Some cool animal pound images:
Climbing to the Greenstone
Image by Viewminder
Why is it that we are drawn to the wild? Why does man, the most social of all animals seek the isolation, solitude and lonliness of a wild place?
In those five days I hadn't looked into a mirror but it was clear to me that I had seen myself there more perfectly than the reflection that any mirror could produce.
It was a 40.8 mile walk.
I learned in those five lonely, beautiful, amazing and sometimes difficult days that I really do like myself. Me and myself, we do get along really well... we never fought once and we were always cooperating. I enjoyed my own company. Before that I'd never spent five days in the bush all by myself.
I learned there that I see the world differently when I'm not influenced by the needs and opinions of others. I looked at the smallest of details around me and I was able to complete thoughts and consider anything and everything without the cell phone ringing to put that particular thought on hold.
I learned there that I can live without my Blackberry, electricity, the internet, my wonderful tempurpedic mattress, a car or a house. Life without modern climactic control... mmmm... more of a challenge.
I learned once again that I can consistantly rise above pain and do what needs to be done in any situation. That's always come pretty easy to me but it's a characteristic I like to test out every once in a while. That's what I was looking for and I definitely found it. I knew I was going to be pushing it. Goes without saying really.
The wild makes me feel alive.
A lot of what I learned is hard to put into words... in the silence of those days and nights in the woods language seemed to be replaced as my primary communication with myself... more so by feelings... emotions... and chemical processes I could clearly see for the first time in isolation.
When the wolves that I was following killed something near my campsite and began howling, the instinctive and primitive fear that ran down my spine faster than the speed of thought... I didn't just feel it or observe it... I saw it... I saw my own fear... like steam rising from your breath on a cold day. It had its own presence.
There was one moment I recall to be the most impacting and pivotal moment of the whole incredible epic. On the fifth day I woke up, cold, wet, hungry and weary... the conditions and decisions that put me in that place were all my responsibility of course, that I clearly understood and accepted... but at that moment I looked at my fucking boots as I sat up in my wet down sleeping bag... those boots, they had really become my antithesis... my enemy... I knew that I had to take my very damaged feet, in the most pain that they had ever been in, and force their swollen mass into those boots that almost seemed to snarl at me like barbaric medeival torture implements and I would have to walk twelve miles in them in four and a half hours.
I had a boat to catch.
Something inside me at that exact moment popped, maybe even snapped, figured it out I guess... an inner insanity instantly prevailed and I pulled on those laces and tightened up those boots almost sadomasochistically with a newfound determination... I pulled them a little extra tight just to tell my feet and that pain that saturated them that I am the boss... I am in control. There will be more pain if I so desire. You want some of this feet? Who you lookin' at blisters? You talking to me, pain?
The twelve miles in those boots, just the thought of it loomed ahead of me like a wall of dark turbulent clouds boiling with rage and uncertainty on a warm and humid spring day... it wasn't that it was a technical hike or anything...without injury it'd be a walk in the park... it was knowing that the pain would be my constant companion with every step... in the center of that moment I was overcome with a bright and stunning clarity of thought and purpose. That doesn't really happen a lot to me with the ADHD and all.
Next time I will take much better care of my feet I swear. I'll stop more... I'll change socks three or four times a day... I won't let them get wet... I'll put duct tape on at the first sign of friction... I'll hear their pleas for mercy... whatever it takes. I'll never take my stompers for granted again.
I would not only walk those twelve miles that day I vowed to myself... I decided then and there that I would enjoy and savor them... wasn't it Jesus who said that you should love your enemy? I would love it then... I would sing songs in my head... and I promised myself that I'd even run the last mile... I would finish strong, and I didn't care if I ran on bloody and dirtied stumps... I just somehow reached a place inside my own being where I was able to transcend that searing and fiery pain manifest in each step of the foot, never able to control it but to find a place above it and dominate it, to step outside of it's realm. I chose to make the pain irrelevant.
Looking back I don't even know how I did it.
Twelve miles is not one 'thing'... it's not one battle, it's not a singular enemy... twelve miles is just about fifty thousand steps. Still carrying thirty eight pounds on my back (weighed on the scale at the dock when I finished) each one of those fifty thousand steps I can tell you was EXCRUCIATING. I think I invented half a dozen new swear words on that segment of the journey. The ability to produce the courage to take each step was in itself a mental battle... the areas I had to climb over rocks or tree stumps or jump down were so painful I had at points begun to hallucinate... to see strange lights... to get tunnel vision. Jumping down was the worst.
Twenty years before when I had crashed into that swamp near Clewiston Florida... after getting knocked out in the air and coming to wondering why I was falling through the sky just then... what a weird way to wake up... a thousand feet off the ground, watching the blood drip from my torn face onto the shattered glass of the altimeter that cut me, seeing my own deep red fluid spill into the soft abyss and dissapearing into the thousand feet of blue sky beneath me... after that I hit the earth so hard that I could hear my bones snap like twigs and then having to pull out my hook knife and cut my shoes off as my feet swelled up before my still seeing stars eyes... I saw strange things that weren't real there too. Weird shit. Maybe that's God's way of telling you that you really fucked up this time. 'Maybe we should talk' he might be saying. "Things don't look like they're going too well for you."
I'm glad that I didn't have a gun in that swampy hell... it would have been nice to think that I could've used it to take care of the gators but at times it would have been too difficult to resist the seductive temptation of lead as the ultimate pain killer.
Twenty years before I recalled, I learned a lesson when I found myself in quite the same house of pain... not wanting to spend the night in that godforsaken swamp with the alligators and the snakes and whatever other denizens of that odd world my imagination could produce, I had by necessity to walk on those jagged broken bones poking internally my swollen flesh and torn muscles... actually I had to crawl mostly... and swim some mercifully... but the hallucinations, they got me there too... I thought that I was in my parent's living room... telling them the story about how I crashed that day even though I was fighting for life itself in a hot and stinking swamp covered in dried blood, a torn to pieces jumpsuit and all manner of exotic bugs waiting for the feeding opportunity.
The definition of disheartening is watching the searchplane flying away from you, knowing full well that the pilot didn't even see you. Knowing you're on your own. It's up to you to get your ass out of this one.
Accepting one's fate... that gets tricky... I mean you want to accept just enough to quit your internal bitching of course, but you just don't want to accept too much and let yourself die. It's a pretty fine line when it comes to survival. I guess you gotta be angry enough to live but still have enough of a sense of humor to laugh at what got ya here in the first place. It's usually always pretty funny... especially after the fact. I'm usually the first one in the group to recommend cannibalism. "Shut up man... we've only been lost for forty five minutes!" But I get really hungry when I'm lost.
The reality is that I fear if I ever ate any of my exploring buddies... we'd probably get rescued right after I finished dinner. The thought always keeps me from goin cannibal.
I remember in the swamp only wanting to curl up in a fetal position then and go to sleep... sung soft and sweet lullabies by the grim reaper himself... kept company by those hallucinations of a place so much more pleasant. I was mentally promising myself I'd only sleep for a little bit... making the 'deadly deal'...maybe I'll just lay down and take a short rest. Bullshit on that... that's how you die. Never go to sleep. Not until your out of the shit, Uh uh. You get down then you aint gettin' up.
Just like that day I could see the pain coming here too... only this was much worse... as I watched the earth seem to rise up at a dangerous velocity I knew that it'd be one hit... one really big hit... and it'd only hurt if I lived through it so I looked forward to that pain.
On Isle Royale I knew very well what I was getting into as I forced my feet into those boots. It would be like crashing fifty thousand times...again and again and again... in agonizingly s l o w m o t i o n. I never really considered it particularly dangerous or deadly, but man it hurt.
Anybody who's ever spent a good deal of time deep in the woods knows what kills you... it's nothing dramatic or even exciting... what kills you is hypothermia. You get wet and cold in the woods... doesn't matter if it's eighty degrees out... you're in trouble. That's what I worry about when I'm in the wayback all by myself.
Each and every step in that terrain on the island had to be so deliberate and considerate... it's not like walking down a street on pavement... you don't even think about where your feet fall on pavement...but the brutal reality here was that each step was in itself a decision to be made...'how should my foot land on that rock' or 'where will my next step take it's grip.' There was no motivational device I could use to look away from the punishment, the pain or the torture... I had to focus on it... I had to look at my cursed boots and watch where they'd land...it could not be ignored. No fucking way. Nope. With each step I knew what was coming... I had to make it so.
Fifty thousand times that day I had to endure the grip of that vicious pain, but I will tell you all of that was nothing compared to the moment that I looked at those boots and commited myself to doing what it was that I needed to do. It all comes down to that moment really.
That was THE moment.
That's why I did it.
In the end, though I needed a little medical attention, and three days later I still cannot walk without enduring incredible spasms of pain, I am on the best antibiotics insurance can buy and the beneficiary of some heavy duty pain medication with a high street value, infection has wracked my body from head to toe and brings me alternating bouts of fever and chills... I got to the rondezvous point with the boat, jumped on, took a three hour boat ride, got into my truck and drove for eleven hours to get myself home... and I didn't take those boots off until I got there.I was afraid of what I'd see when I did.
It was all worth it.
You are my heaven.
The Wild Hunt
