Woke at 5 today. Left camp by 6. Hiking early morning may become the norm. Predawn rays don’t quite have the same kick as sunlight around noon. 
At the 8 mile mark I stopped in at Telephone Pioneers Shelter for a snack. The place was occupied by a doggedly-upbeat dad out from the big city with his two sons. Both teens were sitting sullenly in the shelter staring lifelessly at some vague and distant fixed point where they could see — I have no doubt — gallon drums of pop (Coke), A/C, leather couches with seams sunken between cloud-soft cushions, and cable tv.
I asked the dad how long they’d been out. “Ah, just one night.” I glanced at their pile of gear, their large pile of gear, and back to the guy. “We meant to stay longer but the bugs, and just, you know –” I nodded that I did, because I did.

Still. One night. I know milkshakes and Netflix and showers are hard to give up, but really? One night? 24 hours without a bedit and the withdrawal has already taken its toll.
There’s a term that encapsulates these circumstances fairly well, and it’s pejorative, but I’ll make the connection just as well: when a person becomes so reliant on the luxuries of modern society that they’re not just unwilling, but unable to live without them they have become an addict. A junkie hooked on junk food instead of acid tabs is a junkie just as the same.
In a way this kind of addiction is worse than the meth-head’s. He can go to rehab, or ask a friend to padlock his bedroom door and wait out the withdrawal, or get caught during a B&E, tossed into solitary, and have everything (roughly) sorted out. The everyday consumer-culture addict has a tougher case. For one, he or she doesn’t realize they need their IPhones and Bojangles biscuit until they spend a day out in the woods (and who would ever do that?). And two, how are they supposed to resist their cravings when the only place they can avoid an Apple advertisement is a used port-o-let in the far corner of an abandoned construction site?
And three (this is the biggie) there’s no group to help you through it, no Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to sneak off to for some therapy. This kind of addiction is something that’s swept under the rug or worse labeled as “normal.” The addiction to Chick-fil-a, Starbucks coffee, and Netflix is now so widespread that it masquerades as a condition of simply living in the world. An absurd kind of irony hangs over the whole thing. Everyone’s sick with it and because of this nobody notices.
If you’re quiet and attentive you might notice the causes.
Turn on the tv and it’s that pervasive voice overdubbing the big release of the new Ford F-150 4×4. The truck rolls through some mud. The camera is artfully splattered. “Ford, built tough,” a baritone voice says from somewhere off screen. The whole thing is low-grade hypnosis underpinned by the belief that if people hear a message enough they’ll begin to believe it. And it works. The proof is in your head already. If I tell a person to imagine a tough truck built for a Tejas ranchero I bet most people would conjure up an image of a Silverado “because a cowboy has got to drive through mud too!”
If you’ve seen Inception it’s all a bit like that. By allowing others to put a thought in your head, they can put a desire in your head. And the desire, taking root, becomes a need. And pretty soon you’ve got a populace full of people wanting things they never would have wanted in the first place.
But you’ve got to distance yourself from the mesmerizing spectacle in order to realize it. And most people don’t like stepping foot outside their front door.
I like trucks just as much as the rest though — Nomad