My father told me, "Do not be seduced by the comforts of home!" last week when I ventured back into the world for a sniff.
Seduced, yes--and did I succumb?
This concept of "the real world." Why do we, as hikers, refer to life off-trail as "the real world?" Hiking the Appalachian Trail is no more or less real than anything else in life--I am not taking a break out here, nor am I returning to something when I reach Katahdin--I am in the midst of a continuous flow, and the trick is to surrender to it.
I can no longer claim to carry 40 pounds on my back. Some may consider my preoccupation with weight an unhealthy obsession. And yet, when your whole world is on your back and in your eyes, when there is nothing else to be preoccupied with, why not consider weight heaily? Yes--I ditched my sleeping bag. Yes, I cut tags out of shirts. Yes, I walk around camp barefoot. Yes, I am sometimes cold, suddenly clueless about how to properly wash my clothing, and reckoning with a perpetually dirty crust on the bottoms of my feet. And do I regret the lack of these comforts? I honestly do sometimes. But the ease with which I am now gliding generally outweighs any moments of shivering, confusion, or hoof-skin picking.
Last week I saw few people. I vacillated between lonesomeness and elation--wildly. Too wildly (but who's to judge?). I felt whipped around in an ocean of (I can't say emotion). Blah blah blah, the trail provides, but it does. No two ways about it. It just does.
And attending a Memorial Day celebration yesterday, I couldn't help but feel overwhelmed with grief concerning humanity's preoccupation with war, and afterwards in the car, criss-crossing through America's homogeneity of fast-food chains and strip malls, which I generally so thoughtlessly support (thoughtless due to once-conscious ignore-ance), just about (no, actually) broke down in helpless remorse, guilt, shame, for we as people, who cannot just be kind to each other...
Am I just running away from it all in the woods? What am I currently contributing?
I've stopped checking my bank statement, because it is more laborious to worry about money than spend it. I have boiled my life down to searching for the simplest ways to go about anything. Am I becoming lazy or just efficient? Clear-headed or foolhardy?
Either way, the addition of a small guitar quite nicely compliments my pre-existing harmonica & hackysack conditions, and the smell of this river sure beats the smell of my armpits, and life rolls on as I continue to walk north in style, with or without (or within!) purpose, and striving to act never around but always through love.
--Boot
And yes, our travels (and by our I mean we as in we) have brought us into a grassy valley, smelling of magic and wet rhododendrons, in the foothills of Virginia Appalachia, and in this valley, there is a camp, a farm, and 24 thru-hikers.
I marched them in after 10 days of solid rain, whacking bush, amidst naysayers and doubting Thomases, only to be self-corroborated in what I knew would bring peace, joy, and love to their hearts and mine, and to the valley itself...
Enough of all that.
We worked together. We grew together. We love each other. And with a quick jaunt home to taste (yet not swallow) it's seductions, it is back to trail life for this Bootsy Bootlegger.
I don't need a guide book. I don't need a watch. I need: sun. water. food. legs. a heart. a sense of God.
And thus, I will walk to Maine.
In, out of, and with love,
Boots
Life truly is but a song, no? No! Of course not. It isn't a stage either, though we sure do like to play...
Life itself, truly, is far too unpredictable for either such comparisons! And yet, as in a song or a theater, life does seem to flow melodiously, tense and release, through all the plot twists and scene changes...
Ok, enough of this small talk, let's shoot!
It's true that I do not walk south. But driving south is a different story. But ah, but ah, but ah--before we begin to speak of the present, we must first divulge the past.
Leaving Carver's Gap last Wednesday (for those of you who left your maps at home, Carver's Gap lies at the base of Roan Mountain in eastern Tennessee) I felt alone. Facing the magnificent beauty of the bald mountaintops ahead, I could not tear my mind away from the sheets of Holiday Inn, amidst thoughts of sauerkraut and almond butter, all graciously provided by my valiant father, Moosejaw. Looking ahead towards the wilderness and back towards civilization, I felt torn between two worlds.
And yes, my friends, the trail provides, and yes, the trail does provide. When will I internalize this eternal lesson? This time, it took a dip into the rhododendrons to relieve myself of the previous night's culinary adventures to reacquaint myself with life on the trail. Thus, the chimera was broken, and Bootless hiked upwards.
Why bore you with the mundane (yes, I mean earthly, but surely not lacking in divine element!) details of my days? My routine is unfaltering: wake/eat/walk/eat/make fire/eat/sleep--and yes, I do grant the occasional creek bath/harmonica jam/hackysack session in there. And the great paradox: each moment is utterly novel. Each leaf, each mountain, each fire--so I manage to stay on my toes, so to speak.
So, I could speak of more interesting matters, such as rushing to the sumptuous Watauga Lake to grill hot dogs and smores, only to arrive on a desolate and windy beach with a smiling dead goose being lapped at by the dirty waves, but I will spare you--or I could allude to certain situations without granting them any real significance while still cleverly offering them up!
But the lesson is: expectations are dangerous, and yes, the trail does provide, and yes, life is not a song nor a play, but something far more ephemeral and inexplicable, only to be experienced and never to be understood. Like, perhaps, a song or a play.
I was wondering: must art be necessarily audienced? Or perhaps the opposite is true--art can only be genuine if no audience applauds or boos in the mind of the artist. Musings of an otherwise unoccupied mind.
Yes, I did promise an explanation for my current state of affairs: after exactly 26.2 miles of wet and windy hiking (wait, is it May?) I found myself singing Madonna and taking off my clothes in a karaoke bar in my home state of Virginia (467 miles down!), in the town of Damascus, precisely (a Damascathon!), and who but the studly Cayce Harper himself struts in to whisk 3 other (now full of pizza and burgers) hikers and myself back to his homestead in Johnson City, where we have dawdled the day away, eating often, attending films, playing music....
And tomorrow, I continue north, back to Damascus, back to the woods. If I were asked how I was feeling, I'd say elatedly exhausted, calm, poised, and ready to keep learning. I am free, I am an adventure, I am love.
Thank you.
--Bootsy
