Knowing When Not to Keep Going

“Its caution is greater than its courage.”

Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 22

 

Roads, Highways, and Common Sense on the Trans Canada Trail

 

When we first began long-distance hiking, one of the first big lessons that stayed with us was never to quit on a bad day. It was useful advice then, and in many ways it still is. Fatigue has a way of making temporary problems feel permanent. Rain can make a trail seem impossible in the afternoon and almost pleasant the following morning. Sore feet, hunger, frustration and self-doubt can convince you that an entire journey has been a terrible mistake when what you really need is food, sleep and another chance to look at things with fresh eyes tomorrow. Over the years, we have relied on that idea many times. We have kept walking through miserable weather, difficult trails, flooded sections, long road walks and days when neither of us particularly wanted to continue. Most of the time, persistence has carried us somewhere better.

 

What I am beginning to understand in Alberta, however, is that persistence has limits, and knowing where those limits are may be just as important as knowing how to push through them.

 

The distinction has been increasingly difficult to ignore. Earlier in the province, while preparing to follow Highway 2Afrom Wetaskiwin toward Ponoka, an RCMP officer stopped to ask about our carts and then became visibly concerned when we explained our route. He told us about pedestrians and cyclists who had been struck along the highway, described the traffic, the speeds and the lack of a proper pathway, and suggested that we find another way south. Later, after we contacted the local trail organization, they expressed similar concerns and suggested concessions that might provide safer alternatives. Dana Meise, the first person to hike from coast to coast to coast, offered perhaps the clearest advice of all: if a line drawn on a map did not feel safe on the ground, we should not allow ourselves to become trapped by the idea that following that exact line was somehow more important than finding a reasonable and safe way forward. 

Even the TCT, as an organization, advises that their network of trails (especially on the roadways) is “simply a guide,” not a fixed route to be blindly followed.  Even the online map advises people not to use the route.  At the time, I understood what everyone was saying, but there was still a part of me that resisted the idea. We had set out to walk the Trans Canada Trail. The route was there on the map; it was signed on the ground, and others had completed this same national track. Surely following it was what we were supposed to do.

 

Despite the dangers, that belief and ideal have been surprisingly difficult to shake. Once a route is marked, planned and mentally accepted, changing it can feel uncomfortably close to failure. We are used to solving problems and then continuing on. If the day is long, we walk farther. If we are behind, we start earlier and walk further still. If the trail is rough, we slow down and keep going. If we are tired, we remind ourselves that tiredness is temporary. For years the basic answer to most difficulties has been persistence, and persistence has usually served us well. It is therefore strange to discover that experience does not always make you better at enduring more or more adept at overcoming true dangers. Sometimes experience teaches you to recognize when endurance and stubbornness have both stopped being the appropriate response.

Today on Highway 567 brought that lesson into uncomfortable focus. The route west from Irricana toward Airdrie looked simple enough on the map, but the reality was a narrow, busy highway with little or no shoulder and a drop from the edge of the pavement. My ankle was already swollen and tender, which made walking the slope beside the road painful, but the larger problem was the traffic. As the morning began, transports, RVs and pickup trucks began passing in an almost continuous stream at highway speeds. At one point, a pickup passed a transport while both were beside us, squeezing through so closely that we could feel it brush past our elbows. Not long afterwards, another vehicle sped by while the driver threw a glass beer bottle out the window, sending shards across the pavement and against the front of our carts. At that point the dangers were evident, and the question changed. We were no longer wondering whether this was an unpleasant section of trail. We were wondering whether continuing along it made any sense at all.  We were also wondering whether continuing to walk here was worth our lives. 

 

For years, part of long-distance hiking had meant convincing the mind to keep the body moving. Today the relationship reversed. The mind was still saying that this was the mapped route, that we had already walked thousands of difficult kilometres, that ten kilometres of highway was not going to defeat us, and that abandoning the marked route somehow meant we had not completed what we intended to do. The body, common sense and the evidence immediately around us were, however, saying something else. Traffic was passing too close. Drivers had very little room to avoid us, and some clearly didn’t want to. We had already had two encounters that could easily have ended differently. At some point, continuing simply because we had decided beforehand that we would continue stopped looking like determination and began looking like stubbornness. 

 

Ultimately, common sense (with the help of Google Maps) won out, and so we left the route of the Trans Canada Trail.  In so doing, we left the roaring highway and immediate dangers behind and began to trek a longer but also calmer and safer route toward the day’s destination.  With that said, by every measure there was nothing dramatic about the decision. We found an alternate road and began working our way toward Airdrie on our own terms. Later, when another road ended unexpectedly, we picked our way through a rough ATV track beneath utility lines rather than backtracking through the heat. It was awkward, uneven and painful on my ankle, but it was away from the traffic and felt far safer than the highway we had abandoned. For perhaps the first time in a very long time, following the journey rather than following the line on the map felt like the more faithful choice.

 

I do not think this contradicts the advice we once relied upon about never quitting on a bad day. If anything, experience has made that lesson more acute. There is a difference between discomfort and danger, between fatigue and injury, between frustration and information. Rain is uncomfortable but usually manageable. Sore muscles may simply need rest. A difficult climb may require patience and a little more time. But a busy road that provides no safe space for walkers, or circumstances that repeatedly produce near-fatal misses, are not necessarily obstacles to be conquered. Sometimes they are information that should change the plan.

 

Perhaps this is one of the less obvious things that long-distance journeys teach. At the beginning, perseverance despite the odds often feels like the great virtue. You prove that you can continue despite difficulty. Over time, however, another skill becomes just as important: judgment based on experience. You begin to understand that endurance is not measured only by how much discomfort you can tolerate or how faithfully you can adhere to a mapped itinerary. It also depends on knowing when to stop, when to rest, when to ask for help, when to accept that you need to change the plan and work around something genuinely unsafe, and when to choose a different road.

 

That can be difficult to admit because long-distance journeys attract a certain mythology of toughness. We celebrate the person who keeps going, who ignores pain, who pushes through weather and adversity and refuses to quit. There is value in resilience, but there is also danger in confusing resilience with inflexibility. A route does not become safer because we are committed to it. An injury does not disappear because we are determined. A map has no awareness of how fast the traffic is moving beside us, whether a bridge is washed out, whether a trail has vanished, or whether today's conditions bear any resemblance to those under which the route was originally created.

 

The longer we walk, the less interested I am in proving that we can force our way through every difficulty exactly as planned. That may be one of the more unexpected changes of this journey. In Newfoundland, perseverance often meant learning not to surrender to the discomfort of the moment. Here in Alberta, more than 10,000 kilometres later, perseverance sometimes means protecting the journey from our own determination. If we are going to keep moving toward the Pacific, we need our bodies intact, to trust our own judgements, and have enough humility to admit that a line on a map is only one suggestion for how to get from where we are to where we hope to go.

 

At present I am still frustrated by having to take this deviation from the Trans Canada Trail.  It has not been our first, nor I suspect it will be our last.  The water route around Bras d’Or Lake in Cape Breton, the water route in New Brunswick, the Path of the Paddle across the shores of Lake Superior, the Chief Whitecap Waterway south of Saskatoon – each is an example of where we had no trail and had to make our own way.  Amid those sections, I have also gotten tired of the critiques that we have not trekked every spur of the national trail system or that we had to walk around a water route rather than rent a kayak or swim the section.  While there is a point to following the Trans Canada Trail as much as possible the fact remains that there are also times that everyone has to hike their own hike.

Plans made in advance, trails mapped out (both online and on the ground), and our goals all play into every decision.  But they no longer get to overrule everything else.  Experience, common sense, and the  reality beneath our feet also play into every choice.

 

To that end, perhaps knowing when to keep going and knowing when not to are not opposite lessons after all. They are two parts of the same one - pay attention closely enough to understand what the situation is actually asking of you, rather than responding automatically with whatever worked last time, what the original plan was, or what others will demand  later on.

 

Today, what the road was telling us was simple enough. Find another way. So we did.  Perhaps that decision has been long overdue. 

 

See you on the trail.