The summer heat hit in full today. A warm morning turned into a sun-burnt skin kind of afternoon. Nothin for it but to hike through. 
The one positive is that the trail in New York unravels beneath a thick canopy cover. The bad news is that the heavy foliage traps heat. So even as I darted between puddles of shade the air I breathed was hot, heavy with a sort of clinging jungle humidity.
If ever there was a day to think happy thoughts, to ride a tide of mental escapism, it was now. So I threw in my earbuds and let go.
And the miles rolled by. Easier now, the music serving as a drug really: to distract, to push, to inspire the weary to hope.
And those off-kilter, flannel-wearing teens with Taoist emblems tattooed on odd places on their skin, the ones who tell stories laced with pulsing bass and light shows and music with “good energy,” well they were right about the fact that a good rhythm is life-giving. Listening to that music was like holding onto a lightning rod. It helped me through the day.
And the trail-purists I passed would scowl at the headphones and me like I were engaged in some kind of parasitic affair with my technology. And, if I were critical and honest with myself, I’d see they were right, that I was blinding myself to the reality of my situation.
And the reality was this: I was guilty of listening to happy music to blanket an unhappy day of hiking.
Most people would consider this a reasonable thing to do. I disagree. Looked at objectively it becomes the act of running away. It’s too hot and the hills are too hard and your feet hurt and the top of the next hill is never THE top and you lose your motivation bit by bit. You can’t do this sober. Can’t climb the hill when you look at it. So you put in headphones, look down at your feet, and slip away into a world of crescendo and clashing symbols and good things that get your heart beating and make your blood boil a bit.
But you don’t think of the hike, the hill, the trees or yourself either. Your focus is…somewhere else. And so you’re displaced from the experience that your actually living.
The result is that you walk up a mountain you’re blind to, and reach the top as if in a dream, uncertain how you arrived there, but certain only that you took the last step to a clever line by Bob Dylan. The climb has been overshadowed by the attention-grabbing proximity of the voices ringing through headphones into your ears. The music has become more real than the mountain, and it’s a tragic loss for you. Because you can listen to Bob Dylan in your car on XM, on your iPod at work, over the stereo at home, anywhere, but when in your life do you get to climb a mountain?
At noon I stopped in to a deli across from a hulking fenced in cement factory. The crack of broken stone filled the air while I ate at the picnic table outside. There was no pretending I was anywhere else. The sound tethered me there. It gave the moment an implacable, ruinous heartbeat that filled my ears with an industrial grind. It served as an overture to the men in work vests, grimed with rock-powder, who manned heavy machinery even today. driving ‘crete back and forth across the heat-blasted Tarmac.
I put my headphones away after that.
Learning to listen to a different music — Nomad