Final Thoughts
Reflections on the trail
During the several days since we finished the trail, we have been reflecting on our experience of this hike, so we wanted to write one last post to close out our blog.
We are now ensconced again in the physically comfortable life of being at home in a house: fresh fruits and vegetables, beds, laundry, soap and shampoo, and plumbing. But we are also missing the other kind of comfort from our life on the trail, the comfort of simplicity. On the trail, every thing that we do every day is directly related to our basic needs (eat, drink water) or to making progress on our goal (get to the next shelter, the next mountaintop, and the next and the next until Canada). Everything else falls away. The trees are quiet and calm. The mountains have been there for a very, very long time.
At the same time, I (Martha) thought that presence and mindfulness in the woods would be easy, but found it was not. Remembering to look up at the trees instead of down at my feet still took work, like returning the mind to the breath when meditating. It was easy to focus on how many miles until X, or when we get home we have to remember Y. It’s very human! The trail is beautiful at every step, and has so much to give and so many lessons to teach, but I had to be active in my attention. I think I got better at this over time, after I stopped expecting it would just come naturally.
One of the trail’s lessons for us was about flexibility. On June 20, we really thought that we were about to spend 30 days nonstop in the woods. We created food resupply packages based on estimates of the calories we would need and the meals we would eat. But, of course, we found that we ate less trail mix and more dried fruit, we wanted more variety, we needed more electrolytes and more food in general, and we liked our hot cocoa with more sugar and dried milk powder. We were just wrong about a lot of small things, and it seems foolish now to think that our first series of educated guesses would be totally correct. We learned how important it is to plan on being wrong, to build in time for collecting our thoughts and course-correcting.
This is related to another lesson the trail taught us, the importance of caring for our bodies. When we were asking so much of our legs and core muscles day after day, we also had to listen more closely to what they were trying to tell us about our physical needs, which was usually: more food, more water, more electrolytes. We weren’t very good at this kind of attention at first. It was something we had to learn, and then our days on the trail became much happier and easier.
We have many gratitudes to express. First, to our trail angels, without whom this journey would have been hugely more difficult to logisticate. Second, to the Green Mountain Club employees and volunteers who have worked so hard to maintain the trail and the beautiful land it passes through. Third, to the many wonderful hikers we met along the way. It is a funny thing to make a close friend and share these profound experiences and then part ways without knowing their real name.
Fourth, to the land itself. Early in our journey, we stayed at Stratton Pond Shelter, where the caretaker informed us and the other hikers that we were on western Abenaki land. Later that week, on our first resupply break, we picked up The Future of the Northern Forest off the bookshelf and read from its preface: “The dominant concept of ‘owning’ the land is alien to the Abenaki view of belonging to the land.” Perhaps the most significant difference between life in a house and life on the trail is the reversal in our minds of these views of belonging. At home, we are constantly striving to change our surroundings to make ourselves more comfortable. On the trail, we instead find ourselves changed by our surroundings, adapting to a space where the dominant forces are not human ones.
But in our society there’s no such thing as land that nobody owns. The prevailing European-American model of land ownership for commercial or personal gain demands that ever more land is changed in irreversible ways: resource extraction, destruction of ecosystems, “development.” In order for the Long Trail to even exist, it takes a complex network of state- and federally-owned land, plus conservation easements with individual property owners and companies. This network has been carefully wrought over the past century, mile by mile in some cases, through the hard work of many people who loved the land before us. This is the last unforgettable lesson the Long Trail taught us: National wilderness areas, state forests, and land under legally binding conservation are comparatively scant in this part of the world, but they are essential, both for the preservation of the natural world and for the wellbeing of humanity.