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.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Author
Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
Categories |