By Emily Lawson, The Herald Bulletin
ANDERSON — Backpacking for more than 2,100 miles is a daunting task for any hiker, let alone one with a serious skin condition.
Hiker Matthew Wood didn’t let his rare epidermolytic hyperkeratosis stop him from making his dream of hiking the Appalachian Trail a reality.
“Basically my skin is just really dry and really fragile, a lot more fragile than the average person’s skin,” said the 22 year-old Anderson University student. “When I was younger, it would crack and bleed from being so dry.
“I have to really pay attention to it.”
His grandmother, Tommie Wood, said the condition is not only extremely rare, but requires a lot of care.
“I remember sitting in the pediatrician’s office in Texas for his first appointment, with his mother and father,” the grandmother recalled.
“The doctor looked at us and said, ‘This is really rare. You’re going to need a lot of help and a lot of support’.”
She added, “I was hoping she could find them a support group, but I knew that if it was as rare as she had said, then there wouldn’t be one. Sure enough she came back and said she hadn’t had any luck, but she would keep trying. Right then I knew that this was something that was going to need a lot of care, and it has.”
Setting goals
Despite this setback, the young adventurer has surpassed many goals that even the average person hasn’t.
For one, he’s an Eagle Scout.
“That’s something that takes a lot of dedication,” said Wood’s college roommate of four years, Michael Douglass. “There are a number of merit badges that you have to earn and a project that has to be completed. So, it’s a lot of work, but he’s a very dedicated person. When he gets his mind set on something, he sticks with it.”
Robert Wood, the hiker’s grandfather, agreed.
“Nobody thought he could become an Eagle Scout because of his skin condition, but he did. He proved them wrong.”
That was just the beginning.
Since then, the young excursionist — an education and history major — has had his own adventures including hiking the Appalachian Trail — solo.
“I actually hiked half of the [Appalachian] Trail in the summer of 2007. Then, this year I decided to hike it again from the beginning. I started out in Georgia on the eighth of May and hiked all the way up to Maine. I finished September 29th, so I did it in about 4 months and 3 weeks,” said Wood.
“He hiked the entire thing alone, for the most part,” Douglass said. “I met up with him at the half-way point, Harper’s Ferry. It was kind of neat because that’s where he had stopped the first time he hiked it. He said to me, ‘I really don’t know what to expect beyond this point.’ We set out from there and I hiked with him for a week and we covered about 81 miles.”
Elements a problem
While on the trail, Wood knew he couldn’t neglect his skin.
“I had to shower as much as I could and stay on top of things as best I could. My skin gets pretty dry, so the weather and other elements added a little bit more of a challenge to it,” he said.
“I had to plan ahead as much as possible,” he continued. “My pack was somewhere between 25 and 28 pounds when I started out, so I definitely needed to resupply to make sure I had enough food and other things like that to last me.”
“Our biggest concern when he told us he was doing this was his skin,” said Tommie Wood. “It was much worse when he was little, but it’s still there.”
“I remember when we used to have to soak his feet, just to get his socks off because his feet would bleed so bad. He also can’t perspire ... He used to have to wear a special cooling vest because he couldn’t. So we were just really concerned,” his grandmother said.
Although comforting, it seemed the concern for his skin wasn’t needed. In fact, natural elements posed more of a problem.
“There was one point, in New York when I was right behind a tornado. I actually had to make a detour and walk the road instead of the trail. You really couldn’t pass the trail, that little section in Unionville was completely destroyed from it.”
At the end of the day the focus, for Wood, wasn’t on his skin, but, instead, on his experience.
“There are a lot of great things about hiking the trail,” the backpacker said. “The things you get to see are amazing, but the biggest thing is the people. Not only the people hiking the trail, but people in the different towns.”
Wood added, “The trail goes through Dalton, Massachusetts, right down the main street and there’s this man named Tom that lives right there. He’s been taking hikers in for about 20 years, probably even more than that. He took me in and gave me some food and a place to stay. That’s what it’s really about.”
