2.

Preparation

DENVER, COLORADO

Fall 2011–Fall 2012

The Keystone XL, though not yet built nor even approved, had become, I thought, the perfect symbol of the twenty-first century. It was a war zone where environmentalists were pitted against industry. It was where hopes for our future clashed with habits of our past. It was the first time that the construction of a large-scale energy project had faced a serious challenge from ordinary citizens out of concern for climate change. The fight over the pipeline would be a historically significant event whether or not it was ever built.

So even though the XL’s path would lead me over the Great Plains, the “flyover” states, and what I frankly saw as the middle of nowhere, with the fate of a warming world at stake, I thought of the XL as the center of the universe—and I wanted to be there to learn everything I could about it.

Who better to walk across North America than I? I thought. I considered myself an adventurer, having hitchhiked eight thousand miles across North America over the past few years. But, truth be told, I was more a penniless and drifting tramp than a full-fledged and sponsored adventurer. Hitchhiking, anyway, is a lazy man’s adventure, requiring only patience, the ability to endure hours of drivers’ monologues, and a lot of sitting. I could boast of canoeing one thousand miles across Ontario, Canada, but that trip required more arms than legs and, again, an inadvisable amount of sitting. I’d also been a backcountry ranger up in the Gates of the Arctic National Park, a job that actually required that I did more than sit, but our patrols never lasted for more than a week at a time.

I’d done all those things years ago. Since then, I’d been a student—a designation that required I sit for hours, days, months(!) on end. My ass, once a sturdy hockey-player’s hillock of meat and muscle, had, over the years, turned into a pale downward-leaning sack of fat, a drooping Salvador Dali clock that looked all the more pathetic on the body of an otherwise healthy twentysomething.

Come to think of it, maybe I wasn’t suited for the task, as I had neither the training, nor the body, nor the experience to embark on a five-month-long hike across the New World. But what I could say for myself was that I had the gusto to think I could actually do it, the desire to test my physical limits, and, most of all, the aching need to once and for all get off my ass and hike.

•   •   •

Over the next year, after my Keystone XL epiphany, I had a surprising string of successes. I hitchhiked out of Deadhorse, restarted work on my book about living in a van, got a book deal, pulled myself out of my financial quagmire, kicked the mice out of my van in North Carolina, and moved into my best friend Josh’s basement in Denver, Colorado, where I began to plan my trip.

Liam and I had stayed in touch all that time to discuss trip logistics. At first, the expedition, along with most of my other ideas, could have been listed under the category of “Things I fantasize about doing, and probably won’t (but are fun to think about doing anyway).”

We had monthly phone conversations about the trip. It was clear that I was far more excited about the expedition than he was, but by the end of each conversation, he seemed to be reenergized and rededicated. I’d begun to wonder, though, if Liam had the frame of mind necessary to commit to such a long journey. For one thing, he began to question if it would be better to wait another year so we could properly “prepare and save up enough money.” More unsettling was his suggestion that we “don’t have to do the whole thing” and that we could “hike for a bit, take some months off, and start again whenever we wanted to.” Such suggestions were hardly unreasonable, but I’d read enough books on real-life journeys to appreciate how “reasonableness” isn’t always a good trait for someone who’s about to do something ultimately unreasonable.

Still, I so wanted Liam to come. I knew that he’d be the perfect traveling companion. He was kind, intelligent, a great cook, and I knew from our Prudhoe Bay hike that Liam had an on-the-ground ballsiness that I wanted to have but didn’t, and that this ballsiness was something we’d likely need on a journey where we’d have to trespass over private property, steal water from farms, and probably piss off the oil industry. I pictured the two of us trudging across the lonely wide-open prairie like Sam and Frodo on a long, perilous journey. We’d take care of each other, lift each other up when we were down, and, perhaps, like the Hobbits in moments of utter hopelessness, hold hands in that tender, brotherly, pre-twentieth-century, and not-at-all-gay way. I imagined us on a journey of high adventure: escaping gunfire, taking cover from tornados, and maybe whispering in a moment of life-or-death suspense, with a hushed tone of poised determination: “Run.”

I wanted ours to be a gritty journey. America’s great trails, like the Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail, span more than two thousand miles and are by no means easy (and anyone who finishes one of them is deserving of our respect as someone who is certifiably badass), but to me, these trails hardly seemed adventurous. Typically, these megatrails are well marked, come with guidebooks, have three-walled shelters and signs pointing to water sources. And, of course, they’re trails, meaning that someone else has taken the time to blaze and maintain them so thousands of people can walk them. Consequently, the people and animals around these trails are so used to seeing hikers that opportunities for unique encounters and mutual curiosity are rare. And I thought that these trails were hardly representative of America: They divert around towns, industry, poverty, and in so doing, divert around reality. They keep their walkers on a thin and protected corridor of wilderness on a continent that is getting increasingly less wild.

I didn’t want to trespass across the continent purely to take pictures of pretty landscapes or even to see those last vestiges of a once-wild continent (though I hoped to do at least a bit of each). More than anything, I wanted to get closer to understanding the world for what it is, and if that meant I’d feel more revulsion than admiration, then so be it. I was in it for the knowledge, the insight, the shock. Beauty, for the true traveler, is merely a bonus.

Plus, I knew that walking the XL across the Great Plains—a route that no one had ever taken before—would give me a chance to feel something closer to what Lewis and Clark had felt two hundred years before: the thrill of not knowing what’s behind the next hill, who I’d meet, what would attack me, or how I’d react. I wanted the life of the explorer, the adventurer, so that I would come to thank the cosmos for making the planet a sphere, keeping its explorers in a state of wonder for what awaits them beyond the earth’s ever-changing, never-ending curve.

•   •   •

It was May, just a couple of months before the beginning of our trip, when Liam suddenly remembered that he was still banned from Canada for an undisclosed offense he’d committed in that country years ago during what he referred to as his “wayward youth.”

I suggested that we figure out a way to sneak him across the border so we could get to northern Alberta (our starting point), but he—in a disappointing and uncharacteristic exhibition of prudence—decided to drop out of the expedition altogether.

The loss of Liam was devastating, and reimagining the trip as a solo undertaking wasn’t going to be easy. The thought of figuring out the exact route of the Keystone XL, of somehow creating maps for the trip, of packing boxes of food to be shipped to towns along my path, of outfitting myself with gear, of somehow getting up to Alberta, and of walking it all by myself seemed like such a daunting, life-consuming job that it was almost enough to make me drop out, too.

For weeks I told my friends that I was still going on the hike, but I was trying to get them to believe something I myself did not. In a moment of self-doubt-induced self-examination, I asked myself, Am I the sort of person who leaves everything behind and goes on a grand, uncertain, never-done-before adventure? My answer wasn’t quite a yes, but it was good enough: Why not?

•   •   •

I went online and spent $250 on mapping software. Cheapskate that I am, the investment of money turned out to be a momentous turning point when “crazy idea” turned into “actual plan.” Now that money was invested, I was invested. This was the point of no return.

Between the software and some maps of the XL on the U.S. government’s web site, I was able to figure out my route and print out about fifty topographic maps, which took me a little more than a week.

Once I figured out my route, I focused on how I was going to feed myself. Like most thru-hikers who hike the lengths of major American trails, I figured the most efficient way to hike and feed myself would be to package boxes of food, and have a friend mail those boxes to post offices along my route, where I could pick them up.

I figured I’d need about 4,000 calories a day, so I made a daily meal plan, then bought a Sam’s Club membership and purchased $1,000 worth of food: 6.5 pounds of powdered mashed potatoes, 7 pounds of dehydrated whole milk, 17 pounds of trail mix, 2 pounds of instant refried beans, 15 canisters of Parmesan cheese, 228 candy bars (Snickers, 3 Musketeers, Mounds, Nestlé Crunch, Hershey’s, Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Creme), 300 energy bars, 15 cans of Pringles, 216 Pop-Tarts, and $100 worth of granola.

Daily meal plan	Ounces	Calories
Breakfast: Granola/whole milk	7 (4.5 cereal/2.5 milk)	840 calories
Snack 1: CLIF Bar	2.4	240 calories
Snack 2: CLIF/pemmican bar	2.4/3.75	240/210 calories
Snack 3: Pemmican bar	3.75	210 calories
Snack 4: Trail mix	3	450 calories
Snack 5: Pringles	1/3 of a can (2 oz.)	300 calories
Snack 6: Chocolate bar	2.1	280 calories
Snack 7: Chocolate bar	2.1	280 calories
Snack 8: Pop-Tart	1.8	205 calories
Dinner	6.3	900 calories
Total	2 lbs., 1 oz.	3,945 calories

After buying and packaging all of my food, I went on a gear spending spree with my book-deal money, buying a rain suit, a lightweight sleeping bag, a sixty-five-liter backpack, a set of thermal underwear, a light synthetic jacket, and a baseball hat. I bought a canister of bear spray and a jackknife for protection, a pair of trekking poles, a one-and-a-half-pound tarp tent, a foam sleeping pad, and countless small essentials such as sunscreen, lip balm, chlorine dioxide water-treatment drops, three collapsible water bottles, med kit, wristwatch, matchbooks, headlamp, sewing needle and thread, compass, notepad and pens, toothbrush, toothpaste, and floss. I packed one pot and made a stove out of an empty cat-food can into which I’d pour a couple of ounces of alcohol. Upon igniting the alcohol, it would bring my water in the pot to a boil within a couple of minutes. I wanted to be able to blog about my trip, so I bought an iPad and a monthly cellular-data subscription. I added a small camera, cell phone, passport, and portable solar charger.

I shoved it all in my pack, along with five days’ worth of food, and weighed it: a troubling forty-five pounds that I’d have to carry for the next several months.

•   •   •

Everything was coming together. I had my food and my gear. Josh agreed to mail me packages to post offices along my route. I’d kept up on my training regimen, jogging five miles a day to get my legs in hiking shape. It was looking like I’d be able to start my trip in July as planned, which meant, if I walked from north to south, I’d be hiking through warm weather for the length of my trip, catching the “latitudinal sweet spot” where the temperature would be nice and mild across all the states and provinces I’d walk. I’d be in Alberta in a not-so-hot July and Texas in a not-so-cold December.

Book-editing duties, however, took longer than expected, delaying my departure by weeks. Plus, Josh had announced that he was getting married in late August, and he wanted me to be his best man. I postponed the trip for another month.

Finally freed of work and social obligations, I prepared to leave, but I tripped when scurrying down Josh’s basement stairs. My left little toe got caught on the edge of a step. I heard an awful snap, hobbled to my room, fell onto the inflatable mattress, broke out in a cold sweat, and silently hoped that I hadn’t broken a major bone in my foot. Luckily, it was only my little toe, which instantly became swollen and turned pink.

I’d never tripped down stairs or broken a toe in my life, but I happen to do so just days before I was to set off on a hiking expedition? I wondered if my subconscious—which perhaps had grave misgivings about the expedition—was taking drastic measures by secretly laying booby traps and sacrificing negligible body parts for my own good. Might I have been hurting myself purposefully? Were two parts of my psyche waging war against each other without my even knowing it?

I needed to give the toe at least another week and a half to heal, which guaranteed that my expedition would no longer be in the summer and fall, but in the fall and winter.

I had more than enough excuses not to go and I wasn’t looking for any more, so I resolved not to research my route too closely. I knew I was better off not knowing about unfordable rivers, impenetrable forests, or prairie cougars. Naïveté, though a shortcoming in most any other situation, is a prerequisite to adventure. (Stupidity can be an outright asset.) But now that I could do nothing but lounge around in my underwear and recuperate, I thought that I should perhaps use some of my downtime constructively and figure out exactly what those swampy symbols were on my maps that were in the middle of my route for the first three hundred miles.

But who does one call for advice on how to illegally follow a controversial pipeline? I called a Canadian oil company’s offices in northern Alberta but quickly slammed the phone down when I was put on a line with a human. I did a little Googling and found the phone number of a hunting guide in Alberta who led tours on some of the rivers I’d have to cross.

“You’ll probably get thrown in jail,” he said, pointing out that the first leg of my journey, from Fort McMurray to Hardisty, Alberta, led me right through the middle of a military zone. “And you’re going to be chin-high in muskeg. Where you’re going, they usually take amphibious vehicles.”

“I’m sure I’m going to sound stupid asking this, but what’s muskeg?”

“It’s swamp,” he said. “It’s all swamp and forest up here.”

I could tell from this guy’s tone that he wasn’t trying to scare me or put on an air of expertise and machismo. He was informative, serene, and calm, which made what he had to say all the more alarming.

I now had serious questions about my route, the temperature and weather, and my toe, which had turned a deep shade of purple. I had no partner, no experience with thru-hikes; and I didn’t even know how I was going to get to Canada. The trip had gone from being the serious undertaking of a wannabe adventurer to a laugh-out-loud farce.

As I inched closer to embarking on my hike—and when it seemed that this might be one of the few things I actually follow through with—the conversations with my mother became grimmer than usual, in which she’d call to hysterically inform me about my impending death.

“You’re going to get shot for walking on someone else’s property,” she’d say. “Yeah, keep laughing. You’ll see.”

Perhaps she was right to be concerned. To take off to northern lands on the eve of winter with a purple toe and no trail to follow or guidebook to consult would be, to most rational thinkers, insane. Yet since everything about the tar sands and the XL and America’s contempt for the reality of climate change struck me as insane, too, I thought it would be fitting to embrace this spirit of insanity, throw all caution to the wind, and embark on my adventure anyway.

The thought of quitting before starting flitted through my mind, but it seemed as if prudence and good judgment were losing out to my philosophy of “Fuck it, I’m going anyway.”

•   •   •

Ah, the preadventure jitters! If only we were kept awake every night by the delirious anticipation of tomorrow!

On my last night in Denver, Josh and his wife made me a going-away dinner of chicken, sweet-potato fries, salad, and peach pie. Afterward, while watching the Bears-Packers game on TV in his basement, we heard what sounded like someone frantically banging on the front door upstairs. The sound was actually about a half-dozen gunshots from the street just in front of the house. (Josh lives in a semi-sketchy area in inner-city Denver, and the occurrence of a drive-by wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary.)

In the morning, I looked to see if there was any damage done to my van, which was parked in the street. I was glad to see that it had gone unscathed while the station wagon next to it was pocked with six bullet holes. I took this as a good omen on the day I’d begin my trip—a trip on which I’d constantly have to escape bad luck (and possibly gunfire).

I hopped on a bus that would take me as far north as Fort Collins, Colorado. There were no more northward buses from there, and I didn’t know exactly how I was going to travel the 1,500 miles north, but none of that mattered because the moment I hobbled with my sore toe out onto the I-25 thruway ramp—though far from home, my things, and my friends—I felt like the freest, happiest person on Earth.

I’m actually doing this, aren’t I? I asked myself, elated.

I’m actually doing this, I said to myself, more glumly.

What the hell am I doing? I thought, looking despairingly back toward Denver.