Pile of Debris

So!  Here I am, back in washed society long before my estimated September 2nd reentry from the wilds of Vermont’s Long Trail.  What gives?

What gives is this:

1. I love backpacking
2. I hate backpacking alone

While I was preparing for the trip, I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would need and how I would manage to make my way from Williamstown, Massachusetts to the Canadian border.  I thought some about the amount of effort involved and how I would be burning an ungodly number of Calories a day (and probably lose some weight in the process!).  I wasn’t particularly afraid of not being able to handle the physical exertion, and knew that in time I would get stronger and by the end of the trail would have all of the muscular fortitude necessary to make it all 273+ miles.

What I did not anticipate was the intense loneliness of long-distance solo backpacking.  It is not uncommon not to see another soul for hours on end, and even then, only to see them for a brief moment of greeting along the lines of, “Good morning!” met with “Good morning! Headed south?” and a “Yep!  Have a good hike!” followed by “You, too!” and passing one another return to solitude.  Evenings at the shelters would entail more human contact, but even then, the exhaustion of the day and the varied pace of hikers meant that one would rarely see the same people two days in a row and even then would be more interested in going to sleep than having stimulating conversation.

And that gets at the key factor missing for me in the Long-Trail-by-myself hiking experience: Everything I saw and all the experiences I had seemed only half-real with no one to share them with.  Every day I would see something and want to turn to my friend and show them, only to find no friend there to share it with.  And so I realized that the thing I love most about backpacking is not the physical exertion (which, I can tell you, is mighty, and delightful in its way) or even the beauty of nature itself, but rather the sharing of that beauty with people I love.

In a parallel situation, I enjoy going to museums by myself. I used to go to the Philadelphia Museum of Art all the time while I was doing CPE there two summers ago.  But even better than going to museums by myself is going with a friend who can share the art with me, or with whom I can argue when the piece is strange or when our tastes don’t match. So it is with the wilderness, which, of course, is one of God’s great masterpieces of installation art.  I was having a great time on the trail, but it all seemed a bit half-hollow.  I was there, but I was hardly experiencing what I was doing.  There were moments of profound thought, and moments of genuine beauty, but it all seemed somehow wasted on a single person.

And so, I decided to step off the trail.  Not because I was unsure I could make it all the way to the Canadian border (because of that I had no doubt.  Some fear of the steep mountains, perhaps, but no doubt), nor was it just because I was lonely.  But rather, it was because I want to hike the Long trail someday with my friends, and I want to be able to share it with them as I go.  The thought of walking all of the way to Canada, especially after the Appalachian Trail (whose hikers made up the majority of the people I met) parts ways with the Long Trail some 100 miles up the state, feeling lonely and craving the conversation and relationships of my loved-ones was not my idea of how to spend the remainder of my summer.  The option instead to spend it with my friends in Vermont and in Washington, DC is infinitely more appealing and a much better way to cultivate the thing that I love even more than the outdoors, which is the loving relationships I have with people I care about.

And so, here I am.  Washed (more or less), and sleeping again in a bed.  I do have some regrets about leaving off the goal I had set for myself, but there is really no point in regret.  I sometimes find myself feeling sad that I will now no longer be able to impress people with this astounding feat of pedestrian effort.  But, seriously, is impressing people really any kind of reason to do anything?

I count it as one point against that troubling voice of the ego, which is so often calling us away from what is good and towards what we “ought” to like.  Or, put more simply, is a little death of that part of me that wanted to be admired for doing something other people hadn’t and a little bit of resurrection in the form of relationships new and old to which I can now devote some much needed attention, relationships which are in themselves little signs of life and which make more of us who share them.