heaven

KK and I went hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Massachusetts this week. Just four days in the middle of a week we're spending up here visiting her crazy family. It was a great hike. The first night it rained incessantly, though we stayed nice and dry inside our trusty tent. Even inside the tent, though, everthing gets moist, and it was a good 24 hours before we really dried out. The weather didn't clear up til about noon the following day, so we had a soggy seven mile hike to the next campsite. But the rain made everything feel lush and verdant under the tree canopy, as though if I just reached out with my senses, I'd be able to feel the forest growing around me.



In Massachusetts, you can only camp in designated areas, so we had the company of other hikers most nights. Our second night, we met some extremely entertaining thru-hikers. They were doing 20-plus mile days, and smelled like they hadn't showered in a month (which they hadn't). One was a 60-something year-old guy who was 100 miles from being done. He walked from Georgia to New York, and then took a bus up to Maine and was walking South back to where he left off in New York. He was skinny with a long white beard, and he walked around camp like he felt every one of those two-thousand plus miles in his bones, bent crab-like over his battered feet, wincing. He was travelling with a tall seventeen-year old kid who went by the trail-name of Stretch. Stretch had just graduated from high school, and when he talked to you he peered out from under a thick greasy curtain of curly blond hair. The two had met on a bus on the way to Maine, and they had now walked 600 miles together. They cooked and ate 10 hot dogs for dinner, complete with buns and a ziploc baggie of ketchup that they had bought in the last town they walked through.

On our third day we walked ten miles to a campsite that we had all to ourselves. We passed through Cheshire, a little New England town surrounded by small farms where we got lunch at a sandwich shop. On our way out of town, the trail passed through a cornfield, where we stole three ears of corn to cook for dinner that night. When we arrived at camp, Kati made up a fire while I went and fetched water from the stream nearby. We cooked our stolen corn in the coals, and watched the light fade through the trees.



I love backpacking because it reduces my needs and wants to their most elemental levels. If I don't need something, I don't bring it, because everything has to be carried on your back. In fact, a good chunk of our conversation as we walk is usually about what we brought that we could leave behind next time (you'd be amazed at what starts to look expendable by mile ten under a heavy pack). And I think some of the most satisfying meals I've ever had have been ones that I carried out of civilization to eat. My friend JJ posted recently about the concept of "enoughness". Backpacking feels like an active exercise in enoughness to me. Being out in nature is one of the simplest pleasures I can think of, and also one of the most satisfying. And it feels like a relief to shuck the burden of things I hadn't realized I didn't need. At a stream-crossing on our last day, we passed this on a collapsed stone bridge - it's a nice reminder: