July 1st. I leave the White Mountain hostel and its plethora of civil comforts to head back out into the wild. But things are alright because I’m back in the company of friends.
And the group has grown. There are faces I recognize, Cosmo, White Rabbit, and Large, but there are also a few I don’t.
I sort things out fairly quickly.
There’s Dill, an effervescent Canadian girl with an unruly tangle of auburn hair. Roller, a British neuroscientist out of the lab for a breath of fresh air. And a brother-sister duo who call themselves the Bernstein Bears – individually they just stick with Rob and Claire.
Dill is carefree and wild. Roller introverted, quiet. Claire a chronic worrier with a heart of gold. Rob the brother figure with a hand to her back sometimes to reassure, sometimes to push, always ready to answer her “What if?” with a matter-of-fact “Then this.”
I’d seen them all before. I was sure I had. But in places I couldn’t quite remember. A coffee shop window in Hanover? Maybe that cramped gas station just out of Delaware Water Gap 500 miles back? Or had it been the lobby of the YMCA in Waynseboro – did they wander around the lobby carrying their packs in search of a free shower too?
I didn’t want to introduce myself with “Hey! Remember that pair of eyes you saw watching you from between the cereal boxes at that last Price Chopper? That was me!” so I stuck with “Hey, how’s it going.” Better to start friendships from base one.
Maybe I’d eventually reveal my crackpot theories about meeting them in a past life and let on about my suspicion concerning AT encounters of the third kind. But not yet. That was something to be discussed later. While drunk.
We crossed into Maine that first day like strangers in a strange land. The terrain changed quickly. We hiked all day. 9-10 hours. Through bogs, around slick snarls of roots, and over the rounded, rocky dome of Baldpate Mountain. We went up and down ladders then across two-inch wide catwalks laid across 20-foot drops. Ropes tied off to scrawny trees hung down rock faces to help us descend. At one point I was sucked down to my hip by a mudpit. The ground just fell away beneath my foot and I sunk three feet straight down – whoomp.
We’d all heard the rumors that Maine was tough and now we were seeing it firsthand.
Only half the group made it to the planned shelter that night. A thunderstorm cut us off from the stragglers.
Our crew of 9 temporarily became a crew of 5.
Oddly, I was a little relieved. Already the crowd had been starting to bug me. This wasn’t what I was after out here anyway, the hiking in a line, the communal meals, having the same conversations over and over okay with different words, laughing at jokes I didn’t find funny to stay on good terms with people I couldn’t escape and felt obliged to please. Routine interaction.
I’d gotten enough of that in the world before the trail. I couldn’t take anymore.
I wanted quiet. A quiet where I could hear my own thoughts and follow them without somebody barging in to tell me what they did or didn’t do and why it was important that I know right away. A quiet where I could teach myself a deeper independence than the pseudo-independence of the man living in the crowd.
I don’t want to lean on other people. But given the opportunity I do. And I despise that tendency in myself. So isolation was how I resolved to combat it, to kill that passive apathy that had led to parents handling my bills and friends towing me around like luggage while they actively lived their own days.
Isolation.

Because the crowd picks me apart like vultures do roadkill, just another piece of meat that doesn’t fight back.

Because I’m human too and isn’t the unholy truth that it’s easier to follow than it is to lead?
I’ll show you what I mean.
Scene: barefoot kids clump together at the edge of the bridge. There’s water a dozen feet below. But how deep? No one wants to be the first to jump. So they wait, standing there with puffed up chests and a half-masked terror shining on their faces, daring each other to go. “I bet you won’t!” is repeated a dozen times before one kid, the kid who smiles wild and always seems a bit crazier than the rest, jumps without a word. The others follow only after he surfaces unhurt.
You see the first kid has got the best handle on things though. He sees that sometimes you’ve got to jump before you know. That’s real independence. He sees that there are all these kids just like him who want desperately to swim but they’re turned to stone by the uncertainty of what might be under the water, what might go wrong. They’re all held back by the echoes of other voices, parents, teachers admonishing them to “look both ways before crossing the road Billy” and to “keep that seatbelt on Susan,” and to “save now, spend later because you’ll need that twenty for down payment on a house.”
These precautions are all good and well. They help us reduce danger and risk. But it’s important to realize that there is a difference between mitigating risk and eliminating it altogether. The seatbelt doesn’t prevent the possibility of the car crashing. The risk is still there even after you hear the click of the belt locking in.
But we all hate to admit it. And it’s no surprise we hate it. The knowledge that risk is inescapable shatters the belief we each have in our own safe little worlds. We convince ourselves that if we stick to the sidewalk and out of the road we won’t get hurt.
And here we return to the bridgejumper. Most of the kids dare each other to jump. But the crazy one dares himself to jump. Because he knows life isn’t as simple as looking left or right for signs of trouble. Risk, he’s discovered for himself, is always there. There’s no sense making a habit of hiding from it. Anything can happen at any moment.
But anyone who watches the news every morning, sees the cop shot at the barber shop while getting a shave, hears this word “anything” and immediately imagines the worst, visualizes a piano falling on them the second they open the front door. They forget “anything” is a coin with two sides. If it lands on heads yeah it’s always possible you might get crushed by a piano toppled from a second-story window. But maybe it comes up tails and you open the door to your neighbor holding some homemade apple pie.
Anything can happen at any moment. I’ll

be damned if that isn’t a magical idea. And really, most people do damn themselves by denying it. They damn themselves to a world that moves on grated tracks that never veers of course and takes its passengers to the same places 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It’s a predictable world that masquerades as a safe one. A world of iron cages and hazard tape that keeps you penned in “for your own good.” A place that lacks surprise, restricts possibility, and smothers wonder.
The really great stuff only pans out if you’re willing to embrace risk, think differently from the crowd, take the jump. And we all know that intuitively I think.
Cut to scene: “I bet you won’t,” the boys are still saying. Automatons on repeat. “Anything could be down there,” a kid with a nervous tic says looking wide-eyed at the dark water.
The one who hasn’t said anything yet steps to the edge and jumps. No pomp or flair or parting boasts. He just jumps. He knows the real trick is to dare yourself to take the risk and then embrace whatever happens next.
I want to be that kid.
The next night I stick with a smaller crowd and we camp by the falls at Dunn Notch. The company is laid back now, not high strung.
And it’s quieter.
And before the night is over I learn that the state motto of Maine is the Latin phrase “dirigo.” It means “I lead.”

— Nomad