Date: 2005-03-06
To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0

Oak Park, Illinois.The temperature hit 60 degrees here today and gave me the needed impetus to start getting reorganised for the trail. Last year - ¢04 ¢ I ended at Harpers Ferry after a good years hiking by my standards, at least as compared to a disastrous start in ¢03. For those who wish further details on my saga so far, I would refer them to my ¢04 journal on this site.   I feel the familiar sense of nervous excitement mixed with apprehension as I plan for the ¢05 season. This time however I also feel a sense of inner peace and calmness. I know now that I am a very Slow Walker ¢ having met only one person [Slow Barbara] who is slower than I ¢ but it doesn¢t bother me any more. Knowing that I cannot get the whole trail done in a single year has not left me upset or frustrated ¢ rather I feel good that now I know that I can take my time and spend as long, or as short, a time on the trail as I wish, seeing that it doesn¢t realy matter when I finish anyway. I already noted that change last year and now I realy like it. I am in no hurry. I will do what I feel up to each day and let the miles fall, as they will. Katahdin will still be there.   This is quiet a change in attitude for a goal driven, aggressive, competitive former surgeon, but I like the new me better than the old, and maybe in large measure this is one of the great changes that the trail has brought to my life.   I suppose that from a technical perspective what I am doing is a section hike ¢ of 1200 miles ¢ but still a section hike. To me it seems more like I started to hike on March 15th 2003 and have been at it ever since. It is just that my hike has been interrupted by injuries [bilateral stress fractures in my knees] death [my brothers] family events [college graduations, planned vacations] and of course two long winters. But to me these have all been tempory interruptions and I have been on one long through hike since 2003.   I like it better this way, and I think I have gotten more out of it. I plan on frequent resupplies, many zero days, and always to have as light a pack as possible, not that the hike is an enjoyable event. It is mostly very hard work, under difficult conditions, but by going slower it has given me more time to reflect, and the frequent breaks from the trail have allowed me more time to think about the process of the hike itself.   Of course it is also likely [indeed possible] that I am just a slow and lazy hiker who has neither the physical or mental stamina to complete the trail in a single season, and that I have just dreamed up an elaborate set of excuses to explain my failings! But I like my explanation better.   During the winter I have spent a great amount of time thinking about the trail and my hike. Increasingly I have begun to realize that in many ways it is for me a pilgrimage. That I am engaged in a journey through sacred places. I think that the whole trail is, in a way, a sacred place. By that I mean that it possesses its own spirit and that you can get close to that spirit as you hike the trail. I know that this is not a very articulate way of expressing what I feel, I am not even sure that I have matured the thought process in my own mind sufficiently to express it in words as yet. I do know that as I hiked last year and I reflected on my ¢Thoughts for the Day¢ I came to realize that the land itself, the very trail that I was walking on, the environment that I was passing through, possess a spirit of its own. If you just listen, deep down inside of you, you can feel this force all around you. I don¢t realy know what it is, but I am sure that it is there and that it is powerful.   That is why this year I am looking forward to returning. I know that I will be wet, and cold, and hungry, and thirsty, and tired, and many times even uncertain of my reasons for continuing, but I also hope to gain a deeper understanding of this awareness of the spirit and the sacred that surrounds us all as we hike.   Maybe that is why we need long thru hikes. It has certainly taken me a long time to get to this stage of understanding, and I know that this is a very early stage of thinking about my hike as a pilgrimage. I am not sure that you can get these thoughts on short hikes; at least I am sure that I never did before. It seems as if being on the trail, the physical exertion, the mental demands, the ¢dangers toil and snares¢ has awoken something in a very primitive part of my brain, a something that recognizes that I am a part of this world that I walk through, that it is in some very fundamental way ¢right¢ for me to be doing this. A growing awareness that the trail and I are one in spirit. How about that for a Zen Thought?   Or it could be that I have been out on the trail too long and have just gone a little bonkers in the head, and that all of this will go away with time and distraction ¢ or not!   But all of this speculation and day dreaming is not doing to get the drop boxes packed, or the ¢05 Companion and Handbook read, or the tent checked, or the sleeping bag washed, or all of the other myriad of things done that I should be doing now instead of day dreaming over this journal.   Plan currently is to leave here at the end of the month for Harpers Ferry and start north from there.Thought for today-      ¢Be silent, listen, keep walking¢