Backpacker Magazine – May 2005

The Unbearable Lightness Of Being Scott Williamson

To hike from Mexico to Canada and back, a man needs strength and speed and luck. He needs something else, too. If only he knew what it was.

by: Steve Friedman

You didn't make this trip to baby-sit anyone, to save anyone from himself. You didn't start in Mexico in order to make friends. But something happens. It's funny how a man's plans can change, in spite of himself. You start logging monster distances, too. It takes you 2 weeks to catch him. When you find him at Crater Lake, in Oregon, he is carrying next to nothing. He has taken scissors and a knife to his pack, slicing off all the hanging straps. When the kid does something, he's all in. That summer, you're all in, too. You hike together through the rest of Oregon and all of Washington, to Canada. Over campfires and at sunrise and in meadows you talk about the misapplication of technology in the world, how it is serving powerful interests rather than people. He's just a kid and you're barely an adult. You talk about how society is going down the tubes, how neither of you will be sucked into the machine. You talk about the tricky business of living in a troubled world without becoming part of the trouble. He is impulsive, carefree--sometimes to a fault. You help him settle down, think things through. And you are meticulous, painstaking--sometimes to a fault. Hiking with Kenny, you quit planning so much and start living more. Kenny talks about how nothing is impossible. You can't help it. You believe him.

The next summer, while Kenny climbs in Yosemite, you hike the Continental Divide Trail, from Canada to Mexico. The summer after that--Kenny's still climbing, and you hear he's going through some tough times with his family--you travel the Appalachian Trail, but you tack on the Florida Trail first, then walk 450 miles of road between the two. You want to make it from Florida to Maine. Now you have achieved the Triple Crown of long-distance hiking, which is as rare as it sounds. What's next?

The kid has an idea. You run into him that fall at a meeting of long-distance hikers. His folks have split up and he's spent a little time in a psych ward where the doctors told him he's got a mental illness, and he's ashamed about that, but you tell him it's no big deal, they're just words, like "flu" or "virus," that he doesn't have anything to feel bad about. He appreciates that, it makes him feel better. Do you want to hear his idea? You do.

©Michael Darter Scott (left) and Kenny a the Canadian border, 1996.

What if next year, Kenny asks, you try something really ambitious? What if next year, you hike the PCT again? But this time, instead of stopping in Canada, what if you turn around and hoof it back to Mexico? And what if he tags along? You promise to think about it. And then the man in the hood walks into the convenience store and you decide life is short and a man can spend too much time thinking and you decide that you and Kenny will embark on a great adventure.

You lug your sewing machine up from Richmond to Kenny's mom's house in the Sierra foothills, in Auburn, California. One night she looks in and sees you and Kenny, both longhaired and bearded and plotting, each one of you hunched over a sewing machine. You are sewing your own sleeping quilts and she shakes her head at her woolly son and his woolly friend and thinks, "Gee, this is never going to work." But she's smiling and laughing and while you might not know about it, she knows the sadness that her son carries and you seem like such a nice boy and Kenny seems so at peace when he's with you--she worries often about him but never when he's with you.

She takes you boys--to her, you are boys--to dinner at Auburn's Mongolian Barbecue for all-you-can-eat dinners and the Chinese proprietor smiles when he sees the three of you coming, and you might not know it, but Kenny's mom knows, he hates the sight of you three, because you and Kenny sit at the table for hours, plotting adventures and talking about the trail and spinning dreams, but mostly piling bowl after bowl after bowl full of rice and broccoli and spinach and bamboo shoots, mashing the food down, and eating and mashing it down some more and eating some more and it's a wonder you don't drive that restaurant out of business. Kenny's mom loves her son and she's beginning to love you but she can't help it, she feels sorry for that little Chinese man.