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
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