PCT Day 122 – A Disturbance in the Force

Mazama Village at Crater Lake (mile 1821) to the junction of the PCT and rim alternate, I think. (mile 1839)

I think it has taken my brain four months to power down into thru hiker mode, and now that it’s reached this point I’m worried it is going to ruin my life. Or frankly, it has just occurred to me that a far more pressing worry is that I will fight against any urge to drastically change my life after the trail. In many ways the easiest path would be to simply return to the lifestyle I had before I started the trail. Change, especially that which falls towards the edges of the socially normative, requires a good deal of bravery and a tenacious belief that you’re making the right choice.

I’m not sure I can find a way to say this where it won’t sound pretentious and utterly privileged, but I’ll try my best to wrap this around to a coherent idea by the end of the post. And awaaay we go!

Boulder Colorado is a very high achieving town. Certainly athletically, but also academically and vocationally. This is in partly because during the Vietnam war young men were able to defer the draft while enlisted in higher education. As a result, college towns such as Madison, WI, Austin, TX, Eugene, OR, and of course Boulder, CO received an influx of mostly while, very libral, highly educated young people. And because Boulder is located near some amazing hiking, climbing, and skiing, many of those young people were also athletically inclined. After these second wave hippies graduated college many of them stayed around Boulder, grew up, got married, and had some kids. I am one of those kids, and I have inherited the norms of a society where it is very important to perform at a high level in athletic and intellectual pursuits. Winning age group awards at Ironman triathlons while owning a small organic dog food company while driving your two beautiful kids and equally athletic husband to weekend soccer games five hours away in Grand Junction is the norm in Boulder. It is not extraordinary to think that I would have an impressive career and do long thru hikes.

Unfortunately I have never had much direction or urgency when it comes to my career. A friend told me that when I was in third grade I told her maybe I’d drive one of those cars with ads on the sides, because I didn’t know what else I would do. Have I told you that story before? I’m pretty sure I have, but it succinctly illustrates how I so often felt as a kid. I was a pragmatic child, I could think my way out of every career I knew of—granted that was a limited number. I never wanted to be anything, not until senior year in highschool where I somehow won an award in a filmmaking competition and that was good enough to get me into film school. But only after that win did I decide I wanted to go to film school. I went because I appeared to be good at it, not because it was a childhood dream—which is what so so many of my classmates told me. But at 30, it feels like the end of stumbling through life without clear goals.

And here is the part where I bring it all back around. My concern is that I am too comfortable with the idea of returning to some version of a corporate creative gig in which I sell something, basically advertising, in order to fund the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed. The second problem is that I have no idea what I would do alternatively, and coming in third with the bronze is the problem that I will need some source of income regardless. These concerns are all compounded by the fact that all I think about recently is wandering through a forest with a tiny little pack, and those two lifestyles aren’t really cohesive. Who do you know who is in a high powered career and also scampers off half the year to travel very slowly on foot?

In some ways this feels so cliche it hurts. White woman goes to the mountains, there she thinks a great deal and maybe has a vision in which a fox is her mother, she emerges months later, changed and fulfilled.

But what else? What the dingly dangly else?!?

The morning we walked into Crater Lake village the trail was a smooth, buttery brown, soft with fallen pine needles and so gentle under foot. There were great tall trees in all directions. An infinite depth of trees. A whole other world of trees and soft moss in the yellow sun with chickadees making their cheeseburger call. Keith was a bit ahead of me and I slowed my pace from his because I didn’t want to walk that fast, it felt good to move with less haste. It occurred to me how lucky I am to have these moments, these places and these people, how ratified this is. It made me want to walk away forever into those woods, to see what is on the other side of that hill and fold into the slanting light and green undergrowth.