Before I started my PCT adventure, I read and was told that the experience would change me forever. For the rest of my life I'd be forced to deal with an itch I couldn't scratch; a perpetual need to be on the move. I half-listened with the cocky ears of someone who always thinks they know themselves best.
356 days ago I ended my first stint with long-distance hiking, completing 900 miles of the PCT and 100 miles of the AT. I have thought about the trail, without fail, every day for the past 356 days.
My thoughts haven't been the same every day. I thought They (you know, the general They) were implying I'd become an obsessed freak who would do nothing but talk about, think about, and dream about the joys of being on a trail. Maybe I'd run off into the woods and live as one with the wilderness. Maybe I'd dedicate myself to some trail-preserving organization. Whatever was going to happen, it was going to be extreme. That was not the case.
For awhile my thoughts were, quite honestly, on the depressed side: "You set a goal and it got too hard and so you quit. A lot of other people finished. An 11-year-old girl finished, for heaven's sake. You are weak." Then they became motivational: "Oh, is this run hard? You know what's hard? Walking for 25 miles up and down mountains carrying all your possessions on your back day after day. You did that, so this 5 mile run on a flat road with nothing on your back and nothing to do afterward is pretty much the same as relaxing." Some days they would be fleeting memories of a kind stranger, an amazing landscape, or a particularly tough day completed. Sometimes the thoughts were even a relief: "It's pouring rain and guess where you are? In a nice, warm, soft, flat bed with no reason to get a drop of water anywhere near you." But no matter what those thoughts encompassed, they've definitely followed me for the past year.
Eddy L. Harris said it well in "Mississippi Solo," his book about paddling the length of the Mississippi: "So deep inside me would this thing reside that it would be a part of my soul, and yet with a spirit of its own that would leap to mind of its own accord, being such a part of me that it would enter my marrow and alter the way I think and feel and walk, leaving me with more than memories and smiles, leaving me changed in a deep and abiding way...The Mississippi River offered this to me, promising that if I gave her a try she would be a part of me forever. It wouldn't matter if I finished, if I went for twenty-five miles or twenty-five hundred, six days or six weeks. The desire and the intention were what really mattered. (I learned this along the way). A marriage. You enter it, if it's real, with every intention of seeing it through to the end, till death do us part. You plan to weather the storms and the cold nights, enjoy the sunshine and the warmth and have plenty to look back on when you're old and finished. But sometimes, try as you might, work hard as you can at it, fighting with all the strength that's in you, it just is not to be and you're forced out. Sad and painful but even after it's long over it remains a part of you."
So where does this leave me now? I do have that itch, and I will continue to do what I can to scratch it. Don't get me wrong, I love the life I live on a daily basis and I'm thankful for all the opportunities I've had the past 356 days of stationary life. However, I know I'll always feel restless if I don't break up that daily pattern every now and then with another grand adventure.
I think I hear the Mississippi River calling.....details to come.....
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