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.
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.
This February I am attempting a 9 day thru hike of the 160 mile San Diego Trans County Trail with a group of 10 rad queers. During this hike we are raising funds for Boarder Angles, a non-profit that does important humanitarian work along our southern border. If you have the means I would encourage you to donate to the fundraiser that we are hosting. All money raised will go directly to border angels. You can find the fundraiser here: https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/sdtct-hike-for-border-angels
Since this is a shorter hike I’ll plan to write on the trail and then publish after. So watch this space for blog posts coming up.
I always look out the window during takeoff; I love the feeling of flying. The rising whine of the engines, the sprint down the runway followed by the first tenuous rise of the front wheel and the sudden leap into the sky. As we climb up and above the undulating cotton candy clouds I look south as though from this height I might be able to see all the way to our destination.
Bookworm, Beau, Audrey, and myself are flying to San Diego on this typically wet m Seattle day. We are the four person Seattle contingent on what is to be a 10 person group of queer hikers setting off on a nine day hike of the San Diego Trans County Trail. The SDTCT is a little-known thru hike that runs 160 miles across San Diego county. Starting at the Salton Sea and terminating at the Pacific Ocean the SDTCT is part desert bushwhack part urban walk. To me, a largely unknown entity having been no more than a silent observer in the group chat. As others discussed food planning, water caches, daily mileage and more I feigned enthusiasm while my mental health wained. I was feigning enthusiasm for my entire life.
The two months prior to the departure of this hike I began what I have come to recognize as my yearly descent into depression. This time, mitigated by a nightly cocktail of medication the depression lacked it’s usual potency. It casually chugged along making getting out of bed in the morning a burdensome chore, sucking the excitement from the world while filling my brain with anxious thought spirals and gruesome images. It was not until a sudden change in medication that the wheels really came off. Rapidly and violently I was pitched headlong into a vacuous mixed episode. My once depressed brain took on a frenetic anxiety the likes of which I am becoming intimately familiar with. Now the bone-deep exhaustion was paired with a restless, directionless energy that wanted nothing but out. Mornings took on an arduous quality as I struggled, and often failed, to get myself out of bed. When I did manage to leave the house it was to find a world of endless noise and light, like a thousand needles trying to work their way under my skin. Simply existing in a city became painful, my body was gripped with the agony of it, like a full body sensation of bsomeone driving splinters under your finger nails. Meanwhile my brain spun out narratives of fictional characters, cute stories that consumed my entire mind before turning dark, brutal and violent. My brain was inventing characters only to show me how violently it could maim and dismember them.
And it was against this backdrop that the final weeks before the SDTCT passed. I felt nothing. As though I stood on an eldless grey plain. I felt desperate to be away from the grating noise of Seattle, to let myself vanish into the desert, to grind my body down across the sandy earth. I felt that even on the other end of the country I would be haunted by the endless, spiraling echo chamber of my mind. Such is the reality of a prison you carry with you wherever you go. And in the way that anxiety can warp even the simplest interaction I began to worry that I would be the weakest link of the hike, that I wouldn’t be able to cope with the planned 20 mile days, that the escape of the desert would be nothing more than a case study in my own failing. In going into this hike I am acutely aware that I am unfit and under trained. After all, when you are struggling to make it to work, working out becomes something of a tertiary concern.
And then, and then dear reader the most wonderful thing happened! Two days before I was to board this flight to San Diego hypomania arrived in all her chattering, creative, ebouliant energy. The world flooded back into color, my chest was an expanding balloon of light and wonder and I found myself laughing not at anything in particular but with the simple joy of being alive. And oh music, music and the power of being bouyed along on the soaring emotions of another. For this hike I didn’t download a single podcast. Instead, goodr vibes only music. (Insert link to Jump in the Line) My excitement crescendoed just in time for takeoff and for the first time in more than a month I was looking into the near future with something resembling hope.
And I know, I do. I know that stability comes only when the up and down give way to a middle ground of average. But please, please let me live in this space just a little longer. Just a little longer before the lack of sleep and mile-a-minute brain burn out my core and reduce me to ash. Let me marvel at the desert and feeling the sun on my face in the winter. Let me have deep, roaming conversations with this ragtag band of strangers with whom I feel I already have so much in common. As I wing my way south down the coast I find myself pleading with my jumbled brain not for 10 days of normalcy, I know that would be too much to ask given the circumstances, but simply 10 more days of anything before the inevitable crash.
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.
A thick mist presses tight against the tent walls and I am cocooned from the world by white and nylon and down. It’s too early to hike so I’m reading, my phone screen glowing cheery and bright as I scroll through page after page of Jacob Tobia’s Sissy. The book, which details Tobia’s gender-bending childhood and discovery of their trans and non-binary identity strikes so close to home it feels like someone is jamming their finger through my heart.
As I read, big, sloppy alligator tears roll from my eyes and puddle against my ultralight backpacking pillow. Tobia’s coming of gender story elicits the particular kind of pain that comes from struggling to find one’s self. I can do nothing but cry. Cry and wish I was born just a few years later when more people knew the word non-binary. Cry and wish I was a little more knowledgeable about the queer world. Cry and wish that anyone in my sphere knew what being trans and non-binary was when I was a child so I wouldn’t be stuck working this all out in my 30’s.
But you can’t rework your past to better suit your present.
I grew up a child of the largely homophobic early 90’s where gay culture was just beginning to crack into the mainstream discussion and trans was still a foreign concept to most Americans. Genderqueer was even further afield and non-binary was a word that didn’t even exist yet. And I was a child who liked to dress in boys clothes.
As a child I was a hyperactive, sprinting, adventurous mess who was largely allowed to ditch the femininity ascribed to those of my sex. I credit my parents for introducing me to the idea that gender norms are bullshit. My mother never wore makeup and dressed in jeans and a t-shirt to her job as an engineer. My father worked from home, taught me to cook, encouraged his my sister and I to play sports and that it was okay for girls to want to win. I continue to reap the benefits of having parents who focused on ability over appearance. Brains over beauty.
Still, life is change and childhood is temporary. To me, puberty was a betrayal. Seemingly overnight my genderless adolescent body with it’s straight lines became a mockery of itself. I was repulsed by my widening hips, growing breasts. Suddenly I needed to shop in the girls section. Clothes that were cut to accommodate this new body seemed clownish and bizarre; worse was that my female friends seemed to want to wear these clothes. Short , capped sleeves, tight pants, pink and purple glitter scrawling out sassy phrases across their chests or worse, asses. They sailed off to the land of femininity while I remained trapped on the gender confused island of misfit toys. Clever as I had been raised to be, I could understand how one would assemble the pieces of an appropriately girly wardrobe. What was lost on me was why; why did they want to dress like that? Why did I not?
The years between high school and my first foray into the professional, office-bound world hammered home the idea of why. Because there is social capital, security, and affluence in dressing like the gender everyone assumes you are. And though I was still uncomfortable, still took every opportunity I could to conceal my chest with scarves, I began to develop a look that was feminine enough. Though I hated shopping for clothes I didn’t like. Though getting dressed every single day was a frustrating ordeal. Though I still didn’t understand the rules of this game I was playing, I tried my best to figure it out. To use my brain if not my desire to play the part of woman. And in doing so I even began to believe the specific kind of bodily oppression that women are held to. I dieted: carb counting, paleo, vegan, vegetarian, intermittent fasting, and good ol’ calorie counting. Maybe if I was thin enough I would feel at home in this obviously feminine body. When that failed I tried makeup, styling my hair, plucking my eyebrows, artificially contouring my face. But these efforts were nothing more than secondary acts in the farce that was my life. And all the while I never thought there was another option.
As I progressed through my 20’s I held on to my masculinity through sports and, most importantly, the outdoors. I would rarely think about my chest while bombing down a ski run. Rock climbing, with it’s intense focus and unforgiving standard of safety, meant my gender was shoved to the deepest recesses of my mind. But my true love became solo backpacking; the more remote the better. Away, truly away from other people I was free of expectation, gaze, performance.
Being in the backcountry felt like a return to childhood. In the sort of travel turned adventure, yes. But far more importantly in the way that I could simply be. In Tobia’s book they talk about feigning late-night study sessions so that they could choreograph secret dance routines in their high heels—hiding their feminity away from the world, knowing it wouldn’t be accepted. The outdoors became my midnight dance party, I craved the moments when no one was looking at me. I still do. In a body that has never quite felt like mine, backpacking afforded me the means to move at my own pace, go where I wanted to go. I could simply exist.
Until recently I never thought to tie those feelings of bodily and gender discomfort to anything larger. Certainly not things as substantial as being non-binary or transgender. Plus, I rationed, if I were non-binary, or trans, I would know. Right? Certainly by this age. Right?
And here we come to the lie that cisgender people tell themselves about the transgender experience: that it looks one way. That being trans means you know at a young age that you were born in the wrong body, that you’re meant to be a different gender, and that you’ll go through specific physical transitions to achieve your desired body.
Bullshit.
Bullshit bullshit bullshit.
That narrative, while valid and real, it is also held up as the one and only trans coming out narrative. Because if that’s the only way to be trans then all cis people are safe from questioning their gender. If that is the only way to be trans, then people who fall in the middle, people like me, aren’t real. It’s a narrative that ties physical transition to being trans. It’s a narrative that fails to recognize that being trans is at its very core a simple criteria: being trans means you don’t identify with the gender assigned to you at birth. Non-binary is no more complex than not being a man or a woman.
I hope that paragraph helped someone realize they’re trans. Just as the incredible work of Molly Woodstock did for me. Because sometimes it takes someone holding up a mirror to themselves or their community to help you see yourself. And when you do, it can change everything and nothing. But at least for me the realization that I’m non-binary shook my understanding of myself while simultaneously putting a lifetime of experience into clarity. Everything changed and nothing changed.
Which brings us back to the mountains. To the places where I can bound along like a cut marionette, beholden to no strings but my own. Invisible and protected because of it. Free from constant misgendering, the curious looks or blank stares that are commonplace when you inhabit the hinterland between man and woman, free from the forced self-advocacy that is required by every trans and non-binary person. The mountains don’t ask that from me. Out here I can still be invisible. From others, yes. But also from myself, from mirrors. From that now familiar twinge of disappointment when an unfamiliar face and body look back at me from the mirror. Something that happens less these days but in the mountains it never happens at all.
Out in the wild I never have to explain or ask or justify. I don’t have to listen to people get my pronouns wrong. In the way that these wild spaces belong to all of us and none of us I can be both all of me and none of me.
