The Answer is Not a Hut in the Woods

Source: The Answer is Not a Hut in the Woods, exurb2a, 46:26, uploaded 2023-02-22, category Other / Unclear, playlist index 1413.

exurb2a begins with the first sentence of Anna Karenina: happy families resemble one another, whilst unhappy families become unhappy in their own way. He hears a general truth in the line. Happiness feels simple whilst it is happening, and its cause often seems easy to name. Sadness can feel like a private invention, especially when the person experiencing it cannot explain why they feel wrong. The video follows one such unexplained sadness through two attempts to escape into the wilderness, then returns to the people who had been quietly present all along.

The first wilderness fantasy

At twenty-one, exurb2a had just read the writers he imagined would define his twenties: Margaret Atwood, Arthur C. Clarke, Gabriel García Márquez, Virginia Woolf, and Hunter S. Thompson. The reading brought an old ambition into focus. Since he was thirteen, he had wanted to write one perfect piece, something that would prove he was capable of making a beautiful thing. The ambition had the scale of an unexplored mountain or the Mariana Trench, although he had also begun to notice that he was poor at writing and had no clear alternative life in mind.

A housemate showed him Into the Wild, the film about Christopher McCandless. He remembers the wilderness more clearly than McCandless’s death in Alaska, and quickly turns that image into a private diagnosis. Society has no place for him. Nature will remove the pressure. Solitude will make him happy, perhaps forever. A few months later he spends the remains of his student loan on a flight to New Zealand, where he volunteers on farms on the South Island through WWOOF.

Most of the farms are kind and varied. The first one is run by a British couple who have moved into the middle of nowhere to escape their problems and have carried the problems with them. Their arguments, their apocalyptic agricultural theories, and their suspicion of his kindness towards the animals turn the farm into a small lesson in the limits of geography. When the couple objects to an email he writes to his parents because it is “anti-isolationist”, he negotiates his departure. Before he leaves, they let him plant the flower bulbs. He spends four hours arranging them into obscene words, then imagines the couple discovering the message as the flowers push through the soil.

The experience does give him one useful contact. The couple pass along the number of a woman who owns a yurt several hundred miles away. The yurt is far from the nearest town, which makes it look like the wilderness he has been searching for. He buys a pile of books, moves in, and spends weeks reading and writing in the nude. Candlelit evenings lead to days at the page. He also discovers how easily a writer imitates whatever he has read most recently. A Hemingway week fills the landscape with bullfighting and whisky. A Jane Austen week makes the countryside “positively refugent”, whilst his lack of fibre creates a separate bodily crisis.

After a few months, the yurt loses its charge. The promised wilderness euphoria never arrives. He still feels uncertain about writing, and he misses people. The woman who rents him the yurt becomes a friend. She is around his mother’s age, and he suspects that she sees a surrogate son in him. When he tells her what started the crisis, she listens and says that he will work it out, although it will take time and he must accept that. He rejects the advice because he is twenty-one and knows better.

In town he finds a book about the Appalachian Trail. Its length, maintenance, and occasional proximity to towns make it seem like a manageable version of the life he wants. He cannot yet travel to America, so he tries hiking in New Zealand instead. When he leaves the yurt, he and his landlady cry at the bus stop. He realises that the friendship he formed whilst trying to become completely alone was the best part of the project, although the real meaning of that fact takes years to arrive. The hike itself fails. He gets lost, lets rain into his tent, rubs his feet raw, and continues until his body gives up.

Ten years pass. Writing becomes his job, and the wilderness fantasy recedes into the forests he can enter on the page. Then he finishes a book about ocelots and breaks down again. He has treated an unfinishable book as a test of his worth, sleeping on soundproofing foam in the writing room because sleeping elsewhere feels like a failure to work. When the book is finally done, he cannot write another word or enjoy the work that pays his rent. His imagination and sense of purpose do not answer reason. His self-worth falls with his ability to play, and the daydreams that once made the world bearable seem to have left him.

An eye problem adds age to the panic. On his thirty-second birthday, an optometrist tells him that the eye is healthy and jokes that he is getting old. A friend sees how badly work has taken over his life and tells him to do something else before he damages himself. The friend means a weekend at the beach. Exurb2a hears the old wilderness fantasy and decides to walk the Appalachian Trail without a laptop, pen, or paper. The trip will cost less than staying at home because it removes rent and uses gear he already owns. He plans a holiday that secretly serves the same purpose as work: he will keep walking until he feels better and can write again.

A life carried in a backpack

The trail runs through fourteen states and climbs a total elevation that exurb2a compares with climbing Everest sixteen times. He flies to Atlanta, lays food, long underwear, and toilet paper across a hotel bed, and understands that his life will fit in a backpack for a while. At Amicalola Falls State Park, the rangers weigh the pack at thirty pounds. The first eight miles form an approach trail, and its steepness immediately exposes the difference between training with sandwiches and coffee near his flat and carrying everything he owns up a mountain.

The first day ends at a campsite. He struggles with the groundsheet and tent whilst the other hikers seem to know what they are doing, then sleeps better than he has in years. The trail gives him a small set of repeated tasks: wake, make coffee, pack each object into its own pocket, filter water, walk, eat noodles, read, and sleep. He had expected to give up cigarettes and beer. Coffee remains essential. The order of the backpack brings a calm that his ordinary life, with its clutter and competing demands, rarely provides.

The woods also restore reading. At night, wearing long underwear and a head torch in the cold Georgia weather, he reads Steinbeck, M. John Harrison, A Fire Upon the Deep, a history of nautical clocks, and David Thorne’s work. Books that he had abandoned become absorbing again because the forest supplies almost no other entertainment. A sleeping bag provides a strange primitive safety. Owls, wind, and animals moving near the tent make the night loud, yet the small enclosure feels protective enough.

He expects contact with other hikers to be difficult. Meeting a stranger in ordinary life requires working out what the encounter means and what each person wants. On the trail, everyone already shares a setting, a direction, and a reason for being there. Conversation becomes immediate. After a week, the walking produces a kind of mental quiet. Daydreams, old friendships, regrets, and forgotten arguments rise into view. The same person who went to New Zealand ten years earlier appears again, still lost and still choosing isolation whenever he cannot think of another response.

The important discovery concerns dead ends. The book that exhausted him had promised a final answer. If he could write it truthfully enough, perhaps he would wake up repaired and become a proper person. The trail makes the pressure visible. He had taken the one thing he loved and asked it to rescue him, prove his worth, and provide a permanent explanation. Ursula K. Le Guin’s line about writing gives him a better measure: the reward of writing is freedom, rather than profit. He also sees the strange luck of having a calling at all, even when it sends him into self-pity and exhaustion. Daydreaming had been a form of play before he made it carry his ego.

The temporary society of the trail

The trail is full of people whose private logic becomes visible through small acts. One hiker wears a kilt and congratulates him at a mountain summit whilst urinating with his other hand. A Californian friend suggests getting stoned before breakfast, then disappears into a shelter with a new group and a bag of marshmallows. An artist from New York walks with him for several days, leaves for town, and turns up again during a snowstorm to brush snow from his tent. Their reunion becomes a dance in the cold because the trail has removed most of the other available entertainment.

Deprivation changes the scale of pleasure. A stray Oreo becomes a banquet. A few minutes of battery left for a chess game can fill an evening. Threading his laces through small holes at the top of his shoes stops his blisters, which feels like a scientific breakthrough after weeks of pain. Hikers call another form of pleasure “trail magic”. Former hikers and kind strangers set up tables with coffee, doughnuts, biscuits, and whatever a tired person has been imagining. Older men tease him about the Boston Tea Party, then promise him a beer at the next campsite. One of them walks several kilometres back to his truck and returns with an IPA. It becomes the best beer of his life because the beer carries the effort of the person who brought it.

The same shared setting makes brief friendships unusually close. At a stream, he meets a reader and starts talking about David Graeber. Three hours pass before either of them notices. The group moves to a fire where two more hikers join, each quietly assessing whether the others might be dangerous. The dark closes around the small orange space of the campfire, leaving a few strangers with only one another to trust. These connections deepen quickly and dissolve without resentment when the walkers take different routes or stop for the night.

The trail has dangers and failures. A bear moves around his tent one night. On another day, he rushes, mistakes peeled bark for a white trail blaze, and walks for miles before the path disappears. His phone battery has died, retracing his steps does not work, and twenty minutes of panic stretches into an imagined newspaper headline about an idiotic British skeleton. He chooses a hill that points roughly north, climbs it, and finds the trail again. The mistake changes his respect for people who get lost. The woods had felt large before, although they still seemed to contain a direction. Once he loses that direction, the same size becomes frightening.

The trail’s beauty does some work that the hut never could. Its trees, ridges, and distant valleys make his own life feel small without making it meaningless. He thinks about people he has neglected and about the amount of stress he has created for himself. The towns between sections provide a second kind of pleasure: a bed, extra fries, a supermarket full of beer, and a candy aisle worth studying. He drinks several nine-percent beers in a hiker town, forgets his hotel room number, argues with the receptionist, and then discovers that he has been staying at a different hotel.

Town and trail form a rhythm. Hiker towns feel like an imposter reality after a few days in the woods, yet the woods begin to feel incomplete after enough time. The trail’s culture of self-sufficiency becomes especially attractive after two hundred miles. People repair what they own, know how to remove ticks and hang bear bags, and seem able to build a complicated device from a rubber band and a thumbtack. Exurb2a enjoys the days when he carries himself forward on his own feet, learns the shape of poison ivy, and takes some responsibility for remaining alive.

He leaves before reaching the end. A family member has died, and a war is taking place close to where he now lives. Remaining in the woods begins to look like an evasion of his life. Before flying home, he visits the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Alabama, where he sees Saturn V rockets, spacesuits, and engineers who worked on Apollo. One engineer has worked with a moon-walking astronaut. When asked what the astronaut was like, the engineer studies the rocket above him and answers that he was a total bastard. The bluntness delights him.

Coming home without a revelation

Back in Europe, he leaves the hiking equipment in his corridor so that he will keep tripping over it and remember the trail. He follows the blogs of friends who continue walking. The strange thing is that the wilderness fantasy has disappeared. He has returned without a grand epiphany, a new book, or a rush to his desk. He is still himself. The difference is that he feels better.

A teenage boy asks him why he is on the trail. Exurb2a says that he is unsure. The boy rolls his eyes and observes that many people are trying to find themselves. Exurb2a resists the judgement because he has carried his entire life through the woods, slept in the snow, and dealt with animals trying to steal his food. Then he accepts that the boy is right. The trail attracts people between lives, including recent graduates and people who have left careers. Others simply like walking and quiet. The setting gives people room to think, although it gives no promise of a revelation.

Months after returning, a friend asks why he went into the woods. The exchange reduces the elaborate story to a problem with inspiration. He could not control when inspiration arrived, and the friend asks whether he would want to control it. The answer resolves the problem. Inspiration would lose its character if he could summon it on command. A life built around writing includes the quiet months in which imagination goes dormant. During those months, the work consists of waiting, remembering that the silence is temporary, and allowing the mind to recover from demands it could not meet.

That night he opens the folder of story ideas that had looked worthless during the breakdown. They are weak in places, yet they are not the disasters he had imagined. The ordinary process has continued. He sees that he was supposed to remain at home, in Bulgaria, with his friends and his imperfect life. The backpack had held his whole life for a time, although it had never held the answer.

The people who remain in the background

Exurb2a compares his response to difficulty with a cat’s. Dogs ask for help when they are sick. Cats hide, withdraw, and sometimes leave the house when they think they are dying. He retreats from the world when a problem grows inside it, as if he could debug code by throwing the computer out of the window and joining a circus. The woods then become a tool for solving a private problem, although the trees have their own existence and owe him no solution.

Christopher McCandless supplies the final reversal. The film that first encouraged the wilderness fantasy also contains the answer. In McCandless’s copy of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, he had written that “happiness is only real when shared”. Exurb2a had treated solitude as a route towards an explanation of himself. The line points towards friends, family, and the ordinary dependence that isolation tries to conceal.

The conclusion keeps room for people who love hiking, outdoor life, solitude, or a remote home. A meadow can be a good place to visit. The problem arises when someone who feels ashamed, depressed, or lost uses the woods to avoid telling anyone what is happening. His friends later ask why he did not tell them about the breakdown around the ocelot book. They might not have fixed it, although their jokes and attention could have stopped it growing in private.

The strangest adventure, in this account, happens inside a person. A person notices parts of themselves they have ignored, leaves behind habits they dislike, and keeps becoming someone new through ordinary decisions. The self has no final form that can be reached and defended. Jerome K. Jerome’s Paul Kelver supplies the closing image: a person crosses a bridge, looks back, and sees the earlier self as though it still stood there. The passage gives change a physical shape without turning it into a final answer.

Life continues through new problems, new people, and temporary theories that later fail. Exurb2a gives up the hope of a complete theory of himself and the world. The available choice concerns how to meet the next period of uncertainty. Friends make the walk possible. People emerge from dark periods with help from those who have stayed near them, often without knowing how much their quiet presence mattered. The final hope is modest. We keep walking, get lost, regroup, and remain together long enough to become someone else.

Limits

This note follows exurb2a’s autobiographical account and its interpretation of Into the Wild, Christopher McCandless, Ursula K. Le Guin, and the other works named in the video. The video gives no bibliography, chapters, or supporting research for its biographical details, quotations, or account of the Appalachian Trail. The line attributed to McCandless is presented as a note in his copy of Doctor Zhivago, and the closing passage is attributed to Jerome K. Jerome’s Paul Kelver; both attributions remain part of the video’s evidence rather than independently checked citations here.

The argument concerns one person’s experience of depression, creative exhaustion, solitude, and friendship. The trail does not function as a treatment recommendation, and the story cannot establish that isolation or outdoor travel will help another person. Its claim is narrower. A change of place can interrupt a pattern, while shame and self-isolation can keep the underlying problem out of reach of the people who might help.

Further reading / references

• Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, whose opening sentence supplies the video’s first distinction between shared happiness and private unhappiness.
• Into the Wild, the film about Christopher McCandless that sends exurb2a towards the first New Zealand wilderness fantasy.
• Ursula K. Le Guin, whose writing on the freedom of writing appears during the Appalachian Trail section.
• Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, the book in which the video says McCandless wrote that happiness is real when shared.
• Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat and Paul Kelver, including the passage used near the end of the video.