For the first few thousand years of humanity’s existence, life was really all about living long enough to live some more.
No. It was simpler. Gather food. Build a fire. Make a shelter. Have a family, and hope they live long enough to help you gather more food. They’re modest goals by today’s standards — so modest, in fact, that many of us feel we’re now entitled to them just because we’re alive.
It wasn’t always so, hard as that may be to believe in this world of blazing rapid-fire advertisements and pinging push notifications that bombard the iPhones, tablets, and televisions that haunt us every waking moment.
But it’s remarkable how fast that all melts away the second you strap a pack to your back and step out onto a trailhead. Within hours, you’re back to the basics — build a fire, find some water, set up a shelter — and most of your thoughts revolve around your next step.
You don’t quite sleep through the night when you’re out there, either. It’s as if your subconscious opens that long-shut eye, the one we all closed years ago after barricading ourselves behind high gates and sheetrock walls, and you become aware of every rustling leaf in the darkness. The water you filter from the stream tastes different, also — not quite so "pure." Or maybe it’s more pure, because it doesn’t have all of the chlorine we load into it, and its flavor is that of the rocks it glides over, the moss it flows through, and the fish that swim in it. You taste the earth, instead of the chemicals we’ve created from the elements we’ve found.
You realize that fire is actually pretty important. We don’t pay much attention to that, even though figuring out the cheapest, easiest way to boil water has been civilization’s primary goal since the Industrial Revolution. Nah. We ignore the groan of the baseboard or the hushed whisper of the stove’s burners until they stop working, at which point we panic.
But when it’s actually cold out, and you’re missing that aforementioned sheetrock shell, doing something as simple as pulling wood out of the ground and dragging it somewhere to burn becomes a matter of utmost consequence.
And then there’s the hike up the mountain itself, the one whose summit sits, quite literally, a mile higher than home. Taken as one gigantic mass, it’s intimidating as hell, but if you never look past the next headlamp-lit step, it becomes beatable… although you won’t ever concentrate harder on each and every footfall as you will when you’re on a slanted rock face in the alpine zone of New York’s highest precipice.
You might think this is all just some hippie-ish Romantic treatise about turning away from the modern world to "get in touch with the earth." Maybe it is. But I cannot help but feel that totally disconnecting from this information-overloaded system is necessary every so often, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t find strange comfort in seeing "Searching for Service" pasted across my cell phone screen for three straight days. (The Adirondacks, it appears, are one of the few remaining white spots on Verizon’s red invasion map.)
And that’s fine with me. Especially because after gazing out at the expansive views offered by the craggy 5,343-foot dome of Mount Marcy, coming back down to sea level to sit in a house and look at Facebook is more than a little bit of a letdown.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
Adirondacks, Backpacking, Camping, Hiking, Mount Marcy, New York State
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