“I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.”Ī Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. In a way, it would hardly matter.Īt times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge. You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between.
The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. “Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot.