shake

When Kit shakes, it’s an earthquake. A shiver that starts at her tail and racks through her body, it’s not uncommon to see one paw lift and then the other, a surge of physical release so enveloping to her that she just about levitates.

I love watching her in the wilderness. In January, Kit and I hiked 75 miles on the Arizona trail, south of Sonoita. I was struck by how little of this section I remembered from when I thru hiked in 2018. I guess I had night hiked a decent bit of it – the short days had caught up to my pace, the border was imminent, my responsibilities were a fire on my heels. This time, with Kit, I crawled. 10 miles most days, a couple closer to 20. Kit is 3 now and capable of long walks but she isn’t conditioned and it felt wrong to force her on a march she can’t say no to, so I kept our days short and our rests longer.

When we’re in the wilderness, Kit is a different dog. At home she’s often high strung and easily anxious. She barks at lights, bugs, neighbor kids. She pulls toward squirrels and birds, her entire body weight straining, not caring what happens to her. 

But she’s different when we’re backpacking. She seems to be aware of her job, aware she’s responsible for walking with me. She’s alert but only to things that matter. She doesn’t bark at noises or people or squirrels. She checks in with me, nose twitching, and lets the little things go.

One night, walking into twilight, she tells me she’s had enough. We’ve done 17 miles and the sun is almost gone. Just above Kentucky Camp, we have a ridge line and a 360 desert valley view to ourselves and I’m being selfish. I’m thinking about sunrise even as the sunset is still blazing red all around me, looking for the best spot possible with the most easterly view. After a few minutes of walking back and forth from various flat spots, she lays down and stares at me. Not goin no further. I comply and set up my tent, she pads inside and curls up, dinner forgotten (until a vague crinkling from my food bag brings her back out).

We cross a cattle guard one morning and she still hasn’t figured those out, so I scoop her into my arms and walk across it. Some RVers are parked in a turnout a few yards away and they watch the whole thing and laugh. What a princess, they say. Kit, indignant, trots away.

I’m thinking a lot about shaking things up while I’m out there. It’s January and I’m ready for sea change. Two years at a job that’s not getting better, three years in a partnership that’s stalled, I’m thinking about all the ways my life would change if I let the shiver inside of me explode out. 

For months, I’d felt a denouement gliding toward me. A slow ending. All signs pointing to a break. 
It wasn’t like I was miserable, I wasn’t. I didn’t feel stagnant or asleep the ways I have other times I’ve shaken up my life. I just felt like more was possible. Incandescence, maybe, was possible.

On my best days I still believe to be giddy is something I deserve. Most days I manage to believe that my ex, at least, deserves that chance.

A shake is a release – but it’s also a scattering. Flinging pieces into the air without any way of knowing where they’ll land. I had to let things fall where they would and not every piece remained intact. I wasn’t right about everything.

Kit and I crossed a sparkling stream early one morning, freezing cold, dawn. I could tell she didn’t want to get in. She lingered at the bank while I took my first few steps. When Kit is worried, she narrows her eyes and her ears go back. She whined at me and I stood in the middle and coaxed her to follow me. She wouldn’t. Sighing, I went back a couple of steps and picked her up.  When I turned back with her in my arms and started to cross again, I startled something – a big, brown figure thumped off through the trees in front of us. I stopped cold in the middle of the stream as the steps receded into the forest.

I didn’t get a clear look at it, it might have been a deer, but the steps sounded too thuddish. Kit may be the dog that cries wolf at the Prime truck but she also has some deeper programming and I gave her some good girl pets to let her know I appreciated her.

Our last day on trail, everything felt off. A storm teased us all day – fast-moving clouds lingering just over the next hill but never breaking. The wind picks up periodically, thunder peals nearby. I’m planning to camp in a valley but when I get there, I hate it. Every square foot has is covered in cow patties, the earth torn up by huge hooves. Flies buzz around me when I stop to take out my phone and I know I can’t sleep here. I head up the nearby hill where there’s a cattle guard and a barbed wire fence, the air starts to clear up and just as I approach a flat spot, I’m smacked in the face by the smell of rotting flesh. A cow carcass is knotted in the fence just a few feet away. A coyote looks up at me from behind it, and takes off. I leash Kit and walk past the body. The coyote’s face peeps from behind bushes on the ridgeline, it tracks us back down the trail. Instead of camping, I head to the road and hitch out.

When I get to my car, the sunset is magnificent. Clouds are stuccoed across the sky, pink, orange, blue splatters. The storm that never was left a sensational mark. Kit and I curl up in the back of my Fit at the trailhead and watch the stars come out.

The next morning, I open the car door and Kit jumps out. She stretches and I say “big stretch” on autopilot. She looks up at me, lifts her nose to the air and smells the wind. And then she starts to run. Back and forth, from the edge of the trailhead lot to the car. The zoomies, the runarounds, the joy of existence has lodged a takeover of her little furry body and she can’t help herself.

By the time she’s done, I’ve managed to shake off my melancholy, unable to stop grinning at the little clods of dirt kicked up by her little paws, a subtle stamp that we were here. We drive out of the forest clear-eyed.

small

Imagine you’re where I was on the night of August 20th, 2016. It’s a wild, windy night in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, U.S.A.. You’re on your stomach in your tent with your head poking out of the bivvy, camped under a tree, near a lake. You’re blinking furiously, wanting to see stars, but storm clouds are moving under them and blotting the sky out in pieces, like a skimpy celestial patchwork quilt hung overhead. Wind shakes your tent. The silhouette of a mountain peak rises hundreds of feet above the lake basin. You’re at 12,000 feet. You think this is probably the highest you’ve ever slept, but you don’t feel altitude anymore.

What you do feel is the raw power of this storm. The way the earth beneath you rumbles with thunder, the electricity when lightning sparks on the horizon. Thunder cracks again, loudly, and you instinctively duck inside and pull your sleeping bag up over your head.

A minute passes and you sit back up and stick your head out of the front of your tent again. The light from your headlamp illuminates the rain blowing toward you, like going Hyper-Speed through space. You turn the headlamp off and let your eyes adjust.

It’s all just so big. These mountains are still huge and this storm is still powerful, despite our cities, and highways, and airplanes. Walls and ceilings are a false sense of security. You don’t have a place in the Universe. The Universe doesn’t know you exist.

If you did have a place, though, it might be here. Quiet and insignificant in the roar of a Rocky Mountain thunderstorm. Your tent is shaking much harder than the pine trees that circle your six by three patch of dirt. Those trees will be there long after you’re gone.

You pull your sleeping bag back up over your head and go to sleep. In your dreams, you’re still the star.

PHOENIX ONE

I’m on a Tinder date in the fall of 2015. Freshly minted off of my first thru-hike, I’d just finished hiking 2,000+ miles on the Pacific Crest Trail. I had spent four months almost entirely by myself, seeing all my sunrises and sunsets from remote wilderness areas. I slept well on the sides of a hundred mountains, and fitfully in dozens of cheap motel rooms with warped doorframes. I walked, and hitchhiked, and dreamt and made my way down a famous trail, never able to really connect what I was doing even with other members of the thru-hiking community, because I met so few of them. I came back from the PCT with a renewed vigor for life, a bounce in my step, and a supremely self-important victimhood. No one gets it. I mutter to myself when my date goes up to order us a couple of drinks. We’re at an outdoor beer garden in Phoenix. He doesn’t look like his pictures. He sits back down.

I’m unstoppable. I can’t talk about anything but the Pacific Crest Trail, and I don’t even try. I feel myself getting caught up in emotion, banging my hands on the table accidentally while telling a story with too much enthusiasm. He’s growing increasingly uncomfortable. He tries to relate to me. “My buddies and I went backpacking in the Tetons! It was unreal!” I simply can’t help myself. “I hiked ten days straight from White’s Pass to Cascade Locks all by myself, it was my first time backpacking ever. I ran out of food.” I look at him smugly.

We part with a one-armed hug. “Good luck on all your hiking,” he says. I call “thanks!” with a wave over my head, back already turned. Wait. Why didn’t he wish me good luck with dating, normal life? That’s what I’m doing now. Isn’t it?

PHOENIX TWO

I run like a fanatic the winter of 2016. I had hiked the Colorado Trail the summer before but it only took five weeks. When I get back to Phoenix, I have a restless, angry energy that burns the backs of my heels. I’m brimming with resentment again, and I don’t know how to exorcise it. I resent myself, I resent my inability to win over the enigmatic tattooed adman who reads Vonnegut on the patio of the bar I work at. I decide to run a marathon in January, and I’m sure that my success in that race is inextricably entwined with unlocking his love.

I leave my apartment in Central Phoenix at 10 o’ clock on my nights off and run in wide, rectangular swaths around my concrete city. I don’t return to my gate until after midnight. It’s cold for Arizona – I tuck every strand of my hair under a black beanie and wear baggy black clothes. My mom sees me leaving. “Are you going for a run, or going on a heist?”

No one gets it, I think as I jog under streetlamps. A woman runs outside alone at night. What’s the big deal? I’ve hitchhiked. I’ve slept alone outside hundreds of times. I stubbornly listen to music in both ears. If people catcall me, I can’t hear them.

I run the marathon well under my goal time. This feat, believe it or not, does not seem to make Enigmatic Bar Regular change his feelings about me.

INDIA HOUSE

I move to New Orleans in the spring of 2017 and dye my hair platinum blonde. The ladies at the salon ask, “What are you going to do for upkeep? You know you have to touch up your roots every few weeks.” I laugh, and shake my head. “I’m going backpacking for six months this year,” I tell them, conspiratorially. “I don’t think the deer will care how my ombre grows out.”

I plan my trip on the Continental Divide Trail while working at the front desk of an international youth Hostel in Mid-City, New Orleans. Guests come up to me while I’m behind the desk with my laptop open, scribbling away in a notebook. They ask me to do things like get them towels and let them back into their dorm rooms. They ask me for advice on places to eat and drink nearby.

Everyone wants to know what I’m working on. “Ah, yeah!” They say in Kiwi accents, or British, or French. “What a wonderful trip that will be!” I smile along with them. They don’t get it. Backpacking means one thing to international travelers, it means something else to me.

VAILCORP 

I finish the Continental Divide Trail on November 9^th, 2017. I accept a job as a ski lift operator and move to Vail, Colorado on November 16^th.  During training, I meet a boy who wears a CDT Association hat, and I chat with him. “Oh, yeah, the CDT? I hiked that. From Salida to Denver this summer.” He states this proudly. I have also hiked from Salida to Denver, twice. It’s less than 200 miles. We go out for beers at a Mexican place that’s attached to a bus station in Vail Village. We’re eating chips and salsa, or rather, I’m eating them, and he’s talking without stopping. “I hiked up this 9,000 foot mountain in Montana to watch the total solar eclipse this year – have you ever been on top of a mountain? It’s just so still. The wind stops, it’s eerie. You feel like you’re on top of the world.” I keep eating chips and salsa, wondering if him asking me if I’d ever been on top of a mountain was rhetorical, not caring about the answer.

I’m happy he loves the wilderness. I’m very happy he’s letting me eat all the chips.

Something changed on the CDT. Don’t get me wrong, the self-important canonization of my own privileged adventures continues, but now I get why people don’t get it. How could they?

I have a friend that works at a massive, prestigious law firm in New York City. It’s her first year there, and she works until after ten most nights. I imagine her in a way I’ve completely invented. She’s at a wooden desk, wearing a skirt and a colorful blouse under a tasteful blazer. Kicking off her heels after everyone leaves the office and ordering in Chinese food with the Manhattan skyline lighting up behind her as night deepens. She pores over legal documents, careful not to spill Szechuan chicken on the deposition. I can picture this image, I can even refer to several media portrayals of young, hungry lawyers in the Big Apple and I can imagine what her life is like. But I don’t get it. Not really. How could I? I’ll never be at her desk. I’ll never read her emails. I’ll never know the cases, the banality of some, the euphoria of success when she sees what no one else sees in others. The camaraderie of her coworkers, the way she connects ideas at a whiteboard. I can listen to her stories and ask her questions and squint and project and imagine and watch movies and read books for as long as I want, and never, ever get it.

A WALK IN THE WOODS 

Thru-hikers have very few popular depictions of what we do. Of what we sacrifice jobs, time, financial security, relationships, and often physical health to do. Many of us do it over and over and over again, without really knowing why. Without ever being able to explain to the people we love, who love us, why we keep doing it.

My college roommate calls me after the CDT. “Are you done yet?” She asks. “I finished yesterday!” I say. “No, no,” she repeats, “are you DONE yet?” I know exactly what she means, and, truthfully, I can’t answer her. I’m addicted to thru-hiking for its highs, for the euphoria of living wildly and freely. But I’m also addicted to its simplicity. The more long trails I do, the fewer decisions I have to make.

Here’s where the few popular depictions of thru-hiking lead people astray. There’s no bolt of lightning, no jarring realizations, no sudden moment of clarity and blazing neon sign pointing you one direction or another either during or after a thru-hike. The approach to the terminus is, in my experience, like a walk to the gallows.

You have moments when you fear for your life. You have moments when you stand silhouetted by a sunset, looking out over a glacial lake basin and you sink to your knees in something that you think later must have been real-life ecstasy. You have moments when you gulp down fresh spring water after hours of thirst and feel your body viscerally rehydrate.

Thru-hiking grabs you by your insecurities and rips you open like you’ve got a rusty zipper down your spine. It pulls out your still-beating heart and tramples it in a muddy, silty riverbed. It takes your pride, and your self-importance, and throws it into a vast, bottomless lake. It dumps your heartbreaks into a vat of cow-flavored water by an abandoned desert highway.

And I love it.

A dichotomy can help, for storytelling purposes. Good and evil. Dark and light. City mouse and country mouse. When you’re walking all day, it’s easy to get caught up running over the various collected thoughts of your own existence. Every conversation you’ve had, every person you’ve met, every love you tried to hold close to your chest before realizing that other people too, have desires and the agency to pull away from your grip, if they so choose. You write your story like an omniscient narrator, because the long, winding path of the trail lends itself to self-reflection and understanding cause and effect in a way most of modern life doesn’t. But then, somewhere in Wyoming, as you’re running over your most recent breakup in your head for the twentieth time and expertly crafting it into a climactic film scene that would then cut to this exact moment in Wyoming, next to this stream, when you look up and actually look at said stream and the breath is knocked out of you by the sudden force of your own smallness. The contrast between how you, with your two feet and your fallible body and your achy limbs and your impossible ego, perceive the world and the sparkling, abundant vibrant entropy that actually exists around you is a dichotomy like no other. Your life, its framing, your consciousness – it’s always subjective. And it’s always tiny. You just don’t usually realize it.

When you fall asleep every night with the imprint of the Milky Way beneath your eyelids, though, that insignificance isn’t just your bedfellow – it’s your every breath.

So you come back. And now you’re armed with a constant sentience about yourself and the scope of the space you take up in the universe. You’re half-hearted about every undertaking you endeavor, because – duh, none of it matters. After a while you’re back in the swing of pressures of reality, but you’re like – they’re not reality! in your head and you bang your fists against the dressing room wall of your neighborhood Target like a toddler in a tantrum. You go on dates and stare across the table at the guy explaining things to you without an ounce of the usual energy required to perform proper female decorum and tell him, cool!

It took you three thru- hikes and 5,000 miles to go from “no one gets it” to “no one gets it and it doesn’t matter” to “getting it doesn’t mean anything, and if it did, it wouldn’t matter.” Nieztche, eat your heart out.

All your money, most of your 20’s, several of your highest earning potential and likeliest mate-finding years spent alone, dirty and shivering in the woods – and you’re still just banging your hands on a table writing this drivel, unable to tamper your innate desire to be big when you know. Nearer to your heart than anything else in this world. You know that you’re small.

sharp

“Everything in the desert is trying to kill me.”

 

This is my mantra in the southern half of the Arizona Trail. I’m sunburned and windburned. Despite care with hats and sunscreen, I feel my skin flaking off in bits of ashy detritus. I’m punctured from head to toe by thorns, stings, scratches. Manzanita, juniper, cholla have drawn blood all down my arms and legs. A scorpion inches toward my open tent vestibule in the Superstitions and I smash it with my trail runner without thinking. I look at its mangled body, curled up into the armor that couldn’t save it from me, a god, my brute strength, my impossible bigness – and I feel bad. It might not have hurt me. I didn’t give it a chance.

 

I collect pebbles and build a tiny cairn over its body in the light of a full moon. Memorializing it like the pharaohs of Egypt. It seems fitting for this ancient insect.

 

I’ve been alone for thirty days and I’m getting weird.

 

A fire ant digs into my knee near Highway 87 and stings me three times before I pull its wriggling corpse out of my flesh. I fling it to the ground and crouch to dig the stinger out. It takes forever and I can’t seem to get a good hold on it, so eventually I decide to just keep going and let my body push it out naturally. I’m not sure when or if that ever happens. Maybe even now, there’s a fire ant stinger in my right kneecap.

 

Outside of Kearny, the trail is littered with jumping cholla. I’m slow and fastidious and careful but I still end up stuck with it.

 

It catches on the back of my shoe when I take a step and the force of my step flings it up to where it catches on the back of my calf. When I stop to try to pull it out, it transfers to my fingers. When I try to shake it off my hand in frustration, I accidentally turn my torso into another patch of cholla and it sticks into my elbow. Great.

 

I have cholla stuck between my hands like a Chinese finger trap and more on my elbow, more in my calf, no tweezers, the sun is setting. Everything in the desert is trying to kill me.

 

I’ve been walking and sleeping in the desert by myself for a month. I’ve started to notice things I’ve never seen, even though I’ve spend most of my life in this biome. There’s this beautiful symmetry in the desert. Dead Mesquite twigs lying in the trail look like a coiled, sinewy snake – I jump over them nearly every time just in case. A piece of broken off Juniper has the same scales as a horned lizard. A bit of a fallen Palo Verde tree peeks up above the tall, waving yellow grass near Patagonia and I could almost swear it’s a monstrous scorpion tail, curled and ready to strike.

 

Everything in the desert is covered in armor and thorns. Thick and impenetrable. Will strike if provoked. Sting first, ask questions later.

 

I’m sitting on the bank of a green, slow-moving river, leaning against my pack in a pile of desiccated cow dung when I use my last bit of phone service to send a text I’ve been meaning to send for weeks. It’s well-reasoned and succinct, and it’s got a bite to it. Maybe it’s mean.

 

“This is what you get when you string along a girl who solo thru-hikes,” I think, as I turn my phone on airplane mode, pull my pack back on and climb up into the mountains where I know I won’t have service anymore, even if he replies.

 

I’d met him during a solar eclipse in Wyoming, when the moon blocked the sun in the middle of the day. A once-in-a-lifetime cosmic event. Maybe I ascribed too much significance to the circumstance of our meeting, but also, he certainly did, and he pulled me with him into a long, torturous emotional affair that spanned a year and a country.

 

A psychic in Denver, a thousand miles earlier, had predicted it, told him he’d be with an Aries soon. By the time we’d made it to New Mexico, the bright sun and crisp air had enchanted both of us and the last night of the trip, we confessed our feelings beneath a full moon and it was like that was the teleological inevitability of an eclipse meet-cute a couple months prior. It should’ve ended there.

 

I’m exhausted by the time I see the reply, three days later, at the Lake Roosevelt Marina. I’m eating a microwaved burrito that’s still frozen in the middle with the same gusto I’d give to a perfect medium rare steak, and the ladies who work at the store are chain-smoking and gossiping one table over. I’m their only customer, and they give me the WiFi and access to an outlet and leave me alone.

 

“He crashed my boat!” is part of a romantic dispute that I overhear, and I silently agree with the other women that that’s a reason to leave him, whoever he is.

 

I read the reply. “I’d rather talk on the phone than do this through long-winded texts” he says. 

 

I just send, “k.” That’ll show him.

 

The desert reveals an incredible softness near Mount Lemmon. Suddenly there’s wild grass and delicate rose sunsets and wildflowers dotting the horizon.

 

I see a mountain lion near Vail. It trains its massive, saucer-like eyes on me and the glare from my headlamp reflects so brightly back that it illuminates its silhouette against a rocky ridge line. I jump, and yell, and the lion almost seems to shake its head in annoyance and trots on. When my heart stops racing, I realize it reacted to me the same way I react to a squirrel. The reaction of an animal on top of the food chain. Zero fear.

 

I sleep with a sharp stick in my hand, bear spray by my head, ready to rumble if it comes to it, but it doesn’t.

 

I’m from the desert and sometimes I think that makes me hard. The sun has creased my forehead and eyes more than I’d like at 26. I picture myself in thirty years, with elephant skin, wrinkled and armored. Stinging angrily when something threatens my space.

 

She needs wide open spaces. She needs wind and sun and solitude. She don’t need no man.

 

When I’m threatened, I strike. I’ve slammed doors, thrown drinks, thrown punches. I threw a chalkboard eraser across a room at a boy when I was nine. I leap to self-defense and sharp, stinging words. I have a propensity toward hardness, distrust, to pushing away before I can be left.

 

Life among cacti makes one resilient and resourceful. Spending your adolescence baking in the sun like a Shrinky Dink leaves you twisted and curled into something unrecognizable as human, something hard-headed and immutable. You can fry an egg on a sidewalk here, they say, and crying wastes precious water, so don’t bother, okay?

 

Don’t let life make you hard. But what if you were born hard? What if you came out into the world, squirming and squealing, and the moment your skin touched the dry air all the birthing fluids evaporated and left you a shriveled up, tough little walnut? It’s all just symmetry. Us animals reflect the environment we’re born into. We can’t help our bitterness any more than we can help our exoskeletons, stingers and pincers.

 

Quit being melodramatic, you tell yourself as you climb Mica Mountain south of Tucson. Things have been worse. Remember that guy who measured his Jack Daniels in liters? Who chain smoked cigarettes and insulted you between exhales? Who you eventually had to block on all platforms and hide from behind your little brother when you saw him at a concert a year later, insisting (mostly to yourself) that you didn’t usually date such awful people and have it end so badly. This is unusual, I swear!

 

Quit being melodramatic.

 

Here, in this windswept, cragged, rocky landscape, drama feels inevitable. The wide open sky ushers you into a state of morose existentialism and maybe you cling to your emotions because they make you feel like you belong to something other than this bleak, harsh vastness. I stop and pull my pack off and lie flat on my back in the dust and stare up at a candy-striped sunset. Frothy pink and blue clouds hang like spun sugar and I let my exhaustion drain from my bones into the hard ground below me. I want to cry, but I’m too dry. The next water source isn’t for another ten miles.

 

I sit up and pull a crushed pop-tart out of my pack and eat it messily, scooping up crumbs with my fingers. Lots of crumbs get waylaid on the way to my mouth and drop onto the trail below me. Ants line up and begin a march toward the crumbs. I watch them struggle, four or five ants per crumb, to lift bits of pastry and they create an assembly line to take the crumb back to their queen.

 

Ants have exoskeletons. They wear their armor exposed to the world. They seem hard, but they’re soft beneath the skin. Very vulnerable. But they can lift 250 times their body weight, I read somewhere. Isn’t that amazing?

 

We used to fry ants with magnifying glasses as kids in the summer. I liked to watch them disintegrate into a tiny plume of smoke.

 

I’ve been alone for 26 years. I’m getting weird. One night, in Los Angeles, I drink tequila and Venmo request $9999.99 from Eclipse Guy, captioned, “for wasting my time.” He declines.

 

If we reflect our environments and I want to be soft, I should surround myself with boundless, vaporous things. Six months after trail I gather plants around me. Textiles, macrame, the fur of a quiet purring cat. Emotional vulnerability and poetry and macadamia milk lattes. 

 

But I’ve fought through brambles and brush and stood alone on rocky peaks. The scars still shine white on my legs, run deep in my bones. Dust has seeped into my pores. My seams are stitched with brittle straw. I lie at rest now, like a coiled snake. One eye open.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5/22

Do you know about smoke trees? A desert tree, common to the Anza Borrego desert state park, so named because from afar their spindly, blue-green branches resemble smoke twisting up from a campfire. I’ve lived in the desert for so much of my life. I call myself a desert rat, maybe an expert! 

After all, I’ve walked the entire states of New Mexico, Arizona, the southern part of California, end to end, north to south, and still I’m stunned by the existence of smoke trees, by the fireworks of red bursting from the waving ends of a blooming Ocotillo, by the symbiosis of the palo verde and the saguaro.

I keep learning ways I’m wrong. I’m not even an expert at walking, the omnipresent twinge in my left kneecap reminds me. All the stupid times I didn’t (still don’t) stretch before a long walk. In Southern California I also meet bristlecone pines for the first time. Wandering through the apocalyptic nighttime forest, each bristlecone staking out its own personal space, stuck in the hillside under a bright moon like leftover battlements after a fierce, bloody loss. Their bark is white in the moonlight and I can’t help it, the whole place feels like bones and death. J tells me there’s a tree called Methuselah out here somewhere. The oldest tree in the world, but they can’t point it out with a sign because people would destroy it. Of course they would.

So maybe wandering desert washes, spying for smoke trees is the way to go. I could watch lizard push-up competitions all day, and since the world is in quarantine sometimes I do. The best place in Los Angeles is actually way above it, in the ring of low, scrubby, jagged mountains that surrounds the San Fernando valley. The Verdugos (Executioners) give a birds-eye view of the city of stars and I prefer their lens.

I grew one (1) new leaf out of a Monstera deliciosa and my world feels rocked. I keep checking my thumbs, half-expecting a green sheen to appear under the skin but other people are growing much more, relearning old homesteading skills during the shutdown. My neighbors and I bring baked goods to each other, dropping them off with gloves and masks but our eyes are smiling above the fabric and we fully believe that our ancestors in their little clapboard houses were doing it right. I don’t have a muffin tin, myself, but my neighbor does so shouldn’t that count for something? Shouldn’t we just…share?

When I was trying to get into college I wrote a long essay about how Arthur C. Clarke said every human alive has 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. I wrote a whole thing I can’t find anywhere now about how I liked to imagine my 30 ghosts following me around school, flapping their bedsheet arms and begging me to hug someone. When I’d step outside after sixth period into the harsh desert sun I’d close my eyes to better sense its rays (coming from a star! floating around in space!) wafting into my skin and a breeze (coming from the mountains, swirling around the lonely, sharp peaks, building up force and eventually spilling into the valley!) lifting the ends of my hair. I didn’t even have a smartphone back then and now that I do, my ghosts must be so disappointed with how often my neck hunches over the screen, how sometimes my thumbs feel tingly from scrolling too long.

I don’t think that quote about the ghosts is right anymore, since skyrocketing population density and all, but imagining the ghosts is still a good mental exercise. Or thinking about how when you play the Sims, the last thing you’re interested in is your Sim sitting at their computer for hours (though in an ironic programming decision, that does seem to be the first thing they do when left to their own devices.)

I don’t mean to cast judgment on anyone’s coping mechanisms in these unprecedented times (boy do we all miss those precedented times) but since I’ve been reflecting, it’s become clear to me that existence is a dish best served al fresco. That the sensory overload that comes with a sunburn or a gale force wind or someone touching the small of your back is really what feels the most to me like living.

The blinking cursor on this google doc isn’t alive, but the heartbeat in my finger when I hover it over a key and close my eyes is.

I had to google image search smoke trees before I wrote this to be sure I knew what they were. Pixels? in a screen, manifested by a technology I don’t begin to understand, built the image I described, which is itself, in real life, something that stunned me into disbelief.

Tonight I’m having pasta salad and pink lemonade for dinner, because it’s summer, my lips are sunburned from yesterday’s trip to the hills, and sour sugar and vinegar make me feel alive. I hope I never stop learning new ways that I’m wrong.

10/31/18

It’s 6am, October 31st, Gabe Zimmerman Trailhead just south of Tucson. The sun is beginning to rise over the Rincons, but the trailhead is still in shadow, blue and purple light on the sand, clinging to the nights cold. I stop to use the port-o-John and when I come out, another backpacker has appeared. He’s standing with his pack on, inspecting my Osprey where I left it next to the trail. “Hello! Which way are you going?” “South,” I say. “I’m going north,” he says. “Are you alone?”

 I make a judgment call. He’s a fellow backpacker, he’s already told me he’s hiking the opposite way. “For the moment.” I say. “A girl, alone!” He says. “A GIRL!!” He seems amused. Then he launches into a rant. “So many men are too scared to be solo. Men! And you’re out here and you’re a GIRL. I want to tell those guys, are you really men? This girl can do this by herself and a MAN can’t?” I’m annoyed. It’s 6am. I say something like, “people have different levels of familiarity with the outdoors, different comfort zones, I don’t think gender identity has much to do with it.” I see him roll his eyes at this.

Then he says, as if a bright idea just occurred to him, “say – I’ve already hiked this whole trail, in sections. If I were to change direction and hike south, could we hike together? We could team up, you wouldn’t be alone.” I say, forcefully but with a friendly note, “no, we couldn’t, sorry.” He instantly becomes bitter. His tone changes. “Oh no of course not. The young girl doesn’t want to hike with the old man.”

I choose my words carefully. The same delicate dance all women know well. Reject but make it seem out of your control. You’d LOVE to spend time with this man, you’d be honored! It’s just… you have a boyfriend, or, it’s not professional to give out your number at work, or, you have so much to do that day. So sorry!

Today, I say, “it’s nothing personal. I’m on a time crunch. I have to meet my older brother at the border in a few days.” The mention of a brother seems to quiet him. He’s silent for a moment. I glance over and realize his eyes are traveling up and down my body.

“Have you lost weight on this hike?”

I turn to leave, fed up with this conversation. “Nope,” I say while walking. “Too many pop tarts.” He’s still talking to me so I do a strange sideways shuffle to the trail. “I got a hernia from this trail, went to the hospital, it almost killed me!” “Glad you’re okay, man, have a good hike.” I say and now my back is turned to him. He’s still talking to me. “What’s your name?” “Phantom” I say. “No, your real name! I want to look you up!” I shake my head. “It’s Phantom” and I wave and leave.

For the next few miles, I turn to look behind me every few minutes. He doesn’t follow me, I don’t see him again.

Why am I writing this? Because some daft, lonely old guy annoyed me at a trailhead?

Nah.

That sentence is exactly what my brain automatically tries to do with encounters like this. Reclassify them. File them away as trifling, insignificant, harmless.

And I’ve written about this before, but I want to reassert that this type of attitude is indicative of a much larger set of shared value judgments about women and how they should behave, ie, patriarchal standards. My brain also tells me I should here insert placating remarks about how many kind and wonderful men I’ve met on this trail (which of course I have), how women are sometimes condescending (which of course they are), how when I decry the patriarchy I’m of course not talking about my male friends and family who of course would NEVER.

But having to police my language to assuage egos is, of course, part of the problem.

So this is just a brief holiday PSA from your friendly neighborhood Phantom, a quick reminder to my friends and followers that the spookiest thing in our culture remains white male privilege – which wears many disguises, but today masqueraded as a man who offered his company and perceived protection to a woman who asked for neither, and bristled with barely concealed resentment when she declined. I keep thinking about how he scoffed at the idea that men have become so soft that a woman could be braver than them.

It’s just such a disgusting idea of manhood, that in order to be a man you have to assert superiority over women at all times, in all things. This guy felt entitled to me. To my company, my attention, my space, my body – by the simple fact that he’s male and I’m female. Scary.

Stay safe out there, ghosts and ghouls. The patriarchy is sputtering its last, desperate breaths. I can’t wait til things like this are just a haunting memory of a less enlightened time. Vote on Tuesday.

Xo,

Phantom

Mud

It’s Sunday evening. October 14th. I’ve been on this trail for 20 days, and there’s a new development: I have become mud.

I’m lying in my tent beneath a huge, gnarled Juniper tree. I feel like my body is sinking. It took me an hour of stumbling through the thick mud in the dark to find a spot where I didn’t immediately sink when I put my foot down on the surface, but even this spot, high ground under a tree with strong, thick roots, is tenuous.

Since I left Flagstaff, this trail has been mud. I wish I was being melodramatic, I really do. I wish I was hyperbolizing what the last 150 miles have been like. I’m not.

I stayed in Flag for two MORE days after I wrote. I ended up taking three zero days there, not out of choice, but because a winter storm blew in right on Rosa’s heels and blanketed the trail in snow. Temperatures dropped thirty degrees, and suddenly, I had to gear up for a winter hike.

I hadn’t brought a puffy jacket or hiking pants for the Arizona trail. Most Octobers are warm, and sunny, and clear. This is the wettest October. I ran into Patches, Ski Patrol, Baby Wheels and Beekeeper a few miles ago, all huddled around a small campfire near the trailhead and they told me it was the wettest October. The wettest… ever? The wettest in the last decade? They didn’t know. Just, simply, the wettest.

As far as I’m concerned, it’s the wettest ever. For the last 150 miles, the dirt that makes up the AZT has ceased to become dirt. Its chemical makeup has changed, the definitions of “trail” or “ground” or “soil” no longer really apply to this sludge, consistency of peanut butter, a viscosity more like a tray of undercooked brownies than what I’ve come to recognize in all my years of walking as the feeling of Earth under my feet.

This constant slipping and sliding and sinking, of hopping from one side of the mud to another to avoid puddles, or jumping to stay on top of clumps of grass or sharp boulders – is exhausting. I’m developing different muscles in my legs, I think the same ones we use to ski or surf. The ones that feel for tremors in the surface below, instability, and adjust balance to try to stay upright. I don’t always stay upright.

The backs of my legs and calves are covered with a half-inch of dried mud, up to my knees. My socks are caked, and my shoes – oh my goodness, my shoes. They’ve gone from purple to brown. Mud has sunk in to every fiber and every stitch. They’re mud shoes now.

I’ve mostly given up on trying to keep mud off of my things. I notice mud on the mouth of my water bottle and drink from it anyway. My muddy feet go straight in my sleeping socks. My muddy hands touch my phone, my toothbrush, my food. A cookie with a sprinkle of mud goes straight into my mouth.

A few places, notably, had hard ground. The Highline Trail on the Mogollon Rim was a blessed ten miles of solidity. A few stretches of mileage in thick forest seem to have protected the ground from the onslaught of water. But most is mud.

The frustrating thing about the last 150 miles is that the trail has been FLAT. It should have been easy to walk, easy to cover miles, easy and lovely and warm. But it’s been cold, and wet, and the trail is harder and more frustrating to slog through than dozens of big climbs and descents on a solid trail.

You know the scene in Homeward Bound where Shadow falls into the pit, and can’t get out, because the mud is too slippery? I feel that scene on a visceral level now. The way the mud frustrates him. The way mud clings to Chance’s face and Sassy’s long fur. That squelch, sound, smell of mud that I long associated with that scene have become a daily reality.

I don’t mean to complain so much as to describe the trail conditions as accurately as I can. The mud isn’t impossible to walk in. It’s certainly not pedestrian-friendly, but it isn’t making the trail impassible. What it IS doing is building up a slow, simmering resentment in me for something I have no control over. I feel completely helpless. I keep slipping, my shoes have gotten stuck and come completely off of my feet a few times. I yell at the trail “IT DOESNT HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS!!” But it is like this, so it does have to be like this.

Thick, sharp Manzanitas and heavy, hard to close barbed wire gates are wreaking havoc on my legs. Beneath the caked mud is caked blood, covering long, deep scratches. I could wear rain pants while I walk, I could be more careful with barbed wire, but I’m clinging to the pain I have control over. Three hikers are just behind me, having a campfire, telling jokes – but I went off to camp alone and left them, hiking in the dark in order to choose my own misery. I can’t stop the rain, I can’t harden the ground. But I can choose whether or not to let my legs get cut up.

And I can choose to be alone, and it seems like I have. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last week thinking about solitude. How over and over, I choose to be alone. The Earth is softening up to swallow me, and I want to let it. I feel like I’m souring, curdling, like the rain is changing my chemical makeup into something less solid, more vague and soon I’ll dissolve into my own loneliness. I’ve spent so much time in the last few years with myself. Getting to know how I process and react to all these different stimuli and emotions, completely organically, out of reach of how society has taught me to behave. When I turn the camera on my phone to take a selfie, I see a face that surprises me. I remembered the face of a much younger girl. Do I have crow’s feet now? Is my jaw harder, more angular now? Does my mouth draw downward now, without the pressure to smile, relaxing into a grimace when I’m at rest instead of a pleasant, demure expression?

Maybe it’s all in my head. I learn from the SoBo boys that a man leading a group of section hikers, who I stopped and talked to for awhile, later described me to them as a “very young girl.” Didn’t he see the wrinkles?  Couldn’t he tell that I’m OLD now?

I hike past dark every night, because I can’t get myself to wake up in the pre-dawn and there are only so many hours of sun this time of year. It’s vacation, dangit. One night, I’m ascending a small hill and there are snow drifts all over the trail. The snow has been there for two days, but mine are the first tracks in it. I round a corner and find myself at the edge of a huge, snow-covered clearing, and I’m momentarily awed. I turn off my headlamp and my eyes adjust to see thousands of glittering stars, the half-moon shines off the snow so brightly that it looks like a lake, dotted around the edges with tall, dark pines. An icy wind gusts through the clearing and I move on.

I see elk. So, so many elk. A magnificent, dignified male elk with huge antlers is grazing and I call out “hey Flufferbutt!” He runs away, indignant.

I see a flock of wild turkeys. They scatter, gobbling loudly. I follow them for a little while, yelling after them, “don’t you want to be my friends??”

Pine is a respite, a haven. I woke up one morning and squeezed water from a stock tank through my filter into my pot to make coffee, and noticed a squirming tadpole in the bottle. Morale was low, I needed pancakes. I hitchhiked to Pine 30 miles too soon with a woman who works as an occupational therapist. She drove slowly down the winding mountain road to Pine and told me stories of people she’d helped rehabilitate. “You do great work,” I tell her, “important work.” She agrees.

I went to a diner and ordered a massive breakfast, then texted my friend Andrea. She came and picked me up, and we went back to her and George’s cabin. I met one of their daughters and two of their grandchildren. I unsubtly tried to impress on 9-year old Jocelyn that living outdoors is empowering, cool, fun, girls can totally do it!

We went to dinner at a beautiful, hip pizza restaurant, ate, drank beer and laughed with the rest of the locals. Early the next morning, they drove me back to the trail and I trudged up again, onto the Mogollon Rim, still slipping in mud. Four hikers had passed me while I was in Pine, and I caught them that night. We sat around a fire and talked until 10pm. The next morning, I dilly-dallied about instead of hustling the eight miles back to the Pine trailhead, and so when the skies opened up again, I got soaked before reaching town.

I walked into That Brewery dripping. Sat in a corner, ate a burger. It was a Saturday and they were busy. I felt bad, and cold, and wet. Andrea picked me up again, and I dried out back at their cabin. Last night, we went to a tavern and watched George play in his rock cover band. We danced with a group of preschool teachers in Pine for a ladies’ weekend. In the photo one of them snapped of Andrea and I on the dance floor, our faces are both red from perspiration, smiling hugely.

This morning, pumpkin pancakes and back to the trail. Intense gratitude, serendipity, caffeine high. The first five miles were beautiful. Then mud.

I took a break with the SoBo boys just before sunset and drank a Coors with them, by their fire. I may see them again, but the trail can be mysterious. I may not. I made ramen tonight, and burnt my tongue trying to eat it too soon, so it didn’t taste like anything at all. Why.

I’ve been wondering “why” all night tonight.  I keep daydreaming about moving to LA and interviewing for jobs. Maybe they won’t ask me about my hikes, but, considering the spottiness of the last few years on my resume, I’ll probably bring them up myself to try to sound better. In my daydreams, I’m trying to explain to the interviewer why I’ve spent most of the last three years climbing up and down mountains in the middle of nowhere for no reason. My answers swing violently back and forth on a pendulum from, “so I could have an adventure, do something extraordinary, live a life worth living!” to “because walking seemed easier than being vulnerable and sincerely eager in a career, in a job, in a relationship.”

There’s a not small part of me that wants to quit this hike. I keep saying “the next section will be better, warmer, drier!” And over and over the next section is, somehow, worse.

I’m more afraid of moving to Los Angeles than I am of finishing the Arizona Trail. I’m more sure of my ability to hike the AZT than I am of my ability to pursue and obtain meaningful work.

Right now, with rain hammering the roof of my tent under a Juniper in the Mazatzal Wilderness, I’m not sure of my ability to do anything. Definitely not pick a good campsite. I will almost certainly sink into the mud before morning.

Xoxo

Phantom

Flagstaff Forever

October 5th

Flagstaff, Arizona

205 miles, about 25%, into the Arizona Trail and it feels like I just started. I’m back in Flag, where I ran a trail marathon just three short weeks ago. This trail is gonna be too short.

I love this town. I love the friendliness, the outdoor community, how the whole city seems to take pride in its local businesses. The Aspens on Mt. Humphreys have just started to turn, and it’s a perfect time to be back here.

Guess I’ll start where I left off.

Mr. Peanutbutter and I left the North Rim in the mid-afternoon and hiked down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. It was a hot day, and I took advantage of the streams on the way down by dunking myself in them and washing off some of the red dirt. I’d never hiked North Kaibab before, and I loved how different the scenery is from the South Rim. Huge boulders hang low over the thin trail, carved and dynamited into the side of the canyon. Slickrock and mud, mule poop, lots of other people.

So many other people.

The Grand Canyon is one of those places that makes a thru-hiker feel invincible, powerful, unstoppable – comparatively. I bounced down the canyon and met MPB at the bottom. We got lemonade and Tecate at the Canteen, and walked a half-mile to a beach on the Colorado River and swam lazily in the freezing water as the sun began to set.

We had a site at Bright Angel Campground. It was hot at the bottom of the canyon, and we both cowboy camped until I woke up paranoid that I was being bit at around midnight and set up my tent. A ring-tailed cat snuck into our site and climbed over MPB. We both turned on our headlamps and saw its round, glowing eyes reflected back at us. It had zero fear, and sauntered back to its tree while we watched.

The next morning, MPB got up and left before I did. I hiked the Bright Angel trail out of the canyon instead of South Kaibab, and met MPB at the top at the grocery store where we resupplied and split an entire large pizza. A South Rim employee watched us in wonder as we devoured it.

MPB convinced me to spend the night in Tusayan, so we headed that way, checked into a room that was miraculously available on a busy weekend, and we lazed about, watching Tarzan and the Lion King and washing our socks in the sink. MPB got me a Pumpkin Spice Latte.

The next morning, MPB got himself out of the hotel three hours before I did (obviously) so I hiked alone for a couple days before I caught him again. The trail from Tusayan to Flagstaff is FLAT. Like, very flat. Just old Jeep roads and cows. Water was, once again, bad.

One night, by the Russell Tank, I was kept up all night by bugling elk. You haven’t had a rough nights sleep until you’ve slept between bugling elk. I had vivid nightmares about the elk, one on either side of my tent, suddenly deciding they couldn’t be apart any longer and furiously running toward each other and crashing right on top of me.

Then the storm came. Hurricane Rosa blew in and sprinkled on me periodically on Monday. By Monday night, it was pouring by the mountains. I night-hiked toward the low, ominous clouds. I think I’ll remember that night hike for a long time. Storm clouds blotted out pieces of the sky, like patchwork, and blue twilight shot through the clouds and pooled onto the wide dirt road. MPB was at the trailhead and we discussed the coming storm. He had service – we saw the forecast for Tuesday – so when we woke up Tuesday morning to pools of water around our tents and more rain, we walked the road to the highway and hitched to Flag to wait it out.

We got a hitch from a couple from Toronto, who took pity on us. Hitchhikers in the rain must look just miserable. In town, we got a big diner breakfast and then split for the night. He stayed with a friend, I got a cheap motel and spread all my wet things around the room and cranked the heater.

I had an unproductive day and night. Reality TV and Chinese food in bed.

The next morning, I hitched out with a couple of trail angels who were about to head to Kanab to start their own SoBo hike. MPB headed off to Arcosanti to see a friend for the weekend, so I’m flying solo again.

I covered the 40 miles to Flagstaff (again), getting periodically rained on. The temperature has dropped a ton since the big storm front. This weekend promises more rain. In fact, today, the day I’m in town, is the nicest and warmest and sunniest day in the forecast for the next five days.

Figures.

Being alone on trail again is a lot stranger now, after my first real trail fam experience on the CDT. I take too many breaks and check my phone for LTE too often, desperate for human contact.

I hope that stops soon. I’ll get used to being solo again. Right?

A couple days ago, I ran into two hunters in an ATV near Snowbowl. A mustached man shook my hand and said, “you’re one hell of a woman. You’ve got more balls than most men. It’s brave of you to be out here.” I’m always a little grouchy at the insinuation that it’s somehow braver or scarier to be a woman on trail than a man. Of course it probably IS, just because random acts of violence are much more likely to happen to women than men, but the basics of thru-hiking are walking, eating and sleeping … and how is any of that harder to do if you’re female?

Statistically, one of the most dangerous and high-risk behaviors a young woman can engage in is to be in a romantic relationship with a young man. But I’ll leave that thread for another time. Suffice it to say, I usually feel pretty safe when I’m solo in the backcountry.

Back in Flagstaff, staying the night with a friend of MPB’s I met a few days ago, who is a river guide on the Colorado. My plan for today is to take care of some town chores (resupply & laundry) and also go to the library and update my resume and start sending it out. The whole “moving to LA” thing is getting a lot more real. The more miles I finish, the closer I am.

I had a moment in the last section when I was filtering water from a cow tank that I just kind of thought, “how did I get here??” The water was chocolate brown and I’d fallen half into the mud while getting it. My left leg and palm were coated in sticky mud, and I took my shirt off to filter the water through the cotton to get the chunkies out before subjecting my Sawyer to it.

It’s raining and windy, I’m standing in a sports bra, covered in mud, trying to squeeze drinkable water into a plastic bottle and there’s an old cow skull leering at me from empty eye sockets in the middle of nowhere and I’m like – how did I get here?

I know how I got there, I walked from the Stateline campground in Utah to that spot. But in imagining my life, I never could’ve imagined myself here. Age 26. Muddy and shirtless in the rain in the desolate cow country of Northern Arizona.

I was listening to This American Life all day yesterday, an episode where contributors were talking about the stories they like to tell from their childhoods that act as exposition for what they do now. I can see traces of Phantom in my childhood. I remember standing outside alone during a family vacation in Colorado, stubbornly waiting for hummingbirds.

I remember pressing my face against the window of the van while driving at night down i10 in California, gazing at the mountains above the interstate and inventing an elaborate fantasy where I was the mysterious “the girl of the mountains,” revered and feared by the townspeople down below.

I remember an obsession with going outside to watch the sunset every night one summer, all alone, from the side of my childhood house.

But of course I’m just cherry-picking to fit a narrative. I did plenty of things as a kid that weren’t “go outside by yourself and be contemplative.”

We all write our stories to make some kind of narrative sense, don’t we? That’s what storytellers do. And everyone is a storyteller.

We’re all just trying to write a good yarn.

Happy trails.

Phantom

North Kaibab

September 28

Day 5

I’ve made it to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. In a bit, I’ll be descending down to the bottom. I decided to split my Grand Canyon itinerary into two days, just to make it a little easier on my feet, and to enjoy the amenities of the National Park for a bit longer.

The first four days of this trail have mostly wandered in and out of Ponderosa lowlands along the Kaibab Plateau. A long burn area left me exposed and sunburned, having to duck into new growth Aspen groves for shade. The weather has been perfect. Temperate, mild blue sky days and clear nights.

A fire closure near the East Rim of the Grand Canyon sent me on a Forest Road walk around the perimeter of the fire. I felt the fire before I saw it. My throat always can tell when fires are near. I climbed a fire watch tower near the North Rim where Ed Abbey used to man the post. I got almost all the way to the top, before turning around. I’m somehow still scared of heights.

I’ve been hiking with a first time thru-hiker who still doesn’t have a trail name. I knew he was ahead of me by his prints, and when I caught him I said “oh, you’re the Altras!” and he was taken aback. I forgot it’s not normal to be able to track people by their highly-specific trail runner prints.

Falling back into the routines of a hike has been natural, seamless. Getting back on the single-track feels so normal. Sometimes, when I think back on the last few years, I think I’ve just been walking and not learning anything. I don’t realize how much knowledge I’ve been accruing.

Until I get out here and realize how many questions from a newcomer I can answer confidently, from either firsthand experience or anecdotal evidence. About gear, weather, water, trail etiquette. I realize how many trees I know, how many tracks I recognize, how much I understand about how the park service works.

It’s wild.

The water out here is as bad as everyone says. I didn’t pass a single natural source on the Kaibab Plateau. My water came from caches, animal tanks, cement troughs, and a manmade lake filled with algae that clogged my filter immediately.

So far, the AZT has been simply beautiful. I’m bracing myself for it to be hard, but, right now it’s perfect in every way. Company when I want it, solitude when I crave it. Warm weather and hot coffee and an overarching feeling of giddy gratefulness.

I watched a full, bright orange moon come up over the east rim of the Grand Canyon in a secluded campsite so close to the fire that it had been completely abandoned by tourists.

In disbelief, “is that the freaking MOON???” It looked too big, too orange. I thought I was seeing glow from the wildfires. Maybe it was a little of both.

My new trail friend Felipe is fresh back from the Peace Corps in Senegal and we’ve been talking a lot about what it means to give back. What it looks like to be a good person within the problematic economic and political structures that surround us.

He says I’m a social optimist, because I think things are getting better. I believe that growing up with the internet has made us more discerning, more rational, more empathetic to fellow humans from different races and creeds. More informed about the far-flung consequences of our actions.

I definitely wasn’t an optimist in college, so maybe that’s a direct effect of long distance hiking on my life. It’s made me more hopeful and more grateful.

I wake up every day and I’m grateful for things like the sun, and instant coffee, and a clean pair of socks.

If nothing else, four years of thru-hiking has been worth it because of that feeling.

I’m moving to LA after the trail to chase my fortune and passion (ugh) in the film world, but if it doesn’t work, I’m gonna move to a National Park and be a ranger. Write novels in a cabin, watch fires from a tower, run in the woods.

Either way, I’ll probably be happy as long as the sun is out.

Happy trails,

Phantom

In Motion, At Rest

Sunday, September 23rd

Since I last wrote, I’ve been at rest.

For a thru-hiker, Real Life is just one long zero day.

Between trails, between movement, between decisions – we rest. Or, at least we try. Some of us are better at it than others.

I last wrote in this blog in November of 2017. I finished my Continental Divide Trail journal by writing a post on my phone on the train from the Denver Airport to Union Station. I thought I was going to spend the winter in Vail, Colorado working on the lifts and hanging with Beans and writing and reading books and skiing on my days off. Vail turned out to be a brief, miserable interlude – the first of several moves between moves. I lasted less than a month working for Vail Resorts. It was an objectively evil corporation and a terrible job in a cold, dark town on the side of a loud highway. The tall mountains were suffocating. The cold stung. A man I worked with threatened me, scared me, made me feel small. I left.

I bought a car and moved to San Diego. I drove straight to the ocean on my first day in town and tracked sand into my car’s brand-new interior. It’s still stuck in the cracks of my front seat. I moved into in a sunny room at my brother and sister’s home on a hill. It was beautiful, temperate, bright. I worked at a bar downtown where the customers only cared about off-track betting on horse races. Old, hunched men drank cokes and ticked boxes on their programs. My sister and I jogged in slow circles around Mission Bay. Nothing was wrong, but everything was wrong. I was scared of all the other cars in the Sprouts parking lot. I did Whole 30 and became lactose intolerant. I broke Whole 30 by eating an entire sleeve of cookies in my car outside a movie theatre on a Friday night. I left.

I drove back to Phoenix and worked on a few commercials that refilled my financial coffers, so I very responsibly immediately took a month off. I spent the month of March driving. I drove to L.A., Salt Lake City, Ohio, New Orleans, Texas, New Mexico. I got a speeding ticket in Nebraska. I slept in my car on the sides of interstates with idling semitrucks rumbling a white noise lullaby. I drank coffee sitting on my hood and watching mist  burn off of the Mississippi. I almost slid off the road during a snowstorm in Wyoming. A boy with brown eyes promised me a lot, but didn’t mean much of it. I watched the sun rise at a hospital in New Orleans after getting stitches in my head. I saw Animal Collective in a junkyard-cum-sculpture garden. I hugged my younger brother a lot.

I drove back to Phoenix.

In April, I got a job in Tempe, Arizona at an Irish bar. From April to September, I worked at an Irish bar and and an English bar, intermittently doing production design on commercials and a feature film. It got hot. Really hot. I went backpacking on the Mogollon Rim and did trail magic for Arizona Trail northbounders. I turned 26. I worked at a soccer bar during the World Cup. I lived, and worked, and rested, and waited.

I ran a marathon in Flagstaff last Saturday. I slept in my car on BLM land near Lake Mary for a week beforehand, but didn’t acclimate much to the elevation. I finished, they gave me a medal. I don’t know what to do with said medal.

Tomorrow I leave for the Arizona Trail. Somehow, I can condense the last almost-year (YEAR!!) of my life into a few paragraphs – as though it went in fast-motion. A heroic montage of the build-up, the exposition, to the part that we’re all here for. The part that matters!

When I left Arizona for the first time to move to Connecticut for college, I remember having this thought in the plane – somewhere over flyover country – that what I was about to experience was so far from anything I could imagine that I might as well cease to exist until the next time I was in Arizona, at Thanksgiving. I’ve come to feel that way about time between hikes. Like it’s this time where I might as well cease to exist, because the part I’m really here for is the part where I’m on trail. And this is a SUPER WRONG AND UNHEALTHY way to feel! But I haven’t fixed it yet, despite acknowledging its existence. 

So one of my main goals for this trail is to try to hate it.

I don’t mean that. I love trails more than anything I’ve ever done. But I can’t get around the fact that, and I tell this to everyone that asks me about it, thru-hiking low-key ruins your life.

It rips you open like you’ve got a rusty zipper down your spine, and turns you inside out, spilling your innards out into nature. It tosses your goals, dreams, ambitions, feelings, crushes, embarrassments, successes, failures – into a vat of cowpoopwater in the middle of nowhere and leaves them there. Everything you thought you ever cared about shrivels under the cold gaze of the Milky Way. It’s like you watch your college degree incinerate next to you while you’re drying your tent and eating lunch at high noon. All the emotional bulwarks you’ve built up around yourself to survive are stripped down, and you’re left exposed, naked, vulnerable to the elements. Look up at the night sky and repeat after me: “I’m a worm.”

It’s also worth stating that loving thru-hiking makes you ~that person~ who is insufferable at parties and other social gatherings because of the whole one-note personality thing. 

A guy at the pub tonight overheard me talking to a friend about the trail and he had a lot of questions. It was mostly the usual run-around (“WHAT ABOUT BEARS??!”) but then he asked me what I get for doing it. Do I get paid to do this? Is it like, my job?

I just started laughing.

I’m starting the Arizona Trail tomorrow. It’s an 800 mile single-track trek from Utah to Mexico. I’m hiking from north to south, following the butterfly migrations, as always. I’ve checked my to-do list a dozen times. Everything is crossed off, but, of course, there are bound to be a dozen things I forgot to put on my to-do list.

I’m as ready as I’ve ever been for a hike. I’m hiking through my home state, so I guess I feel this weird kind of confidence about it. Yesterday was the first time I felt that pit of anxiety and nerves in my stomach that I’ve grown to recognize as the main harbinger of forthcoming adventure.

I’m driving to Utah in a few hours so I should go to sleep. But I’m excited to write again, and I’m excited to hike again, and I’m excited for this! to finally be the trail! that puts to rest all my insecurities! and existential crises! and fixes all my problems and allows me to quit this time-consuming, financially parasitic hobby once and for all!!!!

I’m giddy like a kid on Christmas Eve.

I keep thinking about the full moon in the desert. Those big, bold Arizona sunsets. Red rocks and canyons. The GRAND canyon. Bad water sources and new potential friends and strong, sweet-smelling winds and bright stars and Aspens and climbing tall mountains in the middle of nowhere for no reason and all of the beautiful things that are so far outside of my experience as to be still, as of yet, unfathomable.

Xo,

Laura

ps – i also, in the last year, wrote/directed/released a three episode pilot of a narrative podcast about thru-hiking, loneliness, paranoia, family and fear called MONARCH that is available at monarchcast.com, if you are so inclined. it’s blurrily at least a little bit autobiographical-ish and i’m gonna finish it early next year

pps thanks for reading

Postscript

11/19

I have a scab on my left palm that’s just about to peel off. It’s from tripping over a tree root on a switchback a couple of weeks ago, on what used to be a very normal evening for me. I was walking into twilight and delaying the inevitable stop to pull my headlamp out of pack, pushing my luck as the ambient light deepened. But this time it got a little too dark and I tripped a little too hard and actually fell, catching my weight on a rock under my left hand. A cow witnessed my fall and I swear its startled mooing sounded like laughter.

Once the scab is gone, there won’t really be any physical marks left of my hike. Other than a rapidly fading sock tan, I look pretty much the same as I did when I left back in June. While some people (mostly men) tend to lose large amounts of weight on thru-hikes, I’ve ended every major thru-hike without much weight fluctuation. I’m a little thicker, if anything. More muscle, less fat. Nothing really jiggles anymore, I notice bulk in my legs, but that’s not an obvious difference from afar.

It’s a minor source of frustration to me to not outwardly reflect the changes of something that was such a mental, emotional AND physical journey. But I know it wouldn’t really matter if I did look different. It still wouldn’t be enough to explain the subtleties of readjusting to post-trail life.

Like when I see a water faucet indoors and my instinct hurries to remind me to fill up my bottles with potable water. Or seeing my external battery sitting on the nightstand at my parents’ house and itching to plug it in, juice it up for the next stretch.

Like sitting cross-legged on a concrete sidewalk during a night film shoot with my friends and glancing up, out of habit, and being momentarily startled to see the brown haze of Phoenix light pollution instead of the Milky Way.

Or getting ready to go somewhere and seeing on Google maps that I’m 8 miles away and my brain saying, “okay, I’ll be there in about two and a half hours” before I remember that 8 miles translates to 10 minutes in a car.

Or pulling into a gas station and briefly forgetting that I’m there to get gas, not buy Pop-Tarts and chips to supplement my resupply and use one more actual toilet before heading back out to the wild.

Or sitting on the grass at a country western concert with my sisters and hugging my knees to my chest, suddenly feeling the absence of having a pack to lean against.

Obviously I’ve spent the vast majority of my life living in cities with running water and temperature-controlled environments so the reverse culture shock of reentering civilization doesn’t last that long. What takes awhile is processing other takeaways from the trail. I’ve noticed myself fall silent and somber a few times since I’ve been back. Surrounded by family, friends, conversation and laughter, I’m inexplicably sad – aching for crickets, and wind, and stars.

I’ve talked about the trail a lot since I came home. I’ve got my short list of popular anecdotes decently honed. People like hearing about the Grizzly bear, the wolf, the moose, the eclipse, falling in a river in Yellowstone, hiking 89 miles in the Basin and bailing out of winter conditions in Colorado. These are colorful details and fun stories to tell, but I find myself wishing I could explain the trail the way I actually experienced it.

Like how every morning I’d wake up and have to breathe on my hands for awhile to get them to warm up enough to tie my shoes. Or how my red wool hat always slipped down into my eyes when I’d lean over to pull my tent stakes out of the ground. Or what it was like to come around a corner near noon and see the boys sitting beside the trail, cutting off hunks of summer sausage with the flat ends of their spoons and spreading cream cheese on bagels and to happily drop my pack and join them for lunch.

The countless streams and lakes and forest preserves. The endless deserts, sage and juniper – grasshoppers that would sometimes fly in a crooked, drunken line right smack into my legs or arms. The jeep roads and single tracks winding off into the hills. Sunrises and sunsets, measuring time by the progress of the sun across the sky. Lying in my tent at night and looking at my maps for the next day, making plans based on water, elevation profiles, likely camp spots, distance left to town, etc. So much of life on trail is routines and habits, beautiful and exciting in their own way but hard to explain over brunch.

My mom picked me up from the border of Mexico and New Mexico near Columbus on November 9th. The end of the CDT was fittingly strange, and kind of miserable, and anti-climactic. I cowboy camped on the side of highway 11 on my last night on trail and listened to the rumble of semis all night long. The last day to the border was hot, the smell and sight of roadkill the only sign that I was near wilderness. Coyotes yipped in the distance and a few cars honked at me. I walked into Mexico with my pack on, went to a restaurant, sat down and ordered a quesadilla. My server asked me where I walked from. I told him. He asked where I was going next and I said home. He said – so this is the end? You walked from Canada to Mexico to get a quesadilla?

That’s not why, I said. But I realized, well, technically that’s exactly what I had done. I walked from Canada to Mexico to eat a quesadilla. My server bought me a beer and a shot of tequila. It was 9am.

I’m in Denver now, on my way to the bus station. I decided to do the ski bum thing in Vail, Colorado for the winter this year. Partially because I’ve always wanted to do a ski town winter, partially because I didn’t know what else to do. I spent a week in Phoenix cuddling my nieces and nephew, eating and watching Netflix on my parents’ couch, lounging at the George and Dragon patio, being generally overwhelmed and disoriented and distracted.

I wish I had had a little more time to be still before making this move, but I didn’t. And it’s probably for the best to throw myself into something completely new. I have a small tattoo of an ambiguous mountain range on my left ankle, my memorial to this crazy thru-hike thing I’ve been doing. As soon as this scab falls off, that tattoo will once again be all I have to physically remind me that I’m a thru-hiker. That I’ve slept on the sides of hundreds of mountains and I’ve walked 5,500 miles and lived to tell the tales.

And it’s good to have that jolt to remind me that I’M different. Not because of permanent ink on my foot, but because those miles have changed everything about me. They’ve come to define me. While catching up with a friend who’s back in New York City the other day, she asked me if I thought trail Laura had taken over real life Laura. Honestly, I think the two have simply merged. Making one Super Laura/Phantom Being who can crush both miles and a little black dress, who writes and makes movies and isn’t quite as scared of creating anymore.

Speaking of, I’m writing a psychological horror podcast over the winter, so, stay tuned for that if you want to hear a (somewhat) fictionalized account of the trail. I’ve been writing it in my head for a couple of years now, and I’m finally committing to sitting down and making it happen. There, I said it. Now I have to do it.

It feels fitting to end this blog whilst riding backwards on a train in Colorado. I’m going back to a state I’ve walked through twice but never really known. It’s a place I’ve always wanted to know more intimately, a lifestyle I’ve always envied. When I stepped out into cold air between the airport and the train station, I think it kind of woke me up.

The biggest lesson from this trail is the same one from the PCT, the CT, and pretty much every other time I’ve traveled or explored somewhere different, somewhere that has put into stark imagery for me the wealth of love and support I grew up in, the education I received. I’m so unbelievably lucky to have the ability to do the things I do and make the decisions I make. I have a position of privilege that I need to start using to be better. Thru-hiking is selfish. Hanging out and skiing in Vail all winter is selfish. But I can maybe do some small unselfish things while I work up to a more stable life.

One way to manifest how grateful I am is literally the most cliche thing I could say, but I want to try to be kinder and more patient. To steer away from the cynicism I know creeps into me when I’m in the service industry for a long time. To breathe and respect other people’s battles. To applaud others’ passions and encourage and cultivate earnestness in myself and others. To be #nochill, just like my boo, the CDT.

Another is to be braver and louder in speaking out against injustices. And not just the ones that directly affect me, like sexism, but the many, many social injustices plaguing America today. These things matter. My privilege allows me to run and hide in the woods whenever I want but so many people don’t have that opportunity. I need to pay more attention, to listen to other people and do what I can to help.

Everyone has a story. This blog detailed a portion of mine, but I’m ready to focus on someone else’s for awhile. To give back a little bit of what I’ve been given.

To listen more and talk less.

Thanks again for reading. Happy Thanksgiving.

Laura