[pct-l] traveling at home

[goforth at cnw.com (Joanne Lennox)]

When the new year rolled around again this year, I decided to launch off on something that I had always thought about doing-  Sleeping out on the ground every night, no roof, or tent.  A year sounded good for a trial period.  So as the new Year's guns and firecrackers were sounding in the distance, I pick up my old tarp, and sleeping bag, and headed up hill to a semiflat spot between limestone  outcroppings (not so good for setting tarp stakes). I live in the mountains and above the valley, with more privacy than most people can imagine.

I loved thruhiking, and always wondered if some of its benefits were from all those many miles or just being out there.  Was it shucking all those complications of the "outside" world, or all the physical activity?

I wondered what I had gotten myself into.  ( did not have long to wait.). .

It immediately turned unusually cold, down in the teens, which is very rare for this part of the country. After a cold week, it began to snow, also unusual.  In a few days there was 2 feet of snow, It snowed every day for 3 weeks, alternating dry snow  with slush.  I got accustomed to shoveling the snow away from the sleeping area, and clearing the snow tunnel into my abode before hauling in my sleeping gear.  The depth of snow formed "tent sides", and as it deepened at least I did not have to worry about the snow blowing in under the tarp all night long. It took a while to get used to the wind, the ground, the cold, the sounds.  When I finally relaxed enough not to pop up as soon as it was light outside, I felt I had passed some of the initial discomfort and stress.

Then I broke my shoulder blade (I had taken up an interest in rocks, and was tripping through a boulder field  when I stepped around a large standing flake onto a sloped clay covered boulder and landed on the standing flake).  Laying down was very uncomfortable, crawling on my hands and knees was out of the question.  I couldn't bear any weight on my left arm nor lift it above my waist, and I could not sleep on either side ( which stretches the back out and pulls at the shoulder blade).  I learned slowly to sleep on my back, but would get episodes of claustrophobia, when I just wanted to get up in the middle of the night and run around to relieve the stress of holding still and staying on my back.  I hardly noticed the wind, and snow , and rain.  But I figured I would have the same problems in a nice warm bed.  I made a foot tall tube of fleece, which worn around my torso, kept my arms and hands against my body(I had been clutching my hands trying to feel secure). When I finally fell asleep  soundly after a month of this, my sleep was so sound that I rarely awakened during the night and walked around incommunicative for the first hours after awakening. It definitely gave me a different perspective.

About the time that my shoulder problem was getting maneageable, I awoke one morning hardly able to straighten my right knee.  The knee was painful to walk on, nor could I sit cross legged, and either bending it or straightening it was difficult. Getting in to a tarp and sleeping bag became comical.  I wondered if I was training for th circus.

Had I wakened the sleeping dragons??

I had always had knee problems, but 3 weeks into trying to manage this one, I realized it wasn't going to be like all the others and was not necessarily going to go away with rest.  Finally, a MRI showed that I had a lot of fluid building up on the knee and that the tibia bone itself was inflammed, which mystified the doc as well as me.  I have yet to resolve the inflammation, but the good news is that the MRI showed that  all my tendons on that knee are intact.

At a certain point I just did not care .  I sleep outside, but I am not wrestling with getting my knee better or wondering what I should do, or thinking that maybe if I was just more..... it would be better.  Maybe if you surrender completely, no longer feel that you have any control, it loosens the knot you are stuck in, and change happens.

so these are the things I did not know I would be learning.

There are a few other things too that are a complete surprise, things that did not happen on my thruhikes.  Maybe it has something to do withnot having the anticipation of traveling every day and  using so much energy  to that going forward thing.

I began to get more comfortable not only with being outside and the "wider world", but also with my own body, myself and other people.  How could this take 60 years to happen?  Maybe it never happens to most people.  As my margin of comfort shifted back and forth, I seemed to develop a tolerance for imperfection and began to like all the idiosyncracies, discomforts, imperfections, variety.  I wondered if operationally, my body was actually the "outside world", and as I started to open to this very physical experience, I also was opening to the world in a unique way.  It felt wonderful. Seems that if you change your view of your body, you change your view of everything else, and vice versa.

I also started getting more intuitive.  It was like islands were rising out of the sea, unexplored and verdant, and just far enough away that I could only get a fuzzy picture of what was there.
I wondered whether sleeping on the face of the earth, did not bring me closer to my unconscious or to a collective consciousness.

So, at least for some of us , pieces of  the" thruhiking" experience might be experienced with less physical exertion.

Goforth