August 28, 2016 Mile 1543.4-1571.2 27.8 Miles I thrash, zip, stuff, crinkle, and crunch with abandon. Milk said to make some noise, and I’m hoping that means they want to get an early start, too. I won’t be able to keep their pace, but they break a lot more than I do. I prefer to do some of my hiking alone anyway, but it’s nice to have friends for the breaks and to camp with. It’s a beautiful morning. Blue skies, a few wispy clouds, cool air. There’s nothing as wonderful as waking up outside on a day like this, knowing that you have the whole day to spend outside, and that in the evening, you’ll get to rest your head outside, too. Colors are brighter and the day seems full of possibility. When I’m all packed up, I look over at Hoot—still asleep—and Chocolate Milk—awake, but bleary-eyed. Milk stares at me with listless eyes but doesn’t say anything, so I don’t break the silence. He’s awake, so I’ll let him decide whether to wake Hoot now or if both of them will sleep a little more. I crunch my way back to the trail. They’re so fast, I’m sure they’ll catch up to me within a couple hours even if they do sleep in. As it turns out, I don’t see them for the rest of the day, or ever again. A few months later I will read some other hikers’ blogs and see them in a picture with a few other hikers in Ashland. It’s not entirely clear, but from the tone of the blog it sounds like Ashland was the end of their hike. This morning, though, I have high hopes that I will see them during my next break, so I hike fast, but take leisurely breaks. At breakfast I sit crosslegged on a slab of cold granite and look over the country to come. Two bowhunters climb the trail in front of me. They are in their 50s, and carry themselves with the friendly confidence of firefighters. They are boyish in their eagerness. If I were to guess, only one of them has ever been bowhunting before, and it’s a fairly new sport even to him. The other one, the one who holds his bow like a new toy that he hasn’t had a chance to use, asks me if I’ve seen any bucks around. I try to think back to the last time I saw a buck. It’s probably been four or five hundred miles. I tell him so, with false regret. I don’t think they are bad people for wanting to hunt and kill a deer; hunting is a natural human impulse, and I’m sure they have plenty of good reasons to justify hunting. Still, I don’t think it should be a weekend escape, entered into lightly. Hunting is an inherently violent act, and like any violence it strains the psyche. I worry about the damage that hunters create in themselves and society when they treat violence as sport, when they react to the death of a living creature with bravado and pride instead of sacred solemnity. It is another symptom of our extractivism, our belief that we are the spider rather than part of the web. These two men are not unkind, though; they are simply part of a culture that values bravado and sport over subtler ethical distinctions. They live in a society that seems to only recognize relationships and connections between humans, as if we are somehow disconnected from everything else. If they are to blame for anything, it is that they accept their culture’s norms too readily. The men hike on, heavy-footed and garrulous. I am comforted that they are unlikely to kill anything, carrying on as they are. I pack up and move along, too, wondering as I go, what norms do I blindly accept? How are my choices like theirs? There are so many. If I were in the thick of society, I’m certain I would find it overwhelming and exhausting to try to identify and examine each of them, not to mention make changes to the norms that have become habits. Out here, though, I have nothing to struggle against. I am simply taking inventory. I’m mostly thinking about waste, because every day I look at the garbage I’m carrying out with me, and wondering what it would be like if I were responsible for keeping and dealing with all of my waste back home. I discover that many norms are part of our discussions as a society already: single-use plastics, for example. Some are things that we think we have no choice about, or don’t easily see an alternative to: the plastic wrappings that keep foods hermetically sealed, owning and regularly using a car. Then there are norms that we never think about: the necessity for multiple sets of clothes for example, or turning on lights when we are in a room, even if there’s plenty of natural light for what we’re doing. I’ve been hiking in the same clothes for months now, and the sunlight is plenty for everything I’m doing out here. I start to think about ways I can change and reduce my impacts. Things like buying fewer clothes and wearing them more often, buying produce that doesn’t need to be sealed. I can already see that overcoming the cultural norms will be hard work and will make me stand out (After the trail, when I sit in the living room and read a book in ample natural light, my wife will walk in and laugh “don’t you want some light?” She’ll think that I’m being weird by not turning on the light, and she’s right, for that’s all that weirdness is—being outside the norms). Norms have always been flexible to me. When I was 14 I became a vegan. Growing up in California, that was just a little unusual; most people knew at least a few vegetarians, and vegan was “sort of like that”. When I moved to Iowa for college, I was more of a rarity. There were few vegetarians. I almost never mentioned it except when people offered me something I wouldn’t eat, and then you could see their discomfort. People get uncomfortable when you break the norms of society. It creates tension when people realize that there are other alternatives. When they realize there are options, they have to make choices, and that’s uncomfortable. As the world changes, our norms have to catch up, and the only way they can do that is if someone breaks the norms first, and others follow. Once enough people break the old norms, the culture shifts and adopts new norms, but those first few people are weirdos until the rest of the culture joins them. We need our weirdos, even if their weirdness never becomes a new norm, because we can never know for sure which new idea is going to work best with the changing world. I emerge my mental churnings and look around. The landscape has become rockier and reddish-brown. The elevation has been fairly constant all day. I try to stay present in the moment, but my mind seems to have other ideas and it dives back down into all the different norms I can adjust. To what purpose? To live a more ethical, less wasteful life. I fully recognize I won’t be able to do it myself, but perhaps I can be one of those weirdos just on the edge of culture who shifts a few people around him, and that small group can shift the people around them. I once learned about a thing called a trim-tab. On one of those giant cargo ships, the rudder is too big to turn, so they put a little rudder on it. When the captain turns the wheel, it turns the trim-tab, which changes the flow of water enough to help turn the big rudder, which then turns the ship. That’s the type of weirdo I want to be. A small descent brings me into more trees, and soon I’m crossing a road: Highway 3. A campground is just a little ways off trail, with pit toilets and water. It’s completely empty, so I set myself one of the picnic tables and read my book while I make and eat my lunch. Why is such a pretty campground empty in the middle of summer, I wonder? After lunch I climb back up to the ridge line and continue that way for hours, dipping away for brief stretches of time but always returning to the big views. The mountains drop away to the North (I am still headed West), and I can see a large plume of smoke, big enough to be a wildfire, off in the distance. I sure hope that isn’t near the trail.
The evening brings a colorful sky, and I find a campsite in a little wind-protected saddle that looks out into the expansive basin to the north. I can see some farms and the edge of a town starting to glitter in the falling darkness. As I sit and eat dinner in the beauty of the fading sunset, I think about how grateful I am to be out here. To get perspective, to see all this wild, beautiful land. To work my body to exhaustion and to give my mind space to stretch out, unencumbered and undistracted. To think. To play simulations in my brain of different ways to relate to society. To examine my convictions. To pause from the daily grind and step outside of my own life and hold it in my hand like an object and to think, is this a good life? Here in this campsite, I think, it is.
1 Comment
Shane
2/8/2020 09:01:38 am
You are an amazing writer. I am enjoying every step of your PCT experience and all about your family life. I am so Happy to be a part of it.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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