There are endless articles written about how to avoid looking like a tourist. How to fit in, feel like a local, and conceal the fact that you don’t know everything about a given destination. Some of these articles focus on concealing your lack of knowledge for the purposes of safety. But far more promote the idea that to be a tourist is to somehow lack in an essential sort of cool reserved only for locals.
I’m here to tell you the opposite of what all of those articles say. I think you should embrace being a tourist whether you’re visiting or a recent transplant. There is something special about visiting the sights that cities promote as essential parts of themselves. Yes, the Space Needle is expensive and a little cheesy. But it’s also an engineering marvel that offers visitors a wonderful way to orient themselves in a city full of funny shapes and lakes that must be navigated. And sure, the Seattle waterfront is a little kitsch but it’s also teaming with smiling faces.
This weekend I decided to embrace everything that is touristy about this new place that I’m lucky enough to call home. Because enthusiastically taking the same picture that 1,000 people before me have taken doesn’t mean I had any less fun.
On our first day I took Lisa to the Ballard Locks where we stood for hours and watched boats come through the canal into Lake Union. The Locks are one of those activities which sound lame but inevitably captivate people. Watching the engineering necessary to control something as powerful as water, the competent boat hands, and the surging blue of the water itself.
Puget Sound, which nestles against Seattle’s western flank, is shot through with islands to explore while it’s dark waters conceal an entire world of life that is lost to those who live only on land. Both Lisa and I grew up in Colorado, a land locked state where water mostly came in the form of fast moving ice melt that was as deadly as it could be fun. Because of this neither of us have ever been much comfortable around the wet stuff.
But ferry travel is something I find inexplicably delightful. To use waterways as a means for public transit. To connect one city to another by gliding across an open sound. Incredible.
The Space Needle. Seattle was kind enough to give us some wonderful weather this weekend.
Lisa’s last day in town we walked out along the water front and watched the sun set. The sky faded from a bland white-blue to a riot of colors in an instant. Music played from every store front, blending into a cacophony of white noise that was easy to ignore.
Paula Schwimmer is a slight woman in her late 60’s whose close cropped salt and pepper hair scatters around her round face. Twinkling eyes shine out from behind her horn rimmed glasses as she escorts her husband Rafe down a Seattle sidewalk. They hold hands as they navigate the city so that Rafe doesn’t get lost. Since his Alzheimer’s diagnoses four years ago Rafe is prone to wandering off and not being able to remember how he got there.
When her husband’s illness began to necessitate full-time care Paula left her 40 year career as an educator to take care of him. “It’s a different kind of closeness now. When you’re married for so long, you envision growing old together and traveling, doing stuff with the grand kids,” she says. The couple have been married for 38 years. “It wasn’t what I had expected for our retirement,” she says.
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Days after reading Paula’s words I am lying next to Keith in our dark bedroom; we’re talking about the future . The various adventures that we want to go on this year and in those to come. Dream trips, future locations and where our lives might one day take us. The conversation is punctuated by the phrase “wouldn’t it be cool if” as we circle through mountains to climb, trails to hike. The experiences around which we want to build our lives. And equally importantly, the things that we don’t want.
“Part of being alive is awaiting the revelation” of who you’ll become.”
At 30 I am entering the part of my life where people are less likely to describe my choices as phases. When I tell people that I want adventure instead of children fewer people assure me that I will change my mind. Though, not all. Only time and the eventual onset of menopause will ever render this point moot. Until then, I must endure the pitying looks of aunts and criticisms of unbelieving strangers who believe that, of course, I do not know what I am talking about. People have a propensity for defensiveness if your choices differ from their own. I have long since accepted that a person’s incredulity is rarely about me, but rather about what my choices might say about them. Motherhood still stands as the central definer of womanhood. But I have weathered the endless choruses of disbelief for two decades now and I am used to the storm that comes with taking the path less followed.
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Despite my bullish urge to resist, the changing of the year has brought me into a period of reflection. I’ve been thinking a lot about choices lately, and which ones I should make to become the person I wish to be. Even though that woman often feels a long way off I feel compelled to dig through the sand to find her, no matter how often the endless gains slide back into place.
“…we aspire to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess…”
The days are getting longer. Just a little, but I can see it in the evening sky as I drive west into the mountains outside Seattle. As I drive I think about Paula, a woman I have never met. A woman who was not even the focal point in the article in which I read about her and her husband. And yet her words “it wasn’t what I expected from our retirement” pierces a barb straight through my heart and I haven’t been able to get her out of my mind.
For better or worse I have always been distinctly aware that death comes for us all. When I was a child I would lie on my bedroom floor, and with eyes closed try to remember what it was like before I was born. My aim was to dredge up memories of life before my life. In doing so I was confronted with a stretching darkness. In the way that all children experiment as a means for learning about the world around them I too was attempting to reconcile my place within the prodigious expanse of time. As an infant might drop a spoon from their high chair again and again just to see how many times their parent will fetch it from the floor, I too was searching for the bounds of what is.
My searching rendered me a devout atheist by the time I entered middle school. What I discovered behind my eyelids revealed that before I was born I was nothing more than a formless, unconscious bundle of dispersed atoms. Presumably, I reasoned, that would be where I would return to.
I have spent the intervening years attempting to answer the question that the beloved, and now lost, Mary Oliver asked of us all: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Apparently, at least in part, the answer is that I will leave the office early, drive west into the coming gloom of dusk and ski uphill in the dark just for the delighted play of sliding back down across the grainy snow.
Nestled next to my heart I carry a small but heavy stone. One that begs me to look upon the beauty of the world in the knowledge of the fact that one day it will all be lost to me. Some days that stone feels so heavy that I worry it might break me right in two. But it also fills me with a resolve to not spend my life in the pursuit of shoulds. I find myself lucky enough to be entering a fourth decade on this planet I am called to pursue the freedom that comes from time spent in the mountains chasing sunsets across ridges and forever wondering what is just beyond the horizon.
Goodbye sweet Mary, you were a light upon this world who called us to see the wonder that is all around.
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across landscapes, over the prairies and deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, in the clear blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting- over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
Through the dark a warm, red glow begins to blossom, prying me from sleep. Slowly the glow blooms into a persistent light and I am dragged into wakefulness. Before I can fully wake, before I can choose to engage with the day, I roll over and turn my alarm clock off. I am not going to the gym today.
In fact, I didn’t go to the gym once this week. Not once. Each morning when my fancy daylight alarm clock began to brighten the room I would turn it off and go back to sleep for another hour.
For the first time in what feels like a long time I have completely fallen out of the habit of exercising before work. Foregoing my normal practice in favor of extra hours spent between the sheets. When the darkness of morning comes calling I ignore it. The difference is, that this week I elected to stop feeling bad about it.
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Years ago I was introduced to the concept of the Big Why. The Big Why is the concept of drilling way down deep through the desire behind any goal in an effort to figure out what is motivating our actions. Once we understand our Big Why it becomes easier to follow through with the necessary steps to to accomplish our goals. For more than two years my Big Why was attempting a thru hike of the Pacific Crest Trail.
When I didn’t want to do squats (my very least favorite strength training activity) I motivated myself with the knowledge that squats lead to strong legs and strong legs lead to a higher likelihood of completing my hike. The same was true with money. When I wanted a fancy coffee, or to splurge on a last minute trip I would weight that immediate desire against the much bigger desire to save money for the PCT. Suddenly every dollar I spent became potential PCT money and as a result it was easier to skip the fancy coffee and put that money into my savings account instead. My why was big enough to consistently influence my daily decisions. A touchstone of sorts which I could return to when the desire to be comfortable or entertained in the moment threatened to derail the dream of thru hiking.
However, when I completed my thru hike of the PCT on September 11, 2018 my big why vanished. Poof. It was gone. I had a few plans on the horizon, but nothing that required long term dedication in the way that preparing for the trail did. And that lack of motivating force impacted how lived my life. Even though it would be weeks before I could begin to recognize it.
In the weeks immediately following the trail I began running around the lake in my neighborhood. I signed up for a nearby gym. Told myself that I wasn’t going to lose all of the fitness I had gained over the previous months of backpacking. I thought I could roll this experience into another epic adventure, something big and sexy. I was riding a high of accomplishment and in doing so ignoring how my body was feeling.
Barbell weight training, something I genuinely enjoy, became a chore to be dealt with. Running began to feel about as enjoyable as filing taxes. On more than one occasion I would choose hiking destinations based on the quality of story they would produce, not how happy they would make me. I had become someone with two thru hikes under my belt. Someone who gets outside every weekend, hits the climbing gym at night, and does epic shit. But I was also tired and unmotivated. Misdiagnosing the cause of my malaise I plowed forward.
Maybe, I thought. Just maybe what I just needed was another big project to throw myself at. If I could just cultivate the right level of stoke then all my desire to train and get outside would come rushing back. But in the way that mother nature holds us and allows her foolish human children to find their own paths across this planet, she is also capable of stepping in our way when we are in danger of doing ourselves harm.
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This winter in the northwest has been characterized by alternating warm rain and snow storms. Resulting in a highly unstable snowpack and high-risk avalanche conditions which have forced me to stay at lower elevations and closer to home. My personal life has been characterized by stretched finances as I looked for a job and rebuilt my savings account after taking nearly eight months away from the workforce.
In the way in which I pursued the PCT with an unbalanced fervor, the pendulum is has since swung the other way and I find myself craving rest. Yet, having this swing coincide with the new year has left me feeling distinctly at odds with a society that fetishizes productivity and busyness. During the early weeks of January while the internet screams about 10 habits of highly productive people, declaring that this will be the year of the new you. I feel like I am constantly walking through a blaring motivational Nike ad when all I really want is a nap.
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The proverbial Greek choir dubbed ‘they’ says that there is calm before the storm. I have always found that there is a calm after the storm as well. Living our lives in endless circles as we do, means that these are perhaps the same calm. A season of effort followed by one of rest. Around and around we go.
At the center of an experience it is hard to see the edges. When I am living in the calm I worry that I will be tied to this bed forever. That my stillness will stretch to the horizon and I will be lost. And while I am amid the flurry of excitement that is the storm I pretend that this too, is sustainable. But here on the edge it is possible to see that change will come in time and that I need not cause myself undue strife in attempting to accelerate it’s approach.
During the last few weeks, as I have waded through the morass of unmotivation I have slowly felt my desire for adventure returning. The months long break is slowly lifting and I can feel my drive to explore returning. The other day as I took a walk at lunch I felt that familiar tug to grab my running shoes. This week when thrilling boxes of new ski gear arrived at my door I once again began browsing weather reports and drive times to my local ski hill. While the tendrils of my burning desire to explore outside are beginning to rekindle I have not yet regained the urge to labor outdoors.
The new gear sitting unassembled on my living room floor speaks to the promise of new, softer adventures. I am not ready to push myself, lungs burning, down 20 miles of alpine trail. But skiing feels like pure play in the way that hiking does not. And that is what I am ready for, play.
“…this, dear reader, is what I want to tell you about the Pacific Crest Trail. That it is not the romance you expect it to be. Nor is it the suffering which one can imagine it to be, nor the constant elation that many wish it to be. But as with every dream turned accomplishment it lies somewhere in the middle.”
Outside the window the North Cascades roll past as the bus travels south towards Seattle. A verdant green valley stretches away towards craggy cliffs which jut skyward to be capped with low grey clouds. As viewed from the enclosed glass bubble of a Greyhound bus this otherwise expansive view feels distinctly minimized, small, removed—as though I am being sealed off from the natural world. With every traffic-laden mile I roll back hours of walking and this, more than anything, makes me realize that my PCT thru hike is well and truly over.
On March 27, 2018 I stood at the southern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail outside the minuscule town of Campo, California. Hemmed in on all sides by rolling desert hills and nervously laughing strangers I took my start day pictures. I remember thinking that if it were not for the PCT no one would visit this particular stretch of border wall, this particular stretch of chaparral and sand and sky. But there we stood, 35 pale, squinting strangers assembled under a flat blue sky looking north and pretending we could see all the way to Canada. All the way along this wild stretching journey laid out in front of us. The plan: to walk the land between Mexico and Canada, the height of a country. An act which on that day in late March felt more feasible than it does now, some 168 days later. Bizarrely it is only upon completion of the PCT that I have come to realize how absurdly improbable the task of thru hiking is.
At its most basic level a Pacific Crest Trail thru hike is an exceedingly long logistical and physical challenge set against the backdrop of some of America’s greatest natural spaces. Which, when compared to the romantic notion of what people believe a thru hike to be, may sound overly reductive. But the most basic elements of thru hiking are precisely what drew me towards it. Like a thread tied deep within my chest tugging me forward through the months of preparation, it was the thrill of the challenge that sustained me. I have long been drawn to being physically challenged beyond what is expected, or assumed that I am capable of. Furthermore, this hike was an opportunity to spend an extended period of time backpacking in remote places—something which is central to who I am as a person and seek to do as often as possible. I didn’t want to hike the PCT as a means of suffering my way towards a life realization, but because I believed I would genuinely enjoy it—the sleeping in the dirt, the hours spent walking through wild places far away from the next human animal, the self reliance and accompanying logistical planning.
“I remember thinking I wasn’t sure if the PCT would be a life altering experience, or simply another experience in a life.”
And this, dear reader, is what I want to tell you about the Pacific Crest Trail. That it is not the romance you expect it to be. Nor is it the suffering which one can imagine it to be, nor the constant elation that many wish it to be. But as with every dream turned accomplishment it lies somewhere in the middle. More indescribable, more nuanced in the ways it will affect you. More prone to leaving you staring at your keyboard in frustration as you attempt to express an entire world of roiling emotions into the cumbersome, imperfect things we call words. Early on in my hike, as I stood panting atop Mount Laguna and looking down onto the vast beige desert below me, I remember thinking I wasn’t sure if the PCT would be a life altering experience, or simply another experience in a life. Now that it has come and gone and I am left standing along the shores of the aftermath I can say it feels more like the later.
Looking out at the great forward expanse that will be the rest of my life, the PCT stands behind me as part of who I am, not the entirety of who I am. An experience that has left me changed, but was not life changing—a sentiment that I tend to feel a little guilty about. As though I should have produced a deeper moral to this story. That I should want to leave my life in the city, throw everything in my backpack, and wander into the wilderness where I would be my deepest and truest self. I know this is the story that many people want to read. But for me it is simply not true, and I have never been a person capable of dishonesty simply to placate others.
You see, there is a prescribed narrative splashed across the pages of books and the screens of social media, a story that says thru hiking will radically change your life or else thru hiking will become your life. For there are a small but highly vocal minority of hikers for whom long distance thru hiking has become the central pillar of their lives. They post YouTube videos about gear and food in the winter. While during hiking season they fill our Instagram feeds with stunning images of wild places and wax rhapsodical about the purity of life on the trail, how the simplicity of living from a backpack and wandering through the woods will lead you onto a higher plane of being. This narrative is so pervasive, that to the uninitiated it feels preordained. In the days after I finished the PCT I was subjected to the constant refrain: what’s next? Strangers who had followed my hike inquired about my next big hike. Would it be the AT? CDT? Something abroad? The online peanut gallery has read the script and in witnessing my success looks to cast me in the roll of thru hiker for life.
Yet, thru hiking is not something I wish to build my life around. I believe the act is simply too unsustainable for that—you can’t thru hike forever, no matter what social media portrays. And beyond that, neither my body nor mind have the desire to do so. To thru hike repeatedly at the exclusion of all other activities would be to trim oneself into a mere shadow of the multitudes we contain. I am a thru hiker as much as I am a writer, a skier, an adventurer, a traveler. And substantially less than I am a daughter, a sister, a partner, and a individual with myriad desires and flaws.
Please don’t be disappointed dear reader. For while my months long walking vacation has not rent me into a new person for which unabated hiking is the only path to happiness, it has gifted me a great deal.
Thru hiking taught me that there is a great joy in unbalanced, unrelenting forward progress towards a singular goal. The very nature of thru hiking gives us that. Something with which we can focus all our energy towards, an unambiguous pursuit to which we can commit fully and in doing so strip away the banalities and distractions of a more complex life. To realize that balance is rarely at the center of great achievements, but conversely is required for us to be full and complete humans. That balance should be sought in the long game, not the cause for strife in the minute workings of a day.
In the unbalanced volume of time spent walking I was afforded a chance to think, to wander and wonder about my life, to leave space for realizations about what is important. In the broadest sense I came to realize that I do not want to spend my life working towards things to which I only feel the most obligatory passions. Namely, dedicating my life to a career. I have struggled most of my life against the highly American notion that our work lives should be placed at the center of our whole lives. I believe this is most obviously seen in the question we all deem most important to ask new acquaintances–“what do you do.” To which it is implied “for work.” Not what do you do for joy, or to relax, or to challenge yourself. But what do you do to earn money, who are you in relation to the way you feed your ever hungry bank account. And in the drive for transparency I must admit that it scares me to write this.
You see, upon leaving the trail I am also unemployed and will need to seek work, and what if some future employer reads this and in doing so discovers that a my career has never found a home in my heart? It is subversive in the most basic way to not want to work. America believes itself a country of hard workers and capitalists. But thru hiking gave me the time to fully step outside that narrative and see how artificial that idea is. To re-frame my life’s long struggle to figure out what I want to do with my one wild and precious life, and begin to frame that question outside of a career. What do I want to do with the rest of my life if my job is not the most central part of it, but instead a facet of who I am?
Maybe in some ways thru hiking the PCT simply gave me the space to recognize the full measure of myself. It gave me time to see what I thought was important, and most invaluably, why those things were important to me. To have the time and space to fully observe why I choose to do things, even the somewhat silly things like thru hiking was a tremendous privilege.
In truth my beautiful reader, I didn’t hike the PCT for any real reason other than I wanted to. There was no burning desire to memorialize a loved one, nor did I expect the trail to somehow solve all of my life’s problems. In the most literal sense there was no point to it, no purpose other than that I thought I would like it. In so many ways the whole PCT is a pointless, deeply absurd endeavor. To walk the land between Mexico and Canada along a set line between two arbitrarily decided borders–and to what end? To live a life of social conformity–and to what end? If I don’t have my own own reasons for doing something, then why am I doing it? If I am not finding joy in the process or working towards a goal, then what am I doing and why? Why, I was given the time to ask, does one choose to anything in life?
Ultimately, I chose to thru hike the PCT because the challenge appealed to me and gave me the time to shed the gaze of the world and play freely in the outdoors. And that, maybe more than anything, is what the PCT was to me. A chance to honor myself by doing something that was so purely selfish and joyful. Yes, maybe that is the real truth of it—to me, the PCT was an act of joy.
For joy is not something that is without pain, or suffering, or strife. Joy is electing to go through that pain because what is waiting on the other side is so much grander and more beautiful than comfort and conformity could ever be. To bleed, to ache, to hurt in pursuit of something that you want–that is joy. To peel back the layers of your skin like a wild, feral, inhuman beast, to dig deep within yourself for no other reason than the thrill of adventure–that is joy. To choose how you suffer, to look far into the distance and recognize that this ridiculous idea of walking to Canada is nothing but an expression of want–that is joy. It is a privilege to be given the body, time, and world in which that is a possibility.
So no, the PCT did not change my life so much as it was an opportunity to step away from how we are told to live and open up to the ways in which I would prefer to live.
