On Backpacks, Big Macs and the Freshman Fifteen

You may have seen the buses pulling into East last week, or maybe just smelled them after they opened their doors, as the freshman participants and upperclass leaders of Project WILD returned to campus in their sweaty, unshaven, two-weeks-without-showers glory. Then again, you might have missed them--by the end of the day most had showered, dressed for success, and scarfed a SuperValue Meal. It's symbolic of returning to civilization--back to a culture based on appearance and ease. Although every year when I return from the woods I vow to keep some of what I've learned in my everyday life--I'll carry a spoon with me and eschew plastic utensils, I'm going to walk when I could ride--it always peters out eventually.

What I love about backpacking is the slackened and deliberate pace of responsibilities, their reduction to their most basic. Things from waking up to walking stop being automatic as you light your own stove, build your own shelter, and feel everything you need on your back as your legs bring you up a mountain. Backpacking forces me to live what we're conditioned to avoid--effort.

Last semester, studying in Australia, I walked a mile to and from school without complaint, walked to the grocery store where no one used carts, didn't miss the SUVs, and began to realize how much our culture encourages inertia, but at the same time condemns it. We like our people thin, but people who run and go to the gym regularly "have a problem." We drive to Cantina and complain about gas prices, absurdly low compared to the rest of the world. Disordered eating's prevalence on campus leads us to question, and often rightly so, anyone who chooses fruit and cereal over pancakes and sausage--but in a genuinely healthy world, wouldn't it be the other way around? My roommate in Australia followed a vegan diet and was in perpetual training for the Chicago Marathon. Although tiny, she could bench more than our guy friends and drank protein shakes the way the rest of us drank cocktails.

"I'm sorry," my other friends, also American, would say after she ordered quesadillas, extra beans instead of cheese and could you go light on the oil?, "but that girl has a problem. Give her a cheeseburger." They'd follow this declaration with a handful of Cheezels, a seasoned potato wedge with sour cream, or a packet of Tim Tams. From the names of these foods, you might guess that their fat/hydrogenated oil/trans fatty acid contents are not low, nor their nutritional values high. You might be right. So bad it must be good. Why is it that my roommate, with her full meals of lentils and tofu and 8 kilogram bucket of soy protein, was the one with the problem? It was around then that I realized appearance is a no-win issue. The rifts between what is attractive, what is healthy, and what is normal in America are huge. Thin is attractive, healthy is relative, and normal is overweight. That it's normal and average to be overweight seems a bit unbelievable on the Duke campus, where a tour group might reasonably believe that you list your height and weight on the application, but Duke isn't a very inclusive population sample (that's another column entirely).

We all know that Duke kids are under pressure, whether self or parent-induced, to be perfect in every way, including physically, and that Duke provides us with the resources to get as close as we can. At the same time, there's this twisted sense that being happily fit is kind of weird, and that everyone should eat McDonald's SuperSized Extra Value Meals. They're easy and big, right? Just like America! When I returned from Project WILD my freshman year, I felt better than I had in my life--I had new friends, new skills, and more energy than I'd thought physically possible. And yes, as the weeks went on I ate a lot of late night pizza and drank a lot of Busch Light, and the yes-I-hike-all-day body disappeared, but I eventually found a happy medium. College is a great place to do that--to try new things, spread yourself thin, and play to your passions. I only wish I'd figured that out a little earlier.

Moral of the story? Activity is okay. Appearance is relative. If you gain the freshman five-to-fifteen (I did), you'll live (I did that too). Whether you're a freshman or a senior, hell, a seventh-year grad student, it's a new year. I may not light my own stoves in these parts, and I may take the bus, but something I learned in the woods was the importance of choices. I'm not Thoreau, but I want to live as deliberately as I can.

Meghan Valerio is a Trinity senior.. Her column appears every other Monday.