Sailing on Foot — 1,863 Miles

Rand Timmerman enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1966 after hearing a radio report in an upstate New York bar — and nine months later found himself in a rice paddy in Vietnam. Decades later, four years into recovery from alcoholism and carrying an artificial knee, he stood on top of Springer Mountain, Georgia in a blizzard at age 72, setting out to hike the Appalachian Trail with his 71-year-old brother, Ron.

In this Ship’s Log, Rand takes Jeanne from a frozen ten-foot standoff with the biggest black bear he’s ever seen, to five hours pinned inside a collapsing tent on a cliff edge in the Smokies, to the nightmares that followed him home from Vietnam and the recovery program that, in his words, gave him a whole new life — more joy at 80 than he ever had before. He walked 1,863 miles before a fall in Massachusetts ended his hike; Ron went on to finish all 2,200.

The conversation closes with the lesson Rand’s father — a polio survivor who built a 20-foot boat in the family basement — taught him as a boy: deal with what life gives you, then cope with it, one step at a time. And of course, Rand brings three headlines to Two Truths & A Lie that all sound too wild to be true.