Saturday night into Sunday morning, I went to sleep and woke up to the sound of whippoorwills trilling. It's a distinct call, often repeated in seemingly endless succession.
It is also almost a haunting: a call so practiced, so precise and consistent right before it vanishes. The silence of dusk or dawn fills the void left behind, magnified by the lingering call that is now just a memory.
There is something else about it, though, that's harder to put into words.
I will admit, I wasn't sure about this first overnight trip alone. I have day hiked by myself plenty of times, but this was my first backpacking trip where I'd sleep out by myself. I was nervous--not about animals or the darkness or other people, but about the stakes of the experience as a whole. What if I didn't sleep? What if I couldn't stand the stillness? What if I decided to hike back in the dark because I was too restless? Typical in the mind of an anxious person, I felt like my entire thru-hike could hinge upon how this overnight trip went.
But even as I hiked through the day before making camp, I knew the other truth. To do this short overnight, and to do any part of my thru-hike in a few weeks, I have to get over my fears. It's too easy to give in to them. It's too easy to live life according to them. I acknowledge them and then move on.
A thought of what the guy walking behind me, who follows me down a side trail, might be up to.
Let it go.
A thought of having too much or too little gear for this night.
Let it go.
A thought of dead tree branches falling on me in the night, even though I intentionally scoped out what I knew to be a safe spot.
Let it go.
A thought of groups of people I pass thinking I'm too young or too short or too much a woman to be out alone.
Let it go.
...and on and on and on and on and on and on...
Until it stops. Until I can convince myself that I have done all that I can to prepare for the most extreme and obvious risks. There is a time to plan, but there is also a time to admit that not everything can be anticipated and that experience teaches, too. I am allowed to take risks. And I am allowed to decide which risks are worth taking. Eventually, I will not have to think so hard about what once seemed like big decisions.
Throughout that first day, I found ways to be comforted by small things: the owl pellets on the side of the trail, hairs of the prey still sticking out; the glow of my headlamp inside my tent at dusk; the slanting shadows of trees and the almost fluorescent green of the undergrowth; the gentle winding of the trail. A meal. A book. A thousand other subtleties.
Then came the evening, and the call of the whippoorwill. I remembered the first time I heard it. I was with my dad. He'd been going on all day about how he hoped to hear "his" whippoorwill sing that night. When the telltale call pierced even through our cabin walls, he was so excited that he almost knocked over his chair trying to get out the door in time to hear it clearly. Now, as I listened to it in the woods alone, the sound brought some comfort.
I wanted to enjoy that moment a bit longer, so I decided to read outside of my tent in the last light, leaning against a fallen tree.
The next morning, I woke up in my tent in what felt like a completely natural way. I wasn't startled awake by a sound or feeling. I just...woke up. After a few minutes laying there, deciding whether to get up, I heard it again: a whippoorwill. Then another. They took up each other's call like a song sung in rounds. I stayed there for a while, grateful to have slept, grateful for the song, and one step closer to being ready for June 6th.
To listen to the next part of my Capstone, click the link below:
Happy trails,
Anna
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