I came to the conclusion that I needed to return to my roots.
After traveling for so many years with the purpose of seeing another, or speeding somewhere else in the country for an emergency, I started to realize that while my frequent flier miles weren’t accumulating anymore, my travel budget had concurrently expanded rapidly. I’d limited my wandering to a confined area in the hopes of finding the everlasting, lost-to-me home through which I hoped my spirit would find solace and station. But, as it turned out, even with graduating DBT therapy, a proper diagnosis and the according medication, and the happiest and most stable state of being I’d ever experienced, the nomadic spirit does not dissipate.
I have this deep deep feeling in my ribs again…
Therefore, with all the PTO I’ve managed to not use, I decided that I needed to wander like I once did in my youth, while leaving out the part of not having any gas money, or the mental stability to pay attention to where I was, or a fixed address, or any kind of support system, or any kind of impulse control. But in every other way, just like it used to be.
I set an arbitrary goal for myself: 17 states/provinces in which I would hike (and Geocache.) Very little else was permanent and non-adjustable, as evidenced by bumping up the dates by two weeks when some friends invited me to AEW: Dynamite in Philadelphia, so returning to my alma mater and keeping a long held promise to be with them when they went to their first wrestling show, I was more than willing to accommodate that into my (lack of an) itinerary. That’s the great thing about wandering with no particular destination; never late, never early, always right where one needs to be.
I started off the wandering by knocking out the easiest state, the one where I live. I didn’t take the car, for during a holiday weekend in nice weather, it wasn’t even worth trying to find a place that wasn’t flooded with trail tourists, so I walked across the 494 and finally tried to get the Verified Complete badge that had eluded me several other times on the Big Rivers Regional Trail. Despite there being more bikes than mosquitos, and my personal distaste for the branch of the marked trail that requires crossing roads and meandering through suburban hell, I managed to finally achieve that squiggly circle on the fourth attempt.
This trail is lovely, though I imagine it’s more fun on a bike. Running next to the rivers, looking down at Pike Island where they split, and also making a brief cameo in Mendota (no Heights), it’s adequate. I wasn’t hiking for the enjoyment of it, it was just to remove the need of hiking before I left the state and the real travel began the next day.
I am my own arrow, I am my own home. It’s alright, it’s all I’ve ever known.
