There’s been a missing persons report in the area. It’s usually easy to put a name to a corpse. She asked if he was using the Florida Trail App, and he responded that he didn’t have a phone. He said that he had started in New York and was heading down to Key West. She pulled over, and they started to chat. She was out looking for a different hiker when she saw Mostly Harmless. Fairbanks is what is known as a “trail angel,” someone who helps out through-hikers who pass near her, giving them food and access to a shower if they want. “He was out there with a smile on his face, walking south,” Mason recalls.īy the last week of January, he was in northern Florida, walking on the side of Highway 90, when a woman named Kelly Fairbanks pulled over to say hello. Two weeks later, Mason heard from a friend in Alabama who had seen Mostly Harmless hiking through a snowstorm. He then left the shop and went on his way. Mostly Harmless hesitated but then agreed. He asked Mostly Harmless if he could take a picture. Mason loves hikers who are a little bit different, a little bit strange. Mason printed the 60 pages of the map and sold it to Mostly Harmless for $5 cash, which the hiker pulled from a wad of bills that Mason remembers being an inch thick. Another character puts in 15 years of research and then adds the adverb. Early in the series, a character discovers that Earth is defined by a single word in the guide: harmless.
Maybe, too, it was a reference to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Later, it became “Mostly Harmless,” which is how he described himself one night at a campfire. He was “Denim” at first, because he had started his trek in jeans. Hikers sometimes acquire trail names, pseudonyms they use while deep in the woods. He told people he met along the way that he had worked in the tech industry and he wanted to detox from digital life. The Appalachian Trail runs through the area, and he started walking south, moving slowly but steadily down through Pennsylvania and Maryland. And he brought a notebook, in which he would scribble notes about Screeps, an online programming game. He did bring a giant backpack, which his fellow hikers considered far too heavy for his journey. Or at least he didn’t tell anyone he met what it was. He didn’t bring a phone he didn’t bring a credit card. He wanted to get away, maybe from something and maybe from everything. In April 2017, a man started hiking in a state park just north of New York City.