Ray Jardine
I’ve been bent for awhile now with the idea of taking off for the summer and hiking some stretch of trail off in the woods somewhere. So what do I do? Read books about it.
Lately I’ve loved the idea of the Pacific Crest Trail, but there’s a great trail along the shore Lake Superior I’ve had my eyes on for a first time long distance trip.
I’ve done bits of hiking and camping, but rarely more then day or two day trips. The longest I’ve been out in the wild was a trip to the Boundary Waters in the north of Minnesota, a week long canoe trip.
Lately I’ve been getting more and more exasperated with society at large, and can’t see a better way of giving up on it then taking off on a four month hike. I really can’t imagine how I’d handle a trek like that, which is part of the intrigue.
I don’t think I’ve ever really done enough to challenge myself. I’ve accomplished some impressive stuff, but none of it’s ever been a challenge. I’ve done well in what I’m good at in school, screw everything else. I’ve really coasted my entire life, taken the path of least resistance. Things have turned out great, I’m not lamenting (In fact I’ve got quite the cushy life), but I’m starting to think of the things I could get done if I really worked, and liking the way that looks more then the life I can see unfolding for me.
But mostly the romantics of leaving everything I’ve know to date for the simpler life in nature is getting to be too much for me, and taking a big hike, barring something coming up in the near future, is the first thing on my docket.
Jardine evangelizes camping with a tarp, which I already thought was a great idea. Lighter, simpler, and better then tents, the only challenge becomes how to set the thing up, which really isn’t harder then poling and staking a tent. 77
On page 151 Jardine mentioned hiking barefoot, which I’d love to do. Just think how bad a motherfucker you would have to be to walk 1,500 miles through the middle of nowhere without any shoes! It’s just my romantic notion of forgetting society (more on that in a bit) turning me into an asshole, but I honestly want to try it. I try to hike often without shoes, my feet have plenty think calluses to handle the rocks, but it makes my mom have a fit, and sometimes is slower going then with feet. But even when you do get a rock in your arch, where there’s little you can do to avoid it, for me at least, the pain is a joyful sort of reminder of my precious and amazing feet1.
But he brought up a point I’ve never thought of – never having done an extensive amount of hiking, I’ve never had the soles of my feet start cracking. I’ve always thought of foot callus as toughness, never as something that could start to pull the bottom of your feet apart. Maybe a nice mildly protective and tolerable pair of footwear would be nice after all.
Jardine’s section on food is a fascinating look at how much shit people really eat. Even the foods accepted as healthy generally aren’t, providing you didn’t produce them entirely yourself. Flower is processed, in other words deprived of any nutritional value at all, before being made into anything. Meats are laced with antibiotics by way of livestock feed long before it even reaches the processing stage. And to top it all off almost any food produced by the food industry is laced with exitotoxins, like MSG, drugs with endear their host foods to our nerves, all the while leading up to degenerative brain disease like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s ??(183)??. Fuck! Jardine lists some interesting books2.
Foods Jardine recommends are natural seeds, nuts, fruit and vegetables. Especially organics you’ve prepared yourself. And corn based pasta, but that which hasn’t been processed the same way flour routinely is.
Jardine also has done what I’ve wanted to do in terms of purifying drinking water – toughened up his resistance to microbes like giardia by drinking natural water unfiltered in small, then increasingly large quantities. But it turns out that there’s probably too much pollution in many places for anyone to stomach (thanks again, asshats of the world), and the odds of getting sick are very much against you, or anyone else. By picking and choosing clean water sources though, you can enjoy water fresh from the earth while greatly reducing the germination of intestinal sickness ??(208)??.
The one thing about getting away from it all that would be hard for me to take is that I’d be leaving behind all my tech. I practically live through my computer, reading, making and doing things. I’ve worked out a bit of a compromise in my head that I would take a gps and waypoint my entire trip in 10 or 30 minute intervals.
When I got back to the computer I could collate all the data together and make some kick ass maps of how far I’d gone, by the day, complete with weather and pictures. A complete virtual interaction with my hike. But for someone looking to leave everything behind, I think that’s a little much. I bet it would do me good to forget about computers completely for a time, but we’ll see.
But the holy grail would be some kind of computer embedded in my pack (and I keep saying I’ll go lightweight!). Little more then a drive big enough to hold waypoints and photos , and optionally taken synchronously with the gps readings from a lens sewn into the front of a pack strap, it would be solar powered from a panel I could hang off my pack. Then some sort of cellular internet could upload smaller sets of data to a site that friends and family could go to to track how I was doing. Mostly sweet nothings, because a system like this would be imposing in everyday city life, but who doesn’t dream? Plus, instead of writing a goddamn journal, I could blog every night with a roll up keyboard and a tiny screen. I’ve though maybe podcasting would be easier, all I would need would be a cellphone, and I could set up an Asterisk box to call that would record and post my nightly thoughts. I get giddy thinking about how cool this stuff is, I must just not see the point of pen and paper.
1 I’m can’t decide why I stopped wearing shoes whenever I got the chance, but it’s probably because I really really don’t like them. But I can’t help thinking it’s just to sensationalize things, which is something I really hate. I wish it wouldn’t bother me to wear shoes, like the rest of the world.
2 Beating the Food Giants, Paul A. Stitt, Natural Press, 1993. Exitotoxins, the Taste that Kills, Russell L. Blaylock, M.D. Health Press, 1997.