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