Those of us who have caught this "walking sickness", as I call it, have some awesome predecessors. These are men who have blazed trails through some of the difficult underbrush, not just to lead us to new vistas and airy heights which refresh us but to a clearer understanding of what it is to be alive. Perhaps these few passages will illuminate the contribution of these people to our awareness and appreciation of what we are and what we can become.
From: The Ray Way, by Peter Potterfield (Backpacker Feb. 1998)
...amounts to an almost total repudiation of what Jardine terms "standard backpacking style." It was as if he were saying to backcountry travelers, "Excuse me, but just about everything you've been doing up 'til now is wrong."
In typical Jardine fashion, the Ray Way was developed through intense personal experience, starting with his first long distance hike, a Pacific Coast Trail trek, in 1989. "That first day...it was like we were going to the moon." The outcome, he says was always "in question." Even so, he and his wife Jenny arrived at the Canadian border 4½ months later. It had been a rewarding journey, but a physically rigorous one.
He went on to do the other two legs of the Triple Crown of American Trails - the Appalachian and Continental Divide - and along the way watched far too many hikers suffer, often becoming exhausted, discouraged, and eventually quitting. There had to be a way to make long hikes more than grim ordeals.
In 1994 Ray and Jenny hiked the PCT a third time, covering the 2,700 miles in only three months and four days - almost 45 days quicker than the first time. They didn't walk any faster, they just spent more hours each day on the trail. "That hike was pure joy," says Jardine. "With the focus no longer on whether or not we could finish, we could enjoy how much fun it was to spend months in the wilderness." Never had he felt so in tune with the wild.
And thus was born the Ray Way, a blend of philosophy and innovative techniques culled from the hard lessons learned while hiking more than 12,000 total miles. At the heart of the system lies an unstinting reduction in pack weight. In Jardine's eyes, pack weight is the total weight of the pack, minus food and water. On his first PCT hike, Jardine's pack weighed about 25 pounds. On his third hike, it was less than 9 pounds(!)
Read more about Ray in the following links:
Pacific Crest Trail Association
Kayak Construction with Aerospace Composites for the Home Workshop, Ray's latest interest
Ray Jardine's Adventure Page, making your own lightweight equipment!
From: Rolling Towards the Moon, Jack Kerouac's Last Great Adventure by John Suiter (Sierra, March/April 1998)
...October 1955 - Kerouac had never been up to the mountains himself. For all his transcontinental questing, he was East Coast urban to the bone, having lived most of his adult life in New York City, and before that, in his red-brick hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. (Gary) Snyder introduced Kerouac to the high country of the West, taking him up the 12,000-foot-high Matterhorn Peak in Yosemite National Park for his first hike (Kerouac in sneakers), later outfitting him in Oakland army-surplus stores and showing him how to camp out. Snyder also encouraged Kerouac to apply to the U.S. Forest Service for a fire lookout job in Washington in Mt. Baker National Forest, where Snyder had worked a few years earlier. Kerouac took Snyder's advice and was hired for the summer of 1956 to man Desolation Lookout, a remote outpost in what is now North Cascades National Park, just south of the Canadian Border.
Kerouac's fire season proved fortuitous, from a literary point of view. Desolation furnished the spiritual climax of The Dharma Bums, and gave him the title and finest chapter of his book Desolation Angels, a long essay in Lonesome Traveler, and a dozen poetic choruses in his posthumous Book of Blues.
"A mad sunset pouring in sea foams of cloud through unimaginable crags, with every rose tint of no-hope beyond, I feel just like it, brilliant and bleak beyond words - POW -"
from Kerouac's Desolation Journal
...It took Kerouac three days by truck, tug-barge, and horseback to get to his mountaintop from the ranger station in Marblemount. Today the lookout is roughly a day's journey from downtown Seattle. In his 63 days on the peak, Kerouac never saw another person; his sole human contact was with the radio voices of his fellow fire watchers calling from their own lonely mountaintops. Nowadays on Desolation hardly three or four days pass without at least one hiker trudging up the trail. Summer weekends can bring dozens, many of them on literary pilgrimages.
Also read The Dharma Bums, 8 pages courtesy of Penguin Books.
Walker Evans - Against nature (The Economist January 29th 2000)
"I'm NOT interested in nature. I find it beautiful, but I don't find it material for the camera, not my camera," said Walker Evans, the American photographer who never shot a rose. Branded as the visual chronicler of the Depression and its gaunt silent victims, Evans came to change for all time the way that pictures look. Few photographers since have remained unaffected by him.
A retrospective exhibition of his work opens at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art on February 1st, and in March "Walker Evans and Company", a tribute to Evans, his peers and students, opens at the city's MOMA. New Yorkers have an unprecedented opportunity to see Evans's way of viewing things through what John Szarkowski, a former curator of photography at MOMA, once described as "a sensibility that found poetry and complexity where most earlier travellers had found only drab statistics of fairy tales."
...In 1936, another commission took Evans (then a photographer for the government's Farm Security Administration) and the writer James Agee to Alabama to report on the desperate poverty of share croppers for Fortune magazine. In 1941, the Agee/Evans collaboration was published as a book, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", a book that ironically made both of them famous too.
...To the post-war generation, Evans was a prophet who showed them the details and corners of America to explore. "Stare," he told his students. "It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die Knowing something."
Preview the exhibition of Walker Evans's work at the New York Metropolitan Museum.
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From: Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad (turned into hypertext for a new generation of readers)
"Next day I left that station at last, with a caravan of sixty men, for a two-hundred-mile tramp.
"No use telling you much about that. Paths, paths, everywhere; a stamped-in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through the long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat; and a solitude, a solitude, nobody, not a hut. The population had cleared out a long time ago. Well, if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to traveling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon. Only here the dwellings were gone, too. Still I passed through several abandoned villages. There's something pathetically childish in the ruins of grass walls. Day after day, with the stamp and shuffle of sixty pair of bare feet behind me, each pair under a 60-lb. load. Camp, cook, sleep, strike camp, march. Now and then a carrier dead in harness, at rest in the long grass near the path, with an empty water-gourd and his long staff lying by his side. A great silence around and above. Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive, and wild -and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country..."
From: My First Summer in the Sierra, by John Muir (A Sierra Club Book, 1988)
Soon after his arrival in California, John Muir took a job of helping to escort a flock of sheep from the scorching Central Valley to summer pastures in the high Sierra. It was the chance Muir had been longing for to explore the country around the headwaters of the Merced and Tuolumne rivers. He set out on June 3, 1869. In a small notebook which Muir kept tied to his belt, he recorded his first impressions of the Sierra Nevada - and one of the great spiritual transformations in American history.
From: Natural Wonder, A retrospective looks at Carleton Watkins, who helped invent the west (Time Magazine, July 5, 1999)..."For a long time Watkins has been one of the art world's recovered memories, though rarely recovered so handsomely as he is in 'Carleton Watkins: The Art of Perception,' more than 150 vintage prints that make up the beautifully executed show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through Sept. 7. (In October it moves to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, then to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.) Watkins may never have thought of himself as an artist, but like Eugene Atget, the tireless chronicler of Paris neighborhoods, he came so deeply to terms with his locale that he arrived at a vision.
Before it was anything else, Watkins' work in Yosemite was a feat of mountaineering. To make pictures commensurate with the scale of the giant valley, he arranged to have an oversize wooden camera built that could hold 22X18 inch glass negatives. The plates were both heavy and fragile. Watkins and his mule teams hauled dozens of them, plus a literal ton of provisions and darkroom equipment, across the difficult routes around Half Dome and El Capitan....
...The largest market for Watkins' pictures was the middle-class householders who bought cheap 'stereographs,' 3-D pictures designed to be looked at through the binocular viewers that were almost as common then as cameras are today. One of the inspirations of the SFMOMA show is that it ends with a bank of computer stations where visitors can put on stereo-imaging goggles to see Watkins' pictures in a similar 3-D format...."
Review the exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, unfortunately it is now in Time Archive.
From: The master haiku Poet Matsuo Basho by Makoto Ueda (Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1970)
Thus in the fall of 1684 Basho set out on his first significant journey. He had made journeys before, but not for the sake of spiritual and poetic discipline. Through the journey he wanted, among other things, to face death and thereby to help temper his mind and his poetry. He called it "the journey of a weather-beaten skeleton," meaning that he was prepared to perish alone and leave his corpse to the mercies of the wilderness if that was his destiny. If this seems to us a bit extreme, we should remember that Basho was of a delicate constitution and suffered from several chronic diseases, and that his travel in seventeenth-century Japan was immensely more hazardous than it is today.
It was a long journey, taking him to a dozen provinces that lay between Edo and Kyoto. From Edo he went westward along a main road that more or less followed the Pacific coastline. He passed by the foot of Mount Fuji, crossed several large rivers and visited the Grand Shinto Shrines in Ise. He then arrived at his native town, Ueno, and was reunited with his relatives and friends. His elder brother opened a memento bag and showed him a small tuft of gray hair from the head of his late mother.
Te ni toraba Should I hold it in my hand
Kien namida zo atsuki It would melt in my burning tears -
Aki no shimo Autumnal frost.
This is one of the rare cases in which a poem bares his emotion, no doubt because the grief he felt.Thanks to the University of Oregon for presenting the book. To read more, click here.
