The Answer is Not a Hut in the Woods

The novel Anna Karenina begins happy families are all alike all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way I've always loved that line because it isn't just about families I don't think it's pointing to something we all already know which is that happiness when you're experiencing it feels pretty simple and usually its causes are easy to explain if you're having a bad time though you might be the first person in History ever to have had that problem each sad Is tragically unique and it's one thing to be sad it's another to be sad about something

odd and strange enough that you're convinced you'll never be able to properly explain it to another human being but Imma give it a go please get a beer if you'd like to I'm feeling turbo pretentious this might be a longy about 10 years ago I fell into one of my first I'm quite sad and I don't know why periods I have of course Since learned that everyone else gets them too but at the time I was even more of a self-involved idiot than I am today and believed I was special for them 21 is a

good age for that the problem is obvious in retrospect I just finished reading a load of the books that were going to Define my twenties the writers I still love Margaret Atwood Arthur C Clarke Gabrielle Garcia Marquez and Co and had spiraled into realizing the fantasy I've been harboring since I was About 13 of one day learning to write that brilliantly that beautifully precise like Virginia Woolf but vulgar and funny like Hunter S Thompson it was impossible they were the greats I was an unremarkable and frankly hygienically um subversive dweeb the problem was that I

didn't want to do anything else the dream of One Day writing one great thing with a capital gir something perfect I could always point to as proof that not all of me was ugly that even ogres Contend a nice Garden that was all I've wanted to do since I started reading properly it felt like the same thrill I imagined as wanting to scale a mountain no one has ever been up before or go mess around down in the Mariana Trench to be the first stranger to arrive in a Strange Land and I was just then

becoming aware of how unlikely and impossible it was because I sucked at writing but I'd only just noticed a housemate saw I was a bit sad and Restless and showed me a film called into the wild it's the biopic of a real man Christopher McCandless who decided he was done with society and traipsed off to commune with nature to spoil it for you it's not really a spoiler it's a guy's life he died tragically and preventably and alone in Alaska but the only part I remembered the only part everyone in their 20s who sees that

film seems to remember was the Wilderness thing and I decided immediately that I Would like to go and be alone preferably in nature preferably for a long time because I wasn't made for society etc etc and out there for some reason I would be unburdened and finally happy forever or at least hopefully escape this weird crisis I'd fallen into so a few months later I blew the remains of my student loan on a plane ticket and found myself in New Zealand because that seemed wildernessy feeling rather bitter and anxious and lost geographically and Spiritually I

very much wanted to go commune with nature I was sure that would fix something I spent about a year volunteering on farms on New Zealand South Island there was an organic farm program called wolf w uw-o-of it still exists big recommend and before what I say next I really should stress that I never had a bad time doing it everyone was lovely except the first Farm I worked on it was run by a British couple the only thing they hated more than Their Farm was each other they despised each other with the same passion new

lovers adore each other it was an art to watch they had moved to the middle of nowhere hoping to escape their problems and found when they arrived that they in fact were their problems I'd get up around five milk the goats build fences get yelled at for a few hours by the husband for and I'm not joking quote treating the animals too nicely then listen to a three-hour lecture about how Agriculture was going to collapse and they and they alone would be the ones to preserve the light of humanity of their post-apocalyptic Utopia if I

worked very hard they told me they would even let me live there when the end times came I would rather drink paint I thought to myself I would rather have my balls torn off by the blood-drinking zombies of tomorrow's water wars than have to spend even another day with either of you vicious bitter chuckle [ __ ] apocalypse Or not one evening they took issue with me writing an email to my parents because they explained that was anti-isolationist and I decided it had been horrible and everything but I was very done and negotiated getting the

hell out on the last day as an act of what they announced was terribly kind of them they let me plant the bulbs for that Year's flower garden I waited until they were out of view then spent the next four hours laboriously arranging Bulbs into the worst words I could think of [ __ ] jobblies centipede dong Etc I like to think that one day a few weeks later they were having their morning cup of piss week coffee and looked wistfully out to the flower garden and noticed my handiwork pushing up through the soil then

both spontaneously combusted I worked for quite a few more families and farms and really everyone else was incredibly kind and each time was different some days you're maintaining Vineyards other days building a house go and volunteer with woof or work away or whatever if it sounds up your street most people are very friendly it's big fun one good thing came out of that initial hellish experience though the professionally depressed British couple I worked for first had begrudgingly giving me the number of a woman a few hundred miles away who owned a yurt that's a Mongolian

tent in the middle of much to my Wilderness dreams excitement Nowhere and she rented it out from time to time so when I got done with Farms I phoned her and she sounded nice and said sure come live here so I bought every book I've ever wanted to read got on the bus and lived there it was perfect miles from the nearest town I spent weeks doing nothing but wandering around in my birthday suit reading and writing it's very nice to be young and on a mission even when it feels like an impossible one especially

when all you need is some Paper and a pencil I remember lots of evenings in that yard reading by candlelight then spending the whole of the next day trying to write and accidentally inevitably imitating however I've been reading the night before there was the Hemingway week when the sky was wide and the trees were Juiced on steroids and every metaphor involved bull fighting and whiskey there was the Jane Austen week when the countryside was positively refugent and I ate so little fiber that I did not [ __ ] for perhaps two days short of a

fortnight right a strange thing happened with the yacht though a few months in and the novelty wore off and I noticed I was going slightly insane no Wilderness Euphoria had appeared whatever Hermits Shangri-La I'd imagined was nowhere to be found I didn't feel any better about the writing thing nor my prospects are doing it and worse I missed people it was weird I began to realize I didn't Even know what I've been searching for in the first place the stranger thing was that my I suppose landlady and I got really close she was my mum's

age and her daughter had just left home and I think maybe she saw me as a kind of surrogate son I don't know but when she was in town every few weeks we'd go walking and hang out a lot she was very kind very clever and very humble quietly nodding and smiling at my stupid 21 year old musings about how the world Works Never teasing me for being an idiot which I was I remember her going quiet for a while when I eventually admitted what had started this entire freak out then she said very gently

you will work this out but it's gonna take some time and you have to be okay with that well turned out I wasn't okay with that so I ignore this advice completely because she was only more than twice my age what did she know one day I walked into town and chanced on a book about a hiking Route in the U.S called the Appalachian Trail the trail was very long apparently but marked and maintained well it was secluded but occasionally passed near towns it seemed insane but people had done it before and lived I quickly

became obsessed with the idea of a massive hike specifically the Appalachian Trail perhaps that was what I was missing it would be like living in the wilderness just more exercising but I could hardly just piss off to America So I decided I'd go do some hiking in New Zealand instead the day I left the yard my landlady drove me to the bus stop we were both very quiet the mood was very somber and when we hugged goodbye I noticed she was crying and I was too if I'm honest I realized I had made a friend

and that ironically she was the part I really enjoyed about trying to go and be alone an obvious truth was staring me in the face but I was far far too young and stupid to Apprehend it it would take another half my lifetime to work it out anyway I still think my landlady today I hope you're doing okay Mrs Brown the hike was even more disastrous than my other plans weeks of getting lost weeks of knowing it was a stupid idea but having too much pride to give up my tent Let the Rain in My

Shoes rubbed I had no idea what I was doing still I carried it on until my body gave up on me then I gave up on me really and went off to have well not a Life but a bumbling improvisation of one anyway then ten years passed in the way 10 years does and the writing thing did somehow become my job the Wilderness fantasies went away for a while or at least it was much easier to get lost in the silly forests within still once again older and not any wiser then I found myself lost

10 years on I just finished writing a book the one about ocelots if you know it and I was a mess I become so obsessed with trying to Finish something that was unfinishable I had lost the plot literally drinking with inadvisable enthusiasm sleeping on sound insulation foam in the room where I write because that was the only place I could sleep without feeling guilty about not working unable to finish the thing thing yet unable to Let It Go in hindsight I should have just let it go it was one of the worst things I've ever

written in any case I'd gone quite Bonkers and by the time the book was Finished I was pretty finished too I couldn't write another word couldn't find any enjoyment in it which was a bit of an issue since writing had become the one thing in the world that makes sense to me it's the one thing that makes all the other things nice not to mention pays my rent nothing worked I hated that abandoned everything I started second guessing myself the whole time this went on for months luxury problems I know but it felt very real

at the time the Problem is that one's imagination and sense of purpose can't be bargained with or cajoled and when they stop firing for some reason it feels like Suffocation as you may unfortunately already know they don't respond to reason you just have to sit tight and wait to feel human again there are workarounds of course there are but yes your self-worth goes summarily down the toilet along with the ability to play and that's what had left me the fun the playing the silly Daydreams I've been retreating to since I was little I'm sure you

know those Daydreams too and without them the real world is far too cold and Bleak and I'm far too boring and cynical to live in it anyway and all of this was a sort of fun adventure into a mild early 30s Melancholy episode until I noticed if I was reading or looking at something close up it would take ages for my eye to focus normally again when I look away I say I because only my right eye can See anything the left is a sort of cosmetic bonus so as you can imagine I'm quite protective

of old righty visiting an optometrist seemed like a good idea it happened to be the day of my 32nd birthday eye exams are about as exciting as birthdays in your 30s get apparently and the optometrist scanned my eye with fancy equipment and buffed it and varnished it God knows and said nope everything's fine and I said yeah but it's not working it takes ages to focus Now and he looked down on my notes and said oh it's your birthday today and I said yeah and he said Happy Birthday you're getting old which I thought was

extremely funny and useless and funny but I must admit it added a whole new dimension to the whole freaking out about writing thing shouldn't I have written something good by now I've had ages I'm not old yet but I'm hardly young anymore what the hell am I playing at I was supposed to have done a thing By now a thing I liked I think I was proud of [ __ ] optometrists so I was a bit glum and getting glamor a friend noticed the cheese had completely slid off my cracker and said you need to

go and do something else for a while something that isn't worrying about work otherwise you're gonna break some stuff on the inside permanently it came to me immediately a decade in the making all the into the wild wilderness Henry David Thoreau living off the land stuff and Remembering that book I found in New Zealand 10 years before I said I'll walk the Appalachian Trail that's the one with bears isn't it my friend said just a few months I said I won't take a laptop no pens or paper I'll go walk the Appalachian Trail and she

said yeah I meant go to the beach for a weekend and isn't that the one with bears the Appalachian Trail travels through 14 States and climbs the equivalent elevation of doing Everest 16 times Several thousand people walk it every year and it's hardly obscure there are movies about it now but a lot less people actually end up finishing the whole thing I had no intention of finishing it anyway I just wanted to keep walking until I felt better and secretly more importantly until I could write again that was my plan taking a vacation while actually

secretly working the whole time and no one could stop me I looked into it and weirdly walking the Trail would cost even less than life at home I wouldn't have to pay rent since I'd be sleeping in a tent most of the gear I'd need I owned already and I managed to find an obscenely cheap flight over to Atlanta near where the trail begins if you're walking Northbound there was no reason not to do this so suddenly realizing how stupid what I was doing was in March of last year I found myself descending into Atlanta

a few nights later I nervously Laid everything out on my hotel bed food and long johns and toilet paper and realized this was it this was going to be my life for a while everything I owned in a backpack in the woods what the [ __ ] did I think I was doing then the next morning my uncertainty reaching maximum I ended up at amakalola Falls state Park where the trail begins I got my bag weighs by the kind Rangers at the park 30 pounds bang on about 20 of one's body weight though it felt

like carrying A dead rhino chatted for a bit to a few other hikers who looked as nervous as I felt about what in the hell was coming next and then well one by one we all just started walking the path was busy for a while families out for the day a rather arduous climb up a waterfall then soon enough it all gave way to Forest and I was alone the first eight miles aren't the Appalachian Trail it's the approach Trail to get onto the main trail and I don't know if it's designed Like this but

rather cleverly it kicks your ass just enough to make sure if you're not supposed to be out there you'll know it my pack was obscenely Heavy hundreds of miles of this I couldn't imagine another five I'd trained a few times a week for the trail for about a month before walking up the mountain that sits conveniently a few tram stops in my apartment it was always fun throwing a few sandwiches in the thermos of coffee into a backpack and Leisurely wandering up to the peak and each time I'd be thinking man I am so ready

for this appellation thing and I probably would have been if a sandwich and a thermos of coffee and a misguided confidence in my feeble sit at a desk all day legs was all I'd be taking along with it in reality with long hikes you have your life on your back and that changes things enormously imagination is Limitless spinal vertebrae are not and within just that first hour on the real Trail I was learning not to write checks with my mouth and my ass couldn't cash by midday it got rather warm the path past the stream

and I filtered some water from it cold and indescribably refreshing a ritual that had soon become one of my favorite parts of the day and carried on into the woods I walked until it started getting dark and stopped at a campsite four or five other hikers had already set up for the night I bimbled about trying to remember how to actually Lay a ground sheet and actually put up a tent hardly failing to notice everyone else seemed to know exactly what they were doing and finally crawled into my tent and slept better than I have

in half a decade then I woke when the sun rose and settled into the rituals I would do you every morning for the next while not least of all making coffee having planned the walk for a while I decided most of my addictions could go I could give up the occasional Sunday Cigarette the weekday beers too but if you can't have a cup of coffee in the morning what really is the point in being alive exactly they're simply [ __ ] isn't one as a general rule I thrive on clutter and chaos but even I

that first morning and all the mornings that followed reveled in the simple joy of knowing where everything goes and wants backpack while breaking Camp the Swiss army knife and water filter the toothbrush and socks all with their own Little nooks and Pockets then they're even sublima Joy of putting that backpack on and knowing it's all you own on that continent and that first morning things began to feel real my calves and ass hurt a bunch but I've woken up in the woods that morning and will be going to sleep in the woods that night something

was very exciting about that it was also rather exciting to find my shoes and pack worked fine if you care about this sort of thing I didn't until I started the trail I used an osprey exos 48 backpack and in luminous yellow Ultra Lone Peak sixes I cannot recommend both enough they almost never gave me any trouble I ate noodles on a rock for lunch amazed at how good packet noodles suddenly taste after a morning of walking then set off walking again thinking over and over how are humans allowed to be out here until it

threatened to get dark and set up camp alone this time I'd camped alone quite a Few times before but never this far into the woods and never in America right I thought the woods falling more or less pitch black my tiny ten to me probably smelling like whatever the equivalent of McDonald's is for Bears which is regular McDonald's I guess what the [ __ ] am I doing out here surprisingly the woods are actually quite loud at night or the sound anyway owls gossiping to each other wind poking at the canvas of your tent things

Crawling by or mincing by Just a few feet from your head you're in Nature's house after all but something feels primitively safe about a sleeping bag may be the same comfort of enclosure we derived from caves I don't know but somehow a few layers of polyester feels an safe from whatever you imagine is coming to eat your eyeballs and that was the shape of my life for the next a while I would wake drink a bucket of coffee set off have lunch above a gorgeous view Walk until I was done and set up camp just

like I had the night before I watched the sun go down I boiled rice and then I got into my sleeping bag and read I read I should add like I haven't read since I was 15 using my head torch cozy and long johns it was quite cold at night in Georgia in March and that only made things even Cozier clinging to every word like it was my first time holding a book I had forgotten how to read like that things I put down halfway Through a few years before a load of Steinbeck stuff light

by m John Harrison suddenly everything was enthralling then all the stuff I reread just because I could a history of the first nautical clocks a fire upon the deep I devoured everything I could find by David Thorne the guy behind 27b 6 just read it all he's [ __ ] hilarious but in general everything was better for reading properly and amid the almost Silence of the forest and and knowing there's Nowhere else to look for entertainment but your brain and I'd had quite enough of hanging out there sometimes you'd be sharing a campsite or a

clearing with other hikers and sometimes they come and say hello and it really was that easy this will sound insane but getting ready for the trip I hadn't been worried about bears or dehydration but other hikers that I'd have to talk to them I've learned as every introvert eventually does to try and mimic being outgoing and I hope I do a halfway possible impression but to this day meeting new people still feels like having all of my Ram used up by a program I don't understand it's very stressful and I wasn't looking forward to that

this is not how it went down in life you're bumping into people coming from a thousand different contexts maybe they've had a bad day maybe you have maybe they're trying to scam you maybe they're just being nice for no reason But it takes ages to work out which game you're both playing on the trail there is only one context and that is the trail and just as you've chosen to go and live in the woods for a while so have they this commonality makes every conversation immediate really easy because you know what they're doing there

they know what you're doing there you're both going the same way everyone I met was lovely anyway about a week in and a kind of hiking Zen descended by Hour three or four of Walking in the mornings and things would turn up in one's Mind's Eye Daydreams Nostalgia old friends old plans lots of cringe lots of ghosts one ghost in particular I remembered myself 10 years previously also out in the woods considerably more naive but was I any smarter now really I felt just as lost here I was for round two in some stupid self-created

crisis thousands of miles from home again isolating myself again for lack of any Other approach I could think of nothing had changed I was still the same idiot and one morning tying my laces from nowhere I realized it was dead endedness that was doing me in that was why writing the last book had demolished me it wasn't working on it that had sucked I like working if it's on something fun rather it was the hope that if I could pour myself into this thing if I could write somehow truthfully enough or resounding enough it will

be a Salvation Somehow it would make me undirty and I would wake up the next morning fixed or at least better and finally a real person I woke up that next morning when the book was finished and released and found I was still me it was the hardest thing I've ever done and it still didn't work meaning probably nothing would work that's what had sent me mad that's what I was doing in the woods because of the one thing I enjoyed wouldn't work I'd have to find something else how Ridiculous it seems suddenly to put

so much pressure on oneself like that ever resulted in any good work how had I forgotten that daydreaming was supposed to be fun it wasn't there to monetize or bolster one's ego it's for fun it's for playing somewhere along the way I must have forgotten how to play and that was stupid and I was stupid I thought of a line Ursula K Le Guin the greatest writer to ever live in my opinion and if anyone disagrees they're objectively Wrong had said just before she died talking about writing the name of our beautiful reward is not

profit its name his freedom and maybe it was the sheer almost most offensively beautiful Forest maybe it was the joy of still having enough toilet paper for the next few days left but a new thought hit me a hopeful one which was that at least I've never been particularly confused about what I wanted to do not generally ever since I was a teenager I knew I would Either aim for a life of doing stuff with words because I love them because they are music because stories are really just metaphysical investigations of reality with characters thrown

in or I would spend the rest of my life trying to do that it was non-negotiable no other job or path has ever made sense to me I don't know why it's this way but it's always been this way how lucky I am I realized that either by biological accident or miswire brain and a lack of Character that I am like this I know lots of people who aren't who just never had an obsessive calling and they're doing fine often they're sensible and pay their bills and seem quite happy with their lives but a sensible

life had never really appealed to me I am simply too incompetent even if it's fruitless I like that feeling of walking towards the man the mountain of one day I might actually make a beautiful thing I don't know how else I could have lived I was Unfathomably lucky I realized suddenly for having that compulsion even if it occasionally spiraled off into borderline Madness and self-pity in the woods of Georgia as it had now as it had on another continent 10 years before as it may well 10 years hence but I was lucky I probably should

keep that in mind I thought I finished tying my laces and looked out to whatever absurdly gorgeous view was below then I put my backpack on set off walking again and Didn't think about writing for weeks for the first while on the trail it was impossible not to play a quiet mental game of I wonder who will be dropping out it almost never worked one evening I watched a couple walk into Camp apparently having packed for an Antarctic expedition carrying enormous bags of fruit in the sort of elaborate fold-up chairs one takes to festivals well

they won't last I thought to myself I met the couple a few weeks later they Were doing fine minus the chairs and bags of fruit but doing fine all the same other folks ripped like Hercules positively hopping up mountains would suddenly drop out from random injuries or just not vibing with the woods there was no pattern to it barring injury the only signifier I ever found reliable for whether someone would stick with it was whether or not they wanted to eccentrics seemed to have a special advantage and the trail was full of benevolent Eccentrics one

guy who wore a kilt I never got to know but we hiked at roughly the same speed and kept bumping into each other I fondly remember climbing a rather unpleasant mountain and him already having reached the peak we did it he yelled and offered his hand in congratulations I went to shake it and realized he was using his other hand simultaneously to take a piss which I found more charming and demonstrating of character than I can tell you I walked Also for a while with a Californian gentleman who I immediately fell in bro love with

we parted one morning when he suggested getting stoned might make the day's hike a little easier I declined not particularly wanting to get off my tits for breakfast then setting off I went to find him again and by then he'd inducted some new friends into his wake and bake they were sitting in silence in the shelter with extremely red eyes you're not walking today are you I said He shook his head and opened a bag of marshmallows I never saw him again in my experience this was how friendships worked on the trail they got deep

and honest rather quickly but were also ephemeral and without expectation another friend I met was an artist from New York a brilliant one one of those irritating people who claims they dabble a bit then presents the [ __ ] Mona Lisa to you we walked together for a few days having a wonderful time moaning About our respective birth Nations then he stopped in town for a day and I carried on walking and assumed we wouldn't meet again it snowed a week later heavily enough that walking in it seemed like an extremely bad idea I set

up my tent and hunkered down for a day of reading about Richard feynman's various exploits and eating Pop-Tarts near Sundown I heard someone setting up near me and they came over to ask if I wanted them to brush the snow off my Tent we chatted through the tent for a bit then he gingerly said my name gingerly I said his back I got out and of course it was my artist friend from New York as I remember it we did a sort of impromptu reunion dance in the snow the sort dogs do when you take

the lead off the wall for a walk deprived of any other entertainment freezing our balls off it was a party a good one too and deprivation is the name of the game maybe I'm misremembering it but there's A theory of licans that I quite like that we don't desire things we desire to feel desire itself the thing is incidental deprivation is a rather fun way of gaming your desire protocols after a week in the woods a stray Oreo in one's Food Bag is a banquet having just enough battery left for your phone to kick your

ass at chess is about as entertaining as the evening of gin tonics one day I was getting a bit miserable about a blister and looked Down on my shoes and noticed those little holes at the top no one ever seems to use experimentally I threaded my laces through them and just never got blisters again this felt like an achievement tantamount to discovering cold fusion it was the best thing that had happened in weeks another treat to look forward to was Trail magic sometimes you'd be coming down a mountain swearing to yourself about ever having born

in the first place and They're in the road some ex-hikers or just inexplicably kind humans would have set up tables for coffee and donuts and biscuits and everything you've been fantasizing about expecting no money in return and would gladly stand and chat to you too it was miraculous there was another day close to a miracle you meet lots of section hikers on the trail people just out for the day or the weekend I got talking to some older guys out for a catch-up walk with each other They teased me extensively about the Boston Tea Party

and I tease them extensively about what their country calls beer which is [ __ ] by the way it's just European snobbery Americans know exactly what they're doing with beer these days their IPA game is on point anyway these older gentlemen said well if you stop at the campsite near where our truck is the beer's on us I assumed this was a joke and tried not to think about it I'm not a foodie I didn't Miss Falafel or Curry I only crave one thing in the woods and that was beer not to get hammered not

even to take the edge off the day but just that one cold beer to round off doing something difficult I thought about it constantly we got to the campsite and said our goodbyes and the older guys wandered off to their truck maybe a few kilometers walk away I set up my tent and stared into space for quite some time about 40 minutes later an enormous Texan hand Reached into my tent offering a can of IPA one of those older guys had walked not an inconsiderable distance just to go and get me a beer just to

be kind then just to walk all the way back to their truck again I practically shot myself with gratitude that evening I watched the sun go down drinking what was without any contest the greatest beer of my life I think what most hikers were enjoying out there was pretty identical to the kick I was getting Which was the constant sense that you're all on an adventure because on balance it is very pleasant to wander without being lost to plan without foresight to spend a few days alone and getting sick of one's company then chance on

the best company you've had in an age I was feeling a bit lonely and camping by a stream one evening when a guy passed going for water we established we were both readers and somehow we got around to a shared Love Of The Thinker day David Graber when I checked my watch about three hours had gone by we went back up the hill to where his girlfriend had built a fire then two more hikers joined while we all presumably played a private mental game of is anyone here a murderer then satisfied it was unlikely we

watched the dark fold in around us until the campfire was the only visible light in the whole of the woods and Here We Were Strangers occupying a tiny orange universe together there was Nothing outside just each other to trust many nights were that way I came to enjoy the feeling very much I won't pretend there weren't low periods I won't pretend there weren't unsettling periods one night I woke to the sound of something large and not exactly human wandering around in the near vicinity of my tent I'm told black bears are fairly harmless as long

as they don't think their cubs are in danger but I didn't sleep great the rest of that night there Was really only one day when things went wrong and how wrong they went the trail is marked all the way to Maine with white blazes of paint on trees that tell you if you're on the right path it's hard to miss them one evening I was eavesdropping on two hikers talking about how one of them had briefly gotten lost that day and thought to myself come on how do you wander off a Mark's path the universe

was listening though and she has a dark sense of humor the next Day I was trying to make more miles than I probably should have and was rushing I turned at a white Blaze and after a while the path started to look a bit spotty in places the blazes disappeared but maybe they hadn't been that well maintained besides I just come down a hill and had no interest in walking all the way back up it another mile or so and the path disappeared completely I turned around and realized I couldn't even find the PATH back

the way I come Stay calm I thought you can't be that far from the trail only I could I just walked maybe a few miles in the wrong direction somehow and had no idea which direction I come from I wandered cautiously for about an hour and found nothing rather aware I was only getting myself more lost than further from the trail the weeks before the woods had always felt big but only somehow he didn't know where you'd end up but you knew where you were going suddenly the Woods were still very big but that bigness

felt terribly alone and foreboding I panicked finally only for about 20 minutes but as you know 20 minutes of panic is about three years of most other emotions visualizing the headline in the local newspaper idiotic Brit skeleton found Etc I tried everything retracing my steps that didn't work listening for voices of other hikers tried my phone for the GPS but the battery had run out days before In the end I decided ongoing for broke I'd been walking North if I just carried on walking North ish maybe I'd find the PATH again I'd come down a

hill so I picked a hill looking sort of northwards and went up that and about an hour later miraculously I found the path again I hadn't even been that far from it but I'd never wanted to kiss dirt more I noticed a few trees the bark had been peeling off and realized in my stupid rushing I probably seen something like That and assumed it was a blaze and taken a wrong turning I never sneered at stories of people getting lost again and I didn't get lost on the trail again not physically not emotionally it's relieving

only having one thing to do for the day and that's to get where you you're going it's very difficult to worry about anything to stress about anything when that's all that's in your mental inventory you spend your waking hours inside nature traipsing through Evolution's imagination and feeling miniature for it I cannot tell you how beautiful the trail is it defies words it defies sight and inevitably things surface inside you people you haven't thought about in years revisiting arguments revisiting kindnesses thinking of your parents of your friends of your cat well of my cat I'm always

thinking about my cat you should be thinking about my cat too and inevitably you realize just what a stressy dick you've Been to yourself for such a long time now and every day every minute of every day I couldn't believe all this beauty had been out there the whole time Millennia before I've been born and would still be out there Millennia after I die physics with trees on top all of it moving inexorably slowly to its own Rhythm my life and mayfly compared Yellow Birch Mountain Maple Beach all of it towering over you in Vermillion

kaleidoscopes mountain peaks pulling Away into the horizon behind in the head an entire silent World below that will make you cry if you look at it too long it's ridiculous it's absurd it's America there was also the beauty of stopping in a town occasionally the beauty of sleeping in a bed of ordering extra fries of getting to walk around the whole day with nothing on one's back I liked being brought large plates of large American things and getting called hun feeling like the favorite cat at a Buddhist temple I learned to regard gas stations with

new and enraptured eyes spending 20 minutes scrutinizing the candy section for all the delicious things I was going to take back to my room entire fridges stocked with beer we have so much beer in Civilization I kept thinking and it's easily accessible why am I not drinking it all the time and in one hiker town I drank three or four pints of beer and left for a walk just as I was leaving the bar I noticed why The bartender had been slightly cautious about serving me the last one the beer was nine percent it kicked

in on my walk back to the hotel I had a little tumble in a ditch by highway it's difficult to America when you don't have a car I noticed that I was exceptionally shit-faced I got back to the hotel and realized I'd forgotten my room number the guy working there began insisting they had no record of me I began insisting that was pretty ridiculous as I checked in just that afternoon and I would really like to go to bed please he was kind but clearly thought I was insane and that just made me more frustrated

arguing with the kind of inverse proportional logic only alcohol can make possible the less sense your point makes the stronger you believe it just as I was about to start being passive aggressive I pulled the key card out of my pocket and noticed I was in fact staying at a completely different Hotel I told him I was going for a quick walk and apologized without explanation the United States is very strange I think even our friends living there will agree it's made weirder for most of us non-americans having grown up on American television and movies

and thinking we all know what the states is like but Hollywood doesn't mention the miniature toilet stall doors that basically may as well not be there for all they cover and don't cover or the Way people just say hello and start a conversation with with you out of nowhere just because they feel like saying hello in Europe This would usually be indicative you're about to get robbed or even a little stabbed but it works there it's outgoing it's kind I don't know why we don't do this I also came to adore American television halfway through

a sports match the adverts will suddenly come in with Senator McLaughlin wants to burn your House down and [ __ ] your goldfish okie dokie I liked hiker towns very much but after a day or so a familiar feeling would hit a kind of Longing To Get walking again knowing that all you had to do was go to the supermarket buy some food and toilet roll and at any moment if you're choosing he could wander back out into the woods and every time my Kindle had enough books on it and the IPA hangover wore off

that's exactly what I did by Tennessee things were Rather comfortable and nice because everyone's still on the trail probably meant business and had adapted to Trail life compared to the people one met in town hikers lived at a different pace woke early and slept early usually had strange and interesting things to say knew how to move ticks and throw bear bags it was a parallel universe one that became so natural to me that going to resupply in town felt like the Imposter reality I'm not sure I saw a single Instance of passive aggression let alone

an argument or a fight on the trail but my favorite part was the culture of self-sufficiency past about 200 miles everyone was wildly self-sufficient they weren't rubbing it in your face he just knew if you gave them a rubber band and a thumbtack and said please build me a voice activated laser-guided crossbow they will probably do it it even started to rub off on me I liked the days when I was alone knowing I'd carried myself all This way on my own goofy feet I liked building fires I liked finally knowing what poison ivy looks

like so I won't have to go another week where I simply just cannot sit down I liked especially that I wasn't dead and I must in part somehow be responsible for some of that but I wasn't made of titanium like those other hikers I hadn't meant to go the whole way anyway a while in and I decided I'd probably gotten the message and hung up the phone a family member Had just died and there was a war going on to come entries away from where I live these days staying in the woods started to seem

like I was neglecting my life this felt like an ending I caught a ride back down south near to where I'd started again enjoyed a bath a bath and retired my short-lived status as a hiker there was only one thing left to do in America the other thing I've been dreaming about for years and it was the U.S Space and Rocket Center in Alabama Mecca for moon landing obsessives like myself I hired a car and drove over there for a day and it was Paradise full-scale Saturn fives spacesuits and an entire Hangar full of Engineers

who'd originally worked on the Apollo program and you could just walk up and talk to them so I walked up and talked to them I'll try and keep this vague to preserve their dignity but one engineer and I got chatting about an astronaut who'd walked on the moon not the first famous two and That said engineer had worked with them oh my God I said he worked with an actual Moonwalker what was he like the engineer paused for a second thoughtfully glanced up at a rocket hanging from the ceiling and said [ __ ] total

[ __ ] I very almost piddled my pants then a visit to see a friend and soon enough I was back home in Europe I laid out my hiking stuff in the corridor of my apartment for a while so I could trip over it and remember how Wonderful it had all been I follow blogs and my trail friends who carried on and lived vicariously through them for a while but it was strange because I noticed the Henry David Thoreau Wilderness fantasy had finally gone away this confused me I hadn't come back with any epiphanies or

stories I wasn't running to my desk to get anything down why the hell did I feel better I wandered around the apartment for a bit hung out on the bed with the cat folded Up the laundry nope still me still to me I've been before I left where had the Wilderness thing gone there's a day on the trail I still think of sometimes when a mum and her son were kindly giving me a lift into town the sun maybe 16 or so ridiculously clever for his age for any age actually asked me what I was

doing on the trail I answered I wasn't sure yet and he said you know a lot of people out there are just trying to unrolled his eyes for effect find Themselves and I thought I've just carried everything I own for the last few hundred miles through the woods with only my mental illness for company Woodland creatures with large teeth have been trying to abscond with my food and last night I took a [ __ ] in a snowy hole in the ground I won't be lectured on Lifestyle by an embryo when I realized oh he's

probably right isn't he lots of the folks I met on the trail they were at some transitionary stage in their Lives had just graduated had just quit a career Lots were just out there because they liked the quiet and the walking too but it was definitely a place to go and have a think I suppose that's why I went too and no Revelation had come of it which is in itself a sort of Revelation I think it kind of fell into place one night months after getting home when I went for beers with a friend

we laughed our asses off and drank like Sailors and he asked me why I gone into the woods in The first place I told him about the book about burning a few circuits out about going local and in that irritatedly clever way of boiling what feels like a complex problem down into a sound bite he said so you weren't feeling very inspired no I said and you can't control when you are no I said well he asked would you want to control it and the problem immediately solved itself because of course I don't want to

of course no one does any more than You'd enjoy tickling yourself those misguided aha moments are few and far between but they're rather special for being few and far between that's what makes them nice and when you sign up to a lifestyle that involves trying to turn them into something as I stupidly have you sign up to them also being unpredictable that's how it works that's how it will always work that's the deal and the quiet months are part of the deal once imagination going dormant for A bit you have only one job during that

catastrophe and it's to sit tight and remember that it isn't a catastrophe your brain will come back online but you made too many demands and it needs to reset sit tight you idiot it's just another mini crisis you got through the others you barely even remember them now I got home that night and opened the folder I keep all of my stupid could be something but probably won't be ideas for stories they weren't great but they Weren't the disasters I'd seen them as months before when I've been freaking out it was the same game I'd

always been playing everyone is playing keep going oh I realized so glaringly in front of me only an idiot like myself could miss it I was supposed to stay here wasn't I here where home finally is after Decades of searching for one here where my friends are here where are me in weird imperfect perfect Bulgaria I went into the corridor and played with the straps On my hiking backpack for a while thinking how strange it was that it had contained my entire life for a time and realized ultimately that I am not a hiker I

am a cat dogs will come to you for help when they're sick they need you and they're not ashamed of it cats in my experience anyway isolate themselves they shut down and most distressingly when they think they're dying they go somewhere to die alone I do the same not to die but getting stuck with a problem In the world then escaping from the world to try and solve it which is not unlike trying to debug code by throwing the computer out the window and joining the circus this is not a good reason to go to

the woods this is how you go to the woods to try and use system for your own ends which is not why the trees are there and I find myself now in this weird position of realizing Christopher McCandless the hero of into the wild that film I saw what feels like a Lifetime ago had the answer to his own question and to mine that it was there all along a line he scribbled in his copy of Dr Zhivago not long before things went South for him happiness is only real when shared I really thought I

could go off and live like a Hermit and come back with an answer to myself but our internal lives aren't equations to solve there is no master theory of us we don't arrange things right and forever live the rest of our lives in emotional Utopia it's more a succession of little fires one has to keep putting out hopefully learning to turn that into a dance these days I do not believe if one is sad or something has broken on the inside that the answer is a Hut in the woods of course there are isolationists of

course there are introverts of course there are people who just like hiking or living outside and aren't escaping anything but for those who are low about something or spun waywards by something In a pinch I think we often hide from shame when in reality if we were just honest about what's going on in our heads our friends would give a damn and try to help and those friends I've told about my um little dabble with Madness back in March with that awful book have all said more or less the same thing which is why the

hell didn't you tell me I should have they would have made jokes made light of it and I don't know if they could have fixed the thing but it Certainly would have stopped the problem growing if you get the urge to take off into the woods then you crack on there are so many beautiful quiet Meadows out there just waiting to be chanced upon I cannot tell you how fantastic your adventures will be mine were fun yours will be better I'm sure go do lots of that please but in my limited experience when I really

look back on it the real Adventures were someone you know doing something you don't expect or trying to Remember how you fixed yourself after a blue patch and realizing it was largely thanks to someone standing benevolently in the background of your life and doing it quietly from afar without you even realizing it I'd even gently suggest that perhaps the strangest Adventure perhaps the most humbling one happens on the inside discovering those parts of yourself you've never acknowledged jettisoning those parts you've never liked and constantly constantly being Aware that you will soon turn into someone else

and whoever that is is decided at every moment by you now and in two minutes and two minutes after that until 10 years later one very long succession of two minutes is you find a new you sitting there and you're not even sure where they began nor where they'll end which makes us custodians of A Sort looking after this body until a new hopefully better us inhabits it a while from now maybe you know a book Called three men in a boat by Jerome K Jerome it's very funny which is weird considering it was written

by Victorian and in the fashion of popular authors who have their day then Fade Into Obscurity he wrote a book a while later called Paul Kevlar which was obscure then and almost completely forgotten now but I hope it never Fades into total forgotteness just for this passage alone returning home on this particular day of days I paused upon the bridge and Watched for a while the lazy barges maneuvering their way between the piers it was one of those hushed summer evenings when the air even of grim cities is full of whispering voices and as turning

away from the river I passed through the white Toll Gate I had a sense of leaving myself behind me on the bridge so vivid was the impression that I looked back half expecting to see myself still leaning over the iron power pet looking down into the sunlit water I Think this all just goes on I think it doesn't stop until we stop life phase after life phase the illusion of understanding inevitably usurped by yet stranger problems arriving then strangers who arrive in one's life with the solution and are no longer strangers but friends that the

only control one can ever truly maintain is whether we dance or despair when confronted with such a constant lack of control just like Joanna Newsom sang the nullifying Defeating negating repeating Joy Of Life this constant process of thinking you've got it licked then Starting Over Again with new problems completing the final theory of you and the world and realizing it's just the beginning of a whole new class of theories of you and the world many of which you'll never solve and so you say goodbye to final theories isn't that okay I think it's okay rediscovering

yourself rediscovering the world all those Basements down there all those belfries above isn't it cool being remade I'll keep walking until I can't like all of us off the veranda and out into the blue morning with friends I hope and we'll find more friends and walk with them too I hope and blunder and regroup and blunder and regroup I hope we'll remember I hope I'll remember that there's Beauty in it all that we do emerge from darknesses and we're helped out of them by the authored hands of Those we love more often than we scramble

out ourselves I hope we remember that there's Beauty in it all that we do emerge from darknesses though we're here now that that's enough that we do this together that we do this together I think that's enough I think that's enough and I think that's enough [Music]