[pct-l] Colin Fletcher vs Charlie Brown

[JoAnn M. Michael]

I feel like Charlie Brown. 

One of my favorite strips by the gifted cartoonist shows Lucy, Linus and Charlie Brown lying on their backs in this lovely meadow looking up at the cumulus clouds. Lucy refelcts that the clouds remind her of featherly, heavenly type bodies floating gently by on a wonderful white stallion. Linus sees the clouds as groups of angels, swaying effortlessly through their pillows of pure soft cotton gently blowing their trumpets of peace and harmony. 

Charlie Brown looking upwards says, "I see a fire truck."

are we there yet.
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A few great, quickly corralled quotes from my favorite author and greatest  
backpacking, outdoor philosopher of all time, Colin Fletcher.
 
>From "The Thousand Mile Summer" 1964;
"During my thousand-mile summer I sometimes became aware that I was  watching 
a passing show.  But as I walked through those free and sumptuous  days, rich 
with the rewards of inexperience, I did not know that man would soon  lay a 
heavy, engineering hand on much of the land I was seeing.  It has  happened, 
though. And now, almost a quarter of a century later, those who know  today's 
California - today's America, today's world - may perhaps find in the  book a 
quiet testimony not only to the past but also, I hope, to the road we  must walk 
in the future."
 
and 
 
"But all day the wind remained in my command.  It struck discords  from the 
forest of Joshua trees that stretched back, mile after mile, like a  huge 
decaying orchard.  It scythed across the carpet of flowers and set  them all 
shivering.  It faced a group of cattle downwind and set their  coats on edge.  It 
moaned through the eye sockets of a whitened steer's  skull.  It whistled 
through the walls of a stone shack that stood roofless  and rejected, miles from 
nowhere.  And when stray clouds hid the sun it  probed my marrow."
 
>From "The Man Who Walked Through Time", 1968;
"I woke in half-light and lay looking up and off to my left at a vertical  
bank, eight or ten feet high, that a flash flood had scoured out of the canyon  
floor.  And as I lay watching daylight fill in the details of the boulders  
and stones and sand that made up this bank, the flood that had created the bank  
was suddenly so real that I could almost see the last few grains of sand  
dribbling down into its receding waters.  And for a few minutes then, as I  lay 
half awake, more than the creation of the bank was real.  I could feel  and 
understand and accept and believe in, utterly, the whole long and continuous  
process that had stripped rock fragments from the cliffs above and then had  
dropped them, bolder by stone by grain of sand, until at last they accumulated  
into the gravelly soil that now covered the floor of the sidecanyon."
 
and
 
"Yes, get out is the thing - It has been a wonderful life - effort,  then 
perception - peace and insight - deer mice and beavers; sunshine and  river.  But 
now, washing my head in Nankoweap Creek, I know it is  over.  I have 
overstayed my welcome in the museum.  The things I  wanted to do are done.  The time 
has passed for contemplation, I must get  out and do.  For doing is what 
counts.  The contemplation is only for  that."
 
>From "The River", 1997;
"Through my late forties and early fifties, the pattern continued, in  
miniature.  I made countless shorter backpack trips, and several took me  along 
further stretches of the lower Colorado.  As I approached my sixties,  the germ of 
the idea for this journey had come close to surfacing: I wrote that  
'sometime in the next hundred and fifty years I plan to complete a piecemeal  walk 
along the entire Colorado River'.  Then, one spring morning in my  mid-sixties, I 
was taking a shower when it came to me that what I most wanted to  do with my 
life just the was to follow a major river, under my own power, from  its 
source to its mouth."
 
and
 
"What is needed is a myth that can fit our growing body of knowledge of  
geophysics, biology and the cosmos.  In this vein, I do not think it too  remote 
that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one  organism, 
of which Mankind is a functional part - the mind perhaps; different  for the 
rest of nature, but different as a man's brain is different from his  lungs."
 
Colin, we will all miss you.  May your new adventure with GBITS (great  
backpacker in the sky) be a great one and carry you to challenges,  dirt, flies, 
blue skies, lightning, thunder, rock, water falls, deep cuts,  blisters and 
grand vistas for eternity.  You did not overstay your welcome  in this museum.
 
Greg "Strider" HummelA few great, quickly corralled quotes from my favorite author and greatest  
backpacking, outdoor philosopher of all time, Colin Fletcher.
 
>From "The Thousand Mile Summer" 1964;
"During my thousand-mile summer I sometimes became aware that I was  watching 
a passing show.  But as I walked through those free and sumptuous  days, rich 
with the rewards of inexperience, I did not know that man would soon  lay a 
heavy, engineering hand on much of the land I was seeing.  It has  happened, 
though. And now, almost a quarter of a century later, those who know  today's 
California - today's America, today's world - may perhaps find in the  book a 
quiet testimony not only to the past but also, I hope, to the road we  must walk 
in the future."
 
and 
 
"But all day the wind remained in my command.  It struck discords  from the 
forest of Joshua trees that stretched back, mile after mile, like a  huge 
decaying orchard.  It scythed across the carpet of flowers and set  them all 
shivering.  It faced a group of cattle downwind and set their  coats on edge.  It 
moaned through the eye sockets of a whitened steer's  skull.  It whistled 
through the walls of a stone shack that stood roofless  and rejected, miles from 
nowhere.  And when stray clouds hid the sun it  probed my marrow."
 
>From "The Man Who Walked Through Time", 1968;
"I woke in half-light and lay looking up and off to my left at a vertical  
bank, eight or ten feet high, that a flash flood had scoured out of the canyon  
floor.  And as I lay watching daylight fill in the details of the boulders  
and stones and sand that made up this bank, the flood that had created the bank  
was suddenly so real that I could almost see the last few grains of sand  
dribbling down into its receding waters.  And for a few minutes then, as I  lay 
half awake, more than the creation of the bank was real.  I could feel  and 
understand and accept and believe in, utterly, the whole long and continuous  
process that had stripped rock fragments from the cliffs above and then had  
dropped them, bolder by stone by grain of sand, until at last they accumulated  
into the gravelly soil that now covered the floor of the sidecanyon."
 
and
 
"Yes, get out is the thing - It has been a wonderful life - effort,  then 
perception - peace and insight - deer mice and beavers; sunshine and  river.  But 
now, washing my head in Nankoweap Creek, I know it is  over.  I have 
overstayed my welcome in the museum.  The things I  wanted to do are done.  The time 
has passed for contemplation, I must get  out and do.  For doing is what 
counts.  The contemplation is only for  that."
 
>From "The River", 1997;
"Through my late forties and early fifties, the pattern continued, in  
miniature.  I made countless shorter backpack trips, and several took me  along 
further stretches of the lower Colorado.  As I approached my sixties,  the germ of 
the idea for this journey had come close to surfacing: I wrote that  
'sometime in the next hundred and fifty years I plan to complete a piecemeal  walk 
along the entire Colorado River'.  Then, one spring morning in my  mid-sixties, I 
was taking a shower when it came to me that what I most wanted to  do with my 
life just the was to follow a major river, under my own power, from  its 
source to its mouth."
 
and
 
"What is needed is a myth that can fit our growing body of knowledge of  
geophysics, biology and the cosmos.  In this vein, I do not think it too  remote 
that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one  organism, 
of which Mankind is a functional part - the mind perhaps; different  for the 
rest of nature, but different as a man's brain is different from his  lungs."
 
Colin, we will all miss you.  May your new adventure with GBITS (great  
backpacker in the sky) be a great one and carry you to challenges,  dirt, flies, 
blue skies, lightning, thunder, rock, water falls, deep cuts,  blisters and 
grand vistas for eternity.  You did not overstay your welcome  in this museum.
 
Greg "Strider" Hummel