Fear Eats The Soul
It had been months since my last gear trial. Months since I had thought seriously about the CDT. Snow was starting to blanket the mountains – not within my view from San Diego, but I started checking snow and weather reports for the Sierras, the Wasatch Front, and the San Juan’s on a daily basis. I had slipped off into some very deep depression, questioned my value, my purpose and meaning. When I mentioned the CDT to my therapist he basically told me it amounted to running from my problems rather than facing them, continuing an endless cycle of avoidance. I walked out of his office and never returned.
The commitment and dedication required to disrupt your life, quit your job, leave your loved ones, leave your relationships, move out of your apartment, put everything in storage, find some place to store your car, to abandon every modern comfort and convenience, to plan out months of resupply and gear logistics, to put yourself in physical danger on a daily basis, to endure freezing temperatures and tromping through bottomless snowfields over high elevation mountain passes, to put yourself at the mercy of nature for water, to drink from water not suitable for livestock, or polluted by livestock, to endure the sun, the dirt, the wind, the mosquitos, the rain, the snow, the lightning, the mud, the overgrown trails, overflowing rivers, to get lost in the mountains – literally lost, to go against all learned wisdom and venture through grizzly country solo, to do all this with the knowledge that your plans could at any moment be completely disrupted by fire, by early or late snowstorms, by injury, and that after all of that, there is only a finite amount of time to find another job before your money dries up completely, to not know if you’ll be able to get a job back in the place where you came from, to have no idea where you’ll end up, or in what financial state - this is more than a simple desire to escape.
These are just some of the challenges of long-distance hiking, and I’d argue that facing them is not a lesser feat than languishing in the day to day ennui. Boredom and routine are not ingredients for success.
Major concerns: What will happen with Molly? Will she support me? Will she wait for me? Where will I be able to find work after? And how soon?
All of that is just fear of the unknown. Do not make decisions based on fear. Fear eats the soul.