A Rugged Trail Through Retirement

Two careers, eight kids, 17 grandchildren, three great-grandchildren.

If anyone deserves a rest, it’s Jan and Ken Wilhite.

That must by why they’re setting out to plod 2,160 hard-dirt miles from Georgia to Maine. They’ll be wearing 40-pound packs and lumberjack boots, and by the time they reach the end of the Appalachian Trail, they’ll know both the thrill of victory and the agony of their feet.

Rest?

Let the old folks navigate the Naugahyde and linger in the La-Z-Boys.

Last week, the Wilhites spent six of seven days trudging up mountainsides from Santa Paula to Sycamore Canyon, each time logging eight or 10 miles under full packs. On the seventh day, they cleaned out a shed.

Rest?

For five years, the couple have been in training. They’ve worked out at the gym two hours a day, five days a week. They’ve lifted weights. Fully equipped, they’ve strode around their Oxnard neighborhood like urban commandos, building calluses and confidence.

They’ve sold their house and they’re selling their car. Next month, Jan and Ken’s Great Adventure will commence. At the base of Springer Mountain in northern Georgia, they’ll bid goodbye to friends, family and luxuries like flush toilets and daily showers. In September--after six months of bugs, blisters and backaches--they hope to climb the piney flanks of Mt. Katahdin at the trail’s end.

Ken is 66. Jan will turn 60 on the trail.

“Oh, we’ll have some lumps and bumps along the way,” said Jan, a native of England and a master of understatement.

“Lots of ups and downs,” Ken added. And yes, they acknowledge, things can get prickly out there in the wild, where they’ll enjoy about as much of each other’s company as they can stand.

“She’ll get gripey, but I’m easygoing,” Ken said. “There’ll be those moments: She’ll be yelling at me and I’ll just go, ‘That’s OK, baby; that’s OK.’ ”

But trail life presents hikers with things that are assertively not OK: Mosquitoes that can drill through denim. Emboldened mice that skitter across the face of sleeping hikers for sport. Jagged rocks that chew up Vibram soles like so much beef jerky. Bears, swamps, snakes, cold, soaking rains. Steep climbs that have caused more than one despairing hiker to jettison stoves, clothing and dehydrated beef Stroganoff.

“There isn’t a single part of it that I’m dreading,” Ken said. “The one problem we have is that we can’t find a good powdered wine.”

After a nine-mile romp through Sycamore Canyon, he and Jan had barely broken a sweat. They snacked on whole-wheat bagels and peanut butter, wore matching sweatshirts and rhapsodized about early-morning water droplets glistening on the leaves. They looked as though they had been born to hike.

Oh, yes, friends have questioned their sanity. “Well, that’s your lifestyle, but it sure isn’t mine,” they say, leaving no doubt as to which lifestyle is closer to lunacy. But that doesn’t dissuade the Wilhites, whose philosophy of aging is to do what you please, as completely as you can--even if on some dark morning you might not feel like dragging yourself out of bed and into a pair of hiking boots.

“I’ve seen too many friends retire and die two years later,” said Ken, who was a salesman for a company that supplied linens to restaurants and hospitals. Before Jan retired, she set up merchandise displays in department stores.

The two have never undertaken a world-class trek, but caught the trail bug after reading an article six years ago. Since then, each neighborhood walk and each local day hike has been a preliminary to the Big One. On a cross-country trip to see their kids--from previous marriages--they steered clear of standard beds. Instead, they laid their air mattresses on the floor and snuggled into their sleeping bags for practice.

For some of last year, they were sidelined--he for a hernia operation, she for a surgical procedure on a vein in her leg.

A podiatrist who examined a bony growth on one of her feet declared: “You can’t hike with those feet.”

She replied: “Is that so?”

Of course, the trip won’t be unrelieved trudging. Every week or so, they’ll splurge for a shower, a motel room and the blue-plate special in one of the little towns off the trail. Like other hikers, they’ve arranged for strategically timed shipments of trail food to post offices on their route.

Jan dug deep into her pack and proudly produced a 10-pound can of dehydrated cabbage.

“Dehydrated cabbage?” I asked.

“There’s only so much macaroni and cheese you can eat,” she said.

Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.