Appalachian Trail Journal -- At One With The Woods
A very common piece of advice you hear from former thru-hikers is that you'd better enjoy being in the woods! The AT is often derogatively called the "Green Tunnel" because you can almost always count on having trees around you to block out views. Combine this with the sisyphean task of dragging your backpack up and down endless hills, and you can understand why most people quit on the AT.
Fortunately I love the woods. Just being in the presence of the forest for so many hours had a profound effect on me. I got to the point where I felt like I was in tune with it. I could actually feel when a water source was coming up. More and more animals caught my notice. I discovered more new plants than I'd ever imagined. I was fortuitous to hike in a cicada brood year and got caught up in the rhythms of their spacey songs whenever I was in their domain. I vividly remember sitting by a spring as the sun just started to beam strongly, watching thousands of cicadas emerge to make the most of their short existence.
Not that I didn't love to get out of the woods as well! In fact, you get into a cycle where you're totally glad to be in the forest, and then you get hungrier and dirtier, until you get to the point where you'd like nothing better than to be in a town. Once in town, it didn't take long before I couldn't wait to get back into the woods again. And so it goes....
On my (super lucky) hitch out of Katahdin with Just John, his wife asked the three former thru-hikers in the car what we would miss most about the trail. It's a tough question for people who have just finished a thru-hike and are very glad to be done. One person answered: "nothing!". My first response was: "the quiet peace of the woods," and I stand by that response today. The sounds of the forest are so different than that of towns, and so completely outside of our normal existence. A thru-hiker can get to the point where the forest noise seems like the norm.
A bit more than a month off the trail now and I'm missing almost everything about it. So much so, that I almost feel compelled to do Pacific Crest, possibly next Spring. Hiking can take over your life that way. Of course it won't be just like the AT, nothing else is and that's a good thing. But integrating yourself into a natural environment is a moving experience. Seeing, and feeling, all of those subtle and not so subtle changes in the landscape over hundreds and thousands of miles, is a life's wonder. I keep reliving random stretches of trail, just seeing the path and its surroundings in my mind. It's hard to explain, but perhaps not surprising that I would crave a bit more of that.
The one problem I have with this is that I'll become too distant from a more typical lifestyle. The thought that I might never be able to hold down a regular job and integrate into society is almost enough to scare me away from the woods. I say almost because I'm still hoping to have it both ways. It's kind of a Thoreau-type dilemma and like him, I shall probably cop out a bit. Not for awhile yet though.