Writing faster than they can erase

also inchworms, moss, and my shadow

The other day I got up. Then I ate 3 eggs, half an apple, 2 radishes, a quarter of an avocado, some homemade sauerkraut, a piece of bread, and a teaspoon of butter. (If that is an oddly specific accounting of my breakfast, yeah, there’s a story there, but not for today.) After that, I walked along the riverway to REI to return a defective pair of trail runners.¹

The weather was as spring-perfect as it ever is, 70 and sunny, windy enough that I needed a layer in the shade. After I returned the shoes, I went back to the Riverway and tried to sit down leaning against a big oak tree surrounded by moss, but a goose made it very clear that he wanted me to get off his lawn. I settled on a bench instead, and tried to read.

Every few minutes I would be overcome by a feeling that is almost impossible to actually describe, some combination of horror, dread, despair, panic, and doom. Doom, like Poe’s raven has come for me, like I left a beating heart under a floorboard, like I let the Red Death into my castle, like my time is running out. It comes in waves like nausea does, hours and hours of doom nausea, interrupting whatever I’m doing, trying to enjoy a beautiful sunny day next to a river.

I would look up from the book and listen to the wind in the trees and watch the shadows of the trees moving on the grass, and the reflections in the water, and my eyes would fill with tears. I could see the world was beautiful, I could see how beautiful the light was, and the shade, and I could hear the insects buzzing and the geese with their feet slapping against the asphalt like flip flops, and the sounds the geese made tearing out little bits of grass from the ground.

I was fully present, you couldn’t say otherwise, but I could feel no joy.

***

The bench I was on was under a tree and all the time I sat there, every few moments, an inchworm would land on my body and inch its perfect little way across me. The inchworms were rappelling down from the tree on tiny little almost invisible threads, headed to whatever the next stage of their lives was.

Every time I saw another inchworm on me I would watch it for a little while and then gently put it somewhere else, somewhere more congenial to its survival than my body. And I could see that this was also beautiful, the inchworms and my attempts to save their tiny lives, set them better on their way, but I couldn’t feel it. I felt doom instead.

***

The problem with a beautiful day when I feel like this is that the day seems to mock me. It reminds me that even when the conditions for joy or satisfaction or peace are auspicious, sometimes I will only feel doom.

I remember how many days I have already lost this way, beautiful days I could not enjoy, and then I look ahead — I know I shouldn’t, I can’t help myself — to all the beautiful days in my future that will also be blighted by doom. This only makes me feel worse, of course, and then on top of that I add guilt, like I’m deliberately rejecting the bounty set before me. I feel this guilt because even though this can’t possibly be willful, the way nausea is not willful, it still seems like it must be willful, since the alternative is that it is not willful, and if it not under my control then I can do nothing about it, I can’t fix it, I can only live through it.

Live through this, I think to myself, and when the doom nausea fades back to blankness, I go back to my book. When it comes again I look back up at the beautiful world, like a dream I can’t get to, a paradise from which I am barred, and I breathe through it, and cry, and then when it fades I go back to my book. When I look back up everything is so shining and miraculous it hurts, it feels sinister around the edges, it feels wrong, uncannily so, but it isn’t the world that is wrong, it is me.

***

Well, lots about the world is wrong too. It is a strange thing, to know that so much of what is happening in this world is wrong, is horrifying, is obscenities and obscenities, is fascism and genocide, is secret police kidnapping people off the streets — and also to know that if all of those things could be fixed, instantaneously, I would still be sitting on a bench next to a river on a beautiful day, overwhelmed by doom.

***

I am not sure why I am telling this.

I tell it because the alternative is not to tell it and that alternative is worse. I tell it because telling a story passes the time, and the trick to living through this kind of moment I’m in is mostly that: to pass the time.

I tell it because to spin my pain into words is to make of it an almost invisible thread down which, perhaps, I can rappel myself into the future, land somewhere besides death, at least for a little while.

I tell it so as to keep inching my tiny way across the vastness of a world I do not understand, buffeted by forces I cannot control, trusting in luck to get me by and knowing luck is not much of a thing to trust in.

Do the inchworms trust in luck? Do they trust in a human gently showing them to the ground? Probably they don’t, but I like to think of them that way, anyways.

I tell it because there are people in the world who are attempting to erase every word a woman ever wrote, every thought we ever had, every true experience we ever tried to tell. So that all that is left to women (depending on the color of their skin, of course) is to be a tradwife, or an enforcer, or a servant, or enslaved.

If we want the humans of the future to be able to imagine anything else at all, we will have to write faster than they can erase.

***

In service to that goal, I’ve been working on a book about the thru-hike I did last summer, about what it was like and why I did it and how it changed me and what I learned. It has been rough going, as books, I am told, usually are. A couple weeks ago, when I started to feel so terrible that I began to think about suicide every day, I stopped working on the book because I judged that I could not afford to make myself feel even worse.

Maybe that was the right thing to do and maybe it wasn’t. (It’s not always clear, in depression, what will make it better or worse.) I said of course it was just a pause, and that’s what I intend it to be, but you can’t tell the future. In part I hope to keep working on the book, to trick myself into it by writing these essays instead. We will see.

***

Meanwhile, I am getting ready to go back on the trail I did last summer, to do it again. This is why I was buying a new pair of trail runners (that I had to exchange for a non-defective pair). Everyone (i.e. Max, whose opinion is the only one besides mine that counts here) agrees there is no benefit to anyone for me to be in the city in July. So I’ll go to the woods.

I’ll start from the north this time and walk south, to Killington. This is not the whole trail, it won't be a proper thru-hike, but at Killington the Long Trail joins up with the Appalachian Trail and gets more crowded and less remote, and I don’t feel like repeating that part. Still, it’s 175 miles or so, a good long walk in the woods.

Maybe when I come back I’ll know more what the book is supposed to be about. Probably I won’t, because I did not come back from last year’s hike knowing any of the answers to the questions I had last year. I don’t know why this year would be different.

But also, answers are really not what I seek out there.

The mountains don’t have answers, they just are.

***

The other day someone asked me a complicated question: if your shadow were to gain consciousness and start a cult in your name, what would be the first rule of the cult? I said that the first rule of my shadow’s cult would be don’t start a fucking cult.

My shadow does not want a cult, I said, it wants only one thing: my death.

***

Sometimes I notice that over the internet a stranger will say something that makes me think they have forgotten they are not talking to a chatbot. As if my words, whatever I have said, do not come from a conscious being, but exist only in response to theirs, to further their goals or comfort their own anxious hearts.

Another reason to keep writing, then: because I am not a chatbot, and I do not exist merely to serve someone else’s needs.

***

Another day recently someone said with approval that I seemed “active”. They did not mean active like activist, they only meant not sedentary, or sporty, or fit, or invested in healthy living.

I do not think that not being sedentary is a hobby or an interest, as they seemed to believe, and I hate the word active when used in this way.

I am not active, I responded. I’m just in a situationship with some moss that unfortunately happens to live pretty high up in the mountains.

***

It’s not just the moss, of course. There’s the lichen, and the slugs, and the mushrooms, and the trees. There’s the song of the hermit thrush, which a fellow hiker last year said made the sound of a portal opening itself up. So that to walk along the trail was to walk through one portal after another. I like that too.

I also like the emptiness out there, and by emptiness I don’t mean that it’s empty, I mean the emptiness I find in myself. I never felt more free in my body, more solid, than when I was out there on the trail.

It isn’t ordinary life, but it also isn’t fake, it’s just different. It’s at the margins of the world as we know it. It follows different rules. Foucault called places like this heterotopias, but you could also just say they are sacred, that to walk them is to walk a long prayer.

There is nothing out there for me to covet or buy, and there are no mirrors. I don’t have to look pretty. I am not a producer, or a consumer, or consumed. I do not have to produce myself or my hike for the consumption of others.

Out there I am not driven by algorithms or manipulated by content. It is not a curated experience. There is no guru or cult leader, there are no bosses or customers. The oligarchs don’t go there, and there are no superyachts or luxury wellness retreats or surveillance cameras or stores.

There’s just a trail.

The task is arduous, but it is also simple. Keep walking, or lie down and die.

***

I was watching a track competition with a friend who likes watching track competitions. The announcer was interviewing the woman, Tia Jones, who had just won at hurdles, and who was set to run in another event the next day as well.

“What’s your plan for tomorrow?” asked the announcer.

“Tomorrow I’m just gonna put my feet on the ground and run to the line.”

****

On account of my impending backpacking trip, I have, in fact, had to be more “active”. I put on a heavy pack and walk up long flights of stairs, on a path wending behind buildings, to the park at the top of the tallest hill near my home. Then I walk down a different way, and then back up again. At the top of the hill there is a grove of oak trees that I like to stand in for a few moments, to rest, before I go down again.

Exercise ought to make me feel better, everyone says so, but it does not, it never did. I do it now not to be active or fit or toned or mentally well, but only so that when I go to the trail in July I will be a little more prepared for what I will face. The tallest mountains on The Long Trail are all in the north, so I will face them first, and I would like to be ready.

The fact is, I can’t stand climbing mountains. (I also do not like being on top of mountains, and I don’t like going down them either.) My body complains at walking up the tiniest of grades. “That’s not even a hill!”, Max will say, but I know what uphill feels like, and left to my own devices I will avoid it whenever I can.

If you want some assurance that my shadow isn't winning, it is this: yesterday I twice walked up a hill I didn’t have to with a heavy pack on my back. The only reason for me to have done that was because I expect to live to July, to get to the northern terminus of the trail. To put on my pack and face south.

And then: to put my feet on the ground and walk to the line.

***

Maybe it is self-indulgent to insist on my right to do this AGAIN, after I just did, surely there’s something else I should be doing, haven’t I found a goddamn purpose again yet? Aren’t there fascists to fight?!

Yes, there are fascists to fight, but I don’t want to cede this trail to them. Because just as they would erase all our words, they would erase this trail if they could: a thing maintained on public lands for the public good, built on public money and on donations and on volunteer labor, and by the people who walk it. It is a thing that is also a place that is also a community that is also an idea and a journey and it is also love and joy and frustration and defiance. It does not turn a profit, it has not been packaged up and sold, it can’t be ground up and snorted. It is not made up of lies and memes and clickbait and distractions, but of earth and sky and water, of spruce and fir and lichen and moss.

You can’t ask chatGPT to summarize it for you, you cannot deepfake your way through it.

If you want to know what the trail is, there is only one way to truly find out: put your feet on the ground and walk.

***

But that’s true of so many things, isn’t it? The only way to really know them is to experience them yourself. I can try and try to explain to you what the doom nausea feels like, but if you haven’t felt it yourself you don’t really know. I could ask ChatGPT to take the five hundred pages of my miscellaneous writing about the trail and turn them into a book, but it wouldn’t be a very good book, and I wouldn’t have written it.

We don’t read a book but by reading the book and not a summary of the book, and we don’t make art but by making it. We don’t find out what solidarity is by contemplating it, but by creating it, and we do not experience any freedom but by acting as free people.

I don’t know when my feeling of doom will pass and I don’t know when or how or if I will complete the book, but my feeling of doom is a real feeling that deserves to be written, and if the book becomes real it will only be because I made it so, word by excruciating word.

There is so much that is not real these days, and it is so easy to be consumed by it all, to be lost in that funhouse of lies and distractions. It is easy to spend all our time in the spectacle. But the spectacle is stealing our freedom and thinning our souls.

The real is still there, though. They can make it scary and unpleasant, but they can’t make it disappear. And we can get nowhere else, nowhere better, unless we start from what is real. That is why they want so badly to distract us from it.

I’d rather live in the real, even now, when I don’t like living much at all.

1. I wear mens Hoka Speedgoats with Superfeet run inserts, for the gear nerds.