It must be late October because small-circulation newspapers are starting to report on thru-hikers returning from six months on the trail. In Racine, Wisconsin, a guy returning to his parents’ home walked the last six miles from the train station. From the article in the Racine Journal Times.
“It helped me to be out there, to live with just your necessities and to do it in such a beautiful, natural setting,” he said. “The combination lends itself to insight and soul-searching. Even though we were there as a couple, and walked within 20 steps of each other, there is solitude. You talk the first hour of the day and you’re silent for the next 10 hours.
“Everything in you, your anxieties and neuroses, your dreams and goals comes out in your mind.”
On the trail, surrounded by trees and grass, there was a sense of fitting into nature instead of pushing it aside, he said. There were achingly beautiful views, terrifying lightning storms and the fear of encountering something dangerous.
“There were nights I stayed up all night thinking bears were outside the tent,” he said. “I was holding my breath, listening to every crackle. A beetle on your tent sounds like a dinosaur. Then you see a bear and it runs away like a rabbit. You go out and learn to do it yourself, despite your fears and other people’s fears.”
One reward of living in a smaller town: the local press thinks it’s interesting if a local successfully hikes 2,000 miles in one stretch. All you New Yorkers had better face the facts: only way the Post is running your story is if you do something really newsworthy, such as:
- Hiking the whole thing naked with a kangaroo (gear packed in the pouch, natch).
- Making your hike an Al Qaeda fund-raiser.
- Setting a forest fire in each national park you visit.
- Recruiting circus bears along the way.
Whaddya think, folks; what other unspeakable hiking antics might seem newsworthy to the jaded Big City press?