Well, this is embarrassing. I’m hiding behind a broken
concrete wall, letting my rather muddy dog take an afternoon nap while I take
the chance to strip down to my sports bra, spread my clothes out to dry in the
sun, and curl up barefoot on my backpack eating squished bread and tuna. It’s a
peaceful chance to sunbathe – at least until a rather rugged man pulls up his
pickup truck in the grass, not ten feet from me, and tries to turn it around. Oops.
Should I grab for my clothes? Yell an apology?
Nope. Just another
hobo, he thinks, and drives off without a second glance.
***
It was a few weeks ago that I first had the brilliant idea
of leaving behind my end-of-semester stress and taking some time by myself to
think. I’ll take myself backpacking,
I thought, I love hiking, it’s a perfect
excuse not to do any work or check my email. I’ll do 100km or so for a little
challenge. West Virginia isn’t that
mountainous, right?
What I ended up doing was a fragment of something called the
Allegheny Trail - accompanied, by the way, by my dog Fei, who has almost forgiven me for taking him on a never-ending-walk. It stretches some 330 miles through the Appalachians, and is
the brainchild of a group of hikers who decided that if West Virginia didn’t
have any long-distance trails, they would make one – an awesome attitude.
However, the trail is new and little-known enough that my time went something
like this:
 |
| West Virginia is wild... |
 |
| wasting... |
 |
| wonderful. |
Paved Roads: walk along two-foot wide verge while locals
drive by at 55mph. Be impressed by how quickly dog learns to get off the road
and sit still when he sees a car coming. Be unimpressed when dog learns to dive
under the guard-rail and away into the bushes when he sees a truck.
Jeep Trails: in some places
I could go miles without seeing a house or person, and they were easy walking
with lots of little streams and butterflies.
 |
| Can you see the tail of our explorer of shrubbery? |
Footpaths: these were entirely un-maintained. I came to dread them. I fended off spiders with a stick and every few paces in the
name of public service to throw aside trees and branches that had fallen into
the path (Dog collected small sticks and had great respect for my tree-tossing
prowess). Still, at many points we had a great time as jungle-explorers and bug-hunters extraordinaires.
The most spectacular path appeared on the morning of the
last day, and looked like this:
When I finally made it through onto semi-populated roads, a
guy in a little Honda stopped me.
‘Did you just come up Twelvemile Run?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘did I ever.’
‘Do you think I could get my car through there?’
I told him it might not be the best of ideas.
 |
| Naptime. |
***
The final big adventure was camping. I’ve camped in the wild
before, but always with a tent and some company. I brought some rope
and a hammock and tarp, an intention to just pick some good-looking trees in
places no one would bother me, and a lot of warnings about… bears.
Bears aren’t so bad, right? They eat lots of things that
aren’t people. They don’t even like people. You just have to hang up your food
in a tree, far enough away that a hungry bear can try to get it without having
to go through you. Then, having hung your food, you stumble back to your
hammock by flashlight, right towards a set of glowing eyes in the dark. Boy, did I wish I’d discovered this about my dog beforehand.
Afterwards, you can wrap up in your sleeping bag and slowly
doze off, glad that your dog has good night-senses if anything comes. You can
keep trying to slowly doze off while he cocks his ears in one direction and
growls. And keeps growling, and growling towards this one patch of trees; not a
bark, as he gives to anything he thinks he can scare, but a continuous menacing
growl at the dark. I can see nothing. He keeps growling. I make mental plans
about which way to retreat in case of bears. Dog keeps growling. I wish I could
just sleep so that whatever is out there can eat me and get it over with. Dog
keeps growling, until finally it starts to rain and everything becomes still.
 |
| Home Sweet Hammock |
The nights were beautiful, too. There’s something special
about camping in a hammock on a clear night, where you can open your eyes in
the night and look straight up at the stars. The last night, we stumbled on a spot
that looked like a caravan campsite; a lovely riverside clearing a mile from
anywhere. It was still early when we got there, so I spent a while setting up
my lean-to in case of rain, then sat and watched the sunset over the tree-tops.
At dark, the clearing filled with fireflies.
The moment, after three long days, was perfect.
That last day, I loved the coolness of the rain and the
drops on my head. Then I hated the endless rain. I hid from it under a tarp by
the roadside full of the smell of wet dog. I rested from it sitting on mud of
its making. Then I found, finally, a patch of sunlight winking through the
leaves, and came out into open farmland, with a view over waving grass to the
rain falling on valley after valley as the Virginia hills stretch blue into the
distance.
- What did I find here, I asked myself, that I was looking for?
- I found how to keep
going; that it doesn’t matter whether it’s rainy and your feet hurt.
- You learned a little
bit more about sore feet? That took you four days of bruises, filth and getting mistaken for a hobo? After spending all semester wishing for the
time to properly learn statistical physics?
- Yes. Physics is less important than feet.
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