Call me Ishmael?

 

When I was younger I dreamed of one day hiking the Pacific Crest Trail.  As I have aged my appreciation for clean sheets and need for a good mattress have made me reconsider that dream.  I do still enjoy reading the blogs of PCT hikers.  I have done more hiking than in years past and plan to continue that going forward. I expect that my age will and the level physical impact from these adventures will ensure that my aspirations remain appropriately meager.

 

I always enjoyed the rhythm that one grew into after a few days on the trail.  The simplicity of the routine and the Zen-like peace that comes from becoming more and more efficient have always intrigued me.  This applies both to my personal routines and equipment as well as my interaction with my hiking companion(s).  The constant experiment and refinement results in a quiet satisfaction.

 

One of the many oddities of long distance hikers is they assume a trail name.  Trail names allow a certain anonymity as well as being more memorable than saying, “My name is Justin or Laurel.”  Who can forget names like Twinkletoes, Four Eyes, Pancake or Pied Piper?  

 

We aren’t going far enough to justify real trail names, but in the spirit of calling this my OBDT* for 2020 we’re going for it.  (*OBDT = One big dumb thing = A nickname for an event that middle aged men sign up for and then use fear and panic to motivate them to train for it.  No more than one per year, typically in the summer.)

 

My son has had the nickname Tarzan for a long time and that works for this application. For myself, I wanted to acknowledge not just my age but my experience, which hearkens back to a skills almost unknown in 2020. I learned with paper maps and compasses. They don’t require batteries. I’m not going so far back that we are talking sealskin and oiled canvas, but the skillset I have is rare among hikers today.  So after some consideration for calling myself O.G., I declare, “Call me Analog.”

How backpacking caught me

Hiking with Hottie

Perhaps it started when I was five and my father took me camping in Sequoia.  It was a chance to feel like a man when I was a young a boy.  My dad and I slept in the tent like men do and we ate the same food and I rode in the front seat on the drive there and back.  As a teen my passion for the outdoors was further fueled when I started rock climbing and backpacking with my friends.  Again, it was a chance to be with my friends without parents yet we were doing adult things.

 

The satisfaction of learning and having the skills that enabled me to be independent in the wilderness and was empowering to me as a teenager and young adult.  Making decisions and exercising judgment was a lesson in being a grownup.  Being able to say, “It looks too sketchy right now. Let’s turn around,” while disappointing, was also rewarding because it allowed us to demonstrate, if only to ourselves, that we could make an adult decision.  

 

I gained skills using a map and compass. The stoves we had back there were a cross between a deep fat fryer and a bomb in terms of danger and flame size. Our packs were big, heavy and left us raw and bruised.  We wore boots that weighed so much that unless you had a pair of the behemoths you would not believe me.

 

I loved it. We all did.

 

The idea of being in a place that had not been overrun by man was awesome in the years after Robert Redford made Jeremiah Johnson as real as life itself. The high Sierra was federally protected long before the timber in the western foothills ran out.  With the trails in the Sierra having been built by the CCC during the depression, the joke was that they had used Egyptians for the design and construction of the trails. 

 

Our little group went hiking, climbing and backcountry skiing during the late seventies and well into the eighties. With no internet, we had to earn our knowledge via hard work, experience and mistakes.  

Eighteen years on the John Muir Trail

Tim in 2017

In the seventies and eighties I hiked in the Sierra to experience wilderness, independence and freedom.  I returned in the nineties with my children so they could share some of the same experiences. 

 

In 2002, still reeling from an unexpected divorce, my son and I set out to cover the entire John Muir Trail.  We didn’t take it as seriously as we should have, and a simple blister on the bottom of his foot derailed our plan. Fifty miles in we had to pull out for a couple days while that healed.  Then we jumped back on the trail further south at Kearsarge Pass and finished our trip with a memorable night atop Mt. Whitney.  We ended up completing the first fifty and the last forty-five miles that year.  In 2017 we returned and went in where we had pulled out in 2002.  Another physical setback shortened our trip.  This time we are both determined to be prepared in every way to finish off the remaining eighty or so miles of the trail. We are not seeking to conquer it, we just want to enjoy it.

 

Any inner peace or enlightenment that I was seeking eighteen years ago has either come from elsewhere, or will never find me. I have completed all of the gauntlets chosen by fate or by my own designs and the lessons I have gleaned did not stray far from my previous beliefs.

 

When we started eighteen years ago my son was a teenager and I was a full-grown man.  Now he is the full-grown man and I am an old fart that won’t be doing much of anything eighteen years from now.  For me, time has transitioning from my “someday” to “before it is too late”.  All of the realities that go with the passage of nearly two decades of time apply to both of us.  We are different than we were all those years ago and frankly I am looking forward to expanding our experiences and viewing the trip from changed perspectives.