My longest shortest time, in terms of backpacking, are the outings themselves. Sometimes in the middle of a trip I feel like I have been gone for so long. So long that I forget things. I forget the things I own. The things I am surrounded with in my house. I forget the way my hundreds of threaded from Bloomingdales cotton sheets feel when i lay down in bed and the firmness of the mattress. The nylon of my sleeping bag and sleeping pad become all I know when I am trying to sleep. At the beginning of the trip the nights stretch out before me like some infinite opportunity to breath deeply and suck the marrow out of life. As the days go on sometimes it just sucks, there is no marrow of life feeling. But there can be a lot of feeling. Feeling cold, feeling tired, feeling like I want to chavasana in the tundra and breath.
By the time the trip ends, it usually feels short. So...fucking....short. Especially if the trip was good. I often have the feeling of needing to be pulled from the tundra by my boots. Finger nails clawing at the short shrubs, face buried deeply into the damp moss, nose filling with plant material as i am dragged onto the plane.
I want to not leave. I want to stay. I want to be there still. Marrow sucking or no.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
Thank you Thoreau.
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