March 2018 Every summer during college, I drove from Decorah, Iowa to my hometown of Irvine, California, a trip which usually took about 36 hours of non-stop driving to complete (let’s not do the math and just assume I spent a lot of that time speeding). I’d come out on I-80 through Nebraska, cut through Colorado on I-76 and I-70 over the Rocky Mountains, underneath the spectacular night sky of deserted Utah, which I usually crossed in the middle of the night, south on I-15 through a corner of Arizona and Las Vegas, Nevada, and finally into the California desert, until finally I would cross over Cajon pass and the air would change from dry desert heat to cool ocean breezes, and it was as if a rind that had crusted to me over the brutal winter and stiflingly humid summer would just dissolve and fall away. That sigh of relaxation was always the moment when I knew I was home. At the time I had no idea how much more that dividing line would come to feel like home, for it’s at Cajon Pass that the PCT comes down from the mountains and crosses under Interstate 15. I’m currently north of Cajon pass, 112 miles by trail at the town of Agua Dulce, and it feels just as much like home. This winding line that stretches from Mexico to Canada is where I feel most relaxed, most alive. I turn down the road and park my car next to Hiker Heaven, that sanctuary provided by trail angels Donna and Jeff Saufley, and memories come flooding in. A hiker comes out through the gate and walks down the road toward the town. It’s March—too early for a thru-hiker to be this far north. He’ll be at the Sierras in a week, ten days if he really takes his time, and then he’ll have to wait two months for the snows to melt off. Maybe he’s just hiking a section, like me. I go in the gate to track down one of the Saufleys and ask if it’s okay to park my car here for a week. There are five dogs in the yard, all of whom are running around me and barking wildly, and I call out through the open garage, but no one seems to be around. I could wait, but I’m eager to get hiking. I’m sure it will be fine. I leave the way I came. The hike out of Agua Dulce starts with a long road walk, and it quickly reminds me how much I hate road walking. It makes me feel like I can’t walk quite right, and my heavy pack rubs against me uncomfortably. Maybe it's not the road, I worry. Has my body forgotten how to hike? Soon enough I’m on a dirt road, and then a single track turns off at a PCT emblem. From here, I’m headed about sixty miles north to Hikertown, a property just south of the LA Aqueduct and the Tehachapi mountains. This is one of the sections I had to skip in 2016, first because of an extreme heat wave, and later, when I flipped back to make it up, because of the Sand Fire. It has been almost two years since my hike, and though I’ve been on several other backpacking trips in that time, this is my first time back on the PCT. I start through a valley that quickly reminds me how much of California is blessedly undeveloped. My first climb is through classic desert chapparal. The mountains are dry and sandy, barely held together by yucca plants, shrubs, and small grasses. It’s not a textbook definition of wilderness, but it’ll do. Already I can feel myself slipping out of my daily problems and into the bigger picture. The past two years have been a struggle, no denying it. Any beliefs I had that the PCT would change my life were quickly put to rest by reality. My first week back it became clear that my slower pace couldn’t keep up with life around me. As much as I tried to be deliberate and mindful with everything I did, I often found myself in an uncomfortable rush. At a choir rehearsal, I tried to make smalltalk with the people around me, but was surprised at how uncomfortable people became when I paused to consider what they said and how to respond thoughtfully. They would usually find some excuse to turn their attention elsewhere. I found myself surprised by how often people avoided eye contact. When I mentioned that I had just hiked from Mexico to Canada, I was greeted with bored stares. Crowds were the absolute worst. We went to Disneyland for a surprise birthday party for one of my wife’s friends less than a month after I returned home, and at the end of the first hour I was so overstimulated and drained that I nearly broke down. What finally saved me was the open sky and the trees. I spent much of the rest of the day gazing at clouds and watching the trees sway in the wind, and that allowed me to filter out the constant earworms and chatter of a society afraid of its own thoughts. The first crest gives me a view back toward Agua Dulce and the northern reaches of the San Gabriel mountains. I love these little towns, surrounded by wild lands on all sides. It reminds me that civilization is the exception, not the rule, and that I usually don’t have to travel far to be away from it all. The top of this ridge is a little greener, and has a few big cottonwoods for a shade break, where I stop to eat lunch. The other side of the ridge has a little more shade and I make the descent easily, then climb to another ridge and descend again to cross a road. It is a warm day, but not overly so. I am in the desert in March, after all. It’s only afternoon, but I’ve already made my mileage for the day, so I better stop soon. I find a sandy campsite tucked away from the trail by bushy chapparal that provides some shade. I set up camp, then sit and read for a long while. My mind is jumpy, but I manage to get in a few chapters of The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It’s about a sanitorium in the Swiss Alps where rich Europeans are being treated for tuberculosis (but one gets the feeling that many of the patients, the main character included, do not actually have the disease). The novel is a satiric parable that calls attention to the rot and moral corruption of bourgeois society, but also seems to scold the main character for his cowardly avoidance of the world. In the morning I sleep in as late as I can stand it. It feels good to sleep outside again. I can already feel my mind slowing down, taking in details that I wasn’t able to notice yesterday, like the shape of the breeze and the thickness of the sunlight. My watch says 7:30. I need to take my time; I gave myself 5 days to hike only 63 miles. I linger around camp until 10, when I can’t stand it anymore and pack up to start hiking. When I first came home from the trail, avoidance was my modus operandi. I mourned the trail as if it were a deceased friend, and I wanted nothing more than to find a way to live outside full-time. I looked for a job, but nothing interested me. I refused to go back to teaching and the few outdoor jobs I could find were low-paying and required experience I didn’t have. Switching careers is difficult, I learned—the best paying jobs nearly always require education, training, and experience, and I was trying to move from a career in which I had built up a track record into a career where I was short on all three. To effectively make the switch, I would have to either pay for the education and training, or accept an entry-level job to get the experience. Easy for someone in their early twenties, perhaps, but the tradeoffs I would have to make in my late thirties were too dear. My wife and I had already put off having kids, and we felt woefully behind in saving for retirement. Could I add new debts and another five years before having kids? Some decisions were made easier: shortly after I started my job search, our landlords told us they wanted to move back into the house; we had 60 days to vacate. We already wanted to move back to the SF Bay Area, so we moved in with Lindsey’s parents while I continued my job search. I eventually accepted a job offer to be the executive director of a symphony orchestra in the south bay. It was a part-time position that didn’t come with a lot of money, but it would allow me more freedom. We found a small apartment in Fremont that we could just barely afford and moved in. The first day on the job, I worked with the bookkeeper to get an understanding of our finances, and I was appalled to find that we had $3000 in the bank and a $35,000 payroll coming up in two weeks. I was way over my head. The next, much bigger hit came just a few days after our move, when my dog of 8 years suddenly became sick. We spent a long night at the Animal ER waiting for test results. The veterinarian told us it was a ruptured spleen due to a cluster of tumors. I held my beloved dog and sobbed as we put him down. For the next several months, I had no interest in being part of the world. I did what I could to keep the symphony alive and set them on a better path, but I could see it wasn’t sustainable without major changes, and the board wasn’t ready to make them. I started looking for another job, but my heart wasn’t in it. My heart wasn’t in anything. I binge-watched episodes of The Office and surfed the internet mindlessly. I drank too much and ate garbage. Anything to distract me from the pain and the claustrophobia of my apartment walls. All I wanted was to get back out into the wild. The only time I felt okay was on the short backpacking trips I was able to wrest away from the world’s hold on me, but from the second I got back in the car, I would dread the return to civilization. Something has to change, I told myself again and again. I can’t continue to live like this. Today’s hike is much the same as yesterday, lots of brush and chapparal, hot weather, sandy trail. But it feels good to walk. Somehow, I can face these memories a little easier with open sky above me and dirt below. I have a view of the Bouquet Reservoir to my left, and an isolated canyon to walk through on my right. I’m all alone out here, with no walls to bind me and no people to conform with. Just me and miles of beautiful trail. In the afternoon I cross a road and stop at the Green Valley Fire Station to refill my water. I sit at a picnic table in a nearby gazebo and eat a late lunch. Casa de Luna, a trail angel’s home and a famous stop for PCT hikers, is just a couple miles down the road in the town of Green Valley. I briefly consider making the side trip since I missed it the first time, but I’d rather be outside. Besides, it’s early season, they might not be set up to take hikers yet, and there probably wouldn’t be any other hikers there anyway. It’s a hot, hard climb up to the ridge after lunch. At the top, there’s cell service, so I call my wife and give her an update. I’ll probably set up camp soon, I tell her. I’ve already done twelve miles. As it turns out, there’s not much in the way of a good campsite for a long while, and I end up hiking into the dark. It’s fine. I can always take my time tomorrow, maybe even take a nap in the shade. I enter a burned area, every tree and bush completely destroyed and only a handful of small plants beginning to regrow. The Powerhouse fire. In 2016, this area was closed, and the PCT diverted along a 12-mile road walk. Temperatures were supposed to reach 115, and possibly even 120 along the road and the water report was reporting a rapidly diminishing trickle among the widely dispersed sources. I had planned to come back a few weeks later when the temperature dropped back to a more reasonable 100 degrees, but then the enormous Sand Fire ruined those plans. The moon is just a few days before full and casts a silver sheen on the crumbly white granite. Black husks stick out of the ground like tombstones, a graveyard memorialized by the bodies of the deceased themselves. A rock turns underfoot and my knee gives a painful twinge. As much as I enjoy hiking long miles, my body is no longer adapted to it—it’s time to find a place to camp. At the bottom of the hill I cross another road and make a short climb to a hilltop. I scan the ground for scorpions with my headlamp, then stretch out my groundcloth and sleeping bag for a nice rest with nothing between me and the stars. I haven’t slept this well in ages. It’s not a continuous sleep, but I wake up rested and free from the general fogginess that has started every day that I woke in a bed. Since I don’t have a tent to climb out of, I decide to stay in my sleeping bag while I make breakfast. From my perch on this hill I can see down to the road and much of the trail. A man and a woman are hiking up without any daypacks, probably locals just out for their morning exercise. They have a border collie with them who comes to say hello and sniff the nearby bushes. Before they get to me there’s a moment where I wonder how they’ll perceive me. Man of the earth or dirtbag? Adventurer or hobo? Their choice will say more about them than about me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care. It just means that I see the sickness in a society that relegates some people to a less human status. They greet me with a hearty good morning and stop to chat. Definitely an adventurer, then. “Are you thru-hiking?” “Not exactly,” I say. “I’m making up a section that I had to skip when I did my thru-hike a couple years ago.” There’s sometimes a mindset that section hiking is inferior thru-hiking. I don’t believe that, but for some reason I feel the need to qualify myself as a thru-hiker in case its a belief that they have. Status and ego, my oldest friends. You’re never quite gone, are you? The hikers are friendly and interested, and when they leave I find myself enlivened. I just sit and take in the scorched desert for a while, feeling balanced between solitude and society. Even stripped bare, the landscape has a beauty. It will return. Parting ways with temporary friends was once painful. It felt like something was wrong with me, a reminder of loneliness. It’s almost a surprise when I realize that these temporary friendships now enrich my solitude, as my natural solitude enriches my friendships. All friendships are temporary, like everything else in this world, like the fire scars around me, as well as the shrubs and grasses that will eventually cover over these scars. All I can do is enjoy what is here, now, and let it inform what comes next. Time to hit the trail. The morning climb is barren, with little washboard ripples in the dirt where unfettered erosion has begun to take hold. Given time, these ripples will turn to furrows and trenches and dump big volumes of mud and debris below. In the San Gabriel mountains, fires like these have led to the periodic mudslides that destroy parts of Los Angeles every decade or so, but these mountains empty into sparser areas, so even a massive mudslide is unlikely to cause much outcry. The climb brings me up over 5000 ft of elevation and past the burn zone. Creosote, mesquite, and oak provide a brushy landscape, but it’s a dry, exposed hike and the sun is merciless. I stop at the 500-mile marker. Guthooks tells me I’m at mile 501.8. Huh. There’s something that feels good about collecting this mile marker that I missed the first time. More ego? I still haven’t finished the trail up to here, though. There’s that fire closure between Whitewater and Big Bear. Sometime soon. I carry on through a winding labyrinth of shoulder-high brush. What finally got me out of my post-trail depression was a long daily walk. There was a big lake near our house, and when the apartment started to feel too small and my job too overwhelming and all the screens too soul-sucking, I’d go walk around it for an hour or two. There were ducks, Canadian geese, spoonbills, all sorts of birds. And there were trees. Some days I’d just sit on a bench and watch the trees sway in the wind for an hour or more. On my walk back home, I noticed the trees close to my house, and one day I thought, there’s wilderness here too. I had simply failed to notice. There was a dog park, too, and it made me happy to see all those dogs as I walked by. All that love that I had for my dog now had somewhere to go, and that gave me some peace. At first I went out every few days, but when my wife noticed how different it made me, she convinced me it needed to be part of my daily routine. Day by day, I grew to reclaim my sense of control. I can hear people yelling a little ways down the mountain. I stop to see if they’re okay, but it appears they’re just bushwhacking and calling back and forth to one another. I take a break in the shade of a tree and read my book for a long while. My knee is bothering me today. Another backpacker comes by; I think it’s the same guy that was leaving Hiker Heaven when I arrived. We talk for a bit about the upcoming water cisterns and he asks me if I’ve seen another hiker who left Casa de Luna before him. I haven’t, so he pushes on to try to catch up. Shortly after, I follow him down the trail. Temporary friends. I wonder how Roadside is doing. We texted back and forth a few times in the weeks after the trail, but just sort of stopped. He never ended up going to Vegas, he told me, just fell back into old habits sitting at home. It’s so easy to do. I texted him on holidays for a couple of years, and at first he would always text back, but eventually even that stopped. I wonder how he’s doing. I catch up to the other backpacker at the cistern. He’s found his friend, and after I get some water, we all hike to an empty campground nearby. We set up our tents and gather together to eat dinner and get to know one another. Even though I know I’ll never see them after tonight, it’s good to have company. There’s nothing wrong with temporary. It’s all temporary. When I awake, there are two flat spots in the grass where my new friends had been camped. I make breakfast and read my book, just passing the time. The last two days I’ve blown my planned mileage away, unable to sit still for more than an hour or two. Still, an hour or two of sitting gives me time to see the restlessness of my mind: the cravings, the aversions, the delusions and fantasies. The roots of all suffering. Sitting allows me to see them, to recognize them and name them, but it’s the walking that stills them. When I walk, I feel sufficient. I pack up and walk. It seems to me that there’s no reason to force myself to sit longer or walk slower than what feels right. I’ll finish this section a day early, but three days of the right pace is better than four days of the wrong one. The freedom to choose what is most right for me is part of why I come out here, away from the pressures of society. In a way, I realize, backpacking is my meditation practice. I find my stillness, that core of who I am and what I value, by separating myself from society for a time. But the real practice is whether I can hold onto that and live it when I return to the civilized world. It’s not a matter of stubbornly clinging to my freedoms, but of recognizing the freedom in my choice of responsibilities. For much of my life I felt resentment at many of the little jobs that collect as a result of these responsibilities. My thru-hike allowed me to escape from all those little jobs, and the return to society brought them all crashing back. I was unprepared, and it felt like I had lost my freedom. I was serious about bringing that sense of wilderness back into the world, but I found it difficult amongst all of the expectations and daily pressures that built up: emails, meetings, cleaning the house. I saw all of these as independent and separate from the joy-bringing aspects of life: the chance to make a difference in the world, the opportunities to experience the world, the connections to be made with other people (whether short-term temporary friends or long-term temporary friends, because we’re all temporary). During my walks around the lake, I started to notice how all these things are connected. The emails and meetings were intertwined with making a difference in the world. A certain level of cleanliness in the house was intertwined with my mental health, and therefore with my relationships with my wife and other people. The jobs were part of the choice, and therefore, part of the freedom. And here was the best part: I could choose at what level I wanted to engage. I got out of teaching because the high school band director job took up an overwhelming amount of time, but I enjoyed teaching, and I loved the students. I didn’t enjoy my job at the symphony because I felt like the difference I was making was too small compared to the grief of working with people I didn’t like. So I started looking for a job teaching middle school, and pretty soon I found one. A position opened up in the middle of the school year in Napa, and I took it. It was a perfect location: close to Lindsey’s parents; close enough to San Francisco that we could into the city for the culture and the food, but in a small enough community that we weren’t surrounded by track homes or high rises. The job was difficult, but for the first time I felt like the difference I made was commensurate with the time spent. And now I was on spring break, hiking in the desert. That sort of free time, while it wasn’t what attracted me to teaching, was a perk that I had missed over the past year and certainly made it easier to come back. I had returned to a similar job to what I had before the PCT, in a similar community, and yet everything has changed. I feel in control of my life, for the first time. The trail starts a steep descent, and my knee flares up with a sharp pain. I take a long break with my book under some huge Live Oak trees, then try again. It’s still bad, but smaller steps seem to help. Joseph Campbell, the mythology scholar, points out a difference between Japanese and Chinese concepts of freedom. In Chinese, the ideogram represents freedom from social strictures. That is what I was seeking, and yet I was unwilling to destroy the social bonds from which those structures arise. The trail was a reprieve, but like everything in this world, it was only temporary. The Japanese ideogram, on the other hand, represents freedom within the social structure. Given the necessity and inevitability of human interrelatedness, the Japanese ideal of freedom asks us to choose the responsibilities and strictures with our whole heart, in service of those around us. It’s a balancing act I have yet to master, but one that has begun to allow me some freedom from the suffering I have so long felt in society’s clutches. At the same time, it is clear that society is sick. A focus on economic growth and corporate profits above human and environmental well-being is not sustainable. We cannot crack open the crust of the earth for oil and expect that we won’t pay consequences. Even a simple subway sandwich is full of consequences, as I realized in Chester when I tried to think it through from beginning to end. If we pretend that the ingredients appear without human labor and chemical fertilizer, or that the plastics and paper napkins disappear after we are done, we are living in delusion, and we are bound to suffer for it. And so I also live with that responsibility, and try to remember the source and ultimate end of what passes through my hands. I may no longer have freedom in the Chinese sense of the word, but in the Japanese sense perhaps I am freer than ever, for I choose those responsibilities whole-heartedly, free of resentment, free of guilt, and free of delusion. The landscape finally begins to level out onto a flat plain. The Tehachapi mountains loom to the North, and I remember the heat and fatigue I felt when I climbed them two years ago with blister-laden feet. And night-hiking along the LA aqueduct in the basin before it, when I almost got hit by that truck, and the bulls that snorted and stared me down in the night. All that fear, all that pain. It was all so temporary, and now I’m almost surprised to find that I remember it fondly. Maybe not so surprised. Even at the time, I knew it would make a good story some day. As I hike down the last bit of road to my finish line at Hikertown, I give one last look to the field of wild grasses where I once watched a coyote in the sunset and she watched me. I’m filled with a sense of loss, but also a deep love for the moment and the memory. These moments are fleeting, ever-changing, and impossible to hold onto, but if we stay present and pay attention, they are magic. They’re only magic if we pay attention. Afterword I eventually finished the remaining sections of the trail: Seiad Valley to Callahan’s Lodge in the summer of 2018, and Whitewater to Big Bear with my friends James and Konstantin the following January. Eventually I even finished the eight-mile section in Washington between Tunnel Falls and Stevens Pass, where Roadside and I took a side trail. I’m not a purist by any means, I just wanted to see what I had missed. I still send Roadside a Christmas card every year, but I have no idea whether he gets them. Since he lives in Canada, the card doesn’t get returned if he’s moved. I hope he’s doing well. Maybe we’ll connect again some day, but even if we don’t, I’m grateful for his friendship and quiet steadfastness on the trail. In 2019, my wife and I had a beautiful baby girl. I can’t prove it, but I think I am a better parent than I would have been if I had never hiked the PCT. I hope someday she has the opportunity to read this and get to know her father a little better. And Paige, if you want to hike the PCT someday, I would be proud to be your hiking partner. No pressure, though. Thanks for reading, everyone! This is the end.
1 Comment
Karma PCT
6/22/2020 01:54:41 am
Thank you so much. What a fabulous journal, and what a gifted writer you are! I appreciate your taking the time to look back on your journey and share it with the world. Best of luck to you going forward -- one step at a time! :)
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Nick is a teacher, writer, and amateur adventurer. Archives
June 2020
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