Cindy Ross (right) and Steve Clendenning. PHOTO COURTESY OF CINDY ROSS
This story originally appeared in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on April 16, 2021.
On a rainy night in 2013, three veterans were walking the Appalachian Trail through Schuylkill County in an attempt to heal from what they experienced in war. They passed the New Ringgold home of author Cindy Ross, who invited them in for some “trail magic” - a shower and a hot meal. Ross doesn’t remember what they ate that night - probably lasagna - but she does remember what they talked about. Cindy asked the three veterans - Steve Clendenning, Adam Bautz and Stephanie Cutts - to share their war stories. She was expecting their stories to last 30 seconds. Instead, it turned into what Ross calls “a very emotional evening.”
Ross turned their stories, and the stories of many other veterans, in “Walking Toward Peace: Veterans Healing on America’s Trails.” “Walking Toward Peace,” Ross’ ninth book, was released on April 1.
“Right away they trusted us,” Ross said as she remembered that night in 2013, “there were lots of people crying because the guys were crying as they were talking.”
That night, those of every religion held hands and prayed before they ate. The incident inspired Ross and her husband, chainsaw carver Todd Gladfelter, to found River House PA, a nonprofit that promotes “healing through nature.” Ross first hiked the Appalachian Trail 40 years ago.
“There’s so much life out there,” she said, “there’s so much beauty. Sure there’s hardship trying to hike thousands of miles and carry everything you need on your back, but life is watered down to just the basic simple things of walking and being one with nature. I go out for a hike every day of my life because I need it.”
To Ross and Gladfelter, hikes and campfires are everyday occurrences. But to the veterans, it is one of the best days of their lives.
For the book, she researched how hiking is beneficial to mental health, and the psychological effects of war on the young people who go off to fight it. Ross writes that the 19-year-old brain male is characterized by “passion without much reason, reproduction without much responsibility, and performance without caution, just the right time in a young man’s life to convince him to go off to war to kill, but especially traumatizing afterward.”
“Walking Toward Peace” contains dozens of interviews with veterans, many of whom served in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I was never one for war to begin with,” Ross said, “and I’m convinced 100 percent more that the damage that is done to these veterans cannot ever be worth it. There need to be alternatives to war, and to not go into them as quickly as we have been.”
On the trail, the veterans, many suffering from PTSD, have nightmares in their sleeping bags. Off the trail, they are plagued by guilt, alcoholism, drug addiction and lasting trauma, including thoughts of suicide. Many are on disability and don’t have to work, but if they do not have anything meaningful to do in their lives, their condition deteriorates.
“It wasn’t enough to pack thirty pounds on sore knees and aching muscles,” Ross writes in the introduction. “They also hauled war-induced nightmares and memories up the mountains.”
The book took five years to write and research.
“Sometimes it was pretty complicated,” Ross remembered.
When she first met veteran Shawn Murphy, he lived in the Arizona wilderness with no phone or means of contacting him.
“The desert is beautiful and harsh,” Murphy told me. That, and the fact that there aren’t many people around, is why he loves living there.
At first, Murphy did not want to appear in the book, but he changed his mind when his years of hiking put him in contacts with veterans who, like him, experienced addiction and homelessness.
“I realized that with all the time Cindy spent on trail,” Murphy said, “she would be the one person who would understand how nature heals.”
“It was a big deal for them to tell me their story,” Ross said about her subjects. “For most of the vets, I had to build a pretty close relationship before they would trust me to do that.”
Another veteran, Travis Johnston, drove all the way from New Mexico to Schuylkill County to sit on Ross’ sofa and tell his story. Johnston organized a memorial climb in memory of Zach Adamson, an army ranger who committed suicide at the age of 25. The book contains a heart-wrenching letter from Adamson to his parents, who walked the Appalachian Trail in his honor. Johnston also introduced Ross to his friend Dan Stein, who happened to live down the road from her. After several serious accidents while serving as an Army Ranger from 2007-2011, Dan Stein lived as a recluse in Reading, hiding his physical and emotional scars. Over time, he opened up to Cindy and shared the poems that he wrote about his experiences. He stayed in Ross’ cabin for two nights and the two hiked to Hawk Mountain. It was the first time in years that he stepped outside. After all the time that he spent in the hospital, even simple tasks like going to the grocery store became difficult. Ross now calls Stein her “surrogate son.”
“It was a whole process of building trust and getting to know each other,” Ross said.
That, she said, was the easy part. The hard part was experiencing the veterans’ pain alongside them.
“They have relapses,” she said, “they have times where they doubt themselves, they forget that going out there brings them peace.”
The trail to healing, she said, is not a straight path that always moves forward. One year on Christmas Eve, the worst time for people with mental illness, three veterans announced to her via phone and text message that they were going to kill themselves.One called her as she and her family were playing cards. She told him to pour his bottle of moonshine down the drain, call his wife and daughter and go for a walk with his dog.
“Military people, a lot of them are wary because they don’t think [civilians] understand,” Ross said. “I would never have believed seven years ago that this was gonna be a good fit, especially with the way the whole political arena was in the last years… but it doesn’t matter when it comes to helping these veterans. That’s so refreshing today to not see differences but similarities, just to reach out to someone in need.”
Ross will be holding an open house to celebrate the release of “Walking Toward Peace” on April 18 at 85 Red Mountain Lane, New Ringgold. She will also be speaking and signing books at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary at 3 p.m. May 2.