[pct-l] Post Trail adjustment

[Paul Magnanti]

As I promised (threatened?), I am going to write my own essay on post-trail adjustment. ;)

Perhaps it will be a topic that may spark some interest. Perhaps you will say "Mags is going off yet again". :) Or maybe it will provide a topic that we can all relate.


At this point in my hiking "career", I am a repeat offender.

The AT was what showed a different lifestyle. Literally.   Before the AT, I assumed I would meet a "nice girl", get the ranch house start a family all before I was 25. (As with most
of my cousins; all sixteen of us on Mom's side!)

After the AT? Hard to go back that life.  I walked the long green tunnel and saw southern Appalachian wildflowers in bloom. Walked along trenches from the US Civil War. And one glorious day, I walked up Katahdin. "The Greatest Mountain" and looked out not only to a vast horizon, but saw a future that did not involve what I had been brought up with.

Loaded up a U-haul (after a second Long Trail hike) and started a new life for myself in Colorado. To travel 2000 miles away from home and start a new life just wasn't done.

After three years of playing in Colorado, my feet became itchy again. The PCT called. John Muir's "Range of Light" beckoned. I wanted to walk from volcano to volcano and see those white capped peaks beckoning further north.

After the PCT, I frankly went into a "funk". Extreme physical activity had ended. My endorphine rush was gone. More importantly, I traded the simple life of walking for the
fast paced world of networks, fax machines, powerpoint presentations and other  facets of modern society. 

I missed the trail. I missed the simplicity. But I became active in my community. Took up running in addition to my hikes. It was not the same as walking along the crest, but it helped me cope.

In 2004, I got a "fix". Walked the length of the Colorado Trail and feel even deeper in love with my adopted home state.

But it was just a tease.

I wanted to walk the backbone of the continent. To experience WILDERNESS, and more importantly WILDNESS. To see Glacier, see the wild ponies in the Great Divide Basin, to see the desert southwest and its redrocks in New Mexico. And to again fall in love with my adopted home state.

A little over a year after finishing the CDT, I am still not sure what I want to do.

The pull of wandering is strong.  I turn 34 in May. Not old...but not just out of college either.

It is a transitional age. One where I constantly question why I want out of life. To somehow balance this wanderlust with a desire for community. I actually enjoy my life in Colorado. I have friends that I consider to be family, I get to do something exciting almost every weekend. I live in a beautiful place.

But...

The urge to wander is strong.

I think of something Steinbeck wrote almost 50 yrs ago:

When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature
people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy 
prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever
 and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. ... 
In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. 
I fear the disease is incurable. -- John Steinbeck, TRAVELS WITH CHARLEY


So here I a year or so after the CDT. 

I have a "good job", I enjoy where I live. But I want to again shoulder my pack, walk into the distant mountains
and again go on a wilderness pilgrimage.

Once a bum. Always a bum.




 



 
************************************************************
The true harvest of my life is intangible.... a little stardust 
caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched
--Thoreau
http://www.pmags.com