Longterm stares at me, dumbfounded. He is standing in front of a door which leads out to his little porch and the sunny, warm day beyond. We stood there trapped by an awkward silence for a moment. I watch him grimace in discomfort as he tries to think of the nicest way to phrase what he was about to say. “Let me get this straight. . .” He says, bewildered, “you’ve been carrying around a gallon of water in the rainforest?!” To which I sheepishly reply with an understated “yes”. And he then gestures broadly out the open doorway and says; “listen son, listen close. You can hear the water. You can always hear the water out here. You’ve just been carrying around ten pounds of fear this whole time!”
Little Belle laughs at me. I glare at her, embarrassed. She shrugs and says “I’m not any better; I am carrying at least fifteen pounds of nostalgia.” Then we all look at her pack. Which is old enough to be a Lewis and Clark hand-me-down, and the metal frame has been warped and manhandled by every outfitter in the southeast as we have tried to jimmy rig it back into its original position.
As we close in on March there have been more and more people on the trail. Most of them are ‘ultra lighters’, meaning they are carrying less than 30 lbs of gear in their packs. We started this journey carrying near 50 each. After I lost the water weight and Lil Belle let go of some of her extraneous gear, we have gotten our packs down to around 30-35 lbs. We simply don’t have the budget to afford the kind of gear that would put us in their category. This would always lead me into a place of jealousy, anxiety, resentment, and guilt. Which, as we all know, lead to the dark side of the force, and we can’t have that happen.
So herein lies the real question: how would a Jedi approach hiking the Appalachian trail? They probably wouldn’t worry about how fast they were hiking or how much they were carrying. They would trust the force and the trail to provide the correct lessons along the way so that they would be successful. They wouldn’t listen to others when they jokingly say “it’ll be next year by the time y’all finish” and they certainly would be more concerned with the amount of smiles had along the way than the miles bagged that day.
The mindstate of a Jedi thru-hiking the AT can be summed up by the simple statement that Bagbowl taught us the other day: “the last one to Katahdin wins.”
Til next time,
Pan & Bell
from the other side 