Advertisement On four occasions, Baney has hiked more than 1,000 miles on the Appalachian Trail. For him, the hiking is pilgrimage, and God is on the trail.
“I’m a little different,” Baney said this week, sitting at Jules Coffee House. “Most normal people can pick up on that, and usually when people see someone different, people don’t treat them that well.”
Baney, 46, speaks with a speech impediment caused by past medication he took for paranoid schizophrenia. He takes different medication now, which keeps him stable and which he has stayed on ever since his first go at the Appalachian Trail four years ago ended in a fiasco.
He and his girlfriend parted after that short hike, but he found something else: The Appalachian Trail meant something to him. He began reading books about the trail, which is 2,175 miles long, takes about six months to complete and runs from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine.
On March 18, 2004, Baney took a bus from Maine to Georgia to begin his hike alone.
Almost four years later, how he speaks about what he found in the woods could serve as a Sunday sermon.
“I used to think all the people were bad, that there weren’t many good ones. I was that close to being suicidal before I went on the trail. But after I got out there, after a couple weeks of hiking, I had met a hundred friends that I had never had before. And everybody except one or two were really nice, cool people. … They’re willing to be your friend as long as you’re willing to be cool right back. And I’d never experienced that anywhere before I went on the Appalachian Trail.”
Baney talked about experiencing God while sitting on a rock or walking through the woods, and also in the people he met.
“I wasn’t sure there was a God until I got out there and found out how good the world was,” he said. “Only God would have made such good people."
I met Baney while I was sitting outside of Jules a few months ago. He stepped from the door with a grin on his face and said to anyone listening, “Welcome to my nightmare."
Our eyes caught, and then his smile grew and he said with a shrug, “It’s a pretty good nightmare.”
He pulled up a chair as I finished cracking up, and after a while we were talking about the Appalachian Trail.
Baney said he likes La Crosse, but it hasn’t been like the trail.
“People are more skeptical in the cities than they are in the woods. In the woods, they trust you,” he said. “You go to a campfire and there’s 10 people out there and they’ll all talk to you for 10 years. And I don’t see that in La Crosse too much — except for in Jules Coffee Shop.“
Baney, who works as a peer mentor at RAVE, a drop-in center for people with mental health issues, spent six years of his childhood at St. Michael’s Home for Children in La Crosse. On the trail, he has run from wild pigs and heard a bear nosing around his tent. He has suffered from cellulitis, tendonitis and third-degree burns on his feet. And he has met doctors, dishwashers, lawyers, college students and a 78-year-old woman with a bag full of pills.
His trail name is Underground, given to him after people found out he had transgressed trail code and gotten rid of extra weight by burying a radio and other stuff in the woods. He says he’ll never do it again, but the name has stuck.
Baney plans to finish the whole trail someday and hopes to get out on it again this spring or the following, depending on finances.
“I think God loves the Appalachian Trail,” Baney said. “He loves the rest of the world, too. But the Appalachian Trail is a pilgrimage in a way, and I think God loves pilgrimages.”
For an extended interview with Nathan Billy Baney, click here.
Joe Orso can be reached at jorso@lacrossetribune.com or (608) 791-8429.
