Why (or what’s the porpoise?)

By pure coincidence, a cousin I barely know lives about an hour from where I am now. That means that after years of seeing each other only during sporadic family reunions, we finally had the chance to talk. Thanks to my partner Naomi, who is on the facebook, we met up at a state park about halfway between our respective homes. Naomi had never met my cousin, and I hadn’t seen her in—well, I don’t know how many years.

One of the last times we saw each other lodged in my memory, so it was the first thing I brought up upon seeing her again. We’d been at one of those family reunions on a beach in North Carolina. She snatched my uncle’s camera, and like a wildlife photographer tracking an endangered species, she stalked our cousin Andy who’d taken to covering himself head to toe in black neoprene to prevent sunburn. Andy must have always been a gangling creature, awkward and angular, but I agreed with my cousin: the outfit made him look like the “after” photo on a weight loss brochure for Orcas. Even when he just wanted to splash in the tiny pool behind our vacation rental, Andy insisted on donning a black wetsuit, matching booties and gloves, and a black floppy-brimmed hat. Never mind that the temperatures regularly reached the nineties. He’d be out there with only a patch of white skin showing around his black diving mask. I’m pretty sure my cousin got some good pictures of Orca Andy, and I’d admired her sense of humor ever since.

The day we met her at the state park was windy, and we walked for a while through a grassy field before taking refuge in the trees by a river. Naomi or I mentioned that I was going to (try to) through-hike the PCT. My cousin, in turn, asked something I was wholly unprepared to answer: Why? Why do you want to hike for days, weeks, and months on end? Why, on this green, brown, and blue earth, would you want to walk for thousands of miles?

Hearing her ask it so bluntly made me realize that such a hike might be a strange thing to want to do.

Fortunately, Naomi said something about how I planned to keep a blog, and the conversation veered, sparing me from having to stumble through an ad-hoc answer. But the why question stuck in my mind. I’ve written about how I can breathe more fully in the wilderness and how re-entering the wild always feels like coming home. Based on that alone, a sustained wilderness adventure makes sense. But then why not go live in a cabin somewhere remote? I’ve thought about it but not dreamt about it as intensely as I dream about long hikes. No, maybe that’s not quite true. I’d love to do it and was momentarily tempted when I learned a village was looking for a replacement hermit after theirs retired. But the practical side of me always interferes: Seriously, a hermit? But you drive yourself crazy sometimes! Or if I think about retreating to a wilderness-fringed cabin instead, the questions grow even more mundane: How would you earn enough to eat? And how would you get food at the edge of the world? Alas, pragmatism confounds so many dreams.

Maybe I lack the courage to fully take up the tent stakes that anchor me here in this human world. Or maybe it’s a world I actually want to (shudder) engage with on some level? Regardless, I don’t think I’m ready to leave for good, at least not yet. So a long hike is a perfect alternative. It’s like going for a swim but getting out again rather than living in the ocean and become an emaciated whale myself.

A long but temporary stay in the wilderness is part of the why, but I don’t think it’s all. A couple days ago, Naomi kindly accompanied me to get bulk food for my hike. I’ve taken to walking places around town with a weighted backpack to help prepare, and as we walked, I told her how strange walking seems if I make the mistake of thinking about it. Put one foot in front of the other. Hey, well done! Now put the other one in front of that one. Good job! Now do it again. And again. And again, a few million times. You haven’t just walked to the grocery store, you’ve walked across the country! It’s so simple, so silly, so just…small. No single step matters, not really. Even if you string quite a few together, they don’t add up to much compared to the 2600 miles of the PCT. But string together days of walking, and you slowly start to get somewhere. How gloriously simple, deliberative, and slow! I’ve always liked simple things that accumulate into long projects, the sort you can get to know and start to understand before they end. I love coming to know the pattern of a long endeavor, living and dreaming about it, seeing it in rain and sun, seeing it evolve over time as I add to it. Part of me doesn’t want those projects to end because after some time they become friends that whisper kind reassurances: All you have to do is keep walking, and you’ll make something worth being proud of. They’re a slow triumph. That’s the reason I walked 100 km one Saturday in April, then came back and did it again. And a third time. It’s the same reason I wrote a novel. It’s a type of crazy I love: lay these tiny bricks called “steps” or “words” end-to-end, and eventually you cover unfathomable ground!

So there you have it, my dear cousin, the answer I choked on when you asked why I wanted to hike: because it’s simple, sustained, and crazy. Oh, but don’t worry, I’ll try to photograph any endangered wildlife I might encounter along the way.

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The food question

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The mountain from below