There and Back Again

It's been a little over a week since we packed up my truck in Ely, said our goodbyes and left the Boundary Waters behind to return to our lives that, by all appearances, have continued on just fine in our absence. My tent (yes I traded life on trail in the winter in a tent to life at home in the winter in a tent) is in the state I left it, save for the new mouse nest I found that was a compilation of chewed up tye-dyed tapestry and fringe from my wool rug. The wood pile was just as pathetic as I left it, my dear wood stove was cold and quiet and the trails that I made meandering around my property became the favored paths of the deer and coyotes.  It has taken a week to catch up with life (catch up? what is this, a race?) and to start collecting the distilled droplets of condensed thoughts and reflections from this experience. I am not a great record keeper despite at least a dozen attempts at keeping a journal, so I will piece together the day-to-day aspects of this trip amongst my more typical free range thoughts. Yukon (his Appalachian Trail name) is writing another blog on this trip, so if you want his view of the trip or more detail on our adventure, be sure to check out his blog at:  http://yukonsquest.blogspot.com/

Coming off trail from this type of adventure is hard; you begin to become institutionalized to life in the Wild to the point where you wonder how or if you can function back in the modern world. As Ernest Shackleton on his Nimrod expedition to Antarctica said “We are now reveling in the indescribable freshness of the Antarctic that seems to permeate one's being, and which must be responsible for that longing to go again which assails each returned explorer...” You don't have to visit the polar regions to become addicted to or assailed by that freshness- it exists anywhere where the human spirit can live free from the artificial bonds and drudgerous toils of modern life. That freshness lives precariously teetering on the edge between this life and that life, within grasp of anyone with the heart to try but far enough out over the void that there is no guarantee if you reach just a bit too far and tread out on the crumbling threshold betwixt the two worlds that you won' tumble off the edge of existence, perhaps never to make it back to share your story or if you do you may forever become that solitary creature sitting at the end of the bar with the 100 mile gaze, searching the darkness for memories of your last taste of freshness and the route to your next fix. All of us who pin the word “explorer” or “adventurer” high upon our being know full well that by chasing that freshness we pay a steep toll and are required to sacrifice much, but once that life is experienced, our blood is never again still in our veins.

Perhaps what Shackleton was alluding to is the vivacity and simplicity of life on trail or the freedom from the frenetic and overwhelming milieu we learn to live with in our daily lives. Maybe he is speaking to that moment, that beautifully intense moment when you realize you are out there; after months of planning, organizing, and waiting, you are there, and you love every iota of it- perfection. Shackleton was Thoreauvian philosophy in action, living Henry David's iconic statement “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to it's lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole meanness of it, and publish it's meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know by experience and be able to give a true account of it.” From “The Worst Journey in the World” to “The Heart of the Antarctic” the cannon of South Pole exploration has reports on the frozen continent's meanness and sublimity- accounts from the people who drove life into that cold, dark and windy corner. Explorers get the meanness and the sublime oftentimes in a concoction of the two- a little of both- the good with the bad, after all too much of one or the other and you can get either complacent or disenchanted (or worse). Shackleton was a master of converting the meanness to the sublime, as alchemist of perspective and situation- not all polar explorers were so lucky just as not all of us modern explorers who take to the empty places on the map are so lucky, but fortunately for our group of five we got meanness in tolerable amounts and came home with much more of the latter.

Oh the sublime- your face gets burned by the wind and the sun, your muscles become toned and surprisingly bulgy from the continuous labor and your spirit gets a layer of gristle from the intense presence of reality- a good thing for the adventurous type. The problem with the sublime is that it is ethereal and that all those highly prized side effects of this type of adventure fade quickly when exposed to life at home.  You acquire a softness at an alarming speed- all that hard won edge/hard won toughness dissolves like a setting sun, you blink and its gone.

Instead of doing the dishes from the trip which have been sitting on my porch for over a week now, I choose to let my mind wander into the blank spaces, into the roadless areas of our consciousness in order to draw meaning from this experience, and also I suspect, as a way to avoid doing the dishes. I speak of all this as that is where my mind has been since getting back to life after our trip...oh yeah our trip.

By the numbers:

5 guys

5 toboggans

2 canvas tents

400,000 calories

1,000,000 acres (1,500 sq.miles) of wilderness

70+ miles traveled

19 days on trail

1 frostbitten finger (which healed on trail)

-55 below wind chills

3'+ of snow

1 close call with thin ice

1 otter

3 broken snow shoes (3 fixed snowshoes)

1 mile (slowest day)

9 miles (fastest day)

16 days with no signs of other people

The Group: