On Walking

An essay on self love and the illusion of control

Jul 25, 2024

Every day I pack and unpack the litany of gear I’m bringing to Baffin Island next month. Even though I’ve done many big trips like this, I still worry I’ll show up having overlooked a crucial detail.

The idea of having to suffer due to my own blunder is a thematic concern—not just with this backpacking trip, but in life. And though neglecting a crucial item or half-assing physical prep could present a trail challenge, my worries are rooted somewhere deeper.

My adult anxiety of being ill-prepared and enduring scrutiny is directly connected to my childhood. It has tempered over time, that’s for sure, but I’ve yet to completely eliminate my past’s influence of rolling eyes and biting words telling me what I should have done. I sense my compulsion to be error-free is the result of my most influential years under the thumbs of aggrandizing male adults who sought to shape me by controlling me. Such lessons are hard to unlearn.

Still, it’s very important for me to feel prepared. Which is ironic because Be Prepared is the motto for the Boy Scouts—which, in my experience anyhow, was precisely where the previously mentioned destructive and domineering men thrived.

Like many youthful traumas, this inordinate degree of adult surveillance ultimately became a helpful teacher. For example, when it comes to taking wild forays into far flung places like, say, the Canadian Arctic, I generally depart feeling confident I did everything I could to make the trip a success. Gear, bodily fitness, travel logistics, and everything else involved receives microscopic attention before embarking. I still adhere to the adage, Control what you can control, even though I know damn well that control, for the most part, is an illusion.

For various reasons, I had to start my preparation from scratch for this multi-week caper above the Arctic Circle. For starters, I needed a new backpack. The one I’ve been using—the Gossamer Gear Gorilla 50—is too small for a ten day food carry in a weather region where any day could be warm and temperate, or frigid and blizzardy.

I also have had to practice putting on new things. My leg gaiters, for example, because I never use gaiters. Micro spikes, too. I also practice opening the bear canister. I sit on my comfortable couch and depress the plastic nubs while twisting the wide lid. Getting it open isn’t easy even in perfect conditions, which makes me wonder how it’ll be when my hands are cold, wet, and tired.

I experiment with how to load my Gregory Baltoro, a massively spacious 75-liter pack. Will I stash the twenty pound bear canister at the top? Or will weight be better distributed with it in the middle or bottom? Also, what should I put in the pack’s waterproof liner? What can I leave out?

I then pull up a chair and write out various strategies to confirm an even punch of daily calories. No matter the configuration, I loathe the necessary multiple doses of straight up olive oil shots. I anticipate hunger. My growling stomach and irritable mood. There’s no way to avoid the cumulative deficit I’ll succumb to.

Backpacking, even after only a couple days, creates a greedy longing for even a morsel of sustenance. The accompanying ache is desperate and painful. It’s a lust that compromises good choices and overrules logic. I have never been on the trail for more than a week in steady caloric deficit. This will be a new frontier.

Once my list is perfected and my pack is loaded, I commit to memory its contents and locations. What’s in my first aid kit? What’s in each of the pack’s zillion pockets? I pay for an additional month of satellite service so I can practice using my Garmin inReach. I do the math on how many wet wipes I’ll need for a week and a half on the trail, then add a few extra for good measure.

I consider worst case scenarios and imagine the steps I’ll take to manage them. Katie and I often play this game while thru-hiking. “What if I fall on a cholla?” or “What if I am attacked by a mountain lion and am spouting blood from my femoral artery?” or “What if I come down wrong on my ankle and am unable to walk?” or “What if we lose our tent stakes?” or “What if I get bit by a rattlesnake.” We talk it all through so we’re ready when shit hits the fan.

In the throes of it all, I don the 51-pound load and head out for long walks. I need my body to get used to the strain—but more than that, I need my body to fall in love with how it feels.

Make no mistake, this is the goal—to love how it feels. I don’t want to simply be OK with how gear sits on my body. I want to be smitten by it. I want to think, I can’t wait to get that thing back on me! I’ve learned that loving something, anything, is possible with the right intention.

On the first few test walks I learn my most obvious pressure points and note areas of skin chafe. Of swelling. It’s usually hips and shoulders. I practice accessing water bottles mid-stride and note how badly I want to remove the pack during breaks. I walk during the hottest or rainiest times of day because I want to endure the extreme. I want adverse. I want to feel challenged. I want to be sore tomorrow.

I walk and walk and walk way more miles than I will hike on the coming trip. I walk and walk and walk while thinking about what I might think about if I was hanging out at my house. Then, somewhere right around two hours on the trail, I begin floating. Snack intervals and total miles and movement of my watch’s hands accelerate inexplicably. My feet become my eyes—they see roots and rocks and rarely misstep. I glide through the forest.

This warping of reality triggers a sudden disregard for common bothers. Walking becomes a daze of time travel and waking dreams. I have thoughts like, Can’t I just walk forever? then I make plans to do just that.

In the novel The Horse by Willy Vlautin, an old man’s lifetime of brokenness is absolved by one minor act—a walk. And not just any sort of walk, but one that exposes the man’s authentic and embodied self. One that excavates memories in an effort to forgive a lifetime of glitches. One that taxes the man’s waning physical prowess and forces him to look inward more than he ever has before.

The old man’s walk moves him between various states of consciousness—a metaphor deployed by the author to denude the man’s reluctance to accept his innate goodness, frailty, and foible. The old man’s walk reveals a younger, more defenseless version of himself, and ultimately illuminates his raw and unshakable truths.

The old man’s walk, in the simplest of terms, is an act of grace.

Besides breathing, walking is, perhaps, the most natural of human activities. It’s an action, but it’s also an emblem of progress and understanding. Walking is a way to wrap my simple mind around time—an acceptance that all is eventually lost regardless of pace, intention, company, or my degree of stamina.

I walk willingly, at times with thrilling and utter abandon, towards my eventual demise. Towards a joy that culminates with my disappearance.

My first writing teacher, author Doug Rice, told me that writers write when they are not writing. They write when they are, in fact, driving, eating, watching TV, drinking coffee, shooting hoops, fucking. They write when they are walking with a friend in the park, keeping a slow and less normal pace, kicking up fallen leaves and sticks. They write when their breath is suddenly in time with the tempo of the wind as it bellows through branches and boughs. They write as they take in sounds and smells—the wishes and whims of all that’s unknown. Writing, he taught me, is an always act.

The same goes for walking. The walk is the always process. A movement en route to all that eventually matters.

What do I want to do? I want to walk. Here and there. To and from places I’ve been and not. To melt away life in this year’s summer swelter (oh how I’ve come to love the humidity and thick, waterfull air!) while I imagine tundra tussocks and waist-high river crossings where bone-chilling glacial runoff makes water flow milky white.

There are no trails where I’m headed, and that’s OK. I don’t need them. I’ll simply follow Akshayuk Pass and keep my oldest friend, Kent, in sight. Perhaps I will speed up when he motions with his trekking poles to get my attention—telling me to hurry, hurry! because he’s caught our first glimpse of the otherworldly arm of Mount Thor, or the ethereal, flat tabletop of Mt. Asgard.

I walk because I want the fear that follows. The terror of unfathomable enormity. I want to be swallowed. To be reminded how inconsequential I am. So I’ll race forward, tripping my heavy feet on tufts and sedge while my pack, a smidge lighter with each passing day, bounces on my numb back.

I walk to leave everything I know behind. Because nothing after this moment will ever be the same. I will be something new. Refreshed. And in this newness I will be beautifully less than I’ve ever been. I will be grass and rock. A piece of what was, is, and will be again and again.

And all this walking is just fine by me. Why else do I live if not for moments that find me staring, without as much as a blink, into the face of God?

I walk to give myself over to this. I walk to live fully. I walk to die fully.