Hiking Memoirs

The book begins with one of the experiences that I survived while hitchhiking in Florida. I continue by writing about my life as a blind person. How did my parents handle the news no parent can possibly be prepared for - that I was totally blind? How did I handle my blindness, and how did my need to be independent deeply influence my future? It also colorfully discusses my time in a residential school for the blind and some of the conflicting emotions that impacted me, such as feeling sad and abandoned when being sent away from home at the age of four years old.

For four years, Markus Torgeby lived alone in a hut he built with his hands in the Jämtland forest on the northern tip of Sweden, reconnecting with nature, and healing from the stress and strain of urban life and an athletic career derailed by injury. In this moving elegy, Markus offers lessons both practical—how to make fire, how to craft an outdoor bed, how to tap trees for water—and profound—what it means to become one with the natural world, to live authentically, to reconnect with yourself and your surroundings.