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PCT Day 43 – Yes, but first uphill

Campsite at mile 593 to Kelso Valley Road (mile 616)

We reach the 600 mile marker around lunchtime. Like all of the unofficial mile markers that people construct out of twigs, rocks, and pinecones, there are at least four. Spread out trailside, one after the other in 30 meter intervals in accordance with each creators GPS device. All of them are close enough for me, so I take a picture of the one in the best light. It’s a funny feeling standing over the mile marker, something like trying to laugh, cry, and vomit all at the same time. Less a reaction to the number, than to the thought “oh, just a little over 2,000 left.” It’s not a mood booster.

The trail has felt especially hard since Tehachapi. Bigger climbs, distant water sources, and warmer temperatures have left me wilted. At lunch I zone out in the shade as people complain around me. Tired, sore, hot, thirstier, hungrier, and is this getting harder not easier(?!) – everything I’ve been feeling but not saying, pouring from the mouths of other hikers. The relief is euphoric. It’s not just me, that doesn’t make it any easier, but it’s not just me. Isn’t that what Nicole Antoinette is always trying to tell us? That people really just want to be told they’re not alone.

Hours later we’re hiking through sunset to make it down to Kelso Valley Road where everybody else is camping. Keith and I are alone for the first time today, Beandip and Moonshine behind us in the gloaming, All American Austin, Low Key, and Lost ahead – probably already in camp. The air is cool and above us the sky is doing magnificent things. Blue and pink sherbet swirled across the sky, the land around us bathed in that special light – the kind that only comes in the mountains when the sun has gone behind the hills but isn’t totally set. It’s like the mountains are saying it’s worth it, it’s worth it, you’re worth it.

Thank you special mountains, thank you for everything.

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PCT Day 42 – 18 miles

Campsite at mile 575 to Campsite at mile 593

Already the mountains are changing, giving us little tastes of what is to come. We’re in the last section of the desert. Up next, snow, mountain passes, the promise land, the Sierra Nevada. I’m excited, but I’m also tired. It feels like we pushed past our ability during the last section and the accumulated fatigue is bleeding into this section. A fatigue that follows us out of town and down the trail, up the baking desert climbs, and through the quaint verdant meadows with their waving grasses and scrub oak. The extra food, the extra water, the sun, it feels like too much, but so does admitting that. Like somehow only going 18 miles today is a failure. Like only 18 miles is a rational thing to say.

****

Before each section Keith and I sit down and plan out how many days it’s going to take us to complete the given miles to the next town. A more accurate description would be I look at the number of miles in a section, divide it by the number of miles I’m likely to walk each day and get the number of days it will take us. Meanwhile, Keith, with his unending need to plan out details and look at maps likes to schedule how far we should go each day, where we should camp, where we’ll get water, and if he can, what time we’ll arrive in the next town. In so many ways this is a great trait, one that has served us well in the desert where water carries can be 20 miles or more in this dry spring. However, when we fall off this plan it can make it feel like we’re playing catch-up the entire section. Like stopping early to take advantage of a beautiful campsite is cutting yourself short. Like missing your miles is messing up. It’s less like you’re doing something wrong, and more like you’re not doing something right. A small distinction, but vital.

I’m further aware that someone will be tempted to comment “it’s not about the miles, it’s about the smiles.” But don’t, just don’t. Because at some point it is about the miles. The miles until you’re out of water, the miles until you run out of food, the miles that you need to cover every single day regardless of how you feel because that’s how you make it to Canada. That’s how you accomplish a goal, by doing the work even when you don’t want to.

But it can also feel frustrating, to feel like you’re always rushing rushing rushing towards something. Because no matter how many miles you hike today you’ll still have only done a very small percentage of the distance to Canada. It’s both a lot and never enough.

So this evening when we come down a hill into an idyllic valley we decide to cut the day short. We won’t make up the miles from an easy day yesterday. We won’t make it to Walker Pass early enough to get to the post office in three days time. But we also don’t have to do this big climb and four more miles tonight, so fuck it. Fuck the schedule and the timelines, fuck the seasons and the post office hours. It’s too beautiful not to stop right here and now.

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PCT Day 6 – Shouldn’t I be Doing Something?

Zero in Julian, no hiking.

There’s a strange restless energy inside me, flighty birds alight in my chest, skittering lizards are my legs. Never a skilled waiter, five days of walking seems to have obliterated the skill of calmness completely.

All day I stand, sit, give up my chair at the hiker table behind Carmen’s when another person arrives. After breakfast there is a period of socializing back around the table, the only place in Julian where thru hikers can coalesce without attracting the bald stares of tourists. It’s Easter Sunday and Julian Main Street is filled with families driven up from the big cities for a quiet day in a quaint town. When the talk around the table finally turns into fear mongering and misinformation about the trail, I make my break.

Down the street for trail food. To a park to write, email and call family. And when finally finally my absence from the hiker table is noted and texts are sent, I return to the comfortable company and limbo that is the back table at Carmen’s.

Tomorrow we hitch from Julian and hike from Scissors and who knows what the trail will bring us next. My head and heart are a circus, anticipating the newness and novelty of whatever is to come.

Masshole, our ride from Sissors Crossing, and general hiking guru.

Irish Tony, kind and hilarious, like the uncle at the party with all the best jokes.

Marbles, cool as a cucumber and provider of free weed.

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PCT Day 5 – Trail Names

Mile 64 to Sissors Crossing (mile 77) then a hitch into Julian

We rush rush rush down out of the lowland desert hills into the capital D Desert where even in the last day of March it’s hot. A sort of desperate heat, the kind humans aren’t designed for. In this baking valley floor with it’s menagerie of twisted brittle plants, it feels as though nothing is actually meant to live here. The high thin clouds have been coming and going over the sun all day, as mercurial in nature in our ability to decide if and where we’re going into town. It’s just thirteen miles from camp to Sissors Crossing, and if we can get to Sissors by early afternoon we’ll have earned ourselves a precious nero (a day of low milage, typically less than a half day hiking) in addition to our zero (day of no hiking) tomorrow. At Sissors we’ll hitch into Julian. Or maybe we’ll hitch four miles in the other direction and stay at the Stagecoach RV park. Or maybe we’ll hang out under the bridge where we stumble upon the first trail magic we’ve encountered. Finally we end up in downtown Julian surrounded by other hikers at Carmen’s, talking about the only thing hikers ever want to talk about: hiking.

I find myself sitting next to a man who self describes as a “mystic, telepathic energy healer” and I cannot tell if he’s just messing with me or if that’s his real life. We trade names and he informs me that Kara is too hard of a name to pronounce and then works in vain to give me a trail name – which is a sort of nickname that folks use on the tail in lieu of their real names.

At 29 I have conflicting feelings around trail names. On the one hand they’re largely innocuous, fun and often funny, and can be used to preserve ones anonymity if that’s you’re thing. But also, I’m not sure I need or want a different persona for hiking. Maybe it’s a product of growing up and becoming more comfortable with who I am. Or perhaps as a person who has never been conducive to being given nicknames I’ve never grown comfortable with the practice personally.

However, as this drunken stranger who knows nothing more about me than my name – which he doesn’t even like, tries to rename me, I find myself growing defensive over my name for perhaps the first time in my life. When I first heard about the PCT I had such a strong desire for my own trail name, and I’m not ruling out the possibility of adopting one in the future. But I like the feeling of being someone who is strong enough to propose, plan, and tackle the PCT, just me, no alter ego attached.

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PCT Day 4 – Little by Little

Mount Laguna (mile 41) to mile 64

The miles out of Mount Laguna feel hard. Or rather, obligatory. Uninspiring. Nothing is really wrong, but on day four tiredness has begun to creep into my legs and this early in the morning the endorphins from hiking haven’t had the chance to elevate my mood beyond it’s normal morning calm. It’s certainly not reason for alarm, just the reality of big goals.

How can I best say this. I once read that every overnight success is actually five years in the making. I may be bastardizing that quote, but I’m writing this from the side of a mountain hiding from the afternoon heat in the shade of a rock, so I’ll kindly ask you to cut me a break. I love the sentiment behind that idea. In that, it’s so easy to look at someone else’s achievement and fill in the fantasy of how they got there with a nicely paved road to the top. But that’s never the reality of the process, is it?

Like any big goal in life, there are sure to be moments of elation and joy, breakthroughs and beauty. Just as there will be crushing lows and challenges; days that end in tears and stories you’ll only tell after the passage of years have dulled the sharp edges that cut so deep. These are the memories that we celebrate or commiserate over, but I’ve found, and continue to find, that the highs and lows are greatly outnumbered by the mundane doing of a task.

This is exactly what I’m walking through today. The steps one must take day upon day in order to move oneself incrementally closer to the finish line. It just so happens to be that my steps towards the finish line are quite literal. So today, as I’m sure many days in the future, I work to be content with the simple act of walking. To be grateful to live in a body that can do these things I ask of it, in a part of the world where thru hiking is even possible. I work to be happy with knowing that I’m grinding down this hike little by little, and I try not to think too far in the future lest I totally overwhelm myself.

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Is it Environmentally Responsible to Have Kids?

In July of 2018 I’ll turn 30 years old which, in and of itself, is a mildly terrifying prospect. However, this upcoming decade change has ushered in a collection of more probing questions from extended family members, society at large, and relative strangers, all of whom feel they have the right to question and hold sway over my personal choices. As any femme-identifying person can attest to, the most persistent of these questions is: when are you going to have children? As though my uterus is some sort of frequent flyer program of baby making. As though my only value to this world is to push out children. As though any woman who doesn’t want children is somehow beholden to the population at large to explain herself, justify herself, clarify her own wishes and desires to those oh-so entitled question askers.

Before we move on let’s take a moment to familiarize ourselves with the following:

1) ‘No’ is a complete sentence

And

2) “Because I don’t want to” is as much justification as you need to give for any decision in your life. Period.

Personally, I have never wanted, nor enjoyed, children of any particular variety. However, if you (man or woman) really really want kids, then bully for you. I’m certainly not here to tell you what to do. But maybe, to help you consider how your actions affect the planet at large. It’s important to remember that this one miraculous blue dot is all we have, and that we’re all in this together, truly.

2017 was great for showing us how our actions impact others, and that personal responsibility has to be the cornerstone of an effective human race. Furthermore, as someone who is looking for ways to make their environmental footprint smaller, I started to wonder: What is the environmental impact of having a child? As we’ll see, the answer is both conclusive, and nuanced.

In 2017 the Institute of Physics – a London Based charity that seeks to promote the understanding and application of physics – published a joint study from the University of British Columbia and Lund University in Sweden that directly tied having one fewer child to a massive decrease in tons of CO2 emissions (represented as tCO2e saved per year). If you live in a developed country, the impact of having a child is 58.6 tCO2e each year. This number is higher than combined impact of not owning a car (2.4 tCO2e), avoiding airline travel (1.6 tCO2e per round trip transatlantic flight), and eating an exclusively plant based diet (0.8 tCO2e).  

In short, if you elect to have a child, you’d have to give up owning a car for 24.4 years to offset the impact of one year of your child’s carbon footprint. Alternately, you could go vegan for the next 73.25 years to accomplish the same thing. If those numbers seem daunting, worry not. A similar study from Oregon State University posited that each parent should only be responsible for half the impact of each offspring, so you can cleave those numbers above in two. However, the remainder of the OSU study doesn’t paint such a rosy picture for those parents to be.

The scientists at OSU employed the EPA’s Personal Emissions Calculator to extrapolate the yearly impact of having a child over an 80-year period — the current lifetime average for an American female. The OSU study claims that if all global factors remain the same, then having a child will sock an additional 9,441 metric tons of CO2 into our already clogged atmosphere during the life of that child.

However, because things in this world are rarely static, the OSU study also provides two additional numbers for the lifetime CO2 emissions for that child, one which they title a pessimistic outcome (12,730 metric tons of CO2) and an optimistic outcome (562 metric tons of CO2). While ‘pessimistic’ and ‘optimistic’ outcomes are hardly quantitative scientific measurements, and the study does not elaborate on how they came to those numbers, one thing is clear from table 3 below: even in the most optimistic scenario, adding an additional child to your household adds more CO2 to the environment that that could be saved by combining every other CO2 reducing action in the remainder of the table.

The OSU study, sums up the issue succinctly “clearly, the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle.” Bam, case closed. Or, maybe not?

As they say, the children are our future. So then the question becomes: is it worth having a child for the potential benefits that they may bring to the world? Unlike studies documenting CO2 emissions, the argument for having a child is a lot less concrete, but there is still a persuasive, though largely idealistic, argument to be made.

The first argument for having a child is that your progeny could be a genius. With an increase in population comes an increase in the number of geniuses. In the last 200-odd years the population has seen more than an eightfold increase in the global population. In that time we have also seen man walk on the moon, a massive increase in information accessibility via the internet, and a rise in renewable energy systems. The argument that some economists make is that a massive population is necessary for remarkable forward progress. Where geniuses come in, is that a genius, a true genius, on the scale of Albert Einstein, Hedy Lamarr, and Emmy Noether, are so vital to the progress of our species that they greatly outweigh the damage caused by the rest of the more pedestrian population.

The next argument is that the children being born today are coming into a world that has been thoroughly mucked up by adults, and they’re not willing to duff about doing nothing. Consider the landmark trail Juliana et al. vs The United States of America. This suit which was filed on behalf of 21 people aged 10 to 21 claims that an environment sustainable for human life is a basic human right. It goes to further claim that the U.S. government is infringing on the 5th Amendment by allowing global CO2 emissions to pass 410 parts per million.

Now, it should be noted that when the US passed the 410 ppm threshold in early 2017, nothing catastrophic actually happened. However, this number has long been touted by conservationists as a number worth being aware of, one that could possibly signal irreparable damage to Earth’s environment. It’s especially dire when compared to the 280 ppm level of the pre-industrial world. And, more worryingly, that it took us less than 60 years to rise the level of atmospheric CO2 from 316 ppm in 1958 (when consistent measurement began) to 410 ppm in early 2017.

Since it seems clear that nobody in our current administration is going to do anything about climate change, I certainly hope that we can raise a new generation that is committed to remedying the mess we’ve made of our home. And this, parents and future parents to be, is where you come in. If you elect to have a child, knowing the damage it will cause the world, then I fully expect you to raise a conscientious and environmentally aware human.

The OSU study, while providing overwhelming evidence that reproduction is environmentally damaging, also espouses the value of taking personal steps to reduce your emissions. The study states “this is not to say that lifestyle changes are unimportant; in fact, they are essential, since immediate reductions in emissions worldwide are needed to limit the damaging effects of climate change that are already being documented (Kerr, 2007; Moriarty and Honnery, 2008).” And goes on to illustrate the above point that your choices as a parent, as a person, as a human, on this collective merry-go-round that we’re all riding matter a great deal. “The amplifying effect of an individual’s reproduction … implies that such lifestyle changes must propagate through future generations in order to be fully effective, and that enormous future benefits can be gained by immediate changes in reproductive behavior.”

So take public transit, ride a bike or walk, stop eating meat, fly less, make your home more energy efficient by replacing your windows with high insulating ones and replacing incandescent bulbs with LEDs, stop buying new things, and recycle any and everything that you can, buy a higher MPG car, call your congressperson, call your senators, call your local reps every single day and tell them how important our environment is to you, exclusively support brands that have sustainable practices, buy local, and teach your children to do the same.

Ultimately, your daily choices matter a great deal, not just to those of us alive now, but those who are yet to be born. As a person, and as a parent, you are given the opportunity every single day to determine what you want your legacy to be, and I hope that it won’t be one of greed and consumerism, but instead one of conservation and awareness.

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Canyon Walls – Halloween Special

“Life Elevated” read the sign. Welcome to Utah. We drove on. An ebullient mood filled the car as the red desert, speckled with muted green sage brush, flew past the window. The southwest felt like freedom, even to, or perhaps especially to, two 20 something college kids on a road trip.

I eased my car from the freeway and we cruised past the muddy brown waters of the Colorado River, cutting its way between the red sand stone cliffs.  Driving until, after a time we set up camp at a little backcountry spot I knew, just outside the town of Moab – a small southwest tourist town slug between low bluffs, barely making an indent in the oppressive blue sky.

It was a weeknight and we were miles from the closest people, but had everything we needed. Campfire, great company, and a few beers to round out the night.

We drank and relaxed in the way that only those who have shared the traumas of public high school can. Stories wound into the night on the tails of embers. Soon it was late, we doused our fire and crawled into the tent. The sky was brilliantly clear, and the only sounds for miles was the wind softly whispering through the skeletal trees of the desert. Laying awake I heard, in the distance, a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard before. It was so perplexing that even years later I’m afraid that I continue to fail in my endeavor to describe it accurately.

The sound drifted through the canyon walls, it’s source obscured by echo and reverberation. A low, rumbling, metallic, howl drifted through the camp. Then – silence.

Assuming it was a one-off I tried to roll over and fall asleep as my friend already had. But then again, came the sound. It sounded alive, and like whatever was making the sound was in pain. Laboriously droning out it’s final death gasps to the heavens.

My friend, partially roused by the noise, rolled over in her sleeping bag and mumbled “they’re killing it” before she drifted easily back to sleep.

I’m sure it’s gratuitous to say that this didn’t help my anxiety.

For hours I lay awake, too scared to leave the imagined safety of our tent. Too scared to sleep. The sound came again and again, rumbling up through the canyons, across the lonely desert and into my terrified ears. A belabored, struggling, noise, that interposed a sense of foreboding into the stars and wind. The shadows outside our tent were abruptly filled with childhood monsters – born from the unknown and given form within my frightened and drunken brain

For hours I sat listening to the noise – I could tell it wasn’t getting closer, and in the early morning stillness the sound suddenly stopped. My ears, my body strained with the effort of listening, slouched forward in my sleeping bag, I finally had to accept that the howl had ceased.

The next morning as the sun rose to blazing intensity in the clear sky we hiked into the canyon, towards the source of the noise. Buoyed into curiosity by the light of day. What we ultimately found was: nothing. No people camped further in, no wounded animals, no industrial machinery. The only thing out there was miles of red desert snaking between canyon walls and sandstone monoliths.

Whatever had made the disquieting sounds clearly didn’t feel the need to stick around until sunrise.

Today, after all those years, that sound has found a place, deep within my memories, where I can still hear it floating over the dusty red earth. But I’m no closer to understanding it’s source, and – I accept – that I likely never will.

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Your Adventure Doesn’t Need to be Sexy

 

Look at this fucking shit! You could go see this! For real!

I recently told my boyfriend that I harbor a secret fantasy. One in which every young person I see driving a Sprinter van, or a Ford econo-line is a total dirtbag, living out of said van and traveling the world, and that I’m incredibly envious of these fictional people that I’ve created in my mind. He was kind enough to burst my bubble and inform me that no, these people are probably just working delievery jobs and that not every 20-something is living the #vanlife and traveling the country. But it sometimes feels that way, doesn’t it? How many times do we check into social media only to see beautiful images of professional athletes in remote countries, or that one friend who just #wokeuplikethis to a stunning view of the Grand Canyon? Isn’t everybody traveling to some remote place without me?

The answer is simple: no.

And it’s probably for the exact same reason you’re not quitting your job, traveling the world and giving the proverbial middle finger to this capitalist quagmire that we’ve told ourselves is so important. It’s because they have debt, jobs, and responsibilities that they have to attend to. And besides, who has time for a real adventure like that! I mean, doesn’t every true adventure require quitting your job, or at least getting a job where you get paid to be a talented athlete and travel?

Again, the answer is a simple: no. Actually, it’s longer than that. It’s a fuck no, and I’m going to tell you why.

The internet is full of the best and worst versions of humanity, but what people tend to really fixate on is the best. Instagram and Pintrest are especially good at propping up every beautiful person who is #livingthedream in their #vanlife with their #adventuredog. These people are aspirational sure, but they’re also not real, or at least, they’re not honest. In the same way that the abs on whichever actress is on the cover of Glamour this week are not real, nor are they an honest representation of what that woman looks like. Those images are nothing more than the best snapshot of an event, with some heavy-handed photoshopping or filtering done before you get to see it.

The problem with these social media adventurers is that it gives us the impression that you have to chose between an epic adventure and an average life. That small adventures aren’t worth it, and that you as a “regular human” can’t attain them. But nothing could be further from the truth.

Your choice isn’t between climbing Everest and watching Netflix at home. Your choice isn’t between quitting your job for six months to hike through the Amazon, and sitting in a cubicle working forever. Your choice is as simple as choosing to go home and watch Netflix, versus hiking up a local trail and spending the night camping. It’s not all or nothing. It’s something attainable or nothing.

These small, everyday adventures are just as valuable as grand expeditions for one simple reason: you’ll actually do them. And better yet, you can do these small adventures and still be home to watch your kids soccer game. Yes, they will require some sacrifice, typically in the means of time, money, or energy, but if a small investment is enough to put you off of trying something new, then have fun beating level 12,456 of Candy Crush, we’ll be sure to put your high score on your tombstone.

Still reading? Cool.

Think about the time you have that isn’t already dedicated. The time before and after work, the weekends, the moments you spend watching TV or playing garbage games on your phone. What could you be doing with these moments instead? What could you accomplish if you forced yourself to do something new every weekend, or every day on your way home?

And look, I hear you life is complicated and hard and it takes planning and maybe you don’t have every weekend free, maybe you’re a mom with kids and you can’t get away that frequently. But just because you can’t get away every weekend doesn’t mean that you should never try.

Change is scary, trying something new is scary, stepping outside of your routine is scary. But you know what is also scary? The idea that you’re on this planet for a very short time, and that your ultimate goal should be to conform as strictly as possible. That’s a crazy fucked up idea! When was the last time you even looked around at how beautiful, how insanely incredible this planet is?

Let’s just take a moment to appreciate the fact that you live on a planet that has elephants, and ice cream, and pizza, and freaky fish with lights on their heads, and also giraffes, and balloon animals, and flowers that smell good, and fruit that smells like ass but somehow still tastes good, and blue skies and fuzzy slippers, and grass that just grows out of the fucking earth like a giant green carpet, and you’re telling me you’re fucking bored? That you’re “too busy” for adventure?

Well fuck that.

 

 

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Monday Action Post – March 13

Look, the world seems messed up and scary right now, it’s crazy and I totally hear you. I also know that it can seem so overwhelming to reach out and do something without any guidance on how best to spend your time, efforts, and energy. Again, I totally get it. But let’s make a collective move from Freakout-Ville and take the productivity train to Change-Town! It will be fun, I promise.

Each Monday I’ll be doing a quick post that helps you get involved, and better yet, gives you an asset or information for something you can do right now.

This week, I’m not pulling any fucking punches. President Trump has repeatedly shown that he views women as less than human, less than deserving of medical care that treats them in their entirety. And you know what? Reproductive health is human health. And sometimes that health means getting an abortion.

Our president, serving on behalf of right-wing religious groups, has taken steps to limit access to health care and reproductive health care for people in this country and outside of it. Remember, this is the man who signed the Mexico City policy back into effect as one of his first actions in office. You can read more about that here. It’s for these reasons and others that I want to draw your attention to an organization that is working to protect and facilitate access to reproductive rights.

Donate to The National Network of Abortion Funds, an organization that works to remove the financial barriers that some women face when seeking an abortion. Another good option is donating to Planned Parenthood who have been under repeated attack from our government, despite the fact that offering abortions is only a small portion of their mission.

Remember, reproductive rights, are women’s rights. Women are humans. Thus, reproductive rights are human rights. So don’t let president cheeto take that away from you.

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A Dumpster-Fire of Joy

I think we’ve all seen those commercials for Las Vegas. Lots of pretty, generic-looking women, decked out in ankle-breaking heels and sequined dresses. You know the ones. Groups of Jersey Shore rejects dancing to top 40 songs, drinking Malibu, and pretending that they’re having a wild and crazy experience. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas they say, pretending for just a minute that they’re not going to spray this all over Instagram the second their hangover let’s them look at their phones again. This is the time of your life! Aren’t you wild! they say.

Those ads are bullshit. If you want to see some wild crap, spend a weekend in the woods with the raging freak-show that is a Purdue Outing Club reunion or, POC for short. I’ve spend three such weekends with these loveable weirdos, and let me tell you, they’re one David Attenborough voice-over from something you’d see on Discovery channel. And I mean that in the best way possible.

The view from our cabin.

* The names of people have been omitted because, let’s face it, your mom probably doesn’t want to know that you ate an Oreo out of your boyfriend’s butt crack (note: this was not me).

**What, did you think I was fucking kidding when I said these weekends we’re debaucherous? POC don’t play around when it comes to truth or dare. 

When I think of my undoing that weekend, it all comes back to a single contraption, brought to the party by an endearingly sadistic POC-er. Picture a hastily-made miniature wheel of fortune in which the only outcomes are either increased alcohol consumption, or public humiliation. You know, like playing russian roulette with a fully loaded gun. It’s fun.

The evening started off innocuously enough, with a fully-nude hot tub session in which we managed to cram 15 grown-ass adults into a single tub. I’ve never been entirely sure where the propensity for nudity came from at POC reunions, but it’s safe to say that anybody who has attended one has been subject to at least one accidentally seen asshole. Or, as might be the case from my first POC reunion, the asshole you’re trying not to stare into like the Eye of Sauron from the Lord of the Rings, is being intentionally displayed for your viewing pleasure. My precioussssssssss…..

Anyway.

The night began to unspool in an endless stream of drinks, laughter, magical hamburgers, and spin after spin on the drink-wheel-0f-torture/fun. People swirl in and out of the room. Another hot-tub session is instigated. A man takes a naked lap around the house in the snow. Then a woman does the same. Shots are taken off of previously-unthought of body parts. The man that I love shotguns a beer like a champ. People cheer. Clothes are swapped and then swapped again until the women in the room look like Tom-Boy children and the men strut around the room in skin-tight yoga pants. I laugh until tears stream down my face and I cannot breathe. Everyone in the room is hysterically, and unendingly funny.

The next day we’ll get up and hike to a lookout high above the verdant Washington forrest. We’ll sit around eating cold leftover hamburgers as our hangovers leach out of us into the cool Washington air. That night we’ll do it all again. On Monday we’ll ski, making lap after lap through the powder  which barely conceals the blue ice, working feverishly for a few good turns each run, and raucously cheering on our fellow skiers from the chairlift in a way that is hilarous only to us.

On Tuesday morning I’ll return to Los Angeles where people will ask me how my weekend was. I’ll say it was fine. Fun. We went skiing. The askers will smile in a vague sort of way and the conversation will move on. In truth, I barely have the words to explain these POC reunions. I’m stuck relying on a phrase, drunkenly uttered into the dark amongst friends and half-strangers in a hot tub. It’s like a dumpster-fire of joy.