Glacier carved with broad sloping sides, the valley leading south from Akureyri is a hallmark of a prehistoric time when ice covered this land. Cut through with tributary valleys it is easy to imagine great heaves of ice roaring and rumbling their way towards the icy waters of the Greenland Sea. In these moments the land talks to me, whispering its forgotten days, before man, before witness. It echoes the ache in my own chest, the desire to know more, to see behind the roads and signs and into a land which more than one person has told me is full of nothing. But I know that can’t be true, isn’t true. I know that Iceland holds so many stunning vistas and secret beauties and my step this morning is buoyant at the thought of it.
The anticipation pulls me onward while my anxieties drift towards the back of my mind, reluctant to be shaken loose. I’m a little bored during our 20 mile road walk today and I wonder if I’ve grown tired of thru hiking already and what that says about me and about this trip. The tendonitis in my foot is bothering me and I worry that I won’t be able to make it through the hike, that my body will fail my ambitions. Though I suppose the anxieties that come with setting out on something big and new and uncertain are natural. It has taken so much just to get to the starting line of this trip, and now that we’re here there’s no guarantee that we’ll be able to finish this hike, something true of all thru hiking.
I’ve been yearning for the exploration of this trip, even the difficulties that come with stepping off the beaten path. But it’s harder to envision happiness than disappointment sometimes. It takes concerted effort to focus on the good and the now and the person that I get to share this experience with. But I’m trying to become that person who sees the good more readily. And in writing this post I’m doing just that.
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.
The heat and humidity wrap around my Seattle-chilled bones, welcoming to Nadi, Fiji like a heavy blanket of possibility. Choruses of “Bula!” from the staff greet us as we meander through customs while in my head my emotions back-flip over themselves; elated to be somewhere new, somewhere besides the bone-aching winter chill and permeating dark of Seattle. It’s like I’ve escaped, it’s like I’ve been set free. I’ve come across the world, across the dateline, down to the southern hemisphere and into the start of three and a half months spent in New Zealand and Australia. Only now, only upon setting my feet down on foreign soil does this trip feel real. Even during the months of planning and research this trip has felt like a mirage on the horizon. Visible, yet I dare not believe it real. The last years have taught me the debilitating disappointment of hope that fails to materialize and I’ve built walls around myself to keep that potential disappointment at bay.
Through flights booked, hotels reserved, and a plucky little rental car scheduled I fueled this dream through practicality instead of anticipation. But then things started to shift as trip-specific purchases accumulated, jobs were quit, and bags packed. Each one planting seeds in my pessimistic brain: “this is real, this is real, this is happening and this is real.” And now here we are in Fiji and the gravity of what Keith and I are doing is finally hitting home.
For the next three months we will live and travel across New Zealand. Starting on the southern island and working our way north through the northern island, through the end of the southern hemisphere’s summer before spending a whirlwind two weeks road tripping up the eastern coast of Australia. But today we will spend 24 hours on the island of Fiji. Baking our pale bodies under the tropic sun and eating whatever local food we can find. Tomorrow it’s on to Christchurch New Zealand and then, well then dear reader the adventure begins. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.
Tomorrow will be the last installment of the SDTCT blog. As always, I would love if you consider donating to the Border Angels fundraiser.
For three hours I am deeply, perfectly asleep. When the others start to make moves at 5:30am I am rudely dropped from a floating cloud back into my body with it’s scratched legs and aching feet. As with each previous day I feel older and more tried upon waking. But today is the penultimate day of our hike, today we reach San Diego, today I remind myself , that this hike is not about having fun. So I get up.
We leave the campground in a dense fog and wind our way through deconstructed suburbs, turning this way and that until we are unceremoniously dumped on the side of a busy road. I need time in the morning to warm up and Riley is kind enough to walk with me at the back of the pack. Within a couple of miles my legs are churning and we work our way up through the pack and out into the lead. The track takes us around a gravel pit, across a highway and up a hillside via a steep bushwhack that has my scratched legs screaming. From the top of the climb we hike on jeep roads and fire breaks over rolling dusty-green hills. The group expands and contracts like a many-legged inch worm searching for shade.
After so many years in southern California I find this sort of hiking to be easy if not unremarkable. I let my mind wander, past my throbbing feet, past the sweat running down my face and back, past the field trip of people behind and in front of me. I think about why I hike long distances. For the beauty and exercise, yes. But more so for the erasure that comes from grinding down my body so deeply into the earth that I am set free from a body and brain that increasingly feel like a ride on which I am trapped. It pains me to think that even out here I can no longer escape myself, my mental illness and my transness. I don’t know what to do about that. The problem feels bigger than I can handle and so I shuffle it away for future examination.
I am lost in thought when I come upon Riley and Kelly sitting in a patch of shade. They tell me that there is an alternate we can take that would get us off this dull ridge walking and would put us within a half mile of an In-N-Out Burger. The downside, they confess, is that the alternate might force us to walk along a very busy road, possibly a highway, kinda hard to tell from the maps. Fine. Fine, I say. Being this close to the end of the trail has me in both a better mood and ready to give zero fucks about anything. But sure, something other than miles of hard-packed dirt and grey-green bushes that culminates in burgers? I’m down.
We follow our original track until it hits the road and where we discover it’s a capital B Big Road. It’s a highway. Cars are moving fast, blowing by in big gusts, their speed and size feel scary and I wonder if this is a bad idea. Riley and I are again out in front of the pack and they think it’s a go so I do too. I wonder if anyone from the group will follow us, but then I realize I don’t really care. They’re all functional adults and group think has mostly gotten us lost on this hike, so I set off after Riley. Time to learn to fly baby birds.
At first there is a narrow single track trail that contours across the hills in parallel with the highway and we optimistically think we’re all set. Then we walk along the shoulder on the far side of the guard rail which gives us a little extra safety. But then, then comes a blind curve with a narrow shoulder and a big, steep hill overhead. Neither up nor through look like good options. This is what they call the lesser of two evils. Time to bushwhack. Riley and I push our way into the shrubs and my scratched legs scream in protest. My brain knows that being up on the hill is the safe thing to do but I am forced to fight my body’s natural urge to avoid pain. We pick our way up to the top of the hill while my brain sends messages of searing pain so intense that they warp back into some kind of sick pleasure. From the top of our scramble I watch the group below us hike down the shoulder, not on the safe side of the guard rail, three abreast without a care in the world. They don’t even blink when they come to the blind curve. I watch them make the same stupid, unsafe choices again and again as if they exist beyond consequences. As if this route were the PCT or AT where trail angels hold your hand and the trail is nicely marked and easy to follow. As Riley and I make our way back to the road I wonder at what it must be like to live in a world in which you think you are immune to harm simply because you are a hiker.
Still, lucky as we are to be hiking into a city, the shoulder gives way to a sidewalk and In-N-Out appears. We scurry inside, garnering looks from fellow patrons, one of whom I overhear talking about the book or movie Wild. They must think we are PCT hikers. Or, more likely, Wild is the only context this person has for understanding people like us. After all, they’re not that far off.
While we must look out of place to the other diners, to me In-N-Out feels like stepping into a spaceship. Everything is too bright and too close. The tiny bubble of cleanliness is too loud, like all the voices and dings and soda machine gurgles are pressing into me, demanding my attention. I want to stay and eat. I want to linger in this clean, air-conditioned space. I want to clap my hands over my ears and run screaming into the parking lot. But the desire for food wins out and shortly after we are done eating we leave. Following our ever-winding track which leads us down a busy road to a suburban neighborhood to a cut through a questionably public open space, then a park, then finally a winding pathway along a small, algae-choked creek. We follow this path until it hits a road and someone pulls out their phone and calls a Lyft. We are thoroughly in San Diego now and there will be no camping. Tonight we are heading back to where it all started, sleeping on the floor of Sasha’s parents house.
Hi, me again. Can we talk about the fundraiser? You know the deal by now, human rights disaster at the US-Mexico border, Border Angels uses the money you give them to help people from dying in the desert and educates folks about immigration and employee rights. That they’re helping people on both sides of the border. I know that not everybody has the means, that’s okay, care for yourself first, but if you can afford to give, I’d really encourage you too. I threw into the fundraiser myself because I really believe this is an organization that deserves our help.
The infamous bushwhack starts at mile 109. One and a half miles and 1,500 feet of gain to the summit of El Cajon Mountain, through chest high Manzanita and chamise bush. I moved slowly this morning and by the time I reach the base of the climb I can’t see anyone from the group, only their voices above me indicate where they are. I rush to stow everything on the inside of my pack and start climbing. I feel a little left behind, and then a little stupid for feeling that. Since all my efforts were towards self preservation I’ve set myself on the outside of the group. I’d been so focused on trying to stay in a place where I didn’t feel like I was going to crawl out of my skin, that I didn’t notice I’d been drifting away. Now I felt like a little life raft tied to the back of the party yacht.
At first the climb is simple enough. I can follow gaps in the brush, making my way diagonally up the mountain bit by bit. Half way up and I’m starting to wonder what the hype is all about. Sure I’m getting scratched but it’s nothing to write home about.
Except, I soon learn, I’m not half way up. I’m not even a third of the way up but rather half way up one of the three false summits. Fantastic. Really great. Once I gain the saddle I can see the rolling ridge extending away from me. Our group of 12, which feels so large when we are all collected, is scattered across the sweep of terrain and I can finally see how very far behind I am.
The peak rises in three hulking mounds below a round summit. Only large granite boulders break the sea of dense, haphazard green brush, like a giant, warty Chia Pet. It will be my special pleasure to work my way through 1.5 miles of it. As I climb higher the easements in the brush fade away until there is nothing but persistence and heaving lunges to move forward. The Manzanita has smooth bark and hard, unforgiving branches covered in small leaves. They whip my legs and leave them stinging. No matter how I try and navigate through the brush I end up scratched. My only reprieve is when I can clamber up on a boulder and attempt to get a better sense of a path. But there is no path there is only brush. Above me I can hear the others, see them standing on the summit a rise above me. I start pushing myself faster and faster, becoming careless and all the more scratched because of it. But I don’t want to be left alone, not up here, not adrift in a sea of green leaves and dark red bark.
I nearly break down in tears I am so frustrated. But this hike isn’t about having fun, it’s not about doing something easy. And somehow this knowledge calms me and allows me to keep moving as uncomfortable as I am. Eventually the skin on my legs becomes a singular, burning sting. The pain is both part of me and beyond me, allowing me passage through the dense vegetation with a supreme lack of concern for any further pain. It can’t hurt any more and so I stop fighting it, I stop fighting anything and simply make my way to the top of the mountain where I find Audrey, Beau, Hadley, Ashley our adopted daughter, Muffy, Liza, and Pilar.
The infamous bushwhack is over and with it the only summit on the entire SDTCT. From the top we can see ridges marching away to the east, each one unique and yet similar in their building blocks: dense brush and round barrel rocks. To the west a thick haze blankets San Diego and it’s surrounding neighborhoods, blocking them from view. We’re pushing up against the edge of civilization and walking our way out of the desert.
The descent is knee-jarring in its steepness but provides one excellent diversion. Less than a mile from the summit rests an old rusted-out jeep from the days when our trail was a road and well dressed city folk came this way in their fancy automobiles for a bit of adventure. We however, put the car to a different use. Beau suggests a thru hiker themed Truck Sluts photo shoot and soon people are stripping off their clothes and climbing onto the truck. As the person with the camera I am both photographer and art director, posing, arranging, and encouraging this collection of half-dressed hiking companions. It is truly amazing how doing difficult things in the outdoors can bond people.
Dressed and back on trail the sun grows long as the miles slip slowly by. The sounds of the racing highway herald our arrival at the bottom. It is here where we see Pea with trail magic. And this truly is remarkable. There is no such thing as trail magic on a route so obscure as the SDTCT. But Pea loves this route and loves supporting the hikers on it. The group sits on a grassy berm and eats Taco Bell bean and cheese burritos in the fading sunlight as cars wiz by below us. Incredible, I think, that people would go so far out of their way just to help those of us who like to hike long ways and sleep in the dirt. I try and tuck this wonderment away in my head for future use when things grow dark and the world feels a hostile place.
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.
Sometime between waking up and making my way to the campground’s vault toilet I realize that my left foot is going to be a problem. Perhaps it is unsurprising that going from solely strength training with almost no cardio to walking nearly 20 miles a day will fuck you up. What is less surprising, to those of you who know me, is that I totally knew this and then did it anyway. Ah well. I made this mess and now it’s my special pleasure to get myself out of it.
As the camp packs up around me I pop some Tylenol and attempt to stretch. Though at some point under the warming sun I concede hope for a painless day and hike out at the back of the pack. In a former life I was an ultramarathoner who messed up their foot in exactly the same way. Which, while embarrassing, means I don’t have to worry that this is a stress fracture or something that will do anything but hurt until I stop, rest, and stretch in copious amounts. But for today I take careful steps, even though I can’t walk with my heel on the ground, in an effort to keep my gait as even as possible so I don’t end up with two messed up feet.
As I hobble behind the group I wonder at the idea of grit, of tenacity and resilience. In my life I have been told by a fair few people that I have a lot of all those things. But it occurs to me now that those kinds of traits only come from getting yourself in a dumb situation and then being forced to get yourself out again. Take hiking, of any variety, you don’t simply get to stop when you’re bored or tired the way you might in a gym. No, you have to walk your ass back to the car. Or, in my situation, to the ocean. Minimum I’ve got to make it to Julian before I have any chance of hitching anywhere. So then it’s walking for me.
The pain in my foot gnaws at me, making it’s presence known in every step. I am a fool, I think to myself. I am damaging my body, I think to myself. I am embarrassed for getting injured on the first day with all these impressive hikers around me, I think to myself. But I am also in the middle of nowhere with very little recourse and so I walk. I attempt to distract myself but this is the sort of discomfort that will only go away on it’s own terms. So I resolve myself to hurting, to walking through it and accept that things might not be okay, but they’ll be fine in the end.
In keeping with the theme from yesterday the track leads through old jeep roads and dry washes and one very cool, albeit small, section of winding slot canyon. I play leapfrog with Riley, Kelly, and Muffy throughout the morning as they stop for frequent breaks. Meanwhile, my foot finally allows me to take almost normal steps and I am reluctant to stop lest it start behaving worse than it already is. And in this way the hiking day passes. As it so often does during thru hiking. Something hurts, another chafes, the scenery is pretty and at times there are interesting people to talk to.
At the end of the day we drop from the hills into a low flat valley, cross into a small town where, according to Muffy there is an incredible taco shop. And even though none of us possess that infinite hiker hunger we eat copious amounts of food and then post up in a park to charge our phones and wait for the heat to pass.
Finally, in the growing dark we leave town and begin our climb up the other side of the wide, flat valley. The group sets up camp at a bend in the road knowing that tomorrow we must begin our climb into the mountains. I fall asleep under the clear cold sky of the desert and wait for the morning light.
I am standing in the little kitchen at my parents house. The one that really should be big enough for multiple people to work in but really somehow only accommodates one. Two if you’re just standing, talking as my mother and I are now. When my mother says the smallest thing about how when she was a child she wished she could be invisible.
In that moment I saw something of myself in her, as clear as lightning to the chest. Something dark, forbidden and unspoken. And I knew what she meant in more than simple understanding. I felt it in my childhood core, that desire to be unseen and undone. I wish now I would have summoned the right words. Could have said, in that very moment, “yes, I see you. Yes, me too.”
But the moment was so fast it flitted by me like a startled bird and only now do I have the words and means to better observe what she said, and summon an appropriate reply.
I wonder how many of those poignant moments I have let fly by me in my life.
You see, I spent the winter holidays in Colorado with my family. Talking, and more important trying to listen. As I age I come to understand that my parents have a great deal to offer me in the stories of their lives. And while I was there I tandemly rekindled my love of the Colorado mountains, which instill in me a deep ache. Which, now, with the passage of time help me better understand what my mother said.
Beside that deep ache is something tinged with sadness but isn’t quite. Perhaps longing would better closely capture what I feel. Though longing can take on all matter of secondary emotions such as lust, desire, excitement, and passion. How then, do I convey that I long less to explore those mountains than to be consumed by them. To be, as my mother said, invisible. To be without form or force, but instead as light that plays across the face of a peak. Touching everything but part of nothing. To be as free and simple as a bird. Unencumbered by complex thoughts and bombastic emotions. So strange, it occurs to me now, to hold so dear a dream that will never come true.
