August 15, 2016 Mile 1257.4-1284.3 26.9 Miles School started today. It’s strange to know that the rest of my world is returning to work, and I’m out here playing. Guilt arises, but I push it out. Teachers are asked to be altruistic like no other profession: low pay, low respect, always asked to do more, rarely given enough resources, buying supplies with our own money. As a high school band director, a lot of this was magnified. After-school rehearsals, football games, and competitions kept me working seventy- and eighty-hour weeks. I loved the kids, but I don’t owe anyone. I reject the guilt. Despite the pain in my feet, despite the sore muscles, despite the hunger and the thirst and the fatigue, I feel better than I have felt in years. I’m sleeping more, with less stress than ever. I wake at five, and Yogi Beer is up right after me. The morning is cool, but it feels like it will get hot in a hurry. We follow the rim of these cliffs we’ve camped next to, and at the first junction with a dirt road, find a box of books. Someone has created a little library in the woods, and there’s a note to tell us they are free. It’s the sort of trail magic that would be right up my alley if I weren’t already carrying two books. The morning is spent winding through mountaintops. Thick chaparral switches abruptly to pine forest, then back and back again. Yogi Beer disappears behind me after a bit, and eventually I stop for breakfast at an abandoned dirt road. Halfway through my oatmeal, a hiker arrives. “Hullo, can I join you?” He speaks with a Londoner’s accent and looks to be around my age—a rarity out here. “Yeah, of course. I’m Zigzag.” “Ed. Nice to meet you.” We fall quickly into an easy conversation while I finish my breakfast and he makes tea. Ed tells me about hiking the Te Araroa, a long-distance hike that spans the length of New Zealand: “It’s less maintained, but the days are easier. You get to stay in huts most of the way.” He tells me his trail name is Mr. Tea, and then he tells me why he dislikes trail names: “It’s fine if you’ve done something that deserves a nickname, but I don’t like this forced, everyone-must-have-a-nickname bullocks.” He tells me he’s worried about finishing the trail in time: “I think I waste too much time making breakfast and tea in the morning.” A younger hiker comes by, probably in his early twenties. Strange that I didn’t see either of their tents as I was hiking. I must have been in a trance. He asks us whether a town coming up, Quincy, will be easy to hitch to. Neither of us have any idea. By the time I’ve packed up and start again, I feel I’ve found a good friend in Ed. I hope we run into each other again. As I depart, he starts to brew a second cup of tea and Altitude starts to make breakfast. Most of the morning is a blur. I’m lost in thoughts about my career and trying to decide what’s next. I can’t sustain the high school band director schedule anymore—I don’t like who I was turning into, or how little time I had for things I love. I don’t doubt that I could learn another job and be good at it, but most entry-level jobs won’t pay my bills. Maybe I should go back to school, I think. As wonderful as that sounds, I can’t justify more debt for a job that I’ve had no experience with and that might turn out to be a terrible fit. This circular dreaming and thinking eats up most of the morning with no resolution. On breaks, Yogi Beer passes. When I’m hiking, I pass him. We’ve worked up a jocular conversation going that is broken up in time, sometimes by an hour or two. He’s a fun-loving, easy-going guy, and I feel bad that I initially pulled back from him. I don’t want to believe it was because of his missing eye, but the alternative explanation isn’t much better: I let the judgment of others affect me. That first night at Donner Pass, the group I was with gave him the cold shoulder, and although I tried not to ever be unpleasant to him, I definitely didn’t make myself available in friendship. Now that I’ve gotten to know him a little, I wonder whether if their judgment was based in anything more than appearance. At the last big uphill before a plunge to Belden, we start hiking together. We enter a forest filled with Aspen and lush undergrowth and wildflowers. A creek runs through it. I haven’t seen a forest like this since before Lake Tahoe, maybe even since Yosemite. It’s surprising to find it here, and to realize how much I’ve missed it. We stop for lunch together where the trail crosses another creek. Shortly after I sit down, I realize that there’s a garter snake about a foot from my leg. She’s searching for a way up the bank. She’s harmless and moving in the opposite direction, so I don’t bother to move, I just watch her. A month ago, I would have jumped up with a huge rush of adrenaline, but now that seems like a gross overreaction. I feel completely comfortable with her here. Strange how the wilderness changes us. Yogi and I sit and eat and talk with long pauses between sentences. He tells me about his life in a biker gang, which he left long ago. He casually drops that his ex-wife shot him in the face—that’s how he lost the eye. He doesn’t add a lot of information, just lets it sit there, and I don’t want to pry. He talks about his current long-term girlfriend—a college professor—with genuine tenderness. Whatever rough life he led before, he seems to have left it completely behind.
During the long pauses in our conversation, I notice my respect for him growing. Difficult lives happen because of habits and traits that cause us to self-sabotage, and we usually don’t realize that we ourselves are the cause. If we’re lucky, we might see one of these traits every so often, and if we’re brave we can make an attempt to change it, but change is difficult and making it stick takes discipline and courage. Social pressures aim toward stasis, so the people around us encourage us to stay the same and resist change, even when the same is bad for everyone and the change would be good. Yogi Beer somehow transformed not just one or two of his habits and traits, but what I imagine must be his entire personality. He has left behind a guy in a biker gang who had the sort of relationship that ended with him getting shot in the face, and changed into a caring, friendly guy who has found self-sufficiency and joy in the wilderness. I can only imagine what a feat of will that must have taken. I can also only imagine that being shot in the face and surviving would prove to be a pretty good impetus to make a change. Near the end of our lunch break, I mention something I saw on facebook when I had service last night: Lassen National Park is requiring bear canisters now. It seems that a blonde-colored black bear has been aggressively stealing people’s lunches. In one case he went so far as to pull a backpack off of a hiker’s back! I have to call my wife when I get into town and see if she can send me my bear canister again. (I don’t realize how close I am to Lassen Nat’l Park. It’s only a couple days away, and the canister would never get to me in time). “I’ve got an extra canister in my garage,” Yogi says. “I can have my girlfriend bring it up with her, and you can mail it back when you get to the next town.” He’s finishing his section hike in Belden, where we will arrive this afternoon, and his girlfriend is going to drive up from the town of Paradise, about an hour down the hill. I’m grateful for his offer, grateful for his unfettered trust. Over the past five days we have only spent an hour or two in conversation—I am effectively a stranger still. Eventually we leave lunch and start our climb down the hill. Between the ever-rubbing sores on top of my feet and now the pain in my knees, I have to slow way down. At a promontory I have cell service, so I let Yogi use my phone to call his girlfriend. After that, I tell him not to wait for me anymore. There’s food and beer down below, and I wouldn’t be a good friend if I held a fellow hiker back from that. He swiftly disappears from view. Seven miles of switchbacks. From the aspen forest, to chapparal, to live oak and tons of poison oak. I pass a group of hikers heading up, and they seem exhausted. I must still have a long way to go. My feet are sore, my knees are pinging with every step, but there’s food, and there’s beer, and I can’t stop now. It takes forever, but I finally find the bottom of the switchbacks. A fright train blocks the way. It’s stopped on the tracks and it stretches as far as I can see in both directions. I’m not sure what to do here. It seems like a bad idea to climb under it with a backpack on—what if it starts moving? I decide to climb up the ladder at the end of one car and climb over the train. While I’m up there, I grin and imagine that the train will start moving so that later I can tell the story of how I had to jump off a moving train. Alas, it stays still long after I climb over and hobble away toward Beldentown. I find a small paved road and follow it east, parallel to a broad river. It’s the the Feather River again, this time the north fork. Between me and the river are a number of old, faded tents and big bags of garbage. It reminds me of nothing so much as the homeless encampments of San Francisco and Berkeley. I immediately regret such judgment when I see people packing up their tents. They are aging hippies, with Jerry Garcia beards and flowing Woodstock skirts. And the garbage, I realize, is all contained. Not destitute and rejected, then. It appears I’ve stumbled into the remnants of some sort of music festival. As I approach Beldentown, the bustle increases, but not the hustle. No one is in a hurry, not even those who are packing up. At what appears to be the middle of a long two-story motel, Yogi Beer sips a beer on bench. I drop my pack next to his and wander inside to get one of my own. The entryway goes straight into one end of a dimly lit saloon. It stretches spaciously to my right, with large glass doors ahead that lead out to a balcony overlooking the river. I can see some people here, but my eyes are too unaccustomed to the low light to make out any detail. To my left off the entryway is the small convenience store that I need. I walk in and grab a beer from the cooler, pay, and go out to join Yogi. Even in towns, time passes strangely on a thru-hike. Yogi Beer and I sit in kindred silence, sipping our beers and watching the festival folk pass in and out. Some look like they are checking out of the hotel or their campsites, some look like they’re just wandering, just passing the time. It seems like we’re there for a while, but I haven’t even finished my beer when Yogi Beer’s girlfriend shows up in a small car. He introduces us and she hands me the extra bear canister. I take down his address in my journal and give him my gratitude, promise to send it back at the next post office. And just like that he is gone, another temporary friend in a temporary world. All our relationships are fleeting, and we have such a short time to visit. Grasping on is useless. What time we waste in judgment and fear.
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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