pictures at eleven... Re: [at-l] Definition of "camping"

[sloetoe@yahoo.com (Sloetoe)]

--- W F Thorneloe <thornel@attglobal.net> wrote:
> Sleeping in the open made you appear suspicious as well as
> vulnerable to assault. We have several stories of people with
broken cars at rest stops who have disappeared or lost their lives - 

### "We have several stories..."??? And 280,000,000 people in this
country, and more arriving every day, and 279,999,989 happy stories
that just don't make the news EACH AND EVERY frickin' day. But let's
find that miserable 11, call 'em "several", hold 'em up as poster
children for the "This *could* happen to *you*!" campaign, and let
everyone spend their psychic dollar buying out of the bad luck
lottery. God help us if they find a link between diet and lightening
strikes, or the fresh winds of fright will blow through anew. "Could
your diet lead to a horrible outcome? Pictures at eleven!"
### Could we have just one real trail question go by without
attaching fear mongering to it? Or if you really, really, really want
to dwell about something horrible, just stick with the factual
observation that we're ALL, EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US, more likely to
be killed in our nice little cars on our way home tonight, than by
lightening, bears, fordings, giardia-crypts, or, ferchrisake, rest
stop mashers.
### You know, this is why I addressed the whole "what do you do?"
water treatment thread to *throughhikers* who, as a rule, have
tuckerized such fears away as boring (if mysterious) complexities of
"civilization" with which they just don't need to deal -- rated right
there with "Should my tie hang *to* my belt or *below* my belt? Wide
lapels after 06:00pm? Are short sleeves allowed after Labor Day?
Overseas?"
### Sure, there are exceptions (by which I wish to explain my
adherence to my 20+ year old unleaded Svea until just this year,
although I'd been experimenting with alcohol stoves for 3 years), but
that ability -- even the *drive* -- to push beyond some pattern
mindlessly ensconced as a "norm," is one of the greatest gifts a
throughhike can bestow. I think it was Socrates who said "The
unexamined life is not worth living." ... This past spring, I
realized that my refusal to carry a (silly!) water filter on the AT
was ("yooooo-hoooo!") keeping me *out* of Indiana backwoods (where
water is lacking entirely, or fetid if found). "Poof" goes the
realization, "boing" I spring into action, "baddabing, baddaboom", I
have a marvelous little device for *Indiana* which, btw, offers
insurance for my hike with the boys on the LT with a minimal
(2oz)weight penalty.
### OB said to SLIM/Nancy "Stay where you're comfortable..." and I
guess I'd finish that with "... and you'll die." CPete the Snail
Male's email tag observes that the point of life is not to die clean
and whole, but to slide sideways through, yelling "Geronimo!" Thoreau
observed "The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation." And
then issued his implicit challenge to all those who make a claim to
the spirit of the throughhiker: "I went to the woods because I wished
to live *deliberately*, to front only the essential facts of life,
and see if I could not *learn* what it had to teach, and not, when I
came time to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to
live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice
resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and
suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike
as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and
shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest
terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then get the whole and
genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or, if
it were sublime, to know it by experience; and be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion."

So. Take yourself out for a walk, exert yourself, trust in yourself,
rely upon yourself, in elegance.
Sloetoe




=====
Spatior, Nitor, Nitor, In Nitor!

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