postmortem

What a disaster. I have the feeling that most or all of my long walks, from now on, are going to come with this level of calamity—a combination of age (I'm almost 57), health, and simple mortality. We all have limits, I guess, and mine aren't very hard to reach, maybe because I never trained hard in my youth and never really learned how to test and push my physical limits. Distance walking is something I'd been inspired to do, first in the US back when I lived there in 2008 and thought about crossing the mainland from west to east on a journey of discovery about American religious diversity, then again in 2016 or 2017 after I'd watched a Canadian guy's video of him biking across the Four Rivers trail. The guy used a drone, a GoPro, and a cell-phone camera to capture vistas that, up to that time and despite years of living in Korea, I had never even seen before. So in 2017, after some rudimentary training and planning, I did the Four Rivers trail myself, 633 km from Incheon to Busan, from the northwest of South Korea to the southeast corner. It was a thrilling, life-changing experience, and I'd felt as though I'd finally Done Something Big with my life, even if "big" meant walking across a small country.

What went so wrong this time? Why was everything so much harder for what was supposed to be a relatively short walk?

Maybe we should start with what went right. My weight had been creeping up again. I'd been at my lowest in 2021, not long after my stroke: I'd gotten down to nearly 100 kg from 128 kg. Recently, my weight had crept up to around a shameful 114 kg, and when I got back from the walk yesterday, I checked my weight again, and it was down to 110 kg. Lugging 12-13 kg on your back while walking for hours isn't exactly easy work. Of course, in 2008, I didn't know a damn thing about distance walking, and I'd unwisely overpacked about 60 pounds (27 kg) of equipment. There are pro hikers out there who do cross-country routes in the US with at most ten pounds in their packs—and that's including the water they start their days with. Light as a feather. I pack half as much as I used to, but I haven't reached that level of packing wisdom. But this time around, at least, I had at least lost a few pounds (sorry to mix Imperial and metric: it's the price you pay as a Yank in a metric country). Another thing that went right: When I measured my blood pressure yesterday, it was 110/67, which is slightly better than it's been in previous months (my recent worst was around 132/90). What also went right was that I learned a lot about the route—both the bike route nearer the river and the parallel walking route on the berm above. Sometimes, there are things you can learn only by being there, on the ground. I also learned that, thank Cthulhu, Daejeon isn't far enough south from Seoul for the locals to have that annoying southern accent, but I do still hear a little something there.

So what went wrong? It's very tempting just to write off the whole trail with an "It sucks" and move on to other projects. But a more honest answer is that the trail doesn't suck at all. Certain adverse circumstances were beyond my control: the two asshole cabbies, the inadvertently rude kid (I kinda feel bad about how that encounter went), the biker who crashed into the garbage pile right in front of me, the motel that turned out to be a guest house, the extra kilometers of walking that followed, etc. Certain aspects of the trip were in my control, e.g., how to plan the route so as to avoid camping and thus be able to pack more lightly, etc. I could've done that better; everything felt unnecessarily heavy. At the same time, I recognize that I was in control of my emotional reactions even though I'm loath to admit that fact (we all prefer the "He made me angry" excuse to evade our own responsibility), so I could have reacted less rudely to the kid, who might have been slightly retarded, and who deserved something better than anger, disgust, and offense just because I was in a pissy mood. Realistically, if this is the first time a kid has called out "Grandfather!" to me, then this marks the beginning of the Grandfather period of my life, so I'd better get used to the new normal. I'm just a shuffling, old, fat dude with narrowing shoulders, man-boobs (I can hear my goddaughter imperiously declaring, "They're called moobs!"), no waist, and a large, kickable ass. I've never been and never will be a lady magnet, and that's fine. I'm an introvert anyway—alone but not lonely. My right big toe also went wrong, and that might or might not have been preventable. People keep suggesting better footwear, but I've done nothing but search for better footwear from the beginning, and nothing seems to prevent injury (I get injured during every long walk, no matter the shoes). I used my Skechers again, like last year, and they had taken me from A to B even before last year, so why wouldn't they work now? I think, as I've said before, that it really comes down to weight loss: Lose the weight and immediately lose the pressure bearing down on my feet when I walk for hours and hours. When I did the east-coast walk in 2021, after losing so much weight following my stroke, my feet were as close to fine as they'd ever been. This time around, another reason why I had to stop came down to a time-and-logistics crunch: I had brought only so much medicine with me. Adding days to this walk would've meant walking without meds, which would've meant experiencing angina. Angina would've made the walk impossible. (I know the easy solution is "Bring extra meds!", but then the calculus becomes, OK, genius, so how much extra?)

With my longer walks, I normally get involved with equipment reviews and thoughts about the sights I saw and a few column-inches about my interior state as well as what I'd learned along the way. I've got some things to say, but I'll try not to take as long as usual to say them.

Let's start with critters—sentient beings. Every walk involves encounters with critters. Barking dogs are a recurrent motif. I separate the barkers into two categories: good watchdogs and bad watchdogs. Most of them are bad because they don't start barking until I'm right on top of whatever property they're guarding. A rare few of them are good because they either see me or smell me (or even hear me) from far off and starting barking while I'm still at a distance. Those dogs get a silent nod of approval from me. Because my walk took place at the tail-end of winter, I couldn't expect to see any shaman spiders (called Joro spiders in Japan and the US), and I didn't see any live snakes. I did hear a lot of male pheasants (sorry, I just feel weird saying COCK pheasant), and I saw a few flapping clumsily away. Male pheasants are pretty to look at, but they strike me as the dead end of a very weak evolutionary branch: They've got stubby wings, a weird squawk, and they don't generally fly that high, preferring instead to flap desperately, then glide low to the ground. They're "hide in the underbrush" sorts of birds, and I can imagine people hunting them out of a sneering sense of disgust. Pheasants are, basically, goofy; they deserve to be put out of their misery, which is likely why Koreans eat them. And no, pheasant-lover, I'm not going to spend time learning about all the little idiosyncratic quirks that make them unique. Other critters I saw: mainly crawling insects and, during the warmer hours, flying insects. There was also a dead bird. And a dead cat that must've been only recently killed. ("Recently" is a relative term, I realize; the carcass had lost most of its moisture, but it hadn't broken down to the point where bone was showing through skin.) Most cat carcasses look as though the cat died mid-yowl, and this one was no exception. Cats can be theatrical; they often seem to die the way they live.

Any special insights about this walk would boil down to: Plan better. While I couldn't have anticipated the trouble with the asshole cabbies, I think I've devised a workaround for the next time I attempt this route: Have a paper map handy, one with Korean-language explanations of what I'm doing and why I need to be dropped off at Destination X. I will also try to rein in my temper should I ever be accosted by a goofy teen again. Also also: I might need to double-check destinations to confirm I'm—for example—actually headed to a motel and not to guest house.

It was unfortunate that, for most of this walk, I was dogged by a desire for the experience to be over. While I've had vague echoes of that feeling on certain previous walks (no walk is ever perfect), the feeling was never as bad as during this trek. At a guess, it's probably because the first day had started so badly. I was steaming mad after I'd had to deal with those cabbies, and one thing I didn't mention previously was that, along with deciding to start walking from right where I was (in the vicinity of Daejeon's Shintanjin Station), I also huffily resolved not to bother finding any of the certification centers along the way. And if I'm perfectly honest, I was looking for excuses to stop the walk early. I have to go back once again to the idea that this entire endeavor felt cursed, star-crossed from the beginning. So I'll try this walk again when my head is clearer, and I've planned in more detail. I might go back and do a bit more reconnoitering, especially about things like motel locations.

Otherwise, this walk, though brief, did teach me a few things. I have a much better idea of what the region is like. I learned something about the littering patterns of walkers versus bikers (and by implication, how much litter I've missed on other walks). I know a bit more about the shape of the terrain (hillier than most of my other routes except for the east-coast trail, which has some surprisingly steep inclines). I learned that I have personality traits that I need to work on, mainly in the area of learning to keep my temper, which is normally under control, but apparently not perfect control. Well, if you're not learning and curious and growing, you're basically just vegetating. As Morgan Freeman's character Red says in The Shawshank Redemption, quoting his escapee friend Andy:

Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'.