Two things were immediately clear to me the moment I bailed on my thru-hike of the Benton Mackaye Trail. The first was that my increased weight was going to continue to put an increased strain on my poor, beleaguered joints until I found a lower impact means of working some of it off. The second was that I needed a shower. After two months of ups and downs—literal and figurative; physical, mental, spiritual and emotional—riding a loaded bicycle from one end of the country to the other had left me in far better shape that I had been when I set out on that doomed trek through the southern Appalachians. Even so, I was still heavier around the middle than I had been before I had started either the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail. I may no longer have been carrying around the equivalent extra body mass of an entire small child, but I still had as much on my person as a third arm would have given me. That’s not insignificant: to a hiker, it’s actually quite a bit. This is the sort of person who agonizes over the price to weight ratio of a $700 sleeping bag and stereotypically cuts half the handle off of a toothbrush to save 3oz. If the weight of an extra limb had been in my pack instead of my tummy, I’d have thrown out all my gear and started over from scratch.
This is not to overstate the importance of numbers on a scale. American culture is poisoned by its fetishization of a human’s size, and an obsession with one’s weight is a key symptom of that sickness. Rarely do such numbers correspond directly to a person’s well-being, a fact intentionally obscured by the thriving fitness-industrial complex: tens of thousands of people with a vested interest in your personal desire to lose a couple of pounds, often at the expense of your actual health. As a general principle, I’d rather be healthy than “fit,” and in fact, as Sean Meadow and I came into the month between the end of our bike ride and the start of our attempt at thru-hiking the Continental Divide Trail, I was actually in pretty good overall shape.
But that wasn’t enough for me. My goal in the near term wasn’t so much to live well as it was to hike, and after being forced off of the BMT by my sorry physical state, I was driven not to repeat that experience on the CDT. If I was unwilling to endure the misery of a starvation diet and a high-impact workout routine for their highly questionable and inconsistent benefits, I was nevertheless intent on shaving off as much of that excess arm as I could before leaving for New Mexico. At the very least, for the sake of my knees I couldn’t afford to regain any of the weight I’d lost pedaling from coast to coast. I had to stay active.
I was over biking, at least for a while. Even if I hadn’t been, my shoulders, palms, and ass all sorely needed time to recover from the eight-week ordeal I had just put them through. Besides, suburban Georgia is a miserable place to ride: if you don’t want to sacrifice your safety and your sanity to the sort of heavy, bicycle-hostile traffic that had continually tested my ability to hold my shit together across the breadth of the southern US, your only option is to load up your bike rack, drive to the occasional, oddly-spaced greenway, and ride from there. These paths are nice, but are also frequently crowded and frustratingly short, meaning that you just sort of end up either biking back and forth along the same flattish stretch while dodging pedestrians (focused entirely on their phones) and hyperactive children (whose parents are focused entirely on their phones); or you end up riding the nearby streets through the same traffic you were deliberately trying to avoid. So biking was out. I needed another activity low-impact and easily accessible enough that I could do it regularly without hurting myself or having to drive all over the county just to get started. This is how I came to start the practice of walking for several hours most days—for five miles, eight miles, ten miles—through the streets and parks around my parents’ house.
The thing about walking around the upper-middle class suburbs to the northeast of Atlanta is that it’s fucking boring. There isn’t much to look at beyond the overpriced multistory houses, every one built in the same bland, late-1990s/early-2000’s residential architecture style. Each is wreathed by a similarly identical lawn, which has been precisely manicured in a paradoxically ostentatious display of the owner’s ability to conform to the standards of his neighbors. It is fascinating in a way to see exactly how an entire generation which spent its youth complaining about the soul-deadening insipidity of pre-fabricated communities like Levittown chose to recreate them in bigger, more expensive, more fastidiously maintained iterations as grown-ups; but it’s a superficial sort of fascination. These places feel hollow. It’s as if the end goal is to create neighborhoods that look as if no actual humans actually live in them. Every so often, the repetition of one after another cookie-cutter house with a brick façade and an unused adjustable basketball hoop flanking the driveway is broken by the locked barricade of a gated community, identical to its neighbors but for the fences, or sometimes by a golf course. Beyond the warrens of dead-ends and cul-de-sacs lie the squat, sprawling bulk of the strip malls and megachurches, and the ever-present whoosh of the cars on the local highways.
Clearly, this atmosphere works for some people,1 but it’s not my preferred environment.2 Even so, this is what I had to work with. So I walked, on a sidewalk when one was available and in the street when it wasn’t. The fact that the latter phenomenon was so common suggested a reason I so rarely saw another human soul out and about with me, why these communities felt so bereft and lonely: people just don’t walk around here. If I wanted company, I had to drive to a park. I did this often enough, just to have the sensation of gravel underfoot and to feel for once like I was not constantly under direct surveillance3 as I passed sign after sign warning me that this or that residential area “reports all suspicious persons to the police.” There is simply something deeply unwholesome about driving somewhere just to take a walk. Not only does the commute make it feel more like a job, but the need to use a car to do a physical activity that is otherwise so fundamentally natural makes the whole exercise feel kind of artificial and alienating.
Our CDT start date rapidly approaching, I eventually came to accept that I would never really feel ready for it. I hadn’t for AT or the PCT, for that matter. A thru-hike is an undertaking too big to get your head around. I assume that at the level of elite athletes, maybe one of the crazies trying for an FKT (or fastest known time) on one of these trails, this period before the start feels different. Most of these people have quantified their training and their performance down to the third decimal place. They know that they’re ready. They have the data. But for an average dude of average fitness in average health, though, it’s probably best to feel that you’re underprepared. It’s complacency that gets you into trouble in the backcountry. It’s arrogance. If you’re scared shitless that you’re about to dive in way over your head, on the other hand, you tend to treat the endeavor with the respect that it deserves. The CDT would be a real challenge, one that would stretch on for five months or more. It wasn’t just a thing to do but a radically different way of living. I really didn’t know if I was up to it. But I was going to try, regardless.
And so I walked, perambulating the sidewalks and streets and greenways and paths, listening to music and podcasts and the birds in the trees and the whoosh of the traffic, trying desperately not to think about all the hard miles ahead and whatever pitfalls and disasters may be waiting out there, but just putting one foot in front of the other.
- God good, I hope it does. The idea that none of the people devoting their lives to earning the money to live in such a place actually enjoy doing so is too bleak, even for me.
- Duh.
- I’m not under any illusions about the police state we’ve adopted in the US in general and the Deep South in particular, and I have no doubts that I was under some form of passive surveillance every moment I spent outdoors. What I’m referring to here is the creepy vibe I’d often get in a lot of these neighborhoods: a sense that some overanxious middle-class redneck was specifically keeping his wary eyes on me as I walked through his district.