How Did You Become A Wanderer

[Venture]

Thanks to my Father for taking me on numerous wanderings into the Grand Canyon and the mountains of the southwest as a kid! Cant imagne life without regular trips into the great outdoors. He will be sending my maps to me along the way on my thru this year!

[Foyt20]

My father started me off canoeing and My first Hiking trip was at the AT section in Delaware water gap. I was about 7 (i think). Then Boy Scouts sealed the deal, and i was camping, hiking, cooking outdoors, sleeping outdoors, etc etc, every month for 8 years.

My Wander lust kind of died down for a few years when i was a Volly Firefighter, because i had a reason to stay in town, but when i "retired" and moved about an hour away from there, its back STRONG.

Just trying to get my kit together properly, cant wait to get back on the trail.

[Frau]

My dad loved the water. We used to stay all summer on the Rhode River, off the Chesapeake Bay. Dad was close enough to work to commute. Mom watched my younger sibs and I was allowed to wander, go crabbin' with the old man who owned the house we rented, fish, sail, hunt softshell crabs, swim, row, dig for clams (no luck) find snake skins, dissect barnacles and mussels.....I could write paragraphs. We did this every summer from '58-'62.The biggy though, was the road trip I took with an aunt and uncle--DC to Jaspar-Lake Loiuse. Just imagine!! 13 years old and seeing the Badlands, Rushmore, Highway to the Sun, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, Jackson Hole and HIKING in Glacier NP!!Changed my life forever. I have never chased wealth. I work 3 jobs (teach, coach and groom) to hike, paddle and travel. I am blessed. When I am low on cash I hike around here (Geo. Wahington and Jefferson NFs). When Nessmuk takes a notion, we go a little further, like the Cranberry, Otter Creek, Harper's Ferry, and our upcoming Swamp Tour.Life can't get any better.Frau

[CowHead]

I grew up in a small town in Ohio, the only thing we had to do as kids was hike the hills around us, during the summer we would built shelters, camp and fish for weeks at a time. This is where I got my name Cow-head I took off my cap and my hair was sticking up one of my friends yell cow-head when he meant to yelled cow-lick the way we get our names.

[cowboy nichols]

Mom left the door open when I was three---I havn't stopped yet.

[Old Hillwalker]

The following is likely the reason I have had three marriages and love to hike. So far I haven't found a woman that matches me, and I fear that time is running out.

Searching

Some people do not have to search, they find their niche early in life and rest there, seemingly contented and resigned. They do not seem to ask much of life, sometimes they do not seem to take it seriously. At times I envy them, but usually I do not understand them. Seldom do they understand me.
I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, it mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like the forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know - unless it be to share our laughter.
We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we want to love and be loved. We want to live in a relationship that does not impede our wandering, not prevent our search, not lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or to compete for love.

[Dogwood]

I have evolved into this person who believes "church" is "out there".
I can’t go a month without getting gone for a weekend or so. I believe that the peace that I (we?)find in these endeavors directly affects how we do life, how we view life. You look at the whole spectrum of the way people perceive us.

PREACH IT!

Did you ever get the comment “you’re crazy” doing this or that geared to being where we want to be “out there”.

YES! BUT AT LEAST I"M HAPPILY CRAZY!!!


There are people who we all know who will fuss about a meal or a guest bed done properly for the night or if their eggs are well done. The one’s who run from the car to the door in the light rain so they wont get wet for 5 seconds. How about the ones who speak of their doom in a thunderstorm or give you (the classic) the "your nuts" look when you say you've hiked 2100 miles in 6 months or have just kayaked a great length of some river. I love the way we look to some people simply because we represent (to them) an oddity because they can’t fathom why we do this and are so happy about it.

LOL LOL LOL! AT THIS POINT I QUIETLY SMILE AND PONDER WHAT I"VE BEEN FORTUNATE TO HAVE EXPERIENCED!!!

[Hoop]

Boy Scouts at first. Then in high school a few of us got into camping on Exchange Island in the St. Johns river. Pile into a little john boat, putt through the waves and pull into a little cove; country in the city. Fished, enjoyed the moment.

[Lemni Skate]

I have had it in me for a long time. Always looking in the atlas for the most remote spots. The fact is anytime I saw a trail or a railroad track I wondered where it went. I never acted on it as I have always let other people's expectations push me in directions I didn't want to go. Now I'm 46 and the call is overwhelming, but I'm still trapped by life. A mortgage that won't get paid if I don't work, two kids in school who will backpack with me, but really don't have the disposition to join me on a thru-hike and a wonderful wife who deserves more from me than I give her.

Still, I wander when I can and I'm making more and more time for myself to get out on the trail, but I think things have got to the point in my life that nothing short of making my life center around hiking will cure me.

[HIKER7s]

Nice post, I couldnt o said it better. Its exactly my situation, including the mortgage, wife and kid part.

And I am constantly pulled to the trail, any trail so much so that the people most important to me cannot see why its so deep a devotion.

We are a culture in ourselves!

[Ladytrekker]

My father was a hunter/fisherman and I spent the majority of my childhood in the woods. Most of my childhood baths were in a #2 washtub. I have a natural love for the outdoors and spend as much time as life and work will allow.

[Ridge Rat]

Now that I have read a bunch of stories that seem great mine seems a bit off. I got into it in the worst possible way. I day hiked all my life and one day my buddy asked me to go backpacking. We decided to go from DWG to wind gap in PA. I bought a cheap pack and a fleece "sleeping bag". Decided it would be a good idea to hike in chuck taylor all stars (bad idea all the way around).... It was painful, cold, miserable and I hated it. The next week I bought better gear and an actual pair of hiking shoes to prove the trail couldnt beat me... Been hooked ever since... Spend almost all my free time on the trail.

[TrippinBTM]

i was born this way. i'm blue-blazing life

I love the way you said that.

I was gonna say it's sort of an inborn thing. I just wasn't satisfied with this daily grind of civilization, even at a young age. Something always felt wrong, I didn't fit with it. So long distance hiking and all that, it just sorta fits... an alternative lifestyle.

Probably a lot stems from early camping trips and being read LOTR when I was a kid (thanks dad!). My parents always made us play outside (no video games, or too much TV, and all that). And I've always been a map junky, and now I'm finally going to all those places I've seen on maps that looked interesting.

[JokerJersey]

I attribute my love of it to one of my mothers many "father figures" that came around from the time my parents split when I was 4 until they remarried when I was 23.

His name was Ralph and he tried to raise me like a son. He is a part of the Seneca tribe of New York and he taught me almost everything I know about the outdoors. Introduced me to Tom Brown Jr. (The Tracker) and gave me my first wilderness surivial lessons. By 8 I knew how to build a debris hut and start a fire with a bow drill, by 12 I was instinctive bow shooting. He taught me how to tan hides with natural materials including brains taken from the animal. Basically showed me everything he could, from tracking to wild edibles. He taught me never to fear the outdoors but to ALWAYS respect them.

The real punch came when I was about 15 or 16. He invited me to come to the annual Sundance on the East Coast. I still have no words to describe that experience. I spent weeks ahead of time carving him a cedar staff to use while dancing and then, for one of the first times of my life, was treated like a man instead of a child. Camped under the stars for 10 days, helped to cut and carry the tree used in the ceremony, was invited to sweat one night with the dancers in the sweatlodge, was assigned shifts at gate duty to keep the "tourists" out (even though it was on private land), and then finally was given the opportunity to give my flesh offerings (tiny bits of skin cut from the upper arm usually, as a way to offer your pain so the prayers of the People can reach Grandfather Sky). Afterwards, we watched the dancers get pierced and raised up. That day I spotted 7 red tail hawks circling the area, which by all accounts, should never happen. I have never before or since felt such a feeling of oneness with everything around me, with the world, with those who were sharing it with me, and with life itself. It reshaped everything I thought I knew about life and the world.

Jump forward 2 years and I found myself in the military as a way to escape the cycle of bad decisions I had made as a teenager with drugs and continued to make. I hated the rigid structure of it, but I had made a commitment and kept it. I loved any time we would leave garrison to do field-ops. It felt like coming home. Those times would end too soon and it was back to a life in the military that was nothing like what I had pictured. I guess that is the case with most things in life, right?

Then I was deployed to Iraq and things changed yet again. I came home after 6 months a much different person. I was harder, more cruel, and carried scars that I'm still trying to rid myself of. I've been dealing with a slowly easing case of PTSD, mostly associated with loud noises, certain smells, and fire sirens. After that, I submersed myself in alternate realities instead of facing the ones that were threatening my life. I wound up divorced and alone, then tried to pick the pieces of my life back up and glue them back together. After that, I spent about 3 years mired down, still trying to hide from everything in life, until I made the honest decision to stop living like that and find myself again. First place I went...into the woods.

Almost instantly I found the sort of peace and serenity that I had been missing for the past decade that I had spent trying to play by the rules of a society when I never really fit in anyway. I'm tired of doing that. I need my own path and it seems I've found it again. Ever since that day, the trail and the wilderness has consumed my thoughts from the time I wake up until the time I go to sleep and often farther, into my dreams.

To all of us who search...may it never end until we find peace within ourselves.

[Nina]

I think..."Normal life" is twisted, people get tangeled-and then "I gotta get the %#@& outa here", turns into a gear list, and some of us are just weird