A Call to the Unknown — The young adult hero's journey
Backbacking trip pushes youth beyond comfort to discovery

By Ryan Donada, December 2011
Fine Arts Editor

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

— Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”

Part I: The Separation and Departure

In the coast of Some-where, Oregon, I’m holding a cardboard sign that reads “Portland,” and have my thumb sticking out on the side of the road, bedraggled from sleeping in dirt for the fourth time this week. My friend, Nick Roth, 23, is stealing energy bars at the convenience store across the highway because we have reached destitution, and because our legs and backs are numb and sore from a 15-mile trek with our 25-pound backpacks along the beach against biting gusts of wind.

“You know, after having to steal food in order to move on,” says Roth, “society isn’t the bullshit I thought it was.”

On a road to nowhere lurks a spiritual experience. We left our homes in Arizona looking for adventure, something different. So we grabbed a backpack full of necessities — clean pairs of clothes, a tent, a sleeping bag, water, a first-aid kit and a can of American Spirit tobacco — and immersed ourselves into the life of backpacking.

To Shea Smith, a PVCC student, the thought of backpacking was enticing. “ I was in a search for adventure; the excitement of getting away from regular life and putting myself out of my comfort zone,” says Smith. After graduating from Paradise Valley High School, Smith and his friend Ryan Cooper — now at Mesa Community College — left their conventional life of friends, family, work and fun for two months, heading westward.

This “call to adventure” isn’t a modern trend. The call to head off into the unknown dates back to Buddha’s journey and back to the earliest records of man. After seeing an old man, a sick man and a dead man, Buddha leaves his normal life in pursuit of a spiritual awakening.

American mythologist Joseph Campbell fits this adventure into the mythological tradition of the hero’s journey. In his highly acclaimed book “Hero With a Thousand Faces,” Campbell describes this journey in a 17-stage process that is divided into three sections: Departure (also called Separation), Initiation and Return.

"This first stage of the mythological journey—which we have designated the 'call to adventure'—signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown,” Campbell explains in his book.

PVCC faculty member, Lynn McClelland calls this a vision quest. “You go out and get some clue about who you are and what your purpose is in life,” she says. The first step for a hero is to ask, “Who are you and what do you hope to do with this time on earth?”

In our case, we weren’t content with our current lifestyles. “ It was just work, play, rest, every day,” says Roth . There was no excitement.

We were bound to the infinite grids of neighborhoods and strip malls; the blacktops that lead to fast food and parties, in putting our serial numbers into computers to begin the jobs we hated in order to spend the money we made on things we didn’t need or were addicted to, the inescapability of the social network’s “word-of-mouth” into “world-of-mouth,” the endless newsfeed displaying all the evil in men, and the vague thought in the back of our mind that one day, we are going to die — we had to get out.

We took a flight to Eugene— a flat and plain but peaceful town a few hours from Oregon’s coast. We wanted to be saturated in green — alpine plants, towering pines, grass bristling through every crack of the earth — we wanted nature.

When the plane landed and we retrieved our backpacks from the baggage claim and walked out that door, Roth and I, clenching our fists and stretching our arms to both ends of the world, released long accomplished sighs of breath as if to say, “ We made it; we did it.” We felt free; not the kind of freedom someone gets when mov ing into a first apartment, or being able to vote, or turning 21, but a freedom devoid of all the preliminaries of the entire society in which we were confined .
           
Part II: Initiation and Return

When Smith and Cooper first departed they felt helpless. “ We had to play it by ear because we didn’t know what we were doing,” Smith says. They didn’t even bring a tent or sleeping bag. Instead, their shelter consisted of a tarp and small pad s to sleep on.

The day they left their home they got to a train yard in downtown Phoenix and waited for a freight train to head west. What they thought was going to be an easy ride became a mission of infiltration and patience. “We had to dodge workers because we were afraid of what might happen if we got caught,” Smith says. With no sign of their getaway, they ended up sleeping in an alley off 7th Sreet and Van Buren Road for five hours.

When a train finally arrived and was heading in the right direction, they hopped on and two hours into the ride their freight was detached from the entire train, leaving them stranded on 56th A venue and Dynamite R oad at 3 am. After finding refuge and sleeping on a dirt lot, they took a bus later that day to the nearest train yard only to fail again. So they began their journey hitch hiking on the I-10 that would take them to Los Angeles .

“It started off pretty rough,” Smith says, “ but you break through this threshold, and after that it feels incredibly liberating and carefree.”

This experience is part of an initiation stage, where Smith and Cooper began a series of trials -and-errors. After departing from their everyday lives, abandoning the temptation of what money brings and other material things, silencing the noisy chatter of society, the sojourner walks into a zone that leads to themselves.

What a person is left to trust out there, McClelland says, is themselves, fate and their faith.

Smith and Cooper had desperate plans to camp out in California’s redwood forests. After a few days of hitching rides, they were able to get to Orick, Calif., a town known for dispersed campgrounds among redwoods. At night, they tried to start a fire, but everything flammable was wet. With no flashlight, no fire, and no tent or sleeping bag, in the middle of the forest, they became paranoid.

Smith and Cooper went through many rough days. Every night they would end up sleeping behind a building or in an alley or empty lot. After a few weeks of this type of lifestyle they became worn-out and started missing their friends and family and life at home. “But that is how it was,” Smith explains, “It would be good, and then it would be bad.”

“In a true hero’s journey, there is something the hero has to defeat; to overcome,” says McClelland. For a personal journey, McClelland adds, the “heroes”come to terms with who they are and gain self-awareness. U ltimately, they — through human experience — gain truths that harmonize their desires to return home with their new knowledge.

Out there on this journey, McClelland says, the person learns how to survive. “You are able to do a lot more than you realize,” McClelland says.

Smith was surprised about how much he learned from these experiences. “I learned a lot about myself and the importance of being self-reliant,” says Smith. He also r ealized that he had taken for granted some of the things he had back at home.

The sun is half-massed over a series of hills, casting dark shadows around the highway that slithers through the Oregon mountain range. Roth and I see the amount of headlights start to increase. We are 25-miles out from the nearest service station, sitting under a lush tree, exhausted from miles of walking and failed hitching. We don’t talk. He tosses me a bottle of water that is almost as dry as my mouth.
This is the middle of our adventure and for the first time I start to think of home and the safe feeling of being under my bed sheets after taking a hot shower. I have lost hope, and the will to move on. But it is at that moment, when the sun is almost gone, when all light is fading, that a car pulls over to the side of the road.

“Need a lift?” He says.

All of a sudden everything became beautiful. As we drove, the shimmers of the sun’s light raced through the gaps of the forest. The thin shadows of the trees passing by created tunnel vision over the road ahead.

Roth looked at me and smiled. We both knew.

“People take for granted, well, people,” Roth says reflecting back on this moment.