Don’t expect any posts this week. I’m going to be on vacation, backpacking and hiking up on Isle Royale. I’ll leave with a quote from John Muir:

Hiking? I don’t like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not hike! Do you know the origin of that word ’saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, “A la sainte terre“. “To the Holy Land.” And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not ‘hike’ through them.

Wander a whole summer if you can. Thousands of God’s blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted. If you are business-tangled and so burdened by duty that only weeks can be got out of the heavy laden year, give a month at least. The time will not be taken from the sum of life. Instead of shortening, it will indefinitely lengthen it and make you truly immortal.

Badger Blues will be back next week, hopefully with an essay on foreign policy and Jean-Luc Picard Democrats.

Posted by Ben Brothers at 12:33 pm, 21 August 2005 and filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.