“No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.”
-Jack Kerouac, “Lonesome Traveler”
It was my father who first got me into camping, hiking, and general backwoods awesomeness. I spent part of my childhood making tents, huts, and clubhouses out of whatever I could find. Sometimes they would inflate to full-blown villages, and all my siblings and cousins would help me pave the roads, cook the mud-food, collect the weed-grains and the sand-salt.
Much later in life I came upon an amazing show called “Survivorman”. I immediately became addicted to the adventures of Les Stroud as he trekked for weeks in foreign back country, a modern Indiana Jones as far as I was concerned. I was hungry for a backpacking experience of my own, and yet I didn’t even have experience in camping alone.
It wasn’t until last night that I finally decided, “Jack was right. This is something I have to do.”
Now that I’ve done it, I suppose I should sum up what it’s like:
When you’re out there alone, something changes in you. You accept everything as it is, and in the quiet dark of the night, your camp fire crackling as the coals dim to nothing, the sound of distant interstates intertwined with the call of the wild and the sighs of the trees dancing in the wind…that’s when you start finding yourself.
You come back with the assurance that you can survive.
-Stone
