How the PCT Made Me an Accidental Modern Transcendentalist (and why you might care)

PCT photo courtesy of my friend Adam Gaston

So, I accidentally became a transcendentalist on the Pacific Crest Trail. If you don’t know what a transcendentalist is, that’s fine. I didn’t either at the time. But after five months of walking and living outside, something in me shifted. I wrote about a lot of what I learned in The Dirtbag’s Guide to Life. I didn’t realize it until this year, when I’ve been sifting through the old masters (Thoreau, Emerson, Muir and Fuller), but if you’ve read it, The Dirtbag’s Guide was basically a unintentional transcendentalist manifesto. (Shout out to our old friend, literature prof Ellen Bayer for pointing this out straight away, even if it took me years to dig in to what she meant.) 

This post is an early hashing out of ideas that I’m working on for my next book–that the long trails are transcendentalist pilgrimages (and that matters for reasons that no one has ever really stated). I put it together partly to engage in a transcendentalist strategy: writing in order to distill the truth from my own thoughts. More importantly though, it’s for you. Maybe you feel like you need a new way to live in this mad, mad world, but don’t want to suffer in the woods for half a year? That’s fine. Maybe this post will help.

What Happened Out There

In very short, what happened on the PCT is that I lived five months outside, mostly just walking. I read some. I journaled some. Angel and I had long, meaningful conversations with other weirdos that helped us understand what’s important in life. There was no internet. We processed a lot of grief and shock when my dad died midway through our hike. When we came home, we made changes to our life and have never really gone back to normal.

In the process, I was absorbed into a new way of living grounded in nature, creating things, simplicity, and actual human connection. It felt ancient and modern at the same time. And it turns out that I’d stumbled, basically, into the 200 year old philosophy of transcendentalism.

What Even Is Transcendentalism?

Transcendentalism was a chaotic little philosophical/spiritual/artistic movement that came out of Concord, Massachusetts in the early 1800s. There were a number of people in the movement, but the core players were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller. You’ve probably heard of Thoreau’s Walden. It’s been the most enduring transcendentalist work of literature. During their own lives,  Emerson was much more influential than Thoreau, and his Nature and other essays were widely revered. For her part, Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century also gained wide readership during her own life and is considered the first major feminist work of importance in the United States. 

The philosophical side of the movement, really, is Emersonian. He was a revered thinker who outlined many of the ideas that the other members of the movement (and indeed, American thinkers up through today) would draw out and build on. He was writing initially as a religious reformer–he was a Unitarian minister trying to compete with the waves of ecstatic religion sweeping the US during the Second and Third Great Awakenings. (These waves ultimately seeded modern evangelicalism, pentecostalism, and Mormonism.) However, his ideas spread much more widely than the relative religious backwater of Unitarianism and resonated broadly with iconoclasts and reformers seeking to build a new American way of thinking after the Revolution. Transcendentalism became a way to cast off old European hierarchies and religious and political institutions that were found to be oppressive.

The movement never settled on a core set of doctrines, but rather ruminated on a number of recurring themes through a publication called The Dial, which Margaret Fuller edited, and through public speaking, articles, and essays. 

Transcendentalist Beliefs

Different people will have different takes, but in my opinion, the core unifying belief of the transcendentalists was the individual’s ability to access truth and wisdom apart from the influence of authorities. While they probably overreached at times in terms of their faith in the average human, this wasn’t a modern self-actualization message. They were trying to demonstrate how democracy could work and why old forms of authoritarianism were unjust and unnecessary. People don’t need kings or popes telling them what to do. They can figure it out on their own. Fuller in particular extended this idea to its logical conclusion, and applied it to argue for the equality of women as full, free individuals. All of them though were arguing for the dignity and capacity of the individual against the often oppressive and corrupt authority and society.

Closely aligned with this was the transcendentalist reverence for nature. They believed that time in nature is essential to individual wellbeing, and is key to the functioning of society. In Thoreau’s words, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” At times, Emerson worked this out in wonky and detached religious terms, but Thoreau was more grounded. Both believed that if a human being goes into the wild and pays attention, they’ll find deep, essential truth. If the individual doesn’t need a priest to find “god” or transcendence, it’s because they can simply go outside and find it themselves. While this belief is almost cliche these days, it represented a departure from mainstream ideas at the time, which viewed wild nature as a threat, or as a resource to be conquered and mined. The transcendentalists argued that nature was a temple, and preservation of nature was essential for human existence. 

Connected to those values, the transcendentalists also believed deeply in intuition and generativity. They saw received wisdom as less valuable than knowledge gained by experience, and as a result greatly valued the creative process that came out of the churn of individual reflection.   

And, along with all of this, they placed a strong emphasis on the importance of simplicity and solitude. It’s a common misunderstanding to see Thoreau’s Walden as some sort of anti-social radically individualist manifesto, because the common conception of the plot is “man goes into the woods, builds a cabin, lives alone for a few years, and tells everyone how to live based on his experiences.” This isn’t exactly what the book is, but there’s at least a nugget of truth there. In Thoreau’s eulogy, Emerson described him by saying “He chose to be rich by making his wants few, and supplying them himself.” That’s a more succinct way of describing what Thoreau was about. Eliminating excess, providing for yourself, and paying attention to your thoughts in nature are the real values espoused in Walden, and in transcendentalist thought more broadly. 

How the Long Trails Were Built on Transcendentalist Ideas

The PCT didn’t just randomly turn me into a transcendentalist. It was built on transcendentalist ideas.

From the earliest days transcendentalists were interested in turning their ideas into real world infrastructure. They experimented with a utopian village at Brook Farm (Nathaniel Hawthorne fictionalized his time there in The Blithedale Romance), organized public conversations, and wrestled with the political and religious implications of their beliefs. These initial experiments fizzled out, but their ideas didn’t. 

John Muir is rarely identified as a transcendentalist himself, but he should be. He was a key player in enshrining their ideas in the American psyche and infrastructure. He didn’t move in the same circles in Concord, but he was well aware of the movement and worshipped both Emerson and Thoreau, to the point that he kept photos of them on his mantle throughout his life. He considered an encounter with Emerson at Yosemite as one of his core experiences. Muir lobbied for the protection of Yosemite and other public lands on the basis of transcendentalist ideals about the role of nature as temple, and as a crucial asset for human wellbeing. It worked, the ideas spread, and the federal government, particularly under Teddy Roosevelt, took on a campaign to protect massive tracts of public land.  

A regional planner looking at uses for that new, protected wilderness, in the 1920s Benton Mackaye came up with the idea for the Appalachian Trail. In a crazy coincidence, Mackaye grew up just a few miles from Walden Pond, and like Muir, he revered Thoreau and cherished his copy of Walden. He sought to put its principles into place through built environment, and arriving at just the right moment in history, he managed to spearhead the 2000 mile trail project to completion in just 16 years, by 1937. His success in establishing the AT inspired Clinton Clarke and the core group of people who began pushing for the construction of the Pacific Crest Trail in the 1930s, and the two trails formed the foundation of the modern long trail movement. 

All had a similar set of beliefs about the role and value of nature, and the reasons people should spend time in the wilderness. Carrying forward the transcendentalist gospel (sometimes unconsciously), they believed that going into the woods for extended periods of time was essential to human wellbeing, and would be a source of strength and enlightenment. Later in his life, Mackaye described in very transcendentalist terms the function of a long trail:

“The ultimate purpose? There are three things: 1) to walk; 2) to see; 3) to see what you see.”

The long trails were envisioned as corridors connecting sacred spaces: a string of wild temples, and a path back to sanity.

The Thru-Hike as a Modern Transcendentalist Pilgrimage

As far as we know, the founders never imagined thru-hikers (even though Mackaye was aware of them by the time he died in 1975), but in retrospect we were probably an inevitable byproduct of the long trails’ history, philosophy, and layout. “If you build it, they will come–especially if you deeply engrain within them the likelihood of transformation.” 

In fact, a thru-hike is the perfect place to practice what the transcendentalists prescribed based on their stated values. Transcendentalists didn’t create a new religion, per se, but they did provide a roadmap for how to access meaning and spiritual experiences outside of organized religion. 

A thru-hike on the long trails are a crash course in those principles. 

What are the practices they encouraged? 

1. Contemplation. In short, this means paying attention and thinking deeply. Because of their faith in both nature and the human spirit, the transcendentalists encouraged deep reflection both on internal feelings and external observations of the world around you. Want to find transcendence? Just pay attention. This is what Thoreau and Muir were masterful at. 

2. Time outside. The key place the transcendentalists said you could find truth? In the natural world. So, of course, a key practice was simply being outside. Going outside was seen as an act of rebellion and coming home in opposition to industrial society, but also a spiritual pursuit. 

3. If there’s a key “spiritual discipline” which facilitates the sort of contemplation the transcendentalists were on about, it’s walking outside. One of Thoreau’s best known essays was simply called “Walking,” and this quote is representative: “We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only, as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.” 

4. Simplicity. . "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail." As Thoreau suggested in Walden, a good life doesn’t require much. Life is full of distractions from what matters. It’s better to be intentional and avoid them.

5. Solitude. Walden was a prototype for the thru-hiking life. Go spend time as close to nature as possible, and only go into civilization when you need to. It’s not about being away from other people as much as being in a more natural state of human existence.

6. Conversely though, also pursue relationships. “Friendship” was a major theme in the writing and thought of both Thoreau and Emerson, but Fuller was the mastermind here. She presented conversation between equals as a generative spiritual discipline that could lead people to higher truths than individual reflection. As a result, she organized talks and gatherings, and was radical in including women in this. “I would have every woman understand that she may find herself and become complete, through the communion of thought and action, with others; that conversation is the dialogue through which her soul may be expressed and perfected.” 

7. Similarly, the transcendentalists promoted reading broadly. They drew on wide traditions from German philosophy to Native American traditions, and saw growth in knowledge as a process of reading broadly and testing what you encountered against what you already know and feel. They saw reading as a way to extend private conversations to public spheres, and treated their journal The Dial as a way to carry their gatherings in Concord to a wider audience. 

8. Creative expression as spiritual work. In a similar spirit, the transcendentalists all treated creative expression—particularly writing–as spiritual work. They treated journalling as a way to hone in on inner truths and a way to distill thoughts. As a result, both Emerson and Thoreau left behind millions of words of unpublished material at their deaths. Fuller, similarly, saw writing as a key liberating act and one of the core ways that she as a woman could have a voice in the larger societal conversation.

Given those practices, it’s easy enough to see that a thru-hike is essentially a crash course in transcendentalism. On a long hike, there’s nothing really to do but walk, think, talk, read, and journal outside. Maybe take a few photos, or sketch a few drawings. You spend a lot of time in your own head, and in deep conversation with new people with similar values and interesting experiences. It’s five or six months spent doing exactly what the transcendentalists believed would make you free, human, and enlightened. In my experience, it works.

If you like this article, check out The Dirtbag's Guide to Life, an unintentional guide for accidental modern transcendentalists.