The slowest person in the group

When I was a teen, I dreamed of running away from home or abandoning society to explore the woods. I often rewatched Into The Wild and scribbled in the margins of the book-version until it was held together by tape.

Sometimes I went on short hikes with my sketchbook, scribbling ideas. Other times I would hike with my friends, we would bring potato chips as provisions and laugh as we had to poop on the forest floor.

There was a big network of hiking trails marked by orange around the forest in our area. During a summer break we decided to go for a bigger hike. We wanted to lose ourselves in the woods for a week.

We got a ride by one of our parents to a remote location so we could start from a nice part of the trail and work our way towards home. We started walking along a wide trail covered in orange pine needles, surrounded by tall pines. We talked about the adventure ahead. As we walked the tall trees were replaced by shorter and shorter trees. The ground got moist, the trail transformed into a line of planks laid over the damp ground. We walked one after another to have room on the planks.

With our backs turned towards each other it became harder to talk.

The trail sloped upwards to a hill, it became drier and hotter as the trees became more sparse. We took a break to climb around on some big rocks. We looked at the map together and agreed to pick up the tempo so we would arrive at the first camp before it got too late.

The hill went down into the forest, up on a mountain where we snacked on wild blueberries as we kept walking. We encountered a small abandoned cabin, we joked about witches.

At some point I couldn’t follow the conversations, or keep up with my friends’ tempo at all. My feet were sore and my bag was digging into my back. They paused to wait for me to catch up, sometimes they drank water or talked about something. I needed to catch my breath and I already made them wait so I kept my resting and drinking to a minimum.

I drifted further and further behind. I kept thinking of the week that was ahead. Even if I would have had the willpower, my feet wouldn’t be able to do it.

My friends grew concerned and slowed down. We sat down on some rocks to talk, we made a plan. The trail would cross a road soon. When we got there I left them to find a bus stop and rode it back to town. I came back home and felt defeated. But mostly abandoned because they didn’t wait for me to catch up with them.

I told my dad about it, he told me that during a hike you should “adapt to the pace of the slowest person in the group. There’s no way the slowest hiker can keep up with the fastest hiker, but everybody else can slow down.”

For the longest time I thought I had been betrayed or was different from them. I thought I was deeper or walked for a different reason than them. I thought they should have slowed down to my pace so we could stroll slowly alongside each other. But my feet were doing something they were not ready for, maybe I wouldn’t have lasted the week no matter how slow we would have walked. My friends slowed down to meet me where I was truly at, we made an escape plan together after all.

I was far from being like Christopher McCandless in Into The Wild. Maybe that’s what hurt the most, but it was easier to blame my friends.

(Also, I don’t think my friends lasted the whole week either)