Date: 2006-04-18
To: the trail can be a political space
Miles today: 0.0

¢We want to be set free. The man driving a pickaxe into the ground wants to know the meaning of his pickaxe blow. The pickaxe blow of the convict, a humiliation for the convict, is not the same as the pickaxe blow of the prospector, which gives stature to the prospector. Prison is not in the place where the pickaxe blows fall. The horror is not the physical. Prison is where the pickaxe blows fall without purpose, fall without bonding the man to the community of men. And we yearn to escape from that prison.¢(excerpt from Antoine de Saint-Exupery¢Wind, Sand and Stars) In his travel memoir, ¢The Water in Between,¢ Kevin Patterson states that, in life and travel, ¢We had all turned our backs on some thing or another. The distinction between rejection and a selection can be a fine one. But this distinction is crucial.¢ During the past year, I¢ve discovered just how entrenched in the material world I¢ve become. I have student debt, credit card debt, a lease, work obligations, health insurance, utility bills. I need to work so I can own an apartment, buy clothing, have health insurance¢¦all in order to enable me to work more productively. I went to school for six years so that I could get a good job to pay off my student debt and buy professional clothing and indulge in the past times of the upper middle class. The lifestyle I¢ve chosen was never the product of a conscious effort to move up in America¢s fairly rigid class system (I grew up relatively poor by American standards). But, in retrospective observation, that is what has become of my efforts. Materialism is this horrible, never ending, more or less unavoidable cycle that we, as citizens of a developed country, are captives of. It reminds me of that song about the hole in the bucket where, ultimately and ironically, the repaired bucket is needed to fix itself. It¢s a song which has frustrated and delighted children for generations, perhaps because this song is our first gentle lesson in futility. Maybe the song¢s lyrics should become ¢there¢s a student loan bill in the mailbox¢. As a response to my relatively new found awareness of this cycle (albeit, probably a feeble one¢but the best I can muster), I¢ve opted to give up my worldly possessions because, it appears, they¢ve taken possession of me. So my furniture, my dishes, my books have gone or are going up for sale or off to donation. It seems as though a lot of people work hard to achieve the ¢good life¢. And the good life rewards them with more work, more material obligations, stress and frustrations, and ridiculously spent leisure time in between. Now, I¢m not sure where these sentiments orient me politically. Perhaps they dog ear me as being a na ve idealist, someone who will never be able to achieve success in its most normative design. The near thirty year old in me (the person who sees my peers getting higher degrees, better jobs, larger incomes, and more prestige) worries that my responses to the world around me may be infantile or, even worse, futile. Sometimes I panic, wondering if those with houses and cars and tidy investment portfolios know something I don¢t. I just sold a piece of furniture last night; a writing desk that has been in my family for many years. I look around my almost empty apartment right now and feel a lightness. This lightness comes from more than a pragmatic knowledge that I won¢t have to pay hundreds of dollars for movers, over a thousand for storage, and even more in shipping to have my possessions come join me when I settle down. In this world our things tend to define us. And, in getting rid of my things, I¢m finding hidden aspects of myself coming to the surface, attempting their own definitions. Hiking the A.T. is more than walking from Springer to Katahdin. For me, it¢s a political act on the most personal level. I know that I¢ll still be dependant on grocery stores and mega chain stores such as K Mart once I¢m on the trail. I know that the governing bodies that have created and care for the trails are highly bureaucratic and have their own political and, perhaps even, egotistical agendas. I know that I¢m potentially screwing myself by dropping my job with its glittering benefits and relative financial stability. There are many holes in my ideal plan. But to hike is the best option I can muster. I dread the thought of having to return to the city once I¢m off the trail. Having to return to the consumerism, the fake tans, the automobile culture; those who drive their cars to the gym so that they can walk on a treadmill twice the distance of what they drove. The lunacy of modern life. There¢s something utopian about the thru-hiker lifestyle. Benton MacKaye certainly had utopian ideals when he developed the concept of a trail system accessible to the working class population in urban areas. He saw it as a way to bring the people to nature, to spread thin the suffocating ¢top heavy¢ and bureaucratic ways of urban living, to create a balance, to give a sense of greatness to those who couldn¢t find it in everyday life. He stated, ¢If these people were on the skyline, and kept their eyes open, they would see the things that the giant could see.¢ I think the trail is going to offer me a lot of time for contemplation and the perspective of MacKaye¢s giant. Observing Patterson¢s crucial distinction between rejection and selection justifies this hike for me. I am not walking away from a certain way of life; rather, I am running towards another.