August 16, 2005

• I wrote in an email to my mom about my general sense of malaise.

  And it's not really a malaise. It's not general. It's not specific, but it's not general either. Neither word does it justice. It's somewhere in between those. It's like talking about the tide... The tide is specific. It's a specific thing, but it's always in motion. It's never specifically one thing or another. It's a process, not an object.

  Anyway. My mom sent me an email about some stuff and I replied back thusly:
  

  I feel really stuck writer-wise as well as life-wise, which is why I'm so ready to believe that I'll hike the Pacific Crest Trail next year. I've cut my expectations down to the Oregon stretch, but that's still a month of hiking.

  She responded by asking: How is hiking going to help you be unstuck? And the answer is this:

  When I was a little kid, I loved looking through National Geographic magazine. And I loved seeing all the documentaries that contained voice-over narration such as: "The Umbegwe tribe forages for food in the nearby jungle..." Some of my earliest formative years were spent in the back seat of a station wagon on a road trip to a national park or two. Trips to the family retreat in central Tennessee were a high point of the summer, with hikin' and fishin' and splashin' around in the river.

  And then, somehow, over time, my over-literal mind was fed the notion that people live their lives in a certain way, and this certain way didn't involve carting a hand-held 16mm film camera into the jungle following the chief elder of the Umbegwe tribe. I don't know what my family thought I'd do with myself, or what my school teachers thought they were teaching me to become.

  I remember looking at a two-page spread in the National Geographic one time back then. It was a smiling Amazonian kid. I say 'Amazonian,' because I have no clue as to specificity. A lot of indigenous features, maybe some Latin in there, too, but mostly he was naked and standing on the root system of a tree on the banks of a river. The river was a deep emerald green. All around was dense jungle. This boy was about to jump into the river, where his friends were already swimming. And he had a huge smile on his face. The kind of smile that restores faith in humanity.

  Meanwhile, I was skipping school in the fourth grade because I didn't know how else to deal.

  And some of that conflict, between the vision of some (at best) semi-romanticized world, and the one where I had to (by law as my mom would point out sometimes) go to be picked on by my alcoholic fourth grade teacher (unbeknownst to my mom), is still with me today.

  And I want to do this hike because: It would be badass. People lose money on all kinds of things all the time, but seldom do they get to say that they hiked from Mexico to Canada as a consequence. Or even from Ashland to Mt. Hood, or up to Canada. (See, I'm thinking of doing both Oregon and Washington now. Oregon's the easiest part, and I think I'd just be getting warmed up by the time I made it to the Columbia.)

  And, in truth, in this moment right now, I don't need to do it. Just that it's there is enough to kindle the romantic notion that will keep me interested in the world. But soon I'll have to put hiking boot to trail and see how far the notion will carry me, and, when it inevitably fades, how far I can carry myself.

  • 2:17 am
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