A man who went on a hike and never stopped | Hacker News Reader

A man who went on a hike and never stopped

theguardian.com

110 pointscscurmudgeon36 comments

At the age of 21 I took four months and an assignment from an outdoor magazine and traveled Minnesota and southern Canadas state and National parks. I backpacked for long periods of time, mostly alone, and photographed for months on end. I was somewhat depressed, but also hopeful... in a way that lead me to believe over the next horizon here would be some place or someone that would make me happy. I met a lot of strangers along the way and almost died twice. I even had the FBI track me down for questioning due to my extensive periods along the border (I later learned they tracked hiking registries fairly regularly).

Ultimately there was no lesson or grand realization I had out there -- just a rich set of experiences and unique people that I draw on from time to time. I learned my limits and probably pushed them at the prime of my life and I'd like to think I'm better off for it. I learned that I liked people, even though I am often uncomfortable around them. And even though I am slightly different, I'll still survive and be ok.

Ebheret seems to be doing the same and there isn't really and need to assign a motivation to it. Sometimes we wander for vague reasons we can't quite explain. Maybe life isn't quite enough or maybe our bodies just want to return to our pre-city state. But ultimately it just ends up being something new that's maybe worth adding to the canon for human experiences, or just you're own story worth making.

Thanks for posting this. I (all of us?) try to shoehorn our wanderings into a narrative similar to the hero's journey.

Your shared experience was anticlimactic, and yet rewarding to read.

I wonder if it's not an implicit rite of passage for some of us. Also some countries allow for a year of wander after high school so you can live freely to figure some things out for yourself.

I like this perspective. Eberhart takes it to an extreme but it seems worth reflecting on:

"Shaving down one’s pack weight, he said, was a process of sloughing off one’s fears. Each object a person carries represents a particular fear: of injury, of discomfort, of boredom, of attack."

Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

"He also held a dogged belief in personal freedom, including the freedom to pollute the atmosphere with fossil fuels."

Hmm. Perhaps other walking people could use a good look at. Check out, John Francis who started walking (and stopped talking!) after watching an oil spill happen near San Francisco.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Francis_(environmentalist...

https://www.ted.com/talks/john_francis_walks_the_earth

http://planetwalk.org/

Ya really, why stop at the atmosphere? Why not freedom to contaminate the water supply? Or salt the earth? What kind of logic is that?

Did you really think the article is about some kind of oracle for you to take life lessons from?

It's just a story about someone people find interesting.

He does sound like a crotchety old man, but at least he's being sincere. If you look at how much pollution a personal car makes, would you believe that the owner of the car wouldn't find it his right to still drive?

Everything we do on this planet has some sort of environmental cost, especially the way we all live. I don't own a car myself, but I don't like being on some sort of high horse, since I know the food supply chain relies heavily on fossil fuels. One of the reasons I ride bikes is to lessen my environmental cost, but it doesn't remove it entirely - it's a small percentage. What I DO have a right is going, "Yeah, you know, I'll NOT do things that are environmentally destructive, if I can (and I hope you can, too)". Some of that could be protesting, or helping lobbying for anti-pollution laws, etc. It's not a very good atmosphere (sic!) for that right now in Washington, unfortunately...

I find it interesting that the author repeatedly emphasizes the toenail removal. For ultramarathon runners, this is not particularly unusual (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/heal...).

My gut reaction was that it's not so different from swimmers shaving their entire bodies for increased speed and mobility in the water.

It is probably more than that. I have health issues that tend to negatively impact nail growth. In my youth, my nails grew slowly and tended to be paper thin. Keeping them trimmed and short was not very challenging.

After getting a proper diagnosis in my mid thirties, I have gotten steadily healthier since then. Living without a car and doing a LOT of walking has played a significant role in my improved health.

One unexpected result: My feet have better circulation, so my toenails grow faster and are thicker than they used to be. Keeping them adequately trimmed has become more challenging. This fact helps foster toenail injuries because overly long nails get caught on stuff and break more than they used to.

I can readily see that getting them removed would just make more sense than having them constantly injured if you are an ultra marathoner. I think walking or running a lot actively creates conflict for toenails, in part by causing them to grow faster and then exposing them to lots of opportunities to get banged up and what not.

What was your diagnosis?

That isn't really pertinent to the discussion. Though I will note that respiratory problems, blood sugar issues and circulatory problems are all known to cause things like clubbing and are generally associated with negative impacts to the digits, both hands and feet. In fact, high blood sugar disturbingly often leads to such serious foot problems that foot amputation, in part or in whole, is a very real risk for someone with inadequately controlled blood sugar.

Toenails are a pain for runners. Do they have any purpose with shoes? I dont think so...

I have been running happily for years without shoes or with only minimal footwear and initially transitioned to doing so because I suffered from pain in my ankles. Perhaps if you're a runner and your toenails cause problems, you might want to give it a try, too.

That's my hypothesis about toenails as well. If your shoes toebox is smashing up your toes, well duh, your toenails are going to get fucked up.

My partner is a marathoner, she's close to finishing a marathon in all 50 states. I transitioned her to minimalist shoes, lems primal, at the beginning of this year. She went from killing her toenails about every 2 weeks to zero toenail problems. Also pretty cool, she's stopped feeling the need to take painkillers during her races.

It's really sad the amount of misinformation exists regarding the minimalist shoe and barefoot movement. They've helped me overcome foot, ankle, knee, hip, and back pain. Thyeve helped my mother overcome knee pain, she's got really stronger feet and ankles now. Xeroshoes are making great products right now and doubled their revenue from last year, so proud of them! Luna sandals are also doing quite well despite all the negative information. Here's to hoping that in 30 years were all wearing shoes actually designed for our feet!!

Here's to hoping that in 30 years were all wearing shoes actually designed for our feet!!

Same here. I found Altra shoes on my journey towards foot and knee health.

I had to have a large toenail removed as it grew back weirdly after it was broken at the quick. The surgeon said that there are no side-effects unless you're an elite athlete, in which case you'd lose a tiny bit of burst power.

I'm far from an elite athlete; so if I was a hobbit, these days you'd call me Vacri Nine-Toenails.

I love this attitude:

Earlier, I had asked him if he was afraid to die. He shook his head. “Nah, I don’t think so,” he said. He told me his grandfather had died in the woods (of a heart attack while hunting), his father had died in the woods (of a chainsaw accident while gathering firewood), and he was “working on it”.

"He also held a dogged belief in personal freedom, including the freedom to pollute the atmosphere with fossil fuels."

Didn't see that coming.

I suspect it might have been taken out of context. The tone of Eb's reply made it sound like the reporter was perhaps trying to put words into his mouth to get some evocative quote about conservation or something, and instead got the exasperated response "If I want to buy an airplane and fill it full of a thousand gallons of fifty-dollar-a-gallon fuel, and I got the money to do it, goddamn it, leave me alone!"

It's the freedom to, not necessarily the goodness of doing it. He's just on the conservative/libertarian side of things.

Libertarians usually follow the NAP - Non-Aggression Principle - which forbids polluting the atmosphere, since you harm others doing it.

We are all polluting the atmosphere every day.

Yes, that was a little bit of a surprise.

"Each object a person carries represents a particular fear: of injury, of discomfort, of boredom, of attack. The “last vestige” of fear that even the most minimalist hikers have trouble shedding, he said, was starvation. As a result, most people ended up carrying “way the hell too much food”. He did not even carry so much as an emergency candy bar."

Given this minimalist orientation, the hassle and support systems needed for mechanised transport seem incongruous. Interesting article.

Well, I think the vast majority of people support the freedom to pollute some amount.

I believe that for him personal freedom was not about the contents of a bag or even the journey of thousands and thousands of steps. Freedom for him was the ability to cast off the trappings that most in society allow to define them. For him, personal freedom was the ability to lie down at night and know that he had done exactly what he wanted to do that day and he did it to the best of his ability. Freedom meant he could think great thoughts or he could just be; he dreamed; he appreciated the beauty of the world around him as the rest of us did what was required of us rather than what enriched us; he formed a relationship with his God; rather than just having faith, he lived his faith. Freedom is different for each of us but maybe it was what Shakespeare was saying when he said "To thine own self be true."

We all seek personal freedom, I just define it as dreaming, creating, building, nourishing, challenging, changing and pursuing...freedom is not the ability to do these things, but actually in doing them.

As we walked, Eberhart recounted his travels thus far. He had begun 46 days earlier at the southern terminus of the Continental Divide trail. From there, he headed east, through the blackened badlands of New Mexico, through the gateway city of El Paso, and on to an endless spread of dry dun plains. The traffic consisted almost entirely of semi-trailer trucks surging past every 10 seconds at speeds of a 100 miles per hour (sic). He had learned to take shallow breaths through his nose, so as to not inhale their fumes. The sound was meteoric.

Where exactly is this highway where trucks do 100 MPH on a regular basis? Most of them are governed to 65+epsilon MPH at double precision, as anyone who's had to wait for them to pass each other can attest.

Even on the 85 MPH-posted roads in Texas, a large truck doing 100 MPH is going to attract both the attention and the interest of the state police.

I'm guessing it's 100 km/h and got mangled when crossing the Atlantic.

It's just hyperbole.

The English use miles per hour there's literally no reason for it.

Also having driven the one road in Texas with speed limits that high, semi-trucks do not go 85mph. I was not passed once, nor had a semi-truck gain on me. It's simply not fuel efficient for trucks to go that fast (nor cars honestly). ~75mph maybe... to make up time but faster than that and fuel efficiency is surely so bad they lose time having to refuel.

Towns are also so sparse and far between the danger of running out of gas is real with moderately poor planning.

"Flew past at 100 mile an hour" is a common turn of phrase here in Australia, and we use kilometers for everything.

But Australia is quite the mash of cultures in most respects.

I-10

I dunno. Even if truckers could go that fast on I-10 without legal problems, they'd have a hard time making any money given fuel costs alone.

I tend to think the author was just indulging in "journalistic license," Fox News style.

Run Forrest Run

I'm kinda tired now.

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