Member-only story
The fears we carry
the one best reason for minimalism
Guy with the trail name or pen name Nimblewill Nomad, real name Meredith J Eberhart, was a doctor, husband, father, but one day he finished with all that, gave all his money to his wife & sons, & went walking. He’s like a real-life Forrest Gump in the running chapter, because he just started walking, & he’s criss-crossed America in several directions. He’s walked the Pacific Crest Trail, the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail—the three collectively known as the Triple Crown — and all eleven National Scenic Trails. In the chapter about him in a book I just read, he started in New Mexico & walked all the way to the Florida Keys. The author caught up with him east of Houston, & spent a few days with him, enough to see how he ticks.
He’s an unconventional hiker because, having finished the wilderness trails, he doesn’t carry food. He just buys stuff to eat along the way in a service station or diner or fast food joint when he gets hungry. He carries a lightweight pack with not a lot in it. Tarp tent, sleeping bag, sleeping pad, electronics so he can blog, a rudimentary medical kit, poncho, ultralight wind pants. He wears trail running shoes instead of the heavy-duty hiking boots that most hikers wear. No food or cooking gear. He’s not so much a wilderness hiker as a highway-side hiker more likely seen among a backdrop of refineries than in Yosemite.
The point in telling you all this lies in an interesting idea Eberhart has about why people carry the things they do.
Each object a person carries represents a particular fear: of injury, of discomfort, of boredom, of attack. The "last vestige” of fear that even the most minimalist hikers have trouble shedding, he said, was starvation. As a result, most people ended up carrying "way the hell too much food." He did not even carry so much as an emergency candy bar.
The book is On Trails by Robert Moor. Only the last chapter is about Eberhart, and this little epiphany about fear slips in almost under the narrative’s breath. For Eberhart on his long walks, the relationship between fear and carrying is very pragmatic. Yet the idea of life as a journey is so commonplace that it is more synonym than metaphor, so we can get away with extending the idea to talk about carrying fear and…
