Month: April 2018

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PCT Day 6 – Shouldn’t I be Doing Something?

Zero in Julian, no hiking.

There’s a strange restless energy inside me, flighty birds alight in my chest, skittering lizards are my legs. Never a skilled waiter, five days of walking seems to have obliterated the skill of calmness completely.

All day I stand, sit, give up my chair at the hiker table behind Carmen’s when another person arrives. After breakfast there is a period of socializing back around the table, the only place in Julian where thru hikers can coalesce without attracting the bald stares of tourists. It’s Easter Sunday and Julian Main Street is filled with families driven up from the big cities for a quiet day in a quaint town. When the talk around the table finally turns into fear mongering and misinformation about the trail, I make my break.

Down the street for trail food. To a park to write, email and call family. And when finally finally my absence from the hiker table is noted and texts are sent, I return to the comfortable company and limbo that is the back table at Carmen’s.

Tomorrow we hitch from Julian and hike from Scissors and who knows what the trail will bring us next. My head and heart are a circus, anticipating the newness and novelty of whatever is to come.

Masshole, our ride from Sissors Crossing, and general hiking guru.

Irish Tony, kind and hilarious, like the uncle at the party with all the best jokes.

Marbles, cool as a cucumber and provider of free weed.

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PCT Day 5 – Trail Names

Mile 64 to Sissors Crossing (mile 77) then a hitch into Julian

We rush rush rush down out of the lowland desert hills into the capital D Desert where even in the last day of March it’s hot. A sort of desperate heat, the kind humans aren’t designed for. In this baking valley floor with it’s menagerie of twisted brittle plants, it feels as though nothing is actually meant to live here. The high thin clouds have been coming and going over the sun all day, as mercurial in nature in our ability to decide if and where we’re going into town. It’s just thirteen miles from camp to Sissors Crossing, and if we can get to Sissors by early afternoon we’ll have earned ourselves a precious nero (a day of low milage, typically less than a half day hiking) in addition to our zero (day of no hiking) tomorrow. At Sissors we’ll hitch into Julian. Or maybe we’ll hitch four miles in the other direction and stay at the Stagecoach RV park. Or maybe we’ll hang out under the bridge where we stumble upon the first trail magic we’ve encountered. Finally we end up in downtown Julian surrounded by other hikers at Carmen’s, talking about the only thing hikers ever want to talk about: hiking.

I find myself sitting next to a man who self describes as a “mystic, telepathic energy healer” and I cannot tell if he’s just messing with me or if that’s his real life. We trade names and he informs me that Kara is too hard of a name to pronounce and then works in vain to give me a trail name – which is a sort of nickname that folks use on the tail in lieu of their real names.

At 29 I have conflicting feelings around trail names. On the one hand they’re largely innocuous, fun and often funny, and can be used to preserve ones anonymity if that’s you’re thing. But also, I’m not sure I need or want a different persona for hiking. Maybe it’s a product of growing up and becoming more comfortable with who I am. Or perhaps as a person who has never been conducive to being given nicknames I’ve never grown comfortable with the practice personally.

However, as this drunken stranger who knows nothing more about me than my name – which he doesn’t even like, tries to rename me, I find myself growing defensive over my name for perhaps the first time in my life. When I first heard about the PCT I had such a strong desire for my own trail name, and I’m not ruling out the possibility of adopting one in the future. But I like the feeling of being someone who is strong enough to propose, plan, and tackle the PCT, just me, no alter ego attached.

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PCT Day 4 – Little by Little

Mount Laguna (mile 41) to mile 64

The miles out of Mount Laguna feel hard. Or rather, obligatory. Uninspiring. Nothing is really wrong, but on day four tiredness has begun to creep into my legs and this early in the morning the endorphins from hiking haven’t had the chance to elevate my mood beyond it’s normal morning calm. It’s certainly not reason for alarm, just the reality of big goals.

How can I best say this. I once read that every overnight success is actually five years in the making. I may be bastardizing that quote, but I’m writing this from the side of a mountain hiding from the afternoon heat in the shade of a rock, so I’ll kindly ask you to cut me a break. I love the sentiment behind that idea. In that, it’s so easy to look at someone else’s achievement and fill in the fantasy of how they got there with a nicely paved road to the top. But that’s never the reality of the process, is it?

Like any big goal in life, there are sure to be moments of elation and joy, breakthroughs and beauty. Just as there will be crushing lows and challenges; days that end in tears and stories you’ll only tell after the passage of years have dulled the sharp edges that cut so deep. These are the memories that we celebrate or commiserate over, but I’ve found, and continue to find, that the highs and lows are greatly outnumbered by the mundane doing of a task.

This is exactly what I’m walking through today. The steps one must take day upon day in order to move oneself incrementally closer to the finish line. It just so happens to be that my steps towards the finish line are quite literal. So today, as I’m sure many days in the future, I work to be content with the simple act of walking. To be grateful to live in a body that can do these things I ask of it, in a part of the world where thru hiking is even possible. I work to be happy with knowing that I’m grinding down this hike little by little, and I try not to think too far in the future lest I totally overwhelm myself.