Free solo (ditching kids edition)
rumble in the hills and learn how to saw boards and talk to grandmas you damn fool
Cheryl Strayed, John Muir, Jack Kerouac, Jack London, Henry David Thoreau — none of these clowns had young children around during their greatest adventures, free therefore to write for pages about the splendor of an axe or the reasons that rocks are, or are not, space. On the spires of mountains they contemplated death, and otherwise were glad not to be watching TV. A very stoned friend once forgot their shoes outside the tent and had them carried off by a bear overnight. It sounded like a real adventure. I could have been there, I thought, if not for children.
When my kids were small, riding in the carrier through the woods, I often thought that they were a little hypnotized by the interlocking leaves overhead. Now they’re bigger, I spend hikes bribing them with fruit gummies to walk further, helping them on and off rocks like bossy ladybugs, and explaining to them that they can pee on absolutely any tree other than the one by which everyone is standing. The other day, on a “hike” out in the woods, Japhy stopped in his tracks and announced, “I can’t hike anymore, my legs were cut off.” It’s nice to be out there, you know, but it’s not ~transcendental~.
The Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization. — Jack Kerouac, seemingly without a day job, and yes this is where Japhy got his name
I’ve been dreaming of a solo thru-hike, or just a hike without kids, since having kids. Nearing the end of the trip home to Australia last year, at an excess of “quality time” and cut loose from my job, the Noodle Hubs (already back in the U.S.) suggested I leave the kids with my parents and taking myself out on the trail. We had also, admittedly, been watching a lot of Alone. Doesn’t a solo hike sound grand? Don’t you want to be the kind of person who ventures into the brush with only their own limbs for company? Literally as I’m typing, Japhy and Scout are pushing each other’s noses into the nappy basket to take in the composite waft of overnight pee.
Just north of where my parents live in Australia is Myall Lakes National Park, a digestive tract of inland lakes, the lining of which is a double stripe of subtropical rainforest/sand dunes, beyond which is the ocean. I plotted out a two-day, 50-km hike that would put me at a campground oceanside overnight, and lead me up along a fire trail through thick scrub to near Seal Rocks on the second day. My parents would drive the kids around to pick me up at the end of the trail, and we’d head to a caravan park for the night.
A bushwalk seemed a good idea, not just to take a break from peeling off yoghurt tub tops and scraping Babybel cheese wax off the floor for a day, but to leave behind the internet, noise, buildings, people etc. My dad drove me out to the start of the trail in his little Mazda. “Wish I was coming with you!” he said, possibly just out of rote conversation, and I realized how much more exciting that would be than being left on my own, toting an enormous sack of camping gear sourced in 1970, when my father was big on heading out into the wintry backcountry in wool knickerbockers for days on end. “It’ll be good to have some time to yourself,” he said, and I thought, No! Time with myself is overrated! I take it all back, I like people!
He insisted on having me pose for a photo at the trailhead, presumably so he had something on hand to give the local police, no offense to my stamina or sense of direction — you know, just in case. I give him a small wave from under the enormous pack, thinking about how I’m much too stubborn at this point to back out of anything. I take the first few steps on red dirt, finding it a little more sandy and sinky than portends a fast journey, and my dad zooms off with a toot, his arm hanging out the window.
If you are anxious, or experience a kind of free-floating sense of dread from time to time, a hike is really perfect: a pack is not ambiguously heavy, it compresses your vertebrae in such a way that you know you aren’t imagining things and can move from abstract thought to concentrating on steadily moving north like a snail under your worldly belongings. You only need to walk a short distance before your brain stem takes over, and you can watch your own footfalls and tell yourself calmly, “Just 25 kilometers to go,” and think about the unproven bone-building supplements you will try on return.
I have all the time in the world to do what is to do, to do what is done, to do the timeless doing, infinitely perfect within, why cry, why worry, perfect like mind essence and the minds of banana peels. — Jack Kerouac, once again making no sense to his friends with children
A better pace for anxiety is in fact a slow jog. This is impossible to do under 30 kilos of water and equipment (I brought 9 liters of water; not my first outing), so rather than outpacing my thoughts, they swarm alongside me at the same speed. I move from sandy hills by the ocean into the cover of the bush, which turns from gum trees to palms, and brings me from a dirt trail onto sections of bouncy boardwalk hovering above navy marshes. Closer to the lake, the path winds under the canopy, and I think about things I would like to buy from various sites online, and of Crash Test Dummies lyrics.
Soon for story purposes, but after eons for the real-time walking experience, I am skirting the middle lake, the gums at its edge reaching a toe down into the shallows. I’ve had some trail mix and a lot of water, but I’ve barely stopped, and am already at the campground, the sun high over my enormous UPF sun hat. My feet feel generally on fire in my running shoes, my hiking boots tucked neatly away in their sideways bookshelf in Brooklyn, and my back is damp all the way through. I have the thought that if I get in more miles today, I’ll have less miles to sweat through tomorrow. I use my phone, which has a low battery and chews a dollar a second on international roaming, to book a campsite further north, and plug on, focused on the finish line the next day: if I can just lock up another 5 or 10 kilometers now, I can get up super super early and hike hike hike to see my kids at the distant end of the road up ahead. I can send a text to tell them I’ll be there early. Maybe before lunch! I’ll have all my miles and then I can relax and know it’s all behind me and just be with my kids and give up on ever feeling as though there is an inch of crawl space in my overstuffed brain. If there was an actual finish line in life, I would definitely get there early, so I could not worry about being late, and sit about enjoying my snacks.
In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. — John Muir
The last part of the hike to the new campground is along a road. Pickup trucks buzz by at 70 kph, and I hurry along the shoulder. I try to make use of my time outdoors to scheme children’s book ideas. In one, a kid keeps finding beautiful things in the wild — feather, leaves, twigs — but when they bring them inside, they disintegrate. The kid tries taping and pinning them in place, and it never works. I can’t figure out the point of the story. Another idea, per my notes: “Kid: I have no dreams. None.” I read this now in Kramer’s voice. I think about the string trailing behind me, all the way up the road and to the house where my kids are. Like a long vacuum cord, you usually operate around the tether, stepping over the thing from time to time and trying not to rip it from the wall. Only when you go further afield does it ever yank, I think.
(As I write this: Japhy, heaving back and forth in the rocking chair, yells in my direction, “Mom! Can I go on the wobbly chair?”)
My campsite is off the trail to the right. It is a vast clearing with dozens of sites and not a single tent or vehicle. I walk in, the last man on Earth, and pick a patch of sandy, gum leaf-strewn ground at the far end, congratulating myself on my sturdy pace and display of hardiness: I am Alone.
I set up the tent without running from end to end to re-poke the poles into their pockets too too many times, and then set up my bedroll and sleeping bag neatly inside, retrieving my “camp clothes.” There are perhaps three remaining hours of daylight, and then the long night of being there with myself in the palm of nature, worrying that a goanna will brush its scaly back along my tent right at the moment I need to pee.
As I peel off my socks, I find that instead of feet I have two water balloons, my skin trembling like a meniscus over a suspended globe of angry heel fluid. I pull out the medical kit and thread a safety pin in and out of one, releasing a rush of fluid. I tend to the other, the first by then filling up again. I sit. Perhaps I could walk barefoot in the morning. That’s what Cheryl Strayed did at one point. I once read a Reader’s Digest cover story about a man who accidentally cut his own carotid artery while cutting down trees with a chainsaw. He walked a mile or something spurting blood before being picked up by a motorist. Maybe I could walk a shorter distance to the punt, and get picked up there in the morning. The wind shake-a-shake-a-s through the trees. I look at my feet, and at my phone, then snap a photo and hit send.
I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me. — Cheryl Strayed
I was also a pebble and a leaf! But only for about eight hours, it turns out. When my desolate campsite was invaded by three cars full of Bavarians (my best guess, per the accents) and their boom box, I texted my dad, packed up my tent, and was home eating a hot dinner by 9 p.m., never to know how the next 22 kilometers might have looked (my dad: red or white?). Imagine the eight hours condensed to a montage and set to "El Condor Pasa," beginning and ending with my dad driving his little Mazda out to drop off and pick up his 39-year-old daughter: that was my odyssey.
We still drove up and around to Seal Rocks the next day, and to a caravan park. In our cabin, I drained a wine at bedtime with my mum, watching as my dad performed a game where he would grab the kids’ pajama waistband, and they would leap along the couch like frogs, dacking themselves down to their Pull-ups. It was ludicrously funny. No one could breathe at the height of the game for laughing: pants… nappies! pants… nappies! This, I realized, was what I wanted. To be around people, but merely spectating, enjoying everyone else making their fun without having to do anything. To be an oak. With a wine in its hand.
On the way home, we detoured by the Tallest Tree in New South Wales. It was, as advertised, a very tall tree. Not the kind of thing you need a Jeep to drive around, just a skinny flooded gum rising up from the bottom of a deep valley like a holy telephone pole — a popular use for flooded gums as it turns out. A raised walkway allows you to walk close, standing on King Kong’s hand to look at his face. Japhy needed to pee, and really the question was how on earth to pick a target amid so many wonderful trees. I took a photo of my dad standing looking at the tree with Scout — in fact really a photo of them and part of the tree’s shin, since it wouldn’t fit in the shot, and inevitably some of its descendants.
It’s a goodie, isn’t it? Thank heck for trees.
Adjacent
“Why you should plant an oak tree” — New York Times, but read the comments
“I look right now, as we speak together, out my window in my studio and I see my trees and my beautiful, beautiful maples that are hundreds of years old, they're beautiful. And you see I can see how beautiful they are. I can take time to see how beautiful they are. It is a blessing to get old.” — the Maurice Sendak interview on Fresh Air shortly before he died.
This is I think still the best ode to quitting, nestled into Sports Guys’ old post on the Boston Marathon: “Two-plus hours into the race, they reached our group and stopped for a few minutes, looked at everyone eating and drinking, then simultaneously said, ‘Screw it, why are we doing this?’ And they stopped running right there. Five minutes later, they were eating sandwiches and drinking beer.”
This essay by Lydia Kiesling: “The return of my garbage self”
This website lets you draw an iceberg and see how it will float. h/t Tom Scocca
“He outlived nearly everyone who knew him and might explain him.” — the BBC on the Duke of Edinburgh, but interesting also just while we talk about trees and time and no I’m not high.
I really liked The Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino recently — I’m about a year late to this but on time for very tired people — and a book I’m calling “Bossypants for expectant and new parents” is out extremely soon, and you should pre-order if you feel tickled: You Look Tired by the secretly brilliant Jenny True :) :)
How it happened
Goodbyes:
A babysitter who was in the after-school playground crew recently got a new job, so we had one last playtime together, during which Japhy ran in front of a swing and got donked in the head. I waved my final goodbye to the babysitter from outside the fence as he screamed “I want my Mummyyyy” into my ear (he was absolutely fine). The next week at the playground, one of the school dads said to one of the moms, “Aw! You missed Amanda’s last day,” with a kind of gentle melancholy, another scoop of our tiny shoal washed away. End of an era. Pour one out for Amanda.
The mom looked at him. “Do you mean Melanie?”
(Yes.)
Ah, but we are here for just a day.
Thank you for reading!! Don’t hike in sneakers <3 <3 <3