Time to Get Started

Last March I was sitting at work doing exactly what I'm doing right now at home, only it was a lot more depressing. It was a March day, which I'm sure was overcast and horrible, but I wouldn't have known because I was sitting in a windowless cubicle in a windowless office. As I stare into Outlook, a small blue box in the lower right corner of my screen informs me that another press release has found its way into my inbox. This one, like all the others, touts the industry's leading product from the industry's leading company. My eyes glaze over and a thought crosses my mind.

"This is the rest of your life."

Sure, it's not the major leagues like I had once hoped, but I'm doing what I've wanted to do for a long time. I'm making my living from writing and enjoying it. But still, I figured there had to be something more to it than that. But then again, maybe there wasn't. I'm sure nobody grows up wanting to sit at a desk for the rest of their lives or working out in the cold, but the world has jobs and they need to be filled. It wasn't even the job. I love writing. It was more the lack of glamor to it.

It's probably just my tendency to romanticize everything, but I guess I always expected more excitement from a job. Every job I thought could be exciting. You're a cop, you bust drug dealers. You're a writer, you're investigating. You're a repairman and house wives greet you at the door in bath robes and little else. You own a convenience store, you get robbed a few times and make it onto Cops, America's Stupidest Criminals or at the very least break.com. Whatever a job was, I could always picture myself doing it because I injected far more excitement into it than most likely would ever be found in the real world. I guess you could say that after 9 months on the job, I had officially realized that work is a boring thing and that my mom's "Work sucked" responses to my adolescent queries about her day were not simply the result of a bad day at the office.

But it was more than that. Thinking of myself in the same position 10, 20, 30 years down the road was not exactly comforting. What will I have done by then? What will I have seen? What will I look back on? I felt a general dissatisfaction about not having done anything worthwhile, about not having done that one big thing that defines a part of your life. And it's not like I don't have ideas. I daydream all the time about the green grass on the other side and it might be while I'm talking to you. You never know what's going on in my head. This week alone I've thought out what my life would be like as a ski instructor, a band manager, living on a deserted island, what I would do if I won the lottery, living alone in a cabin in the woods somewhere, being a landlord, being an actor, being a screenwriter, being a teacher, being a brewmaster. The list goes on.

That week I'm sure I thought about those very same things, probably right up to the moment when I received an email from my friend Joe asking me if I could take a year off from everything for a trip that would put life in perspective. And that is how I have arrived at this point, writing in a blog getting ready to hike 2600 miles from Mexico to Canada. I didn't make the decision right then and there of course, but the email planted the seed. And it really wasn't just the idea of a hike, but knowing that wherever we went, when we came back, life would be in perspective.

I'm restless and have been so for quite a bit of time. I've felt like there's something out there for me that I need to do before I can settle down and be happy with the direction in which my life is headed. So something like a big trip where I'd see things that I never have before, where I'd test myself physically and mentally sounded like just the thing. Originally the plan was to put our lives on hold for a year and hike from Alaska to San Diego. Now, if you're thinking that that doesn't sound practical at all, you're right. We have few if any survival skills and quickly realized that the Alaskan wilderness would laugh at us and kill us immediately for trying to travel through without experience. So that idea fell through and changed to a hike across the middle of Canada to backpacking through Europe to a long road trip before finally being relegated to the extremely large pile of failed ideas that has built up over the course of my life.

A few months passed and after going back and forth about whether or not it was a good thing that the idea had died, I started searching around the Internet for long trails in the United States and I came across the Pacific Crest Trail. But I'll spare you the flowery descriptions of deserts, mountains and flesh eating bears. You start in Campo, Calif., walk for five months through California, Oregon and Washington and end up in Manning Park in British Columbia. So it's not Alaska to San Diego, but it was close enough for me.

And that was pretty much it. Once I did a little research and found out that there were people who've hiked it numerous times, that a few dozen hike the entire thing every year and that there were more than enough how-to guides to help me get out onto the trail, I decided to go for it.

I say it was that simply, but who am I kidding? I needed words of encouragement on multiple occasions to get myself to commit to the decision and had more than a few sleepless nights agonizing over whether the trip could really happen, whether it really even should happen in the first place.

After a while, though, that feeling just passed, probably because I did something I don't do as often as I should. I always get caught up in things, some idea that sounds like the best thing in the world, something shiny sitting on a pedestal that I have to have now now now and before I know it I own an orange 1981 Toyota Celica and can't stop wondering what it was I was so excited about.

But this one I thought over...and over and over and over. I went back and forth, double and triple checked the list, took a couple deep breaths and eventually I decided that things were going to be alright. Still, I have absolutely zero idea whether anything is going to work out, but I'm content with the decision at least. Then again, I've had this feeling before, but let's just hope all my planning makes the ending a bit different.

So that's why I'm hiking. It's not because I hate work, my cubicle or the idea of being at a desk writing in 30 years (my cubicle actually is gray, but it's really not that bad and it's surrounded by nice people), just that before I get there I want to have done something worthwhile along the way, and the hike is it.

Mile one begins in two and a half months.