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On the first part of the journey, I was looking at all the life, my imagination ablaze with the joy of being back on the trail. The light fractured through the trees, the wind crisp, the air alive with the morning chill. To be out here was to be inside something certain. The impossible green of everything—plants and birds and rocks and things too strange to name.
The first night we found shelter at Hawk Mountain. The next day I woke early, made coffee, and performed the ancient ritual—tent poles collapsed, gear reshuffled, weight redistributed.
I had done this before, but the body forgets. The weight on my shoulders wasn’t pain yet—just presence. But presence has its own gravity, and gravity always collects.
Back on trail the second day, a hiker flew past—abuzz with the energy of fresh miles, every step an act of conquest. He barely slowed to speak. His trail name was “Fly.” He dropped a few updates (mud in the gaps, a dry piped spring), offered a comment on my gear that hovered, Schrödinger-like, between compliment and insult—then vanished into trail ether.
Lefty, beside me, watched the stalwart hiker speed off.
“That’s definitely not the pace you’re ready for,” he said.
But the pace didn’t matter. Only the miles. And soon enough—
“You think the faster one hikes, the sooner the trail provides?” Lefty mused. “Or do they pass the magic by in their rush to conquer?”
I didn’t bite—at first.
“You ever wonder,” I said, “if I even can hike this thing?”
Lefty looked at me like I’d just asked if gravity was optional.
“That guy back there,” I added, “said I looked like a resupply run stuffed into a clearance rack.”
“Harsh.”
“Yeah, well—he’s not a disciple.”
“Of course not,” Lefty said. “He probably hasn’t even studied the sacred scrolls.”
I nodded. “Charles of the Path warns that ounces become pounds. Scott of the Gifting Hand claims a chair is a necessity. Zeus Rambles insists comfort is the path to enlightenment—but never at the cost of flightweight form.”
“And Mira in the Woods?”
“She says, if it brings you joy, carry it. Even if it’s a porcelain gnome.”
Lefty smirked. “So… which one of them is right?”
I hesitated. “That’s not the point.”
He cocked his head. “Isn’t it?”
“They’ve hiked thousands of miles,” I said. “Their words built this canon. I didn’t come out here to freestyle philosophy—I came to walk the walk.”
Even now, I was distracted by the buds of spring, the tender green flirtations edging the trail like whispered promises of more.
Lefty shrugged. “And if Willow told you to hike naked to save weight, you’d strip down right now?”
I didn’t hesitate. “Willow is one of the highest-paid backpacking YouTubers alive. She could say the best way to survive a snowstorm is to sleep in a grocery bag and half the trail would be trying it by morning.”
Lefty smirked. “So truth is measured in views?”
“It’s the wisdom of the crowd,” I said. “If it was bullshit, people wouldn’t watch.”
I kept my eyes down, watching the ground with cautious steps—rocks, roots, rambles. Was I stepping over or off the trail?
He gave me a look. “We’re letting strangers on the internet tell us how to walk.”
“It’s not just watching—it’s training. Learning from the best.”
“From people making money off you watching.”
“They’re just making a living,” I said, stepping slower now.
“So is the Leviathan,” he muttered.
“I’m saying structure is necessary. Civilization works because people accept hierarchy. Same with hiking. The YouTube sages are our trail aristocracy.”
“Not a monarchy?”
“A meritocracy. They earned their wisdom.”
He chuckled. “By making gear list videos.”
We walked on in silence.
I checked FarOut. Today’s strategy was Gooch Gap. Eight miles. Modest. Manageable.
Did you know the bully on Diff’rent Strokes was called The Gooch? But you never saw him—just the name.
The sages had names—mythic names. But me? I had nothing. No trail name. No mark in the logbooks. Just “M.” A placeholder in search of legend. Even the Gooch.
“I still don’t have a trail name,” I muttered.
“It’ll happen,” Lefty said.
“I could pick one.”
“Then it won’t stick.”
I kicked a rock. He was right. Names had to be earned—or cursed upon you.
“You haven’t been to a trail town yet,” he added.
The ground beneath us shifted as the miles stretched on—roots rising like skeletal fingers, waiting to catch the careless. My legs, once eager, now carried the dull ache of labor. The soreness wasn’t unbearable, just insistent. The body remembering what the mind had romanticized.
By the third day, my hands had reddened from gripping my trekking poles, callouses forming with each mile.
I shifted my pack. It had settled into me, no longer foreign but fused—shaped to my back by rain and sweat.
It wasn’t much, but it was mine.
“My pack has a name now,” I said. “Having been through the desert with no name, I figured something ought to.”
Lefty nodded, satisfied.
And then—
There she was.
The Old Hiker Lady.
A slow collision of years and miles, and neither had claimed her yet. She stood just off the trail—not blocking, not beckoning—only there. Wrapped in layers stitched from decades of weather, sorrow, and surplus-store wisdom. Her face vanished beneath the wide brim of a battered hat, where shadow clung like memory. One arm rose—not high, not low, but measured—in a gesture that might’ve meant greeting. Or warning. Or neither.
I stopped. Offered a trail hello.
She nodded once.
And imparted her knowledge.
Not in words—but in presence.
Something in the air shifted. A new gravity. A pressure behind the eyes. A feeling I hadn’t earned yet, but which had already claimed me. Like recognition without memory.
Lefty d
idn’t look up. He kept walking.
I lingered a moment longer.
Was she…?
The miles stretched ahead. Blood Mountain waited.
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