[pct-l] Why Hike?

[mardav at charter.net (Marion Davison)]

Shaw Manford wrote:

>    I adventure travel, and now hike, because that is where  freedom is at. Here in the sedentary world of American Dreamland, we spend most  of our days re-acting to other peoples agendas and desires. On the trail, all  of that carefully designed prompting and manipulation is gone, allowing us to  live every day as nature intended and enabling us to take back the ownership of  our lives.
>     
> 
>
This relates to my feeling about wilderness travel.  I sum it all up in 
one word--freedom. 
I like to hike at least 50 days of every year, and I also like to take 
long road trips all over the country.  Road trips are fun because one 
can make impulsive discoveries--restaurants, hitherto unknown national 
monuments, but on a road trip you are never free from "the man".  You 
gotta watch your driving, watch out for the other lousy driver, watch 
out for the speed traps, and think about where to spend the night 
without getting rousted at midnight.  So you find a friendly truck stop 
or pay some obscene price for a parking place in a campground, or get 
lucky and find a cheap camping spot in a National park or forest.  You 
have to deal with gas prices and breakdowns and the lousy neighbors in 
the campground with the boombox and the cooler full of booze that party 
until 3 am.
But in the wilderness I am free of all those things.  Once I leave my 
rig at a relatively safe parking spot I leave it all behind.  No paying 
for camping, no neighboring campers, no speed traps, no breakdowns, no 
gas..... I think of wilderness hiking as the real world.  In that real 
world, if I want to talk to someone, I can't pick up a phone.  I have to 
go find that person.  If I don't want anyone to find me, well, they 
probably won't.  If I want to go somewhere, I will have to walk.  If 
it's raining, I will be wet.  That's reality.  The simplicity and the 
freedom are what appeal to me, because my "normal " life is so stressful 
and dependent upon computers, phones and automobiles.  That "normal" 
life seems very artificial.  When I return to work life, I don't think 
of it as coming back to reality.  Quite the opposite.
This is precisely why I don't like to hike in places that have a high 
presence of backcountry bureaucrats (aka rangers).  They remind me too 
much of CHP, waiting to pull me over and give me a hard time, enforcing 
rules that don't make sense to me. If I had ever needed their help I 
might feel differently. 
llamalady