Re: [at-l] Reasons for Quitting (was a lot of other s**t)

[Robert and Catherine Rubin <rhymworm@mindspring.com>]

NO ONE QUITS A THRUHIKE. They go off the trail. "Yeah, I'm off the trail
for now," they say. "Just until I can get some more money together. Just
until my feet stop hurting. Just until I get finished with this job that's
calling me back. One of these days."

The thruhikers who remain talk about it like it's a kind of death. "Did you
hear about Fish?" someone says. "I hear he's off the trail now."

"No!" someone replies. "Too bad. Foot problems, I guess."

"Yeah, he was taking time off in Hiawassee."

"A good guy. His girlfriend broke up with him over the phone at Neels Gap.
Took it hard."

What's not said: Poor bastard. He's out of the club. He didn't have the
fire down below. But we do. We're still walking. No way it will ever happen
to us.

It does, though. Most of the people who go off the trail during a
Georgia-to-Maine thruhike do so before they reach Damascus, Virginia, 450
miles from the beginning. The first week in Georgia gets the ones who were
completely unprepared, the pure dreamers who came out never having carried
a pack up a hill before, the TV-watchers with ill-fitting boots, the
college dropouts who have heard of this thruhiking thing and just want to
check out the scene, the 65-year-olds who've waited just a little too long
to get into shape, the mid-lifers who discover that they really do miss
good coffee every morning and a comfortable mattress at night. Between
Dicks Creek Gap and Fontana Dam, at the foot of the Great Smoky Mountains
National Park, it is joints and ankles and backs that send people off the
trail-chronic pain that becomes too much to bear, ligaments that tear under
the strain of carrying heavy loads down steep hills, arches that start to
fall, ankles that twist on rocks and log steps, blisters that become
infected, knees that blow out.

Once past the Smokies, the highest mountains of the entire 2,000-mile
journey, it's generally boredom or money or unfinished business with family
and loved ones that sends hikers home. Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods
told of his failed 1996 Appalachian Trail thruhike, which only made it as
far as the Smokies before degenerating into a miscellany of dayhikes and
short backpacking sections between there and Maine, totaling about a third
of the trail. Bryson simply got bored and discouraged. He had come out
imagining a walk on the wild side, and instead had found a well-trodden
path and pack of stinking dropouts for whom he had no empathy. There are
plenty of reasons to quit.

I wasn't quite ready. When I'd announced two months earlier that I would
leave my job as an editor, everybody at work had been most polite and
solicitous.

"Are you sure?" they asked. "What will we do without you?"

They'd given me a going-away party at the Dead Mule, a local watering hole,
toasted me and my adventure, presented me with a gift certificate to a gear
store, and bid me a gracious adieu. But it had been high time to go: I'd
overstayed my welcome there by a couple of years, and the problems were
piling up.

"I want some time to think," I'd told people before I left, as all the
minute-by-minute demands of my work and my concluding obligations pressed
down on me. That's what you imagine.

But you're so busy putting in the miles during a thruhike you rarely get a
chance to sit on a rock and put your life in order. The shelter-to-shelter
ridgeline world is a kind of Limbo, somewhere between heaven and hell, but
in this world of the fringe you're too busy to think yourself into
damnation. You turn things over in your mind while you walk, but not with
any sort of analytical precision. A thought, like a sock in the dryer, goes
around and around, mixing with other tumbling thoughts, appearing,
disappearing, hidden except for a flash of color, reappearing upside down
and inside out, but finally not going anywhere. Your conscious mind is so
busy staying on the path, avoiding roots and loose rocks, looking for bears
or deer, or worrying about how hot or cold you are that your worries get
mixed in with everything else. All the crisp edges get worn smooth and
fuzzy by the tumbling. It's hard to dwell on a problem because you have to
pay so much attention to staying upright, to staying on the trail. You just
walk. And walk.

---Rhymin' Worm GA>ME '97

Robert Rubin
mailto:RHYMWORM@MINDSPRING.COM

Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
-- Frost


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