This field guide to Chris Woodside’s career covers the woman’s life east of the 80th Meridian. It begins in southeastern Pennsylvania, moves eastward to central New Jersey, briefly way south, back to Philadelphia, northward to New York, then up and down the ridge of the Appalachians. It wanders through  New Hampshire and Maine and rests with the establishment of a home base in the lower Connecticut River Valley.

39° 30' N / 75° 2' W

Just about every ancestor on the Woodside side of the family was some kind of tenant farmer in southern New Jersey dating to pre-Revolutionary War. They were hard-working people who probably didn’t have a lot of money and didn’t go to college. My grandfather Amos Woodside left the farm as a teenager for a better life in Trenton (“Trenton makes, the world takes”). He was a union card holder. During the Great Depression there was no work, so Grandpop started a milk delivery business. My father, Robert Hanks Woodside, got up at 1 a.m. when he was in high school to help his father deliver milk. They talked a lot about everything during those early dark hours in the truck. Hard work, making your own success, and talking things out became family traditions that all affected my work. My father talked a lot to me, too, from the time I was tiny. He was a solid, confident man who had been a professional soccer player but grown up poor. He was self-made.

39° 57'N / 75° 10' W

My mother Gloria Nicholson Woodside grew up in Philadelphia, where her parents had grown up. Her father worked for the telephone company and was a ham radio operator and a trombone player. Her mother Viola was a petite jokester who raised her own three daughters and her niece. My mother married my father when she was 20. In her 40s, she became a self-taught costume designer for the Princeton Ballet. Another self-made hard worker. All of my siblings and I were born in Philadelphia. We lived in Southampton, Pennsylvania until I was 4, and then moved to Princeton, New Jersey in 1963.

40° 21’ N / 74° 40’ W

My three older brothers and younger sister found Princeton in the 1960s and 1970s to offer tremendous independence. We played outside with no agenda and rode uptown on our bicycles with no adults along. I can still taste the Necco wafers we bought at the Carousel. We pedaled often to school and across the Princeton University campus to get to Episcopal church choir practice. The choir loomed large in how our family practiced our faith and made sense of authority. It was also the first place I learned to read music. One odd highlight of this period was when I played the raven in Trinity's production of "Noye's Fludde," a Renaissance era interpretation of the Ark which Benjamin Britten had composed into a church opera. Noah sends the raven, the story goes, away from the ark to look for land; the bird never returns. In my tunic, tights, and black bird head, I danced out to the narthex, never to return. My friend Beth got to be the dove, returning with a branch. My parents gave me piano, clarinet, and dance lessons and summer camp (Les Chalets Francais, on the coast of Downeast Maine).

45° 18’ N/ 72° W

I climbed my first mountain, Rattlesnake Mountain on Squam Lake, New Hampshire, while on vacation with my family in 1962.

40° 21’ N / 74° 40’ W

My first writing project was to be a two-volume safety manual, an idea developed with a friend in the fake-log-cabin playhouse in the Princeton back yard. By age 12 I was under the spell of traveling creative writing teacher Eugene Doherty. He loved Ernest Hemingway and could quote The Old Man and the Sea. I was a motivated learner but not savvy in the ways of the college search, the importance of keeping my grades up, or using connections. Every college I applied to in 1977 rejected me. Then I applied late to Emory University, went there for four trimesters, studied constantly, and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania halfway through sophomore year. Philadelphia and majoring in American Civilization and writing for the Daily Pennsylvanian were the life I’d been waiting for.

39° 57'N / 75° 10' W

My first journalism job was typesetting and helping with production at Town Topics, a weekly in Princeton, after my sophomore year in college. I also was an intern reporter at a little paper in Burlington County, New Jersey, called, unbelievably, The Little Paper. In this, the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was not that easy for a young woman to get ahead in journalism. I applied for an internship at the Cleveland Plain Dealer the next year, and the managing editor said, looking at my clips from the Little Paper, “You must have worked really hard on those. You had to interview all those people!” I didn’t even have the sense to storm out. At 22 I had my BA and was answering telephones and typing obituaries at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Soon after I took a job as assistant editor at a weekly paper in Center City Philadelphia. The Welcomat (yes, that was the name then) was a former shopper paper on its way to being an alternative weekly. I worked for Dan Rottenberg as the only fulltime staffer. The Welco offered to pay me $150 a week to start. But if I were willing to also be the staff photographer, I would make $200 a week. I had owned a Minolta SRT 201 for a few weeks. I said of course I was an experienced photographer. And so I wrote articles and a column on a portable electric typewriter on the third floor of a row house near 18th and Ludlow streets. I took three rolls of film a week and gradually learned not to catch the backs of people. I lived at 50th and Pine and commuted by bicycle. WXPN-FM, a listener-supported station on the Penn campus, swept me into its world. I loved experimental radio in the middle of the night and hosting classical shows once a week.

51° 32’ N/ 0° 5’ W

At 24 I left Philadelphia with a grant to live for a month in London, where I interviewed journalists and editors in an attempt to explain the difference between the British and American press. It was a tremendous eye-opener for me, not only to spend time abroad after a sheltered life, but also to see how much opinion and irony enlivened the British press.

41° 4' N / 73° 51' W The next several years found me in Westchester County, New York, where I had moved for love (my future husband Nat's). I house-sat a gigantic Queen Anne style house on a hill. During this period I tried freelance writing, worked as a camp counselor, was briefly a church secretary, broadcast radio shows for the Pillar of Fire Church in Zarephath, New Jersey (really), taught adults and children how to swim at the YMCA, taught middle school for one year, and worked for a birthday-cake children’s party service. Nat Eddy and I married in 1985 and lived in Tarrytown for two more years. I became a managing editor of a twice-weekly newspaper in Mount Kisco, the Patent Trader. It was very good training and also disheartening. I was not happy as a middle manager.

34° 32' N / 83° 59' W to 45° 39' N / 68° 42' W and, finally— 41° 23' 8" N / 72° 26' 8" W

We left our jobs in spring 1987 to hike the Appalachian Trail, from Georgia to Maine. This was a huge turning point. It gave me a kind of inner peace that I had lacked before and a confidence that came from within, not from without. When we returned, Nat and I moved to Connecticut, where he did graduate work and became a teacher and I started at The Day, a daily paper in southeastern Connecticut, where I worked for 13 years. Our daughters Elizabeth and Annie were born in 1988 and 1990.

I covered many beats and edited most sections at The Day. I copyedited news, business, and science pages before becoming a reporter on the night staff. I covered small towns for nine years, seven of them in Lyme and Old Lyme. I learned how to write better, faster, and to report with less fear. The lower Connecticut River had gone from "the world's most beautifully landscaped cesspool" to an internationally regarded wetlands. That and my mountain experience propelled me into starting the environment beat at The Day. I was the environment reporter for three years.

I was exposed to the world of marine and coastal science as a fellow of the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting in Rhode Island. My interest in the environment had begun on the shores of Squam Lake when I was a child, but the AT thru-hike and the ridges and estuaries of southeastern Connecticut had ingrained that fascination. By the late 1990s I had looked into my crystal ball and not seen the future I wanted at my newspaper job. So after a summer off with my family to visit Laura Ingalls Wilder’s houses in the Midwest, I gathered my courage and quit. Self-emplloyment varies the days and multiples the bosses.

The backcountry rambler in me met the editor and writer these last several years. The Blue-Blazed Hiking Trails of Connecticut grabbed me in 2001, when I hiked the Metacomet Trail in sections and wrote about the journey for Appalachia journal. The Metacomet Trail and a lobbyist I had interviewed as a reporter both encouraged me to write for, and become editor of, Connecticut Woodlands magazine. Connecticut Forest & Park Association, which publishes it, also recruits and guides trail maintainers on the Blue Trails. Now Nat and I are volunteer maintainers of sections of the Mattabesett and Reservoir Loop trails in Middletown. In 2006 I became editor of Appalachia journal, published by the Appalachian Mountain Club. Ever since then, I seem to meet extraordinary hikers and writers every season, on and off the trail. The mountains are where I feel most like myself, both as a writer and as a person.

But I live in the lower Connecticut River Valley. Here, I work hard, talk to my husband, dream, write in spiral-bound notebooks at the kitchen table, hike, run, walk my dog, Charlie, struggle to grow vegetables, and sing at the Episcopal church in Essex. Cold nights find me by the woodstove in Deep River, working on new articles or just staring into space to recharge.