[pct-l] One story of the decision to go hiking...

[Gail Van Velzer]

Very respectable pack weights!  Just kidding, but that's what it was like 
back then.  How did the adventure go?

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeffrey Olson" <jjolson60 at centurylink.net>
To: <Pct-l at backcountry.net>
Sent: Monday, April 21, 2014 8:09 PM
Subject: [pct-l] One story of the decision to go hiking...


> Here's a story from six years ago...  Maybe the churlish animosities
> will abate...
>
> My girlfriend and I had moved in together in November 1991 and rented
> house in Duvall, WA that within a year was to be torn down for a
> subdivision "in the forest." She had four kids that lived with their
> dad. She had her first kid at 20 and the twins at 24. She was the oldest
> of four kids. Her mom was 16 when she was born, and 21 when the fourth
> was born.
>
> Jane never had a childhood or adolescence. She took care of kids - that
> was her job.
>
> She was 32 and I was 39. I'd found out the previous week I had been
> admitted to the MSW program at the University of Washington. We were
> sitting in a Mexican restaurant in town on March 1, 199, waiting for
> dinner to appear. I'm a philosopher at heart so questions of meaning and
> purpose and the future were always "UP!" Janey made the comment we
> didn't have a "couple project."
>
> This concept was new to me. I thought being a couple was a project.
> Apparently there is more involved. Not only do you work on the
> relationship - constantly, but you have something you do together as a
> couple that involves experiencing something that is the two of yours,
> and no one else's.
>
> I'd thought I was doing good in the "being-in-a couple" part and had the
> rat in a well-lit room feeling - I can't escape! Scurry, scurry scurry...
>
> I'd done a long hike on the Tahoe Yosemite Trail back in the 70s, and
> that had stuck in my history like a beacon without enough amperage. I
> had always wanted more.
>
> I asked if she had a pen - she has a purse so she has the world at her
> fingertips - and I began figuring out the spring and summer on a napkin.
> She asked what I was doing and I asked her to wait a minute. I had to
> start grad school on the first of October. If we started hiking on June
> 1 we could hike from Lassen to Whitney - 750 miles - in 75 days, enough
> time to get back to reality and rent an apartment in time for me to
> start school and her to find a job. (Her school time would come later.) '
>
> Our food arrived and she asked me questions about backpacking. She'd
> never done it before. She'd not done much day hiking. She looked at the
> napkin and asked about details - what to do with our meager possessions,
> her dad who was dying of colon cancer, etc. By the end of the meal we
> were both heady and excited and that much more in love. We had a "couple
> project" - a hike from Lassen to Whitney.
>
> We spent the next three months preparing for the trip - a story in and
> of itself. On June 7 we left Hat Creek heading south, her pack weighing
> 56 pounds, mine 72...
>
> Jeffrey Olson Martin, SD
> June 2008
>
>
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