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Re: [at-l] Philosophical

Hi Brent,

I'm thinking about some of the very things you ask about, trying to draw
some of my own conclusions about my hike, so I'll do it at the keyboard.

It CAN be selfish, I think. People thruhike for all sorts of reasons, and
in the case of those who see it purely as an escape from responsibility,
and a chance to party their way to Maine, I'd say, yes, it IS selfish.
(Though a lot of these people are perfectly wonderful fellow
travelers--don't get me wrong!) But most of the people I met had more
complicated reasons than that--certainly most of those who made it past
Harpers Ferry. My feeling is that unless you're driven by some sort of
compulsion, it simply gets to be too boring and painful to go much past
there.

I wish I'd gotten my hike out of my system before I married and bought a
house. I'm 39, and my hike came as something of a mid-life crisis. It was
physically hard to do it at my age, and all the career and marriage stuff
only made it harder. Still, my guess is that if you're already feeling the
tug, it will only get worse once you've committed yourself in the way you
describe, so you should probably give serious thought to it. Right now it
sounds as if it's an interesting intellectual problem for you. Believe me,
if you get the strong urge to do the hike once you're committed to a
mortgage and another person's life, and maybe to kids, it will be a problem
that is considerably more wrenching and destructive.

In my own marriage, even though we were childless it caused a lot of
tension, and now I'm not only trying to patch up the marriage, I'm faced
with the prospect of re-starting a career after leaving a good job and
dropping out for most of a year. In my line of work, good jobs are hard to
come by, however. If you're in a "seller's market," though, it may not be
as much of a problem. You probably know better than anyone what your
prospects would be, assuming you want back into the same sort of work.
Relationships are more complicated. As you're unmarried, you should ask
yourself: would she wait? Do you really want to find out? A number of my
fellow hikers put their relationships to the test when they went to
Springer. A lot of those relationships fell apart under the strain. Would
they have fallen apart anyway, in a divorce some years later? Maybe.

A thruhike would certainly change your life post-hike, but whether it would
be damaging or not might depend a great deal on your point of view. I don't
yet know how it's going to shake out for me, so I'm not your best source
here. If you're on the fast career track, and the track is important to
you, I can't see how "dropping out" for six months would help much. But you
might find that the very thing that interests you in the idea now hints at
a deeper dissatisfaction about where you're headed. In that case, a
thruhike might help you see things differently and might ultimately help
you feel less torn in the long run. As long as you don't expect it to be a
revelation from the heavens, a thruhike does offer a chance to simplify
things for a while. As such, it sometimes helps people see their lives a
little more clearly, and offers some alternatives to them that they may not
have considered. Some, however, find it useless in that respect. Some find
it only leaves them more confused. My only advice is to try to listen
closely to what your heart is saying. Trust that.

Most of the thruhikers ARE in transition, though certainly not all of them.
Make no mistake: it is an ordeal. That's part of what makes it so
compelling. But do you really want an ordeal at this time in your life? If
I were to have the chance to start over again, I'd probably NOT thruhike.
Instead, I'd do 3-week or month-long sections, and try to hold things
together at home and on the job. What you don't, and can't get by doing
sections is a place in the thruhiker community. Missing that means missing
a lot, because it really is a wonderful community. But you can get a lot
more out of the AT itself, which offers much more than aspect experienced
by thruhikers. As a long section hiker you'd not be tied to doing such big
miles, day after day. I found I missed a lot of things (overlooks,
interesting side trips, curious people, etc.) that now I'm going to have to
go back and re-discover, simply because I was trying to catch up and keep
up with my trail friends. When I got to New Hampshire and Maine, I found
that many of the hikers who'd been doing regular 20 mile days were suddenly
not so eager to be finishing. They'd been rush rush rushing, and now they
were trying to slow down before they rushed through the whole thing. What
you discover, if you really love thruhiking, is that the community becomes
more important than almost anything else. So I think it is possible to
hike--a LOT--and still be committed to a home life. But the nature of the
thruhike demands that you give yourself over to it, and that can play hell
with life at home. Does it have to wreak havoc on that life? No. Is it
likely to? Yes.

Others will doubtless disagree. Thanks for giving me a chance to air out my
brain on this. I feel well ventilated now.

--Robert
Rhymin'Worm -- GA > ME '97
(Ploddin' rhymes with Katahdin)



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