Date: 2018-03-03
To: View Entry
Miles today: 0.0

It just struck me that with all the prehike writing I¢ve done up until now, I have yet to write about hiking itself. I would like to remedy that. Walking ranks right up there with food and sex as one of life¢s great pleasures, the greatest of all being love. I¢ve written quite a bit about food, and I have no intention of writing about love or sex, so walking it is.  Whenever I¢ve needed to puzzle anything out, whether it¢s a plot twist in something I¢m trying to write, or back in my science days, trying to fathom what could explain my observations, I¢ve turned to walking. Walking suspends time and exposes time as illusion. Why something as obviously metronomic as walking should have that effect on me, I haven¢t a clue. Perhaps walking substitutes a natural rhythm that¢s as old as bipedalism for the tick-tock of modern civilization. Walking is just physical enough to occupy the body, but except on difficult terrain, doesn¢t require much mindfulness. So my mind is free to float off, make new connections, and sometimes return with answers that have previously eluded me. It¢s like directed dreaming. Our ancestors were mostly bipedal four million years ago, and Homo erectus was fully bipedal 1.95 million years ago, so it¢s hardly an overstatement to say that walking is in our genes. By contrast, the oldest known evidence of calendars dates to about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, at the start of the Neolithic period, the beginning of farming and the domestication of crops and animals. The oldest clocks, possibly shadow clocks, go back only 4,000 to 5,000 years. We can blame the Sumerians of 2,000 BC for our sexagesimal (base 60) system.  About the time we start school, we are introduced to timelines, as portrayals of the history of European explorations, geological time periods, and the history of life on Earth. We quickly absorb the concept that time is linear, having a beginning on the left and an end on the right. Big Bang to whimpering loneliness, with ravenous supermassive black holes in between. Perhaps later in our education, we wrap our pea brains around Einstein¢s Theory of General Relativity and the concept of time dilation, or we are exposed to Nietzsche¢s doctrine of eternal recurrence or Buddhist thought. We might even have gained a sense of circular time or spiraling time, in the sense of Gregory of Nyssa, proceeding from glory to glory. At some point, we become aware that not all minutes, hours, years and decades are of equal length. A twenty-year old looking at a sixty-year old sees an unfathomable gulf. From the opposite perspective, it is the merest blip. As a kid, waiting for Christmas or summer vacation was eternal.  Walking restores the subjectivity of time and frees us from the tyranny of clock and calendar.Humans are not the fastest animals, but we are built for endurance in running and walking, in part because we sweat and can thermoregulate better than most species. Walking is what we do and it was our primary mode of transportation until we domesticated animals. With each technological advance, we¢ve gotten lazier to the extent that we now think of running and walking as exercise, something that we do instead of doing something else. Walking is done on treadmills and elliptical trainers while watching TV or playing with our phones. Our communities are designed for cars, with pedestrians and bicyclists receiving only secondary consideration. Roundabouts have become fashionable in urban street design, but have you ever tried to navigate one on bicycle? Burlington, Vermont where I now live is very pedestrian and bicycle friendly, and becoming more so. Living downtown, I find that I use our car once a week for grocery shopping, and quite literally walk more miles than I drive. I don¢t have to go out with the intent of walking for exercise. It¢s simply part of my life. Even so, I sometimes take long walks for the fun of it, along the lakefront bicycle path or through the University of Vermont campus to Centennial Woods, which I think of as Pooh¢s Hundred Acre Wood, even though it is only 65 acres.   When the doctors told me to stop running in 2002 because of progressive osteoarthritis in my knees, they consoled me with, ¢Save your knees for walking and hiking.¢ At least I still had that. My knees continued to degenerate and after they ended my 2013 thru-hike attempt, I explored total knee replacements, getting as far as choosing the joints and discussing anesthesia. Before we scheduled the surgery, my surgeon went to a conference and came back convinced that stem cell cartilage regeneration was less than five years away from having a standard protocol and insurance coverage. He wanted to postpone my replacements until then, offering me steroid injections and massive off-loading braces. The braces stopped providing relief in 2016, while I was hiking on the Long Trail in Vermont, and I approached the orthopedic department at UVM, ready for new knees. They insisted upon an evaluation by a physical therapist first, something no other doctor ever suggested. I met with the physical therapist (thank you, Michelle!) four times in November and December of that year, and the results of the simple repetitive motions she prescribed seem miraculous to me. I¢ve continued the exercises, and my knees are pain free for the first time in many years. Oh, the joy of walking without pain and without those &$^% braces! It only took me twenty years to figure out that the key for me is keeping the quadricep muscles stretched out. I can do that on the Trail.  I have heard it said (meaning that people say it, but I don¢t believe it) that a person¢s walking gait is unchanged for long periods of time and is as unique as a fingerprint. Certainly, we¢ve all had the experience of recognizing who is approaching by the sound of their footfalls. Yet I know my walking gait has changed. As a young man, I had a pronounced spring to my step and would sometimes imagine myself as a springbok, pronking over the Veldt. On my first few Appalachian Trail hikes, before I adopted hiking sticks, I would gallump down hills, and even ran the gentle 16 mile downhill from Tri-Corner Knob Shelter to Davenport Gap in the Smokies, propelled onward by the vision of one of Mountain Mama¢s burgers. As my arthritis progressed, my gait shortened, and especially on the downhills, my cadence slowed. I also started practicing quiet walking, both to increase the odds of seeing wildlife, and to reduce the impact on my knees and hips. The physical therapist taught me to keep a slight bend in my knees, to make full use of my natural shock absorbers.  When the sidewalks here are icy, like this morning, I shorten my stride even more. It¢s gotten so that my gait is no longer automatic, but something I decide upon based on conditions.Watch people as they hike, especially from behind. Does their pack bounce up and down or sway from side to side? Or does it glide down the trail, with little wasted energy? Can you hear their footfalls, even when there aren¢t autumn leaves or snappy twigs on the ground, or are they walking silently with a gentle heel-toe rhythm? Efficient, quiet walking is a learned technique. I started hiking with full leather boots, believing them necessary with my pack weight at the time, and essentially s*^%-kicked my way down the trail. Switching to trail runners means having to pay a bit more attention to foot placement. I even tried a pair of Vibram FiveFinger Shoes: http://vibramfivefingers.com. They are like lightweight gloves for your feet, with a separate compartment for each toe. Once I learned how to get the right toe in the right compartment, they were quite comfortable. I tried them on a long day hike in Myakka River State Park when I lived in Florida. I quickly learned to place my steps carefully and to avoid stepping on branches or anything that was hard. There are no rocks there, fortunately. Blisters were not a problem, but I had to stop every few minutes to pry live oak acorns from between my toes. Live oak acorns are rather small, under 1/2¢ in diameter, and between the toes, they hurt. I haven¢t tried them on the Appalachian Trail, not even as camp shoes. They take too long to put on when I need to pee at night, and the Vivo Barefoot Runners I now use in camp actually weigh about the same. And no one laughs at me.Quiet walking, especially in the dawn¢s early light, is a wonderful way to observe your fellow creatures. Standard wisdom is to make noise as you hike, particularly to alert bears to your presence. Black bears along the Appalachian Trail know what people are and how we smell. It¢s hard to surprise one unless you approach from downwind. If you are alert to bear sign, like scratch marks on trees and fresh scat, you will know when a bear is around, and if you are downwind, you may well smell them. I personally enjoy watching bears before they become aware of me and run. If you encounter the rare bear who is habituated to humans and associates us with food, I¢m not sure that the tinkle of a bear bell or a shouted ¢Hey, bear!¢ is such a good idea. Encountering a bear or even seeng a bear¢s butt running away is not common, except perhaps in Shenandoah National Park. I have hiked through SNP half a dozen times and have always seen at least one bear and as many as six. I hope you are as fortunate.Deer are common sightings along the trail, and except in the fall rut when the bucks can be somewhat aggressive, they are more concerned with their browsing than with passing humans. My goal is to walk by without the deer leaping away. In Myakka River State Park, where there hasn¢t been hunting in 80-some years, I¢ve had flocks of turkeys cross the trail around me, and one deer even approach to lick the salt off my leg when I was resting at the base of an oak. I treasure these among my St. Francis moments.  Some backpackers find hiking boring and distract themselves with music or ebooks.  I used to carry a small Sony Walkman but I found that I only used it on easy terrain in miserable weather, when distraction was welcome. In October, 1999, I hiked from Greenwood Lake, New York to Williamstown, Massachusetts. The hiking is relatively easy on the east bank of the Hudson and on the fifth or sixth day of the hike I awoke to an overcast, drizzly day, and succumbed to the headphones.  As I approached the The Nature Conservancy¢s Pawling Nature Reserve, I saw a bear cross the trail on a ridge in front of me. I thought she went well with the Mozart horn concerto I was listening to. A few minutes later, the French horns sounded terrible and I ripped the headphones off, only to discover that the cacophonous sound persisted. I was hearing a fox hunt from the valley below. A few minutes later, two Great Danes came bounding up followed by two women shouting, ¢Be careful, they hate men!¢ One dog stood with his paws on my shoulders, licking my face, and the other nuzzled my butt. No, the women may have hated men, but their dogs had no problem with me. I found the Trail plenty interesting that day without the need for music. I no longer carry earbuds, not even for my iPhone. I will use the cellphone, however, to read at night and to keep this journal current.The treadway of the Appalachian Trail is sometimes described as rocks, roots and mud, but there are isolated sections of splendid walkway, following old post roads, the C&O Canal towpath, and even in Connecticut a part of an old harness racing track. No special techniques of walking are needed for the good sections, but I can offer a few hints for the rest of the trail. First, lift up your feet a little higher than you normally would, to avoid tripping over the rocks and roots and to minimize toe blisters from kicking them. That becomes automatic for me after a couple of days and at least one blackened toenail.  Look for footprints in the mud to gauge how slippery it is, and in Vermont, if the trail looks glossy black and you don¢t see footprints, don¢t step there! It¢s apt to be a bottomless soupy quagmire that will try its hardest to steal your shoes. There are sections of trail, even outside of Pennsylvania, that are carpeted in nasty little unstable rocks that can¢t be walked around. Navigating those rock gardens is a challenge and there are two basic approaches.  The first is to take it slow, testing each rock for steadiness before committing yourself, making full use of your hiking poles. The second is to rock dance, setting a sight line by a distant tree or boulder, and moving quickly across the rock field, trusting your feet to dance across, without committing your weight to any one rock. If my knees are free and nimble, I prefer the latter. I no longer picture myself as a springbok, but I could imagine myself as an elephant in a tutu. Gotta Dance!