Date: 2004-12-29
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Miles today: 0.0

I¢ve been thinking lately about the trail, and the statistics about how many make it and how many don¢t, and the reasons they leave, and trying to do a sort of internal assessment. Have I got what it takes? Can I make it? Will I? And I think I can, mentally and emotionally at least, barring injury or illness or other extenuating circumstances. I don¢t think I¢ll find myself hating the trail, or growing so tired of putting one foot in front of another that I¢d do anything for a real bed and a hot shower and a normal life. I am afraid of finding myself feeling that way anyway, and only time will tell, yet I don¢t think I¢ll find myself giving up. A little bit of know-how, mixed with passion and balanced with perspective, plus a liberal dose of luck: we¢ll see. We¢ll see where I end up.Perhaps it¢s a strange thing, you¢re thinking, for a girl with some camping but no long-distance hiking experience to be so sure she can swing it. How could I know? And the answer is of course that I don¢t know, not for sure, but I think I can, and I think so because of a year I spent in New Hampshire three years ago.Halfway through college, I¢d burned out. I couldn¢t bear academics anymore. I didn¢t know what I wanted to do or why I was doing it and I couldn¢t stand the thought of wasting all the money my parents were spending on tuition while my education skidded by underneath my feet. I was tired of spending all my time running from one climate-controlled building to another. I needed out.So, in what felt like the biggest decision I¢d yet made, I signed the papers and left for a year, enlisting in a volunteer conservation corps based in New Hampshire. And I drove north.New Hampshire¢s a funny state. Libertarian and crotchety in character. Live free or die. To get to our camp it was necessary literally to drive both past a gun shack and down Podunk Road. And yet there was the landscape: casually unaware of its own rugged beauty, and always the autumn-covered mountains in the distance.There were 18 of us in the crew, living in wood cabins without running water or electricity in a state park in the southern part of the state. We arrived in October and left the following August. We spent the winter months commuting into Concord and Manchester, team-teaching elementary and middle school students environmental education, tutoring low-income kids in an afterschool program, and volunteering at a kids¢ soup kitchen. We spent the summer months building and maintaining hiking trails around the state. I loved it, in a consuming, relieving way. It was exactly what I had needed. To do something useful, and meaningful, and to know that it was useful and meaningful.It was also a paradise of the absurd. There was teaching and tutoring and trailwork, but there were also weeks passed without showering, naked parades in the snow, uneasy truces between vegans and carnivores, 18 matching pairs of pink velour hot pants, Kevlar paint suits and singing aliens, a cook who liked to throw pots at intruders, an unfortunate incident involving a state trooper, a camera, three bare asses, and a laundromat; and one particularly ill-advised but nevertheless extraordinary food fight. Not everyone wanted to stay. We lost a couple, over the course of the year, who couldn¢t bear the tight quarters, or the insular community, or who were concerned with personal matters they had to leave in order to address. There were innumerable internal social dramas, inevitable when you put 18 twenty-somethings together in a few small cabins in the middle of nowhere for a New Hampshire winter:¢Oh f***. I think they just drove the car out onto the pond.¢¢Someone ate my baked tofu, and it was clearly labeled! This is comPLETEly unacceptable.¢¢One of the vegans hid the TV and I am REALLY PISSED.¢¢I can¢t keep the wood stove going tonight! There¢s a GHOST in there!¢¢They're having a biting contest! The safe word's 'orangutan'!¢But I never thought of cutting my losses and going. I wasn¢t always overjoyed to be there; I was often frustrated with the lack of personal space; I was sometimes cold, and wet, and dirty. But somehow none of that was ever a big deal. Because I¢d fallen in love, the same way I fell in love at ten years old in a kayak on the broads of Lake Winnepesaukee under a July sky, the same way I fell in love at fourteen in the hush between the final curtain and the first applause on opening night. I fell in love with the smell of woodsmoke and the color of a whole woods turning spring green; in love with the rain and the wind on my skin; in love with knowing where the moon was in the night sky, and the way the snow fell, and the texture of bread dough before baking; in love with the way my arms and legs responded to the days of physical labor and grew strong; in love with using a rock bar to move a boulder four times my size; in love with the community and the friendship and the laughter, and above all with being truly present in my body and its present moment, in love with the work and and the wild joy. I think I will fall in love with the Trail.Here is what I wrote in a journal kept in early May of that year, on an evening in a campsite in Pawtuckaway State Park in southern New Hampshire, where a small group of us had been working to construct a timber staircase into an eroding hillside:****I¢¦stopped tonight on the way up the gravel road, an empty blue five gallon water jug in one hand, turned around, watching the ripples in the lake and the way they wash around the standing stones, the dewy trees, the half-light of dusk in a spring rain, the rush of water through the culvert washed free of leaves, a light in Eric¢s car and music, and from off in the trees where the kitchen tarp hangs, flashlights, laughter, low voices. Phillip¢s song comes on and Charissa teases him. Who could have chosen Moon Boot Lover? I have no idea. The air is cool. One day my soul just opened up. It¢s been said before ¢ just relief, rushing through me like vernal flow. Money? It¢ll work itself out. Here ¢ now ¢ standing in soggy boots with dry feet, my Wal-Mart bag boot lining wrapped loosely around my ankles, in rain pants splattered with dried mud after a long day¢s good work with friends ¢ here in the twilight like a standing stone in running water ¢ such clarity: it gets no better than this, nor does it need to. That happiness, done right, is redemptive, holy.****So I am worried and yet I am not. I am afraid my troublesome knees will be troublesome; I am afraid of loneliness, or sickness, or injury, or of finding myself physically incapable of keeping up. I am afraid not so much of being cold or wet as I am afraid that coldness or wetness will drive me to think of leaving. I am afraid of becoming fixated on schedules and mileage and destinations such that I lose sight of why I went to the trail in the first place.But I have been afraid before, and I¢m still standing. And it¢s not as though anyone will be personally let down if I don¢t make it all the way. Let¢s be realistic: they all think I¢m insane to begin with. I want to make it to Maine, but if for some reason that doesn¢t happen, it¢s okay, as long as I stop because I want to, and not because I am afraid I can¢t go on. I am doing this for myself. I¢m about as stubborn as they come, but I¢m also willing to take things a day at a time. And somehow, for whatever paradoxical sense it makes, I suspect (and hope) that that willingness will help me go farther in the end than if I were to be constantly thinking two weeks ahead.Twice in my life I¢ve known subconsciously, kinetically, that I was doing what I was meant to be doing. Once was during my year in New Hampshire; the second was a year later when, after an extended hiatus from the theater, I started doing it again. Different, and the same, the theater and the outdoors, but that¢s another topic for another day. Still: one body, and to be willing to live in it. To be willing to breathe.Certainly, it¢s all in the timing. I don¢t know for certain that setting foot on the trail will bring with it that unshakable sense of rightness, and of belonging. I won¢t know, I suppose, until I get there. But I¢m young and healthy and unattached and dreaming of the mountains again. Let¢s say I suspect I¢m right. A feeling, flimsy as grass, easily disproven. But still there. I have a hunch, quiet and insistent. For now, a hunch is enough.