October 5, 2016 Mile 2477.6-2508.1 30.5 miles I find it difficult to sleep all night. My sleeping pad insulates me from the cold ground, but any time I turn over or stretch out, the cold is there, lying in wait for me, ready to attack through the down baffles. I’m not cold enough to be in any danger, but it makes the night uncomfortable. When the alarm goes off at 5:30, I’m almost eager to be up and moving around again. I decide to hike in my longjohns, at least through the morning. We start our downhill hike in the dark among the huckleberry bushes. I’ve mentioned that I generally don’t eat breakfast until later, but that’s not to say I don’t eat anything. I usually carry a pack of Pop Tarts in my pocket and eat pieces of it as I go. I’ve come to dread it. A deep, loathing dread that is only overpowered by the force of my hunger. There is only one flavor that I can stomach anymore, and I’m delighted when I open the unlabeled foil wrapper this morning and discover a pair of S’mores Pop Tarts. I don’t understand why this cloying flavor is bearable when simpler flavors like strawberry and brown sugar have become repugnant. As the sky lightens, it appears mostly clear with a few wooly clumps of clouds near the horizon. I am hoping for some sunshine and warmth. The bushes are gold and crimson, and trees are few and scattered. Along the ridges and high slopes, even the tundra has assumed the colors of autumn. A brook runs across the trail between thick bushes. A small city of tents is camped on a large patch of grass with a group of hikers in various states of disorder. Some are cooking breakfast, some are organizing their packs, some are doing both. I greet them and then turn to the brook. The water is so cold it stiffens my fingers so I can barely hold onto my water bag. I try to ignore the ache. They campers are all thru-hikers, and from the sounds of it, they have been hiking together for quite a while. “You gonna sleep all day?” This comes from a guy who is struggling to untangle the guy-lines on his wet tent. Every so often he drops the tent and tries to shake some warmth into his hands. “It’s soo cooold,” a girl whines back from her open tent. “Where’s the sun?” She is still in her sleeping bag. It’s fully light out, but the thin lines of clouds I saw this morning have somehow covered most of the sky. I take a seat at the edge of their camp, make my oatmeal, and greet each member of the camp with a good morning as they each pass by me every few minutes to fill up their waterbottles. When they dip their filter bags into the water and get their hands wet, expletives related to the cold explode out of every one of them. I sit there and watch them, an outsider, an observer. I’m envious of their easy rapport, the relaxed start to the morning, the way they alternate silence with quips at each others expense. It becomes clear that they’ve been hiking since April, that their mileage has been low, that several towns were “vortexes” and caught them up for days at a time. “Hope you guys catch up,” says one of the guys, the first to set off. “Last one to the border wins,” says the girl who’s still in her sleeping bag. Roadside shows up, gets water, starts breakfast. I’m the only one who says hello to him. The other hikers are starting to peel off, one by one, and only when it’s clear that the last of her group is close to leaving does the girl in the sleeping bag start to pack up. We leave right after the girl. By now our teeth are chattering and we’re hiking as fast as we can just to get the blood flowing again, to loosen up the muscles that have been clenched for warmth ever since we first sat down. I pass the girl, and sooner than I thought, several others of her group. We hike along the top of a low ridge between two valleys. The right one is hidden behind trees, but sensed by the slope of the land; the left falls away into clouds and mist. Across a basin, sunlight. We race to arrive there, and when we do it feels glorious, that penetrating warmth, that radiant fire, those streaming golden beams. The relief is palpable and makes me want to cry. Momentum and the chill air keep my feet moving, though, and soon the clouds obscure the sun again. These clouds are hanging low, but not so low that we can’t see the enormous depth of these valleys below us, or the massive mountains to the west. We can see long streamers of rain descending thousands of feet and curling in the winds. We can see huge ink-blots of shadow on the mountains and in the valleys, blazing columns of light that pierce through cracks in the clouds and illuminate auburn and rust-colored slopes like corroded gold bullion shipwrecked under an unimaginable depth of sea. This, this is what makes my soul sing out. This enormous and spacious world, endlessly unique, endlessly beautiful, always changing, full of life. Full of death, too, but somehow that seems inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. And I can see now that life does not end with the dissolution of this body, this mind. This embodiment, as unspeakably cool as it is, is only temporary, is only one step along the way in the great flow of life. I feel the patterns, the ideas, the memes that make up my beliefs and identities and actions, and I know that they were there long before me. They have come into this body, and bounce off of one another and transmute each other inside this mind, and then they are sent out, into the world to replicate and transmute other patterns and ideas and memes in other minds. And ego and status and tribe and identity and loving and hating and living and dying are all a part of it, but the life of the world, the stuff of existence, flows on, connected and interdependent and breathing—yes, breathing and throbbing and vibrating with life. And I know that ego and status and all of that stuff will still be there, and I can set it aside for a time or not, but my life will always be there, independent of me, flowing through time and the world like a river, calm and serene at times and turbulent at others; spreading out and intermingling with other lives like ripples on a lake; joining up with other lives and forming into powerful forces like tides or waves in great oceans; or permeating the culture, unseen and unrealized but ever-present, like vapors; all of it water, all of it life. I eventually come back in to myself, humbled by this body and its need for warmth, food, rest. I break at Pear lake—striking as much for the totality with which autumn has claimed its surrounding vegetation as for its natural beauty. There are short evergreen trees, dark gray granite ribs, and white talus running down to the lake, but the tundra is uniformly red, and some deep, primeval part of me hears the strike of a bell announcing that winter is here. I feel the urgency, keep my break short, and hurry my steps. Another ridge walk, dip down to Pass Creek, and back up to a different ridge. The meandering of the trail seems truly erratic—what unusual geology has swirled and stirred these mountains so? I begin to pass the group of hikers from this morning, now spread out in ones and twos. The trail turns west along a long steep slope that falls away steeply to a river thousands of feet below. Some of the group has fallen behind, some are still ahead, but right here I am all alone. A junction splits off and leads down away from the main trail, and like it has at nearly every junction I’ve seen, a piece of me goes with it to imagine where it might go. All of these junctions, all of these choices available in a great web of trails and roads that stretches from coast to coast and opens the entire continent before me, and yet momentum and commitment keeps me on this single path. What might happen, what might I discover, if I were to follow this other path? It occurs to me that I have more than two choices—the first is to simply to follow the momentum I have built up and continue along the main trail, and the second is to follow the new trail simply to do something different and prove that I have a choice. But I can also choose either path with intention—I can continue on and complete what I have set out to do because it is still valuable to me, or I can go somewhere new, not out of a reaction to momentum, not simply to break something, but to seek out a new goal consciously, with foresight and knowledge. Those choices are only available to me when I choose them mindfully. Directly past the junction, the numbers 2500 are spelled out in rocks along the slope. 150 miles until Canada, and only 9 miles beyond that until I return to my old life and immerse myself back into civilization. I have mixed feelings about it. I can’t wait to see my wife, to eat good food and get enough calories, even to sit on a couch and watch a movie. But I dread the distracted, busy momentum of the civilized world, the constant ping of requests for attention, the shackles of jobs and houses and please can you respond to my email, you should you shouldn’t you need to everyone else does cut your hair wear these clothes shower every day show up on time eat these foods drink these drinks buy these cars because if you don’t you’re not as good as him or her and all of the fucking rules that just make me want to scream until it seems like there’s no choice except to reject it all and sell everything, move out to the desert and live alone in a trailer or maybe a tent and pass the time by drinking too much and yelling at the moon. But now I see it, now I see the lie. There is another choice there: I can walk with intention. I can stare society in the face and say “this is for me, but that isn’t.” It will be a force of will, and exhausting at times, and at times I will have to follow certain paths in order to get where I want to go, but as long as I keep the end in mind, I can follow those paths without fear of losing myself. The key is mindful intent: never accept the status quo blindly, but never reject the status quo blindly either. I continue up, along the main PCT, mulling over these thoughts, when I turn a corner to find a dozen or more hikers scattered lazily in a large patch of sunlight on the shoulder of the mountain, just above the trail. Some of them are the hikers I met this morning, and I soak up a few small dabs of conversation, but mostly we are all quiet, enjoying the first warmth of the day. Roadside is close behind and is as surprised to find so many people here as I am. We make a small climb after lunch and cross a small pass into a beautiful, secluded alpine valley. It feels like we have stepped into a secret nestled here among the mountaintops. My pack feels lighter than ever and we descend at a trot. The trail follows the valley in a leftward curve and the headwaters quickly become a roaring creek. Switchbacks plunge us into a tight, dark forest, hugging a series of small waterfalls that cascade into a green chasm. Boughs of fir and pine are freshly cut along the sides of the trail; trail workers have been here recently. It is a long, beautiful descent filled with the sounds of rushing water, the smell of fresh-cut pine, and the lightness of my newly untethered soul. At the bottom, I cross the White Chuck river and a series of small streams on footbridges. It’s a long walk through a dark valley, but it passes quickly and before I know it dusk is closing in. I find a campsite in the woods just past a footbridge right as it’s getting dark. It’s a large area segmented into ten or more sites by fallen trees, but I am the only one here until Roadside catches up a few minutes later. I set up my tent, and now it’s fully dark, but I need water, so I cross back over the footbridge, climb down the embankment, and lean far over the water to fill up. I’m certain I’m going to fall in, but I don’t. We make dinner in the dark, chatting easily over the beauty of the day and the small miles remaining, then turn in quickly to bed.
1 Comment
Shane McLennan
5/23/2020 09:55:28 am
All I know right now about life is that if you have a purpose, every day is easy. I am lucky that my purpose is to be Paige’s Nonna and to help her learn all she can at every age that I am here for her. I am also lucky, being retired from a successful career at teaching, I have everything I need to be comfortable, happy and safe in my life.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
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