Becoming the Well-Read Explorer
So I haven’t been at my desk much lately. I’ve been writing, but it’s been in on yellow legal pad and not on a computer. I’ve been outside in the woods, deserts, and mountains for a while. I’ve hiked many miles in far flung places from Alaska to the Big Bend National Park along the Rio Grande at the edge of Texas. I’ve lost over 50lbs since I last put up a blog post. Just weeks ago I was out in Arches National Park. I’m back with many stories.
But today I want to champion stories that others have written. Maybe they’ll inspire you to get outside as well. Outside Magazine has a pretty damn good reading list here for anyone looking to learn more about the wilderness. My favorites listed here are Bill Bryson’s Walk in the Woods, and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.
Much of Bryson’s humor comes from the foil of his buddy Katz as Bryson himself plays the straight man. Katz gets lost and when he makes his way back to Bryson, he says: “To tell you the truth, I’ve never been so glad to see another person in my whole life, and that includes some naked women.”
Krakauer’s book is one I just finished yesterday, and I’ll be writing more about that book shortly. But the Christopher McCandless as described in the book was less annoying and more human than the film version led me to believe. And though I’m not positive I’d get along with McCandless if I’d have met him in person, I can relate to the wanderlust he was filled with, according to Krakauer: “The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.”
Two books not listed that inform my thinking about hiking and spending time in the wilderness are Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Strayed’s book wasn’t published when that list came out. And McCarthy’s is a post apocalyptic novel about a boy and his dad walking and scavenging the wasted gray landscape with all their meager positions in tow, but it still sounds like hiking to me.
#optoutside
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