“I took the road less travelled, and now I don’t know where I am.”
— Either me, or some guy on Reddit. Hard to say.
Another shot rang out in the otherwise still mountain air, piercing the inky blackness surrounding us.
“Jesus Christ,” Jared shouted. “How is it still alive?!”
He fired again. This time, the music stopped and there was a stirring from the other side of the trail. The zip of a tent followed by unsteady footsteps. The kind of groggy and erratic clamor that one makes when they’re buzzing with adrenaline, but also too drunk to channel that adrenaline into anything other than fumbling anxiety. I thought I heard panicked voices, but maybe it was wishful thinking.
In all of forty-five seconds, they’d ripped their poor, ungainly tent out of the ground, stuffed it halfway into a backpack, and begun stumbling down the trail, away from us and the blanks we’d just fired.
It was 1:00 am. We were at least twelve miles deep on a back-country trail deep in the southern Appalachian Mountains. And until about five minutes ago, we had been listening to a group of drunken college graduates relive their fraternity days to the tune of Bath Salts by DMX. In light of which, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if there had been a bear and it had just eaten us.
Soon, the sound of frantic footsteps on the trail faded into the night as our vanquished friends escaped the imaginary bear hot on their heels. In the distance, a Whip-Poor-Will sang, its voice echoing through the already rapidly-cooling late July air. We were at an elevation of at least five thousand feet, and it was a crystal-clear night. More stars shined over my head than I’d known existed as a kid. They felt so much closer here than they did back home in the city. Like a curtain had been pulled back and I was experiencing the real sky after months of staring at a projector screen every night in my backyard. I missed that feeling.
“Do you think they’ll come back?” Jared wondered aloud, also staring at the sky.
I shrugged. “If they do, I have real bullets.”
For legal reasons, this story is a joke* meant to elicit chuckles from other irritable people. My distaste for people who blast music on nature trails, however, is no laughing matter, at least for me.
I don’t really know how I got here, to be honest. I did not grow up with an affinity for the outdoors. My vein of rural North Carolina was virtually always too hot, too cold, or too close to ongoing lightning for the outdoors to be both enjoyable and safe at the same time. I quit the Boy Scouts when I was a Tenderfoot after almost freezing to death on a mountain. I don’t think I caught my first fish until I was in college. The outdoors were not really my cup of tea.
And yet, here I am. I backpack, hike, or kayak every free weekend I have. I tread nearly every inch of the North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia segments of the Appalachian trail, and have camped out in thirty-one U.S. states and one other country entirely. I am routinely covered in bug bites, and have caught a majority of the fish species that live in the Carolinas. With the exception of river trout. Which I blame primarily on the trout for being so picky about what they eat.
Somewhere along the line, I caught the bug. By my junior year in college, I was a mixture of bored and stressed in varying proportions, and while I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted out of my career, I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, and I found myself in a rut. Then, following a stint on the largest, yet least-developed and least-populated of the Bahamian islands, I discovered that I thrived in a slight uncertain environment in which I was always slightly nervous but distinctly challenged. It meant I was always trying, failing, and learning something new, and that was good enough for me.
It also means that I send my fiance into a conniption** every time I tell her what my weekend plans are, but at least I get some good pictures out of it.
* On a very serious note, most national forests and national parks, at least in the U.S., have a very strict policy against firearms, even in backcountry areas. While it is not uncommon to see people carrying rifles in areas designated for hunting, you should be mindful of what regulations are in place, for your own good and everyone else’s. Now that I’m done patronizing you, back to my story about pretending to shoot bears to scare away annoying campers.
** I actually have no idea what a conniption is. It’s just fun to say.