Essay On My First Walk Into The Wild

The idea of being lost in a place in which you don’t speak the language, in which you have never been, and in which you do not have a cell phone plan has a certain terrifying romanticism to it. This was its own kind of wild in that there were consequences to getting lost and it was probably dangerous but I, ever the ebullient if a little naive student of Krakauer and Thorough, reveled in it. I decided to take this arena of new experiences and play on hard; I was going to find the Dragon’s Back in Shek-O, Hong Kong, and I was going to hike it unaccompanied and without a map or a phone to undo any mistakes I made along the way. As the story goes, “I now walk into the wild.” This was, of course, not nearly as romantic a notion as I made it out to be as I sat on the subway which had, only days before, been set on fire with both of my roommates onboard. It was January of 2017; being an American abroad was suddenly controversial. Complete strangers wanted to know for whom I voted for before they asked my name. I claimed to be exploring this Sunday morning after the Chinese New Year festivities, but really I was escaping back to what felt natural.
This study abroad had been planned months before the first threatening visitor to my doorstep, yelling obscenities about how “we own this

The crest was just ahead now, dirt was at last beneath my tired sneakers. My calves were burning and the thin, carbon heavy air was thick in my lungs. Turning to reflect on the land far below from whence I’d com, I saw to my surprise that I was looking down upon a city. The tops of skyscrapers dwindled in the distance, peculiar looking in three point perspective. I ruminated on how difficult it was to draw that way, realizing that this is probably because the eye was not used to seeing things as I now saw