Terminus
Day 23: Sunday, May 15, 2022
Eleven Point Section
Today’s Mileage: 7.97 miles
Total Mileage: 309 miles
Time on Trail: 4 hours, 5 minutes
Elevation gain/loss: 840 feet / 1,010 feet
If you buy Talenti, not for the yummy gelato but to use the jar for cold soaking your couscous … you might be a thru-hiker.
Final day.
A shorter, easier day than I’ve had recently, but I find I’m walking more slowly. Savoring this last day, reluctant to move forward, soaking in the last of the trail and at the same time looking forward to being home.
I should reach the trail’s terminus by noon. I’ll be home by nightfall, and sleep in my own bed for the first time in more than three weeks. It will feel strange to put on a tie and dress shoes and go to work in an office tomorrow, to spend all day indoors, under artificial lights, surrounded by people. To drive in rush hour traffic.
I know I will miss the trail when I return home, its simplicity and solitude. I also know that I will return a different person than I left.
This is a single-track dirt trail in the woods, not the road to Damascus. I didn’t experience any blinding revelation, wasn’t felled by thunder and lightning. It’s been more like a quiet infiltration over the days and miles, the Spirit seeping through my skin via sunshine and gentle breeze.
On a spiritual pilgrimage, change is as inevitable as it is necessary as it is desirable. As Mark Nepo writes in “The Exquisite Risk”:
“To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim.”
Spiritual practices are designed to change us and to help us better know ourselves. Through this pilgrimage, I think I’ve learned to cultivate patience, stillness, perseverance.
I love beginnings and new things, to launch a new project or seize upon a new idea. I’m not so good at the drudgery of following through. I get bored in the daily grind of practical implementation. One of the things I hope I’ve gained from this hike is the discipline to see things through to the end.
I’ve also gained a deep appreciation for the value of simplicity. On a thru-hike, life is stripped down to the basics. Walk, eat, sleep. Repeat. Possess no more than you can comfortably carry on your back. Life is simple on the trail. Without the clutter and cacophony of so-called normal life, there is room for reflection.
Wander gives space for wonder.
After spending the first half of my life accumulating possessions and advancing my career, I’m ready to spend the rest of my life shedding most of those encumbrances. I want all of my life to look more like my trail life, to be shaped by simplicity.
Also, I’ve learned that I want more of this. More time spent outdoors. More fully embracing nature. More days following a winding trail, more nights spent in front of a campfire and in my tent. Visiting remote places without roads or utility lines, that can only be reached by walking long distances. Landscapes unavailable to most people by virtue of their remoteness.
Dirt beneath my soles is good for my soul.
I feel in a hurry about this. I fear some of these natural wonders won’t be around much longer, and if I wait too long, I will miss them. Man-made climate change has marred the environment, ravaging our natural heritage at an escalating pace. Whatever we gain by easy access to cheap energy comes at a horrific, if hidden, cost. Most of us don’t notice this, because here in the American Midwest climate change hasn’t wreaked the kind of deadly havoc suffered in other parts of the world. But those who spend a lot of time outdoors, on the trail and in the wilderness, witness the damage up close.
Thru-hikers on the western long trails, such as the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide Trail (both on my bucket list) now face constant re-routes to avoid wildfires. I’ve hiked through parts of Colorado, exposed to sun and wind through miles of burn areas ravaged by past fires. As I write this paragraph, the largest wildfire in Texas history, and one of the largest ever in the United States, is tearing across the plains with deadly ferocity, flames covering a million acres and spreading at a pace one writer described as “at speeds faster than a person can run.”
“At speeds faster than a person can run.”
That’s a frightening metaphor for our accelerating climate catastrophe. It’s getting harder to outrun the havoc we’re wreaking on our environment. The planet’s convulsions are coming faster than our technology can come up with fixes for our predations. Catastrophic events, such as hurricanes and floods, are happening in so many places and with such frequency as to overwhelm any adequate emergency response.
In the fall of 2024, thru-hikers were forced off hundreds of miles of the Appalachian Trail as a result of damage caused by the effects of a hurricane in Florida. The warming sea water loaded the atmosphere with so much moisture that it carried torrential rains and floods farther inland. The United States has had as many Category 4 and 5 hurricanes make landfall in the last eight years as we did in the previous fifty seven years.
I’ve hiked through forests of trees, weakened by drought and vulnerable to pests due to the warming of our planet, suffering in large swaths of dead zones on the mountains. Rivers and reservoirs are drying up. Water sources relied on by thru-hikers in the desert southwest are less dependable. The Great Salt Lake is shrinking, now only a fraction of its former glory and disappearing fast.
Not only is the landscape through which we hike being devastated, but the living creatures (whom Muir called “our earth-born companions”) that share the mountains and prairies and forests and waters are vanishing at an astonishing rate. We are in the midst of the sixth extinction period in Earth’s history. No mass extinction of plants and animals has occurred on this scale since the extinction of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago.
The only question is whether human beings will be counted among the victims.
To preserve this sacred world of our origins from destruction, our great need is for renewal of the entire Western religious-spiritual tradition. We need to move from a spirituality of alienation from the natural world to a spirituality of intimacy with it … to a spirituality of the divine as revealed in the visible world about us, from a spirituality concerned with justice simply to humans to a justice that includes the larger Earth community.
We cannot save ourselves without saving the world in which we live .… We will live or die as this world lives or dies. We can say this both physically and spiritually. We will be spiritually nourished by this world or we will be starved for spiritual nourishment.
(Thomas Berry’s selected writings from “The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth”)
It seems we are being held hostage in a global suicide pact.
So long as feckless politicians and wealthy industrialists can wring another penny of profit by recklessly exploiting the earth, drilling and mining and industrial agriculture will continue to pose a threat to our environment, to our enjoyment of nature, to our lives and futures. Making this even worse, are the throngs of citizens enthralled in a sort of Stockholm Syndrome in which they sympathize with and support their abusers, making it politically difficult to resolve the most critical issues that confront our generation.
I regret that I waited until the hottest summer in recorded history to thru-hike the John Muir Trail in 2023 (it seems like each successive summer now is “the hottest summer in recorded history”). This, on the heels of record-setting snowfall in the Sierras and in the midst of the first hurricane to hit California in nearly a century, made for an interesting hike.
We’re losing these natural wonders just as I am waking up to their existence. I feel a panic that they won’t be there when I finally get around to visiting more of them. I worry that my grandson won’t be able to share my joy.
The end of this trail has become the start of future trails.
Since this Ozark Trail thru-hike in 2022, I have also thru-hiked the John Muir Trail and am section-hiking the Colorado Trail. I’ve gone backpacking in Rocky Mountain National Park and day hiked around the San Juans in Colorado. I’ve hiked across and through the Grand Canyon several times, as well as the largest slot canyon in the world at Buckskin Gulch and Paria Canyon. I plan to thru-hike the Superior Trail in Minnesota. I’ve planned more than enough hikes and thru-hikes to last the next several years, and I keep discovering new trails to add to the list.
When I retire, I intend to mark the occasion by taking six months to thru-hike the Continental Divide Trail. After that, the Pacific Crest Trail. There are more trails than I have years remaining. I need to hurry.
But first, I have to find my way home from this trail. And there’s a problem.
When my wife and her father last visited me to drop off a re-supply box, they also moved my car from Brushy Creek Lodge to the trailhead at the terminus. At least, that was the plan. My wife let me know that my car was parked somewhere in the vicinity of the trailhead. They couldn’t find any Ozark Trail markers, or any indication of the trail, but her cell phone’s GPS told her she was at the trailhead. There was a place to pull over, off the road, so that’s where they left my car.
In other words, I don’t actually know where my car is parked.
That’s been haunting me for several days, wondering how I would find my car when I finished. I stuffed those worries in the back of my mind the same way I force my sleeping quilt into the bottom of my backpack, determined to enjoy my hike today without worrying what I will do tomorrow. Nothing I can do about it in the meantime.
Well, now it’s time to worry.
The Ozark Trail, at least the spine that serves as the official thru-hike route, generally runs north to south. But on Day 21, the trail took a westward bent. I’ve been traveling westbound for the past few days toward the terminus, which the map labels “Western Terminus,” though I can’t help but think of it as the southern terminus.
About five miles before the terminus, I encountered a 20-something thru-hiker headed in the opposite direction; I was finishing my hike and he was just starting his. My last day and his first day. I was jealous of him, of his excitement to be embarking on a new adventure. He was the only thru-hiker I met on the trail.
I asked if he noticed any other vehicles parked at the terminus. Nope. He asked me about trail conditions. I warned him about the ticks in the hollows and the crossing of Big Creek and Courtois Creek. Then we parted ways, him to begin and me to finish.
As I stepped to the end of the trail, I looked around. I saw a car parked at the trailhead, presumably belonging to my fellow thru-hiker, but no sign of my own. I’m going to date myself here, but I couldn’t help muttering out loud, “Dude, where’s my car?”
I walked past the small parking area to the intersection with Forest Service Road 4155, where there are several trail markers posted. I figured I could at least hike toward civilization. If I still hadn’t found my car, maybe I could get a ride. Soon a pickup truck headed toward me down the road, and I waved it down. I explained that I’d been hiking on the Ozark Trail for a few weeks and my wife had abandoned my car somewhere in the vicinity.
“Oh, was it a small red car?” asked the driver.
As a matter of fact, yes. Turns out, he had seen it parked just around the curve behind me and had driven past it several times in recent days. He didn’t offer me a ride, because my car was so close, just around the bend. I don’t know how I could have missed it, since I just walked from that direction, but I thanked him and turned around to begin retracing my steps as he and his wife drove away.
When I rounded the curve, there he was, waiting on the side of the road. The car was a bit farther down the road than he’d realized, he explained, inviting me to hop on his tailgate so he could take me to the spot.
Sure enough, about a half mile away, there was my car. If I had turned south instead of north coming off the trail, I would have quickly found it. If my wife had driven just a bit farther, she surely would have noticed the trail markers leading to the trailhead.
I unloaded my pack, settled into the driver’s seat, and began the six-hour drive home (stopping along the way for a cheeseburger and a beer, of course).
This journey has reached its end, but the next adventure begins soon. I hope to meet you on the trail sometime. Until then, let me leave you with this blessing:
“May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.”
Edward Abbey, “Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness”
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