Introduction..... Why. Again.

Big dreams were scoffed at in my middle school, but I held two that buoyed me even so.  First, I would hike the 2,600-mile Pacific Crest Trail. And after that, I’d write opinion columns.

   Playground ridicule did little to shake my convictions.  I daydreamed a lot, and each time I imagined myself doing either of them, the hiking or the writing, the endeavors shifted a bit further out of the realm of possibilities towards certainty.  I even began to wonder if my big dreams were big enough.  I mean, how hard could they be?  The Pacific Crest Trail starts at the Mexican border in California and ends up north at Canada, and Canada is an unmistakably large and unmissable target.  And as for writing opinion columns, well there I was blessed with natural talent.  Even at that young age, opinions came to me effortlessly, almost without thought really, and I held an expansive store of them.  My opinions though, went largely underappreciated despite being suffused with unique profundity and holding great import for humanity.  It was just that the people around me there at the time lacked a capacity for comprehension, or something.  But that was no reason to dwell on my poor luck. Circumstances would change, no doubt. 

    The main obstacles between me and my certain future would be getting away from the dairy farm I was indentured to and gaining a measure of personal autonomy and means.  And doing that brought a load of distractions. It brought firefighting, ambulance driving, teaching, mountain guiding, more dairy farming, heavy machine operating, building permitting, map making, and a long stint of wild animal tracking and research. It brought two marriages and a divorce, fatherhood, and an assortment of minor personal tragedies and triumphs. It brought a lot of- well, life. Finally though, I hiked the 2,600-mile Pacific Crest Trail footpath- at the age of fifty-eight. Next up, the opinion column.

 

    Opinions still come to me as naturally as ever, luckily, because just after finishing the Pacific Crest Trail another distraction standing between me and the New York Times was cleared away. I got fired. 

 

     I had been tracking wildlife and counting fish, doing my job and whatever else needed to be done, and mostly leaving the office gossip and petty infighting to folks that had more aptitude for it. I remember telling a coworker once, “There always has to be someone around here that just gets the work done.” “And why’s that?” she asked, which probably should be a strange question. But if the group you’re working for lives and celebrates a culture of dysfunction; it’s not. 

 

    We’ve all finished the sentence, “If I had it to do over again I would...” hundreds of times. But our lives aren’t games where time-travel exists and do-overs are given for free. All we can do is finish the sentence, take the lesson, and apply it going forward. Unless you have offspring, of course. Then you can encapsulate experience into little pearls of wisdom to drop on their heads. 

 

    “Don’t work for people you can't respect,” I tell Matthew. 

 

     “Sure.” That’s easy enough advice for my fifteen-year-old to accept. His plans don't include working for anybody. 

    

    “You’ll need to have a job, you know, so you won’t be homeless.” 

 

     “I won’t be homeless. I’m going to live in an old school bus.” 

 

     “Oh, right,” I say. “With eight children.” 

 

     “Seven kids, Dad. Don’t you ever listen? Seven. There’s got to be room for chickens in the back.”

 

    Sometimes I can’t tell if he’s serious or not.   “Your mother thinks you’re joking,” I said. 

 

     “She’s been wrong before.”  Matt's dreams and ambitions worry me sometimes. On the other hand though, if he weaves through life's distractions as slowly as I did, he’d be in his late fifties before his address is a school bus anyway. So why worry about it just yet?  And really, that chicken and kid-filled bus idea would die at the feet of his first girlfriend anyway, or so I thought. 

 

    When Matt got his first girlfriend, I took the opportunity to throw the ridiculous idea out there for her to stomp on. 

 

    “Did you know Matt’s life ambition is to have seven kids and live in a school bus?” I asked her. I waited, expecting fear and revulsion. But when she answered, it just wasn’t there. 

 

    “Huh,” she said. “I can see that. There should be a tent set up outside for a kitchen, though,” she said. 

 

    I can’t tell if she’s serious or not either. 

 

     And what if they are? I don’t know. I’d expected to reap the rewards of honest work, but my last stint dealt me a kick in the chops instead. It’s possible that a life of bus-dwelling and endless surfing, of barefoot home schooling and excessive procreation wouldn’t yield any worse. Life is, after all, a gamble, and the art to living well is deciding what balance to strike while you hedge and make your bets. Getting fired proved that I had hedged my bets, some of them anyway, wrongly and going forward I’d have to lay down some new ones. So I did, on myself. 

 

    Now I write stories during the quiet morning hours before heading out to remodel some bathroom or other in the afternoons. The Times hasn't called me yet, but it's nice.  I set my own schedule and only work for humans who are pleasant to be around.  I have more time to do the things that good dads and husbands and dog-owners should be able to do. And this summer, I’m doing something else that I really want to do. Again.  I’m going for another good, long walk. 

 

     One of the surprises I’d found while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail was my body’s purpose.  I’d done a lot to and with my body over the years, but what it had really been built for was walking all day for months at a time, sleeping on the ground, and eating noodles.

 

    It was like my favorite toy when I was little, the long-handled ‘Spoonie’, who lived in the corner of my grandmother’s closet behind a pair of black leather lace-up witch boots.  I could poke my sister with it when her back was turned, scratch my back with it, use it to trowel gravelly trenches in the bottom of the fish tank.  Lunchtimes, I’d eat macaroni and cheese with it. And then one day my grandmother borrowed Spoonie back from me to put her shoes on. What? She handed Spoonie back, and I took my shoes off. Then I put them back on, with Spoonie. I did it again. And again. I still remember the ambivalent wonder of it. Discovering that Spoonie had a special purpose was warmly satisfying.

 

     The Pacific Crest Trail taught me that my body is just like that old long-handled shoehorn. I’d never known it was designed and created for anything in particular before taking it out there, but it was and I’d been using it only imperfectly and clumsily for all its preceding fifty-eight years. I’d have to take it for another long walk. 

 

     My idea for a follow-up was to hike the English Coast Path, the 2,700-mile route that circumnavigates the English coastline.  But being away from home that long just isn’t in the cards this time. Danged distractions.  So I’ll be doing just the pointy bottom-left corner of it, the 630 miles of shorelines and headlands that make up the Southwest Coast Path. 

 

     The PCT, most of it anyway, was built for hikers, but the Southwest Coast Path wasn’t.  It was purpose-built for tax collectors, customs officials actually, about 300 years ago. Britain had a lot going on then, losing the American colonies and fighting Napoleon and such, and doing all that required an army. And a navy, the most powerful in the world at the time. And funding all that military apparatus took a lot of money. 

 

      We were taught here in the US that the money came from plundering their colonies, but it’s not entirely so. The British paid taxes; a lot of taxes.  Tax collecting wasn’t easy in those days of iffy record-keeping, cash, and barter, so they taxed odd things like how many windows or doors your house had.  But what really brought in the revenue was taxing imports. Being an island, goods came in by boat and the customs officers could levy the importers as the goods were unloaded at the docks.

     But not all the boats unloaded at docks. There are scores of small, isolated coves along the English coast and smuggling became a real problem. The Southwest Coast Path was built to peer into these isolated coves, and customs officers used the trail to catch smugglers for over a hundred years. The smugglers are long gone now, or grown more sophisticated, and the path is no longer trod by customs officers. But the path’s ocean views from the headlands, and its meandering over the countryside and down into the coves brings to it more foot traffic now than ever. 

 

     I’m exporting my feet from here to there soon. And not just mine.  My son Matthew will be going with me. He remembers the 200 miles of the PCT he did with me as a ten-year-old with fondness, and that he does is something I'm very proud of and grateful for. Our trail dynamics will be different on the Southwest Coast Path than they were on the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s only been a short five years since we’ve trekked together on the big Trail, but it marks a full one-third of his lifespan. And, as healthy young people do, Matthew has grown. He’s about as tall as I am now and looks very much as a healthy specimen should. My body has seen some growth in these last five years as well, though regrettably, only circumferentially. As a result, he hikes faster than I can. I rarely see him when we hike together now, except for the brief periods every couple of hours or so when I catch up to him; sitting beside the trail on his backpack, waiting for me and looking bored. 

 

     Also going with me is my sister Rhonda, who is probably the sweetest, kindest, and most forgiving person I've ever met, which is remarkable given that impatience and incredulity is as much a part of her personality as they are mine. I’m looking forward to spending time with her to learn how she does it. 

 

     In the run up to hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, what I looked forward to most was seeing what the geography would be like, the mountains, the trees, what the plants and animals would be, that sort of thing. I was going to observe nature. But as I hiked along, what intrigued me more were the other people out there on the Trail with me. I hadn’t expected that people could be so interesting, or even imagined it to be possible, as it hadn’t been something I’d noticed until I slowed down and lived life at foot speed.

 

The landscape of Cornwall will be engaging, I’m sure. I've watched most of the Doc Martin and Poldark series and can hardly wait to walk between stone-walled and sheep-dotted pastures on my left and an ocean horizon to my right. But people live along the Southwest Coast Path, much more so than along the Pacific Crest Trail, in the countryside and in the coastal towns, and on this hike, I’m looking forward to meeting them. 

 

     Even though the American and British cultures are different, they are similar enough to be mutually understandable, I think. The British seem more reserved, resigned, or maybe just more mature than we Americans are. We have Rambo. They have Mr. Bond. We have Dirty Harry, the Brits, Sherlock Holmes. When I was online buying my tickets from British Airways, after typing in my name there was a required field for my title. In its dropdown box was a menu where I could choose Lord or Lady, Baron or Baroness, or even Viscount or Viscountess, whatever the heck those are. 

 

    One of the things I'm curious about is what it’s like to live in a society where class and birthright are acknowledged as a matter of course. I grew up, I believed, in a meritocracy where men made themselves, the way Thomas Edison or Ben Cartwright did. And I firmly believed that someday, I too would be a great and rugged individualist- like everyone else in America. Here, we mostly deny the power of luck and privilege, or even their very existence. In America, children dropped off in an underling’s office to be babysat while their parents go off on a bender don’t come back on a caprice in a later decade to fire its occupant. Until they do, anyway. I wonder what it’s like where even the children grow up knowing who the Lords and Ladies will be, or the Barons and Baronesses, and more pointedly, who will be always just common folk. What does it do to a people that face these realities head on? 

 

    Weird shit, probably. It might make them riot in stadiums when a score is just one-nil, or drink beer that’s warm, dissolve in hilarity over Monty Python skits, or maybe even name a warship Boaty McBoatface. 

 

    There’s no way we Americans would react with that kind of silliness. We’d buy assault rifles. But people over there in Great Britain are a little different. Just how different and why I can’t see from here, though. Maybe, probably, there’s something to learn there.  And there’s really only one way to do that.. 

 

    So I’m going over there to take a good, long walk, see what I can see and hear what I can hear. Then I’ll share some undeniably profound and important opinions that I'm bound to have about it all.

 

      In a New York Times opinion column, quite likely.