The Trouble With Almost There

“To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”

Robert Louis Stevenson, “El Dorado”

 

Hiking the Trans Canada Trail across British Columbia

 

For most of this journey on the Trans Canada Trail, the Pacific Ocean has existed as an idea rather than a destination we could truly imagine reaching. While we had every hope and intention of walking from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the fact remains that even from Newfoundland it was simply too far away to feel real. Even in Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, the western coast remained something represented by a line on a map and a direction we kept moving toward. Alberta brought the Rockies into view, and British Columbia finally placed us on the other side of the Continental Divide, but even then the province was large enough, mountainous enough and complicated enough that the coast still felt distant. Somewhere over the past few weeks, however, that has begun to change. The Pacific is no longer an abstraction. It is close enough to think about every day, and perhaps that is making the remaining distance more difficult rather than easier.

 

We are sitting in Christina Lake after another long stretch of trail, more than 12,500 kilometres from Cape Spear. On paper, the numbers should be encouraging. There are roughly 600 kilometres, another month of walking and several mountain ranges between us and the coast. Compared with everything behind us, that hardly seems enormous. Yet today it feels enormous. Sean's shoes have been worn through for weeks and can no longer be held together reliably with duct tape and Goop. A camera lens has stopped focusing properly. Our laptop has failed after an update, taking hundreds of hours of photo editing work with it. We are behind on blogs and images, money is tighter than we expected after a journey that has already taken considerably longer than planned, and winter is beginning to close in from the mountains around us. Instead of feeling energized by how close we are to the Pacific, we have reached Christina Lake wondering how much we have left to get there.

 Perhaps this is one of the strangest things about approaching the end of a very long journey. You imagine that each kilometre closer to the destination will make the remaining distance feel smaller. In reality, the opposite can happen. When the goal is impossibly far away, there is no point in thinking about it very often. You deal with the day in front of you because there is nothing else you can do. But once the destination becomes imaginable, it begins exerting a kind of gravity. Suddenly you start calculating how many days remain, how many kilometres can be covered each day before the weather changes, and whether every break you is something that is simply slowing you down. As a result, the finish line, which once provided direction, begins influencing the character of the days themselves.

 

This is why I am beginning to think that “almost there” may be one of the more dangerous distances on a long journey. Certainly it must be one of the most dangerous mindsets to have on a long-distance hike.  Not because the remaining trail is necessarily harder than what came before, but because it becomes increasingly easy to think of everything between here and the destination as something that must simply be gotten through. A day that once would have been an experience becomes another forty kilometres completed. A community becomes a resupply point, not a place to explore. A section of trail becomes a means of making progress. Rest starts to feel like wasted time. Even a beautiful place can become frustrating if it delays arrival somewhere else.

 

We have felt that tension before. In New Brunswick, as winter began catching up with us, daily distances increased, and attention sometimes narrowed toward the number of kilometres we could cover before conditions became impossible. The lesson then was that distance and progress were not necessarily the same thing. Here in British Columbia, the pressure feels similar but not identical. This time it is not simply winter creeping up on us. The Pacific is ahead of us, close enough now that we can almost imagine standing beside it, and that possibility creates its own urgency.

 

The irony is that British Columbia has given us some of the most remarkable walking of the entire journey precisely at the moment when we are most tempted to hurry through it. Over the past weeks we have crossed mountain passes, walked through rail tunnels, followed historic railway grades, moved through forests altered by logging and fire, met naturalists and trail users, watched unfamiliar wildlife and entered communities whose histories we barely knew before arriving. Even during difficult days, there has been an enormous amount worth noticing. Yet fatigue has a way of making those things harder to see, and the thought of the coast now seems to be behind almost every decision.

 

The rest day here at Christina Lake is a good example. Under ordinary circumstances, there would be nothing particularly remarkable about stopping for a day. We have done so throughout the Come Walk With Us #Hike4Birds when weather, resupply, injury, exhaustion or logistics required it. Here, however, staying still feels strangely expensive. We are already watching the calendar and trying to stay ahead of colder, wetter weather. A resupply package is waiting farther along in Midway - Sean needs the replacement shoes inside that package badly enough that walking past it is not really an option. What would normally be a practical delay has begun to feel like losing three days we cannot afford to lose.

 

That reaction probably says more about where our minds are than about the actual schedule.

 

Three days do not erase four years of walking. A rest day does not make the Pacific farther away.

Waiting for shoes that make it possible to continue is not a failure to progress. And yet when the destination feels close, logic and emotion do not always agree.

 

There is another danger hidden in all of this. A journey this long cannot be reduced to its ending without distorting everything that gave it meaning. If we allow the final month to become nothing more than a race toward the ocean, then some of the landscapes and communities closest to the destination risk becoming less important simply because they came last. That seems especially unfair after spending years arguing, at least to ourselves, that slow travel matters because the places between major destinations matter.  To that end, the Pacific should not turn southern British Columbia into an obstacle to be raced across.

 

Perhaps this is the challenge now: to hold two truths at once. We do want to reach the coast. After thousands of kilometres, several hiking seasons and more changes of plan than we could possibly count, there is nothing wrong with wanting to finish this Atlantic-to-Pacific portion of the journey. The destination matters. It has always mattered. But wanting to arrive cannot be allowed to erase the value of what still lies between here and there.  And that may require more discipline than slowing down did earlier in the journey.

 

When the destination was distant, staying focused and paying attention came more naturally because there was little advantage in obsessing over the end. Now every kilometre west seems to pull our thoughts forward. The temptation is to look through the landscape instead of at it, to evaluate days by how much distance they remove from the map and to see interruptions only in terms of the time they cost us.  Perhaps the last part of a long journey requires learning how not to arrive too early in your mind.

 

Tomorrow, or the day after, we will continue toward Grand Forks, Midway and whatever comes beyond. There are still mountain ranges ahead, uncertain trail conditions and many hundreds of kilometres before we see the Pacific. We are tired enough that pretending otherwise would be pointless. There will probably be days when all we want is to be finished.

 

But almost there is still somewhere.  There are landscapes here we have never walked before, people we have not yet met, birds we have not yet seen and places whose names currently mean little to us. If the past four years have taught us anything, it is that those unnamed spaces are often where the journey acquires its character.   The Pacific will still be there when we reach it. For now, perhaps our task is to make sure we are still here for everything that comes before.

 

See you on the trail.