Date: 2005-02-10
To: Musings on Journals and Posterity
Miles today: 0.0

I¢ve been trying to figure out how best to capture various aspects of my hike, as I hike it, so as to record the most important elements for posterity. Let¢s be realistic here: most people never get the chance to undertake such an enterprise even once in their life. The prospects for my doing it a second time are, at best, remote. Accordingly, I am very keen to try to get it right this first time. I will be taking my new digital camera, and hope to record not just the scenic vistas, the flora and the fauna, but as much of ¢life on the trail¢ as I can. I am, frankly, as interested in capturing my fellow pilgrims ¢ and myself ¢ on film, as I am the forest, the vistas, and the occasional sunset. My sense is that I can always revisit certain spots to appreciate once again their scenic beauty, but will never again be able to capture the magic of the relationships I will experience on the trail. Long after we have forgotten the bad parts of the hike, it is the people we hike with that will remain in our thoughts and in our hearts.I will also be taking a Pocketmail device to record my musings along the way in the form of entries to this journal. Daily musings, hopefully, if it all works out. These pre-hike entries have already convinced me that there will be two journeys going on out there ¢ the physical one and the mental one. Here also, I suspect I know already which will be the one that I am most keen to capture so that, long after, I can revisit the trail and reconnect with what I experienced. As an aside, an astute reader of journals has cautioned me that it is highly unlikely that anyone other than me is likely to be interested in my journal entries after the hike is done. This was not intended (so far as I know!) to be a comment on my writing abilities so much as a quite realistic assessment of the ex-post marketability of one¢s own journal ¢ a point with which I cannot disagree. How many times are any of us inclined to sit through a slide show of our neighbor¢s summer trip to Hawaii?? There is, however, one not-altogether-insignificant caveat to that point: I am absolutely convinced that somewhere down the line, one or more of my ancestors will be thrilled to come across this journal ¢ assuming that a record of it is able to survive the ravages of electronic obsolescence, wind, rain, fire, earthquakes and tsunamis. I can say this with certainty because of how much I wish I had a journal from certain of MY ancestors. Just to cite three, there¢s the one who came to this country from England, on a ship with the Welsh Companies in the 1630s, another who fought in the French and Indian Wars and lived to be 104 years old, and a third who fought in the Civil war with a unit from Connecticut and also survived to a ripe old age. The latter gentleman was stationed just across the Potomac river from Washington in the port city of Alexandria at one point during the conflict, and later marched west along the Leesburg Pike (now Route 7 here in Northern Virginia) all the way to Winchester. Along the way he passed through Snickers Gap. Some 140-odd years later, I was marching north along the AT, from Front Royal to Harpers Ferry, and also passed through Snickers Gap. I remember wondering what he might have been thinking about as he passed that way so many years before. Food, probably, a long-distance hiker acquaintance has suggested. But he was quite young at the time, no more than 14 or 15, so I have to wonder how much the whole enterprise was still an adventure to him, and how scared he might have been of not surviving it. He later took a piece of lead in his knee, and allegedly met with Lincoln after the battle when the President was visiting the hospital tents. As the story goes, he asked Lincoln to tell the surgeons not to take his leg. Lincoln asked them if they could save it; they said they might, but that my great grandfather would forever walk with a limp ¢ which he did, but proudly so as he marched in the GAR parades in Aurora, Illinois into the turn of the next century. My own father has told me stories of conversations with this old veteran, but somewhere along the line the facts seem to have gotten garbled a bit. Legend has it that the wound was suffered at Gettysburg, and we know that Lincoln showed up there, for sure. A recent review of the actions of his Connecticut unit, however, reveals no such participation at Gettysburg. It does turn up a later action at Petersburg, near Richmond, and on the date following one of his unit¢s battles, Lincoln himself was known to have visited the scene of the battle. When I fully retire, I intend to look into his story in greater detail and those of other ancestors as well. But you have to admit that it would be incredibly interesting to have a documented record not just of his movements, but of his thoughts at the time. Not that I¢ll be fighting in any great wars out there¢¦but still. Don¢t you ever wonder what some of YOUR ancestors were up to ¢ and especially what they were thinking about at the time?One concern I have is whether or not I be able to muster the discipline to write in my journal every single day. To capture the story in full, you really must do it as it happens. Trying to reconstruct it later is just not the same. All of which brings me to the topic I was going to write about today, but will now save for tomorrow ¢ to wit: the connections between the physical demands of the hike, and what they will do to my body, and how the condition of my body at the end of the day will effect not just the prospects for my getting some journaling done, but more importantly, what it will do to my spirit and to the degree of enthusiasm I feel about the entire enterprise. For THAT is what will determine whether or not I am able to continue the adventure, day after day, week after week, in the face of considerable odds. Stay tuned,