Before you read this, please take time to read the introduction.
Chapter I
Like many other stories, this one begins on a somewhat normal day. Needless to say I had no idea what lay ahead of me. I would have stayed at home and locked the door if I knew.
One summer a few years before this is being written down, I was sitting in a sidewalk café in the town I grew up in. On the table in front of me was a cup of cocoa, or hot chocolate as the crew preferred to call it. I was reading one of the country’s biggest newspapers. The middle pages that day was devoted to an article about how to travel on foot through our beautiful nature. The author claimed that we have become so obsessed with visiting other cultures that we often forget about our own. We had gone from being a warm, nature loving people to becoming cold, cynical capitalists who really only wants to visit other cultures in order to be reminded of how much we have accomplished, and how much more privileged we are than “the others”. That, and cheap booze of course.
The article was comprised of several pictures from various nature sightings you could find in our own country. Mountains, plains and eternal shores was of course highly represented, but the pictures that caught my eye right away was those showing deep forests. No pathways, tracks, roads or anything artificial made the large forests great candidates for when you want to really breathe fresh air in a time when more and more people fled in something close to panic in to the city’s because their home town is boring.
A rich plant life was described, smells you would never find in a city, complete silence and the thrill of meeting some of the many animal species you’d normally only find on TV or in zoo’s. With a backpack full of necessities like maps, compass, sleeping bag, food and so on, the author had traveled in to the unknown to experience the nature and maybe see our country as it once was, free of humans and destruction.
The article was short, with some standard descriptions like “fantastic nature”, “impassable terrain” and other phrases you knew would be there before even beginning to read. In other words, the text itself didn’t really attract me. For all I knew the author could have written the entire article from just looking at pictures of the places he was describing. What grabbed my attention was the beautiful sights and my own personal need for silence, peace and quiet. For several years I had lived in the city, with a busy job, friends and relatives who kept wanting my attention.
When I one month earlier got “burned out” I lost it all, friends, the job – everything a “normal” person needs to be considered ”normal”. However, I lost most of this of my own free will. Without any warning I suddenly became tired of living for everyone else, constantly wondering if what I was doing was good enough for other people, if they would accept me or not, if they would embrace me or turn their backs. I had spent all my life giving to others, trying to make them happy with me. So when I one morning woke up knowing that I can’t do this anymore, I realized things would never be the same. Sick of the job, sick of the friends, sick of the relatives, sick of the roles I had to play to please them all, sick of looking for a partner, sick of everything. It was time for ME to live.
After a week of not showing up at work, I went to the boss’s office and told him without any chatter that I quit. He halfheartedly tried convincing me to change my mind, but just the fact that he really didn’t bother made me sure I had done the right thing.
The first thing that came to mind during my new found freedom was that now, for the first time, I would go to a café, alone, with a newspaper and try being one of them. The social creatures that are so confident in their own worth that they don’t need anyone else to be around them. One of those who doesn’t care what other people think, but just live ones life for good or worse.
It was one of these days I came over the article about our fantastic nature, with it’s peaceful yet remorseless spirit, it’s promise of the one thing I had never had; quiet.
On my way home that day I went to a wilderness store. Even though I had practically no idea of what could be necessary in the wild, I bought a lot of equipment that seemed to be logical to bring. New shoes, a raincoat, map, compass, a slightly over sized knife, a whistle, a backpack, mosquito spray, a black Indiana Jones hat (mostly for fun), a book about berries, a sleeping bag and wool underwear. Exiting the store I already felt like a ”son of the wild”, prepared for everything – even though I wasn’t. Not even close.
It would later become painfully clear that there was no way I could have prepared for what was about to happen. No books, TV-shows or newspaper articles could have helped me where I was going.
