The Trail of the Lonesome Hiker
Written by Ramona Stylos, April 18, 2011 He planned to start his hike on April 1st. I teased him, saying, “Is that so that if you change your mind before the day is over you can say ‘April Fools’?” He answered, “No, I won’t change my mind, I’ve been planning this for months.” And he had, I just hadn’t heard anything about it. But, then, where’s the boy that confides his plans to his grandmother? We always thought of him as the scholar of the family — the only one of four siblings who went on through school, after the first several years of home-schooling finishing high school [editor’s note: GED], then college, then grad school, getting his PhD in Computer Science at 28. We’ve always viewed him with awe and admiration, this slight, quiet boy who practically lives on bread and cheese, never weighing more than 120 lbs. We knew he would not be an athlete, though he was remarkably accurate when sending a basketball flying toward the hoop. When Jeff graduated from Carnegie Mellon he announ