Trekking With Strangers

Footnotes ...

Our trek guide didn't start with a route map, he started with a thread.

Come here, he said pointing to one filament of spiderweb catching the morning light. Don't move, let your eyes adjust. Right away, the single line revealed its geometry: anchor, bridge, spiral—the work of an experienced architect. A little later he pointed to a smudge on bark most of us would've simply ignored. Lichens, he said. If you see them, you're in an unpolluted place.

One way to think about trekking is that it is a practice of attention disguised as a long walk. The uneven ground beneath our feet becomes a teacher, demanding we stay present—not daydream while walking, but read each surface. We place a foot, feel the texture—loose stones, weathered rock, the odd root sticking out, slippery moss—accept each slope's specific challenge. Our balance becomes our compass, our breath our metronome, our body learning the terrain.

Was Grant on the trek with me?

Noticing

Trekking¹ restores our five senses to factory settings—no, better than factory: to natural settings. Smell sharpens after the first rain: the clean scent rising from the parched earth, oxygen-rich forest air, the funk of healthy soil. Sound relocates entirely: no longer the city's white noise but the percussion of leaf against bark, rustling wind, gurgling streams. Sight multitasks: tracking the next safe footfall while simultaneously peeking at the middle distance where light pools between trees. Touch becomes constant negotiation: root, stone, the surprising give of forest floor. Even taste upgrades: water after an hour of honest climbing arrives in our mouth as something entirely different from what we left camp with—sweeter, cooler, more satisfying.

Lichens aren't one thing; they are a partnership—a fungus giving shelter and structure to an algae making food from light. It's a sight so unshowy we overlook it, yet it represents something profound about how life actually works. Unlike human evolution, which eliminated its prior ancestors, plant evolution accumulates. The forest around us still contains its entire history: ancient blue-green algae, the first tentative partnerships between fungi and roots, every successful collaboration that followed. What looks like a simple green canopy is actually millions of years of retained wisdom—every ancestor still present, still contributing. Perhaps this is why forests have such quiet staying power. They don't discard; they integrate.

Moving

Five kilometers in, something shifts. The mental chatter—our inbox, our deadlines, our persistent sense of falling behind—simply drops away like a burden we didn't realize we were carrying. The body assumes command: legs initiate, lungs respond, and the chattering mind, momentarily displaced from its executive role, agrees to follow. Thoreau understood this handoff: Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow. Trekking routes cognition through calves, dissolves our identity into something more fundamental. We are no longer a role in an organization or a parent or a child; we're bipedal creatures moving through a habitat at precisely the speed our body can sustain and enjoy.

Spiders carry a lesson in this rhythm. A smart spider tightens and adjusts a web the way a guitarist tunes for a note: pull, test, adjust, repeat. No hurry. The day frays; the spider repairs. That's the job. On a trek, the day frays too. We adjust our expectations, our pacing, our temper. That constant calibration is the work.

Belonging

Termite mounds look like miniature cathedrals, but to my surprise, most of its architecture is actually underground—ventilated chambers, fungus gardens, and highways we never see. At the center, a queen coordinates this complex society through chemical signals, with specialized workers maintaining the structure and soldiers guarding the colony.

Somehow our trekking group found its own organic rhythm without a central command. We started as strangers with different expectations but became something more intimate through a thousand micro-courtesies: the pause at a river crossing, the called warning about loose stones, the way someone waited at each ridge. Somewhere between the second water break and the river crossing, we stopped being strangers and became something we could feel but couldn't quite name—a walking tribe.

Unlike those termites, we were building something temporary through voluntary cooperation—a social organism that knows how to move as one body through unfamiliar terrain.

Two children were part of our group—bundles of pure kinetic joy who approached every stream crossing like they were in Mowgli's backyard, every viewpoint like they'd discovered it first. Watching them, something shifted in the rest of us. Adults who had started as polite strangers began moving differently—someone always nearby to steady a small hand on tricky rocks, conversations flowing around their endless questions about crabs or bird calls. The children didn't just join our group; they catalyzed it, the same way enzymes enable reactions that wouldn't happen otherwise.

Their presence reminded us that wonder isn't work—it's our natural state when we stop being self-conscious and start paying attention.

The forest asks us to banish the ubiquitous screen temporarily—no filter needed between us and what's actually there. We pause at a plateau, and senses flood the vacant space where notifications used to ping: the dry percussion of seedpods rattling in their husks; a column of cooler air rushing down from some hidden ravine; the faint sweetness that rises when we crush a handful of fresh leaves. Nothing dramatic happens, yet everything shifts. Wonder simply waits for our attention.

Becoming

Walking for an extended time dissolves identity into embodiment. The forest does not care who we are; what matters is how we move—how gently we place a boot, how readily we pause for someone else to catch their breath. That small social physics is part of the ecosystem too. We think of ecology as plants, animals, climate. Add courtesy; add pacing; add a habit of looking back.

A well trodden path is a marker the landscape keeps because many feet cared enough to repeat it. Every step is a small vote: this way matters. Walking with strangers is consent in motion—we trust the person ahead to mind the slick stone; we become, for the person behind, a human handrail with a beating heart. At some point we realize we're not in nature; we are part of it. Carbon on loan; water on the move; breath on a lease. The forest doesn't become ours; we become the forest's for as long as we walk attentively.

Attention, once tuned, is portable. So is humility. So is the knowledge that cooperation—between species or between walkers—is not a moral requirement but quite simply, how anything gets done.

Afterwards

I came home without souvenirs but with upgraded software: a different quality of attention. Now, walking through the nature reserve nearby, I notice the lichens everywhere and know them to be indicators of good air quality and not bad bark disease. I recognize the dark posy and purple duke butterflies, I hear birdsong more easily, catch the different scents carried by the breeze, high-five trees to feel their texture and to receive their blessings.

Nature taught me that nothing spectacular has to announce itself. The most profound connections—between fungus and algae, between species and strangers, between who we were and what we're becoming—happen in the spaces between our rushed intentions.

All I needed was a willingness to slow down enough to see the threads that were always there, holding everything together.

1. Here’s a previous post with my first impressions from the same trek, completed one month ago.

Postcards From Mowgli's Backyard