Journeys North by Barney Scout Mann

There are many metaphors for life:  a ship upon the open ocean; the solo flight around the world; the long walk across the land.  All are powerful and shamanistic in their own right, important as dreamscapes of our unconscious desires to pack meaning into our brief moments of existence.

Barney Scout Mann, in his book, Journeys North:  The Pacific Crest Trail (Mountaineer Books, 2020), takes us on such an expedition.  His approach is slightly different from previous memoirs of great walks.  The most famous in recent years is Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, wherein the author takes us on a deeply personal, Zen pursuit of personal enlightenment and redemption.  The originator of the genre is the great John Muir, whose journey was about nature, the world, and a human being’s place in all of it.

Mann takes a nonfiction novel approach with characters, a well-paced plot, and a final push to the climax.  His account of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) has elements of a soap opera—relationships form and fall apart; characters find themselves in jeopardy; and there is the world on the trail and the parallel universe off the trail.  The characters exchange the day-to-day grind of jobs, responsibilities, loved ones, momentary achievements and resounding disappointments for the singular focus of staying alive on the trail with blistered feet, wounds that won’t heal, aching bodies, and circumstances that push them beyond their limits.

Because he takes a novelistic approach to the story of a group of hikers traveling the 2650-mile PCT in 2007, he sets himself up as the first-person narrator.  There is some difficulty with this.  The hikers spread out along the trail, often overtaking and passing their colleagues only to have them pass ahead the next day.  It is a fluid experience.  Some take what are known as “zero days,” when hikers check into a motel for a day off to recuperate.  Others suffer injuries and must seek medical attention before returning to the trail.  Because Mann has his own experiences, and in the book also relates others’ adventures, he is more of a first-person omniscient narrator, something that does not always work.  He relies on other hikers’ online trail blogs and interviews with them that he later folds into the account.  He does a good job of setting up tension in the plot, hinting at some piece of action to come, sometimes moving back and forth in time to weave in backstory.  Still, the best parts are when he acts as a true first-person narrator with his observations and insights as he encounters people and obstacles along the trek.  He and his wife, Sandy, are the central characters that bind the entire enterprise together.  It is no wonder that hikers consider them the parents or grandparents of the experience.

Each character comes with a trail nickname.  That is how Mann becomes Scout, and his wife becomes Frodo.  The nicknames and real names were confusing at the start, and how they came to have a particular nickname felt like a joke the reader was not entirely in on, since each name comes with a story from the trail.  Because many of the nicknames are not gender-specific, this quirk took some time to define each character.  For example, one of the central characters was a young woman named Amanda, also known as Blazer.  Another named Paul was also known as Bounty Hunter.  A third, who was an accomplished opera singer, was called Figaro.  For some reason, with the trail names, I found it difficult to lock in on the characters and had to keep turning back to find where they were introduced in an attempt to cement their identities in my mind.

The book is filled with intimacies, secrets, pleas for redemption, all of which add to the novelistic approach.  Characters have epiphanies.  They suffer through the epic adventures of people on a quest, each finding his or her way up the trail, an apt metaphor for how we live.  One major plot twist comes in the last third of the book, something that alters forever how we see Mann and his wife.  I did not see it coming, and it reveals our heroes to be deeply flawed.  I kept thinking about it after I finished reading, and when I participated in an author reading online, I found myself wondering about the couple’s more than three decades of marriage.

The strength of this narrative comes from seeing the PCT as a parallel universe.  In an intensely focused, highly personal, and redemptive journey north, one sees our existence in the broader parameters of daily life.  But this is about survival in the moment, something we sometimes lose in the expanse of time.  The PCT has a beginning, middle, and end; in life, we have beginnings, middles, backtracking to begin again, endings, and then, other beginnings.  All of them parallel this one, focused hike from Mexico to Canada.  That is the value of this kind of narrative.  Life happens; we change; and then we go on.  Sometimes, we are forced back to confront our anger or our fears, and then we begin again.  In that way, Journeys North is a reflection of what it is like to test oneself over and over again, burnishing who we are, and discovering what we are to do with our lives.