"All the good times are done and gone."
I finished the hike, around five hundred miles in just under two months. It has been a wonderful trip, marked by the fantastic luck that attaches itself to endeavors with an acceptably slow pace.
And slow it has been, no doubt about that; walking is a painfully slow way to get anywhere, especially if you walk as slowly as I do. There are, however, certain attractions to the pace, combined with the lack of a pressing need to ever arrive. For one thing, it lends itself to detours; sometimes I would take several days, hiking off-trail, to track down vague or non-existent destinations. (The only time one of these long detours truly backfired was when the destination of a three-day detour was a grocery store that turned out to be closed). Some of the most interesting ground I have covered has been along these detours; a spirit of discovery always accompanies travel through unmarked and unknown country.
A sufficiently slow pace also forces the attention to the present. Destinations and deadlines recede until they become irrelevant. Replacing them is a keen awareness of the immediate, the noise of the surrounding forest, the tug and sway of the pack against the shoulders, and the slow accumulations of hunger, thirst and fatigue. Taking care of yourself becomes a chief priority--the mind acknowledges its subservience to the body and devotes most of its energy to its primary task of ensuring physical well-being. This promotes a certain mental stillness, not to say that I stopped thinking about things, but thoughts lost their adamancy and tended to flow in a most unproductive manner from one subject to the next, regularly becoming preempted by the more pressing issues of various musculoskeletal complaints.
Not that complaint comprises the majority of communication from the body during a long hike. A deep, primal pleasure springs from the most simple elements of well-being—lying down to sleep in a warm, dry place with a full stomach contains a satisfaction of an ancient nature, completely different than the ordinary triumphs of life. Appreciating it requires a level of internal quiet not ordinarily encountered in the outside world, and, of course, if you are open to the joys of living as an animal, you are also open to the terrors of thirst, hunger, and cold. I found the balance to be favorable, propped up as I was on an array of technology and circumstance.
On a very few occasions, I did witness something akin to the transcendental holiness of nature. Generally, I don't buy into that manner of romantic silliness, but there were moments, separated by weeks of mere appreciation, when the forest inspired a tide of awe that can only be described as religious. These were the fleeting glimpse, the glimmer that inspires a contemplation of whether it might not be possible to lift the eternal veil and unchink the doors of perception. But it is best not to dwell on these moments; ethereal and sublime as they are, only trouble follows from them. Nothing more than a will o' the wisp, luring the soul into a futile game of waiting for enlightenment, and pretty soon, you end up writing like Annie Dillard.
Now it is over, and I am returning to normal life. I have shaved and gotten a haircut, and soon I will have moved back to Tennessee. So what has changed, now that I have finished the journey? I can't say that anything has. Walking alone through the wilderness has made me a bit more asocial, self-reliant, and resilient--traits that I already had in abundance. In the end, it was not a life-changing trip. Even the fundamental pleasures of life are beginning to fade; the slowness loses its grip a little each day, and soon I will be fully back up to speed. The primary value of the trip has come from the chance to live the American Dream. Forget widespread prosperity and economic mobility--the true character of the nation is to chase the dream of perpetual, unencumbered motion, a journey with no guide but curiosity. When I woke in the forest, I had the rare chance of spending a day as I pleased, with no man holding dominion or influence over my thought and movement. As I took survey of a piece of the 635 million-acre estate that is mine by birthright, I was, if only for a moment, Tom Sawyer on the raft, taking self-determination to its individualistic extreme. Of course, this freedom was nothing more than a fantasy, the foam on the crest of a wave, ultimately limited by my ties to society, which, if they are loose, are also sturdy.
My sincere gratitude to those of you who sent things to help me along my trip, and everyone is encouraged to come visit me in Tennessee this summer.
Alan
