September 27, 2016 Mile 2292.4-2314.6 22.2 Miles Resupply is the same old story: I can’t make decisions and it takes ten times as long as it needs to. I finally finish, take a shower, check out, and head down to the store to have some breakfast and coffee and wait for Roadside. On the walk down, someone pokes me from behind. I jump a little. I didn’t realize anyone was there. “Oh, hi Rainbow!” “Hi, did you stay in the motel last night?” “Yeah.” “Can I use your shower?” “Oh crap, I just checked out. I think Roadside is still up there, though. He’s in room 7. I’m sure he’d let you use his.” Now that I think about it, it was a pretty dumb move to check out so early. There will probably be more hikers at the store who are eager to take a shower. As it turns out, there’s no one else at the store except for a couple of old local guys. Roadside shows up as I drink my third cup of coffee, and by the time we are done eating, I’ve had four. We walk the road together, but once we get to the trail we go at our own pace, which means that he disappears behind almost immediately. I am hopped up on caffeine and donuts. My legs are moving at breakneck speed, and so is my mind. When someone reads this far in the future, they might think that I have been saying that memes can are conscious. I’m not. Of course, I’m not saying that they aren’t conscious, either. There’s just no way of being able to tell, given the limits of our own consciousness. What I can say is this: structures that replicate, replicate. Structures that don’t replicate, don’t replicate. It’s a tautology. Which means that over a long period of time, we’re left mostly with the structures that replicate. Once there are enough replicating structures, any one that requires resources will have to compete for those resources, assuming they are limited. Resources, at their essence, are the means of longevity, replication, and copying fidelity. In the case of genes, they require energy and raw materials for cell division, as well as the inherent fidelity of the structures themselves—for example, the shorter a gene sequence is, the more likely it is to be copied with fidelity. In the case of memes, the resources can be anything with the capability to transmit information. Computers, books, mathematics. And of course, human beings. What makes memes so interesting is that, much like genes, or lines of code, they contain instructions that lead to real-world actions. Imagine a book with instructions to replace another book with a copy of itself. As long as the librarian faithfully executes the instructions, that book is more likely to proliferate than a book that doesn’t hold those instructions, even if the library starts with only one copy. In the world of genes, the self-replicating codes gradually emerged over long spans of time, but in the world of memes, there was already a framework with the capability to follow out, alter, or create new memes: the human mind. The interesting thing is that the memes aren’t just held by the mind, in many ways they are part of it. Memes about identity and beliefs. As an imperfect metaphor, think of the brain as the hardware, memes about identity and beliefs as software, and other memes as programs. Some of the programs can rewrite the software, and some can make changes to the hardware itself. Someone who grows up in a conservative religious household can later become a liberal atheist if exposed to the right memes. That’s not always easy, though: some of the memes have defensive measures, such as distrust of people from outside the tribe. Religions that promise damnation for people who leave the church, for example, are large meme structures practicing inoculation from opposing ideas. Memes can explain some of our ideas about status, too. As a music teacher, much of my status came from memes within the music teacher tribe: ensembles that played in tune and knew how to decode rhythms were important to the tribe. My status was based in some part around the community itself. In wealthier communities, schools had more money for instruments and parents were more involved in setting up practice routines with their students, so the ensembles were better and it made me look like a better teacher. In a poorer community, the opposite was true: old, shoddy instruments and students that didn’t practice as much. My status was less, despite the fact that I was the same teacher. Out in the wild, none of that status matters anymore. The only tribe is other hikers, and they are so loosely aligned that it really depends on who you are hiking with. Some hikers base status on how many miles you can hike each day, others on how light your base weight is. There’s even a saying that “he who stays on trail longest, wins.” It’s these varying, often conflicting memes that have led to the saying “hike your own hike.” In other words, choose your own definition of status. Don’t be infected by the memes that other people try to impose on you. Hours have passed. I find myself hungry and at a river. I take my time with lunch, but Roadside never shows up. I continue on, sad that I may have lost him. A ranger stops me to see my permit. He tells me I need to start filling out local permits for each of the special use areas ahead. It seems silly that I need another permit on top of this one, but I agree. I’m startled nearly out of my skin by a giant Elk hiding among the trees right beside the trail. He just stands there, so I try to take a picture, but when I stop it spooks him and he runs off. Uphill. Another stop for water. I fumble the filter bag and spill water all over my right foot. I almost succumb to frustration, but it’s not worth it. Just accept reality as it is. A connection is made, and I realize that anicca (pali: as it is) is also a meme. It has had utility in managing my emotions, and that utility has led me to adopt it and replicate it again and again in my own mind. Anger and frustration have some utility, too, but anicca has superceded them in my mind. Is it a meme I have chosen, or has its utility given it an advantage in the tangled web of my mind? Is there another meme within me that decides whether something is useful? Is it in my hardware, or is there actually free choice here? I finish the climb, come over a ridge, and Rainier dominates the view. It is a massive white mound trying to shove its way through the blue ceiling. I stop for a snack break. Elk are calling to one another, a tumbling alien sound that I recognize as the out-of-tune upper tones of the overtone series. Something else catches my ear, and I look back up the trail to see Roadside emerge from the forest.
“There he is!” I say. He grins at me. “I thought you were long gone.” “I waited for a long while at lunch. I was afraid you had passed me when I went to the bathroom.” We stick together the rest of the evening, tromping over ridge and through thick trees, then stopping early for dinner. We speak softly and sparsely during dinner, not wanting to disturb the strange magic of the elk as they call to each other, near and far.
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September 26, 2016 Mile 2271.0-2292.4 21.4 Miles At 5:30 we begin the noisy, thrashing ritual of packing up. When I emerge from my tent into the dark, I am struck again by how free the darkness makes me feel. While the rest of the world wards off darkness with artificial light and retreats into their stale homes, I get to smell the fresh air and feel the expanse of thousands of miles of atmosphere around me. I get to stand alone in the world, facing it as it is. There is nothing that makes darkness inherently less safe, unless it is our own tendency to panic in the face of the unknown. The means with which we seek safety and security are prisons of our own devising. We trade a little more time for a little less life. Sometimes the tradeoff is worth it, but if we’re not careful, we may spend our entire lives in a cage, free from danger but cut off from the richness of the world. Rainbow is still asleep, or at least not stirring. I am sorry to leave her behind. Her cheery disposition warmed up our camp and added life to our conversation. How many people have I left behind this way, now? I’ve lost count. Only Roadside remains. Faithful, quiet Roadside. I wonder what he gains from our partnership. He remains a black box. We set out in the dark, traversing a narrow catwalk along a steep slope by the dim light of our headlamps. The trail turns around the side of the mountain, the slope becomes less precipitous, we enter a dark forest and begin to climb. The air is cool but still this morning, and I begin to work up a sweat. The forest falls away and I find myself climbing a wide barren bench, Roadside trailing somewhere behind. A purple twilight fills the sky slowly and I switch off my headlamp as soon as I can muster it. Adams and Rainier glow like bright gold above the horizon, two dots in a volcanic chain that encircles the Pacific Ocean. Up here, it’s easy to forget the hard, local existence that we try to scratch for ourselves in the dirt; up here, one can almost see the turning of the planet on its tracks, sense the galactic order as it floats noiselessly through space in great circles of time. I can see Roadside’s headlamp climbing below, a pinprick of light in a dark expanse. It reminds me how empty this landscape is, how much space we truly have to move about without bumping up against anyone else. I turn and look back uphill, at the tall slope I still have before me. I climb. The first glow of light appears to the east of Mt. Adams, already distant in the south. It flows in slowly like water and pools at the edge of the volcano, as if filling in behind a dam. I check again from time to time as I continue to climb up a steep rocky slope. Pink and orange gradually fill in the other side of Adams and reflect off the glaciers. It rises far above anything else on the horizon, monolithic and kingly in stature. Off to the southwest, Mt. St. Helena protrudes only slightly above the horizon. It appears to have been lopped off at the base, an unfair illusion that belies the powerful eruption that stole its cap. A junction leads either north or up. Both ways will reconnect shortly, but I choose up. The steeper, more difficult climb will afford better views. It also avoids an ice patch along a very steep slope that often forms in the shadows of the mountain. There’s not enough light yet to see whether the ice is there, but I want to take the higher path anyway. I begin. Steep, tight switchbacks on loose talus fight me on every step. I’m still wearing my down jacket, and now it fills with sweat. When I finally near the top, it’s full light. I look back to see Roadside at the junction. Will he take the shorter, easier, and potentially more dangerous route? He starts up after me. At the top, a wind whips from the west. Strange, since the mountain has been on my eastern side all this time and I never felt a wind below. I sit in the lee of a rock pile and get stuff ready for breakfast. Then I record a video for friends back home. The microphone catches more of the wind than me. “We’re at the top of the knife’s edge. [wind sounds] hiking up. Mt. Adams…” I pan across. “Mt. St. Helens…Rainier… there’s Roadside,” I sweep back over to the ridgeline extending miles in front of us. “And here’s what we’re about to hike down. Goody goody.” When Roadside arrives, we stop and look around for a bit and fawn over the view, but it’s so windy that we quickly huddle down behind the rocks to cook breakfast. Still, not a bad place to eat a meal, I think. We check the maps during breakfast, wondering what time we’ll get into White Pass. After breakfast we start down the knife’s edge. The trail is built on large chunks of talus with tricky footing and sharp dropoffs on both sides. Strangely, I find that it’s not nerve-racking at all. I have become so used to these heights and narrow paths that I even feel comfortable enough to take out my phone and record part of my walk down the path. It’s a stunning walk. The slopes extend all the way down to the valley floors, thousands of feet below. The ridgeline is strung out before us for miles, like a skyway that leads all the way to Rainier. Snow patches dot either side of the path. Across the valley to the left, the mountains are purple with striated rock above, and green with patches of forest below. The valley itself leads out to a shimmering blue lake at its north end. It takes us a couple hours to cross the whole ridge, during which I want nothing so much as to stay fully present and engaged. This is a peak moment, I think. Something I will remember forever. Even as I’m hiking it, I imagine how I will remember it. On the northern end of the ridge walk, we turn off to the right and cross a broad tundra. There’s a small rill where we get water, then we wind down, back into the forest. And just like that, I’m back in my wandering thoughts. I’m trying to puzzle out how one of those large meme structures, like the economy or government, self-replicates and gains resources. There seems to be some sort of symbiosis between the two. I think it comes back to measurement. Measurements are a form of information that are clear and easy to spread. Before money, an object’s worth or someone’s wealth were largely a matter of personal values. If you thought your ten cows were worth more to you than my twelve sheep, who was I to tell you any different? Our status in the community would depend on other things, like what relationships we built. Monetization gave us a way to say specifically how much something costs, and to compare different types of wealth and value. It led to a direct comparison between different objects, and now we could measure wealth with a sort of certainty. Relationships were still important, but it was much more difficult to talk about the quality of relationships than it was to talk about how much money someone had. If our culture is propagated by the ideas we spread, easily measurable ideas have an unfair advantage. They spread more quickly and easily, and they are bound to take up more and more of our psyche as we see examples proliferate around us. As money became more universal, it also led to greater optionality. The more people who were willing to trade goods for money, the more options you had to spend your money. Eventually money could buy just about anything, including power. Our governments today are filled with millionaires and billionaires, who use their power to protect and grow their wealth. They reinforce the power of the “measured wealth” meme, because it benefits them. Well, it’s a start. I can tell there are a lot of other memes that reinforce money and help it spread as an idea, but they are all tangled in my head and I’m not ready to pick them apart yet. Besides, I’m back out of the trees and this climb is about to kill me. A couple day-hikers are trying to bushwhack up to the ridge to get a view of Rainier, just a little ways from the trail. I tell them that there’s a good view that we just passed five minutes ago. Then Roadside and I finish our climb and stop at a pass right above Shoe lake, which is shaped like a horseshoe. A lone mountain goat crosses back and forth over the pass while we eat our lunch. A couple of friendly dogs and their owner come up the trail and greet us. Roadside finishes lunch first and starts down the hill while I pack up. It’s a long, fast downhill that starts to hurt my knees by the end, and I can’t seem to catch up to Roadside. I start the road walk to White Pass, stick out my thumb, and get picked up almost immediately by a guy in a white honda.
“Where are you headed?” he asks. “Just to the store up the road,” I say. “You PCT hikers are getting lazy,” he says with a smirk. I don’t understand, but I smile and chuckle as if I do. There’s Roadside walking along the side of the road. I’m about to ask if the driver would mind picking him up, but then I see the store just beyond. We’ve driven less than a half mile. “Oh, I didn’t realize we were so close,” I tell him. I grab my pack from the back, thank him for the ride, and turn to wait for Roadside to close the last few steps. The store is a gas station convenience store. They have some fried foods that look like they’ve been in the glass cases for a while. The only thing vegetarian is a fried bean burrito, so I get that and a beer. The cashier tells me he feels bad charging me full price for the burrito because it’s getting old, and gives it to me for a dollar. He tells us there are picnic tables in the back of the store for hikers. The businesses along the PCT do this so they don’t have to say “you guys smell bad, please don’t stay in here and drive off our other customers.” I don’t blame them. I’m happier outside anyway. The burrito is overcooked and stale, and I can only make it about a third of the way before I give up. I go back in for something else, but convenience store food never offers much. I settle on some Oreos and a bag of Doritos. Convenience stores all offer the same foods, because those are the foods that people buy. People buy those things because it’s what they know. The culture is shaped by us, but it also shapes us. I call my parents to check in. We buy a couple more beers, then head over to the lodge nearby to see if we can get rooms. We can. Shower, call Lindsey, text with friends. Boredom. We got into town too quickly, and now I need to fill the time. I turn on the TV. There’s a presidential debate going on, between Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump. I have trouble believing this is even reality. Is this even reality? Everything seems so detached from the life I used to know. The wilderness is clearly real, the principles that govern it are clear, easy to read. But this world of politics and television and talking heads, it all seems constructed, artifice upon artifice until we can’t even recognize the principles that the house was built on. That’s not to say it’s not important. Just like the convenience store aisles, the culture is shaped by us, but it also shapes us. Sometimes I think we are too passive about it all. After the debate is over and I am sick from the talking heads, I knock on Roadside’s door. “Hey man, what are you up to?” “Nothing. Just watching TV.” “I’m bored as hell by my TV. You wanna sit on the patio and drink some beer?” “Yeah, sounds good. I’m bored too.” And it’s better, doing nothing. We don’t talk much, mostly just look out and sip our beers from time to time, but at least here I have my thoughts, and a little camaraderie, and a whole lot less nonsense. I ask Roadside questions about himself. I’ve been hiking with this guy for over a month, and I still barely know him. Born on Christmas, never knew his dad, mom died when he was nineteen. What do you do with your free time at home? I just work a lot, usually come home and drink some beer and watch TV. Where do you go for vacations? This is the first vacation I’ve had in years. He talks about Vegas again. He wants to take a week there after we’re done with the trail, just lay by the pool and eat and drink. I know there has to be more to him than this, but I can’t figure out what it is. I tell him as much, but he chuckles it off. I give up trying to pry information out of him. If he wants to stay private, he can stay private. He doesn’t seem mad about the attempt, though. If anything, he seems flattered, like no one has asked him about himself before. Eventually we head back to our rooms to go to sleep. Mine is stuffy and hot, and I toss and turn for a couple hours. Finally I open the sliding door and let the cool air in, and then I quickly drift off. September 25, 2016 Mile 2241.8-2271.0 29.2 Miles Sometimes you have to indulge with a little extra sleep. It’s not much, just an hour, but it makes all the difference in the world. When we leave, Rainbow is packing up. It’s not until we’re a half mile along that it occurs to me that we could have waited for her. Our first stop is at Lava Spring. It gushes out of the bottom of a large pile of lava rocks, where we pull water for breakfast. No matter how often I see water emerge directly from the earth, it never ceases to amaze me. We’re close to the end of breakfast when Rainbow passes by. The sky is crystal clear, with the exception of a few wisps to sketch out its enormity, a pillow over the crown of Mt. Adams, and a trail of clouds leading away from Mt. Rainier. The slopes are filled with huckleberry bushes, many of them turning the slopes crimson, and we graze as we go. The trail stays high on the slopes, giving us wide views for most of the morning. It’s a truly spectacular day. Why does an experience like this give me so much joy? Red bushes, white glaciers, blue skies, feel and taste of berries, cool air, warm sun. Each of these alone would be enjoyable, but there’s no doubt that the sum is more than the parts. I have no idea how Roadside is feeling, but he seems more talkative today. We walk and talk away the morning, seemingly unhurried but covering miles quickly nonetheless. It’s a thru-hiker conversation, filled with long pauses for contemplation between each slow, languid dialogue. Eventually I break away from Roadside and plunge back into my thoughts about society and culture. Society is a strange thing to pin down. It’s made up of all these individuals, and yet there’s a sort of ebb and flow to it, as if it were water, except that the individual droplets appear to have free will. Culture describes the waves, but society is something different, containing both the water droplets and the forces between them. When I think about those forces, and the waves, I begin to see the importance of the ideas we pass between us. We have ideas about morality, ideas about status, ideas about money, education, freedom. We have ideas about identity, too, both our individual identity and our group identity. Some of them change our behaviors, and some of them don’t, but all of them are contagious, and they help make up the culture and society we live in. Contagious. What an interesting idea. It makes me think of a parasite, with a mind of its own, using us to spread and replicate. How many of our ideas are we unwilling hosts to? Richard Dawkins brought this idea up in “The Selfish Gene,” where he calls them ‘memes’ and defines them as a packet of information. He points out that genes are also packets of information, and from their natural selection and replication we have created amazingly complex “replication machines” that have even produced consciousness. He was talking about us. If information can create conscious humans, could it create a complex, self-replicating meme structure? What would that look like? I come up with answers almost before I ask the question: the economy; religion; governments; human rights; the arts. And how would those structures interrelate and compete for resources? Oh shit. Resources. Human resources. Something about that gives me the chills. Almost before I know it it’s lunchtime, and then afternoon. We enter the Goat Rocks wilderness, which we’ve been told many times is the most spectacular part of Washington. I can’t disagree. Long, wide open slopes; sweeping hills; deep canyons; craggy mountains. We start a long ramp over a pass. A young woman coming the other direction tells me that there are mountain goats on the other side, just above the trail. We cross the pass and there they are, a tribe of the white, demonic-looking animals. They have moved further away from the trail, up close to a knot of hexagonal basalt columns that form the peak of this particular slope. The trail traces a wide sweep along the western slope of this valley and continues to climb toward another pass. As we make our way north, the goats parallel us, then flow downhill around us. Up close, they look powerful and fearsome. I feel a buzz of excitement and danger. They seem indifferent to us, but leave a berth as they pass to the grazing slope below. We cross over Cispus pass into another wide amphitheater on steep slopes, nearly barren of trees. The evening light casts everything in a golden sheen. A creek plummets down through broken white granite that resembles the marble chunks of greek ruins. A side trail cuts up near the creek to a campsite perched near the top of the amphitheater with wide open views. It’s one of those perfect, once-in-a-thousand-miles campsites. Sadly, it has already been claimed by three tents and their campers. We continue around the amphitheater, looking for sites, but they are few and mostly claimed. A waterfall sprays down over green moss, and we stop to refill our bottles. Rainbow shows up, and we’re both happy to see her. We talk about finding camping together again. Maybe the three of us will continue hiking together tomorrow. A half mile later, we find another site with a gorgeous view on a chunk of dirt that seems to be barely hanging on to the mountain. There are already people setting up camp, though, and it looks like there’s only room for one more tent. A little farther along, we find another camping area. This has campers too, and it’s surrounded by trees, but there is space for all three of us. We quickly set up and get started on dinner, then spend close to an hour talking about life, beauty, and the famous section we’re going to hike tomorrow—the knife’s edge—before we finally turn in. I feel well-spent. So well-spent, in fact, that when I get into the tent I struggle to make simple decisions about what goes where and what order things need to happen. It takes me about twenty minutes, but I finally lie down and try to get to sleep. My head spins with ideas about complex meme structures, and it takes me forever to get to sleep.
September 24, 2016 Mile 2216.1-2241.8 25.7 Miles Strange howls and laughter wake me in the night. They don’t sound like the desert coyotes I’m used to, but the style is similar. There’s a richer timbre, a wider range of pitch. It takes me a minute to wake up enough to realize what I’m hearing. Wolves! Are there wolves in Washington? I wonder. There must be. They seem to be away down the mountain somewhere, no threat to us. Their music reminds me of a gypsy camp, tumbling and feasting and singing. It lasts for most of an hour, an exuberant party. I am delighted. I wake again at 5:30, well rested and ready to move. My sleeping bag has collected dew in the night, like the rest of my belongings, and puts a chill into my hands almost immediately when I begin to pack. Roadside takes a few minutes to wake up, but he’s still ready by the time I finish. Pushup sleeps on. I’ve spent a lot of time on this trip thinking about why I don’t make friends easily, and I think it’s this tendency more than any other that creates barriers: I don’t change plans for others. How many people have I left behind because I’ve chosen to wake early every day? How many times have I hiked too fast to keep up with? I avoid inviting people along because it might mean changing my plans. Roadside has stayed with me since Northern California because he’s been willing to stick with my early mornings and long miles. If he had asked to slow down a little, or to do a few extra miles each day, would I be willing? How much more (or less) would I have enjoyed my hike if I had been more willing to concede some ground to others? Perhaps I’d be headed southbound with Ed and Altitude right now. Or maybe I would have skipped the Mojave desert so I could keep hiking with Sprinkler. Should I have slept in and continued with Hoot and Chocolate Milk? We make our first stop at Trout Creek for breakfast. There’s an arch bridge over the water, and all the fallen logs and rocks are covered with green moss. The sun is out, and it falls in spotty patches on ferns and other leafy plants. I’d like to dry off some of my gear, but the patches of sun aren’t large enough. I notice a tent nearby, but it’s still early in the morning and no one comes out to greet us. I wonder if its another thru-hiker. On the way out, I decide to try one of the dark blue berries from a nearby bush. I’m not sure what they are, but I know there are supposed to be blueberries and huckleberries in Washington. Hopefully it is one of those. When I was a teenager reading about the PCT, one of the books talked about picking blueberries off the bushes as the two men hiked through Washington. It sounded so wild and free, and I’ve been looking forward to doing the same for decades. Roadside doesn’t know what the berries are, either. If I wait until I meet someone who knows, I could be waiting most of the state and end up missing out on days of living the life I want to live. On the other hand, I could end up sick. I hesitantly start with one. If that goes well, I can try a few more this evening. It is a little sour, but sweet too. “Good thing we’re close to a hospital,” I joke. I’m not even sure where the closest road is. We start a steep uphill, one of the steepest yet, where I pull away from Roadside. I’m surrounded by thick forest again, cedars and firs and spruces that block out the sun and remind me how cold it is. On the downhill, I come to a dirt road with a big trashcan. It’s a bear-proof can, and someone has taped a piece of paper to it that says “PCT Hikers”. Inside there are packs of goldfish crackers, applesauce, and lollipops. I have one of each. The applesauce is especially welcome, since all the fruit I carry with me is dried. There’s not a ton left, though, and I want to leave some for other hikers, so I supplement with several of my own snacks. It takes Roadside a little while to arrive, and I am clammy cold by the time he gets there. Then a young woman named hikes up to us. She must have been the tent we saw earlier, I think. Or not. Who knows how many tents we passed by and didn’t notice. She tells us her name is Sunshine. Pushup had asked if we had seen her yesterday, because he wasn’t sure if she was ahead or behind. Her trail name fits her—she is full of smiles and enthusiasm. She offers us a ride into town, and almost before she finishes talking her brother and sister show up in a van. They have an enthusiastic, noisy dog with them, and I pet him and find myself missing my own dog, Deuce. Sunshine introduces us all, though we’ve barely just met her, and I have an awkward moment with her sister where I can tell she’s expecting me to offer a hand to shake, but my hands are dirty and feel like they’re two degrees, so I don’t offer and just stare dumbly and say “nice to meet you. We continue on, leaving the excitement and trail magic behind us. Another big climb into sunnier, more open forest. The map tells us there is a spring, and we both need to get water, but the spring, though we can hear it, seems to be hidden down a dangerous and seriously overgrown slope. We beat our way through the bushes, trying to find a way to the water. This can’t be right, I think. There’s no longer any trail at all. I check my phone map again, and now the GPS has changed my location. I’m about a hundred yards too far to the west. I cut up the hill and over, and I’ve found it, a little creek buried under fallen logs and rocks. I call back up to Roadside, and tell him we turned off too soon, and he goes back up to the trail and comes around. When he gets to me he says “There’s hikers up there.” So I fill up the bucket and carry it back up to join them. The other hikers are Rainbow and Squarepants. Rainbow is a blond woman with an accent I can’t place. Squarepants is younger, with short-cut brown hair. They have their gear spread out all over the place, drying in the sun. I notice that the bushes that their tents and sleeping bags are on have the berries I’ve seen. “Hey, do you know what these berries are?” I ask. “Huckleberries!” Squarepants answers. “I’ve been eating them by the handful and putting them in my breakfast!” “Thanks, I’ve been wondering for days. Glad to know they’re safe.” I grab a handful and start chomping while I filter water. Roadside takes a few berries, too. I ask Rainbow and Squarepants all the regular questions: where they’re from, what they used to do for work, whether they’re worried about making it before winter hits. In the sun today, winter doesn’t seem like as much of a concern. It’s not warm, exactly, but it’s pleasant. Roadside and I press on. A little ways up the hill, someone has written 420 in sticks, and in the center of the ‘0’ is a bag of weed. Did someone leave this way out here as trail magic? Or maybe a hiker decided they didn’t want to carry it anymore? Roadside picks it up. “Leave no trace, right?” I joke. “Right.” Southbounders are coming through steadily. It seems like we see another one every twenty minutes or so. We’re climbing up toward Mt. Adams, a beautiful snow-capped volcano. The forest has been burned, but there are new trees growing between the husks of the old. After a while, I zone out and listen to a podcast. I make room on the trail for a couple of southbounders to pass when I hear “Zigzag!” cut through the podcast. I look up and pull out my headphones. It’s Whistler and Paramount! I camped with them way back at Donner Pass, and didn’t figure I would see them again. They were getting ready to flip up to Washington with Poundah. We stop to talk. “How’s it going?” I ask. “Are you still hiking with Poundah?” I glance up the trail, half expecting her to come around the turn. “No, she had to go home,” Whistler says. “Ran out of money.” “Oh, bummer.” I can’t imagine how hard it would be to give up on a dream because of money. It seems perverse the way that money controls our lives. I hope she is able to find her way back someday to finish the trail. Roadside catches up, and I introduce everyone. We try to have a conversation, but we all need to keep moving, so we can’t dive into a real conversation. Before we leave, Whistler offers us a piece of useful information. “Hey, there’s an amazing view just ahead. Adams, Rainier, and St. Helens are all spread out before you.” “Thanks! We’ll stop there for lunch.” Just ahead turns out to be a long ways. I can’t blame him, I lose track of how long I’ve been hiking all the time. Plus, he was headed downhill and I’m headed up. Thinking it’s just around the corner, I keep putting off lunch, corner after corner. I’m getting hungry. It’s pretty here, though. Wildflowers, views of imposing Mt. Adams and distant, anvil-like Mt. St. Helens, the husks of burned-out trees, huckleberry bushes, and blue skies. It’s after 2PM when we finally find the spot. I’m starving, but first I need to dry out my gear. I hang my tent on some bushes and lay out my sleeping bag in the grasses beside the trail. There’s a breeze here, so my longjohns and spare socks have to be held down with heavier objects like my hiking poles. Roadside makes a similar yard-sale presentation. About halfway through lunch, Squarepants comes by and asks if either of us lost our water filter when we last filled up. I check, and I’m surprised to find that I did! I didn’t even realize it was missing. That could have been a disaster. I thank her profusely for bringing it back to me. She joins us for a snack and the view, then leaves before us. Rainbow arrives right before we’re packed up, and the three of us continue hiking around Mt. Adams. Adams stands at 12,281ft, the second highest mountain in Washington (after Rainier). The western slope is covered in a massive glacier, and it is this glacier that we get to see as we pass around the western side of the mountain. It looks so distant, yet so overwhelmingly large. Every time I look at it, it seems like it’s a different color of blue. Something about it calls to me. I want to go explore it and climb its face. I add it to my list: this is a place to which I will return. The section hikers and overnight backpackers are starting to appear everywhere and many of them have already set up their tents in the campsites that are around.
“Should we try to camp early tonight?” I ask. “It might be tough to find a site if we wait to late.” “Yeah, that sounds good to me,” Roadside says. “Yes, that’s good.” Rainbow says. We find a place near a small waterfall running into a little creek. There are several impacted sites around, most of them with tents already set up. At first we try to find something a little apart from the others, but there’s nothing we can find, so we end up adding our three tents to the five or six others. It’s a chilly evening with a cold breeze, but the sound of running water and the nearness of people is relaxing and we have a nice dinner sitting in the dirt and talking. September 23, 2016
Mile 2187.9-2216.1 28.2 Miles (No pictures today, sorry. I always forget to take pictures when it's raining) I emerge from my tent to find a brisk, breezy morning. I heard the trees swishing in the wind all night, but I was toasty warm in my bag. We pack in silence again, bracing against a piercing cold. When all has been packed away, we speak a single word: “Ready?” “Ready.” When the light emerges from the horizon an hour or so later, We are walking atop a ridge. There are berries on thick low bushes to either side of us, and fog blocks the view beyond a few trees. I wonder what type of berries these are. I’ve heard that Washington is filled with blueberries, but I don’t know how to identify them. They sure look like blueberries. We stop for water and see Pushup packing up his camp nearby. Another few miles, then a small descent to a piped spring where we stop for breakfast. A long, white pipe comes down out of the hillside to about chest level, where a thin stream of water slides out continually and falls next to the trail. We sit on a nearby log, cold and damp through the seat of my pants, to make breakfast. The hot oatmeal is gummy and overly sweet, but it’s hot. Right now, hot is all I need. Pushup catches up and passes us while we scrape our dishes clean. A light mist begins a few minutes later, which turns into a light drizzle as we hike. I dig my rain gear out, but can’t find my gloves in the black hole of my pack. As we hike on, I grip my hiking poles extra tight to try to get blood flowing to my hands. I try to sink into the feeling of coldness, stay present with it. As I do this, I notice that the aversiveness to the cold is a different feeling from the cold itself. As I stay with the feeling rather than distracting myself from it, the cold remains, but the aversiveness washes over me like a wave, then retreats. The cold remains, but I now I am at peace with it. I turn my attention to think about media culture to continue my thoughts from yesterday. This idea of shared, common ideas that we use to communicate has many results. For one thing, if the media we steep ourselves in is vastly different from others, we’re likely to see the world differently. The people who watch a lot of TV will have one set of references and beliefs, while the people who read books will have a completely different set. In our world, whole civilizations are built on different sets of ideas, such as communism vs capitalism. What does that mean for the good life? Is it better to steep ourselves in the dominant culture so we have the references to easily communicate with others? Or should we specialize in specific types of culture so that we can add different thoughts to the conversation? My instinct tells me that too far down either road is a trap. Someone who only watches the shows that everyone else watches and listens to the music to which everyone else listens will think the thoughts that everyone else thinks. The culture can’t progress that way; we will fall into the same traps, make the same mistakes, fight the same wars. On the other hand, someone who is too tightly specialized might have new ideas that could help move the culture in a positive direction, but they won’t have any common references with which to make their point. The truth is, we need a spectrum. Too many people on the fringes, and we’ll lose cultural cohesion and pull ourselves apart. Too many people in the center, and we’ll stagnate, and other cultures that adapt faster will quickly move to supplant us, in a sort “survival of the fittest” writ large upon cultures. If the culture is an organism subject to the laws of evolution, it would require people on the fringes to make it adaptable, but the majority of people should stay near the center, where they can help the cultural organism stick together. I visualize a large number of weakly magnetic balls, coming together and pulling apart depending on the beliefs and references they share. On the fringes and in the center, it’s impossible to move the mass, but somewhere in between, one magnetic ball can move a small group, which can move a larger group, which can finally move the mass. That, it seems to me, is the place of greatest impact. I catch up to Pushup, which pulls me out of my reveries. The landscape has changed. Oregon’s trees were often monothematic, possibly due to a long history of logging; Washington’s are wild and diverse. We are coming up on a lake with several side trails going in different directions. I don’t really want to stop in this rain, but it’s past lunchtime and we need to eat if we’re going to make any miles this afternoon. I fill up with water first, then stop at a campsite covered with trees a little ways from the lake, and Roadside and Pushup are right behind me. Pushup and I decide to make hot lunches, but Roadside just wants to eat some bars and go. He finishes eating right as my lunch is ready, and he waits around for me, shivering and wet, as we all are. There’s no reason for him to wait for me, but I appreciate the gesture. “Hey, do you want to keep going?” I ask. “No reason to sit here getting cold and wet, I’ll catch up.” “Yeah, thanks. I’ll see you.” Pushup finishes eating about the same time as me, but cleanup takes me much longer and he is long gone by the time I finally finish. My cold hands don’t quite want to do what I tell them, and it takes me some fumbling to get Zip-loc bags sealed, drybags rolled up, clasps clasped. I’m tired, but I’m also glad to get the blood flowing again. The afternoon passes quickly despite the continual drizzle. I catch up to Roadside quickly. Pushup has just passed him. The next ten miles are pretty—granite-framed lakes and rocky buttresses remind me of the high sierra, though the intensity of fall colors is much greater here. We arrive at Mosquito Creek and a campsite at about 6:30. Pushup has already set up his tent, and there are a few flat sites nearby. Roadside and I choose our spots quickly and begin to unpack. My gear is damp, but not soaking wet. I had feared the worst in this all-day rain. There is a pool of water in the bottom of my pack, but a drybag has kept it off of my sleeping bag. While I set up my tent, I drop the stakes and fumble with the cords. Finally I get everything settled and go to join Pushup and Roadside for dinner. We huddle under a fir tree with low, dripping branches. The ground is driest here. It takes me several tries to get a spark from my lighter, but I’m finally able to start the stove. I’m impatient and burn my tongue on the first bites of dinner, but I don’t care. I just need to get the hot food inside me. We barely talk through dinner. Nobody complains about how cold it is. Nobody wishes out loud for a sunny day tomorrow. We finish our dinner, scrape our pots, and wish each other good night before we turn in, Pushup, then Roadside, then me. September 22, 2016 Mile 2159.7-2187.9 28.2 Miles 5:30 comes too early, and I reluctantly pull my body out from my warm sleeping bag into the cold damp air. When I step out of my tent to finish packing, I pause to consider what I will do about the yellow jackets, or hornets, or whatever they are that attacked us last night. There’s really not much I can do except hurry, I guess. It’s good luck that a thick fog sits on the land. The stinging insects are nestled away somewhere and don’t bother us. The morning hike is serene. We start with a steep descent through the fog. My headlamp reflects fog and my steaming breath back to me, and it’s sometimes difficult to see the trail. As the morning light begins to filter through, we’re walking along the side of a slope that falls steeply off to our right. There are some crashing sounds far off in the valley below, like trees being felled. They are followed by crushing, thrashing noises. I don’t hear an engine, but it seems like the sorts of sounds a tractor might make. We stop at Snag Creek for breakfast and then start a big climb through mossy forest. Roadside says it looks like Jurassic Park, and I chuckle. It’s such a common comparison that I hear it almost every time I go on a hike in forest like this. Many of the big trees are broken and lie across the trail. I’m struggling with energy this morning, probably a hangover from all the coffee I had yesterday. Over the top, big lookout. The fog has cleared, and it’s sunny and cool. We take a fairly long break. Another descent. Roadside falls behind, and I cross two roads and meet an older couple out for a day hike. I sink far into thoughts that go nowhere. In the early afternoon I come to an arched bridge over a wide shallow creek. There’s a thru-hiker sitting in the sun on a sandy bank. I cross and ask if I can join him. His name is Pushup. He tells me he is from Israel, and we don’t talk much beyond that. It’s nice to sit here in the sun while I set up my stove and make my lunch. Roadside is taking a long time, I think, and just at that moment I see him approaching the bridge. After a couple minutes, Pushup continues on. While I’m waiting for Roadside to finish his lunch, I strip off my shoes and socks and roll my pants to the knee. The river is cold to the point of pain when I step in, but it feels so good on my feet. I have to get out a couple times to let my calves and feet warm back up, and by the time I’m out for good, my feet feel so much better that they’re ready to hike another fifteen miles. The rest of my body is less sure about hiking, but I don’t give it a choice. I plug into my audiobook and start up another three thousand foot climb. So far Washington is nothing but a three-thousand foot walking roller coaster. The afternoon and evening pass in a blur of sluggish fatigue so bad that I hardly notice my surroundings. We find a campsite near the top of a ridge, with views west and south to Mt. Hood, which is mostly shrouded in clouds. There hasn’t been much water for a while, and I don’t have enough to make dinner, so I scrounge through my snacks and eat a couple of bars I’ve been avoiding, along with a big serving of peanut M&Ms and dried fruit. As I update my journal before bed, I’m surprised to see we’ve done 28 miles over this terrain. I’m disturbed that I noticed so little of it.
September 21, 2016 Mile 2144.6-2159.7 15.1 Miles 7am, a luxury. I know we should be hurrying toward the border, but right now I just want to lie here. 8am. The luxury is spoilt, now it feels like sloth. I force myself up and out of bed. I text Roadside. “Breakfast?” He answers by knocking on my door a minute later. We walk next door to the restaurant and take a booth next to the window-wall that looks out over the Colombia River. I drink four cups of coffee with my vegetable omelet and french toast. We agree to leave by 11. 9am. After breakfast, we split up to take care of our different errands. I head to the post office, then supplement my resupply at the grocery store. I grab a mocha from Jumpin’ Jax coffee shop. I’m already buzzing from the caffeine, but I have no self control and a mocha sounds delicious right now. 10am. Back in the hotel room. Put away your phone, Zigzag. You need to pack. What food should I take? Is this enough? Too much? Put away your phone. How do I pack my bag again? Oh crap, I forgot to brush my teeth, and I buried my toothbrush in the pack. Why are you on Facebook again? Put away the fucking phone. 11am. Knock on Roadside’s door. “Ready?” I ask. “Yeah. I need to run to the post office.” I’m a little annoyed, but there’s nothing to do about it. After the post office: “I need to hit the grocery store too.” We will never get out of town. What was he doing all this time? 12 noon. Lunch time. No way we’re going to leave town without one more meal. We stop in at a small restaurant just as they open. There’s another hiker who we haven’t met before, Quinn, who has been waiting outside, and we invite him to join us for lunch. He tells us he’s an ex-marine with a messed-up spine. I imagine that must make backpacking excruciating, but he says it helps to keep it moving. We talk for a long time, and it takes us a while to realize that we haven’t even ordered yet. We finally flag down the waitress and order our food, and then take a while to get it. 1pm. We leave Quinn, who is going to stick around for a bit, then cross the street to get some ice cream before we leave town. Man, the hiker we met a few days ago near Mt. Hood, is here, and we chat while we eat our ice cream and get ready to go. 1:15pm. Time to hit the trail. Space Cowboy gets dropped off by someone in a car. We greet him, tell him we’re about to leave, and he asks if he can join us. Sure! “Thanks. Just let me say bye to my friend.” Their conversation takes another fifteen minutes. I’m fuming, but I don’t say anything. I know it’s not his fault. We’ve already frittered away half the day, and can I really fault him for wanting fifteen minutes of society before we jump back into the wilderness? 1:30pm. We start walking toward the Bridge of the Gods. Walking makes everything better. We cross the street and climb up a steep embankment to get to the toll plaza. The lady in the booth tells us to stay on the left side of the bridge. I lead the way. The mythic name actually comes from the natural land bridge that preceded it. A huge landslide from the North dammed up the river temporarily, and then the water punched a hole under it, leaving a large land bridge. It eventually collapsed, and when they built a bridge for car traffic, they kept the name. The new bridge is a green, steel truss cantilever bridge. It is a narrow two lanes, and spans 1858ft. It’s also the lowest point on the PCT, which is hard to believe when you look straight down through the cheese-grater roadway at the intimidating drop to the river. A car comes toward us over the bridge, slowly, and forces us closer to the guardrail, a broad strip of thick metal with a large gap beneath it. It seems completely inadequate. We make it across, and follow a junction West, where we find a big green sign that reads “Pacific Crest Trail”. Then we’re back home in the trees, the noise of traffic and the myriad distractions of civilization quickly receding to a muffled lull. No easing back into it, it’s time to climb. The forest is cool, the canopy complete. I’m eager to move, and I do. Five cups of coffee power me up the slope and quickly away from Roadside and Space Cowboy. I’m left to myself to think, and although I still have 500 miles to walk, it feels like I am close to the end, so I begin to think about that. What am I going to do with my life after the trail? I’d like to try something different for a change. Something more creative, that builds on my strengths. I play for a while with being an architect. I’ve cycled through enough fantasy jobs that I try to dig a little deeper upfront with this one. What would the day to day look like? I probably wouldn’t have my own architecture firm right away, so I would probably work in an office doing architecture stuff. What sort of stuff? Probably a lot of math stuff. Ooh, that’s probably not a great idea for me. I always understood math concepts easily, but I always wanted to do steps in my head instead of tediously showing my work. When I would make mistakes, I usually wouldn’t notice, and even when I did it would take me forever to find them (usually it was forgetting to carry a negative from one step to the next). An error like that could cause a whole building to come crashing down, it seems. I’m not willing to throw it out yet, though. The idea of creating a beautiful building just has too much appeal. I move on through my mental checklist. What sort of investment of time and money will it take? This is more of an obstacle. I don’t have to look it up to know that architecture school is expensive, and probably requires some sort of 4-year degree. That’s two counts against. I don’t relish the idea of adding several tens of thousands of dollars onto my current college debt, and the education would make it difficult to start a family in the next four years. I go through several more career ideas this way, and notice a pattern: almost any job I’d like to switch to either pays too little, at least at first, or requires a new, expensive degree. I feel trapped. A career change is almost impossible. Perhaps if I were single and didn’t want kids, or didn’t have any compunction about taking on a massive load of debt, I could make a switch. But even if that were the case, it’s an awfully big risk for something that might not work out. Thinking back to my high school history classes, I realize there’s a name for this financial prison: indentured servitude. The shape of it has changed, and there is a little more leeway, but the effects are much the same. It’s true, I’m not indentured to a single landowner, but I seem to be indentured to the whole economic system. Even bankruptcy wouldn’t help, since student loans are exempted from bankruptcy proceedings. My thoughts spread out from there and begin to explore the contours of free market capitalism and the education system. Eventually they start to loop back into a bit of a tangle and I become frustrated. I stop at a stream for water. The music of the stream is so gentle and pure, it cuts through the tangle of my thoughts like a scalpel, bringing me back to the present. This side of the Columbia River gorge has less volcanic rock, and the forest seems less like a rain forest and more like the national parks in California. It is so quiet. The dirt is claylike and cool on my legs as I sit and squeeze water through my filter. When I start hiking again, I’m quickly stopped by voices behind. I can hear Roadside and Space Cowboy talking, so I wait for them. I keep waiting for several minutes, but they don’t catch up. They must have stopped at the stream for water. I call back to them, but it seems they can’t hear me like I can hear them. A strange trick of forest acoustics. It’s not all that far to go back down to them, but it’s downhill, and I can’t stand the idea of hiking up what I’ve already hiked up. I decide to push on—they’ll catch up later. I plug into an audiobook—Grit, by Angela Duckworth, which is about the benefits of developing persistence over a long period of time (ten years or more)—and let my thoughts run wild. The hours fly by. In the early evening I get a fantastic view back to the Columbia River gorge and a little later, towards Mt. Adams to the north. The light is falling quickly. I reach a junction to three-corner spring, a fair ways off the trail. I’m low enough on water that I’ll need more for dinner, but I’m a little worried about leaving the main trail for so long in the falling light. Even if I leave a note in the trail for Roadside and Space Cowboy, it’s likely they’ll miss it. There’s really no choice but to go get water. I can only hope that they’ll need water too. I head up the hill. The spur trail intersects with a dirt road that takes me to the spring. The light is failing as I fill up one of my platypus bladders. I decide to fill up my other bladder, though I don’t need that much water. Maybe I can save them a trip up to this spring. While I’m filling up, I occasionally shout to try to let them know where I am. My voice seems to disappear immediately into the darkness. On the way back down, I have to use my headlamp, and I almost miss the turnoff trail in the dark. I stumble down rocky, eroded trail back to the main trail, and when I get to the junction, Roadside is standing there.
“Did you hear me yelling for you?” he asks. “No, did you hear me?” “No. I yelled just like thirty seconds ago.” “Yeah, I didn’t hear a thing,” I say. Then “I got some extra water if you need it. Save you a trip.” “Thanks.” “Where’s Space Cowboy?” “I lost him about an hour ago. I’m sure he’ll catch up.” He won’t. “There’s supposed to be a campsite up ahead.” We hike through the dark trees. Where are GPS says there are campsites, all we see are more trees. There’s an area that looks like it might be flat enough, but it doesn’t look like a real campsite. We look a little further ahead, but quickly come out to a steep slope—there would be a view here if it were light out. The next listed campsite is a couple miles ahead, and neither of us wants to hike that far right now. We head back into the trees. If there are campsites here, we can’t find them. We make do with some small sloped, pine-needle-covered clearings. As we’re setting up camp, large insects keep flying directly into our headlamps. It’s annoying at first, but then Roadside gets stung. Yellow jackets? Hornets? It’s impossible to tell in the dark, but we’re already halfway set up, so all we can do is hurry to finish. When I climb into my tent, it occurs to me that if we’re close to a hive or a hornets nest, the morning might be worse. PCT Day 109
September 20, 2016 Zero Miles We’ve decided to take a zero day. Roadside needs a new backpack, I need new hiking poles (one of mine has broken along the way), and the nearest REI is in Portland. Despite the approaching winter, despite the feeling that we’ve been taking too much time anyway, we just want to take a zero day. First things first. Breakfast. I hit up facebook to see if any of my friends are willing to drive us there or back so we don’t have to hitch. I’m surprised to find that I actually have a lot of friends living in Portland, though I’ve never lived there myself. Then we check into the Best Western across the street. It’s a nicer hotel and doesn’t cost all that much more. Our rooms aren’t actually available yet, so the lady at the front desk lets us keep our packs behind the counter. My friend Nathan’s partner Tanya has generously offered to give us a ride. I’ve only met her once before, when Lindsey and I stayed with them for a week last January. It’s incredibly nice of her to take time out of her schedule to do this, knowing me as little as she does. We help ourselves to the lobby coffee while we wait. When she shows up she greets me with a warm hug. I’ve showered this morning, but my clothes have captured months of hiker smell and I’m self-conscious. Riding down in her car is surreal. We talk about Nathan, who is one of my oldest friends and is away on a work trip, and her kids. It doesn’t feel at all like I’m on a Grand Adventure, it feels like I’m just riding in a friend’s car on our way to go grab some lunch. I forgot how easy this feels, to sit in a car and talk. Soon this hike will be over, and I can get back to this easy life. But is that what I want? Tanya drops us off close to the REI. They aren’t open yet, so we walk a few blocks to Rogue brewery for an early lunch. When we return to REI, it’s open but nearly empty. I find a pair of lightweight aluminum poles quickly, but Roadside takes a little longer to try on different packs and get the fit right. I take a seat on a bench near the window and look through the glass at people walking by. I imagine that I am at a zoo or an aquarium, looking at the strange creatures behind the glass. There are only two species that I see: the ones that are in a hurry, and the ones that are walking with their heads down, buried in their phones. I can’t find a single person who looks like they are enjoying themselves. Emerson said “Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.” Hustle is just another form of artificiality. We hustle to avoid despairing at the artificial world we’ve constructed around us, to rush through the discomfort and get on to the next thing. The problem is, once we get ourselves into that habit, we begin to rush through the enjoyable parts of life, too. To slow down would force us to look at the deep scars we’ve allowed into our lives. Yet that same hustle only serves to dig the scars deeper, build the walls around us higher. The only way out is to stop and let ourselves heal, to confront the damage we have done to ourselves and refuse to inflict it any more. How is it, I wonder, that I see this so clearly now, when I spent so many years thrashed about by the tides of civilized society? I come up with two answers: solitude, which allowed me out of the status trap, and wilderness, which allowed me to see the connectedness inherent in the world. Disconnected, it is easy to forget our own value, but in a truly efficient system, every piece has value. If we can focus on our intrinsic, underlying value as human beings, I think, it makes it more difficult to return to the self-harm that civil society tricks us into thinking is “normal.” We begin to see the lie when we do things like work ourselves to the bone, consume as much as possible, and entertain ourselves into oblivion. Roadside startles me out of my reveries and asks if I’m ready to go. We check out and step outside. “What do you want to do now?” he says, as we begin to walk without purpose or hurry. We have a couple hours until my friend Chris can meet us. I try to think through options. It seems like we should have many, in a big city like Portland, but all I can come up with is the bookstore, and I don’t want to carry more books. “How about food?” I suggest. I’m not hungry yet, but I know I will be soon. We find another nearby brewery called Ten-Barrel where we eat and drink and talk about nothing. Nowhere to be, nothing to do. Chris calls and invites us to meet us at Trinity Episcopal Church, where he works as an organist. He needs to do some practicing for an upcoming recital, and his girlfriend is going to meet us in an hour; do we mind the wait? I met Chris when my wife was getting her Master’s degree in early music from Indiana University. He was getting his doctorate in Organ Performance, and had started dating a soprano who was a good friend of my wife. The four of us often got together for drinks after concerts and recitals, and we enjoyed their company. Chris was affable and genuine. He was also an incredible organist. I don’t mind the wait at all. In fact, I am looking forward to the private concert. We walk several blocks to the church, where Chris unlocks the gates and lets us in. He takes us on a brief tour of the old church. I am tempted to walk the labyrinths, a particular type of walking meditation that I have always loved, but we continue on into the sanctuary, where he invites us to take a seat while he finishes practicing. The organ takes up an entire wall of the massive sanctuary, and fills it with bone-shaking sound. We are treated to Bach, Buxtehude, and several modern composers who show off the incredible power and beauty of the instrument. Recorded music has the same relationship to live music as a picture of a landscape does to walking it, to feeling the rocks and roots under your feet, smelling the pine and dirt, enjoying the fire in your muscles as you work to climb a hill. No recorded music, no matter how well-produced, will ever scramble reality, seep into your cells, vibrate your soul, juice your emotions, and turn the world upside down like a live performance. Listening to a practice session can be especially enjoyable, because you can hear the truth behind the notes, the ethereal something that the player is reaching for, better than if they play the passage only once. Participating in the music is best of all, of course, but the next best thing is listening to a solid musician truly practice. While we sit there in the pews, I realize that Roadside probably doesn’t have access to this level of listening, and I am sad for him. He likely has his own masteries that I can’t access in the same way he can, and it doesn’t make me better than him in any way, but I can’t help but feel like he must be missing a piece of life. Chris finishes his practice session and we meet his girlfriend Kate in the parking lot. Roadside is mostly quiet on the way back, but the conversation among the rest of us makes the drive pass quickly. When we arrive, Roadside goes back to the hotel and the three of us go down to Thunder Island Brewing company for dinner. We have a great time talking and listening as a nearby table asks another thru-hiker, who I haven’t met, all about his hike. When it’s time for Chris and Kate to go, I’m sorry to see them leave. I walk back up the hill to the hotel and spend the rest of the evening talking to Lindsey on the phone. September 19, 2016 Mile 2111.7-2125.1 (+14.5) 28.9 Miles Space Cowboy isn’t ready to wake up when we leave. Roadside and I pack up as quietly as we can so we don’t disturb the other campers. I wonder who they are. There’s no way of knowing whether they are thru hikers we’ve met before, NOBOs we’re passing without ever meeting, SOBOs, or just local backpackers. How many NOBOs have we passed this way, without ever meeting? There’s a misty fog permeating everything. My hands are cold from packing up my wet tent, and I can’t dry them on my clothes, because they are damp too. We start our hike by crossing a strip of forest that has been cleared for power lines. I look back at the far end of the clearing and I can see the imposing eastern flank of Mt. Hood among swirling mists where some clouds have lifted. It looks like a Japanese painting. Then I turn and plunge into the forest. All morning it is overcast and misty. As the sun rises, a kaleidoscope of color punches through the trees in great beams of prismatic light. The beams turn and flash between the trees as we walk through the hushed forest. The smell of wet soil and pine needles hangs in the air, and a flash of memory contrasts this with the stale, dry smell inside my rental house in Santa Maria. Given a choice, I will always be happier with the discomfort of my chilly, wet hands and the smell of this living, breathing earth than I will with the dead, dry comfort of the indoors. And yet I know that if a lodge appeared around the corner serving hot food and a warm, dry place to sit, they would have my business in an instant. We are poor custodians of our own happiness. We climb. I pull ahead of Roadside and enjoy the quiet, overcast morning. It’s a morning for contemplation, and I spend it thinking of how a life within civilization could be different. What scorecard would I prefer to live my life by, rather than the status and success metrics that the media culture feeds us from childhood? Relationships are one metric, I decide. Appreciation is another. Growth is important, but not financial growth. If I can live five months out of a backpack, financial security does not require largesse. Personal growth is what I seek. New perspectives, new paradigms to see the truth of the world around me. The trail has shown me just how constricted a civilized perspective is. We can wall out small portions of the world, but nature finds a way back in. Nature always finds a way. I begin to realize that I’ve always believed in keeping a different scorecard. The problem is not one of recognizing higher values, but in holding to those higher values in the face of culture. We float in currents of culture that ferry us along to predetermined roles. Culture’s toxic brine seeps into our pores and deadens our awareness of higher values. The solitude and slow, quiet pace of trail life have allowed me to get away, recapture my senses, and begin to see the poison of the world for what it is, but how can I reenter society and keep my wits? Will my refusal of roles be seen as anti-social or even sociopathic? I have spent most of my life as a loner, though I ache for human connection; will the rejection of cultural norms simply take me farther away from connection? Perhaps it would be easier to jump full-fledged into the poisonous culture and spend my Sundays getting drunk on cheap beer in front of a football game, but I can’t see myself doing that either. Escape from dystopia seems to be hard-grained into my being. I set the questions aside for now and focus on hiking. I find myself high on the rim of a canyon. There would be big views here, if not for the low-hanging clouds and fog. There are trees below, and trees to my right, but right here is rock and grass. It reminds me of the deep gorges in the Trinity Alps and Marble Mountain Wilderness. I catch up to another hiker, a small Korean girl. The Korean couple with whom I shared a campfire a few nights ago mentioned that they had a companion who had gone ahead; I ask her if she knows them, and she says yes, but not much more. Her English is good, but I can tell she is nervous about it, and we don’t speak much. She pauses to let me pass, and I leave her to her hike. I reach a clearing with a picnic table and stop to snack and wait for Roadside. I check my map, and it appears that I’m at the junction to the Eagle Creek Alternate, one of the more popular side-trails on the PCT. Roadside and I have already agreed we’re going to take it. I don’t see the side trail, though. The Korean girl catches up and stops for a little more conversation, stilted but friendly. She says she’s going to continue on, and then disappears behind a bush at one end of the clearing. I suppose the alternate must be somewhere over there, but I’m not sure how she was so confident. Roadside shows up a little while after she leaves, and we stay a little longer to eat an early lunch. We begin the descent into Eagle Creek. The Korean girl was spot-on; when we turn behind the bush, the trail is there. It descends quickly between trees, at times so steep that we have to slow and place each foot just so, or else we will slip and fall on the muddy slopes. It seems like we are descending for hours. The trail flattens out and turns south. I worry for a minute that we’ve taken the wrong trail, but a quick check of the GPS tells us we’re on track. We follow the Canyon south, still descending toward the floor as the forest around us grows more dense with ferns. Water is streaming down small waterfalls and creeks. This is a classic rainforest, dripping on us and all around us. The trail switches back, and soon we find ourselves next to the creek itself. The trail is hewn unevenly from rough stone, trying to turn our ankles and jabbing aggressively at our soles with each step. The creek descends in stages, a placid flowing stream that funnels into narrow dark folds in the rock and plunges far below us, only to return to a gentle meander. After these plunges, the trail sticks to the mossy cliff as a narrow walkway without guardrail. The cliff turns a corner, and suddenly before us is Tunnel Falls. There are a few day-hikers taking photos and videos of the falls. It is so-named for the rock tunnel that passes behind it, through which the trail passes. I take my phone out and start recording. This doesn’t seem like a great idea, staring into my phone’s screen as I walk beside a forty-foot drop on uneven ground. One of the dayhikers seems very uneasy and is sticking to the wall side of the trail. When I go to pass her, I step awfully close to the dropoff, and decide that maybe I should start looking at where I’m stepping. I keep the phone recording, though, and safely navigate my way back behind the falls. I wait for Roadside to make the passage, and then we’re off, covering the last miles toward Cascade Locks and food. From here until the trailhead, there are tons of hikers. The sun has finally come out, though it only reaches us in splashes and splatters of light. I dodge dayhikers and race downhill over the rocky ground, covering miles in the blink of an eye. There are several more waterfalls, and I enjoy them all on the fly. At one of the waterfalls, teenagers are cliff jumping into a pool below. The crowds thicken the entire way, until I am surprised by the trailhead. I fill up my waterbottle at a faucet and guzzle it down, then fill it again and sit nearby to rest my tender soles and wait for Roadside. It’s a good half hour before he arrives. We ask a few people for rides into town, but they’re all going the opposite direction, back toward Portland. We decide to walk to town on a bike path that covers the last two miles. To get there, we first have to walk from the parking lot to the main road on a small road that parallels Eagle Creek. Something large is splashing behind a bush, and we half expect to see a bear or some other animal, but when we pass the bush we see nothing. Then we hear it again and take a closer look at the river. Salmon! Huge salmon, the length of baseball bats and the width of newborn babies are lying still in the shallow creek, facing upstream and only occasionally slapping a tail. We take a couple of pictures and continue on our way, that mystery solved The bike path is quiet, a nice relief after the anxious noise of all those day hikers. To them I’m sure it was a day of quiet and peace, but to me it felt like we were at Disneyland. After a few minutes of walking on the path, I have to start walking on the dirt beside it. My soles are just too tender after the pulverizing rock of Eagle Creek.
We pass under the Bridge of the Gods, where the PCT will cross out of Oregon, over the Columbia River Gorge, and enter Washington. Directly on the other side of the bridge, the town of Cascade Locks begins. We find ourselves two rooms in a motel and then make our way down to the Columbia River for dinner—nachos and beer—at the Thunder Island Brewing Company. It’s a fitting way to finish Oregon. PCT Day 107 September 18, 2016 Mile 2094.4-2111.7 (+.8) 18.2 Miles Between the snoring and the hot, stuffy room, I didn’t get much sleep last night. But that’s okay because this morning we get to enjoy the famous Timberline Lodge brunch. It’s a fancy affair with plenty of fresh fruit and veggies, two things we have been lacking on trail, as well as an omelet station. I go back for seconds, then thirds, then fourths, downing little cups of coffee the whole time. My final trip is to the Belgian waffle station, where I cover a carb bomb with a heaping pile of whipped cream, strawberry compote, blueberries, and chocolate chips. After breakfast we go down to the WY’East building to get our resupply packages. It’s like a small shopping mall with a food court. The place is empty and most of the stores are closed, except for one employee in one gift shop who leaves us alone in the store so she can track them down for us. We take them back to the hotel room and repack them into our pack, then decide to get the most out of our $274, one-night rental. We go down and spend some time soaking in the hot tub in our hiking shorts, then wrap ourselves in towels and throw our shorts in the dryer. Across the hall is a sauna, where we sit and stew. My calves and hamstrings are tight, hard as rocks, but they’ve been that way for so long that I hadn’t noticed until now, when I feel them start to soften, just a little. “This is what I want to do after the trail,” Roadside says. “Sit in one place for a week, maybe by a pool in Vegas. Pay someone to bring me food so I don’t have to move.” “Hell yeah,” I say. I know that’s not what my post-trail will look like, but I enjoy the fantasy. To everyone I know back home, this trip is already a vacation, and I’ll be expected to get back to work finding a job. And maybe they’re right. Maybe all the hard work and loneliness and self-reflection and overcoming of fears, maybe all of it was just a different way to escape. But I don’t think so. I think the work I’m doing out here might be some of the most important work I’ve ever done. For the first time in my life, I’m starting to see that the mismatch between society and me is not entirely my fault. The horrible feeling of inadequacy that has made up most of my life is actually the result of playing by the wrong scorecard. And I’m starting to get an inkling of what a better scorecard might be. We check out at 11am on the dot. Before we leave, we each take a picture with an axe that has “Here’s Johnny” written down the side of the handle. We have to go back to the WY’East building to see if we can get some canister fuel. I’m running low. They don’t have it, but there is a small restaurant open in the food court, so we get lunch before we leave. Another hiker stops by and starts up a conversation. He’s an older guy, maybe in his sixties, with the trail name Space Cowboy. After some conversation, we tell him our fuel problem, and he says he has plenty if we want to hike together and borrow his canister for a meal or two before we get to Cascade Locks. It’s a generous offer. We pull our stuff together and head out together, all three of us, then we’re back out onto the trail, back in the rain and the wind on the side of the mountain. The rain is a light drizzle, not like the whipping sheets from yesterday. I don’t find it all that unpleasant, despite the cold air. We hike fast under ski lifts and past a number of junctions. We find ourselves on a sandy cliff above a glacial creek. There is a small trail along the edge, but it is crumbling, and we have to hold on to bushes to get across certain parts. This doesn’t seem right—there’s no way hundreds of backpackers have come through here. The trail works its way down along the cliff, then cuts down steeply through thick vegetation and lets out onto a wide, well-groomed trail. We must have taken a wrong turn, because this seems much more like the trail I’ve gotten to know. I check my gps, and sure enough, we’re back on the PCT. We cross the glacial runoff by following a number of misleading cairns and find the trail on the other side. Then we take a side trail to Ramona Falls. It’s a towering two-story waterfall that fans out over mossy rocks. A few people are sitting nearby. I clamber onto the wooden bridge that straddles the runoff from the falls, pull out my camera, and snap a photo. I stand there and gaze at the falls at what seems like an appropriate amount of time, then start hiking again. I’m sure it seems to the day hikers that I’m not appreciating it adequately, and perhaps they’re right. But I gave it my full presence while I was there, and now I have miles to make. I have pulled away from Roadside and Space Cowboy, so I plug into a podcast about Myths and Legends. It ends with a section about a folk monster with long, oily black hair that comes and takes away children in the night. I look around the dark forest and peer between the trees. This seems like the sort of forest that would hide a folk monster. I chuckle to myself.
Back on the main PCT, I come to a river crossing that I’m not willing to do by myself, so I wait for Roadside to catch up. The river itself is down in a gully about fifteen feet. The crossing requires balancing my way across on a fallen tree. Normally no big deal, but this tree has two trunks, and the top one blocks passage for the last part of the bottom one. And they’re both wet from the rain. Roadside arrives, and Space Cowboy just after him, and I start across. I try not to look down at the rushing river below, or the rocks. At the halfway point, I grab onto the upper trunk and press myself to it while my backpack tries to pull me away into empty space. A sideways shuffle gets me to a point where I have no choice left but to climb up to the upper trunk. Someone has fastened a yellow rope here to help with the climb, but I don’t trust it. I pull myself up the wet wood, heart thumping, and work my way across the last section with special sensitivity to the grip on my shoes. They hold. I make it across. Roadside and Space Cowboy follow, slowly and carefully, and I am at least as scared for them. Once everyone is across, we start an evening climb up lots of switchbacks. At the top, we meet another hiker, “Man”, in his twenties or early thirties. The four of us rest for a bit after the hard climb, then start down the switchbacks on the other side. We lose Man in a hurry. We’ve planned a campsite, but when we get there we realized that we missed a water stop. The next water is a half mile on, so we plod on hoping that there will be a campsite there. There is, but it’s tiny, enough for a single bivy and not much more. We fill our bottles in the fading light, then discuss whether we should continue on or turn back. I hate turning back. I’d rather hike nine more miles in the dark than go back a half mile. I’m convinced we’d find another site quickly. Space Cowboy is adamant we should go back. There were plenty of spots where we said we were going to stop. Roadside agrees. I’m grumpy about it, but I concede. The three of us walk back in the dusk and set up in a grove of small trees. There are a couple other tents set up, but nobody makes a sound and we try not to disturb sleeping hikers. We make dinner and talk about departure. “What time do you start hiking?” Space Cowboy asks. “Usually up at 5:30, hiking by 5:45,” I say. I really hope he’s not going to try to negotiate us into a later start. We can’t afford it this close to winter. “Okay,” he says. “Wake me up.” |
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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