Why so hard ? - Appalachian Trail

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#21

Yeah, it is very hard to get into the " real world ?"… yuck. I think for me… coming to Alaska in the summers eases the pain… and liing in Eastern Or is also very very nice. I just can’t… don’t want to … deal with traffic… sprawl. and all that. I try and keep it very simple for myself…I hear absolutely NO traffic from where i am ( 2 rivers alaska )and Joseph Oregon is off the beaten track too… 80 miles to the nearest redlight !..The helps my sanity…:wink: I agree with the road call from snack attack. That is one of the hard things about the AT… too many ways to get off .

yappy

#22

Hey, Goggles - good to see your voice in this online thingie. And weird/cool to have a face to associate with a name in what had been just randomland before last April.

Getting off the trail was hard. And I didn’t want to have to do it. But, given Moxie’s knee injury (2 miles outside of Harper’s Ferry she fell, right on the soft part of her underknee, requiring six stictches - but worse was depth of slash, and the deep bruising, swelling under her knee which made her unable to even hobble around regular flatlands - stairs, and anything with any amount of ascent/descent were killing her), I was faced with a situation where I could go on without her, but, you know, that just didn’t really feel like an option that I could follow… though I tried it out for a hundred miles or so.

What’s strange is that it felt like we’d overcome the major mental/emotional obstacles. We’d done our work already. Our personal challenges were at 300 miles and at 500 miles. At the thousand mile mark (pre-injury) we were feeling good. And I was already, in my heart, breathing the fresh cool Maine air, and seeing the fall colours in the forests…

Ah.

But one thing about getting off the trail for this reason. Though I deeply wish we had finished, it does not feel like a failure to me. No, it doesn’t feel like a thru-hike. But it feels like something. A thousand miles of a certain beautiful rare something that we were all so lucky to have got to experience.

whoa

#23

Hey Whoa, I wondered what happened to you two. Hadn’t seen anything on your ejournal since August. Sorry you couldn’t make it to K, but those things happen. Hope Moxie is walking fine again.

The trail is hard, make no mistake. Virginian and Wolf say it’s not so bad, but everyone has a different breaking point. For some it’s their first full rainy day, for others it’s a bruising fall, the 20th hill that day, or hiking alone for a week. For me it was to take that first step. It took more courage for me to ignore society’s expectations and decide to do the hike than anything else. Once I made it to Baxter and got out of the car, it was all downhill (that’s the good thing about SOBOing).

I’ll never claim the AT was or is easy, for each of us defines difficulty differently. Who am I to say someone should have continued instead of quitting? Maybe they learned more about themselves and their capabilities in 300 miles than I’ve learned in 2100 miles. Who’s smarter? Reread Whoa’s comments and ponder.

Enough philosophy, it’s back to the salt mines…

Goggles

#24

Long distance hiking is somewhat like giving birth (or so I understand, never having done the latter) – if we didn’t forgot how much it hurts, we wouldn’t ever do it again. Somehow, six months after the trail a sort of amnesia sets in. All that you remember are the good times, or the bad times are remembered, but with sort of a glow about them: “Yes, it was hard, but what an adventure!”

When I finished my first long hike I was asked, “Do you plan to do another one?” And I said, “No, it was a good experience, but I don’t need to repeat it.” The following March, Springer fever set in and I started thinking, “Maybe I could do it again.” Three years later I was on the trail again.

Even now, after four long hikes, I forgot about the pain and exhaustion and sheer difficulty of living rough for six months. I can’t wait to go back out again. When we go on a vacation hike, or even a long weekend, my aches and pains remind me of reality, or walking in an all day cold rain, or sleeping outside when it’s 25 degrees outside and I think, “Maybe having a roof over my head isn’t such a bad thing.” The idea of living on Liptons for six more months makes me gag, but at the same time, I would leave next month if I could. I know that when we do our next hike we’ll be six years older, six years stiffer, and that the push for miles will be even more difficult than it was on my last long hike – but still I can’t wait to go back to that life.

Spirit Walker