for the next day and a half, drinking, until Lisa stormed in and said I had to go back to my place or to the hospital.

Lisa drove me to the hospital. I remember threatening to jump out at a stoplight on the way, but she got me there, and finally, on May 6, 2021, I started the process of medical detox, hooked up to a hydrating IV and fed calming drugs. Going through detox in a hospital was much better than doing it in a lean-to on the AT, but it was also fairly public. Suddenly, I couldn’t pretend I didn’t have a problem.

After a five-day stint, I moved back to the home I had shared with Lisa, living in an old chicken coop we’d converted to a guesthouse. I had three relapses over the next six months. During the first, I was in North Carolina, where I’d gone to visit my dying dad; despite reassuring everyone I was OK, I immediately dived into his liquor cabinet. When I drove back to Maine after the visit, my children found me passed out in my car, outside my daughter Helen’s apartment in Portland.

Instead of talking with my wife about how I felt, I kept right on drinking, sometimes mixing in prescribed painkillers. For the better part of a decade, I “only” binged and didn’t think of myself as an alcoholic.

The second backslide happened on September 15, the day Lisa and I finalized our divorce. We drove to court together and cried together after having to answer the judge’s question “Do you agree your marriage is irreparably damaged?” Then we went home together and packed some of my things. When I’d moved out nine months earlier, I’d left nearly everything behind.

Lisa asked again and again if I was all right with the divorce, and I assured her that I was. (It had been my idea, I figured, so I had no option except to be OK with it.) She headed off to a work meeting; I kept packing. Then I drove to the nearest drugstore and bought a fifth of whiskey. I hated myself for wanting to be divorced.

This relapse lasted about two weeks—researchers believe that relapses in rapid succession usually lead to even heavier drinking, for reasons that have to do with neural pathways. This one only ended when Monica persuaded me to go back to the hospital. I detoxed yet again. Once I was discharged, I moved out of the chicken coop and found a new place to stay and, feeling more shaken this time, started occasionally going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

My third relapse ended with me in a ditch 50 feet from my driveway and a cop telling me to get out of the car. Scared and shaken, with a drunk-driving charge staring me in the face, I decided to enter rehab at a bare-bones facility in Helen’s home city, Portland. I checked in on December 22, 2021, and submitted to a strict routine. Cell phones weren’t allowed. Two metal-framed single beds, dressers, and a night table furnished the sparse bedrooms. The exercise room had a single treadmill. Our only outdoor activity consisted of hanging out in a small fenced-in area for smoking breaks.

The place did its job. It broke me down. I finally started to see and understand some of my teenage wounds. I also got a sponsor—something I’d vowed never to do. When my 28 days were up, I stayed another couple of weeks by choice. Some studies say that less than 10 percent of people who go to rehab remain sober. Finally, desperately, I wanted that.

When I got out, I couldn’t half-ass it anymore. I went to AA meetings daily. I enrolled in an at-home recovery program. I learned to recognize my resentments and occasionally even avoid acting out because of them. And I started to enjoy meditating—well, sometimes. Mainly, I learned to tell the truth: to myself, to my family, and to anyone else who cared to listen. It’s been surprisingly freeing.

Illustration of a tent in the wilderness
(Illustration: Caroline Tomlinson)

And yes, I decided to have another go at the 100-Mile Wilderness. I trained for about seven months and set off in the middle of August 2022, my pack light and my body fit. Most important, I was sober. Lisa, with whom I’m still close, not only drove me to the correct trailhead but did half the first day’s hike with me. We’d always enjoyed nature together, so it seemed like a fitting send-off. We talked about things we should have talked about five years earlier.

On my second go, the trail still kicked my ass, but I loved almost every step. It’s littered with toe-catching roots, uneven stones, and slippery wooden planks, and I earned the AT nickname Sir Falls-alot. I suffered greatly day after day. Once, near the end, I crashed hard enough to break two ribs and sprain a knee. I met people who were out there for all kinds of reasons—from a homeschooling family of five hiking the entire trail, to older people celebrating the remission of cancer, to twentysomethings on a monthslong adventure. It was perfect.

My aha moment arrived on day eight. At 2:30 that afternoon, I stopped at Hurd Brook, the last campsite in the wilderness. I’d gone a comfortable eight miles and would only have to do four the next morning to finish my journey. I stretched my hammock between two towering cedars and followed the brook to Hurd Pond, a tannin-brown lake dammed by fallen trees stuffed between huge boulders. I scrambled over some dead cedars and sat on a boulder baking in the sun. Water murmured through hundreds of separate channels into the brook behind me. The air was still and I just sat there, listening and watching. I remembered how I’d once made interconnected loft beds out of cedar posts for my kids, and now, surrounded by cedars, I thought of them. Heavy tears flowed down my cheeks. I was sad for what I’d put them through, but at the same time I was crying because I knew that, for the first time, I was doing better. I would keep trying to do better. For them. For me.

Dragonflies skimmed the surface of the pond, flying low and then arcing skyward over lily pads spread out like ovular runways. From the corner of my eye, I recognized another familiar flying pattern on the far north shore. A kingfisher, my favorite bird. I love their absolute focus and reckless disregard for the effects of gravity. I hadn’t seen one in years, but I’d know one anywhere—the hard, fast beat of the wings; the short glide; another sharp beat; and then the focused hover, ready to dive. I don’t know how long I watched, but I did know much later, when I scrambled back to my camp, that I’d hiked 96.5 miles for this precise moment, this place of grace.

It was a fitting end to my hike—or at least that leg of it. I hadn’t fallen in any holes all day, and even better, I no longer thought that falling in the same hole over and over again was a sensible life choice. While I was in no way cured, I was finally comfortable in my recovery.

Ha ha. Fuck that. For months and months afterward, I actually believed I was out of the woods. I felt pretty zen, even when all my buttons were pushed. And when I wasn’t feeling good, I understood why. When my dad died last year, I didn’t drink.

But then, week by week, one irritating moment after another, my never-resting mind slowly wore me down. My shield of recovery began to feel a lot less secure. I realized that I was—no, still am—the daily-struggling, 61-year-old man typing this. And sometimes, for a few hours, sometimes day after day after day, I slip back into my drinking thinking. I act out, most often with Monica, because, well, because I still have these holes that need filling, and when I’m having a hard time, I want her to fill them. I’ve thrown embarrassing temper tantrums simply because she didn’t have pictures of me on her phone. I’ve ranted at other people in my recovery meetings, comparing them to mindless religious adherents.

I’ve fantasized about drinking so many times in the middle of sleepless nights that at times there’s part of me that thinks I should just go ahead and do it. For a few dark moments, all I want to do is drink. I have to drink. All the happiness I’ve ever wanted will be mine—if I just drink.

But then. But then. I remember nauseating moments from my drinking life, or I simply recall the most awful version of me. And I remind myself I’m good enough. I work through the hurt, and somehow, day after day, I don’t buy that bottle. Sometimes I’ll head out on the closest trail. I’ll go to a meeting and talk about the swirling mess in my head. I’ll tell Monica what I’m thinking and try my best to listen back.

There are also, thank God, the good days, sometimes a whole week of them in a row, when drinking is the last thing I’d ever do. In those blessed times, I simply live my life in the present, as I did that afternoon by the pond watching the kingfisher. I’m happy. And I’m sober. And I’m finally here for everyone I love.

If you or someone you know is suffering from alcohol or substance addiction, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration at 1-800-662-4357, or go to  to find an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting near you by clicking on the “learn more” tab.

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From July/August 2024
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Lead Photo: W. Hodding Carter