Legends of the Traile: Myron Avery

A Madman, an Axe, and 2,000 miles of beautiful wilderness that needed to be destroyed

Follow the Appalachian Trail across Maine. It cannot be followed on horse or awheel. Remote for detachment, narrow for chosen company, winding for leisure, lonely for contemplation, it beckons not merely north and south but upward to the body, mind and soul of man. - Myron Avery, In the Maine Woods

When running from the authorities with a bloody axe, I often find myself hiding on the Traile. It doesn't work out very well if you can find yourself whilst hiding, see? Luckily, in the Appalachian Mounts, there are plenty of opportunities for the body, mind, soul and body-mind to become completely hypothermic, or quite confused really. Aha! A nice lake in which to swim. - Myron Avery, unpublished letter found on his person, 1958

Myron Haliburton Avery, the man responsible for clear-cutting all 2,000 miles of the forest (that wanderers today trample upon with heavy boots and walking sticks maiming enumerous molds and grasses), was a peculiar boy.

Born on October 31, 1899 to two Russian whalers from Vladivostok who drifted ashore in Maine after being shipwrecked, it was sometimes rumored that his mother - a startling beautiful woman - was stolen away and impregnated at sea by none other than Poseidon. As the story goes, she waited until he was asleep, slipped from out of her giant oyster shell and escaped his undersea kingdom on the back of a mighty seahorse!

The rumor, though probably true, could never be substantiated. She died in childbirth and neither of Avery's two surrogate fathers wanted to talk about it, seeing as Yusuf had been blinded and deafened in the great tsunami of 1870 and the other father, Fillyp, stole a horse and rode off into the wilderness as soon as he was conscious. The prime difficulty, however, was that no one spoke Russian in those days - not even the Russians.

Since no one could understand him, the young, multi-fathered, nameless child spent most of his days burning fenceposts or being taught survival skills by local chickens.

Often found pecking at their seeds, a local farmer cursed him and ran after him with a belt. As he chased the feral child off into the woods, belt in the air, the farmer yelled out loudly enough for the village to hear: "Let God know ye as a 'Myron Avery'!" This name was responsible for everything that followed, you see, as we can use the 1903 edition of Yon Mainer Dictionayree to see that Myron means "sea creature" and Avery means "misshapen" or "preposterous" in its Ancient Summerian incarnation.

Thusly, the preposterous sea-creature went on to live a life of crude prankery - garnering much hatred from all of the people in the village - and it wouldn't be until he met a drunken, old Native in the Woods (Benton MacKaye), that Avery was able to find his one true passion: chopping things, preferably into halves.As the old saying went, "Hear nary chopping? Look around quick, 'cause a tree is dropping." Needless to say, Avery's proclivity to chop first, ask questions later, garnered him a local status of sorts, and when he was but 14-years-old, he was sought out and hired by none other than Captain Archibald Fritz XIV, the wealthiest man in Maine at the time, or perhaps the entire Atlantic Northeast. Fritz can be seen in the photograph to the right, standing with the much younger Avery. The photo was taken mere days before his death*, and fortunately for Avery, he happened to be the one who murdered him. He then took over all 19 of his paper companies and amassed a small fortune, which then was piddled away on booze and an axe collection that to this day is the largest collection of sharp objects in the world. Lastly, merely as a formality, Avery was chased out of town by a new sheriff, and was forced to cut his way through 14 states of wilderness before getting lost in Florida and freezing to death.

This was the beginning of the Appalachian Traile. To be fleshed out sooner or later!

MacKaye, who promised Avery eternal life, amassed a much larger fortune, but that's a different story altogether ...


* Avery was rumored to have enslaved and trained an army of 50 crabs with the assistance of his Native friend, MacKaye, and while no one witnessed the crabs firsthand on the night of the murder, a crushed crab was found beneath the corpse of Fritz. His body had been riddled with pinches. The pinches were, in fact, ruled to be the cause of death. The axe-hole was thrown out, because according to old records, not a single axe could be found for questioning.