August 31, 2016 Mile 1629.9-1657.5 27.6 Miles 4am. Nothing woke me up, I just can’t sleep anymore. I could get up and hike, I guess. Or I could just lie here. I think I’ll just lie here. My mind wanders over all the usual subjects—what should I do with my life after I get back from the trail? What habits do I want to change, and how? What’s on my bucket list? How can I keep from falling back into mindless consumption, stuck-insideness, and the busy trap? What makes me me? There are no real conclusions, but the wandering isn’t unpleasant. My sleeping bag is cozy and soft, and the air is just cool enough to make me grateful for how warmly I’m wrapped up. When my alarm goes off at 5, I’m ready. I pack up as quietly as I can—which isn’t all that quiet—so I won’t disturb Roadside, who is snoring happily in his red and grey tent. Just as I’m finishing up, my headlamp goes out. So now I have to dig back through my pack to find the drybag that has the spare batteries. An eternity and a million noisy rustles later, I finally pull out the right drybag. I find the batteries—two CR2032s, each about the size of a quarter. They are sealed inside hard, tight plastic, and neither fingers nor teeth can find any purchase to tear them asunder. Roadside isn’t snoring anymore, and I’m self-conscious about the noise I’m making, so I decide to just hike in the dark, at least until I’m far enough away to dig through my pack again for my pocketknife without disturbing Roadside any more than I already have. I hike a short ways, then—finally—find my knife and cut into the package to retrieve the batteries. It’s a matter of trial and error before I get them in the right way, and by this time it’s almost light enough to hike without the headlamp. Note to self: work out a better system for replacing batteries. There are a few more short uphills left along this ridge, but then it’s a long steady downhill. I practice my hundred mindful breaths several times in a row, and it feels like I’m floating down a river. The light is ambient when it begins to filter in through a gauzy green canopy. There are still conifers here, but the dominant lighteater in this forest is the broad leaf. I recognize poison oak among the rest of the lettuce here, and I give it a wide berth. Though still twenty miles away, the Klamath river already has me in its lazy grasp; it just feels like a river valley here. I begin to encounter southbounders every half mile or so. Each of them has a different story about the fire ahead. One tells me they’re getting ready to close the trail north of town, another that it’s been closed since yesterday, a third says that they’re recommending hikers don’t go through, but that we can make our own choice. This last hiker adds that it’s pretty damn smoky up there. It’s hard to know which story to believe. I don’t want to be goal-blind, but I also really want to finish California. I’ve been looking forward to the California/Oregon border for a while, both for the pride of finishing the state, and less nobly, for the pride of posting a selfie with the border sign and the accolades that will come when I post it to instagram. I hate to admit such base motives to myself, but I’m a gold-star junkie and I know it. Miles and miles of downhill, all in lazy luminous green. It continues endlessly without the slightest indication of forward progress. At least it’s a pleasant purgatory. I’ve given up any expectation of change when I am spilled out of the forest onto a dirt road. A woman calls down to me from her garden on a hill to tell me her version of the upcoming fire. Abandon all hope, she suggests. She’s so adamant, in fact, that I get the feeling that she would only be happy if I were to sit down in the dirt right there, perhaps to cry and gnash my teeth. I thank her for the information and plod onward. The town of Seiad Valley is right there, across the river. The map tells me I need to cut east for a few miles, cross a bridge, and then back west for a few more miles. 6.4 miles total. But I can see the town. It’s. Right. There. As I walk toward the Klamath River, I scan for a place to cross. It’s a wide river, but it doesn’t look particularly deep. I’m hoping there will be a shortcut down this bank and up the other. If there’s a use trail, I’ll probably take it. The problem is, I don’t see one. Which means that either the river is too deep to cross here or I’d be crossing private property on one side of the river or the other. A few too many hikers do that, and townspeople are going to be pissed at all of us, just like that hotel manager almost didn’t give me a room because of other hikers who left a mess. The towns and trail angels have been kind to me because of hikers who came before, and I won’t be the one to break that chain of trust. No use trail appears, so I follow the road to the east. I really hate road walking. I can hike 25 miles on a trail and feel nothing but a little tired at the end of it, but if I have to walk a quarter mile on asphalt, everything starts to ache, from the soles of my feet through my knees and hips up to my neck and shoulders. We think of our bodies as a collection of distinct parts, and forget how interconnected it is until something goes wrong. A tension in one part of the body expresses itself everywhere in subtle changes. Even more common is to forget the interconnection between our mental systems and our physical systems. We notice the big overlaps, like the way hunger or alcohol affect our mind, but we rarely notice the more subtle distinctions, such as the way that the speed of our body affects our stress levels. The road walk gives me a dull headache and puts a sharp edge on my hunger. I cross over the Klamath on a truss bridge and work my way back west up a main highway. There’s not a lot of space along the side of the road here, but the cars are few and far between. Later I’ll learn that they’ve closed off a part of the highway. Many of the properties have cardboard and wood signs that say “No Monument” or “Stop the Cascade-Siskiyou Monument.” I arrive at the town of Seiad Valley, which is really just a pit stop. There’s a small campground that can fit about ten trailers or RVs (PCT hikers, camp on the lawn), and a building that serves as general store and restaurant. There’s another “No Monument” sign in the window of the store, and the restaurant advertises “Home of the Seiad Challenge”—if I can finish 5 of their giant pancakes, my meal is free. I’m certain I won’t be able to finish, but I’m looking forward to stuffing myself in the morning. Inside the store, a man is talking to the cashier, a woman, in a manner that makes me thing that he is probably the owner of the place. I look around while I wait for them to finish their conversation. It’s not like most convenience stores that have every space crammed with consumer goods and brightly displayed. The store is dimly lit, with bare cement floors and a lot of empty space, even in the coolers. A poster inside the front door encourages people to snitch on pot growers, and clothing racks and displays sell official “State of Jefferson” merchandise in solid green with two large “X”s emblazoned across them. I pick up a bag of Salt and Vinegar potato chips, a pint of Blue Bunny black walnut ice cream, and a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Lunch. I should eat better, I suppose, but what’s the fun of hiking 25 miles a day if you can’t eat some junk food? The owner—I’m sure he’s the owner now—and the cashier finish their conversation and I ask for my resupply and check out. The cashier gives me the wifi password and tells me there’s a picnic table and bathroom around the side for hikers. On my way outside, a man in a uniform is posting something on the door. “You hiking the PCT?” he asks. “Yeah.” “Toward Oregon?” “Yeah.” “We just had to close it for the fires. You should try to hitch out today, they might close the road, too.” “Well, shit. Okay, thanks for the info.” As I carry my junk food to the picnic table I start to think about what to do next, but then I decide I can stress about it after lunch. First, I have some calories to consume. In the second hour, we only see two cars, and neither of them stops. Roadside and I talk like thru-hikers do, short bursts of conversation surrounded by long, easy silences. He complains about the difficulties he’s had with hitching. Sometimes it’s easy, he says, but mostly people don’t want to stop because his skin is dark. I had assumed he was latino, but he tells me he’s a Native American from Alberta, Canada. I am white, and have rarely had trouble finding a hitch before now. It’s a side of white privilege that I hadn’t considered before.
The third hour is a little better, but the two cars that stop are both going somewhere else. Eventually it’s dark, and we’re tired of sitting on the asphalt, so we set up our tents on the campground lawn and chat for a while over beers. The lawn is springy. It feels like a mattress compared to the hard dirt and rocks I’ve been sitting and sleeping on for months. We stay up talking and drinking beeer past hiker midnight (9pm) and finally climb in to our tents a little drunk.
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 |