A Dream Deferred

The dream was born in the fall of 2008. It was a year after “Into the Wild,” directed by Sean Penn, came out on DVD. We were still renting movies via the mail through Netflix in those days. My roommate and I settled in for a lazy night of watching films we had missed, which is something we often did in those days when money was a little tight.

After escaping Atlanta, we see Alexander Supertramp in Northern California running along a downed tree on the Pacific Crest Trail. At that moment in time in the comfort of my living room, this twenty-something-year-old kid from Oklahoma didn’t know anything about the PCT. I just knew I was hungry for adventure and I needed something more than an 8 to 5 job to feed my appetite.

In the days that followed our viewing of the film, we began making plans for what we were calling the “Epic Journey.” Our adventure would consist of hitting the open road, backpacking through the Smoky Mountains, sightseeing around Washington D.C., and finally getting ourselves lost under the bright lights of New York. For months, we prepared, planned, and saved. Then, our journey came and went. With it, I was supposed to return to my normal life. Life demanded I find satisfaction in the expected. Life screamed that my two weeks of vacation a year be enough. It wasn’t. Not even close. That trip taught me to reject the tyranny of the expected.