The sun never really rises. Never really arcs across the sky. Never really sets under the leaden grey clouds. The first tendrils of fall are working their way across New Zealand as we make the leap to the North Island.
The whole thing feels, honestly, improbable. Not necessarily that time has passed, but more so that we are here at all. This trip started with a declaration which had no intention behind it other than escape and desperation: I cannot spend another winter in Seattle. It had nothing to do with New Zealand or the southern hemisphere or traveling internationally. I just knew that the winters in Seattle were dangerously bad for my mental health and that I wasn’t willing to put myself in that situation again. I was looking for an exit and I didn’t much care what was on the other side of that door other than sun shine and someplace that wasn’t Seattle.
And now, as the world turns and pitches I can feel the passage of time in my mammalian skin as entirely as I can feel the forest around me as Keith and I follow the sinuous path of the Queen Charlotte track from ridge to ridge above the bays below shining in every shade of blue. It’s quiet today, another sign that the summer is coming to a close. We see barely a handful of hikers all day and will share our campground with only one other couple. And though I have more than a month left before I fly home I cannot help but wonder if I have accomplished what I set out to do here. It feels pretentious to talk about living in the moment, a coifed nod to the ever-popular yet never defined mindfulness trend. After all, one’s follies and insecurities don’t evaporate just because you’re in a different timezone. I’ve been on stunning hikes where I wished I could be anywhere else and lazy days in bed grateful that I had nowhere to be. I’ve felt guilt over my privilege that allows me to go on such a trip while simultaneously grateful to be living in a trans body in this country and not the pulverizing hellscape that is the United States at this moment. Maybe it all comes out in the wash, or maybe there is no wash. Maybe hiking through the trees on this early fall day is all there ever is or will be, maybe I have sprung into being just now and that is the only thing that really matters.
That night, at camp, there is a rainbow that bursts into fleeting life just as the sun begins to set. Keith and I stand next to our little tent in dirty clothes and sweaty hair and watch the show unfold. And all I can think is that I am so blindingly lucky to have whatever it is I have right now.
“You’ll want to move your foot off that first hold as quickly as possible,” I say down to Keith from my perch atop the muddy chimney, “it’s going to want to collapse from underneath you.”
“Gotcha,” comes his ever-stoic response as he begins to climb the near-vertical mud wall. Hauling himself up hand over hand, moving from root to rock before each perilous hold can slide from beneath him. I scoot aside so we can both share the small rocky bench above the first 10 foot pitch. With more than 700 feet left to climb to our hut I feel suddenly overwhelmed at how long this is going to take. The rest of the day had been on well groomed and even better maintained trail, courtesy of New Zealand’s Department of Conservation. The first 2000 feet of climbing passing in, if not easy, at least manageable grades. But this, a slippery, muddy, barely consolidated mess that could only be approached in a bear crawl of sorts, fingers reaching for every sturdy rock or well-planted rock, this too felt like something DOC would call a trail. In fact, over the course of this trip Keith and I had spent several days on designated trails that were only slightly less ridiculous than this.
I turn my face to the next pitch, huck my trekking poles up and into a bush so they won’t get in the way and begin to climb. Another 15 feet up on hands and feet gets me to another flat spot to rest, Keith coming up shortly behind me. This new perch reveals something else, another hiker walking, no, strolling along in jeans and a cheap school backpack. At first my brain has trouble comprehending what I am seeing. But Keith gets it, letting out a low “I am so sorry” before I bark a cackling laugh of absurdity and amusement. Our mud-covered micro expedition has been on the old trail, on the barely-there trail, on the this is a muddy disaster so let’s reroute trail. Our casual fellow hikers glance confusedly at us as I retrieve my poles from the bush. I might feel like an idiot were I not so relieved that we wouldn’t be scrambling up a vertical mud wall the rest of the way to the hut. Bemused and a little abashed we make our way the last mile, tired legs forgotten and grateful for the trail beneath our feet.
Angelus Hut day 1 Mt Robers car park to Bushline Hut
The trail descends away from the car park for a long while before beginning a gradual, almost gentle climb towards bush line. In the late afternoon sun I can move slowly without the agony of screaming muscles. It’s something I’ve almost forgotten I can do.
The last few years have been more painful than not. Certainly, in the shared global trauma that has beset us all, but more deeply in my personal life, my health, and all the little ways those pains worked their way into the things I loved. My chronically fluctuating thyroid made exercise feel impossible, fatigue constant or else the exertion made me feel like ripping my skin off, a vibrating tangle of loose wires. My mental health made everything else feel an insurmountable chore of drudgery, a darkened tunnel of medications and appointments and days spent inert on the couch, unable to even sleep away the torment and stupor.
I learned that in the midst of crisis no stone is left unturned as pain stole the light from everything I was and wanted. Why did my legs sear on every uphill, why did my ski boots cause my feet to cramp and go numb before my weakened muscles could even have their say. Why did my knees hurt when I ran. Why did my body collect side effects like medals. Why was nothing helping, why wasn’t it getting any easier. A thousand unanswerable questions so often invisible and churning to rancid fear in my gut. For all the times someone said I sounded better I died a little inside, felt a little further away from the rest of the world though all I could ever say was “thank you.” I feared I would fracture apart so completely that I would lose everything, person, and joy I had ever known, every desire I ever cherished.
And now comes the part where I offer a lesson, serve a platitude. Tell you that on this late summer’s day I have turned my face to resounding optimism and hope, liberated, as it were, from darkness by the brilliant New Zealand sun. But that would be a lie—a nasty habit I’m trying to do less of. Because the truth is this: the scar on my neck from where they cut out my thyroid still aches when I work too hard, my medications are still a ham-fisted juggernaut keeping the darkness at bay, yes, but bringing with it a slew of side effects as well—all this piled into a body that has never felt more and less like my own. But I can say this, on this late summer day under the brilliant New Zealand sun, that today is a good day, that the sun is warm and long in the way only early fall can do. And that is not enough, because I want so much more for myself than good enough; but it’s good enough, if only for today.
Angelus Hut day 2 – Bushline Hut to Angelus Hut
The morning comes on slowly, doused in thin clouds wrapped softly around the hut. We play out our morning chores with little haste, waiting until the clouds and our lethargy burn away revealing a brilliant blue sky shining gleefully upon golden grasses.
The climb, though moderate, feels unfairly difficult in the wake of yesterday’s relative ease. My previously piano wire calves feel okay so long as I tread carefully, but my low back burns with exertion and strain and I wondered how long I can keep going, if I’ll be forced to turn around and retreat to the car. But I have grown so entirely sick of my body’s many betrayals that I simply force my way forward, hoping that with time the pressure will ease.
Across grey rock speckled through with sun-tanned grass the trail rises and falls, an ungainly dragon’s spine. And then, almost without me noticing, my back eases and my body begins to churn slowly through the literal steps I have taken so many times before. A treasure wrapped in a mystery. Maybe it only takes me two hours and a snack break to finally warm up. Maybe, it simply takes me this long for the sedation from the meds that keep my brain in order to release me from their hold. I wish to know as much as I don’t care to think about it now because the best part of this entire route is below my feet, right now.
The dragon’s spine narrows in on itself until we are sliding sinuously across steep scree fields that required my entire attention to avoid slipping and falling. Hand over hand climbing along mellow holds just perilous enough to make it fun and which drag my mind away from anything more than that exact moment and the handhold that comes next. The endorphin rush, to be in the sun and the wind on high, my body working as I demand of it. Burning from exertion and only little bits of pain sparkling to life here and there. This mellow class 2 climbing has become my favorite way to travel through the mountains, slow and methodical as it is. Through exposure and panic attacks and learning how to breathe while crying at altitude I have transformed a terror into a delight. This space between trail and cliff no longer frightens me but instead fills me with the sort of quiet exultation that I have only ever found in the mountains.
Eventually, after hours of careful footwork the trail decides it is time to go down towards the sparkling blue lakes of Angelus Hut. Nestled in a protective bowl the hut greets us with just a few other hikers, a sign as good as any that summer is coming to an end in the southern hemisphere.
Day 3 — Angelus Hut to Mt Roberts car park
The morning starts with the crinkle of synthetic fabrics wrapped around warm beverages as our fellow hikers and us postpone venturing out into the cold rainy morning. Modern though Angelus Hut is, it creaks under the strain of the pulverizing wind which seemingly emanates from everywhere and nowhere at once, protected as we are inside our snow globe inside a cloud inside the storm. Eventually, finally, reluctantly it’s time to go.
The morning starts with a quick scramble up to the ridge, fog dense and wind ripping. My gloved hands are soaked through before we reach the trail junction but at least they’re warm. A theme for the day: soaked but at least I’m warm.
We make our way down the valley which will lead us back to the car park. A stream springs to life out of nowhere, a collection of drops of water slid from blades of grass all coming together to create a bubbling little torrent slicing through the base of an ever-widening valley. At first we can simply step over the stream, but soon the waters have grown until we are wading through knee-deep waters that require careful planning before each crossing.
Progress feels slow, progress is slow as we navigate through shoe-sucking mud and only barely there trail. The rain puts on its many faces and we begin to know each one intimately as we walk. Misting rain. Barely there rain. Torrential rain. Soaking rain. Rain that might actually be heavy fog or the other way round. A cloud of rain inside the storm inside my wet but warm bubble of clothing. And so it goes: across the river, into the trees, navigating up over rocks and tree roots and mud slides only to come back down again. Again. Again and again and walking until finally there is no more up and down only the firm grip of the road and the last few meters to our car.
Just as we reach the car the snow begins and I do a little dance in celebration, cheering: snow! Snow! I adore the snow, the magic and light upon the sky. Through, in this moment I am more than grateful to be off the trail as the flakes begin to thicken and the heat in the car merrily whirls around my chilled hands.
The bubble of our car slides out of the bubble of clouds within the storm and soon we are whisking across dry roads on our way to Nelson. The sun cracks the sky and slips across the land in warm, late-summer’s glow. Rolling green hills like something out of a fairy tale remind me of the best parts of rural Colorado where the mountains give way to the plains and forests give way to pastures give way to cities and then all at once we’re in Nelson, unloading our damp things in the car park of our hostel.
At the front desk Keith pays for the room in wet bills that he has to wipe dry before handing them to the cheerful attendant. Once inside our room our bags explode and wet clothes and coats and sleeping bags are hung over every available surface. A ritual we are only too familiar with after winter and fall camping trips in Washington. It strikes me that this is what fall looks like off the trail, that our endless summer may in fact be approaching an end.
It’s a damp, greying kind of day, all low clouds and drizzle. It’s a bickering over nothing, irritated at everything kinda day. It’s the kind of day, in truth, that I am always tempted to omit from travelogs and stories told. Filled not so much with painful sweeping truths as grimy little realities of life on the road.
The first hours of the morning are full of Fine. Sure. Whatever you want. Fine.
And then we’re on the road, driving north from little Franz Josef, not so much a town as a dot on the map serving one thing: helicopter tours of the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers. When we stopped there the night before not even the two restaurants in town were open. This morning the streets are empty, as an impending rain storm has shuttered any chance of a helicopter ride. The same storm has also forced us to cancel two additional backpacking trips because of the danger of flooding and becoming trapped in the backcountry; grinding our trip to a halt and leaving both of us frustrated.
But when you’re on the road things don’t stop, they only change direction. So we putter our tiny car into the oncoming rain and begin our drive up the coast. The forecast calls for near-biblical amounts of rain along the West Coast but the storm is late in its arrival and we drive through a landscape ever-changing. One minute windshield wipers flailing against the torrent the next minute the roads are nearly dry and one could be forgiven for describing the sky as just the littlest bit blue. A familiar refrain presses against my lips against the obvious unreality: “what a beautiful day.” But it is, it is a remarkably beautiful day even with the mountains hidden by clouds, the sea blockaded by shrubby green-brown trees. Because bad days happen wherever you are and I’d rather be in a small car on the road than in my small apartment back in Seattle. The joy of being somewhere new, even on the bad days, so entirely eclipses the mundanity of the familiar that I cannot help but say it: “what a beautiful day.”
— We shut off the car in the small town of Greymouth, a former mining town stuck somewhere in the middle of reinventing itself into a tourist town. Too bad there’s nothing to do here.
That night Keith and I lay in bed and watch as the lightning illuminates the sky, bright as a cosmic spotlight but without the accompanying thunder; the melodramatics without the danger. The storm is here but we are safe in our little rented bed for two. A nest of home within each other, not so much us against the world, more like us within the world, a center, a home from which the road doesn’t feel so chaotic.
The irony of what I am looking at is not lost on me as I watch the ink bleed across the small strip of paper. Not ten minutes before Keith and I had argued about whether we needed to keep carrying around the bulky covid test kits we’d picked up on a whim in the Christchurch airport. I was in favor of ditching them having grown irritated at their constant presence in our luggage, seemingly always in the way and taking up more space than I felt they were worth. Keith, on the other side of the issue, thought they were worth it and that my current cold warranted me performing the nasal-swab hokey-pokey.
The astute of you will have no doubt surmised by now what that little strip of paper read. Still, I let Keith look over the test for himself, standing a long moment staring down at the desk before he turned to me. “Well, you have covid.” “Again,” I agreed.
After Keith performed his own partial lobotomy his test came up negative and we sat on the bed of our hostel, all rush to pack for an early departure the next morning forgotten. The four day backpacking circuit we were supposed to leave on abandoned. I had already been toying with the idea of skipping out given my current cold, but now both of us had to come up with new plans. The reliance on backcountry huts in New Zealand made it irresponsible for either of us to attempt the track. I was disappointed for Keith but only a little upset for myself
It’s like the coin flip trick. The one where you flip a coin not so much to make the choice for you but because it forces to the front any unresolved feelings about the decision. I had been waffling about heading out on this trail and now that my little covid coin flip told me I couldn’t I actually felt relieved. Relieved that I could just be tired without letting anyone down, relieved at all the effort I wouldn’t have to expend from a well that I worried was running increasingly empty. And besides, what could I do? Be angry at the proverbial universe? No, better to rest, replan and try again, just as soon as our self-isolation ended.
A thick mist presses tight against the tent walls and I am cocooned from the world by white and nylon and down. It’s too early to hike so I’m reading, my phone screen glowing cheery and bright as I scroll through page after page of Jacob Tobia’s Sissy. The book, which details Tobia’s gender-bending childhood and discovery of their trans and non-binary identity strikes so close to home it feels like someone is jamming their finger through my heart.
As I read, big, sloppy alligator tears roll from my eyes and puddle against my ultralight backpacking pillow. Tobia’s coming of gender story elicits the particular kind of pain that comes from struggling to find one’s self. I can do nothing but cry. Cry and wish I was born just a few years later when more people knew the word non-binary. Cry and wish I was a little more knowledgeable about the queer world. Cry and wish that anyone in my sphere knew what being trans and non-binary was when I was a child so I wouldn’t be stuck working this all out in my 30’s.
But you can’t rework your past to better suit your present.
I grew up a child of the largely homophobic early 90’s where gay culture was just beginning to crack into the mainstream discussion and trans was still a foreign concept to most Americans. Genderqueer was even further afield and non-binary was a word that didn’t even exist yet. And I was a child who liked to dress in boys clothes.
As a child I was a hyperactive, sprinting, adventurous mess who was largely allowed to ditch the femininity ascribed to those of my sex. I credit my parents for introducing me to the idea that gender norms are bullshit. My mother never wore makeup and dressed in jeans and a t-shirt to her job as an engineer. My father worked from home, taught me to cook, encouraged his my sister and I to play sports and that it was okay for girls to want to win. I continue to reap the benefits of having parents who focused on ability over appearance. Brains over beauty.
Still, life is change and childhood is temporary. To me, puberty was a betrayal. Seemingly overnight my genderless adolescent body with it’s straight lines became a mockery of itself. I was repulsed by my widening hips, growing breasts. Suddenly I needed to shop in the girls section. Clothes that were cut to accommodate this new body seemed clownish and bizarre; worse was that my female friends seemed to want to wear these clothes. Short , capped sleeves, tight pants, pink and purple glitter scrawling out sassy phrases across their chests or worse, asses. They sailed off to the land of femininity while I remained trapped on the gender confused island of misfit toys. Clever as I had been raised to be, I could understand how one would assemble the pieces of an appropriately girly wardrobe. What was lost on me was why; why did they want to dress like that? Why did I not?
The years between high school and my first foray into the professional, office-bound world hammered home the idea of why. Because there is social capital, security, and affluence in dressing like the gender everyone assumes you are. And though I was still uncomfortable, still took every opportunity I could to conceal my chest with scarves, I began to develop a look that was feminine enough. Though I hated shopping for clothes I didn’t like. Though getting dressed every single day was a frustrating ordeal. Though I still didn’t understand the rules of this game I was playing, I tried my best to figure it out. To use my brain if not my desire to play the part of woman. And in doing so I even began to believe the specific kind of bodily oppression that women are held to. I dieted: carb counting, paleo, vegan, vegetarian, intermittent fasting, and good ol’ calorie counting. Maybe if I was thin enough I would feel at home in this obviously feminine body. When that failed I tried makeup, styling my hair, plucking my eyebrows, artificially contouring my face. But these efforts were nothing more than secondary acts in the farce that was my life. And all the while I never thought there was another option.
As I progressed through my 20’s I held on to my masculinity through sports and, most importantly, the outdoors. I would rarely think about my chest while bombing down a ski run. Rock climbing, with it’s intense focus and unforgiving standard of safety, meant my gender was shoved to the deepest recesses of my mind. But my true love became solo backpacking; the more remote the better. Away, truly away from other people I was free of expectation, gaze, performance.
Being in the backcountry felt like a return to childhood. In the sort of travel turned adventure, yes. But far more importantly in the way that I could simply be. In Tobia’s book they talk about feigning late-night study sessions so that they could choreograph secret dance routines in their high heels—hiding their feminity away from the world, knowing it wouldn’t be accepted. The outdoors became my midnight dance party, I craved the moments when no one was looking at me. I still do. In a body that has never quite felt like mine, backpacking afforded me the means to move at my own pace, go where I wanted to go. I could simply exist.
Until recently I never thought to tie those feelings of bodily and gender discomfort to anything larger. Certainly not things as substantial as being non-binary or transgender. Plus, I rationed, if I were non-binary, or trans, I would know. Right? Certainly by this age. Right?
And here we come to the lie that cisgender people tell themselves about the transgender experience: that it looks one way. That being trans means you know at a young age that you were born in the wrong body, that you’re meant to be a different gender, and that you’ll go through specific physical transitions to achieve your desired body.
Bullshit.
Bullshit bullshit bullshit.
That narrative, while valid and real, it is also held up as the one and only trans coming out narrative. Because if that’s the only way to be trans then all cis people are safe from questioning their gender. If that is the only way to be trans, then people who fall in the middle, people like me, aren’t real. It’s a narrative that ties physical transition to being trans. It’s a narrative that fails to recognize that being trans is at its very core a simple criteria: being trans means you don’t identify with the gender assigned to you at birth. Non-binary is no more complex than not being a man or a woman.
I hope that paragraph helped someone realize they’re trans. Just as the incredible work of Molly Woodstock did for me. Because sometimes it takes someone holding up a mirror to themselves or their community to help you see yourself. And when you do, it can change everything and nothing. But at least for me the realization that I’m non-binary shook my understanding of myself while simultaneously putting a lifetime of experience into clarity. Everything changed and nothing changed.
Which brings us back to the mountains. To the places where I can bound along like a cut marionette, beholden to no strings but my own. Invisible and protected because of it. Free from constant misgendering, the curious looks or blank stares that are commonplace when you inhabit the hinterland between man and woman, free from the forced self-advocacy that is required by every trans and non-binary person. The mountains don’t ask that from me. Out here I can still be invisible. From others, yes. But also from myself, from mirrors. From that now familiar twinge of disappointment when an unfamiliar face and body look back at me from the mirror. Something that happens less these days but in the mountains it never happens at all.
Out in the wild I never have to explain or ask or justify. I don’t have to listen to people get my pronouns wrong. In the way that these wild spaces belong to all of us and none of us I can be both all of me and none of me.
