“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.
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.
This February I am attempting a 9 day thru hike of the 160 mile San Diego Trans County Trail with a group of 10 rad queers. During this hike we are raising funds for Boarder Angles, a non-profit that does important humanitarian work along our southern border. If you have the means I would encourage you to donate to the fundraiser that we are hosting. All money raised will go directly to border angels. You can find the fundraiser here: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/sdtct-hike-for-border-angels
Since this is a shorter hike I’ll plan to write on the trail and then publish after. So watch this space for blog posts coming up.
I always look out the window during takeoff; I love the feeling of flying. The rising whine of the engines, the sprint down the runway followed by the first tenuous rise of the front wheel and the sudden leap into the sky. As we climb up and above the undulating cotton candy clouds I look south as though from this height I might be able to see all the way to our destination.
Bookworm, Beau, Audrey, and myself are flying to San Diego on this typically wet m Seattle day. We are the four person Seattle contingent on what is to be a 10 person group of queer hikers setting off on a nine day hike of the San Diego Trans County Trail. The SDTCT is a little-known thru hike that runs 160 miles across San Diego county. Starting at the Salton Sea and terminating at the Pacific Ocean the SDTCT is part desert bushwhack part urban walk. To me, a largely unknown entity having been no more than a silent observer in the group chat. As others discussed food planning, water caches, daily mileage and more I feigned enthusiasm while my mental health wained. I was feigning enthusiasm for my entire life.
The two months prior to the departure of this hike I began what I have come to recognize as my yearly descent into depression. This time, mitigated by a nightly cocktail of medication the depression lacked it’s usual potency. It casually chugged along making getting out of bed in the morning a burdensome chore, sucking the excitement from the world while filling my brain with anxious thought spirals and gruesome images. It was not until a sudden change in medication that the wheels really came off. Rapidly and violently I was pitched headlong into a vacuous mixed episode. My once depressed brain took on a frenetic anxiety the likes of which I am becoming intimately familiar with. Now the bone-deep exhaustion was paired with a restless, directionless energy that wanted nothing but out. Mornings took on an arduous quality as I struggled, and often failed, to get myself out of bed. When I did manage to leave the house it was to find a world of endless noise and light, like a thousand needles trying to work their way under my skin. Simply existing in a city became painful, my body was gripped with the agony of it, like a full body sensation of bsomeone driving splinters under your finger nails. Meanwhile my brain spun out narratives of fictional characters, cute stories that consumed my entire mind before turning dark, brutal and violent. My brain was inventing characters only to show me how violently it could maim and dismember them.
And it was against this backdrop that the final weeks before the SDTCT passed. I felt nothing. As though I stood on an eldless grey plain. I felt desperate to be away from the grating noise of Seattle, to let myself vanish into the desert, to grind my body down across the sandy earth. I felt that even on the other end of the country I would be haunted by the endless, spiraling echo chamber of my mind. Such is the reality of a prison you carry with you wherever you go. And in the way that anxiety can warp even the simplest interaction I began to worry that I would be the weakest link of the hike, that I wouldn’t be able to cope with the planned 20 mile days, that the escape of the desert would be nothing more than a case study in my own failing. In going into this hike I am acutely aware that I am unfit and under trained. After all, when you are struggling to make it to work, working out becomes something of a tertiary concern.
And then, and then dear reader the most wonderful thing happened! Two days before I was to board this flight to San Diego hypomania arrived in all her chattering, creative, ebouliant energy. The world flooded back into color, my chest was an expanding balloon of light and wonder and I found myself laughing not at anything in particular but with the simple joy of being alive. And oh music, music and the power of being bouyed along on the soaring emotions of another. For this hike I didn’t download a single podcast. Instead, goodr vibes only music. (Insert link to Jump in the Line) My excitement crescendoed just in time for takeoff and for the first time in more than a month I was looking into the near future with something resembling hope.
And I know, I do. I know that stability comes only when the up and down give way to a middle ground of average. But please, please let me live in this space just a little longer. Just a little longer before the lack of sleep and mile-a-minute brain burn out my core and reduce me to ash. Let me marvel at the desert and feeling the sun on my face in the winter. Let me have deep, roaming conversations with this ragtag band of strangers with whom I feel I already have so much in common. As I wing my way south down the coast I find myself pleading with my jumbled brain not for 10 days of normalcy, I know that would be too much to ask given the circumstances, but simply 10 more days of anything before the inevitable crash.
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.
