Mar 03 2011
Journey’s End
Eighteen months ago I leaned against a big rock, making one last entry in my field journal. I was exhausted from a punishing hike across north-central Maine on a section of the Appalachian Trail known as the 100 Mile Wilderness. Judy came along and took this picture of me. Not very flattering, but telling in more ways than one.
I remember feeling both a deep sense of satisfaction in that moment, and tremendous sadness. These are predicable sentiments at journey’s end. But I also remember thinking that the easy part was behind me. Now the hard part – the telling of the tale – lay directly ahead. Or maybe it’s the other way around.
This morning I reworked to completion the final chapter of the Maine hiking narrative, thus finishing the journey in another sense. The physical effort of hiking and the mental effort of writing are behind me now, and all that remains is publication. That’s always anticlimactic. So now the trek truly is finished. Once again, I feel both satisfaction and sadness.
I don’t really know whether I hike in order to write or vice versa. The two are so much a part of me that I can’t untangle them any more. What I do know is that I love to hike as much as I love to write, and that journey’s end – actual or literary – always leaves a void in my life. No doubt there’s another book in my future, along with another trail. But there are times, like now, when it seems like a crazy way to live.
At midday I went for a walk along the Rail Trail despite a biting cold. The trail had been groomed for snowmobiles so I walked in the tracks of those fast-moving machines. Occasionally I stepped aside to let one of them zip past. And it seemed like the perfect metaphor for the literary life – especially one steeped in wildness. I plod along at a snail’s pace while the rest of the world races by. How very Thoreau-like of me. Am I the lucky one or a pathetic creature? I know what Thoreau would say, but I am not he.
I’m still on the greatest journey of them all and have, as the old poet said, “miles to go before I sleep.” That means I’ll be an old man before I can answer that question with anything approaching certainty. Even then, I might not be able to sort it all out. Perhaps it isn’t for me to say.
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