My mind does a lot of stuff while I walk…it wanders, it focuses, it languishes, it ferments, it concentrates, it stews, stagnates, jitters, wonders, creates, visualizes, hibernates, buzzes, zooms, and vacillates…it does it all.
Sometimes I linger on my past, rolling it out in front of me like a big, misbegotten, patchwork map. I scowl at certain events, blush at others, cry in the remembering of this and that. I regret and criticize and furrow my brow…sometimes I smile and even laugh…but frankly, the visiting of the past isn’t exactly funtime for me, too much self-condemnation goes on.
sometimes I daydream…big, sprawling walter mittyesque fantasies that sometimes take a week to come to fruition and then quickly fizzle out…coming into tons of money, building a super sailboat and cruising the world with a crew of wacky friends, or maybe I’m a celebrated writer or a crazy-good musician, or I build my very own inca-style mansion on a huge plot of forested land, or I’m dunking at will on Shaq, winning boatloads of NBA titles, or I’m a lifelong pilgrim of the world, wandering, riding and shifting from continent to continent, sewing them up with my footsteps.
Sometimes my mind and thoughts melt into an unplanned state of meditation, a day-long buzz of not-awareness, of every-emptiness, of hum-buzz, and ohhhhmmmmm…
And sometimes I obsess over something, running it and all its variables through my head again and again. Such was the case this last week as I did an informal audit of my trip in terms of days walked versus days off.
I’ve been on this trip, in one way or another, for almost 4 years now (3 years and 8 months) and one day a bit back I asked myself “how many days have you ACTUALLY walked?” the answer surprised the hell out of me.
First, I spent a good part of a day revisiting my whole trip, trying to recall all the places where I stayed more than about 4 days without walking. It was amazing how vividly I could remember the details of my trip as I swooped northward along a mental map of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia and Perú…campsites, people met, the cold, the rain, the emptiness, the huge skies.
And then I started stringing together the number of “off” days I had, and I was already in shock even before I was done with my revisit of argentina. By the time I had caught up with myself in the present, I’d counted about 900 days where I hadn’t taken a step….NINE HUNDRED DAYS!! That’s two and a half friggin’ years…2.5 años, man.
I couldn’t believe it. So when I got into a town with an internet connection, I studied maps of the countries I’d visited and jotted down days off as I went, thinking that maybe I’d made a miscalculation using my mental maps…nope. The number 900 (and somewhat conservative, that stat) came up again.
That meant that to get where I now am (central perú), I’d actually only been walking, purely walking, for 1.2 years…14 months and nothing more. Sweet Gravy Marie….that ain’t nothing. I vacillated between shock that I’d taken so much “time off” and joy that if I were to “put the old nose to the grindstone” (a saying that conjures very unpleasant images) I’d be able to wrap up this trip much sooner than I’d thought…that maybe I wouldn’t have to celebrate my 70th birthday on the road afterall.
Where did all that time go, though? Talk about sands through the hourglass, man…
A majority of that time found me with my girlfriend in Patagonia, failing miserably to juggle both my walk and love…hurting her and others in my confusion and conflicted priorities. And then that damned bolivian terrorist tree fell on me, resulting in another solid chunk of no-walk time, and in between there was laziness in this and that town, parties in others, the World Cup in Lima, illness, inertia, repairs, retooling, horse purchasing, package waiting, horse selling, cart building, and general muscle rehabilitation.
And added in with those biggies are so many little stays in little towns with little to show at the end of it except a couple more brain cells either filled up or killed off by some straight-to-cable movie in a hostel, another liter of beer, or another 14 hour sleep marathon.
And here I am now, in another little town, some sleepy coastal burg on the Peruvian coast…and the results of that number crunching session is still with me, still stirring me up, but in a good way.
I’m as inspired by ever by my trip. To get down here to the coast, I’ve passed, with my friend Marieke, through some of the most beautiful and compelling landscape of my whole trip. I’ve met a whole cast of interesting, wacky, offbeat, and solid people. I’ve come back to a good place emotionally and existentially after a tough year in that department…and…and, well, I’ve come to a decision:
It’s time to put this walk into high gear. It’s time to take advantage of time, of my inspiration, of my momentum. It’s time to cover some big miles. It’s time to wrap up this walk, to fully realize this dream of mine. It’s time. It’s time to Carpe some big time diem…it’s time to finish what I’ve started, and in a judiciously expedited fashion.
pedal to the metal
one foot in front of another
baby steps on speed
it’ll be hard sometimes, when the siren-song of a Costa Rican beach slithers into my ear, or some comfy hostel beckons me into it’s folds, or some caribbean island whispers to me that the diving is cheap and beautiful, or a mexican fiesta promises me weeks of fun, or even when the FARC kidnap me and end up wanting to promote me to El Comandante status…yeah, those will be the real tests, the times when I’ll have to keep the eye on the prize with my eye of the tiger…
but as luke skywalker was once admonished to do, I must and will “stay on target…stay…on…target”
Watch out Alaska, here I come, guns a’blazin’…
what’d you say?