A year ago, or a year in a couple days, I touched the northern terminus of the PCT. I ran a couple miles into Canada, illegally, looking for friends who were just ahead and had the appropriate entry permits. I sat at the border for a while, watching people coming and going. I said goodbye to some of my friends, and hiked south with one of them, to Hart's Pass. By way of a Seattle food tour, we made it back to Shelter Cove, Oregon, where a fire had prevented us from completing the last 100 miles of our continuous footpath. And 3 days later, I walked out onto the road at Santiam Pass, and was done. I was done in the theoretical, surreal way that happens when you've done something that takes months of steady, impossibly slow progress, and when the way in which you've finished lacks the clarity: the finality of touching the terminus, of having a real benchmark, of really having any feeling of closure at all. Now what?
I didn't hike that much in the last year. A couple hundred miles in the desert, back on the PCT, with a half-Gossamer-Gear, half-Jansport pack that I created just to make myself laugh. I was looking for what had made me feel so alive on the PCT, and I didn't find it. I had planned to go to Wrightwood, with the time I could take off from work, but in Idyllwild, I just didn't feel like going anymore. I wasn't finding what I was looking for. I just saw my friends in every campsite we'd stayed in, pictured the hitches we'd had at each road, remembered the meals and the conversations and the laughs and the hard times, too: the time I was convinced my foot pain was so bad heading up from Scissor's Crossing that I thought I was going to have to quit, and I spiraled deeper and deeper into existential despair that I wasn't cut out for this thing that meant so much to me. It ended up being the third worst pain I'd have on the whole trail, behind a dislocation knee injury that plagued me for the final thousand miles, and foot chafing in Lassen so bad that I made my only unplanned wilderness exit and roadwalked across a dam and through a construction site, twelve miles off the PCT until I got a ride to Shasta. And you know damn well I got a hitch right back to where I exited-- well, twelve miles off the PCT, even though my ride offered to take me all the way to the trail. Well, this is how I left, so.
I went to the southern Sierra a few times, a deeply personal place that I've been every year since I was a kid. And I still couldn't stop thinking about the PCT. I know I complained about the snow every day, as anyone within a ten mile radius of me can confirm, but I somehow missed it.
The Sierra under deep snow cover is an unmatched beauty, a wild, desperate thing that comes out of the darkness-- you started at 3 am, and you haven't seen the view yet, and as the pink-orange light starts to shine from the horizon, the mountains around you take shape, and there's no sound at all save for the crunch. crunch. crunch. crunch. of your crampons and your breathing. You take a moment to make out the mountains around you, and once you've got a rough idea of where you are, and where you're going, you take another moment to admire them. The sun finally touches down, and you run to it, hoping that in the light, soon you can feel your fingers and toes again, and that it won't hurt to breathe so much every time the ice-cold air gets sucked sharply into your body. But the sun is too weak, and won't be enough to warm you for another hour or so. And then that time comes, and you're warm, and you gratefully bask in the one moment of comfort you'll get all day, and then, you realize that in about one hour, you're going to have to slog and suffer and posthole through soft snow for the rest of the day. And it's going to be slow, and you've got about 1700 miles to Canada, and soon it'll be the 4th of July. Better get a move on. Crunch. crunch. crunch.
What was I looking for? Why couldn't I find it? If it had been snowy, would I have been happy? No, of course not. It's not the snow. It wasn't the desert. It wasn't even the routine, setting up my tent in a minute flat, sleep gear laid out a minute after that, eating my cold soaked dinner watching the sun go down, and laying out all my gear just right: hat, with contact case, earplugs, headlamp, glasses next to my head. Below that, my food laid out for the next day. Backpack lower down. Layers and anything wet down by the footbox. DCF bag of electronics in my sleeping bag. The well-practiced habit was comforting, but in the way where I could tell it was a salve for some ache, not a genuine solution.
I found part of it, a month later. I went to Portland to go on a little weeklong trip with some friends from trail. We were going to make a circuit around the Sisters, and then summit Mt. St. Helens. The mileage was low, it was entirely ground I had already covered or wasn't excited to hike, and I was expecting to have a totally fine time. But pointlessly bootskiing down the perfect hill just to walk back up it, or dipping your toes in the blue slush melting lake-edge, knowing that it's dumb and will only hurt you, but also that it would be pretty funny, or soaking your feet in a creek in a burn area for way too long-- all of these things are totally possible by yourself, and also much better with the right friends.
We talked incessantly. We talked about our lives, and what had happened since trail, and where we were and what we were feeling and the people we were becoming, or trying to be, and the things we had retained from trail, or the things we had learned, or the things we were trying so hard to do but coming up short. And it somehow never felt like enough time to get to listen to my friends. I saw in them the things I admired so strongly, and also saw my own ability to reach out for those things in my own way. Toph is working on a farm in the gorge. Bob is pushing himself doing endurance races with Dumpsty and QB. MJ is running ultras. What am I doing? Not in the judgmental way, but in the-- let's invite scrutiny. What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Is it making me happy?
Some things are. A continuing gender transition. A decision to quit my job and buy a van. An ongoing endeavor to be grounded and present. I'm growing flowers from seed, and they're adorable. I live by the ocean again.
Some things aren't. It's hard to be present. My job is sapping my life away. Why am I so stressed? Why do I move so fast all the time? Why can't I relax? Why can't I shake this feeling that I'm chasing something that I can't even identify?
We double our daily mileage to go to town a day early. It is one hundred degrees, and we float the Deschutes. Again. We bail on St. Helens and summit South Sister. I explode a flamingo pool floatie that I have been using on all the lakes while inner tubing down the volcanic rim from the summit. We go back to town. We loiter. God, do we loiter. I spend hours in all the coffee shops and breweries I can walk to. I do phone chores, I read magazines. I just kind of look around. I live a slow, peaceful existence. We go to a grocery store to get snacks, and we sit on the curb out front, passing bags of chips up and down the line, drinking cold beverages after days of lukewarm groundwater.
And then it's time to go. Rachel, Dianne, and MJ carpool toward Seattle, still on the donut tire we replaced in the dark, halfway up the pass. Toph returns to Hood River. Bob and I have time to kill in Portland, a couple hours. I show him the type of van I want to buy. He says "that Craigslist posting is in Portland-- wanna go test drive it?"
Sure, I say. No way am I going to buy this Portland Craigslist van.
I buy the Portland Craigslist van. But that's a bit of a story for another time.
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