As I wait out the healing of my left foot, post-surgery—as I wait to find out whether the surgery did anything at all—I have become trail-obsessed, in a way that only those completely out of touch with a thing’s uglier aspects can be. It’s the glow of nostalgia. All I want is to be out on a week-long backpacking trip, because I can’t.
I’ve been coping with this void in a variety of ways. I complain. I read gear reviews endlessly, hoping to find some justification for dropping money on shiny new gear I might someday be able to use. And I read trail memoirs.
The trail memoir is a subgenre that’s upheld by its giants—Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild—but which contains a long tail of books by regular people who hiked trails and wanted to write about it. Usually, the very same two trails. That’s a lot of words about a lot of steps taken past the same trees, rocks, and brightly colored bags of dog poop.
These books don’t have the high-stakes tension of murders, wars, or even love affairs. And yet I, who am addicted to tension in literature, find a special kind of tension in all of them. This tension comes from two very basic questions:
When will the narrator find the next water?
and
When will they find a flat place to sleep for the night?
Yeah. It’s tense to me because I’ve been there. There’s nothing like pushing through the exhaustion of a 20+-mile day when it’s pushing eight o’clock and you still haven’t come to a flowing water source, or a place flat enough to put a tent down. And you have a quarter-liter of water left. And it’s dark. And the darkness is starting to make those spooky noises it makes. When reading a trail memoir, I just can’t go to bed until the narrator finally finds their water or place to sleep.
My most recent trail read was Thirst: 2600 Miles to Home (AM | BN) by the remarkable Heather Anderson. She’s the very humble woman who has set records for the fastest unsupported hikes of both the Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail, averaging over 44 miles a day for 60 days for the latter. It’s this effort on the PCT that Thirst chronicles.
Thru-hiking stands out as a “sport” because women can compete on semi-equal ground with men. Anderson has said she only hikes at about three miles per hour, no faster than any other reasonably fit person; it’s the ability to do so for up to 20 hours a day for 2+ months at a time—along with the courage to keep hiking right past bears and mountain lions in the dark—that makes a hiker a record-setter.
This record attempt gives Thirst its own special drama, of course. It’s a drama that never stopped being tense for me, despite that I already knew she’d succeeded. (Isn’t it funny how that works?) But there’s plenty of everyday drama over finding water and places to sleep, too. Confronted with the reminder of all that misery, do I still want to get back out in the trail as soon as possible?
Hell yeah!