When the only way out is through

It’s easier to keep going if you don’t have an option.

I vowed when I started this blog to stay away from politics. For me (and maybe for you) time in wilderness is sacrosanct, and one of its great blessings is its distance from the modern fray. I also know that my readers don’t all see eye to eye on how the world should be, or who should be in charge. But I do know that we in the U.S. are currently experiencing a disorienting whiplash and witnessing a broad chasm between our realities. The chickens of our disintegrating faith in institutions are coming home to roost: we’ve lost faith in each other. In times like these it can be tempting to want to opt out entirely, not only from the news cycle but from any engagement with the question of governance or shared national culture. If we can’t tell which news to believe, it’s tempting to say it’s all propaganda and nothing we do matters. From there it’s an easy slide into not treating our neighbors like they are fully human, and to making decisions that serve only ourselves, imagining everyone else is doing the same. It’s going to be a tough next decade (or longer) as we renegotiate what it means to be both free and safe in the modern world, and to keep the most cynical people among us from playing our fears to our peril. I’m here to ask you not to opt out, whatever your personal politics but to find your most peaceful way to stay in the moment with all of us. And as with just about everything lately, my viewpoint is grounded in last year’s hike of the CDT.

A reader recently asked about motivation, sharing that he finds himself without the will to set out on a long hike and that he wonders how thru hikers go the distance. I could wax philosophic about why some of us need to wander the earth, but I don’t think that’s really the point of the question. A person who doesn’t actually want to hike a long trail wouldn’t have thought to ask himself why he hasn’t yet hiked one, so there must be something else at play. There must be on the one hand a small voice that is telling him “if you go out there you will see and experience tremendous things that you cannot find any other way” (true), and on the other hand a practical, bureaucratic voice that says, “that sounds like a lot of trouble to go to, and I feel tired just thinking about it” (also entirely valid). Perhaps he imagines that those who decide to embark on something so lofty as a 2500-3000-mile hike are made of tougher stuff and are more determined than the average (metaphorical) bear. How do we do it?

The answer is: we trick ourselves. We decide to do it, we start doing it, and then there is little choice but to keep going, no matter how often and how desperately we may feel we are in over our heads. I am speaking both metaphorically and literally: there is the idea of wanting to make good on what we declared, sure, but much more often the thing that keeps us out there on the tough climb, the merciless road walk, or the monotonous-yet-dangerous process of picking our way through an expanse of treacherous fallen trees is that we literally have no other good option. The fastest, clearest path to the other side is the one we are already on, convoluted and inefficient as it may be. There often is no alternative but to proceed, unless we’d like to press the “please save me” button on the Garmin InReach—and even then, the first question they would ask would be, “are you able to walk yourself out?” Search and rescue services are not intended to rescue you from “I don’t feel like it,” and depending on where you are when you call them, the mountain’s magnetism may falsify your location to them anyway. (We had a lot of fun kvetching to an imaginary operator to mock ourselves: hello, Garmin? Emergency! I’m out of peanut M&Ms, and the clean socks I put on this morning are full of mud! Save me!)

You got yourself into this mess, and now you have to get out. First comes the bargaining: isn’t there some other way? Must we really go over that river just to cross it again tomorrow? Must we go over this mountain with the lightning on top? Looking at the map, in five miles there’s a connecting trail that goes to a road that goes to another road that eventually reaches a highway, and from there is a three hour hitch to the nearest city with an airport. It will take two days to get to the highway. Or, we could climb that next small peak as the trail indicates, then walk another six miles for the day and make camp by the river, and in a couple more days we’ll be in town—all of which in context now sounds like a cakewalk. And so we go on, hour by hour and day by day, and when we finally arrive to the next town in the honorable fashion—by our own foot power—it feels like it was a foregone conclusion that we would make it. “You walked all the way here from where?” the stranger at the bar asks, incredulous. Aww shucks, we say, it was nothing, it’s what we do. (And we mean it.)

There is a saying in thru hiking that applies to much in regular life as well:

“Never quit on a bad day.”

This advice is both sensible and and terrible.

It’s sensible never to quit on a bad day because the woes of life on trail are so fleeting and ever-changing, and the bar for joy and surprise is set very low. It’s easy to wish you were home when you’re in the middle of a steep climb in a freak blizzard—but then you turn the corner and see a marvelous alpine lake with a moose grazing in its shallows, and as you stare in astonishment for what feels like hours (but is only minutes), you slowly start to notice that the weather is lifting. You reach into your snack bag and find that you didn’t eat the last sesame crisp yesterday after all, it’s right here! And just like that you have been transported to a trifecta of happiness: bodily comfort, a satisfying repast, communion with the natural world. Aren’t you glad you didn’t have a magic escape button two miles ago?

Then you turn the corner again to make another climb, the rain starts, and it is only at the top of the ridge that you realize you left one of your trekking poles down by the lake, so you have to go back down and back up again. You’re suffering now, but can you truly wish you hadn’t experienced that interlude of joy? Through it all you are the same person, but the deepest desire of your heart seems to be shifting by the moment, and when any problem is solved it feels almost impossible to imagine experiencing it again, until you do. Add physical exhaustion and sleep deprivation, and you may start to wonder if you are suffering from some kind of dissociative identity disorder.

“Don’t quit on a bad day” means, “be here in this moment and know that it too shall pass.” To start to conjure escape plans is a form of separation from the body. It seems like it will be soothing to make alternate plans—if it stays this bad I can leave—but in reality it’s an invitation to start racking up complaints as evidence in favor of leaving. Instead of saying, “this is hard,” one starts to say, “I hate this,” a dangerous pathway. We have to shut that voice up, and the fastest way is to replace its sorrowful accounting with a practical goal: let’s get to camp and see how we feel tomorrow.

Our friend Energizer, who vlogged every single day on the CDT, made a powerful video about anticipatory surrender, aka “trying to swallow the watermelon,” based on his experience in Army Ranger training. He says the dropout rate in that program is extremely high, but people don’t drop out because today was too tough. They drop out because today was tough, and they can’t imagine the next 29 days not being worse. Instead of waiting to see how they will feel if and when their actual personal limit comes, they decide there is no way they can make it through “if every day is like today.” I thought about this advice a lot on trail, and had many conversations with other hikers about the desire to take one day at a time.

It sounds like this should be easy advice to follow, but there’s a sneaky culprit: time dilation. Each day on trail can feel like a week. Things that happened “yesterday” feel like a month ago, an effect that magnifies the more miles you hike each day, seeing different vistas and ecosystems rolling by at 3.5+ mph, moving from morning chill to noonday heat and back to chill again. Sometimes we find ourselves asking each other out loud: wait, was that today? Is it still today? Did we really wake up in that fen three mountains ago? Was it really just yesterday that we were in town? In such a state, knowing that it’s “only” four more 20-plus-mile days to your next resupply isn’t very comforting, especially when you also know that you don’t have enough food in your bag to stretch it to five days if you wanted to. There is nothing to do but keep going, and to be quick about it—your choices are to stay the course or go faster. But also you should savor the moment, allow yourself to rest, give yourself a break, don’t worry about the overarching goal, just keep walking. If you don’t walk you’ll never get there, but you’re not supposed to worry about whether you’ll get there. The act of walking feels at once necessary and arbitrary, because the difference in magnitude between an afternoon and half a year is insurmountable in our imaginations. So we walk on and try not to worry.

On the other hand, it’s terrible advice to never quit on a bad day for exactly the same reasons. The days are long, sometimes feeling eternal, and it’s so hard to imagine feeling any way other than how we feel now—and this is as true in town as on trail. The joke version of this idea is, “They say never quit on a bad day, so if the days are all bad, you are never allowed to quit. You must continue until you have a good day.” Har har. We reveled in this conundrum, the idea that perhaps all the happy, well-adjusted people left the trail long ago and only the suffering martyrs continued on. But that’s missing the point. The actual issue is that once you’re in the thrall of a good day, especially if it’s happening in town where you could actually do something to execute on a plan to quit, you are incapable of imagining the on-trail suffering that made you want to leave, no matter what promises you made to yourself out there in the hail storm. This effect is enhanced by how you are greeted and cared for in trail towns, and by how the ego responds to such care. You might as well be trying to decide how much money to spend on wool sweaters during an apocalyptic heatwave, or packing for a tropical vacation during a blizzard. The question feels neither timely nor relevant precisely because you are doing such a good job of being in the present moment and context.

This whiplash of heart’s desire happened to me several times on trail, chiefly in the month after Saint had gone home for a long break and I continued. It was the mental torture of bad days/good days that finally broke me and sent me home, thinking I was leaving the trail for the year but finding myself back again only ten days later. I look back on that period now and see the time dilation in full effect. My decisions there, especially after my pack caught on fire on the hellish blacktop walk into Rawlins, WY, seem frantic from this distance: why didn’t I just slow down and give it a couple days? Because those days each felt like a week, and not being in motion meant I was falling farther behind by the moment. So I made a plan to get myself to the Canadian border to hike south, pinning all of my hopes to escaping from the heat of the arid Great Divide Basin.

But when I got up there I found different problems: rain, frustrating permit procedures and confusing campsites, too many people, too much human infrastructure in what was meant to be a wild place—and having placed so much store in “if only it weren’t so hot,” I ended up at loose ends. I had allegedly fixed the problem, so why was I so miserable, so unable to perceive the tremendous beauty of Glacier National Park? Looking back now, I see how simple it would’ve been to stay in Rawlins for another couple days, let the heat dissipate, make a good water plan, and keep going northbound. Instead I started a cascade of decisions that meant a new plan every other day, at lots of expense and trouble, with serious hits to my motivation and morale that eventually sent me home—thankfully not for good, but for a reminder that home was doing just fine and I could stand to save it for later. Do I regret any of it? Nah, because those choices brought me to unanticipated situations and joys, and a restorative interlude at home—but I hope to bear it in mind next time, and let things unfold differently.

It’s tempting to say, “my pack caught on fire, and that was the sign that I needed to go north.” That’s how I framed it at the time, but it’s not really true. The terribly hot day walking into Rawlins was not a stand-alone struggle, but the final straw on the back of an extremely grumpy camel. From the moment I set out from Steamboat Springs without Saint and resumed the journey north toward the Wyoming border, I struggled hourly with the battle between my brain and my body, with the gap between the present and the imagined future. I should have known there would be grieving and shock at my newly solo undertaking, even though I had felt relieved that I’d be able to set my own pace while Saint could, as he had expressed a deep desire to do, spend his days doing “something other than walking.” Instead of acknowledging these feelings and being mindful that they might make the days ahead more difficult, I externalized the struggle. It was the trail’s fault, especially this Wyoming Trail sharing the CDT, with its dirt bikes and ORVs and rutted roads. It was other people’s fault, especially the obtuse and ungracious families of day hikers at waterfalls and reservoirs and the parking lots of peak trails, not following trail etiquette, not caring. It was the fault of the very landscape itself, with its sickening lack of trees, its whipping winds, its ferocious mosquitoes, its dust and gravel, its undrinkable alkaline streams. Everything was terrible, and there was nothing for it but to go home, as soon as I made it to the next town.

And then I would arrive to town in a cloud of angry fervor like John the Baptist, ranting in the final miles about end times and judgment, only to be met as if I were the guest of honor at a banquet hosted by Strawberry Shortcake. Never have I felt so much love for all of humanity as when some stranger would offer me a ride the rest of the way to town, or would let me use the motel laundry room overnight even though it was meant to be locked, or would lend me their car to drive to the gas station two miles away to get snacks. The more the people I met went out of their way to care for me, the more I didn’t want to let them down. The women at the distinctly evangelical Brickyard Inn in Rawlins cheered me on, as did the wonderful Joan and David and Patti in Encampment, as did every grizzled and generous section hiker I met coming the other way. “You’re amazing, and you can do it! I know God is with you.” Who can argue with that? Who would want to break their hearts, to reveal oneself to be unworthy of their faith while also calling into question their own divine revelations? And so the fervent wish to be evacuated by helicopter that had come calling every single day for the past five days was set aside as false, as merely a matter of a bad mood on a bad day. What was real was what I had before me now: a beer, a steak, a firm mattress, a deep bathtub, and most of all, good company.

When you see trip reports from trails, especially vlogs which by nature are edited and posted in town and tend to feature more footage from town than from trail, it’s easy to imagine a big bubble of people all moseying along together. That’s likely more true on the very crowded trails, such as if you are going northbound on the Appalachian Trail. But on the CDT, just like on my past adventures on the NCT and the GDT, the hiking itself is mostly a solitary thing. “We” are all out there hiking, but “I” climb this mountain and ford this river with my body for my own sake. Later in town we will share our experiences and weave them together into something collective, a quilt of shared experiences that makes up the community of the trail. In the company of other hikers we can tend to put up a proud front, to pretend nothing was ever all that bad, that we were stronger and we prevailed, that others might be tempted to go home but we true believers have always abided and always belonged. We need that, to make sense of the suffering—but to say anything real about the experience we have to lift away that gauzy veil. We have to admit how we were tested, and where we failed, if we want to be in real community with each other. It is each of us vs. the trail, yes, but it is also all of us and the trail vs. the unexamined life.

After a couple of days in town, no matter how lovely and luxe, the itch starts to build. We didn’t come out here, after all, to be part of a caravan of cheap motels and dubious restaurants with 1980s salad bars. We came here to hike the trail, to see America, to push our bodies and minds to their limits, to see things that cannot be seen from the car window, to dwell in places we cannot reach except by foot. And that means sometimes it’s lonely, and sometimes it’s very, very hard. But we know that there are others out there in the same struggle, and we wish them safety and peace just as we hope they are wishing it for us. When we get to town we tell the stories of our days, compressing the hours of angst into a series of happenings, of plans that unraveled and reformed into something better, surprises that saved us, and unexpected moments of simple satisfaction. But we don’t go back out to get more of the things we talked about. We go back for the suffering, because it is in the hardest places that time becomes infinite. If we can bear it, life can go on forever.

As we walk the rocky trail toward America’s tricentennial, now only 51 years away, I hope we can make it there in one piece. What a joy it will be, looking back from age 101 if I am to be so lucky, to have survived this period of tumult and to have had the privilege to craft something more durable together, a nation that lives up to the one described to me at age 9 in the Weekly Reader, where the bounties of science and human understanding belong to everyone in equal measure. Just now we are in tough country, and it can feel to each of us that we are the only ones out here, that They have figured it all out and there is no point. The time dilation makes it feel like January lasted six months, and that things have always been and will always be so fraught. You may feel that you would press the escape button if you could, to another planet or another dimension. There is no such place to go. If you move to another country you will still carry with you this responsibility as an American to fight for America—and your isolation will likely break your heart. So, what is there to do but to keep walking?

Please push back on thoughts about giving up when they come to you. Please extrapolate from your own fear and worry to know that others are out there too, me among them, hoping, praying, planning, working, wishing. Remind yourself, if you can, that it is the very nature of the journey to not know how it will all turn out, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something or to take something from you.

Sometimes things are just hard, and there is nothing for it but to do them.

Keep your head up, and I’ll see you in town.