Have you ever gone for a hike? Have you ever carried all of your camping gear and water with you on that hike? No? I hadn't either until last weekend. I went for my first backpacking trip in Idyllwild, California and it was so many different things. It was hard, exhausting, magical, rewarding, dirty, and so much fun. As someone who has been camping and hiking her entire life I knew what backpacking was going to be like. Or at least I thought I did. I expected it to be hard. Hiking is hard enough without an extra 30-pound pack on your back. But I didn't expect to move so slowly or for my mind to move in and out of clarity so often.
As someone who lives most of the year in New York City and walks everywhere, I understand deeply the idea that walking is the greatest mode of transportation for seeing the world in its most intimate details. But in New York there are distractions. I take my phone with me everywhere and listen to music or podcasts as I walk. I overhear snippets of people's conversations as I pass by them. As magical and beautiful as the sounds of the city are, it's loud. Almost deafeningly loud, the polar opposite of the grandness of sound that exists in the kind of nature that I went backpacking in.
Hiking up Devil's Slide trail to Saddle Junction where we would take the Pacific Crest Trail a little ways before setting up camp for the night was strenuous. I ended up about half an hour behind my friends and was on my own most of the hike. This allowed me to have my own mini "Wild" adventure. I got a taste of what Cheryl Strayed experienced walking alone through nature for months. You run into other hikers along the way, have a quick chat and then keep going. I found that counting my steps and focusing on the way the dirt trail felt under my feet kept me focused on moving forward instead of paying attention to the weight of my pack on my back and hips. And that's all I focused on. Moving forward, towards my friends but with no real end in sight.
That's how life in college feels to me right now. Like I'm constantly working hard to move forward but to no real end, just for the sake of forward motion. And I'm coming to see that this is probably just how life is. You keep trying and trying to do more and be better for no real reason other than that is what people do. We strive to keep on keeping on. And hopefully along the way we get to enjoy it. Whether that means taking a break to look back at how far you've come as I did often on my backpacking trip, or that means perpetual motion until you decide that there is a natural end that you can just set up camp and watch other people on their journeys forward, life and backpacking will always be hard but will always be rewarding.
