SDTCT – Day 3

Mile 38 to mile 58

The SDTCT runs close to the US-Mexico border. As such it seemed only right to raise money for an organization doing humane social justice work in this area. Border Angels, a non-profit organization that works to reduce the number of deaths on the US-Mexico. If you have the means to donate I strongly encourage you to do so. If you appreciate my writing on this blog, consider it a favor to me to donate to this fundraiser.

I start the climb out of Borrego Springs before the sun has cracked the eastern horizon, priding myself on my early start. However, as soon as the sun makes its way over the ridge I know I didn’t start early enough. The temperature rockets skyward even at this early hour. This morning we are climbing on a real bona fide trail as we gain more than 3,600 feet in a little over four miles. The sun paints the rocks a warm, glowing pink and I think, not for the first time, that I do not find the desert beautiful. The trail winds through a Seussian landscape of house-sized boulders and scratching plants with their curled fingers clawing at the sky. Just past the summit of the climb is our second water cache and we press ourselves into the bushes in search of shade. My cohorts gush about the beauty of the desert while all I can see are rolling scrubby mountains shot through with sandy washes and covered in reaching, splayed vegetation. They say there are three types of people, mountain people, desert dwellers, and river rats. In that case I am a mountain person surrounded by 11 desert dwellers. We hike on.

The afternoon is one long descent towards another highway and I allow the group to pull ahead. My brain feels too full, chattering with itself, making up stories and playing out imagined scenarios. There is already too much going on between my ears and I feel panicked at the presence of other people. My mood feels like it is perpetually falling down a flight of stairs and I am struggling to right myself amid the tumbling. Toward the bottom of the climb I find most of the group posted up for a snack and smoke break in the shade of a large bush. I stop long enough to shovel down some snacks before I head off alone.

I imagine they think I’m weird. Or that I don’t like them. That I’m a loner, antisocial, a freak. My brain is too full and today none of the voices are on my side. I can’t manage the niceties of being social and yet not doing so makes me feel like I am somehow failing at this hike. Why would I come all this way to hike through terrain I don’t even like if I’m not even going to hang out with the people I came to see? It makes me want to cry, just as so much does these days. But I don’t, I can’t. I’ve never been much of a crier, something which at this moment I’m frustrated by and grateful for. After all, it’s not easy to hike when you’re crying.

A few miles after I pass my group I see Ashley, a woman who started this hike on the same day as us and who has been flitting around us like a serene humming bird. She is sitting on the side of the trail in some deep shade all by herself. I am so envious that my knees almost buckle from the wanting. To be alone, I think, I would give anything to be that alone. But I know the group is just behind me and so after a quick chat with Ashley I press on, pushing myself harder and harder down the shallow descent.

My legs churn and my feet ache and my brain starts looking for a way out. When I get home, I tell myself, I’ll have one single afternoon before Starman gets home from work where I can be totally alone. Somehow, I’ve reasoned, being alone will stop the roiling current in my head. Somehow if I can just be alone, if I can just make everything stop then maybe I won’t be so very tired and so very wound up at the same time. And then, I do something I have never done before on a thru hike, I pull out my phone and look for flights back to Seattle. Or, I would have, but there is no service out here. And so I hike on with my head too full of thoughts and my body weighed down from the inside with this exhaustion that has followed me for the better part of a year. On throbbing feet that ache with every step I march into camp and set up my tarp with the others.

Over dinner that night I laugh and joke and listen to the others tell hiking stories as we eat our dinners out of our tiny pots. In the darkness it is easier to be social, almost effortless. Like it used to be. It only occurs to me now, after a day of being disappointed in myself, that my meds still aren’t right and that my brain is still running away with me. But there is less than nothing I can do about it now and so I return to my little home under my tarp and prepare for bed.