Came late to this thread, hopefully BlueTrain is out there living the dream! Congrats, keep us posted!
My own crazy indulgence re: "Without a safety net" was documented back in the day on the old SNS site. Reader's Digest version:
Saskatchewan was "gridded" in one-mile squares well over 100 years ago when Euro settlers were granted the land of First Nations people for settling and farming ... that's a whole other story, and not Canada's finest moment. We still have gravelled "grid roads" across the southern part of the province, and it occurred to me (as "Nightwalker") that it might be a gnarly thing to hike one, a total of four miles square, in the dead of night, completely nude, sans backup. In today's lingo, that is 6.4 kilometres.
Succinctly put, I hid the car in a grove about 100 metres off a declining-use highway that had been reverted from asphalt back to gravel. My bathing suit went into a plastic bag, just off the road. And yes -- long story short, I did the whole square completely in the nude. I carried in my hands my car keys, a tiny flashlight, a small can of pepper spray -- and nothing else at all. On the way, two cars went by. With the first, I nearly ran naked into a porcupine at the side of the road! I also passed an abandoned farm, which proved to be exactly that, judging from the lack of ball-ripping farm dogs. There was a chorus of coyotes, the snorting of (I hope) deer, and many other things in the naked night to keep my imagination torqued.
I haven't even touched on the tactile pleasures of it all...the cool drops of scattered rain on a hot summer night, the patches of warm, black, leftover asphalt, the whiff of wild sage... Gawd, I miss summer!
It was crazy, stupid, nonsense ... and I hope to have the guts to do it again someday.
