0 Miles Chester, CA A zero day is a vacation from a vacation. Done right, it requires a level of sloth that borders on mortal sin. Thus I find myself, at noon, still in my hotel room watching videos on the spotty wifi and snacking on the remains of the continental breakfast (more like three of them) that I have smuggled back to my room. It’s not like I’ve truly done nothing—my gear has required cleaning and no amount of scrubbing in the shower can get all the dirt off my feet. I’ve just done it all very slowly, with long internet breaks in between. But I have many chores to do today, and breakfast pastries and fruit will only go so far toward assuaging my hunger. Making decisions in towns is surprisingly difficult on trail. Simple decisions become life-or-death dilemmas. Part of the problem is the desire to minimize walking. My pulverized feet hate nothing right now more than cement and asphalt. Even the thinly carpeted floors of my hotel room are painful against my soles. So my brain tries to calculate the shortest, most efficient route to get all my town chores done in the least distance possible. I can’t figure it out. There’s no reason this should be so difficult, but it is. It’s like I’m thinking through a haze, like a marijuana high (Later, I will realize that this is probably the result of dehydration. My muscles and tissues are still screaming for water as they repair themselves, but I’m not drinking anywhere close to the same amount as when I’m hiking, and I’m drinking coffee, a diarrhetic, on top of it all). Finally I decide to start with lunch. I walk a quarter mile in the wrong direction. That’s how hazy my thinking is. The whole town is arranged along one street, and I go the wrong way. Along the way I pass the laundromat, where Ed (Mr. Tea) and Altitude are sitting on a bench outside. Ed is just down the hall from me at the Best Western, and I offer Altitude the other bed in my room so he doesn’t have to camp on the church lawn tonight. We make plans to get dinner together. Have either of them seen a shoe store anywhere in town? They haven’t. I go back the other direction, another half mile of pavement walking on bruised feet, and find the Thirsty Trout. I order a veggie burger and a beer. There is one other person eating here, but he leaves soon after I arrive. It is just me, the bartender, and the owner. The TV is silently broadcasting olympic women’s volleyball. The owner is an older lady, and she also serves as the cook. She pops in and out to see what’s happening with the game. I stick around for a couple hours, sipping a couple beers and reading my book, but mostly chatting with the bartener. She’s a woman in her mid-twenties, and she tells me working her last day here before she moves away for college. She is excited to move, but she and the owner enjoy each other and each is sad she is leaving. They are having a going away party for her this evening with a live band, to which they invite me. I am surprised at the invite since I look like I’ve been sleeping in an ally somewhere, and probably smell like it too—I’ve had a shower, but I haven’t done laundry yet, so I’m still wearing a layer of dirt and sweat several days thick. I’m grateful for the warmth with which they’ve received me and I tell them I might come by later, but I don’t plan on it. I struggle to socialize in groups of people even when I know them. Add a dash of trail brain, and the night would be a series of blank stares and awkward silences.
I run into Altitude on the way back to the hotel and let him in to take a shower while I take my stuff to do laundry. The laundromat is playing Mahler’s 5th symphony, an unusual selection for any laundromat and especially unexpected in this small town. I grew up enjoying classical music, and grew to love it more as I got better at the trumpet through high school, but it was always peripheral for me. Mahler’s 5th is the piece that put classical music in the center of my listening identity. It was dramatic, violent music, the heavy metal of the symphonic world. It didn’t hurt that it started with a dark trumpet fanfare before it launched into a funeral march. I started my laundry and sat at a picnic table out front in my rain pants, listening to classical music and reading my book. An enjoyable way to spend the afternoon. A couple hours later, with everything clean, I meet up with Ed and Altitude for dinner at a pizza joint. We order a pitcher of beer and a pizza each. It’s a busy place for a Thursday night. We fall into the easy conversation of people who have been through the same experiences, met a lot of the same people, have the same goals to look forward to. Despite our different ages and backgrounds, the trail has brought us together. After a while, Ed starts to worry about finishing the trail. We go through the math together, using the calculators on our phones. We have only 45 days left until the end of September, and that with no zeros, that means 29 miles a day. A freak snowstorm near the end of September, and our hike would be over. There’s the possibility that we might not get major snow until October, but that’s a risky move. Ed explains how we could get up to Hart’s Pass (the northernmost accessible point of the PCT on this side of the Canadian border). He wants us to join him in flipping. I’m not ready. He’s right about it all, but it doesn’t feel right to me, at least not yet. I have imagined my way all the way to Canada so many times, that to head up there now would be like opening my Christmas presents early. The rest of the trip would be a bit of a letdown, and then I’d finish my trip here in Chester. It’s a great little town, don’t get me wrong, but it would be really difficult to see it as a finish line of any sort. I suggest flipping at Castella. It’s right along Interstate 5, so we could easily find transportation to Washington and back home after the trail, Castle Crags State Park would provide a scenic finish line, and we’d get to spend our last few days looking at Mt. Shasta. It’s only about a hundred miles away, so we’re only delaying by 4 to 5 days. The new plan is agreeable. We toast. To Castella! After all this isolation, I finally have a trail family. I imagine us laughing and eating meals together, sharing conversations on the trail and hiking separately, too. I feel the relief of knowing that I’ll have people to camp with, that we can face the bumps in the night together. By the time we finish our pizzas and our second pitcher of beer, we’re all in a fantastic mood with more than a little buzz. We head back to the hotel to enjoy the jacuzzi before it closes. Naturally, a swimsuit has no place in a lightweight hiker’s backpack. Skinny dipping isn’t an option here, so we each improvise our own swimsuit out of our trail clothes. It’s all quick-dry clothing, anyway. We smuggle some more beer in plastic hotel cups and continue our planning, dreaming about the trail ahead. A group of five, possibly a family, shows up for a little while, and we talk with them, but thruhiker brains work at a different speed so the long silences become a bit awkward and the conversation dies. They move off to the pool, and then to a grassy area beyond it where they have some food. Ed is agog at a pretty twenty-something asian girl in a black bikini. We rib him a bit and try to get him to go talk to her. We’re a little drunk, and it seems like he’s going to work up the courage for a minute, but the moment passes and the next thing we know a security guard is telling us that the pool is closing. We go back to our rooms and Altitude and I channel-surf the TV for a little bit before bed. In my stiflingly soft bed, in this stuffy room, I just can’t wait to get out into the open air again and camp with my friends. I have a trail family!
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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