For five months in 2010 my husband Chris and I lived outside on the Appalachian Trail. We carried our life on our backs as we walked from Georgia to Maine for a 2,179 mile thru-hike. It took several weeks, honestly maybe even half the hike, before I stopped dreaming about showing up late for work. Our hike was before everyone had smart phones, the cusp between the handful who had one vs everyone having one, so we hiked in relative obscurity of what was going on in the world around us. We were hiking up and down the spine of the Appalachians when the Deepwater Horizon Spill occurred, and caught glimpses of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruptions on the tv news from a hostel we’d stopped to eat breakfast at one morning on a sliver of trail that bounced back and forth between Tennessee and North Carolina.
There’s an extreme simplicity to backpacking long distances. Your body generally grows accustomed to the daily movement—though you often wake up in pain for the first few minutes of every day—but it is the mental part that is the hardest to overcome. And it’s the number one reason people quit the trail. But if you can move past that, you suddenly see how we as humans used to live, how we used to move (albeit, we weren’t necessarily hiking 2,000 miles in 5 months but you get my drift). Its easy to want to grab hold of those feelings and keep them perpetually.
Now, make no mistake. At the same time I was thinking of ways to live in a tent for 9 months of the year I was also dreaming up wine and cheese parties to have with my friends when I got home and daydreaming about the next trail town so I could gorge on a hamburger. What’s the meme phrase? “It’s called balance.” Wine and cheese party at the next AT shelter it is, then!
5 months on the trail and then returning to society was a jolt. Suddenly everything seemed so stupid. Magazines and media were ridiculous. Advertising? Disgusting. My entire perspective had shifted. The trail had changed me in many ways and I wanted to figure out how to take that feeling and apply it to regular life. We got temporary field jobs working in Sabine National Forest and instead of living in a tent we lived in a motel in San Augustine, Texas alongside our other field coworkers, random oil field workers, and travelers who used the town as a stopover.
We tried to continue our vagabond ways in early 2011 with a two month thru-hike of the Florida Trail, an 1,100 mile odyssey in swamps, sandhill scrub, and longleaf pine forests through my beloved Florida. A distinctly different experience from the more social Appalachian Trail, Chris and I often hiked days and weeks alone, sometimes only seeing hunters or fisherman in passing. If the AT had initiated me into this wonderful world of traveling by foot, the FT sealed the deal in me chasing this feeling for more than a decade now. The only thing was that there were other things I also wanted to do, like have a retirement fund so I wasn’t a pauper when I was 80. And possibly have kids. Some people manage to make a decade or two lifestyle out of long distance hiking, often sacrificing all of these other things for that to happen, or they turn it into a hashtag-van-life situation so they can have the best of both worlds—again, something that isn’t typically long lasting.
Chris and I eventually chose the settled-down-with-a-house scenario and I bawled the day in 2012 when the PODS guy dropped off the things we’d shoved into storage in February 2010. The kiddo came along in 2014 and I’ve been adapting how to experience those feelings from our backpacking years ever since.
Last week I was restless. Writing felt heavy and pointless. I was depressed about the FLSP outlook and my overall feelings about social media felt heavy. Cue all of what I said about our return from trail life, how everything outside of the well, outside, felt pointless. I may not live my life outdoors these days but when I’m feeling despair or out of sorts, it is usually a long trip outside that puts things right.
A long weekend of camping did just that. My perspective has shifted again, things feel easy, or at least easier. There’s clarity in my goals and what matters. As much as I despised the materialistic world I came home to in 2010, I, of course, fell back into the patterns everyone else falls into. My house is half decorated for Christmas—I felt the urge to decorate earlier this year—and now there’s a mix of camping bins to unload and put away and piles of laundry to fold, something that will probably take me all week to accomplish. My kiddo will go to school tomorrow and Chris and I will go back to work. There will be routine and it will not involve living in a tent or walking 15 miles and filtering water from springs, streams, or sometimes the very dubious swamp buggy track (see: Florida).
We are campers, as in we put up a tent and sleep in that at our front country camping sites, typically Texas state parks. I have recently dabbled in the lifestyle of RV/trailer life when one of my best friends bought one with her husband. It makes for a really accessible way to have a girl’s weekend with friends while keeping costs down and also being something my non-camping friends can enjoy while also being at a campground. But the two experiences are vastly different, even if you are both staying at the same state park, next to each other. I can’t say that my son and I didn’t seriously consider at least having a small teardrop trailer to hang out in while it was grey and drizzly yesterday afternoon and evening, but I can 100% say that I did not envy the people with the trailer next to us who felt the need to drag their tv outside so they could watch sportsball and share it with the rest of the campground. Did you want to be outside this weekend, or not? is what I wanted to ask them.
But I did ponder what it would be like to stay at the campsite for the limit the state park would allow, to see how the days pass at the site, the way the light moved through the days, and what animals would appear. I saw a housecat last night, at first mistaking it for a raccoon, finally noticing its movement in the dark to identify it when my headlamp wouldn’t illuminate the animal to the degree I needed for a complete visual identification. Would the cat friend, presumably from the non-park property nearby, come back around to visit again on another night? I could hike the trails at different times of day, walking slowly or fast, stopping to notice and take part in my surroundings for a deeper time than a short four-day weekend would allow. Honestly, these are the same things I thought when I lived outside for five months, because even if I wasn’t moving about in a car or doing the daily grind of work/life, I would only be seeing these scenes along the trail once in a very specific instance and season.
These are the perspectives being outside gives you. It takes away the asinine worry about how your writing or photography will be taken online or how you will handle trolls on a Facebook group and makes you think in Deep Time. I am now 275 miles away from where I was camping this weekend. Tomorrow, the beetle I saw crossing the trail will still be moving about its life, the birds my son enjoyed watching in his “jungle” spot alongside the same trail will be flitting from scrubby oak to scrubby oak. It will rain and it will shine. I will make coffee and answer emails and write reports and make maps and come home and do dishes and fold the laundry. And when things feel heavy again, when I start worrying about stupid little things that mean nothing, I will go for a hike and walk slowly, and see that the spider’s web hanging from just the right spot will produce the most remarkable gleam in the sun, and nothing else will matter.
Notes:
1: No shade to the RV campers—there’s a time and a place and I totally see why people use them. Maybe leave the satellite dish at home, though, ok?
2: If you really want a deep dive, you can read all of my Appalachian Trail writings here. Florida Trail archives are offline for the moment while I work on getting my hiking memoir published.
3: Life’s Better Outside is an older TPWD slogan. It’s still appropriate and should be used more often.
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.
Really enjoyed this. We get bogged down so easily in materialistic stuff and it’s hard not to feel that way at times (perhaps more so this time of year), but your perspective, on nature and life continuing despite that, helps to re-orient and sharpen focus again.
Loved this. I’m also a tent person but we haven’t been camping in a while. We hike regularly and in this short season of light I try to make sure I find the light every day.