The Weight of Wonder

It’s nearly one in the morning, and somehow I’m still trying to figure out Day 5.

I finally lean back and look around my room. My hiking shoes are waiting on the floor with socks tucked inside them, piles of clothes have slowly taken over my bed, my rain jacket is draped over the corner because I still haven’t decided whether it belongs in my backpack or my suitcase, and camera batteries blink quietly from the dresser. The pages of my itinerary are scattered across the floor around me, wrinkled from being picked up, set back down, turned back and forth, and rearranged so many times over the last few months that they no longer lie flat.

Day 5 has become the day that refuses to cooperate. Every time I think I’ve finally pieced it together, something changes. A trail closes, a road washes out, the tide shifts, or I stumble across another place that looks too incredible to pass up. Before long I’m back on the floor again, moving pages around and trying to make everything fit.

Strangely enough, I don’t mind any of it.

Somewhere between researching tide charts, rerouting around mudslides, checking trail closures, and rebuilding entire days, this stopped feeling like planning a vacation. It became something I quietly poured pieces of myself into. Every revision made it feel a little more real, like I was slowly getting to know a place I’d dreamed about for years but had never actually seen.

People keep reminding me that this trip isn’t about checking every hike off a list. They tell me I can turn around if my body tells me to, skip a trail, or spend an afternoon beside a river instead of climbing to another overlook. I know they’re right, but there is still a part of me that hasn’t learned how to believe that finishing isn’t what gives something its value.

It reminds me so much of college. Once I commit to something, I don’t simply make a plan. I start living inside it. I memorize it, build my days around it, and before long the outcome feels inseparable from the effort I’ve poured into it. After months of dreaming about this trip, walking away before the picture in my head is complete doesn’t feel like flexibility. It feels like leaving something unfinished that I’ve been carrying for a very long time and that feels like failure.

That’s probably why this has caught me so off guard. I’ve spent months adjusting the trip every time the landscape changed, but I can’t rearrange my own body with the same confidence. There isn’t another route around fatigue. There isn’t a backup trail when pain decides to show up. No amount of planning can tell me whether the version of me standing beneath those towering cedars will be the same one who imagined them from my bedroom floor.

I don’t know if I’ll hike every mile I’ve planned. I don’t know if there will be a moment when my body quietly says, that’s enough, while every other part of me begs for one more switchback, one more waterfall, one more overlook. I don’t know if I’ll have to turn around before reaching a place I’ve spent months imagining, and I think that’s the uncertainty I’ve been carrying all along.

Because somewhere inside me is still the little girl who learned that finishing was what made something worthwhile. She doesn’t care that my adult brain understands mountains aren’t grading me, bodies don’t always cooperate, and missing one trail won’t erase everything else I’ll experience. She only remembers what disappointment feels like. Every unfinished plan seems to wake up the ones that came before it until one missed hike somehow carries the weight of every other time life unfolded differently than I’d worked so hard for it to.

Lately I’ve caught myself wondering not whether I’ll be disappointed if I miss a hike, but whether I’ll push so hard to keep a promise I made to myself months ago that I’ll end up sitting in an emergency room somewhere far from home. Even writing those words makes me stop because I honestly don’t know what I’d do in that moment. I’d like to believe I’d listen to my body. I also know how heavy turning around has always felt.

And yet, when I close my eyes, none of the first images that come to me are about mileage. I picture stepping beneath trees so tall I’ll have to lean my head back until they disappear into the sky. I wonder if the air will really smell the way I’ve imagined for years, rich with cedar, damp earth, rain-soaked moss, and a hint of salt carried inland from the Pacific. I can almost feel my hand brushing across moss so thick it looks more like velvet than something growing on wood. I imagine hearing a waterfall long before it comes into view, the sound echoing through the forest until the mist settles on my face. I picture standing there long enough for everything else to become quiet, then kneeling beside a tide pool for the first time and watching sea stars cling to rocks that have welcomed the ocean twice a day for thousands of years.

The truth is, I’ve dreamed about standing in those forests for nearly half of my life. Long before I knew which trails I’d hike or where I’d stay, I just wanted to be there. To breathe that air. To look up into those trees. To stand in a place I’d only ever known through photographs and documentaries and finally whisper to myself, I’m here.

That’s what I’ve been waiting for all these years. Just stepping into those forests is already everything. Everything beyond that is simply a gift.

I gather the pages into one stack, smoothing another corner that refuses to lie flat. They’ve carried months of dreaming, planning, changing, and dreaming all over again. In two nights they’ll stop being an itinerary, and whatever happens after that will become part of the story I’ve been waiting almost half my life to live.

Two nights.

That’s where I am tonight.