PCT Day 9 – Body Glide is my Religion

Warner Springs (mile 109) to Mike’s Place (mile 127)

The temperature is rising as spring slides into summer. Early in the desert, earlier in this year of low water. My body is pouring sweat, drops running down my nose before they fly onto the cracked trail which is climbing long and low. All day we’re climbing and sweating, salt caking our shirts and packs making shapes like inverted mountains. Mountains made of little salt crystals that cut into our skin, like tiny betrayals building into chafe. Fucking chafe. I made you sweat, how dare you cut me! My legs. My back. Thank god(dess) for body glide, my savior in this heat.

All day we skitter miles between shade patches, Keith, myself and Gently Used. For a while we’re a pack along with Jacoba, Drop Bear, and Stephanie who are pulled away by the call of a snack break and we press on.

The last 12 miles of the day we ration water in order to make it to Mike’s Place. The only water in a nearly 40 mile stretch. Mike’s Place with pizza and beer and a place to camp. Or Mike’s Place with sketchy dudes in a ramshackle house in the middle of the desert. We won’t know until we get there, which rumors to believe. So we hike. My brain feels too hot, it’s hard to focus on much of anything. The PCT with it’s clearly defined lines is all too happy to ferry me forward on fatigued legs and an autopilot brain. We’re all grateful when Gently Used suggests we stop and sit in the shade for a bit. Cooling down, legs tightening along with drying sweat and I feel better. But my human form does not belong here I think, this desert of sharp plants and hard baked earth.

As my brain slides back into focus I wonder if this the other shoe dropping. The trail thus far has been relatively painless, which I know is not the whole story of a thru hike. Hiking is hard work day after day and perhaps this chafe, this heat is just what the trail has chosen to throw at me. Though of course the trail doesn’t actually choose to throw anything at you. It’s indifferent to our suffering, only existing because we built it into existence.

I think of the words tattooed on my arm. A quote from the writer and runner Lauren Fleshman “to choose one’s method of suffering is a privilege.” As the trail climbs away from me, serpentine along the hill, I think, this is a good suffering to have chosen.