[pct-l] PCTA Trail Fest 2004 Sacramento

[jjolson at uwyo.edu (Jeff Olson)]

One of the joys of anticipating hiking any long trail is the unknown.  One
subscriber to the list talked of planning information overload.  Long timers
said to relax, the first step on the trail puts all the anxiety to rest and
the moment rears its head, both beautiful and ugly.

Until the first step is taken this is abstract.  I found planning fun.  My
mother commented on how my girlfriend and I maintained a firm couple
presence while we were packing and dealing with all the little details that
prefaces two and a half months on the trail.  My mom is of the depression
era and WWII generation in which the man dominates and the woman
capitulates.  She saw the tension between Jane and me, and how well we
worked under pressure.  I think I became a man in her eyes during those ten
days Jane and I spent at the folks' house prior to hitting the trail.  I was
40 years old at that point...   :0)  There is always hope the folks can
admit the world has moved beyond them...

The unknown....

Four dots, not three...

Where in the infinite range of personal possibilities created by our
republican (not democratic) capital spun society is there a frontier?  I
would like to think the answer is found in every person's life.  Each of us
warbles on the edge of of our own responsibility to take charge and move in
a direction of our individual choosing.  I teach in a univesity and am
constantly asking my students to say what they want to do with their lives.
Most follow scripts they've inherited from their parents, or worse, some
version of the materialistic American dream.  I too often have to push hard
to find a story in the making.  What's wonderful, is that I ALWAYS find a
story in the making, or one in progress.

The Radisson...

Three dots, not four...

I felt despair when I gazed at the photos of the trail fest.  Not because of
the meeting and its purpose, intent, and actualization.  I felt despair that
something related to pushing the frontiers of personal meaning and purpose
had been rendered into a conference at the Radisson.

I watched Scott Herriot's DVD about PCT hikers the other night.  I received
the video and put it into my space for 10 days before playing it.  It was
more a matter of moving the dvd player to the tv from the stereo than
letting energy/karma build.  Actually, it was both.

What I took away from the video was a sense that "WE ALL ARE GOOFBALLS!!!"
Probably the most powerful piece of that video for me was the uncompromising
humility and "in the moment" presence of everyone interviewed.  Sure, there
was guy stuff, and burgeoning GRLL power that I predict will frame women's
increasing presence and independence on the trail.

But the bottom line, was the ever-present sense that the end is not a day,
week, or month away.  The end of "The Trip" is constant and present, and it
haunts and drives and twists and sometimes distorts.  "The End" is the
metaphor I saw underlying even the most silly story.

Everyone in the video had a sense of being on "A Trip."  It would end.  It
would end at Sonora Pass, at Tahoe, or it would end at Manning Park.  Life
would return to "norm"al.

Even section hikers as myself experience a moment during "The Trip" where
"The End" is suddenly present.  Online journals that plumb beneath the
surfaces mention this.

I was educated to do therapy with individuals.  The foundational principle
guiding a good therapist is that with the first handshake "The End" is being
planned for.  I did lots of hallucinogens in the 60s and 70s and the
principle is the same.  Unless "The End" of the trip is planned for, "The
Trip" as an experience is wrought with momentary pushes and pulls, often
intensely emotional, and finishing is literally an act of will.  What is
lost in this frame is the centered balance of being in the right place and
the right time, which is each, and every moment....  The lesson from being
on "The Trip" is never learned.

Four dots...

You may have will and finish the trail, or a section.  But the lesson
possible to learn is so much larger, so much more beyond any one experience
or memory.  Most trail journals end with a statement that says "The Trip"
has changed the person.  We never hear of "how."  There is often a
melancholy undertone to this saying, that somehow, "The System" slowly eats
away at the change and we get married, have children, keep a job for ten
years before moving to the next, and remember the feeling of being near
totallly self-sufficient.

The metaphor of "The Trip" and "The End" is lost, or perhaps, never fully
faced and integrated.  I am so admiring of Yogi and Gottago for their
perspectives.  I get a sense from both their journals that they sense what
is beyond the norm"al."  Herriot's video ends with Yogi sitting at the end
of the trail, and she is essentially inarticulate in the face of the
challenge to summarize the immensity of her experience.  Yet, she is not
inarticulate at all, and Herriot has captured the essence of the
thru-hiker's experience.  Yogi  is in "The Trip."  She refuses to leave it.
There is a siren in her life that captures what most of us have not even
been aware of, that we can create our own lives, that we are not bound by
the externally originating parameters of our existences.  She is aware of
the possibility she can create her own world!

It is so hard to move beyond the parameters of materialistic and expected
life trajectories.  Hiking the PCT offers possibility to forge a life
outside of the capitalist created, materialistic desires box.  There are few
paths in this life in which rebellion and creativity don't end in
mediocrity.  Five months on the trail can enable a person realize "I create
the world."

But the Radisson...  Something doesn't meld here...

Jeff Olson
Laramie Wyoming, where summer is two months early...