The Summer I was Seventeen

About the Book

The Summer I Was Seventeen: A Story of the Appalachian Trail

This is a tale about psychological growth and about the circumstances that may propel it: some steady, like the love of parents; some accidental, even chaotic, like the unpredictable things that might happen as a fellow hikes with strangers along a trail in the mountains.

At the beginning of the summer after his high school graduation, John Hunt accepts a job as a junior counselor at a hiking camp which operates in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. He is hired in lieu of his older brother, a college student who is off to Europe for a few months.

John’s father has a little talk with John before the boy leaves for his summer work. He tries to tell John that relationships with adults are tricky, hard – sometimes – to understand, and therefore a bit dangerous. “Be cautious,” he advises.

John is a healthy lad; he feels competent to deal with challenges; and he sets himself the task of understanding the adults he will be working with. But his father’s warning – only partially understood – makes him a little jittery, especially when his initial contacts with those adults are immediately fraught with behaviors and ideas unfamiliar to him.

His chief boss is Tooley Madison, whom he meets unexpectedly in a strange place in a strange mood. Tooley turns out to be unlike anyone John has ever known. John watches as the arriving campers almost instantly place unfaltering trust in the man, and he observes how the boys come to love this, their leader, within the first few days.

It is Tooley who introduces the campers to the mythical Zip, whose inspiring presence accompanies the group as they climb up and down the ridges in the beautiful mountains.

Tooley evokes in John reactions which are new and worrisome. John, just as predicted, cannot make heads nor tails of his feelings. There is an early discussion of “charisma” among the members of the group, but understanding that sociological phenomenon does not settle John’s uneasiness. A phone call to his dad helps, and John determines to live with the mystery as it is.

Then there is Richard, the high school teacher who seems at first a familiar type to John – a person who shares the middle-class, liberal views which dominate John’s understanding of the world. John is, from the beginning, at ease with Richard, but not in the way the younger boys relate to Tooley.

Richard, for his part, understands and values John’s qualities – the old aristocratic traits of beauty, intelligence, and virtue. Rich is a dedicated teacher, and he finds in John the perfect pupil. The relationship between the two flourishes. But Richard, though he understands much more of “the world and life and time” than John does, is very different from Tooley – more down-to-earth, more disciplined, less openly affectionate. John does not understand why the two men interact so well. Another mystery.

Clyde, at first, seems just like a “hired man” to John. Clyde does not hike on the trail with the rest of the group. He drives the truck and packs in to and out of the appointed campsites. John fairly quickly sees how important Clyde is to the functioning of the group, but only gradually does he discover that Clyde contributes to the spiritual well-being of the hikers. Clyde seems the most mundane of the three adult leaders, but as John gets to know Clyde better – from working closely with him on several occasions – he begins to feel the warm, caring interest Clyde has for the hikers and to grasp the depth of understanding, the sense of reverence, which Clyde has for the forest and the mountains. From Clyde, too, come insights into the events on the trail, objective observations which anchor John to the realities of the “outside world.”

And while John struggles with making sense of these adults and their relationships, things are happening –

About the Author

Gerald Coomer was already in his thirties when he first came back to his ancestral mountains. He had been busy growing up in the Midwest, getting a formal education, teaching at a university, even living abroad. But when he finally stood on one of the Blue Ridges, some genetic voice deep inside him said, “I’m home!” For several years in the early seventies, Mr. Coomer directed a hiking camp in the central Appalachians, and it is from that experience that he fashioned this novel. It is a novel of memory. He was already retired when he began writing. This is his second published book. His first book – of personal, impressionistic essays – is titled The Coasts of Southern Indiana.