The beginning and the future: the journey

Where are you? That’s a difficult question. You really don’t know. Who are you? That’s a difficult one too.

You’re writing a goodbye email to your coworkers in front of an office you can’t enter. Then you give your computer, phone, and ID card to a person you’ve never met and will never see again.

Then you’re flying, metaphorically at first, your feet barely touching the sidewalk and jog, then jog, then run away from your now former employer and your former life.

Then you’re flying in a more literal way, in a middle seat on a budget airline and your feet finally land in Georgia and you’re on the road before the road, the car ride from a now ex-coworker to Amicalola Falls.

You sign up, watch the video, wonder what the name of a trail is, and weigh your backpack, but you’re so nervous that you don’t care about the number, you throw it over your shoulders and run. Until you can’t run anymore. You are greeted by a wall of stairs, a huge, gigantic climb. You reach the halfway point and stop to catch your breath.

The co-worker who smoked two cigarettes while being transported from the airport to the driveway says:

«Okay, that’s it for me, good luck, stay safe, we’re all proud of you.»

“But I haven’t done anything yet,” you reply foolishly.

And with that you are alone, a hiker among a crowd of day hikers. Smiling families taking photos to be placed on Christmas cards.

You go up the mountain, you reach one shelter and then another and it rains and you get wet and you are cold. You try to remember the names of the shelters but you can’t, you can only remember the presence or absence of mice at night until you finally decide that you are carrying a $400 tent for a reason.

You start to sleep better in your personal cocoon and when you resupply in Hiawassee you find a decent instant coffee so you can wake up a little easier and interact more deeply with the people around you.

Day hikers have been reduced to a minimum and direct hikers have increased in number. Some of them have trail names and when you meet someone new you try to guess what it will be before they tell you.

Someone suggests a name to you and at first it doesn’t seem right because it seems too soon. But as far as trail names go, it’s not too bad. You could have easily been Bearbait, Dingbat, Sir Farts-a lot, Dances in underwear.

Instead, people start calling you Campfire because of your insatiable desire to light bonfires every night. Not bad, you think. Better than Pyro or Arsonist or Plays with Matches.

You continue on, setting up your little tent each night, lighting a small fire, tending it into the night, in the mountains, and stoking it again on the frosty mornings.

Layers of snow, ice and frost high above are soon replaced by patches of tiny white wildflowers, their little faces turning imperceptibly in the sun.

You continue moving through green grasses, spring flowers and budding leaves. And then there are the ups and downs and the ups and downs again. During the day, on the ridge you can see the broken horizon: layer after layer of brown mountains and then gray and then green and finally blue like waves in an ocean in which you are lost.

Hills become mountains and pastures become fields of rocks and clear skies become rain and a mile becomes a hundred and then three hundred, but at night there is always a fire, a bright little speck in the sea of ​​the forest, your own personal North Star, guiding you to wherever you need to go next.

You take the name.

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