We wake up to our phone alarms at 6:30, bleary but rested. We pack our belongings and set a few unnecessary items aside. We have eaten our way to lighter packs, but we’re still carrying more than necessary, and not all of it is food. I am eager to shed pounds, ounces even, and Lindsey follows my example. We drop the items in a hiker box in front of the hotel on our way to breakfast. A few hikers are making their way through the buffet when we arrive. We collect cinnamon rolls, waffles, fruit, deviled eggs, and more. Our plates are overflowing. We both avoid the oatmeal. We join Tars and Cathy at a small table and dig in. Eating fresh food is delightful. We have only been hiking six days, and already the flavors make me pay attention. The honeydew melon is slightly underripe, but I don’t care. The flavors pop into existence suddenly on my tongue, and permeate dark hidden spaces in my mouth where I shouldn’t have taste buds. The sweet cold nectar spreads like energy and cools me. Every bite is like this, not just the melon. Stoicism and asceticism have never been for me, but short periods of denial have always helped me appreciate what I have. I know people who love backpacking for the taste of food after they return. I’m in it for the scenery and adventure, but I will admit that the food is a nice side effect. After seconds, and thirds, we collect our packs and check out. Tars and Cathy still have to pack up, so we leave without them. Besides, we all have to hitch this morning, and it’s easier with two than with four. Since trail angel Ed was waiting to give us a ride into town yesterday, we didn’t have to hitch, so I’m still nervous about catching our first ride. Hitchhiking stories seem to be dominated by psychopaths and criminals. Rationally, I know that’s not true; plenty of people have hitchhiked over the years without problems. It’s just that scary, unusual stories stick. It’s the same reason people worry about bears and mountain lions on the PCT: statistically, you’re more likely to fall to your death than to be attacked, and you’re more likely to be hit by a car than to fall. But mountain lion attacks are more interesting than getting in an accident on the way to work, so those are the stories we remember. Nonetheless, knowing a thing and feeling it are different things, so I’m still nervous to hitchhike. Ed told us to stand across from the Library, so we do. Five or six cars come by, but none of them stop. Most of them turn down a side street before they even get to us. After about ten minutes, a car pulls over and pops the trunk. We hurry over, cram our packs into the small space that’s available, and climb in the back seat. Our driver is a woman in her fifties, and her passenger is her mother. We share the backseat with a pot of petunias. I suppose old ladies with petunias can be psychopathic murderers too, but if I was looking for a way to make my fears seem ridiculous, I couldn’t do better than this. We talk about adventures on the drive: the younger of the two hiked Kilimanjaro with her husband the previous year, and we’re planning that in a couple years, so we have plenty of questions. We arrive at Scissors Crossing—the 4-way junction where we left the PCT—in a snip. After all that conversation, the desert seems especially quiet. The crunch of our shoes in the sandy soil seems to define and amplify the surrounding silence rather than disturb it. Uphill. Turn. Double-back. Double back again. Switchbacks follow the contours of an exposed mountain face for miles. From across the basin, this mountain looked a uniform tan. Up close now, it is teeming with flowers, endless varieties of cactus, and gardens of ocotillo. The desert is easy to malign when you stick to the roads. Get out in it, and it crackles with vibrancy. The morning cool shifts into a radiating warmth, and we rest several times. At each stop we review the morning’s climb with a birds-eye view of the basin below. We look for other hikers below, but at this distance, the lower details of the mountain have resolved themselves back into a uniform tan, and any hikers that are out there are indiscernible from other dots that speck the landscape. Two fighter jets streak the basin—loudly—and later, two more. This must be where pilots practice their low-altitude flights. You can escape civilization, but you can’t escape the machine. As we continue up the switchbacks, I reflect on the many systems we have created as human beings: Commerce, social hierarchies, systems of power and law. Every system is a mixed bag, but the one that seems to chafe me most is capitalism, perhaps because it is treated as gospel to so many. I develop a case against it in my head. In a perfect world, price would be determined by value. But humans are imperfect and driven by emotion. You don’t have to look far to see how savvy marketers can turn our own short-term desires and emotions against us. A false scarcity (“for a limited time only!”), sex appeal, illusions of status, these things seduce us all. Of course, every time we’re seduced, the perceived value of the object goes up. On the flip side, those things which don’t tickle our short-term desires are less valued. On a biological level this makes sense—when we have to decide between getting food today and creating social cohesion sometime in the future, we should choose food. But as our fundamental needs are increasingly met, our emotional minds don’t catch up. We continue to buy the fancy car to enhance our sex appeal even after we’ve created offspring. We value the limited time offer—that we don’t need—over the long-term savings plan that will give us security in old age. On an individual level, it’s easy to blame the individual: capitalism isn’t working for him because he lets his emotions overcome his rational mind. A fool and his money are soon parted. But what about on a social level? Much of our safety and security is dependent on social programs: fire, police, military, education. In a completely free market, it’s easy to see how the system could quickly get out of whack. In fact, we see it all the time in insurance markets: people pay for earthquake coverage after an earthquake, when fear of earthquakes is in the front of their mind. Does the value of the coverage go up after an earthquake? If we paid for police in a free market, the police would only protect those people who paid. The police would be able to focus their attention on only those people, and yet, those people would be less safe, because the whole society would descend into chaos. Luckily, we have a government system (also imperfect), that decided that we are all safer if we pay for police protection. The same rationale can be used for fire, education, and the military. But what about those things we leave to the free market? Aren’t we capable of gross perversions in the attribution of value when we leave things in the hands of advertisers? This is what scares me about the school choice movement. When money comes out of public education to fund private schools, it will be the same as if only the rich pay for police protection. Short term gain, long term danger. And what about the way capitalism values entertainment? In the movies, flashy effects and sex appeal are easier to market than deeply crafted stories, and so we are glutted with superheroes that add little to our personal growth, while films that can expand our understanding of the world are relegated to the arthouse. The nightly sportsball games draw billions of dollars to create events that will mostly be forgotten tomorrow, while the orchestras and choirs that keep some of our greatest cultural achievements alive struggle to stay afloat. And of course, how we value the natural world. Capitalism could never create the Pacific Crest Trail, or a national park. In fact, capitalism tries to convert the sublime beauty and richness of the world into resources for consumption. Capitalism isn’t all bad, of course. Much of our technological advancement has come as a direct result of capitalism. But I have to wonder if there’s a better system possible—one that rewards real value, long term value, rather than ephemeral desires. These thoughts take me deep into the afternoon. We pass a pipe gate, which makes a horrible creak as we push it open and pass through. The trail has turned to follow the eastern side of a large valley. Two gates later we find a collection of small tents nestled among the bushes, and a jeep trail goes down to the right. This must be the third gate water cache. Strange that no one is around, with all these tents. We still have plenty of water, so we continue on. We go through a series of small sandy valleys as we make our way along the top of the large one. The trail often disappears, but other hikers have used their poles to trace the outline of where we should walk. Large, in the middle of one valley, someone has written 6P in the sand. Later, we see it a couple more times, smaller, in the middle of the trail.
A few large black clouds, each one distinct, comes over the other side of the valley. Unexpectedly, we are suddenly deluged by rain. The forecast showed sunny and warm all day! We quickly take out our rain jackets, but we have quick-drying pants, so neither of us brought rain pants. This was a mistake. The rain lasts for about a half hour, and by the end we are both soaked and shivering. Note to self: buy rainpants. We set up camp in a cold wind, and a nearby hiker comes over to say hi. His introduces himself as Chuck, and we ask if he has a trail name. He does—6P. We strip off our wet clothes and climb into our sleeping bags for warmth. I read for a bit while Lindsey naps. An hour later we emerge to make dinner, and we are greeted by a spectacular sunset: streaming stripes of sunlight split and splayed by cloudbursts over the valley.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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