Jellybean, from Mile 43 of the Pacific Crest trail:
I was sitting on a rock out cropping yesterday to air my feet and eat a snack. I could see down into the valley and interstate 8. I was thinking Wow! Its so much better to be sitting here looking at the trucks go by than it is to be in a truck watching the mountains go by!
Priceless because Jellybean Jean is a long-haul trucker half the year, and a through-hiker the rest. Previous Jellybean journals: 2002 PCT | 2005 AT | 2006 AT | 2007 AT
I don’t have the book handy to look up the precise quote, but there is a great story in Colin Fletcher’s “Complete Walker” about an appearance he made on a talk show to discuss his 6 month walk the length of California. (If you haven’t ever ready Thousand Miles Summer, you should.) It goes more or less like this, as I recall:
Fletcher had been describing his long walk and the details of the experience. The host made some comment suggesting that he wasn’t living in the “real world” or similar. Fletcher’s response was along the lines of “What is more real? Spending six months out in the world experiencing it directly while walking the length of California? Or working 8 hours per day in some dead-end job so that you can struggle home at the end of the day and perhaps find a few moments to sit in front of the tube and listen to some guy talk about how he spent six months walking the length of California?”
Words to live by.
Dan