I have always loved the outdoors. You could not get me to come inside as a kid. We didn’t live anywhere particularly outdoorsy. In fact, we lived in the farthest thing from it, the suburbs of Detroit Michigan. No one in my family liked to camp or hike, but for whatever reason I was always drawn to the woods. I would spend all my days in the park behind my house. There was a little patch of trees there I would refer to as the wild. You could see all the way through those trees to the homes on the other side, but nonetheless, I had no trouble getting lost in them. It was not even an acre big but to me, it was its own little universe. I used to make plans of how I would run away to that forest and “live off the land”. At night I would sleepwalk out my back door and into these woods. The forest was quite literally calling me.
When I reached my sophomore year of high school, I signed up for what was called wilderness; a ten-day backpacking trip through the smokey mountains in small groups led by a staff member. I had never been so excited for something in all my life. They loaded my classmates and me onto charter buses and we drove through the night. When we got to what was going to be our base camp, they divided us into small groups, gave us our supply bin for the week, and we divided it up amongst ourselves. I had no idea how ill-prepared I was for what the next ten days would hold. We were a group of Michigan suburban kids, being trotted off into the actual wild.
We hiked at least ten miles a day with 50-pound packs on our back. I had been in pretty good shape at the time, but it still felt impossible. My legs were quivering by the end of the first day. We had no idea what to do when we got to our first campsite. In fact, we weren’t even completely sure if we were there or not. Our leaders showed us how to tie a rope around two trees and drape our tarps to create a shelter. We looked at all our food and had no idea what we should eat. Two people in the group said we should all eat apples for dinner because we should ration our food. Another kid and I argued that there was no way they didn’t give us enough food to eat more than just an apple for dinner. The leaders eventually had to intervene. They explained the basics of nutrition to us and showed us which foods did what. I had never seen a lentil in my life before that trip and they made up half of our food supply. I have not eaten a lentil since that trip.
The first night was the worst. No one could sleep. I had to pee every 20 minutes, we weren’t used to our sleeping pads and bags, and none of us had broken in any of our gear prior like we were supposed to. Everything was sore. Our hips rubbed raw from not packing and wearing our backpacks properly. Our feet blistered from unbroken-in boots, and everyone was slightly dehydrated because we were still getting used to the taste of the iodine in our water. It rained nonstop for the first seven days of our ten-day trip. At night it turned to snow, freezing our soaking wet clothes we had hung to dry. It was an inescapable cold. It was an inescapable wet. Yet we trudged along.
Each day our guides designated one of us to be the navigator and we sat together in the dirt using a shoestring to try to measure out miles on our old topography map. We got a little better at each task each day. Tarps became easier to roll, packs easier to carry, maps easier to follow, and meals easier to cook. Not that we didn’t continue to make mistakes. We made so many mistakes. Walking miles in the wrong direction, forgetting equipment and having to go back for it, spilling food and having to eat it off the ground. I never got used to the way we had to drink the water we used to clean our pots in order to leave no trace.
On the other side of all this, the hikes were beautiful. However, I had a bad habit of staring at my feet the whole time because of how often I tripped. It has been a long time since that trip but there are still certain spots in those mountains that I can picture perfectly. Certain memories and feelings I recall so well. Like the night we all crawled out of our tarps and watched the stars. Or the giant moss-covered boulders we sat on to eat our lunch right by the little waterfall that ran through our trail. I remember the campsite we had at the top of the mountain that was so windy we spent half the night chasing loose tarps. Jack made dinner for us one night and put all of our soup packets into one pot of boiling water. It was the thickest most flavor-packed bowl of soup anyone had ever made. I remember near the end when we were low on supplies, so we just put jelly on pretzels for lunch and decided it reminded us all of that one Jell-O desert. I remember licking my bowl clean after every meal. After five straight days of rain, we finally had a sunny one and all decided to swim in the little freezing-cold waterfall we had found.
It only takes ten days to accept something as your existence. Actually, it takes less than that. By day five of our trip I was so used to waking up soaking wet in the middle of the woods with this group of people, that it felt like I had been doing it all my life. All other parts of my world were so far out of sight and so far out of mind. I hadn’t thought of my family or my homework or my phone and all its social media accounts at all. I was completely detached from society and our world as we know it. My life was simply wake up, eat, pack up camp, hike, set up camp, eat. That was all I had to do and that was all I had to think about which gave my mind so much space to explore. Distance is the best way to create perspective.
You know how people tell you to go for a walk to clear your head, and it helps! We’ll just imagine if that walk was ten days long. In that time you will clear your head of what has been bothering you but also things that were subconsciously bothering you, and anything and everything else that might be in there. Until it is empty. You played out every scenario, you have worked through every problem, you have faced every truth. There is nothing left to clear. Your mind is open, and that is a feeling that I cannot explain. That is a feeling I crave constantly, and that is why I hike.
Comments