The Write to Roam

Hemingway’s Kudu and Quitting Your Day Job

On August 18, 2019

Always as a writer there is the question of whether to keep your day job. Successful writers for generations have been telling aspiring writers to keep their jobs and do their writing on the side. Aspiring writers, myself included, have spent generations ignoring this wisdom.

And then there is Hemingway, who found a sneaky way to give new advice on this, then buried it in the pages of an unlikely source: his 1935 safari tale, The Green Hills of Africa. In it, he says…

Now it is pleasant to hunt something that you want very much over a long period of time, being outwitted, outmaneuvered, and failing at the end of each day, but having the hunt and knowing every time you are out that, sooner or later, your luck will change and that you will get the chance that you are seeking. But it is not pleasant to have a time limit by which you must get your kudu or perhaps never get it, nor even see one.

It is not the way hunting should be… The way to hunt is for as long as you live against as long as there is such and such an animal; just as the way to paint is as long as there is you and colors and canvas, and the way to write as long as you can live and there is pencil or paper or ink or any machine to do it with, or anything you care to write about, and you feel a fool, and you are a fool, to do it any other way. But here we were, now, caught by time, by the season, and by the running out of our money so that what should have been as much fun to do each day whether you killed or not was being forced into that most exciting perversion of life; the necessity of accomplishing something in less time than should truly be allowed for its doing.

-Ernest Hemingway, The Green Hills of Africa

It’s tempting to believe that your day job is what’s keeping you from your writing. That quitting it would offer the long open stretches of time you crave to be creative. Depending on your means, it may.

But when you leave a job behind, you turn over an hour-glass. The grains of sand counting down the days before your work needs to begin paying for itself.

It’s impossible to say for certain whether any particular writer should or should not have a day job, or whether they do or don’t stand a chance of making it. But we can comfortably say that no writer should ever do their work in less time than it ought to take.

Most of the time, when we talk about quitting our day jobs in order to pursue writing full-time, the question at hand is “How quickly can I make money at this?”

But another question, the one Hemingway offers, is “How long should this project take, and can I still afford to give it that if I walk away from my paycheck?”

On the Difficulty of Writing

By Ethan

On February 23, 2019

In Writing, Writing Life

The most difficult thing about writing is writing something that’s true. I think that if you can write something that’s true, it will always be good, even if it’s not enjoyable. The truth is not always enjoyable. But reading a truth that you recognize has a certain redeeming quality so that even if the story is unpleasant it sticks, because you see your own experience reflected back at you.

Writing the truth is hard because it forces you to be vulnerable, and also requires that you don’t believe your own bullshit. The bullshit I speak of is not comprised of overt lies. Rather, it is the collection of little half-truths we tell ourselves in order to get through each day. I’m not that lonely. There’s still time. The spinach is tasty.

These half-truths are needed to keep from going crazy in a world where the good guys don’t always win, and bad things happen to all sorts of people, and the rules are different depending on how many zeroes there are on your bank balance. They help you to put two feet on the floor each morning, shave, and wear pants when you might prefer to grow your mane long, flip the table, and donkey-kick the guy who’s texting when he should be paying attention to the traffic light.

The half-truths help you to live a civilized life. Hell, they may even help you live a good life, help you hang on long enough to cut yourself a better slice of the pie. But they will not help you to write.

That is why writing is so hard. Because the mindset needed to write honestly is fundamentally different from the one needed to be a card-carrying member of the civilized world. So writers tend to be recluses, the good ones at least. And the better you’ve done at society’s game, the more difficult it is to recognize truths and put them on the page.

That doesn’t mean your writing has to be unpleasant. There is a beauty to truth. When Hemingway writes about winters in Schruns, about skiing in the high mountain country, and about the hillside farms and the warm farm houses with their great stoves and huge wood piles in the snow, it is beauty itself; words of a true admirer, written by someone who knows.

Hemingway’s truth will not be the same as Neil Gaiman’s truth. For Gaiman, the world is full of ghosts and gargoyles, witches and warlocks. Magic exists, and it finds its way onto every page. Hemingway finds magic in an elk hunt at sunrise, but stays well away (certainly outside shooting distance) of anything mystical.

If you don’t believe in dragons, you will not be able to write about them convincingly, no matter how attractive the market-size for fantasy thrillers. So you must know the true truth of the world, as well as the truth of the world as you see it, and you must avoid believing your own lies, and if you can do all that and clear a few hours a day to put words to paper, maybe then you can write something worth reading.

The Joy of Looking Up

By Ethan

On December 10, 2018

In Travel

But for my money, the best view on Earth – anywhere on Earth – is straight up. It’s easy to forget because the whole scene is often reduced to glittering lights sprinkled across a midnight blue dome. But to glance up at the stars is not so much to look at the night sky as it is to peer out into it. There is a vast depth to the scene which is often missed but which is far grander than even the grandest earthly vista.

On a clear day, you can see 130 miles from the top of Mt Washington in New Hampshire. The view from Everest can exceed two-hundred. The current record for line of sight stands at 334 miles, taken from a place in the Tien Shan Mountains in Kyrgyzstan.

But look up on any night from anywhere and the very closest twinkling light is somewhat further still. So far, in fact, that the distance is not measured in feet or miles but in time – the time it takes the fastest known thing to traverse the space. A lightyear works out to about six trillion miles and Alpha Centauri, the closest star visible in the night sky, is a little over four light years away.

It’s little use talking about the distance, for it is so far as to be virtually ungraspable in any practical way. You could try though. Imagine, if you will, being able to climb to the roof of your apartment building in New York, and looking out over the edge, you were able to see, far off and impossibly small, the faintest shimmer of Paris’ lights in the distance. That would be a view of about four-thousand miles. Alpha Centauri is roughly six-billion times further on.

It is, in short, a long long way.

And that is just the closest one. Polaris, the North Star, is nearly a hundred times further still. Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, the three stars that make up Orion’s Belt, are each well over twelve-hundred lightyears away. If you’re working out the mileage on your calculator, you may well find that it’s more zeros than the device can comfortably display, but the distance is around seven quadrillion miles.

To look up into the night sky, even with the naked eye, is to look out across the most magnificent sweeping vista that mankind has ever known.

And we have always known it. Even today, as the blinding speed of development seems to have approached that of light itself, the stars above us have remained largely unchanged for the last four-thousand years.

These are the stars that Caesar saw. Socrates and Homer too. When they pushed the very last piece into place at Stonehenge, they would have toasted the occasion beneath a sky very much like the one you’ll see tonight.

In a world of division — left, right, black, white, Abraham, Jesus, or Mohammed — it is at least some comfort to know that when all three pondered the meaning of a life well-lived, they did so beneath the very same stars that shine now.

It was Emerson who said that if the stars came out just one night in a thousand years, “all mankind would believe and adore and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown.”

Instead, they are ours every night.

Except in the cities, of course, where the glare of a million headlights and streetlights and billboards has chased all but the brightest celestial bodies from the sky, and the only constellations to be found are the ones made of lit-up office windows. There a person can go a whole lifetime and never know what the night sky is supposed to look like.

I remember the first time I saw it. I had flown to Colorado and caught a ride to a dusty camp on the outskirts of a town called Cañon City. Back then, there were only two reasons to go to Cañon City – either you were going whitewater rafting, or you were going to jail. In a town of less than twenty-thousand, there were thirteen penitentiaries. It was even home to the Museum of Colorado Prisons, lest the people’s dedication to the science of confinement be called into question.

I had cast my lot with the water, having signed up to learn to guide on the nearby Arkansaas River. It was my first time camping in the wide open spaces of the American west.

There are many places in this country that claim to be home to fickle forecasts, and I’ve had locals from Seattle to San Antonio tell me “If you don’t like the weather here, just wait a few minutes.” But only there, on the high-plains desert of one of the world’s great mountain chains, have I found the expression to be true.

Sun and heat, then rain, then snow, then heat again, all in the same afternoon. We would watch the weather coming over the distant back range, swept along by the relentless wind which pressed my tent flat to the ground and sent many others cartwheeling along the desert floor.

In the evenings, the darkness seemed to suck the warmth from every corner of the world and that first night, even wrapped in my sleeping bag, I was frozen through.

I climbed from my bag to try and stomp some heat back into my limbs and stepping from my tent I was met with a view so spectacular as to make me forget everything else. An onyx black sky reaching from horizon to horizon, filled from edge to edge with the most magnificent display of glittering lights. They seemed to reach down from the heavens, at once close enough to touch and yet grand beyond belief, and snaking a course through the middle of it all, the great white river of the Milky Way.

I had not known the stars could ever shine that bright.

Later, when we’d seen the river take its first life of that deadly summer, I remember looking up at those stars and feeling small and safe. Safe in the feeling of being small. The stars have long been a reminder of our place in the grand scheme of things. Seems a shame to trade that for the billboards.

No matter. A sense of place is among the first things to return when you decide to crane your neck and look upward. Not just a sense for your place in the cosmos, but more literally a sense of where you are.

It’s a novel thing the first time you get the lay of the land by looking at the sky. The world no longer feels quite so big. To glance at the stars and say for certain that this way is west or that it is about 2AM is enough to make you feel master of the universe. It’s as though the entire hemisphere, at a stroke, has become your neighborhood, and while you may not know exactly what lies over the next hill, you feel certain that you could find your way out of the desert given enough time and a backpack full of snacks.

Of course, one need not go to the desert to see the night sky through new eyes. For it is not really the sky that changes, but the eyes themselves, the way of looking. All that is required is curiosity. To look once more with the eyes of your younger self, and to wonder about what it is you’re really seeing – that is all that’s needed.

I like the winters for this. I’ve heard it said before that you can either curse the blustery snows of winter or you can decide to learn to ski. I’d say the same goes for winter’s long nights. I used to dread them. But these days, I enjoy the chance to grab my copy of Regas’ 100 Things, slip out into the crisp night air, and spend a little extra time looking up.

AI as Nature

By Ethan

On October 28, 2018

In Exploration

As a writer, my job is to recognize the relationship between things that may otherwise go undetected, and when it comes to the future of AI, I can’t help but notice several similarities.

One of my favorite explanations of Artificial Intelligence comes from the work of Tim Urban over at Wait But Why. He has a special knack for simplifying the complex.

The danger, he says, of AI is that it is going to be so overwhelmingly smart that it’s not just capable of doing things better than we can. It will actually be able to do things without us ever understanding how it does them.

He likens it to the difference between us and chimps.

“If you take a chimp outside on a starry night,” he once said during an interview with Tim Ferriss, “and have him look up, he may notice the lights of the planes and satellites up in the sky, but he doesn’t know what they are, and he can’t possibly conceive that we put them there.”

That is what AI is going to be like.

A lot of the experts seem to be in agreement. For a long time, the human mind represented the most formidable problem-solving (or problem-creating) machine on Earth. A group of people focused on the same thing represented quite a formidable force.

The great risk of AI is that it will not just be a little smarter, but vastly, vastly more capable than even all the humans on Earth put together.

I’m not disputing that.

It’s just that to my humble writer brain, the threat of a vast omnipotent force, a super-intelligence that is orders of magnitude more capable than all of mankind, capable of doing things we can’t even begin to understand, and imbued with the power to either sustain life, or destroy it en-masse… well, it just sounds kind of familiar.

It sounds like nature.

Nature is the only real intelligence. We don’t usually like to think so. Just look at the impressive cities we’ve built. But get just a little bit more rain than normal, or a little bit less, and watch how human superiority is called into question.

As I write these words, the city of Austin has been under a boil-water notice for a week after rain washed silt into the Colorado River, mucking up our water treatment plants. Restaurants were closed down, hospitals were impacted. The supermarkets ran out of water the first day, and parks were shut down and turned into emergency water dispensaries.

Civilization is balanced on a thread.

It was a quick and powerful reminder that nature ultimately has the last say, and has since the beginning of time.

I remember the first time I ever truly realized the overwhelming, indeed uncaring, power of nature.

To me, that is what AI will probably be like.

Note here that I’m not disagreeing or trying to downplay the threat that AI represents. I think the threat is quite real, capable of the destruction of cities and the deaths of untold thousands of people.

But I would stop short of saying it’s a species-level threat.

Civilization-ending? Perhaps. At least in isolated cases, it’s likely that AI will lead to some cataclysmic event that makes certain cities uninhabitable, the same way a hurricane or drought does. Similarly, it will allow people to thrive in other areas, perhaps bringing stability that has thusfar been absent.

Through it all, I don’t think any of it will be personal. Like nature, my suspicion is that we will hardly matter at all to AI. Not a species to be crushed out of existence, but not a species to be favored either. Just another thing floating down the river of life.

On Getting Older

By Ethan

On February 10, 2018

In Life Lessons

It hits you suddenly one morning; The realization that nothing you do will ever again be impressive because of your age alone.

If you earn a graduate degree or start a business at the age of twelve, you are extraordinary.

But neither makes you special at twenty-eight. You may be special for other reasons. But if you publish a book, or invent a new method for harvesting juniper berries, no one will say “and he’s only almost thirty!”

After all, you’ve had nearly three decades here on this rock, and you ought to have been spending your time on something.

Then, there is the time. The awareness of all the time that is forever behind you, and which you can never get back.

Tomorrow, you said, day after day. Tomorrow I’m going to start. Now, looking back on ten or fifteen years of tomorrows, you can’t help but wonder where you might be if more of them had been todays.

It’s a funny thing, you think, that life is planned forward but the only time you’re ever sure you own is the time you’ve already spent.

These two realizations are enough to turn the hair gray, and sometimes that is the next thing that happens. Or perhaps you make one last attempt at glory, opting for a mid-life crisis a few decades ahead of schedule.

But if you’re lucky, another realization begins to dawn on you:

That if you can no longer be impressive because of your age alone, you also don’t have to be.

The years, you realize, perhaps for the first time, are suddenly on your side. There’s no rush. The sun is setting on your chance to be a prodigy, but just as sunset somewhere is sunrise somewhere else, this passing of time shines light on a newer, more meaningful possibility: Long-term Mastery.

My Favorite Notebook

By Ethan

On January 16, 2018

In Life Lessons

What movie had the biggest impact on your life?

If you’d asked me yesterday I probably would have told you something like Poltergeist. I watched that movie with my dad when I was seven and hardly slept again until I could legally drink. The last four places I’ve lived were completely without bedroom closets, and I’d be lying if I said there was no connection.

Or perhaps I’d have pointed to Man of the House with Chevy Chase and Jonathan Taylor Thomas. After watching that I spent the next ten years trying to pull off Jonathan Taylor Thomas’s cool-guy attitude and his haircut.

But the truth — which I didn’t realize until I sat down to write this — is that the movie which has had the most powerful impact on my life is one that I hardly remember anymore.

I was ten the first time I saw Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and now, nearly two decades later I recall just two things: The fight scene where Indie throws a man out of a zeppelin and tells onlookers it was because the guy had “No ticket”, and the grail diary. Dr. Henry Jones senior’s Grail Diary was a battered leather-bound book in which he’d recorded every clue gleaned from his lifelong quest to find the Holy Grail. Its pages were filled with notes and sketches from a hundred different adventures in places all around the world.

What is it about the leather-bound notebook that’s so powerfully linked to the life of the traveler? Even now when I see one on the shelf at a book store I’m transported to places yet unseen. Gypsied away to the heat and chatter of a bustling Turkish market square, or to an Amazonian lodge when the rains are about to come and electricity is in the air. Not unlike real books, notebooks have a special power all their own. From the moment I saw that book I wanted one of my own. Perhaps more importantly, I wanted to lead the kind of life that could fill those pages.

I must have talked about it endlessly because on the morning of my eleventh birthday I unwrapped a beautiful leather-bound sketchbook.

“Dear Ethan,” a note on the very first page read, “Thought you could use a place to record all your adventures! Love, Mom & Dad”.

That simple gift changed the direction of my life forever.

It’s not easy to lead a life of adventure. Going places means you have to leave other places behind, and when those other places are filled with the people you already know and love it’s hard to make the move. It’s much easier on the heart (and the wallet) to simply dream of faraway places.

But when someone hands you an empty notebook, they are in a way telling you “go”. They’re telling you to get out of your head and into the world. They’re telling you it’s okay to leave them, so long as you bring back a story from out there. And once you have an empty notebook, you can’t very well leave it empty. An empty notebook is a constant reminder of all that you haven’t done.

Your life changes when you have an adventure journal to fill, even if you’re just a kid — especially if you’re just a kid. At least a couple of times a day you find yourself pausing to think about whatever it is you’re doing, wondering does this count as an adventure? Can this go in the book? I began looking for adventure everywhere, if only to have something to write down.

And of course the secret, that only eleven-year-olds with empty adventure notebooks and even emptier bank accounts learn, is that adventure can be found anywhere. Even the most remote jungles are home to someone. Far-off mountains lie in someone else’s backyard, and somewhere there’s a little kid who’s bored of seeing that same Turkish market square every day. They dream of a far-away place that looks just like your backyard. And so it’s not the setting, but the mindset that makes for an adventure.

Those early experiences, scrounging for excitement in the bushes around my house, shaped me as a traveler. But I don’t think it’s necessary to start young. Just that you should have an empty notebook.

And if you’re in the market for a notebook of your own, you could hardly do better in my opinion than the Canson 180 artbook. I won’t pretend to be an expert on paper. I don’t know what acid-free really means. But there’s one thing I do understand and that’s writing in awkward places. In the years since my eleventh birthday I’ve been lucky enough to scrawl notes while holed up on the floor of a frozen mountain shelter while snow piled up outside, and in the back of a truck in the jungle. I’ve made do with the desks in a hundred hotels and motels, and with the balcony of the Queen Mary II as she made her way from New York to England. I’ve written by firelight, and head-light, in the rain, and after not seeing rain for a month.

Write in enough places and you begin to appreciate the little things. The Canson 180 is the first notebook I’ve ever found that will not only open but lie perfectly flat on every single page. There’s no awkward grappling with the binding or paper in order to keep it open. Simply lay it down, and put pen to paper. They accomplish this using a unique technology called a “coptic” binding and it’s truly remarkable. I’ve been carrying one every day since September of 2015, when I left for a month on the Appalachian Trail. That notebook lasted more than six months before I finally filled it, and went with me everywhere from the southern states to posh English country estates, rural France, Mexico, and many places in between.

After so long on the road, as you can imagine, the notebook had seen better days. The people at canson were nice enough to send me a brand new one so that I could photograph it. But lest you think this is just a product plug, you should know this — I was in France when my first notebook ran out. The replacement they sent me was six-thousand miles away in my home in the US. Rather than waiting a week to pick it up when I was home, I walked to the nearest art shop and spent $25 to replace it then and there. All told I’ve spent well over a hundred dollars on these notebooks, and plan to continue spending that money for as long as they continue to work, which based on my experience so far seems to be forever.

On Small Deaths and the Need for Adventure

By Ethan

On August 11, 2016

In Life Lessons

Why do we go away? This is the question that every adventurer wrestles with at one point or another. Why can’t we be happy with a settled life, a quiet town, a loving partner, a stable job? What pushes us out the door again and again, away from home and into the punishing reality of a life “out there”? Makes us draw taught the sails, and point the bow towards the irresistible siren song of a distant horizon? What are we hoping to find?

For me the answer, in a word, is clarity.

Clarity of mind, and of purpose. For I am never so clear as in those days just before the beginning of some new and uncertain enterprise.

There is a certain noise to civilized life — a clashing and clanging of the grand machine; of politics, and bills, and appointments, and grocery lists, a ruckus of obligation which grows louder with time. Death alone brings escape from the noise.

Each big adventure is like a very small death. Unlike a vacation, an adventure is filled with risk and contains within it at least a small possibility that you may never return. It’s this possibility that allows you to step outside the life you’re currently building, and examine it as though you were about to leave it behind forever. As a trip draws near, the volume on life’s noise goes down each day until soon you’re left with the pleasant hum of nothing but the essentials; the stuff you really care about, the people you want to spend time with, the things you want to say to them.

And then you go out to the edges of the map, the places unknown. There you live a different sort of life. It’s difficult, but not in the same way as life back home. You eat less, and sleep less. You’re colder than you want to be, hotter than you think you can bear. You come face to face with your own smallness, and realize that the world truly doesn’t care whether you live or die. And somehow, in the face of that, your own will to live is rekindled and fanned.

The world you left behind no longer seems chaotic and full of noise, but colorful and set to music. Life, you realize, is full of possibilities. It’s there for the taking, and there are no rules except that you must be willing to reap whatever it is that you sow. Your eyes turn once more towards civilized life and the sweet promises of building a place for yourself, falling in love, shredding endless piles of junk mail, and watching TV talent shows.

And so in this way adventure is partly about escaping civilized life so that you can learn to love it once again. It is the winter that strips away all the excess, so that spring can usher in a new bloom. We go, not just because adventure is out there. We go so that we can come back.

A Taste of Patagonia

By Ethan

On July 19, 2016

In Travel

Patagonica is a visual love note, created by Joe “Dapp” Foster during an intense month-long trip to Patagonia in 2015.

A four-week blur of hiking, filming, and driving, the team spent more than twenty days on foot exploring the jungles, fjords, and glaciers of Patagonia, capturing hundreds of hours of footage, and navigating more than six-thousand kilometers of twisting mountain roads in a rented van they called Condorito.

With such a heavy workload, fancy meals were mostly off the menu.

“Wonderful culinary experiences? I wouldn’t say my trips lend themselves to them…” he said as we talked just a few days after the film debuted. “We had our goals, we had to get shots. So if a granola bar is what allows you to get the shot and keep moving, then, well… Cooking’s considered a luxury.”

When timing and fortune allowed, they hungrily availed themselves of piping hot empanadas, made in the local way. But for much of the trip cooking was limited to simple stir-fries done up over a camp stove, or freeze-dried meals quickly re-hydrated with boiling water.

That was fine for the team of five, all of whom were experienced adventurers used to the rigors of life off the beaten track. But it made it that much more special when they connected with Ervin, their local guide in Futaleufú, for a homemade meal and a round of Pisco Sours.

You know Ervin, he’s the guy at the 1:22 mark who’s drinking wine from a traditional bota in slow motion. The meal— chicken and vegetables roasted over a wood fire, and hand-made gnocchi — features prominently with at least three shots starting at the 0:24 mark. Three or four shots may not seem like a lot. But when you consider that the movie is just three minutes long, and how carefully each shot had to be chosen from the hundreds of hours of footage, you get a sense for how special the night really was.

“I’ve never put eating food in a film before,” Foster said, “But that was big for us. It was really a moment.”

How to (Really) Pack for the Appalachian Trail — A Look at My Gear After One Month of Hiking

By Ethan

On October 19, 2015

In How-To, Travel

2020 UPDATE: It’s been almost half a decade since I originally wrote this piece, and it’s been viewed thousands of times since then. I sat down this year and did a complete review, updating info and links as I went. Virtually all of it has held up to the test of time, and all these years (and miles) later there’s nothing I’d add. The only thing that may seem outdated is the technology I carried to run my business remotely while hiking the trail (iPad Air2 and iPhone 4S). But all the rest holds up and AWOL is still making the best damn guidebooks on the planet.

Best of luck on your adventure…

Cheaper Than Knee Surgery

“You know, my first time out I learned two things,” a man by the name of Hatchet told me as our cookstoves simmered in camp, “If you buy wrong you buy twice, and expensive gear is cheaper than knee surgery.”

He was certainly one who’d know. He’d been given the trail-name Hatchet because he began the Appalachian Trail with—among other things—a hatchet, a five-man tent, two hundred-foot lengths of rope, heavy-duty combat fatigues, a lantern, a flashlight, and a headlamp.

This scenario is way more common than you’d think, even among experienced hikers. I spent many weekends backpacking as a kid, and used to sell equipment for a living. And yet, when I spent a month retracing Bill Bryson’s footsteps on the Appalachian Trail, I still brought almost twenty pounds too much.

The excess weight is killer on the knees, and replacing gear with lighter, more-effective versions is a pain on the wallet. So to help you avoid both I offer a comprehensive guide to my final gear load out.

This is not the stuff I started with, but the stuff I ended with and as such I think it’s a much more useful representation of what a long-distance hike really requires.

The Truth About Isolation on the Appalcahian Trail

By Ethan

On September 20, 2015

In Travel

I never really had what you might call the “college dorm experience”, but I imagine that nighttime on the Appalachian Trail comes pretty close. You’re far from home, the living quarters are small, and the bathrooms (really just toilet seats over holes in the ground) are kind of horrifying. You grow your beard, dress like a homeless pirate, and exist on a diet of Ramen Noodles & peanut butter which you must hide lest your neighbors — in this case squirrels, mice, bears, wild boar, and the occasional hobo — steal it. And of course, most importantly, you share this experience with some of the greatest people you will ever meet, for life on the AT isn’t nearly as solitary as you might first think.

Daytime is much as you’d expect; lots of walking alone through deep shady woods, past rivers and springs, and up over sun-dappled summits. You can go hours without seeing a soul. But at night people tend to congregate, mostly in and around a series of rustic shelters built along the trail by various volunteer groups and government agencies over the last few decades.

The shelters, really just wood floors with three walls and a roof, are spaced roughly a day’s walk apart, and are almost always provisioned with a picnic table, fire ring, and the aforementioned slightly horrifying bathrooms, which are known as privies. The really luxurious shelters might have a loft, or plywood bunks for sleeping in, a roof over the picnic table giving you a place to cook in the rain, and a series of pulleys and cables slung around trees from which you can easily hang your food bag in order to deter nighttime visitors.

In addition to all this the shelters are usually surrounded by a handful of handsome campsites, complete with their own fire rings, and are almost always near a good source of water. And so people trickle in all evening, looking for a place to fire up their cook stoves, grab some much needed calories, and a get good night’s sleep.

It’s in those hours, after the day’s hiking is finished but before drowsiness forces everyone to their sleeping bags, that many of the best memories from the trail are made.

Imagine, if you will, that you are the sole survivor of some civilization-crushing apocalyptic meltdown. All alone you struggle to fend for yourself, with nothing but the sound of the wind and the circling buzzards to keep you company. Then one day a couple of well-meaning strangers show up on your doorstep, with news from afar, pleasant conversation, and a bag of fun-size snickers bars that they readily share. That is every evening on the AT.

After a long day spent schlepping alone through endless woods every person you meet becomes a kind of miracle encounter. Strangers take on a whole new significance, and you are even excited to see people you may already know quite well. Conversation flows easily as you all have something in common: you’re all hiking the same trail.

If they’re heading in the same direction as you, you discuss the higher points and moments of intrigue from that day. If they’re going in the opposite direction, you trade tips on the terrain to come. The shared struggle of the trail opens the door to deeper discussion, and it’s not uncommon to forge strong bonds with perfect strangers before the sun goes down.

Then, in the morning, you wake up, pack up, and do it all again. Because everyone tends to walk and rest at different paces, you will sometimes pass new friends from the night before filling water bottles from a stream or enjoying the view after a taxing climb. Other times, you only see evidence that they’ve been there — someone will stand a stray bird feather up in the mud, or thoughtfully drape a red bandana over a tree branch in order to warn others of a nearby bee hive.

You begin to get the feeling that you’re part of a very large, loosely formed community of transients. Each of you facing the same hills and rocks and wind and hunger, and each of you keeping a kind of distant eye on the others. It is very nice.

With this bond there comes a palpable feeling of loss any time it is broken.

The day after we left Hiawassee, while camping at a place called Plumborchard Gap, we met a man whose trail name was Gunny.

Greeting people by their trail name is a jarring, almost nonsensical experience at first, mostly because trail names tend to be jarring and nonsensical. We had, for example, met hikers by the name of Can’t Tweet, ColdieLocks, Smokes, Puffs, and Just Lookin’, and had even heard of a librarian who was walking north under the moniker Thunder Fuck. But gradually you come to see that “real” names are just words, and words with very little back-story at that.

“She was named Gertrude after her great aunt Gertrude”… Boring.
“She was named Thunder Fuck because one day in camp she absolutely blew up on someone and nearly killed him to death with her bare hands”… Now we’re getting somewhere.

In any case you grow to accept trail names as legitimate methods of identification, and cease to notice their strangeness.

Gunny was, like many hikers, immediately likable and easygoing. He was optimistic, congenial, and a great talker which can be nice after hours of woodland silence. We all chatted late into the night, and made plans the next morning to meet up and camp together again at another shelter about eight miles north. I walked out of camp that day, following a zig-zag of side trails and footpaths that lead from the shelter back to the main Appalachian Trail, and wondered briefly if I shouldn’t wait, if only to help ensure that no one got lost. But we were all trail-tested by that point, having already navigated nearly a hundred miles of south-Appalachian wilderness and I shrugged off the thought and pushed on.

That evening I sat in camp, trading stories with two hikers – Squirrel and Zero — whom I’d just met. They had actually started behind us that morning, about five miles further south at a place called Dick’s Creek Gap, and had made good time getting to camp.

“Did you see an older guy out there,” I asked, “big knife hanging on his backpack?”

“Yea, Gunny?” Squirrel said, “I passed him near Plumborchard this morning. Nice guy.”

“Oh, good.” I said, “He’s actually supposed to be camping with us tonight.”

Squirrel paused for a moment, a piece of string cheese half way to his mouth.

“Then why was he headed the other way?” he said slowly, but even as he said it we all thought we knew the answer.

By their very nature, any trail that heads north also leads south and while it’s not easy, it is possible to get turned around on the Appalachian Trail. Without any discernible landmarks you can walk for miles before realizing your mistake. Gunny had likely gotten disoriented in the twists and turns of the trail that lead away from camp, and had hopped back on the AT headed in the wrong direction. If he were lucky he’d see some bit of trail that looked familiar, or have a chat with another hiker and figure out his mistake. If not, he’d walk several miles only to be very confused to emerge out of the woods, after a long sweaty day, back where he’d started the day before.

“Poor Gunny,” Zero said as she glanced back toward the trail. And though none of us had known him more than a couple of hours – some of us only a couple of minutes – we all felt the same way.

This twinge of loss is common on the trail, and I felt it again several days later when Zero caught her flight home, and again a few days after that after parting ways with Squirrel.

Things like Facebook and email can help you to stay in touch. But these, you find, aren’t enough to recreate the sense of community and comradery that’s forged on the trail. No matter how popular or far-reaching it is, the digital world is a poor replacement for the real one.

It is, at the very least, a heartbreakingly funny little lesson in impermanence. Back home, in a world of twenty-four hour drive-thru, on-demand TV, and constant connectivity to friends around the world, it’s easy to forget that things on this planet naturally come to an end.

Easy accessibility can give us the illusion that people and posessions are in our lives to stay. But the reality, the real reality, is that they are only ever passing through.