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.
Look, by this point you know that I am raising money for Border Angels through this blog. We’re in the second half of the trip now and so is our fundraiser, I believe in the readership and community that has developed at Wild Country and I know you can help us reach our goal. Border angels is really on the front lines of the humanitarian crisis that is the US-Mexico border. They are saving people’s lives. And that is important to remember, you may have different political views than myself, but these immigrants are people and they deserve to not die walking across the desert just a few days away from a massive American city. If you’ve got a few bucks, it all counts.
A fitful night of half-sleep finally gives way as the first dusting of light spreads across the ceiling of our hotel room in Julian. Town sleep in a room with five other hikers never promises to be good and last night was worse than I anticipated. Ah well. What can you do. We’ll be back on trail tonight and I can hopefully get some sleep then.
To make it to the ocean before Audrey, Beau, Riley and I need to catch our flight, we are hiking out this afternoon. In my lackadaisical planning for this trip I had miscounted our days as eight hiking with a zero in Julian and last night received the rather rude awakening that this is not the case. We actually have eight days of hiking with no zeros. Well, I think, I am already dragging, what’s one day. This morning is a rush of chores and I am a rock amid the chaotic tide that is the rest of the group. I sit on the porch and call my mom as the tide goes out to coffee and breakfast. I know myself well enough to know that I cannot be civil amid company this morning, so I stay planted. Banking on our sheer numbers to conceal my absence. While the others are at breakfast I cry on the phone to my mom. About the difficulty of thru hiking while depressed. About the bone-deep exhaustion that has followed me for months. About my conflicting desire to both quit and to prove to myself that I am stronger than this hike, than my mental illness. Sitting curled on the floor of the hotel room I sob as quietly as I can until I can get myself under control, until I can hang up and not leave my mother too worried.
I resolve to take advantage of the empty room and grab a shower where I won’t have to rush so anther dirty hiker can take my place. But then Starman calls and the presence of his kind voice sends me spiraling again. Except this time I’m crying on the bathroom floor. Starman offers to help me find a way back to Seattle and through some combination of hubris and hopelessness I decline. I shower. I put on a happy face and just in time. The tide is rolling back in with the boxes full of hiker food that we sent to Julian. I tear into mine, packing things away as quickly as I can before I bolt for the door at a pace that won’t strike the others as bolting. It’s not their fault. It’s nobody’s fault. But my skin is set to crawling at the presence of so many people. Their wants, their needs, their voices burrow into my skull where they mix with the existing chaos of my chemical-imbalanced brain.
While on the phone with good, kind, logistics-oriented Starman we devised a plan to help me make it through the rest of the hike with as much of my mental health in tact as possible. I will rise before the others, hike alone when I need to, rest with the others when I can, and remember that there are only a few days left in this hike. Sometimes distraction is the solution. I will abandon the pointless endeavor to avoid media and stay alone with my thoughts. Then. armed with a plan and a dozen hours of newly-downloaded podcasts I make my way to the Julian Cafe for a breakfast date with myself and the plan to drink as much diner coffee as I can.
After breakfast I take myself back to the hotel to find the others poking at their phones and waiting out the heat of the day. At 2pm Audrey, Beau, Riley, Sasha, Pilar, Ashley our adopted daughter, and myself climb into Carrot Quinn’s van and head back to the trail. Our half day in Julian means we’re going to need to skip 10 miles of exposed road walk in order to keep on schedule. Nobody is terribly upset about that.
A brief ride down some unremarkable dirt roads dumps us at a bend in the road and we start walking. Immediately Riley pulls away and I find myself in the empty middle of the group. Perfect. The hiking is along yet another dirt road this time under the merciful shade of live oaks. But on this turn of the merry go round when my brain starts it’s jet engine whine of panic I don’t try and play the hero and just put some music on. Whether I am manic, depressed, or mixed music has the same effect; to suppose a different set of emotions on top of my own. Like spackling over a wall, the cracks may still be there but at least I can’t see them. And in this way I pass what might be the most pleasant miles of the trip. As the sun inches its way towards the western horizon I decided that this hike is no longer about having fun. Lots of hikes are fun but that doesn’t mean they all have to be. No, I decide, this hike will be about proving to myself that I can still do hard things. After a year of feeling weak and out of control, like a passenger on the runway ride that is my brain, I need to show myself that I am still capable. And if it hurts like hell in the process, then so be it.
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 border. 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.
This morning I feel like I am moving backwards. Every time I pack something away it’s on top of something I need and then I have to reverse course and start over. It’s perhaps unsurprising that I am the last one out of camp, walking up the cool canyon that lays beneath the morning shade. The tendon pain in my left foot has receded to the point where I am no longer worried about it. But in its place the bottoms of my feet throb. Such is part of thru hiking and so I walk on.
Unlike my foot, my mood has not improved much over night and as I make my way up the first gradual climb of the day I find myself thinking of ways I could leave this hike that wouldn’t be my fault. Maybe a rock fall would break my arm. Or maybe just a small bite from a rattle snake. Or maybe a severely rolled ankle in one of the gopher holes that litter the fields we so often walk across on this route. I wish I could say that my brain felt like it was on my side today, that I felt well and truly better, but I can’t. Rather, it feels like one side of my brain is arguing with the other and I can’t stand it anymore. I am growing tired of being awake with this runway brain. I feel like a building that has burned from the inside, leaving nothing but sparking wires and blackened timber.
As the track rolls out of the narrow canyon and onto a broad valley dotted with cholla cactus and manzanita bushes I realize that I have service. I pull out my phone and start to text Starman. I want to tell him how hard this hike is, how my meds aren’t keeping me stable, how my brain feels less and less like a safe place to be. I want to tell him I wish I could come home. But I settle on “this is hard, I miss you,” then put my phone away. However, my phone soon buzzes, the message from Starman reads “I miss you too, I can’t wait for you to come home.” In those three small words, I miss you, something in my chest cracks open and sobs rip from my throat with only the vast silent desert as witness. I am trapped I think, as I cry-hike my way across the valley.
The sun so far above presses me into the valley bottom like I am an ant walking across a giant open palm. The others are ahead of me and I find I don’t care where, I am content to be relieved of the niceties required of socialization. I simply walk and attempt to tune out from my brain. “Isn’t this what you wanted?” I ask myself. “Isn’t this what you’re out here to get?” To be worn down, to grind my body into the earth until it disappears, to be forced to listen to my thoughts without the distraction of music or podcasts or people or work. The pain becomes me and I surrender to it. I wanted this, brought it upon myself and now I will see it through. As much as I want to quit I know I will regret it if I do. So I walk. On tender feet through campgrounds of clean-smelling tourists in their gleaming RVs. I walk. Tear-stained and salty through narrow sandy canyons below the hiss and rumble of cars on the highway overhead. I walk. Across flat fields full of short grass and hard-packed soil.
I walk until I am past the last highway I could hitch a ride from. I walk past my last out and find myself seated in the sand amongst the group in the shade of a large bush. Lunch time. Today we get to town and because my food bag is still somewhat full I treat myself to soup and a sandwich for lunch. This basic meal is a luxury and I savor it as such. I listen to the others with their funny stories, letting their words wash over me and away. I don’t want to be in my brain anymore but instead let the words of these people cover me until I find I am laughing along side them. I could sit here forever, I think. In the good, calm shade. Laughing and sharing. I could stay in this moment forevermore and be happy and held and safe. But that’s not how time works and soon the others are packing up around me.
We string out along the hard-packed jeep road and begin the climb that will take us up and over a ridge to the Sunrise Highway where we will hitch into Julian. We couldn’t have picked a worse time to start an exposed climb as the hottest part of the day is quickly approaching. The heat is relentless. A thousand fevered hands pressing onto every inch of my body. Any breeze, a kindness. This is the kind of heat that feels dangerous, intolerable. The road climbs steeper and steeper, undulating along the side of a mountain and occasionally, but not nearly often enough, proving a small sliver of shade into which we can squeeze ourselves. Squatting in the red dirt we complain about the heat, the climb, the pain in our feet. The saving grace of the day is that it is still early and even at this slow pace we will be able to make it to the road with enough time to hitch before sunset. The group hops from shade patch to shade patch, the only person who doesn’t seem to be suffering is Audrey who matter of factly tells us they were made for the sun.
The good, the bad, and everything in the middle. All things end, and at long last we crest the top of the climb and the world opens up around us. From here, round-topped mountains march away in ridge lines toward the inland sea where this whole thing began only a few days ago.
The last miles to the highway slip by in an easy downhill, the afternoon cooling as the sun arcs to meet the horizon. When I hit the road it is to find the others gathered on the shoulder waiting for a hitch into town. Relief covers me like a soothing blanket allowing me to breathe fully again. I am still less than half way done, still held firm by the talons of this hike. But I made it to Julian, and perhaps with enough food and time I will be strong enough to make it all the way to the ocean.
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.
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.
Sasha’s father is driving us to the eastern terminus of the San Diego Trans County Trail. In the early morning light the road drops away below us and I can see the Salton Sea where it meets the horizon as an expense of flat white nothing. As though the earth fades away at the intersection of sky and brackish water. Even in the early morning, the desert here is brutal. Mountains like curtains thrown over furniture drop onto painfully flat valley floors shot through with pink sand washes. And it is these self same washes that we’ll be walking today. Gaining just under 1,000 feet in 19 miles the hiking should feel nearly flat. Meanwhile the sun makes will make its presence known in every minute of its arc across the sky. Even the flora here is suffused with it, twisting branches as much warm brown as green.
11 hikers clamber out of three cars and we all assemble dutifully to take a picture on the edge of this great, man-made inland sea. My body feels pale and soft after a winter spent in Seattle and my dysphoric brain is whispering unpleasant nothings to me. So I hide behind my camera and refuse offers to take it so that I might be in the picture. I cannot handle being in a picture today but I can handle taking pictures.
Finally it is time to walk and like a gangly field trip we head off across the sand. Veering this way and that as we make our way through the brush and into the wash that we will follow for the rest of the day. Annoyingly, the ebouliant mood of the previous three days is gone and I feel overwhelmed and edgy around this many people. Like I need to perform joviality, gain popularity, be chatty and pleasant. At the first opportunity I drop back under the guise of going to the bathroom and back here I can walk alone and talk to myself, wondering at the desert I spent so many years living near and yet never learned to love.
The group takes their first rest stop at mile four and I pause only long enough to tell them I’m going on. I have long since recognized that my hiking style is not the way most people hike. Which isn’t to say my style is the best, I think the average hikes would prefer to take more than two stops in nearly 20 miles, but I don’t. Soon Kelly catches up to me and though I only met her yesterday we fall into easy conversation. One person I can handle. One person at a time doesn’t send my panicked brain reeling.
Throughout the day I hike with Kelly then Riley, Hadley, and Muffy. As the day wears on and I wear myself out I find I can sit and chat with the group as a whole without feeling like all of their voices are clanging through my head like so many cow bells. For not the first time I notice how there are two ways that hikers typically react when faced with the inevitable discomfort of hiking. The first kind seem to only understand hiking through pain, and they talk about it constantly. As though by witnessing their own discomfort they can better understand the experience they have put themselves in. To the outside observer it seems as though this type of hiker is perpetually surprised by the discomfort that is hiking 20 miles day after day. They want to talk about their feet, how they are sore, how thirsty they are. I wonder if in their minds an ideal hike would be entirely pleasant. For in contrast to the first type of hiker, stands the second. Those who know that pain is a part of thru hiking the same way filtering water or peeing outside is. Pain is inevitable and therefore not worth commenting on. Pain need not be discussed or compared or dissected because in the end it is irrelevant—you just accept it and move on.
I have always fallen in the second group of hikers, preferring to tuck my pain away from the world. I know it is an inevitable part of life and so why would I mention it. But I wonder if this is for the best. As Pilar said today, “there is a kind of camaraderie that comes from cataloging your pain.” And I wonder if I might be better, if we all might be better if we understood pain as inevitable, yes, but also worth discussing. If for no other reason than to gain a fuller understanding of what our fellow humans are going through.
Suddenly it was October. It felt like I woke from a fever dream and suddenly it was October. Somehow. But how? Somehow the spanning months between February and October had slipped past me like a fast flowing river, depositing me on the far side of a lake. Filled with torrential grappling, struggling against my flailing mental health the months dragged and bounded past me. Psychiatry and therapy appointments, medication changes, dark days, brief spiraling highs. Somehow it was already October and I wondered where the year had gone.
July 13th. Happy Birthday to me. The dour, tumultuous moods that had followed me since February persisted and now I was 31. My gift to myself was a solo backpacking trip to the Enchanted Valley in Olympic National Park. Following a long, river-cut valley, the trail meanders along until finally the valley widens below glacial ridges. The hike is dotted with little idyllic river-side campsites, each one called my name, entreating me to stop. My energy levels were failing, a physical manifestation of the illness in my brain, I desperately wanted to stop.
When things fall apart I cling to normalcy. Convinced as I was that faking it until I made it was the only way through I pushed on my hike. Eventually, eventually I made it to my valley floor campsite with a view of the river where I sat under a tree and tried to draw the darkness in my brain. It helped. Drawing almost always helped. It became central to how I understood my mental illness and I never left home without a sketchbook.
The next day I hiked out, I drove home. Driving into Seattle I pulled into a tattoo shop. A spontaneous birthday present to myself. A simple, short phrase but the pain of the tattoo needle along my ribs was exquisite. Maybe that’s why I chose the spot, chose the phrase: never too late. That night, in the darkness of my bedroom I ran my fingers across the raised skin on my side. As though touch they would give me strength. As though by inking the words onto my body I would remember what they said and I would make it through this ceaseless storm. Never too late.
August. The Loowit trail runs a low, bobbing loop around the base of soaring Mt Saint Hellens. But on this trip the decapitated peak was hidden from view by low drizzling clouds. As I hiked the 32 mile circumnavigation I struggled to dredge up the elation I used to feel at these weekend trips. The clouds, like my mood, hung heavy and damp. Unenthusiastic emptiness, grey and bland.
Underneath my apathy roared spikes of outrage. Though quickly tampered they demanded to know why I could no longer connect to the joyous child within me. The part of me that rushes headlong into the natural world eager to look, to see, to breathe in the scenery through my very skin and be made whole by it’s embrace. I was out here but I was trapped within the cage of my skull. I was miserable. But the joy of hiking is that you can’t quit until you are back at your car. So I walked and waited for the trip to be over. The well I was trapped in was dark and deep and at times I felt certain I would never make my way back to the surface.
September. The rumbling plane swept me eastward towards the European continent. Starman sat beside me. We were on our way to hike the Tour du Mont Blanc. A 108 mile circumnavigation of the Mt Blanc Massif running through France, Italy, and Switzerland. In the weeks approaching the trip I knew something was wrong. I knew that despite new medications that something had never been made right and it was getting worse by the day. But I wasn’t on this trip for myself, I was on it for Starman. Normalcy. Just pretend to be normal I told myself. I wanted nothing more than for Starman to have a good time, after all his planning, after months of worrying after me I needed this for him more than I wanted health for myself.
And I did make it through the trip. There were minimal tears and no fights. I saw Starman snap photos and drink beer. We stayed at refuges, met chatty Brits, ate fondue. It was good, but inside I was struggling to hold on. From one hour to the next my mood would surge and the drop out below me. For half a day I would be in tears only to be laughing and joking with strangers over dinner. It may come to be one of my greatest regrets that when I looked upon the Alps for the first time I felt a hollow, buzzing nothing. My head was a fluorescent bulb, at once too bright and sickeningly empty.
Then it was mid October and one more wonder drug in my cocktail and I was stable. I did everything and nothing and somehow things got better. I was elated. I was enraged. How could everything simply get better with one drug. I felt impotent in my health, I could take no credit other than having lived through the ordeal. Though perhaps that is credit enough.
The episode was over. The summer was over and with it came the rains. The clouds closed in around Seattle like silence, and I marveled over this glorious blue dot. The indecisive weather left me in the hinterland of seasons. I felt I had missed spring and summer, I had missed so much of 2019 it felt like a personal loss. In October I walked through the city and waited for winter to come. In October I began to look forward to the coming snow. In October I was glad that I could look forward to anything at all.
