Jeff Darren Muse

Either Jump the Log or Not

Featured in Dear Park Ranger: Essays on Manhood, Restlessness, and the Geography of Hope

“Hoosier” praises a sweaty, storm-soaked weekend with my oldest nephew, a thru-hiker on the Appalachian Trail (AT). An excerpt:

“Only days before I picked him up, Henry had graduated from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, and his texts along the AT had carried me back to my own youth, my first summer out of DePauw when I worked at a YMCA camp on the Flat Rock River, southeast of Indianapolis. I wore hiking boots and cargo shorts and tied a red bandana around my head, whatever I thought people were supposed to wear as environmental educators, a job that chose me as much as I chose it. And whenever I broke away from the kids, I buried my nose in books like John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams. I pictured myself on a trail in some faraway unknown, and began making plans. I began working up the courage to believe the story I was telling myself—a story I’m still telling myself, you can bet. And I bet it’s the same story Henry is starting to tell himself: ‘The mountains are calling and I must go.’

“John Muir wrote that, but you get my point. This myth making, this restlessness, this primordial itch lies inside you, and you don’t know if it awakens with a book, a felled suburban woods, or your first hard look in the mirror as part of a broken family, and you can only scratch that itch—itchy as all get-out—on the go. You start figuring out who you are and where you are are practically one and the same, and you’re in your twenties, feeling that first hint of numbness, and you know the time has come: either jump the log or not.”

The “log”? That’s a reference to the Indiana State Seal, discussed earlier in the essay. The seal depicts “civilization subduing the wilderness” as a fleeing bison leaps over a felled tree. I identify with the escapee. Does Henry?

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