Kind greeting from your friendly neighborhood Monster, I’m back to talk today about becoming a slackpacker. What’s that you say, you need to know all about slackpacking? Well, glad to help, pull up a chair.
Actually, you’re probably out of luck here, I’m not some mythical all knowing beast, there are some significant limits to my admitted genius. (Hahaha – You do know I’m losing my mind, right? Ya. I am. More precisely, I may be losing my mind, but I’m still “normal”, it’s just the genius wasting away. What can you do? You are dealt the hand you get to play out and I’m not giving up!)
At this point I’ve actually slackpacked jack squat, my knowledge is primarily theoretical. I’ll be the first to admit it, I’ve become pretty inactive the last few years. Pretty inactive is certainly not not pretty, and I’m sure that it also had an impact on my mental health. There’s nowhere I feel as alive as in wilderness, and it’s been a long long time since I’ve visited wilderness. Just going out west last year with girl on honeymoon was a real tonic, but like a junkie in need of a fix, I need more!
It’s been ages since I last strapped on a backpack, something like ten years now. And that was a one time thing, I walked 3/4ths of a mile and spent an August night under the stars on the deck of the infamous “Cabin Where No One Can Hear You Scream”. That didn’t turn out real well, the pain wasn’t worth the small pleasure I got from strapping on a pack. That wasn’t long before I had my first back surgery in 2015, and I travelled all of 3 miles with a pack on.
I wasn’t exactly staying in good shape then, and I can’t say my conditioning has really improved today. I’ve been suffering from intractable back pain since the 1990’s. I tried so many different things to relieve the pain, and nothing really worked.
The truth? After having emergency surgery to remove infected tissue (MRSA) that developed as a result of my second back surgery, I thought my days of camping were over. Forget car camping, forget backpacking, or slackpacking, or anything that required me to walk more than a hundred yards, stick a fork in me.
It was grim. I had no idea how grim. After emergency surgery my surgeon walked up to my bed and said, “Congratulations Mr. Monster, you made it through, you have survived the surgery and now have a 90% chance of survival.” I asked what my chances of survival were before the surgery? He just looked at me and shook his head back and forth, “Not real good, but we’re past that now…”
Then I had a heart attack. It was a big one I’m told. There’s an entire story to be told about getting to the hospital, it ended up a farce. I also know what it’s like to step out of a car and leave all of your loved ones behind. My heart attack came at the height of the first wave of the COVID epidemic.
I have seven stents around my heart, and I went through it all alone. No one was allowed with me in the hospital, phone calls to girl were all I had…
I’m thinking that’s a pretty good summation of the physical reasons behind why I will never backpack again. Even slackpacking may prove to be beyond my new reach, I just don’t know. I’m pretty decrepit some days. But, slackpacking offers the best hope of me seeing anything other than purely handicap accessible sights.
There are things in life worth fighting for, and getting to hike more than my own street is one of them…
