The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky described art as a tool through which you “may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony”. In a sense the journey we are embarking on serves the same purpose: to graze and pare down the calluses and corns gradually brought on by suburban routine, the rat race, the disappointments and general malaise that are inevitably part of life. By immersing ourselves in the strangeness, minimalism and simplicity of a backpacking trip through a section of North America, we hope to emerge again with a new eye – one sharpened to the point where we can again celebrate the stone as stony.
Another angle of approach and significance might emerge from our specific context. Kobus and I have been married for 18 and been in love for 21 years. Coming from an engineering and a liberal arts-cum-law background we might seem like opposites. This seemed to be confirmed by a Myers Briggs Personality test. Kobus loves reading, motorcycles, sailing and sea kayaking, 3D printers, attempting and reattempting physical and mental challenges and minimalism. He would love to have a dog or a cat. I have spent my time on dissertation writing, punctuated with a few photos and haikus, but mostly paired with a growing sense of guilt about my ancient poetry in the bottom drawer, the staggering bookshelves with partly read books and the easel accumulating dust in the corridor. Although I am allergic to cats and dogs, I find birds and donkeys appealing. I also love kayaking on a lagoon or a river, joining him for a slow bike trip on a perfect day with no wind or rain, preferably with as little bends in the road as possible and will never be a Marie Kondo candidate. However, we have done some interesting and more daring things together: backpacking through Europe, doing Bible School, taking French lessons, Italian Cooking and pottery classes, canoeing on the Orange River, running a Two Oceans Half marathon, flying in a microlight aeroplane, ziplining, holding alligators, parachuting (my first time in airplane) and going on an outreach to India. We both have a distaste for administration and routine. However, it might be fairly accurate to describe him as the accelerator and tagging me as the brake. Fortunately, God in His wisdom knew how to weld together our disparate souls and blessed us with a rich marriage full of love, friendship, fun and grace. We both love evangelism and teaching, outreaches, creativity, innovation, writing, books, travel, adventure (to an extent) and have a quirky sense of humour. We have been the owners of two goldfish (they died tragically after witnessing a burglary). We both enjoy hiking.
Like most forty somethings we live fairly regulated and insulated lives in a suburb. Unlike quite a few of our peers, we are still standing in faith for a family. At forty this hope needs to be constantly renewed and frames the question about legacy and significance in a very particular way. Both of us have the need to evade established routine from time to time and succumb to the luxury and novelty of transience. Consequently, we love travelling and encountering new cultures and places. However, we are nagged by the disconcerting “still small voice” that there must be more to life than this… This trip is a partial response to that voice. It is not merely a question of achieving a new hiking goal or travelling for the sake of travel, but in a sense we are venturing into the sphere of pilgrimage. To be fair, AT travellers probably set out with some inclination to combine aspects of a pilgrimage with the goal of completing a particular section or a thru-hike, but frequently find themselves in Virginia admitting that no startling revelation has dawned on them yet. So, in an effort to be realistic and not to negate the experience of our predecessors, we also aim to motivate ourselves by accumulating miles for Community Keepers, an initiative that provides professional school-based support services to improve the emotional and social environment for learners. You can check out their website at: https://communitykeepers.org/ and if you would like to make a mile-based contribution for every mile we walk, you can support them by making a financial contribution by sponsoring a child or school (read more here). We will keep you up to date with our mileage on our blog.
Just so you know, we have done a few things in our lives in the counterintuitive order (like jumping out of an aeroplane before landing with one). This AT project is one of them. So bear with us (we’d really like to keep these hairy guys at a distance!) as we prepare for our walk and get everything ready.