It is past midnight, and the contents of my backpack are strewn across the living room of my parents home -- my home for much of my life -- in Boiling Springs, South Carolina. In a few hours, I will take my first steps on the Appalachian Trail, a 2175 mile journey that I will endure over the course of 4 months. The backpack is red, the nicest one I could buy, and has been used once -- it looks almost new. Most of the items now being reorganized into smaller and smaller piles are the culmination of a series of purchases made between my freshman and senior years of college. They are the result of hundreds of hours spent reading online journals, guidebooks, and equipment reviews in outdoor magazines. My father wakes, looks at me and my empty pack with bewilderment, and murmurs an unremembered question.
Looking back 6 years later, I can't remember what the purpose of repacking for the dozenth time hoped to accomplish. Like much of the AT, this night now seems like only the first in a series of trials devised by the trail gods to expose my weakness, raise self-doubt, and question my mental fortitude. As I examined each individual items of REI miscellany with the eye of a jeweler, a million thoughts raced through my mind, and each one presented itself with a particular set of anxiety-invoking, unanswerable questions:
Shall I carry the standard or travel-size tube of toothpaste?
How long exactly will I be able to boil water with a mini-fuel canister compared to a regular size one?
Should I pre-remove the cardboard tubing from my half-roll of toilet paper, or should I save it as a fire starter?
What, exactly, are the symptoms of giardiasis?
And finally, which pocket of my Osprey pack will be the most convenient for my ultra-lite umbrella? Is carrying an umbrella some sort of violation of thru-hiker code? What is a thru-hike worth, without the experience of slogging through a southeastern monsoon after all?
I had never before felt so existentially motivated by my belongings in my life. The 50-odd items before me on the floor, to me, represented my will to complete a task I had planned and dreamed of for a large part of my life: to walk the distance from Georgia to Maine and stand on top of a mountain called Katahdin - "the greatest mountain." Each piece of equipment carried with it an anticapation of a journey, a spiritual experience, a redefining of my life. In some ways, the obsession reflected a shockingly limited understanding of the necessities of trail life - an ultimately
Looking back 6 years later, I can't remember what the purpose of repacking for the dozenth time hoped to accomplish. Like much of the AT, this night now seems like only the first in a series of trials devised by the trail gods to expose my weakness, raise self-doubt, and question my mental fortitude. As I examined each individual items of REI miscellany with the eye of a jeweler, a million thoughts raced through my mind, and each one presented itself with a particular set of anxiety-invoking, unanswerable questions:
Shall I carry the standard or travel-size tube of toothpaste?
How long exactly will I be able to boil water with a mini-fuel canister compared to a regular size one?
Should I pre-remove the cardboard tubing from my half-roll of toilet paper, or should I save it as a fire starter?
What, exactly, are the symptoms of giardiasis?
And finally, which pocket of my Osprey pack will be the most convenient for my ultra-lite umbrella? Is carrying an umbrella some sort of violation of thru-hiker code? What is a thru-hike worth, without the experience of slogging through a southeastern monsoon after all?
I had never before felt so existentially motivated by my belongings in my life. The 50-odd items before me on the floor, to me, represented my will to complete a task I had planned and dreamed of for a large part of my life: to walk the distance from Georgia to Maine and stand on top of a mountain called Katahdin - "the greatest mountain." Each piece of equipment carried with it an anticapation of a journey, a spiritual experience, a redefining of my life. In some ways, the obsession reflected a shockingly limited understanding of the necessities of trail life - an ultimately
