auntieannie

Very compelling, a page-turner, lots to think about.Doing the PCT alone as a young woman. How that relates to the rest of her life, especially the death of her mother, the disintegration of her family, the break-up of her marriage. How long a few dollars can last and what you can do without a few dollars. WildCustomer service and expertise at REI – and an example of her vibrant writing style: “These employees [REI] ranged in age and manner and area of wilderness adventure proclivity, but what they had in common was that every last one of them could talk about gear, with interest and nuance, for a length of time that was so dumbfounding I was ultimately bedazzled by it. They cared if my sleeping bag had snag-free zipper guards and a face muff that allowed the hood to be cinched without obstructing my breathing. They took pleasure in the fact that my water purifier had a pleated glass-fiber element for increased surface area. And their knowledge had a way of rubbing off on me.” P.41On being alone: “I’d only wanted to be alone. Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren’t a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was. The radical aloneness of the PCT had altered that sense. Alone wasn’t a room anymore, but the whole wide world, and now I was alone in that world, occupying it in a way I never had before. Living at large like this, without even a roof over my head, made the word feel both bigger and smaller to me. Until now, I hadn’t truly understood the world’s vastness – hadn’t even understood how vast a mile could be – until each mile was beheld at walking speed. And yet there was also its opposite, the strange intimacy I’d come to have with the trail, the way the pinon pines and monkey flowers I passed that morning, the shallow streams I crossed, felt familiar and known, though I’d never passed them or crossed them before. “ p.120The shock of running into crowds of tourists after being alone on the trail so long: “The campground wasn’t just a campground. It was a mad tourist complex that included a parking lot, a store, a motel, a little coin Laundromat, and what seemed to be three hundred people revving their engines and playing their radios loud, slurping beverages from gigantic paper cups with straws and eating from big bags of chips they bought in the store. The scene both riveted and appalled me. If I hadn’t know it firsthand, I wouldn’t have believed that I could walk a quarter mile in any direction and be in an entirely different world. “ p.271The rhythm of the trail: “There were pleasant mornings and lovely swaths of afternoons, ten-mile stretches that I’d glide right over while barely feeling a thing. I loved getting lost in the rhythm of my steps and the click of my ski pole against the trail; the silence and the songs and sentences in my head. I loved the mountains and the rocks and the deer and rabbits that bolted off into the trees and the beetles and frogs that scrambled across the trail. But there would always come the point in each day when I didn’t love it anymore, when it was monotonous and hard and my mind shifted into a primal gear that was void of anything but forward motion and I walked until walking became unbearable, until I believed I couldn’t walk one more step, and I stopped and made camp and efficiently did all the tasks that making camp required, all in an effort to get as quickly as possible to the blessed moment when I could collapse, utterly demolished, in my tent.” P.275