Oh, spring. The freezing nights and warm days. The snow patch clinging to the shadows. The leaves on the cusp of emergence reversing course, drooping. The sun’s intensity waxes before the sharpness of cold fronts wanes. it’s too early to smell the spring but possible to feel it in heightened solar power. The cold front this weekend beings the coldest air of my hike thus far.
Snow on vibrant moss and fern is the epitome of freshness. Green and white, like a spearmint candy. As the wind blows over it, the air acquires fresh chilliness. This refrigeration melts the little patches dangling on the Tennessee-facing slopes. Today brought my first contact with these wet snow leftovers (confirming that staying in Hot Springs earlier this week was worthwhile).
Escape or stop escaping
Most attempts and categorization are efforts to rationalize a spectrum of possibilities or simplify a larger set of variables. This attempt is no different. Caveat aside, there are two broad categories of people I have met on the trail: those escaping something and those trying to stop escaping something.
Some want to escape societal expectation or identity, perhaps coming from a job or lifestyle, that became exhausting. Some want to escape an anxiety about the state of the world. The trail offer a fine antidote to this in its stability, which is frequently augmented, I’ve found, by recreational drug use. Some want to escape work or relationship or responsibility. These are perfectly reasonable motivations, but I mostly fall in the other category.
Others want to avoid escaping something (a sort of double negative description better stated as leaning into something that’s been missing). For the few artists I’ve met, like Honey Badger with his epic spoken word poetry, this description fits. Same for my friend Rhetoric, who I hiked with for the day. Rhetoric teaches English at Colorado State and keeps a daily journal like me. I imagine his journal filled with wit and humor. Others pursue self-discovery. We avoid asking who we really are, but the trail provides ample time, if time is indeed the barrier to asking. We must still take a difficult initiative to ask hard questions, to search for meaning.
It’s to lean into writing and meaning that I avoid approaching the trail as an athletic pursuit. If the goal is a fast time, then the ability to produce, to linger on a conversation, to focus on a relationship shrinks.
I finished the day with a cheeky evening hop over Big Butt. Kudos to whoever followed through on this idea to obtain official US place name designation for Big Butt. A crack in the limestone adorned the summit.
Now I am camped near the graves of 2 Union soldiers who were killed during the Civil War at this site while visiting their families. It’s not as awful as fighting a war for the right to continue buying and selling people, forcing them to labor without education or compensation and treating them as subhuman, but come on Confederacy, not kind.
