Bethany ‘Fidgit’ Hughes is a visionary explorer and writer, having hiked, paddled, and cycled over 22,000 miles across 25 countries. She is the founder of the Her Odyssey Expedition, a human-powered endeavor that connected the Americas, following the longest chain of mountains in the world, while highlighting the stories of the land and its inhabitants. Bethany’s writing, which includes the Herstory series, has been featured in publications such as Backpacker and Outside, focusing on women forging frontiers in various fields. With a background in Institutions & Policy from William Jewell College, she brings a unique Third Culture perspective to her work, focusing on education, exploration, and community building.
Bethany spent more than half her life abroad, climbing in the Andes and jungles of Latin America. She has been writing and sharing human-powered adventures for over 20 years, with a focus on planning and pursuing the Her Odyssey Expedition. Bethany’s current focus is on Slow Travel, offering consultations on trip planning and writing a book, while making public presentations that connect audiences through wilderness to both inter and intra-personal health and decision-making.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Bethany Hughes about enhancing body awareness through barefoot exploration and thru-hiking.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How exploring barefoot movement in activities like hiking offers physical benefits and fosters a deeper connection with one’s body and environment.
– How trail maintenance reflects the evolving needs of hikers and the importance of preserving wildlife corridors through trail cultivation.
– How thru-hiking connects with the earth, simplifies life, and allows individuals to experience discomfort to feel grounded.
– Why you should balance your professional and personal development through nature experiences.
– Why travel encourages individuals to be open to the unknown, confront vulnerabilities, and engage with unfamiliar cultures for personal growth.
Connect with Bethany:
Guest Contact Info
X
@her_odyssey
Instagram
@_herodyssey_
Facebook
facebook.com/herodyssey
Links Mentioned:
her-odyssey.org
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, this whole barefoot thing, it’s fine if you’re walking around the house or maybe going for a little run or a little walk or a little hike, but maybe you can push much, much further than that. Don’t say anything yet. We’re going to find out more about that on today’s episode of the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who like to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body, starting feet first, those things at the bottom of your legs that are your foundation. We break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the flat out lies you’ve been told about what it takes to run or walk or hike or play or do whatever it is, and do that enjoyably and effectively and efficiently.
Can I say enjoyably? Don’t answer, it’s a trick question. Because if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to keep it up. So do something you enjoy. I’m Steven Sashen from Xero Shoes, and I call this the Movement Movement podcast because we are creating a movement. We involves you, more about that in a second, about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do, not getting in the way. And so what you can do is really, really simple. Check out our website www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You’ll find all the previous episodes of which there are quite a few. You’ll find other places you can find us on social media. You can find other places to find the podcast in general if you don’t like the way you got it now. And you can subscribe to find out when new episodes are posted. And that’s the gist of it. You know what to do. Leave a good review. Give us a thumbs up on YouTube. Hit the bell icon on YouTube as well. Whatever else you have to do, just look, you know the drill. If you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. You like that?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
I like that a lot.
Steven Sashen:
Bethany, do me a favor, tell people who the hell you are and what you’re doing here.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Hi, my name is Bethany Hughes. I’ve been working with Zero since what?
Steven Sashen:
1943.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Yeah. Since either of our foundings.
Steven Sashen:
Right before the war. So we’re going to ignore you people and we’re just going to chat. But here, no, tell them the who you are part and then we’re going to have a conversation that looks like we’re ignoring them.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Okay. I am Bethany Anne Hughes. My trail name from the thru-hiking community is Fidget, and I am the founder and leader of the Her Odyssey Expedition, which was an 18,000-mile plus expedition to connect the length of the Americas telling the story of the land and its inhabitants.
Steven Sashen:
Before we even jump in, do you want to explain the whole trail name thing to people? A lot of people are not hip to how that goes.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Okay, fair enough. Pretty much I find around the world, any outlying community or folks who faced a lot of adversity together tend to adopt their own separate names. So it’s I think something that kind of rooted in the military, guys would do that. And then that was a large influence on the thru-hiking community early on, those are the folks going out there to process through their bodies. And so then thru-hiking took on that tradition as well that we give each other names based on either characteristics, or I got fidget, because it’s something I didn’t see about myself, and this whole new community was one of the first things I noticed, they’re like, “You’re really fidgety.” And I was like, “No, I’m not. I’m stolid.” And it turns out…
Steven Sashen:
Oh, funny. Well, and so once someone gave you that name by noticing that, did that change how you were behaving? Did you stop or increase your fidgeting?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
It wasn’t an immediate thing, and I definitely chafed against the name for about the first three or four towns.
Steven Sashen:
Well, how come?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Because I was young. I did my first thru-hike when I was in my early 20s. And for me it was now I’m grown up, now I’m mature. And Fidget was a little childish name and it didn’t encapsulate how mature and fully evolved I had been with my plastic Tupperware and the spoon I’d stolen from my mom’s kitchen.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, that’s the thought that a 20 something person would have, “I’m so mature right now at 22.”
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Yeah, exactly. But then it was like three towns later and the people who had evolved into my trail family, they were all experienced thru-hikers and they were sitting outside of a pub like eating burgers and there’s a big storm coming in over the mountains ahead of us. And I had just been, had my to-do list, I’d done my laundry, and I’d gone grocery shopping, and I was ready, I was like, “Okay. And now we eat and we leave town, right?” And they’re like, “You are the worst fidgeter.”
Steven Sashen:
Oh my God.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
So finally that was when I accepted. It was given to me the first night before I’d even started hiking, and I was unpacking my bag at nighttime in a room full of thru-hikers trying to get ready to hike, and then I refused it. But then a month later they were like, “No, you’re Fidget.” And when the elders of the trail speak, you listen.
Steven Sashen:
I like it. But now it seems that you’ve sort of grown into beyond it in this interesting way.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Yeah, it’s been an interesting journey, and I think the thing that’s really wrapping my mind up right now is realizing that growth is not so much linear as it is cyclical. And to have been through the cycle enough times to… The first few times you cycle through something, you’re frustrated, you’re like, “Oh, no, I’m back here. I thought I’d grown beyond this.” Because we want it to be a linear trajectory. But then you realize you just have to come back into orbit pretty close to some of those same learnings and you learn it at a deeper level. And so I think at this point, with over 22,000 miles underneath my soles, it’s kind of disrupted me from the attachment of counting up miles as a way of counting up identity. And even in the thru-hiking community, I think that thru-hiking is an incredible inward journey, and also at some point you break out beyond that and you realize that there’s value in any kind of way that people can find their meditative speed.
Steven Sashen:
So that’s a great segue into this question, if I’m lucky. So for many people they may have heard the term thru-hiking, but don’t really get it and don’t get what the appeal is, frankly, because it just sounds like, especially some of the hikes, like the… Oh, come on, come on, come on. It’ll hit me in a second. I’ve been really bad with names lately. It makes me, not only does the fact that I can’t think of one make me crazy, but when it pops into my brain out of nowhere, it really makes me question any idea about free will. So it’ll hit me. But anyway, some of these things are torturous, and some of them are a little more caszh and everything in between. So can you describe just for people, what and why about thru-hiking?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
So thru-hiking is an endurance sport. I think one of the loosely agreed upon concepts is any mile that’s 500 miles or longer. And a thru-hike is, again, varying definitions, either done in one single stretch or within a calendar year that you cover the length of one of these trails. And that’s become somewhat codified in the US and Europe and then all around the world, there’s also long trails popping up with maybe a little bit looser structures because there’s more moving parts to it.
Steven Sashen:
So some of the classics, Pacific Crest Trail, Appalachian Trail, come on, give me the one-
Bethany Anne Hughes:
The Continental Divide Trail is the one that runs right through our home here. But the oldest one I think was the Long Trail, the early clever naming. But we have 11 national scenic trails in the US and other countries like Canada are starting to get in on these ideas of creating and protecting these spaces because there’s this sisterhood of, as humans find ways to ground ourselves in walking long distances, as usual with the human way, it’s like we have to experience it in order to value it. And in that, in realizing we want these corridors to walk, we’re realizing animals need this too. The grizzly bears need these. And actually in creating and cultivating these trails, we’re creating and cultivating wildlife corridors like the Yellowstone Yukon route, et cetera.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, that’s interesting. And so how much of the trails are… Well, let’s ask it differently. How cultivated are they on a scale of not at all to you may as well be walking in a mall?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
I think it depends on which trail you’re on. I call the Colorado Trail the red carpet of, because it’s so smooth and it’s beautifully maintained and it’s well-loved. And then there’s other ones that are sort of still in process. And then there’s other ones like the Pacific Northwest Trail that there’s still a lot that overlaps with roads, which when you go back in history, or particularly for me getting to walk the length of South America and you see ancient Incan roads so well-built and then they’re layered over and then they built highways over the top of them. And at first you’re offended like, how could history be buried in that way? And then you realize 500 years ago, these folks were just such good architects. And going through Mexico again, I was looking at some UNESCO maps of some of this [foreign language 00:08:45], which is where they found some of the oldest remnants of humans cultivating food in the Americas. And I just realized that Mesa was an old time mall, and the people anciently were walking across that same path that right now there’s a highway that goes over it. So it’s like we’ve changed, but also we haven’t changed. We still have the same needs.
Steven Sashen:
There’s a guy I met, I don’t know, have you ever been to a place called Kakawa Chocolate in Santa Fe?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
No.
Steven Sashen:
You would like it. So some of those ruins that they found that were big earthenware pots had remnants of things with cacao in them. And so basically, he refers to himself as a chocolate historian, to which my wife said if I had known that was a major, that would’ve been mine. And so he recreated these recipes from these archeological digs and what they found. And some of them are amazing. Most of them have no sugar, because that was not a thing until chocolate was brought back to Europe. But very, very clever things. And course a lot of those had Domino’s pizza, which was shocking for everybody. And you could get to those ruins in 30 minutes or less, or anyway, had to keep going down that road. No, but that’s the part that I have mixed feelings, when people say it’s so amazing how intelligent these people were and they built these things so well that they last forever. It’s like, yes, and they had nothing else to do. So there was hundreds of years of experimenting and figuring it out when you didn’t have television and podcasts were very low quality.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Seadog.
Steven Sashen:
Exactly. So I mean, I find that all just incredible and it’s really a shame with what’s happening now, of course, with more tourism, they become more and more degraded and become off limits and you can only handle so much. But the other part that I find interesting, and you’ve gone through some of these, is when they find a city underneath whatever is now, it’s like how did that much crap pile up on top of what was a city to now an entire city is underground. It’s one of those things that I’ve never looked up, because I’m not archeological or whatever, but that just seems so crazy. Imagine in, well I was going to say, imagine at some point in the future people have to do an archeological dig to find New York City, but that’s called Planet of the Apes. So maybe that was a documentary from the future. We didn’t know. So what inspired your first thru-hike?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
It sounded impossible. And I think this is kind circling back to an earlier question, what is the attraction to thru-hiking? I think that there’s a component of it that one could jokingly say masochism, right? And the other part of it is that there are so many comforts and so many layers of cushioning around us in life today that sometimes it’s easy to become separated from what is the truth of things. And I’m the kind of person who would rather feel the rocky ground beneath my feet and see what is happening in the world in an open way. And I grew up in Latin America as a kid, and I was raised in the communities and running around where you didn’t get shoes until you were 12 years old. We had them because we were the white kids, but there was a kid had one shirt and that was their clothing until middle school or higher and it changed. But then missionaries, we would come in and be like, “Oh, well here’s shoes for everyone.” But nobody actually wanted shoes. In fact, we didn’t need shoes.
Steven Sashen:
Or other things the missionaries brought with them as well.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Here’s, yeah, a lot of components of that, working in, being raised in the Christian industrial complex in that capacity, but the child of it, so I had time with the people who were living very close to the land. And then we moved back to the US and I started to feel really separated from it going through high school and university. And I went and worked on a cattle ranch and that was a way of… I just realized I needed one set of limbs distinctly in the soil and that can help keep things running straight. So after college I was running sled dogs in Alaska, and I heard tell of-
Steven Sashen:
As one does this one.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
It’s funny. Yeah, when the other option, the parents were like, “Well, here’s the State Department internship we got you.” And I was like, “Uh-oh, I have to go somewhere with no cell phone, Denver Glacier.” But it was up there that the idea to thru-hike came. And then once I began thru-hiking I found it a way to ground myself and the reality of the world around me and to be moving at a pace that felt consistent enough for things to make sense.
And for me, I think that’s the thing that has branched out since post Her Odyssey, because there was times on the trail when I would just run with my backpack on because I just wanted to get to camp 10 minutes earlier. It’s going to hurt so, I may as well hurt a little bit more. But then over time, and I think with age moving through, yeah, you find that meditative rhythm, and then it links back to that bigger picture stuff I was talking, like the historical component of it. One of the difficulties of coming back from Her Odyssey is when I was on that expedition, it was human powered movement. It’s like the fastest we went was a bike. But there’s between three miles per hour and 15 miles per hour is a noticeable difference.
Steven Sashen:
Oh my God. Yeah.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
But then I jump into this world where I just got off of a plane coming back from Thailand and hopped into a train and then got into a car. And it’s so integrated into our days, we can’t even conceive of a life option otherwise. But I have been privileged with that opportunity to live outside of that and to live at a slow travel pace for long enough that I can physically feel the difference. And so as I see people in their lives and in their daily lives making the effort to ride their bikes to work or giving time to walk places and you realize that reduces your stress, because you don’t have to find parking. So it’s like, it’s a big notion, but we’re coming back around to some of those fundamental ways of making progress. And a lot of that has to do with the fluidity of it and being aware of what is around you and what is beneath you in terms of the ground and to follow the lead of the other people around you, especially if you’re doing it internationally.
Steven Sashen:
Well, that’s an interesting question. How do you find it differently if you’re on a trail here versus anywhere else? Let’s use Europe as an example.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Most of my experience walking around Europe was when I was studying at Oxford. And so it was a lot of the footpaths and the towpaths. And the thing that struck me the most coming from the US and from my Boy Scout background, got my 70 pound pack ready for anything. And then walking amongst the Europeans who were only carrying a small ruck and lunch and then they would stay at the bothies every night. And so I realized that those were built at a time when people were building communities within walking distance of each other. And in the US were so splayed out. So I think that was the most pronounced difference that I would say between Europe and the US.
Steven Sashen:
Pardon me, exactly. The reason that I asked is whenever I’m over there, it’s amazing, you just get from place to place, you can walk or bike and it’s almost as fast as taking a car. These roads are often hundreds of years old and still doing fine, or many of them are still doing fine. But just also, the European, certain parts of Europe, just the general pace of life is different. And so I just imagine that when Europeans are on a trail, different flavor than when Americans are on a trail, different flavor than an aliens from Raja Five or whatever it is. So that’s the part that I’m really interested. So on that first thru-hike, what was either the thing that kind of said, “Oh, yes.” To you, or what was the thing that was a big surprise that you had to adapt or adjust to or really see if it fit with whatever you were thinking? Does that question even make sense?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
And my mind’s going a lot of different directions with different answers. The moment about it that said, “Oh, yes.” Was that I had purpose and direction every single day. And also within that there was space for me to go to the places that I needed to, to pursue personal growth. I think a lot in the modern day, how rapidly things move sort of asked us to put personal development to the side in order for professional development. And the capacity, kind of what you were saying, they didn’t have a lot going on before televisions, so you don’t have as much information input. And I realize that I feel much calmer when I have a lower level of information input than when I’m trying to drive someplace.
Steven Sashen:
Got it.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
And somehow from that space, my mind feels a lot safer and is able to process things more deeply and recognize this is what will lead to a fulfilling experience. And you get the satisfaction of completing a goal. There’s measureables as well. So I think it was that balance that really attracted me.
Steven Sashen:
I’m going to tell you where this question comes from for the fun of it. I was in Thailand 35 years ago, which-
Bethany Anne Hughes:
I was in Thailand 35 days ago.
Steven Sashen:
You should say 35 hours ago.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
35 hours, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
And so I ended up on Ko Samet. Did you ever go there?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
No.
Steven Sashen:
It’s a tiny little island.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Ko Tao.
Steven Sashen:
Hold up a game. And Samet is typically only the locals go. And my second day there, I’m trying to think of how much… I mean, all right, I’ll tell the whole story. I was going to say I got really sunburned and then I had to sit under a tree. I got really sunburned because I was out swimming. And as I was ready to come in, one of the most amazingly beautiful women I’ve ever seen in my life comes out into the water and I’m going, “I’m going to have to stay in the water.”
And I’ll give you the rest of the story for the fun of it. So we’re swimming. I said, “What’s your name?” She says, “Flakia.” And I literally had to resist from saying, “Flakia, I hardly know you.” But anyway, she was a Danish woman with a bunch of Danish people. It was delightful. But anyway, I got massively sunburned, and I had to spend the next couple days just sitting under a palm tree because I couldn’t really do anything else. And I watched my brain slow down finally. And it was very interesting, unlike anything I’ve ever done, unlike meditation courses, unlike whatever. But at the same time I could sense that it wasn’t like I was getting less information, I was just getting different information. So it was the same processing speed in a weird way, but at the same time a whole different pace. It’s hard to reconcile. You’re nodding your head.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s exactly the thing that we are all benefit from touching in our own lives. And I actually just came, I got to do a 10-day silent meditation retreat in Thailand. That was one of the objectives of going there. And it was interesting beforehand talking and realizing a lot of us were attracted to go there because it’s one of the ones that there is no phone, there is no technology, there is no connection to the outside world. And when we can cultivate those spaces as well as have the grit and courage to step into that space, it allows us to ground in the situation that is, which I think sets up the firm foothold for the launches that we’re having to make. I see a lot of things shifting, having been out in the woods and then coming back, out in the woods, you’re very aware of the climate shifting and talking to people who’ve lived on the same mountain for three generations or at least 30 years. In the US we move around so much, but in Latin America, the same family will occupy a valley-
Steven Sashen:
Same house.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Yeah, same house. Or it’s like, “There’s mom’s house, there’s mine, here’s my brothers.” They’ve been watching the climate change and the extremes become more extreme. And socially coming back into the larger construct, I’m seeing that same thing. It’s like people are either gunning the engine, working their patooties off, and then they go on vacation and they just crank… They don’t even go through neutral, they just slam on the E-brake. And I think that’s one of the things that I don’t think we realize how much it knocks us off kilter, how much moving from one extreme to the other is. So those moments to slow down and to experience that swing at a natural pace, whether it’s the gait of your feet when you’re walking or you’re running, or in your life in general. I think it’s that slow travel concept and letting it seep into your body. And nobody’s going to understand it unless they’ve experienced it. Yeah. Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Well, to that point, you used a word that I’m going to have to look up, what was it, oh, vacation. Yeah. After we’re done, you can tell me how that works. A little unclear. That’s a whole other story.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
35 years ago.
Steven Sashen:
Well, that was a big one, although that was, let’s say the vacation was cut short by an event, and this is going to be the world’s shortest version of this story. I ended up in Beijing on June 3rd, 1989. And so June 4th was the Tiananmen Square massacre. And I got caught in a shooting spree and held captive with six guys pointing machine guns at my head for a while trying to decide which one would have the honor of pulling the trigger. And apparently none of them did. And I was actually literally thinking about this morning for no apparent reason. I was thinking if I had to do a talk about this, shocking this coming up, I was saying the fundamental experience, the most important part of the experience was after…
I was there with my best friend who had been living in China for about a year at that point. And we were just going to find out what had gone on the night before, and in the process got caught in a shooting spree, got captured, et cetera. And as we were leaving, I had this endorphin rush. Imagine you’re in the ocean, you’re facing the beach, and you feel the undertow pulling out behind you and you’re trying to keep your balance. And then you know that there’s a wave coming, but you don’t know how big, and then you get slammed by this wave. But the wave isn’t slamming you, it’s just filling you with bliss and relief and every positive thing you can think of.
And my next thought was, wow, if this happened every day or every couple of days for a month or something, if you were in a war situation, I don’t know how you would be able to come home in any way where you’d be sane or in any way be able to tolerate someone saying, “Honey, the dishwasher’s broken.” And not want to just lose your mind. So I don’t know how we got off on that. But anyway, so the vacation was a little less vacationy than I thought. At one point I found myself, I’m not a drinker, but two weeks later I found myself having a lot to drink for about a week. And then I went, “Well that’s interesting.” And that was the end of that. But yeah, it was pretty wacky.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Well, and I think that’s the difference between vacation and between travel. And I think that very much goes to the heart of what I have come back from Her Odyssey with in terms of slow travel, is vacation is one of those cultivated experiences where you do Bali, you do Patagonia. And hearing people speak in that language and it very much is that it’s like, okay, I’ve gone and I’ve gotten what I want from these experiences. And I think that travel is more of you make yourself vulnerable.
And I think that’s one of the things like circling back to the thru-hiking idea and what kind of people thru-hike. When I first started thru-hiking in 2010, it’s a broad generalization, but also those of us who are out there, we got our own stuff going on, right? And one way to say it is we’re all broken. Many of us are recovering from trauma, a lot of them are just coming back from military, people are dealing with PTSD, CPTSD, even today, the queer community and folks on identity journeys.
And in my own personal journey is as an empath, it’s been stepping away from people that I was able to figure out, oh, this is who I am, not who I am in reflection to others. But in that space, in those, if I can use the word broken, but instead of broken, it’s like those are cracks in you. And curiosity is another kind of crack in you. And those are where the grit of life and of other people’s beliefs get in and the new fusions grow out of it. And I think that’s one of the critical parts that sometimes vacation lacks that travel affords us is those chances to be broken open and have new notions planted into our… New visions. When you know that you can be gunned down. But you see life differently.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, I like to say I don’t recommend it as a personal transformation technology, but it’s very effective.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
And it’s one that more people than on this planet have experienced.
Steven Sashen:
Absolutely. Well there’s a flip side of that, which is that when there is a war, and I’m not trying to minimize this at all, but people can’t even contemplate or even entertain the idea that there’s a way to survive in those situations where there’s a certain kind of weird normalcy. And I mean, when the whole Tiananmen Square thing was happening, we just knew these are the roads you stay off of, and if you stayed off those roads, everything was completely normal.
And the travel versus vacation, I really love that, because I was thinking about that the other day. In part because I’m a married person and my wife and I have different agendas about how much energy we have to spend doing various things. And I was just not bemoaning but thinking I’m going to have to at some point when we have time, assuming there’s ever a time where we have the ability to do this, say I’m going to just take off for four or five weeks.
Because when I was in Asia, that was my fundamental thing is I’m going to land somewhere and then something’s going to happen. I don’t need to figure it out in advance, I’ll look lost. Somebody will say, “Can I help you?” And the next thing you know I’m having dinner with this family. And that’s just less likely to happen when you’re a couple, frankly. And you’ve traveled as a couple. So how’s that different than traveling solo?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Yeah, it was interesting, because across Latin America, I hiked most of South America with one other woman whose name was Lauren Neon Reed. And it took me several thousand miles to figure out, because they would be like [foreign language 00:27:57].
Steven Sashen:
I just love that, it took me 70,000 miles to figure out.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Speaking of thinking things all the way through. But they would say, [foreign language 00:28:04]. You’re traveling alone. And they just kept on repeating that. And I immediately went into that white woman defiance space and then being like, “Well obviously you don’t understand there’s two of us.” And then it took one woman just literally being like, “You have no man with you.” For me to acknowledge that that is what they were saying.
Steven Sashen:
Wow.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
And there is that perspective. And so it’s like as two women traveling together, it was an interesting… People see the risk that it presents. And also I think that many of us don’t understand what a strength vulnerability is. Being exposed to being able to feel the ground beneath your feet makes you respond to it differently than if you have all those layers of cushioning. That’s one of the things I see in thru-hiking in the US, these big trail families now. These are groups of people who travel all together.
And having watched how the thru-hiking community has changed since I started to now, it’s like there’s much more of an industry around it. So it’s like they can call for an Uber ride to pick them up. They don’t have to stick their thumb out and wonder who’s going to pick them up. You can book your rooms in advance so you’ll have a place to stay. And I think whether traveling in a couple or traveling in a large group, at any point that you become a self-sustaining unit, that very much goes with our ideal of the independent strong loner. And also it closes you off to a lot of those opportunities for connection.
Steven Sashen:
Well, I wonder, and I’ve been thinking about that and how that would change for me as a now just about to be 62 year old person versus 29 year old person. Was I 29? Something like that. 26. I don’t know. I’m not going to do that. 27. I was 27. And the particular thing that I think of is the number of times where I was so out of my depth and I didn’t even know it or I didn’t know what to do.
Actually, the one that just popped into my head, I was trying to leave India and I didn’t know that there was an exit tax. And I had spent all my money by that point. And the plane that we were going to be on was like 12 hours late, which means on Indian time, completely on time or probably early. And I’m just sitting there freaking out like I don’t know how to get out of here. And somebody realized this kid was in trouble and said, “Here, I’ll take care of the exit tax. And you probably don’t have enough money for dinner. Come with me.” And I wonder would that happen if I’m this guy now? And maybe, but maybe not. And with your time, so how long have you been doing this?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
So we started walking from Ushuaia, Argentina in 2015, and then we paddled the canoe into Tuktoyaktuk, Canada, I think it was August 22nd, 2022.
Steven Sashen:
Got it. So that’s not enough necessarily for you to see the difference between how you might be treated by people as a much younger person versus wherever you are now, because still a young person. And again, I may be completely making it up, but I’m very curious, how would it be different, me on my own getting lost somewhere versus when I was a little kid?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
So for the context of what I have accomplished, there are only a handful of other people who I’ve been able to find record of having done this expedition. Like George Meegan, a fellow named Cargo, and there’s a handful of us who’ve walked the length of South America. And the majority who’ve done it are men who’ve either done it alone or there was one couple who walked, or a pair who walked the length of South America, male and female. Up until at the end of the expedition, I had thought that we were probably some of the only women who had done this. And then I found a book from 100 years ago that mentions during the suffragette movement-
Steven Sashen:
Oh, wow.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Exactly 100 years ago. And it took her seven years to walk from Ushuaia, Argentina. I’ve only found one mention of it. It’s like as I’m working on my own memoir, this is my side passion is trying to track down some records of this trail mama that I have. But largely, my context has been with other men. And I think one of the differences is a perception of risk that we present. As women, I believe that we were invited into spaces a lot more often. And sometimes they’d be more intimate spaces, like we were welcomed into kitchens because we weren’t perceived as a threat as much as a large white guy.
And also, we had to have just different boundaries and caution in place. And our safety procedures I think began earlier than most men would know how. People are, “Aren’t you in danger?” In their mind danger starts when there’s weapons. And in my mind you’ve made a series of decisions, if you got to a point where there’s weapons, a series of decisions led to that point. And as a woman who grew up third culture, you just know how to… Or grow up anywhere, and you just learn how to make those calculations earlier on in the process for safety.
Steven Sashen:
This is something that I don’t think there’s any man… How do I want to say this? I was going to say something that I’m going to immediately backtrack. No man can appreciate what it’s like being a woman and having to have that sort of situational awareness. And the backtracking is that when I lived in New York, I was in a couple of weird situations where, well, where I realized that I had gone one step too far. And I could imagine having to have a different sign of situational awareness, but for the luck of the draw, didn’t have to develop that.
And the situation was I ended up in this one, there’s a path train, or maybe subway, in the West Village, where typically a lot of gay men and a bunch of kids from New Jersey came in. And this is back in the early ’80s where fag bashing was a thing, where a bunch of guys would come and try and beat up a bunch of gay men.
And so I’m in this subway station where a bunch of guys show up at baseball bats. And I look the other way and it’s a dead end. And I’m running towards a brick wall thinking, “Well, we’ll get to the brick wall and see what happens then.” And living in New York, you develop a certain kind of awareness about that, but it’s just not the same as when I know a number of women were asked on a scale of one to 10, 10 being totally safe and one being not safe at all, how do you feel anytime you’re in a parking garage? And it averaged around two.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
I was going to say three. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Steven Sashen:
And no one can understand that. And traveling, I can totally get that traveling as a woman, whether you’re alone or not, there’s a different kind of awareness. And also I can imagine in certain circumstances people are aware of this and want to be more protective earlier and in a way that they never would with a man.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Yep. And I think there again, in those situations, it’s being able to ground within yourself. One of the things that I really appreciated about Her Odyssey and about having been a woman who had done this is that you do have those senses. And I believe that as with traveling, as with barefoot travel, there’s a lot of skills and resources and understanding that we have that I think we’ve just forgotten that we have. Once you’ve been out on trail for long enough, you can smell water, right? And so these instincts that we counted on that I think have been blunted by all of the cushioning around us in our daily lives does start to peel away as necessary. And so you call it the Spidey sense, but for me it had been doing some work before going and grounding in my own body and just knowing where in my body different alerts are of just sadness or frustration.
And danger was always the baby hairs. My baby hairs would still try to warn. And having been a woman in the first world, there was a lot of emphasis on being likable and being polite and giving people the benefit of the doubt and the Christian upbringing, second chances is very important. And I really appreciated traveling with another woman in foreign countries, because there wasn’t that you have to justify yourself. If I was like, “We’re not walking down that alley.” And I don’t have a good reason, but the baby hairs are telling me, then we just didn’t walk down that alley. Being able to make those decisions earlier on to mitigate risk was important.
And then circling back to the fascinating story that you shared in terms of how sometimes we process things after the fact, or there’s latent blowback from it. By the time we were getting up towards northern South America and Central America where the machismo takes on a different tenor, I think there’s more border crossings and borders are always the most dangerous part of any kind of travel as you learned in India, that’s always the riskiest and there’s always a high level of anxiety that’s going to come around that.
But that was where I realized that all of my frustration of sidestepping and smoothing my way through machista expectations was starting to come out. And it was coming out in this really, I don’t want to say ugly, but instead I’m going to say I was Karening out, I was getting really upset and trying to exert my own authority and power in situations that was not ideal, because at that point we were in the middle of the Darien Gap. And there’s a lot of large weapons in there and there’s a lot of different military and there’s a lot of people just trying to do their own thing. And we’d learned very much you just mind your own business. What’s in your backpacks in your backpack, what’s in their backpack is in their backpack. But with the military, it wasn’t like that.
And then it was along the Costa Rica-Nicaragua border, the Rio San Juan, I had been having it out with the head of this military outpost, because I’d just paid several… At each outpost you bought them a soda, or basically it was nice words for bribing. We just called it lubricating. But this was going beyond lubricating. And I decided to dig in and Karen out in that situation.
And then I went down by the river to sit there and calm down. And one of the younger guards who’d been pretty sympathetic came over. And I was just in my crabby head space, and I was just like, “How many people die in this jungle?” Because there are a lot of people crossing the river and they call it the lung of Central America, but he was like, “Well…” Or what did I ask? “How many murders are there?” And he was like, “Well, it’s not a murder if there’s no body, and there’s a lot of crocodiles in this river.” And that was just one of those moments when there’s people debating who’s going to pull the trigger where you have that moment and you just really drop into this deeply human space.
Steven Sashen:
Everything gets very clear, very fast.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then that can be dulled over time, but it never leaves you.
Steven Sashen:
No. Well, in fact, backing up to my story, just for the fun of it, the part where after trying to run away and then having weapons going behind us, which is a weird thing in and of itself because automatic weapon fire sounds like popcorn. And so part of my brain is going, “Hey, that’s like popcorn.” The other problem are going, “Shut up.” And from the time that we got captured until the time we got released, I’ve never been more lucid in my entire life. And everything was very, very clear. I really only had two thoughts, keep John in my sight, and I want to know if I’m dying. I want to have one second where I know. And what popped into my head, for the sake of saying it, was this Buddhist idea that your last thought determines your next rebirth. So literally I was going, “Hope I get a good one.”
I mean, seriously, that was the thought, “I want to know, hope I get a good one.” And whether I believe in that or not is irrelevant. That’s just what was popping up. It was very entertaining. And then a whole bunch of jokes. As we were running away from the automatic weapon fire, I’m thinking, “God, if I get killed here, my parents are going to be so pissed.” Which I thought was good. And the next was, “I can’t believe I got John into this.” Because it was my idea to find out what was going on. And my next thought was, “For 26 a half years I’ve been denying my Jewish heritage, and here I am, my last thought might be guilt.” And there was a couple others that were very entertaining.
So anyway, be that as it may. A big question is, there’s two that pop into mind. Here’s the easy one, have you watched any of the Ewan McGregor documentaries or however you want to call them, that he did, Long Way Down, Long Way Round, Long Way Pp? You’ll get a kick out of them, because he did the Long Way Up from South America all the way into, I think they stopped in California, but on motorcycles, on electric motorcycles. But I imagine there’s going to be some parts where you’re going to go, “I stopped there.” You might get a kick out of it. So now granted, they had all support crew and everything. There’s still a bunch of moments that were really hairy, even for two guys on motorcycles with a whole lot of protection. So when you have time. But the big question that I want to ask, talk to me about just the adjustment period, getting on the trail and then getting off the trail. Because I literally can’t even imagine what that would be like.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
I found that there’s sort of two journeys that would be happening simultaneously going on trail, and that the process of getting on trail, my mind would be further along in the process by the time I was physically moving. And then once I was on trail, it was about six weeks until your body really just breaks in and is like, “Okay, this is just what we’re doing.” And then after about two months for me or so, then all of a sudden food stops being food and it starts being a unit of energy.
Steven Sashen:
Interesting.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
And I know how much I can get off… I know how many minutes based on the kind of terrain that I can get off of, when I first started thru-hiking, Snickers bar was my primary unit of measurement. I could get 45 minutes on normal terrain, 30 minutes on pushing it terrain.
Steven Sashen:
So miles per Snickers?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Miles per Snickers. That was pretty much my early math. And then as I’ve grown in thru-hiking, then getting to do it in other countries, you also began to recognize food deserts. And for example, traveling across the Pampas down in Argentina, or the Altiplano in Bolivia and Peru where you see local women feeding tri-colored corn that they grew. They’re feeding that to their chickens and then they’re feeding bleached crackers to their children. And you can even when you go through the little stores and you pick things up, they’re super light. Everything is really light, but it’s packaging, so that means it’s developed, so that means it’s better. And having a conversation with a quinoa farmer and the price of quinoa has dropped so much I can hardly afford to pay to feed my family. So I was like, “Well then why don’t you just keep the quinoa?” And she was like, “That’s for selling.”
Steven Sashen:
So there’s a concept called mental accounting, and that’s what it is, it’s sort of like the easiest way to describe mental accounting, if you were walking down the street and found a $100, the question is would you put it in your bank account and treat it just like income or would you blow it because it was free money? And so there’s the free money account and there’s the regular money account. And people do it all the time in ways that seem crazy. And it’s like, I just bought two pairs of pants about a month ago. It’s the first time I bought clothing in five years, because I just don’t give a shit. But there’s other things where I will spend money on.
Actually, my favorite mental accounting, I called my wife and I said, “I think I’m having an issue about money.” And she says, “Why?” I said, “I just bought some apples that were $3 a pound. It’s like, normally I wouldn’t pay anything more than $2 a pound. Something’s going in my head.” And that was our joke. And that’s been a big… Anyway, blah, blah, blah, mental accounting. It’s like, yeah, that’s the food for selling, here’s the food for eating. And it makes complete logical sense for them, not for you. It’s another way of seeing the world that is logically consistent.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Well, and you’ve also framed really well, the expanse of those, “Huh?” Moments. We both talked about our own personal experiences of really extreme ones. And then there’s those smaller, not threatening like, “What’s going on with the price of this thing?” Or you’re interacting with a person from another culture, and they have a totally different way of greeting. Learning how to hand money in Thailand or even navigating Confucian hierarchy when I was going through Korea and being like, “Okay, there isn’t room for your Western…” Your Western feminism is very much a thing, and you are in fact picture perfect for that. And so you need to… But those, “Huh?” Moments are the richest ones. And you just have to realize that sometimes maybe in that moment, you’re not prepared to learn. But if you can just put a little marker in that you can come back to even 35 years later and then you can connect it to another experience that you had. And it’s sort of that breadcrumb trail that no matter how far away our daily lives might take us from what this experience is, you can always come back to those and they’ll be waiting for you once you do have time for that foreign word vacation.
Steven Sashen:
Well, one of the things that I find so weird about that for me personally is that, and that’s redundant, is when I’m in China, I’m either on my own where I have one experience or I’m the Western businessman. And I don’t do code shifting. I treat everyone like they’re a friend of mine, which causes all sorts of problems in certain contexts, certainly in that kind. And I’ve learned barely to play the role. And I find it very bizarre and silly and crazy, but also I recognize that’s what is expected, what has to happen. It makes total sense. And so I’m certainly not perfect at it because I find it so weird, but that’s again stepping into… I’m trying to…
Oh, my wife and I were in India 15 years ago for a friend’s wedding, and it took us a while to recognize sort of the who we are and what we did in that same sort of way. So for example, we were staying in an area where there’s very few white people, and so therefore very few beggars. There was a couple of kids who came up and were asking for money. And after the second day of this, I said to them, “So look, here’s the deal, I’m not going to give you any money, but if there’s anything you want to do, anything that would be fun for us to all do together, I’m your guy.”
And they thought I was crazy until two days later. And then they went, “Let’s go.” And away we went. And it took everyone else that we were traveling quite a while to get hip to the idea that we can’t use our Western way of looking at things in a place where it’s a whole different worldview. There are people who were literally living in some combination of cardboard boxes, and that was their home. And I’m not saying it’s great, but they were completely content with, that’s the way it works here, your home is a thing of cardboard boxes and here’s where you go for this. And it is a hard won mental shift to not impose your ideas on what’s around you.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
How to decentralize yourself from your own experience is one of the-
Steven Sashen:
Or lack thereof.
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Or yeah. And the capacity, learning, the capacity to do that is its own thing. But particularly when you’re in someone else’s environment, and that reality, just having moved through areas with heavy gang presence or heavy military presence, or a lot of [foreign language 00:47:54], you just learn what’s your business and what’s not, and how to move through those spaces. And it’s the richest space for personal development is letting yourself be uncomfortable and trying out, standing in another position being like, “Okay, fine. I am the businessman.”
For me, I love so much the thru-hiker grungy, like, oh, I haven’t showered. But then you go out into the campo and you meet the [foreign language 00:48:22] and the [foreign language 00:48:23] and the like, they’re out there at 5:00 AM in freezing cold water cleaning themselves and bathing. And you realize, okay, there’s dignity in how clean you present yourself. I take it for granted because I assume I’m going to be able to have a washing machine to clean my clothes next week. But that’s not the reality for most people and was not the reality for us for much of South America. But it is in the spaces where you’re willing to challenge your own perception of yourself, to understand the local cultures that is going to be the experiences that change your life.
Steven Sashen:
I’m guessing that this has happened to you where you are invited into someone’s home and they are giving you more than you can imagine they have any right to give anybody. And what was that experience like? Because that happened for me once or twice. It was like, “Whoa.” Of course I have an evolutionary kind of philosophical thing about why we do that, which is if you’re in a community where you are just always giving your most valuable things, you know when you’re in need, somebody will do that for you. But even still, coming from a, let’s say, semi-Western perspective if you will, what was that like for you? What happened?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Yeah, it actually felt really good for me having been raised in the community that I was to return to gift economy, and sort of realizing how paper thin, literally, we have made exchange as people with money and from the Western world. And it’s like we assume that if we can pay for something, it should be there. And in many of these places, it’s not. And I would find it in myself getting into these remote towns and like, “Hey, man, you got some wifi?” Or then recognizing that things like hot water is a luxury or even clean water is a luxury, and receiving so much generosity.
I think in the US culture and in thru-hiking culture, we have this concept called trail magic. And it’s like, oh, you’re out there, you’re putting your all into it, and good things come to you. And this is also coming from a country and an environment where many people’s needs are met and those people who are helping you are helping because like, oh, well, in our culture, it’s almost like the giver gets to decide how much they’re going to give, right? And in Latin culture, it’s the guest’s job to put down a boundary when it’s too much.
And so there was one point, for example, when we were… A gaucho had invited us in and he had made bread that was clearly his bread for the week. And I was watching him in the kitchen and realizing he was taking his last piece of bread to give us seconds. And so then it’s like that balance of you need to receive their generosity, right? If you don’t receive the offerings of the generosity, then that’s almost a degradation and you hurt feelings. So you need to be able to receive. And also you need to be able to say, when is it, you have to be watching. Which are all things that we have not learned because we’ve streamlined interactions and exchanges. But gift economy is much more cyclical. And the part of the gift is I’m observing your reality.
And so it’s dangerous to take the sense of entitlement of endurance sports in North America, whether we’re talking about backpacking or bike packing, where we’re just used to being celebrated for exploring this extreme of human exploration and body and self and ground. You’re going to places where people do have nothing and would give you literally everything.
And then talking to people at either extreme. The two places that I found it the most prevalent was far south in Patagonia and then far north going up towards the Arctic. I had a really interesting… The larger latitudes in either direction, I think people having known need and known challenges, places that they’re like, “Of course we’re going to help you.” And for example, talking to some of the Inuit folk and them trying to explain, we’d finished, they’d put us up for a week. It was just an amazing experience getting to spend time with them. And after a couple of days, I understood when they just kept on being like, “No, generosity is part of our culture.”
And so realizing that being able to receive the generosity and also reciprocate in a way instead of just being like, “Oh, I deserve this generosity I got here. I’m so cool for being here.” It was really humbling. And then finding ways to give back is one of the things I think those of us who have the fortune of being on the front ends of these waves of change, some of the first to create some of these trails or hike these trails, you get so much generosity and then you write about it on the internet and then everybody else comes looking for that as well. But if we don’t understand what we need to bring to give back, then after a couple rounds of it, people are burnt out. And I saw a lot of that in Central America, for example, where generosity has been taken for granted, overstepped, and now people are terse about it, and then soon guns are coming out. So it’s a process and you get to decide which way your one body weight worth will weigh. And I would say bring gifts and give time.
Steven Sashen:
Well, Elena and I went to Cuba last October, for our 20th anniversary. And people said to us they have nothing and so bring what you can. And we brought two giant double bags full of medicine, snacks, shoes. We brought a lot of shoes to give away, which is really fun. And people could not have been more grateful. And it was of course, delightful that we were able to do that. But we also had that weird… I mean, the thing we had to go through was, we’re the rich tourists, which we didn’t like until a few people said to us, “This is how our economy is working now. If it weren’t for you, we would have literally nothing.” It was like, “Oh, well then I’m thrilled that I can do this.” And again, it was getting out of our American sensibility of however you would describe that in that situation. Anyway, changing topics. What have you noticed that’s changed both internally or externally about your body during all of this?
Bethany Anne Hughes:
Yeah, so I’ve been really intentional in the time after completing Her Odyssey to give myself this… I laid out a timeline of about two years to give myself this recovery period. Having some buddies in the military and having talked to some of these guys who’ve done these long hikes, A, mentally, has been a really interesting struggle. The easiest way I could put it is your brain without the strict formulation of schedule and constant new information gets, I just call it mushy, but my capacity to retain both the storage and the access to that storage got really loosened. All those became really permeable when it was on trail. So being able to get back, gather back words, and remember to get to the point, I mean, I’ve been telling one story in circles for seven years to myself, and so coming back into these sort of opportunities to have a linear conversation has involved a lot of retraining my brain.
And then there’s the emotional component of recovery. And I’d say part of that has been, as I’m working on memoir and recognizing what I would need in an agent, but going through the memoir has been a lot of emotional journeying in terms of being like, “Oh, kiddo, you are in way more danger than you knew most of the time.” And realizing that when you’re in the moment, you tell yourself the story you need to get through that environment. And then once you’re safe someplace else and you look
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