Jack Miller (right) and his son Fritz hiking the Appalachian Trail. The Trail hike is just one of many daring exploits in Jack's life. PHOTO COURTESY OF FRITZ MILLER
ORWIGSBURG - A French scientist, his wife, a handful of Pygmy rangers and the Pottsville-born heir to a textile company walk down a volcanic path in Rwanda. The year is 1976, and they’re looking for a group of gorillas, the same group that was studied by Dian Fossey and featured in “Gorillas in the Mist.” The Pottsville man, Jack Miller, has military experience. He knows there will be an arduous journey ahead. As the group sweated along, they learned about what to do (lie on the ground, grab a root and start chewing on it to appear non-threatening) and what not to do (look directly at them, bare your teeth, run) in the event of a gorilla attack. Speak of the devil, there’s one now!
“So I’m laying there,” says Miller, 73, “I’m looking first of all for the ranger, and he’s on the ground, eating one of these roots.”
Miller turned his head, and got a crick in his neck. He grimaced in pain, showing his teeth. A gorilla saw him.
“I swear,” Miller says, “the gorilla went-” he imitates a gorilla, balling his hands into fists and gasping like an ape. He tells the story like a joke, standing beside the bar in his Orwigsburg home that smells like old books. But when it comes to the rest of his life story, he’s as serious as can be, extolling the glory of nature, God and mankind. On Sep. 19, after a 106-day, 1,000-mile hike through the Appalachian Trail from Maine to Schuylkill County with his son Fritz, 22, Miller returned home with some fanfare (he still has the half-eaten cake from the welcome home party). For him, that was the coda to a lifetime of adventure.
“I’m blessed to be able to have this hike at the age of 73,” Miller said. “On this trip, I was the oldest person I ran into.”
He’s sitting on a rocking chair in his darkening sun room. A trellis of leaves climbs over the mesh walls, scratched open by Miller’s cats, as if to let in the chirping of birds and insects. The sunset illuminated the pointy treetops. His dog Waylon howled in the night.
“What amazes me still is that he still wanted to hike and finish,” said Fritz in a Sept. 20 Facebook post. “After all that work, he wanted to hike on. His sense of adventure and spirit continues to inspire me. Most people who are 73 can’t even hike one mile, let alone 1000. Most 73-year-olds would never sleep in a tent for over 100 days. That’s what makes my dad so so [sic] cool.”
In 2016, when Fritz was in college playing soccer in Europe, he and his dad walked the Camino de Santiago, a 30-day, 500-mile pilgrimage from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in France to the cathedral city of Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, the fabled site of the remains of Saint James the Apostle.
“I’m an adventurer and a traveller,” Miller said. “He brought it up, I said let’s do a week, he said let’s do six weeks. And that was a fabulous adventure.” Every day there was something new to see.”
The two walked through small towns, fortresses and vineyards, joining local festivals.
“There’s a spiritual aspect of the Camino,” he said, “and it literally brought us to tears at times with the beauty. I don’t know how else to say it, thinking we’re walking so far back in time is amazing.”
After arriving in front of the enormous Medieval cathedral, Miller entered the altar, viewed the crypt of Saint James, and, like millions of pilgrims before him, put his arms around a porcelain statue of the apostle.
Before that, Miller said, the most hiking experience he had was walking to Russo’s to get pizza. When Fritz graduated from college and asked his father to accompany him on the Appalachian Trail, he remembered the Camino and was ready for the next level. To train, he put weights in a backpack and hiked through the wooded hills surrounding his home. On June 5, they started at Baxter State Park in Maine. The mountain was still closed due to snow, so they walked through what is known as the Hundred Mile Wilderness.
“There’s no cell phone reception , you made all your own food,” Miller said, “you slept on the ground. I lost 21 pounds in that 30 days.”
Maine is the hardest stretch of the trail. Every day required climbing up thousands of feet of rock. In a Maine hostel, Miller had the best hamburger he’d ever eaten.
“You might have been five days out just eating MREs,” he said. “One guy, when we got in there, he served milkshakes. That was so exciting.”
The trail usually ends in Maine and starts in Georgia, but Miller and Fritz worked in reverse.
“The peaks and the hills,” he said, “it’s a constant battle with going and up these mountains and stuff… The drudgery of a hike like this is just getting up every day and hiking your 10, 15 miles, and the ruggedness of the territory.”
Miller raved over the restaurants he found in the little mountain towns he and his son stopped in along the way.
“You probably just wouldn’t realize that the country is so wooded and rural,” he said. “You would just see mountain ranges or other peaks or lakes. You’re really in nature. That’s part of the enjoyment of the trip, despite the difficulty, is the views and accomplishment of getting to the top of the mountain.”
To Miller, nature is a somewhat religious experience. In his life, he’s been to over 100 countries, including ones that don’t exist anymore. He remembered the gorilla story in his living room, standing on a Turkish prayer rug, looking at a French poster above the fireplace. Across from that was a felt carving he bought in Mongolia, where he spent 40 days horseback riding (“You’re actually riding to these yurts with people who live the same way did 2,000 years ago,” he said) and a Maasai shield from Kenya. Mounted on other walls through his home are a goat he shot in the Yukon and an alligator head from Thailand. A Portuguese tile painting of a monk drinking wine sits on his dining room table, beside a star-shaped Egyptian lamp and a Dutch porcelain fountain. Those two souvenirs are from his parents, who gave Miller his love of travel.
“You learn how much you don’t know when you travel,” he said. “You just learn about life and history and how moving it is.”
In the early hours of Nov. 24, 1963, twelve hours after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Miller’s father died of a massive heart attack. Miller, 17, was suddenly thrust into the family businesses, H.L. Miller and Son and Pottsville Bleach and Dye. On the day of the funeral, he woke up with the sunrise and felt that his life was over. That morning, he says, he had a mystical experience. He could feel God speaking to him, telling him that everything was going to be alright. Along the Appalachian Trail, Miller and Fritz talked about God, what the hike taught them, how to get over difficult situations and what the future held.
“It let me appreciate the beauty of nature,” he said, “and God, and the beauty of life. The humanity of it all is you meet wonderful people.”
One night in Maine, he found a lonely log cabin on the side of the road with two men inside. They were part of a group called Trail Magic, which offers food and drink to hikers.
“You were thinking of ‘Deliverance,’ you know?” He said. “They had cheeseburgers and they had drinks, and we ended up spending the night with these guys.”
In his freshman year of college, Miller toured Europe with his wrestling coach. He drove through East Germany (they took his camera at the checkpoint) and visited Shakespeare’s house.
“That trip,” he remembered, “seeing all of history, every chapel, every cathedral, you see all this wonderful creativity and beauty, and you see the tragedy of Auschwitz.”
Miller gets up from his rocking chair and pulls the chain on a lamp, illuminating a painting of an old sea captain smoking a cigarette. His eye is completely black.
“About two days before I left for Vietnam,” Miller says, “I was sitting at a bar having a drink, this guy was looking at me all the time, so I bought him. He keeps following me with his eye.”
On July 20, 1969, as Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, Jack Miller landed in Vietnam. Unlike many in his generation, he enlisted. He was in the infantry and ran communications in an area called Parrot’s Beak, taking over a group of 50 men after their previous leader left to replace an officer from Lancaster, who was shot and killed by one of his own men.
“We did things that constantly challenged the men to keep them off the challenge of war or depression,” Miller said, “even though it was all around you.”
His base was attacked two or three nights a week. He returned to the U.S. in the spring of 1970, then did a six-month tour of west Africa, returned again and took over the family businesses in 1971. He spent three months of the next three years running safaris in Kenya.
“The adventure is you might have a flat tire, you run into a pride of lions.” He said. “You see something being born, you see something being killed in a hunt.”
Almost 50 years later, H.L. Miller and Son and Pottsville Bleach and Dye are gone, (they shut down in 2000). Miller is retired, and while Fritz is in Harper’s Ferry, looking to continue the rest of the Appalachian Trail, Miller is back home. He was disappointed that he wasn’t able to go to Georgia with his son, but still feels a sense of accomplishment.
“Just the overwhelming beauty of nature,” he said, “the ability to hike with my son and experience the pluses and minuses of life, to see all the little towns and the different mountain ranges, that you can still do that in this time and age. You almost get to feel comfortable in your tent.”