Hiking in 2005 up Algonquin in the Adirondacks. (Compass Points Media / flickr)
Casey Lyons, an editor at Backpacker, wrote in the latest edition about a trip he took to New York’s Adirondacks Park and the existential questions nagging his mind:
Mostly, I want to find out if my 18-year-old self would punch the man I’ve become in the face.
Harsh? Sure, but I’m considering many of the same questions, and I, too, am heading to the Adirondacks for … something. I know hiking will be involved, but I’m in that stage of life when trips like these should bring some sort of enlightenment. Will it be about the past or the future? Am I nuts to think I’ll even find enlightenment? I have no idea.
I’m a fifth of the way through my 30s and nearing the age of 33. Four months from now, I’ll be for the first time a father, the most exhilarating and frightening concept I’ve ever faced. I’m entering a new chapter. It’s like I closed my eyes when I turned 30 and woke up to a different world where I owned a home instead of bouncing from apartment to apartment; I went to work in television news after nearly a decade in newspapers; I don’t backpack nearly as much as I used to; my priorities include fixing a leaky toilet before planning my next hiking trip; and I have a little boy arriving in December who’s going to rock my world even more.
I am a perpetual existential question.
My wife thinks I’m crazy, but I go through phases when I want to yank on the emergency brake and examine whether this life is the way we imagined it years ago. I’m a little fearful of the answer. I’ve avoided watching my Blu-Ray copy of Into the Wild, just to make sure I won’t drop everything for a year to explore the wilderness. There was a time when that would have been an admirable remedy to constant soul searching; now that would be the height of irresponsibility.
If friends thought I was a daydreamer before, I’ve become more intense now, staring at a computer screen for lengthy moments at the websites of national parks or at photos I took when my life was marked more by the number of mountainscapes I shot rather than the number of visits I make to home improvement stores.
Alison and I hiking in Bryce Canyon National Park, Utah. (Dave Pidgeon)
This Adirondacks trip to touch high points like Mount Marcy and Gothics represents … something. Perhaps the end of an era when I could easily pack up the gear and explore a new corner of the American wilderness. Maybe instead it’s a celebration of what’s to come. I spend time imagining the look on my son’s face when I introduce him to places like Bryce Canyon or the Smokies, when he’s old enough to appreciate the preservation of those epic landscapes (by the time he’s six months old, right?).
But when will that actually be? Will he even want to be my hiking buddy?
“It can’t just be a hobby for you,” my wife once observed. “It has to be a lifestyle. I don’t get that.”
Many don’t. But if you’ve ever had to find a niche or discover what you’re made of, and you found it staring at a lonely waterfall or reached the peak of a mountain you thought you’d never reach, you know what I’m aiming for.
As I ready myself for this Adirondacks trip, I inhale the aroma of hiking that spills out of my gear closets — the nylon tents, the Techwick shirts, the well-worn backpacks, the mud-spotted boots. I question the properness of leaving my pregnant wife for four days to go hiking. Am I being selfish? “You better go because if you don’t you won’t ever stop talking about it,” my wife says half jokingly. And when my son is born, my focus will have to be on him and his mother for a long while. I take that responsibility willingly and enthusiastically. The snowshoes will have to stay hung on the wall; the tents furled; the gear packed away. It’s the right thing to do.
My guess is that I’ll have to take it on faith that in the years to come, the hiking life I pine for will be renewed.
