[pct-l] Yowee!!!

[jjolson at uwyo.edu (Jeffrey J. Olson)]

It was three years ago I thought I might be able to actually get to do a 
thru-hike for this summer and fall.  I set myself up to find a job, and 
the one I wanted fell through.  So now I'm without obligations for a year. 

I've played around with Craig's PCT Planner, am on my third set of 
guidebooks, the first two torn up for section hikes, have Yogi's take on 
the trail, and have enough ultralight gear to outfit two people.  My 
base weight is down to about 12 pounds, which includes War & Peace.  I 
may replace the book with a pocketmail for journaling, although I wish I 
could find something with a full size keyboard.  Anyone help on that one? 

On June 15 or thereabouts, I will start a SOBO thru-hike at Manning Park. 

I am so stoked!  This is the perfect year to do a SOBO hike it seems, 
with Washington and Oregon snotel sites 50% to 75% of normal. 

Everyone who plans on doing a thru-hike reaches a point at which it 
moves from a possibility to a reality, from a dream to a lot of 
planning.  This point happened for me about three o'clock yesterday, 
April 21, 2005.  A turning point. 

I entered graduate school in 1991 at 39 years old, and have either been 
a student or professor since then.  My identity is so not based in being 
an academic, although it comes very naturally for me.  My heart drips 
with compassion for persons my age who've never been out of the academy, 
whose battles are small and political, and ultimately, irrelevant. 

This is what commiting to a thru-hike means for me right now - leaving 
the petty politics of really smart people with very narrow skill-sets 
who are full of themselves and unaware of being-so.  I feel a growing 
anticipation and trepidation, a calm exultation, a screaming 
in-your-face "fuck you!"  I am 17, in 1969, and can see the adult world 
for what it is, a huge, Great Lie.  My draft number is 18, and it is 
only student deferments, the gift of being white, middle class and 
privileged that keeps me from emigrating to Canada or jail.  Adults do 
things that for me are empty and pointless.  Even the wisest of adults 
are blind...

I know what I will face - the deepest, most intense being-present 
imaginable.  Day after day of being-alone, hiking from dawn til dusk, 
the important busyness of a fast--moving world receding step by step.  
All the filters generated by commitments and deadlines slowly pale as 
the raw emotion stemming from the heart of living emerge. 

There is a hollowness in a thru-hikers eyes found elsewhere only in the 
meditation chambers of religious zealots - a hollowness of unfiltered 
emotion reigning supreme for as long and as deeply as it does.  I don't 
talk about what I think happens to me.  I am talking about the eyes of 
NOBOs I've met on my southbound section hikes.  I always ask about 
hiking alone, and always there is a deepening of the spirit and a 
hollowing of the eyes. 

When I write these missives caring, compassionate people write me back 
and end up trying to "fix" me, telling me to get over it, or find 
someone to hike with.  It's as if there is a norm on the trail that we 
find each other and huddle together for 25 miles a day, keeping the big 
feelings and questions at bey.  Sure there are people who find the 
camraderie of a thru-hike its core, its essence.  I would not presume to 
judge or opine about another's path.  I see the pictures accompanying 
journals of a group of six hikers at the couloir below Forester Pass, 
and revel in their being-together.  I cannot imagine that these six 
people do not watch the sun go down and talk about the meaning of life... 

My work revolves around teaching how to mobilize communities to create 
more socially just and healthy environments.  I am constantly in 
dialogue with others in mutual discovery and creation.  I love working 
with students and community members in our common struggle to identify 
the "Great Lie" and create alternate patterns of thinking and feeling.  
I am constantly asking "what enables a person to learn to think and feel 
differently?"

My guess is that almost everyone on this listserv is resonating with 
this question.  Those who have completed more than a couple weeks on the 
trail understands this "what."  Whether a hiker moves towards others or 
seeks to be alone, the experience of being-on-the-trail for weeks on end 
makes up the "what." 

So I sit here at 4PM on a friday afternoon, stoked, listening to the 
Grateful Dead, revelling in the reality of my impending adventure.  I am 
scared.  I am scared that I will reach the point again, where the pain 
of being-alone overcomes the joy of hiking, of being on the trail, of 
living in "The Trip." 

No remonstrances please - no condolences or patronizing.  The point of a 
thru-hike for me at this point in  my life is take one step at a time in 
the midst of the incredible maelstrom that is my emotional life.  I am 
already walking...

My fear is very real.  It is a palpable, bumpy surface along which I run 
my hand.  I can anticipate the end of a 25 mile day, 4000' climbed and 
dropped, where I simply am. 

It is so hard just to be, to exist in the moment with a lifetime's 
experience coalescing, moment after moment...

To be responsible for all that I am, right now, right now, right now...  
This is all there is, will be, and has been... 

The pain in being-alone surges and ebbs.  Odd twists make weird thoughts 
and emotions that seem to have me leave "The Trip."  It is so hard to be 
present.  It would be so much easier to go home and re-enter the world 
of externally originating routines and meaning, to give up the quest to 
balance the pain and the joy in thru-hiking. 

The silence reveals this life is mine, and no matter how tumultuous it 
is, there is a core that takes one step at a time, that moves through 
the world, a core that is "who" I really am, that words make illusive 
and elusive. 

Such is the possibility anticipating a thru-hike engenders. 

Jeffrey Olson
Laramie Wy