Cradle Mountain to the right, before the clouds moved in.
The chain is cool beneath my fingers, rock damp beneath my feet, and my body is moving, if not powerfully, then at least competently up a rock face so steep I have to pull myself hand-over-hand up a dangling chain. “This is just going to be hard until it’s not,” filters up into the back of my brain, a refrain from the earliest days of this trip. Back when every hike felt brutally difficult and the only reason I finished some of them was because I refused to quit, no matter how slow or how long it required. It felt like my fitness was forever in the making, each hike so infinitesimally faster than the last I hardly sensed any progress at all. It seems a surprise miracle then that things have grown easier. Not easy; because hiking is never easy, you just go faster or further or steeper. But at least easier, and within my body I feel a sense of competence both familiar and elusive.
I pause, allowing Keith to scale the next pitch of rock while I take in the scenery around me. We are hiking a loop around Tasmania’s Cradle Mountain, a peak nestled in the interior of the state. Rising up from dirt roads, farms, and vast stretches of eucalyptus trees comes the brief ripple of foothills before the jagged summit fin juts into the sky. At its base and below me lays Dove lake, its waters dyed nearly black with tannins from the surrounding vegetation. Above me the sudden rock walls of Cradle Mountain are swaddled in an encapsulating batting of grey clouds. It means there will be no summit bid for us today, just a long and pleasantly challenging loop around its base.
Though rain threatens all day it never arrives. A mercy given the steep bare-rock nature of the trail that on more than one occasion forces me to sit on my butt and scooch myself down off a drop of some feet. The hike is fun challenging, not brutal challenging and I’m extremely grateful for it. It feels like finally there might be a way forward into a body that feels more like my own.
The country outside my window jumbles and bumps along in a way that is distinctly the Tasmanian bush while simultaneously reminding me of a dozen other landscapes. Hard packed umber dirt sprouts bone white trees which reach their branchless arms skyward. A thousand, thousand cheerleaders waving faded green pom poms of leaves into the flat, blue sky. It’s captivating. Foreign and unique the landscape draws the eye to rest upon the details: a jaunty cropping of rocks, a haggard yet epic ridgeline, stepped flats above muddy waters. I want to stare, to understand and know the lands of this southern little island. I want to mash my face into the dirt and let it tell me its stories. I want to spend not just time, but intimacy with this new place. Which, is just as well seeing as Keith and I are making the four hour drive from Hobart to Queenstown Tasmanian via a stop-over at the long-defunct Waddamana Power Station—because that’s just the kind of engineering nerd Keith is.
Forced to slow down on the dirt roads of the bush, I have my time to sit and watch while a half-listened-to book plays in the background. It’s just enough input for my hummingbird mind to slow and allow me to observe my own thoughts. Fall, I love fall, I think. And I think, I might just be falling in love with this strange little island with its cool, crisp mornings and the feeling of being away from almost everything else. The unpaved, barely inhabited interior of the island is away from civilization, yes, but on a global scale the very location of Tasmanian feels isolated in a way that has called to me. We’re closer to the south pole than we are to Seattle and that sense of vastness, of geographic loneliness breeds a curiosity that verges on longing.
These thoughts, but others as well. I think about sitting on my couch in my tiny apartment, about riding my skateboard and joining a gym. About building a routine for myself—something I both resent and know I do better beneath. Part of me, perhaps a larger part, is ready for this trip to be over. And I sort of hate that. In my vision of myself I am the endless traveler who never tires of the road, whose curiosity is never quieted. But honesty, I’ve found, is so often battering when it forces us to confront the actual that we wish and the actual that we are. When I set out on this trip, I thought three and a half months would never be enough. The great New Zealand circus to which I was running away would never grow tiresome. And in so many of the ways that it matters, it hasn’t grown old. The wonder is still there, nestled in its home inside my heart. But I feel that I have grown weary, and in that found myself wanting, not to stop but to rest, at least for a little while.
Queenstown, interior Tasmanian. Because I absolutely forgot to take pictures today.
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.
By the time the others start stirring I have already spent an hour watching the sky lighten through the window of Sasha’s parents house. At this point in the trip it’s not even remarkable that I’m barely sleeping, it has become the norm. As I start to pack away my things I take solace in knowing that today is the last day of the hike. Tomorrow I will be home and I will sit in the stillness and quiet of my own company, allowing the tension and exhaustion and pressure to slide from my shoulders. It doesn’t have to be fun, I remind myself. You can still do hard things, I remind myself. Only another 13.7 miles to the ocean. 13.7 miles and I will be free.
Since we are staying at Sasha’s parents house tonight we will slack pack the last section of the SDTCT, leaving the majority of our gear behind and only carrying what is needed. Despite this, the packing process drags on as people debate what to bring and what to leave and Sasha wrangles day packs for people to use. Finally at 8am we take the urban equivalent of a hitch, hopping into two Lyfts which take us back to where we left off last night.
Arriving at the trail freshly laundered and showered feels incongruous with my aching body. But then again, thru hiking is a deeply absurd endeavor so why should this trail feel any different. We set off down a gently winding path that runs alongside a small creek. Almost immediately some folks announce their boredom, put in their headphones and hammer off down the trail. But this morning I don’t want to be alone, I feel no need to push my body through these last few miles. The remaining miles to the beach will take us about five hours and for the first time on this hike I am content to let them slowly melt away.
I walk off and on with Liza, Pilar, Kelly, and Riley. We tell stories of childhood and awkward first dates. We decide that Riley is indeed the coolest of all of us and that Liza is the official cult leader of our hiking group. Everything is uproariously funny, drenched in the glow of the last day of a hike. The trail continues to wind through a shallow canyon past parks and below housing complexes, beside industrial areas and below bridges roaring with morning commuter traffic. But almost always on dirt, a fact for which my throbbing feet are grateful. Mile after mile slips away unnoticed and I am content to let them go. Unlike other hikes where I have used the last day for reflection, today I keep myself occupied with conversation. I have neither want nor need to spend another day ricocheting around the walls of my own skull. I want to be here, in this moment, and then I want to be done.
The trail dumps us out at the side of a busy road as though we are too-tan aliens deposited from another planet. This new world we have found ourselves on is inhabited only by rumbling glinting speeding beasts who wish us nothing but harm. Amid the noise and bustle we make our way to the taqueria directly on track at mile 150 where we eat thoroughly average Mexican food.
And then, as though by magic and kindness and luck and wonder I am hiking through a muddy wetland just a mile from the beach. The sky has grown grey, the air damp from ocean spray.
And then I am there.
The scene is not a jubilant sun-soaked dash to the finish but instead something more subdued and powerful in it’s finality. One last sprint across a busy road. A short flight of stairs. I am standing on a shallow beach which gives way to startling blue water that fades into fog like the end of the world. I am standing on the finish line. For all the tourists and hiking partners on the beach I might as well be alone. I made it. It didn’t break me. But something inside me has shattered. I spent eight days hiking and laughing with these people while crying hidden away in private moments. I saw the best of the hiking community while being reminded yet again that thru hikers are not kind to weakness and uncertainly. There is no fault or blame, only a wild, undulating ride through heat and brush and strife. I made it. I can do hard things. I am free.
Later, after we have snapped photos and played in the icy waters of the pacific, I am laying in a tattoo parlor. A tattoo of a jack rabbit jumping over a barrel cactus is being inked onto my skin. The needle piercing flesh reminds me of the pain from the innumerable scratches covering my legs. Only less. The heat from my rising skin reminds me of the brutal sun at the Salton Sea. Only less. I nearly doze off while the artist works, as though I have grown so accustomed to discomfort that this tattoo cannot phase me. I have forced myself to walk through pain and tears, through the loneliness of an endlessly screaming brain and now I will brand that experience into my very skin. I will carry this with me forever, pierced into my body, into my very core. Proof that amid more than a year of raging metal illness I still had the resilience to do something hard. I am trapped and I am free. Tomorrow I go home.
** Thank you for reading this far, you’re my special favorite. Wild Country is going back to it’s regular schedule of posting every other Friday; watch this space for a new post in two weeks. **
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.
I fantasize about running through a red desert. The breeze is cool and tinged with coming night, the red of the sand seems to reverberate with the last vestiges of the fading day. In the distance, a monolith mesa rises from the creosote-dotted earth to block the eastern horizon.
In this fantasy, I shuffle slowly along. I have never been a fast runner and there is no need to pretend otherwise for the purpose of this fantasy. Besides, in the soft, silty sand it is hard to run quickly and I am more than content to lope along. Footsteps kicking up clouds. Breathing in control. Sweat sticking my short hair to my head. In this fantasy my body is familiar, capable, powerful.
But I am not in a nameless red desert. But sitting alone on my couch in my small Seattle apartment. The last of the day’s fall sunlight leaks through the window in watery rays. Dust motes stir on the desk. I watch the world grow dark around me, marveling at the stupefying effects of oxycodone.
Even through the drug, my chest feels like it is bound in searing ropes. Not painful exactly, but uncomfortable enough to warrant constant notice. A reminder, as it were, of what I have done. What I have chosen. A surgery to shave down my body into one I hope be more comfortable living in. Top surgery, yet not a full mastectomy. I did not wish to remove my breasts entirely, but to move myself from visibly feminine toward a different place altogether. As a nonbinary person I am no more a man or a woman than I am a combination of the two. Instead, I am something different, less a middle ground than a third option entirely.
In choosing to have reduction top surgery I wanted to give myself a body that I could tolerate inhabiting. One that didn’t project unwanted femininity at every opportunity. One that I didn’t have to bind and conceal and endure every single morning as I desperately tried to find something, anything in my closet that covered my chest and made me feel normal. Invisible. Unneeding of attention. A human blip on the radar of society soundlessly gliding by without a protruding prow out ahead of me.
For days after my surgery I wore the same oversized red flannel. Even with the bandages around my chest the shirt fell nearly flat. It was perfect. Comfort like a deep sigh of relief.
Rather than feeling strange or shocking my new chest felt normal, expected. Like this was how I was always supposed to look. And it was this sense of rightness that would carry me through the coming months of healing. As the last of the beautiful fall days passed I sat on my couch, I fantasized about running across a red desert. I dreamt of a strong, capable body as weeks passed and my muscles atrophied.
Physical exertion and strain seem to be the only ways I can understand this body that I inhabit. Being forced to abandon those tools quickly left me feeling lost within my own skin. Weak and without recourse to manage the sickly, vibrating energy that seems to fill my very bones. The price of making my body my own is to be forced to sit and handle my discontent. Energy within me that bubbles and strains, looking for a way out. This new chest is one part freedom, one part test of patience. Wholey a lesson in coming home.
Through healing from top surgery I came to see my body as an old house. A thing that I inhabit but do not love. A thing that requires maintenance and understanding, that is both imperfect and impermanent. A thing that I can shape to a degree, but short of total destruction I will never be able to transform it fully into my own. I can paint the bathroom, knock down a wall, but the structure is the same.
I am coming to accept that this old house contains the very core of who I am, a constant energy seeking a way out as though my very being is discontent to be trapped under skin. Yet through effort and ink and knife this body of mine is starting to become familiar. And if I sit here long enough it will heal and I will be allowed to return to physical exertion, to wild places, to the brutal joy of endurance. I fantasize about running across a wild, red desert. I wait.
