Can o' Beans and Spoon Set Out on a Trail…

I want to tell you about the can of baked beans. How it was for us on Vermont’s Long Trail in the early 2000s. How we sixteen-year-olds were famished, ravenous, starving, getting scrawnier by the hour, shedding calories at the same rate as our heels shed blistered skin. How we packed into the muggy tent—swatting mosquitoes, bumping spoons, laughing and groaning and laughing—and ate all eight gloppy pounds of beans in a single ill-advised feast.

There’s something wonderful about being a total freakin’ idiot. Or, putting it more kindly, about being a newbie, a fresh-faced greenhorn, a bumbling novice, an earnest student, the world open and uncertain before you, not yet pinched and narrowed by so-called expertise. This holds especially true for outdoor activities. Some will claim the opposite, will insist that initial awkward attempts at downhill skiing, say, are nothing but misery, nothing but a stiff entry fee paid in order to one day, eventually, shred the gnar like a boss.