'going long' can reveal about a place and about ourselves. In the last post, quotes from a half dozen authors provided insight into what their adventures had taught them. We wrapped up with Cheryl Strayed's hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. This time we'll begin by swinging east to the Appalachian Trail to hit the ground running.
Speed ascents, fastest known times (FKT) and trail records aren't for everybody. In fact, many consider them a travesty. The thought: time outdoors is to slow down, take a deep breath and become one with nature. I get it, but I've also enjoyed trail running in the past, the way it focuses your attention on each footstep, on the slightest variation of slope. How aware you become of your lungs and heart rate, your hydration and energy reserves. There's just something 'animal graceful' about moving quickly thru a landscape under your own power. This from a guy who can just as easily spend hours at one trailside ledge studying rock, lichen, moss and fern. I'm good with both sides of the speed coin and I'm good with the next couple of 'epic' books.
Jennifer Pharr Davis - Web image
Scott Jurek - Web image
Davis: "In the midst of this pain, the only thing I wanted
to do was return to the trail. The trail provided me with a
purpose. It was a catharsis and it provided a way to move
forward physically, even if my heart was held captive. And
if miles were the best medicine, then I wanted to hike as
far and as fast as possible."
Jurek: "Maybe I'd convinced myself I wanted something
I used to have. It's true that sometimes I felt washed up...
Why not try to beat the AT speed record? It was perfect...
I still loved to run and explore my surroundings on foot.
I loved being out there.
Because I'm forty and I need to feel what it's like to go
to the edge again, and then go farther."
Davis: "I love God and I felt called to the trail by him.
I wanted to follow his voice and praise him with the talents
and the gifts that he had given me.
I also love the trail. Out of all the paths that I have traveled,
the Appalachian Trail remains closest to my heart."
Jurek: "The point of a thru-hike is different for everybody.
Some people assume thru-hikers are running away from
something, trying to escape the real world. For me it was
transformation. I wanted to find something I thought I'd
lost, to test strengths I didn't think I had anymore, to
rekindle the fire I'd thought was long extinguished. The
journey was the tool I needed to pry myself open."
Davis
Jurek
If the intensity, suffering and soul-searching of the record setters seem a bit much maybe it's time to lighten up with Bill Bryson. A Walk in the Woods is his slower, funnier take on the Appalachian Trail. Here he's having second thoughts after having blithely committed to the hike:
"Nearly everyone I talked to had some gruesome story
involving a guileless acquaintance who had gone off hiking
the trail with high hopes and new boots and come
stumbling back two days later with a bobcat attached
to his head..."
"The woods were full of peril...loony hillbillies destabilized
by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations
of profoundly unbiblical sex..."
Is a swimsuit your outfit of choice for a long journey? It is for both Lynne Cox and Diana Nyad. They are two of the best known distance swimmers of our times and both have books chronicling their adventures. Cox's is called Swimming to Antarctica and in case your wondering, yes she did. Find A Way is Nyad's story of her obsession with a Cuba to Florida crossing.
Lynne Cox with ice water friend - Web image
Diana Nyad found a way - Web image
Both women are amazing endurance athletes but I do have some problems with Nyad. She has a turbocharged ego that sometimes leads her astray. Writing of a 1975 swim around Manhattan Island she states "...it hadn't been done since 1927..." and "I was the first women to swim around Manhattan..." Sorry Diana but wrong and wrong. A woman did it in 1959 in a documented, well publicized event. I know this because around our house that woman is known as 'Mom'. Even back in 1959 when Diane Struble did the swim, she wasn't the first. There had been several before her. Within the long distance swimming community there seems to an uneasiness about some of Nyad's claims, something I haven't detected with Lynne Cox's almost unbelievable accomplishments. That said, here are some quotes from both author/athletes:
Lynne Cox - "And I swam as if I had learned to fly. I raced
across the water. My strokes felt powerful, and I felt strong,
alive, as if awakened for the first time...I couldn't believe how
happy I was. It was like I had gone from a cage into limitless
possibilities...as if I had found my place, finally, found my
niche in the universe."
Diana Nyad - "...it is truly a vast, unfathomably powerful
wilderness out there. This is a swimmer's Mount Everest,
the great epic ocean endeavor of our blue planet. It's never
been done...You can do this. You will do this."
Lynne Cox - "I would have been happy that I tried to reach
my goal, but if I didn't succeed, I would want to go back and
figure out what I thought I needed to do to accomplish it,
and then try again."
Diana Nyad - "This feels like the magical ending to a
lifelong fairy tale. Are we really about to touch the seemingly
impossible, unreachable Other Shore?"
Web image
I can swim enough not to sink but that's about it. Mostly I like being in a canoe with some boat between me and the water. So a book about a long paddle trip that goes right thru our area...I'm on board with that. According to Peter Lourie, no one had ever canoed the Hudson River, source to sea. In River of Mountains he tells of doing just that.
"When we finally pull out of the rapids to rest in the calm of
an eddy, I feel raw elation. Joy bolts into my blood - an antidote
to fear - and I realize I haven't felt so alive in years...Deciding
to make this trip instantly stirred the muck of boredom and
routine with a dangerous and physical task."
"In my enthusiasm I said to Melissa, 'I'll hunt off the land.'
She countered, 'You'll hunt hot dogs and canned peaches,
you mean.' She was right...I'ld be a kind of foreign traveler in
a familiar land. To see the river for myself was the goal -
not through the eyes of the Hudson River school of painters,
nor from the tourist boats to West Point, not even through
the polemics if the environmentalists. Mine would be a
paddler's view..."
Bill McKibben - Web image
Perhaps no one on my list of travel writers is as exquisite a wordsmith as Bill McKibben. His small book Wandering Home tends to get lost in the author's large canon of work. But it's one of my favorites because it covers 200 miles of walking across a landscape I know well - Vermont and the Adirondacks - and does it in a thought provoking and perceptive way. Here are a few passages:
"To me, this country on either side of Lake Champlain,
though it has no name and appears on no map as a single
unit, constitutes one of the world's few great regions, a
place more complete, more full of future promise, than
any other spot in the American atlas."
"Today...a journey is at its end, and so of course beer is in
order. A little Saranac pale ale from this side of the lake,
and a little Otter Creek copper ale from Vermont - we mix
them together and drink a toast to this whole territory..."
"It's the glory of the land and the human making sense of each
other...I have the great good fortune to have found the place
I was supposed to inhabit, a place in whose largeness I can
sense the whole world but yet is small enough for me to
comprehend."
Web image
Let's finish with a long ride on horseback. A really long ride. Like 29,000 miles long. Many people in the area came to know and love Bernice Ende when she spent a winter layover in Fort Edward several years ago. She was on her way back west after riding from Montana to the Atlantic Ocean with her two Norwegian Fjords, Essie and Spirit. Lady Long Rider is Ende's chronicle of that ride as well as several others leading up to it. Bernice pleads "I'm a rider, not a writer," and she never really explains her 'Why'. I have a hunch she's not sure herself, but it's clear that long riding is how she defines who she is and that's good enough for me.
"...I saw what I can only describe as a 'vision'...myself, grubby
and haggard, packed and traveling across a desert, mounted
upon a horse..."
"'Reentry,' as I refer to it, stands out as the hardest part of my
journeys. Reentry comes at the end of a ride when I fold up
my tent, put the horses in my corral, and return to the busy
and social existence that most people would consider normal
living. I have felt stifled every time I've reached this part...
It's the exposure to nature and the submersion in living
I love, and I dislike ending these adventures even for
short periods."
Essie and Spirit in Fort Edward - "Let's hit the trail."
WISH YOU WERE HERE...
There were a number of books/authors that I wanted to include but ran out of time. Here are short takes on their long trips:
* The Worst Journey in the World is sometimes cited as the greatest adventure story of all time. Apsley Cherry-Garrard was a (surviving) member of Robert Scott's ill fated 1911 expedition to the South Pole. Cherry-Garrard's side trip thru dark and cold to see the Emperor penguins will chill you to the core. Read this and you'll never want to travel more than a few feet from your woodstove.
* Craig Childs is at home in the hotter, drier climate of the desert southwest. Something of a next generation Ed Abbey, he writes lyrically of deep travel in arid lands. The Secret Knowledge of Water is one of his early offerings with several more books since.
* There is, well, a mountainous stack of mountaineering literature. The best of it delves into the 'why' of risk and hardship, of the rewards of pushing beyond the easy and familiar. I like Maurice Herzog's Annapurna and Arlene Blum's Annapurna - A Woman's Place, two individual takes on the same mountain. But for every iconic peak you can find shelves of books. As Herzog concludes, "There are other Annapurna's in the lives of men." And, I might add, in the lives of women.
* One of those 'other Annapurna's' is Mount Everest with its own obsessive following. Perhaps the most eccentric of its followers is Goran Kropp. Starting at sea level in Sweden he biked 7000 miles to Kathmandu, Nepal towing all his supplies with him. Then he shouldered his 140 pound pack and trekked to basecamp before climbing to the summit. Solo and without oxygen. All that was left was to climb back down, walk out and bike 7000 miles home. Ultimate High is his book.
Goran Kropp, to the mountain biker - Web image
FRESH VOICES...
Here are several footloose young writer/travelers and their offerings:
* Leath Tonino and Sam Brakeley are Vermonters adventuring large in their small state. In The Animal One Thousand Miles Long Tonino shows how creativity can find new possibilities in a place that may seem explored-out. Brakeley, on skies and in canoes, weaves history into his trips as he traces the military routes of Benedict Arnold and Henry Knox.
* Noe Alvarez, the son of Mexican immigrants, recounts both physical and emotional challenges in Spirit Run. The memoir tells of his running 6000 miles thru indigenous communities from Canada to Central America in an event called the Peace and Dignity Journey. Look for Alvarez's story in bookstores and libraries this spring.
Web image
* Lands of Lost Borders is Kate Harris's tale of a 14 month long bike ride on the Silk Road.
"Hope is the right word. Lands of Lost Borders is
fundamentally optimistic and uplifting, and Harris is funny
and generous. So many adventure memoirs detail seemingly
superhuman feats of endurance that are off-limits to most
mortals. Harris, instead, suggests that anyone can become
an explorer simply by taking a long walk - or a bike ride -
and paying close attention to the world as it passes by.
Her enthusiasm is contagious."
- from a review by Eva Holland in Outside magazine
OUT THE BACKDOOR ADVENTURES...
If your urge to go is red hot but your bank account little more than a smoldering ember, there are options. Rather than heading for the back of beyond you could opt for some 'budget adventures' right here in the tame Northeast.
On the N-P -Web image
* It's said that more people have walked on the moon than have through-hiked the Northville-Placid Trail in winter. While the moon walkers had a little help from NASA's billion dollar budgets, the N-P requires little money but lots of skill and effort. It's 138 miles of mostly low-level terrain in the south central Adirondacks and while it does cross roads there are some fairly remote sections. The winter difficulties come in the form of deep snow, frigid temperatures and water and wetness. There are many river, stream and wetland crossings making it hard to stay dry and being wet dangerously saps body heat. The N-P in winter requires a well equipped group with plenty of fitness and experience plus some luck. Don't buy Muck Boots and a cheap pack at Walmart thinking you'll knock the sucker off in a few days. Not unless you want to die with your Muck Boots on.
The Long Trail in Winter - Green Mountain Club image
* Vermont's Long Trail - all 272 miles of it - end to end in winter? Be prepared to join a very small group, as in just two soldiers who had helicopter support! In January of 1990 Pat Moriarty and Tom Stone of the Vermont National Guard completed the impressive mission. Read their story here. Once again snow, cold and wetness are the hurdles but this being an up and down ridgeline hike you will also contend with icy climbs and descents and scouring above tree line winds. I remember summiting Camels Hump one winter when we literally crawled to the top on hands and knees to avoid being blown off. This is a challenge right up there with any on the planet.
The High Peaks in winter - Web image
* I'm reluctant to mention the Adirondack High Peaks because of severe overuse issues but do want to tell of a local guy who found all the adventure he could handle there earlier this winter. Mike Jaworski of Greenwich along with his friend Nick Glasser through-hiked all 46 High Peaks in early January. They finished in nine days and nine hours covering 199 miles with 63,000 feet of elevation gain. And yes, they are sort of thinking about the winter Long Trail next!
Nick and Mike go for a hike - Web image
Epiphanies are in short supply. After all this vicarious travel about the only revelation is that every traveler is unique as is every place traveled to. Hardly a revelation at all but it does open the door to myriad fascinating interactions between people and place. Thus the rich trove of 'journey' literature with, no doubt, more to come. Including, perhaps, yours.
Finally, writing of these cold winter treks leaves me longing for some warm weather fun. In honor of Lynne Cox, Diana Nyad and Mom here's a link to Louden Wainwright's The Swimming Song.
Summer's right around the corner.
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