ambulation

moving on my feet seems painstakingly slow, most days. when i plan trips, i budget myself around a dozen miles per day; this number seems startlingly low, as someone brought up in a car. for cars, we think about distances in hundreds of miles, because a four hundred mile day is easily approachable when a machine is doing the majority of the work.

but dozens of miles add up as well; seven days on the trail took me from johnstown to ohiopyle, 77 miles with my legs moving myself and everything i needed to survive for those seven days. sometimes, i'll hike all day, pulling my body in what feels like an impossibly slow slog; at some point, i'll reach a prominence, where i can look down and see the valley drop towards a distant gap where i know the car was parked.

it's a powerful feeling, to look at a speck in the distance and know that i cleared that distance with my own body within the span of a morning.

26 January 2018 20:44