Positively Change Truth

You see I fantasise The Trail all the time.  I imagine incidences and outcomes.  We don’t last a week and head out on a vehicle led road trip and come back incredibly overweight (which is normally what happens on trips to America.  I’m going to India later this year and that will have the opposite effect.)

I imagine Austin will lag behind because he’s climbing trees or moaning about us going too fast (this one is off set rather by the fact he’ll be nineteen if he does with us at all and therefore likely to have left us altogether before the first few sunsets have fallen.) 

That Samantha (my wife) will be way way ahead and I will be stuck in the middle hoping I can get them together for camp and wishing I had some company. (not an altogether made up situation as it is what normally happens when we go walking!)

Other times I imagine what kind of songs I should play if I come across a guitar and if I will feel good enough to play them by then.

You see The Trail is not just some planned trip that takes some training to do and has no guarantees that you will be able to do most of it, but actually something bordering on a JF Kennedy kind of fantasy of flying men to the Moon.  It is steeped in mythology that means you are not allowed to get it wrong or to not have the experience you are expecting.  You could see that in a film called Girl in the Song, when the supporting characters panic that a new arrival will ruin their experience of Nevada’s Burning Man festival, so uptight are they about having the perfect time.

I have been reading https://colleenstinchcombe.com/ blog, although only up to Day 70 at the moment (I got behind during a busy time at work!) – I like to call the trail name Reece because that’s what a couple of middle aged guys kept calling her because of the film and she is walking with her mother’s ghost haunting her like Cheryl Strayed.  She has come across a lot of what she would have hoped not to experience, panic of those trying to have the perfect experience and therefore thinking she doesn’t fit in with their ideal, some bullying of people she notes as well. 

The Trail is now more popular than ever, I guess mainly because of ole’ Cheryl and the film, so it must be hard for The Trail to live up to filmic standards and even the idea of tight community when it’s got too big even for the opening party to carry on.

Still, not to worry, I think it doesn’t matter what the reality will be because it’s the journey there that counts.   Oh!  Just like The Trail…………………………..