Beyond Backpacking

Outside Magazine, April 2000
Bill McKibben

You check your e-mail, what, three times a day? eight times a day? the world is too much with you, friend. You need out. Not for a day. Out for ten days. By yourself, if possible. Because believe it or not, your brain can actually stop buzzing. For a day or two it will keep firing on all cylinders— what stock you should buy, what your savviest career move should be, what trip you should take next. And then for another day or two you might panic. What am I missing? Is the NASDAQ, like, plummeting?

But soon enough your brain starts to run out of gas—opinions, ideas, plans start to float away. Maybe once upon a time life was so simple that this process only took a few hours: wander in fields, write sonnet, come home, take bath. But now a day trip does more for your muscles than your mind. It's hard to leave it all behind when it all is used to tagging along with you wherever you go.

When you do really get away, though, strangeness can happen. I remember hiking for a week by myself, easy trail- walking in the Adirondacks where I live. One rainy morning, I woke up, my mind still, didn't bother to get dressed, and just began to wander down the trail. It was as if I gave off no vibrations at all. An owl stayed perched on a branch as I walked two feet beneath him; a deer stayed on the trail, shifting her weight to let me pass; a mother merganser paraded her young inches from where I lay naked on a rock. Late in the day I saw people coming my way_—a party of four, perfectly pleasant-looking backpackers chattering their way down the trail. I'd already yanked my clothes on, but I crouched behind a fallen hemlock and hid till they were gone; I didn't want the spell to break.

Take as much food as you can carry, but no cell phone. And no book that isn't illustrated with pictures of the local birds or wildflowers. You can chew information all the rest of your days—the idea here is to get a little bored. Does that prospect unnerve you? It shouldn't; it's not like going on an airplane without a book. There's plenty of stuff out there to read, written in what John Muir called "the great alphabet of nature." But you have to slow down enough to see it.

One trick is to bushwhack whenever possible (and ethical). You can keep your eyes fixed as firmly on a muddy trail as you can on a four-lane highway, and if you do, your mind will drift just as quickly. When you're off the trail, finding your way, you're always looking. The contours of the land, the game trails, the drainages—they catch your attention, fill your head.

Sometimes, if everything's going well, even movement starts to seem unnecessary. I remember a week I spent on the top of a mountain near my home, when I hiked no more than two or three miles from camp on any given day. I'd just head out along some ridge until I found a patch of sunshine and then sit down, or until I found a patch of berries and then fill my baseball cap. Here are the things I noticed: Night takes a long time to fall—hours, from the sun low in the sky through the pink glow to the darkening blue to the first star. Also, a mountaintop has a sufficient number of rocks and trees, needing neither more nor less to be complete. One day I lay on my stomach on a little promontory and watched a black bear pick berries on the same slope I'd browsed the day before. He moved at about the same leisurely and unconcerned pace. Like me, he had the luxury of a predatorless existence, at least until hunting season. His only work was to fill himself with calories before winter; mine was to fill myself with silence before I returned home.

If you're lucky, nothing dramatic will happen. The days will fade into one another. That way, you'll know it wasn't fording the raging river, or facing down the grizzly, or surviving the thunderstorm that left you a little changed. It was just the quiet, the chance to use senses other than the info-eye or the info-ear. Which leads, of course, to the main danger of going long and deep. You might not be able to find your way back to quite the spot where you began.

PHILOSOPHY OF CAMPING 101: "People too often hike to a beautiful natural area, pitch their tent, crawl inside, zip the door, and shut out the world. This is camping? I prefer what I like to call 'stealth camping'—wander a mile or two beyond the crowded campground, establish a low-profile campsite, and sleep under a tarp. If a deer wanders past, you see it. You stay connected to nature."