April 24th was a standard hiker workday. Woke early, walked solo through a smothering mountain fog with rain jacket on then off then on then off, all day breathing air drunk with the smell of earth and pine needles and something like crushed hemlock.
A day of downcast eyes and wandering thoughts.

The 25th started bleak too, with leaden skies and that same dense fog cover, but after a while the sun burned through. Strange thoughts are unavoidable when walking alone, and as the precipitation disappeared I couldn’t think of anything but the heavy water molecules that were being heated and sent skyward around me, flocks of balloons helium-inflated and cut loose.
Wild thoughts seem to come in the morning most days. There’s a kind of emptiness, though, that takes hold of the long distance hiker after a couple hours on the move. You fall into a sort of fugue state where your mind goes blank and each step just leads into the next. In the athlete world the term for this is flow.
Flow has helped me through some long days of hiking, but it’s a bit scary too. The first step of the day is easy. The thousandth is hard. And then you fall into flow, stop counting, and go ten thousand without even noticing. You temporarily become an automaton, functioning purely on intuitive autopilot.
Your peripheral vision is the first to go, the outside world becoming something shadowy like figures behind a steamed up windowpane. The only thing you’re aware of now is the thin line of the trail. It scrolls by beneath you foot by foot, unspooling like some endless equation with you, the whole time, computing each step — where to place your foot, how to angle it, the shift of balance while stepping — moment by moment, instinctively, instantly.

That’s how it goes. In the morning I’m lost in half-finished dreams from the night before. But by mid-afternoon I’m a machine, a perfect system, with no time for sporadic thoughts. Caught in the current of flow, thinking only along one line, like an electrical charge running through a wire. There’s no spare thought for anything but “fluid movement.” In those moments, similar to those mind-blank, everyday-commute-to-work-highway-driving moments (we all know that one, right?) I’m outside my body and steering it, rather than living in it. I’m a drone, passively killing time while time is killing me. Walking mindlessly and not purposefully.

And that’s not what I want. When I’m walking along like that I could pass a bikini-clad, gun-toting, coke-snorting hillbilly and not bat an eye or have the sense to up my pace to a run. In short I’m completely closed off from the world.

So I think quickly and bash my toe into a rock to force myself back to reality. The reality of one muscle-straining step here, another there, and on and on.

I should count my steps for each day. Because the goal has always been to embrace the difficulty of the single step in order to fully appreciate the value of taking it.

Nomad