Date: 2005-01-10
To: Theory: Because You Know You Want It
Miles today: 0.0

¢Actually,¢ you may be thinking, ¢that¢s really the last thing I want. Quel drag.¢ Well, intrepid Reader Golightly, I don¢t recall tying you down and forcing you to read this, so ease off, ¢kay? If I bore you, go seam seal something.I have been thinking lately about purists and subcultures and above all about the strange tension existing between the construction in the hiking community of What Hiking The A.T. Is All About and the oft-repeated maxim Hike Your Own Hike. Go to the woods, the mystics say. Go to the woods and find God. Go to the woods and find yourself. Go to the woods because you wish to live deliberately, because you wish to follow in the footsteps of those who have lived deliberately, because you are at a crossroads and you wish to leave behind the constraints of the workaday world, because you wish to be a body in the wild, submerged by all that is greater than yourself, ¢no voice, no mouth, pure¢ -But there is more, here, than the desire to break the mold, to leave behind Technology and Schedules and Expectations and Large Buildings and the Evil Urban. If there were not more, those who wished to leave would find another place to walk. They would not flock, reverently, irreverently, to the well-worn wild. They would not go where so many have gone before them, where the lore and the legends grow yearly. They would not number themselves among those making the slow pilgrimage towards Katahdin, that beckoning zielpunkt. They define themselves as much by identification with the community they have joined as they do by their opposition to all that they have temporarily left behind.In the introduction to her book ¢Wanderlust: A History of Walking,¢ Rebecca Solnit writes:¢It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking. The most obvious and most obscure thing in the world, this walking that wanders that so readily into religion, philosophy, landscape, urban policy, anatomy, allegory, and heartbreak¢¦Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic¢¦The imagination has both shaped and been shaped by the spaces it passes through on two feet.¢ As she goes on to explore in rich detail, the particular way in which we in the West conceptualize and construct the Outdoors is (like near about everything else) deeply rooted in cultural and historical context. Poor farmers in developing nations hardly ever rhapsodize about the beauty of the land. Nor did Westerners, not on a wide scale, not until the eighteenth century. That distinction belongs to the Parisian fl¢neur, to the Victorian poets, and to modern-day outdoor enthusiasts ¢ whose love for the outdoors is very great and very real, but who are still, it must be noted, nearly all white and nearly all, whatever their private socioeconomic histories, able somehow to afford not working for the duration of a very long walk.And there is a certain threshold of saturation intimately and inversely linked with our willingness to recognize a thing. We don¢t think to analyze the things that are most present.So if I am to acknowledge the cultural specificity of the way in which I am coming to regard the Trail and the idea of walking it, am I to claim that, therefore, the mystics and the qualified sympathies I share with them are, essentially, flimsy? Or am I to cite articles like the Adbusters one !Hephzibah posted last August, holding up research studies pointing to the psychological and physiological benefits of exposure to the outdoors, as evidence that what I tout as extraordinary is indeed extraordinary? Can I claim, as fervently as the article does, that ¢when you cut off arterial blood to an organ, the organ dies. When you cut the flow of nature into people¢s lives, their spirit dies. It¢s as simple as that¢? Or must I take the assertion with its contextual grain of salt? Curiouser and curiouser.Let me clarify: I believe this sh*t. I believe all of it. I believe that immersion in the natural world is healing: physically and mentally, individually and socially, artistically and politically. I believe that the degradation of our land and our water and our air only hastens the degradation of our communities and our selves. I believe that to be physically present and mindful in one¢s body and one¢s place is to awaken one¢s intellect and one¢s compassion at once. I believe that no one and nothing is truly separable from its environment. And I believe that we, humanity, collectively, have from an environmental standpoint done a great number of very stupid things.But it is nevertheless difficult to separate, sometimes, what we say and the way in which we say it, and the way in which we have come to believe what we say.So the question of cultural transference is an intriguing one, and I¢m at once leery of assigning too much automatic credence to the idea that Walking From Georgia to Maine will be a Transformative Psychospiritual Experience and of dismissing the evident connection between who I am and where I am, mind and body, landscape and identity.I am struggling, as usual, between the theory and the practice, between recognizing the stories we tell ourselves for what they are, and believing them anyway. Absurd and beautiful and necessary at once. But then I¢ve always had a soft spot for gray areas: for the cracks in the rocks from which green and growing things spring.