Blistered Kind Of Love

by Angela Ballard

  We arose at the first hint of dawn, tired and dehydrated but ready to tackle the ascent out of Belden Town. As we sweated and strained our way up from the Feather River, we moved north of the geologic border of the Sierra and out of gold country. Not a big deal, really—I felt like we had left The Mountains miles ago, and I couldn’t recall seeing anything gold all summer besides Sierra sunshine and Angela’s fading highlights.

  As we continued our race to the Burney deadline, the miles peeled away, and Mount Lassen, the monolithic master of the Southern Cascades, grew closer. On the morning of July 23, we strolled through rather monotonous forest and our views of Lassen became obstructed by a canopy of ponderosa and sugar pine. The trail was silent but for distant birdcalls, the occasional crack of a falling branch, and the crunch of deadwood under foot. On both sides of us lay a graveyard of trees and tree parts—deadwood of all sizes and shapes, providing many nooks and crannies for spiders to spin their webs. The tread was relatively flat, and because I’d fallen into the soothing monotony of a thru-hiking groove, I barely noticed when, just past Ruffa Ridge, I passed a PCT emblem with “½” marked on it. It wasn’t until a quarter of a mile later that the significance set in: We’d passed the halfway mark, 1327.5 miles to Canada, 1327.5 miles to Mexico. It wouldn’t make much sense to turn around now.

  Our trail continued on mostly level terrain, weaving in and out of parcels of national forest and private land. The scenery gradually took on a more volcanic character. Pockmarked, scarlet-tinted rocks and boulders mingled with bright white and pink wildflowers. The tread beneath my feet became reddish and dusty, engulfing my boots in a thick cloud with each step. We were drawing tangibly close to an active volcano, Lassen

  Peak, the “sweathouse of the gods.” By the next afternoon we’d be there.

  Our jaunt through Lassen Volcanic National Park was disappointing. We hiked rapidly through the park (our goal was a thirty-three-mile day, to Old Station), so we didn’t have much time to stop and smell the sulfur. We were in and out of the moonscaped surroundings before I even had the chance to examine Lassen’s famous mud pots—indentations of viscous mud emanating vapors and gurgles. The only thing that I remember clearly is the myriad signs that warned us how dangerous volcanic activity can be. As if I had any desire to jump into the steaming bowl of pale Easter egg-green soup called Boiling Springs Lake.

  When we finally made it to the RV community of Old Station late that night, I was both exhausted and elated. We were going to make it. It was just thirty-eight miles to Burney, and we had a full day and a half to get there. I’m periodically amazed by the motivational power of a fixed deadline, and this was one of the more remarkable instances I’ve experienced. In eleven days, we covered 284 miles—without a single day of rest, without shortcuts, and with two overstuffed packs. For experienced long-distance hikers this was nothing special, but for neophytes like us it was unexpectedly prolific. The accelerated mileage had, however, come with a cost. We were two and a half months into our journey and halfway to Canada, and our bodies continued to rebel, feeding us a consistent menu of sores and chafing as well as emaciation. And we weren’t alone.

  We’d seen it firsthand, the toll that many hard miles can take: bodies treated like cheap rental cars, driven hard and fast without rest or proper maintenance. The complaints ran the gamut of discomfort: shin splints, plantar fascitis, tendonitis, lower back pain, stress fractures, shoulder separation, backpack palsy, altitude sickness, vertigo, diarrhea, dehydration, heat illness, pneumonia, extreme weight loss, debilitating blisters. The results of overuse are unfortunate but not surprising. A 1993 survey of 178 successful AT hikers (134 thru-hikers and 44 section hikers) by B. J. Crouse and David Josephs (physicians from the University of Minnesota) found that eighty-two percent had suffered at least one significant illness or injury along the way. Sixty-two percent of hikers had experienced extremity or joint pain, twenty-two percent had gastrointestinal issues, and seven percent sustained fractures. One in four of these injuries required medical attention, and on average, the ailments resulted in 4.7 lost hiking days. And this was in the group that completed their hike; one would assume that “unsuccessful” hikers experienced an even higher prevalence of illness, injury, anguish, and grief.

  Our problems hadn’t quite reached the level of anguish and grief, but they were moving in that direction. Angela’s knee was better; she only periodically experienced a twinge of pain going downhill, but there were new problems afoot—literally. She’d discarded her worn boots at Lake Tahoe, opting for a new waterproof model. Too watertight, perhaps, because she soon discovered that they didn’t allow in enough fresh air. For the first time, Angela developed blisters—five of them. They were cute little things, red and inflamed, with pockets of serous fluid. Well, I found them cute; she just found them painful. Each morning I’d carve five moleskin doughnuts for her and then wrap her dust-coated toes in Duct tape. My feet and hands didn’t look much better. Several painful blood blisters had formed in the crease of each palm. The culprit? My trekking poles were rubbing me raw.

  The blood blisters hurt like hell, but in the big picture they were insignificant compared to my bony and hollowed frame. I’d started the trail thin, but with pockets of reserves. These pockets—a thin stripe below the umbilicus and two bulges on my thighs—were gone. Completely gone. So were the hint of love handles and pinch of flab under the triceps. Even worse, my receding hairline was quickly progressing to a chrome dome. I was shedding hair like a Siberian husky in Cancun. I could only assume that my dietary deficiencies were contributing to this troubling process.

  I’d become stick man, the incredible shrinking man with the incredible sloughing scalp. No matter how much blubber I ate in town, I still got thinner and thinner and balder and balder. I’d started our hike a robust 185 pounds, but at last check I was down to 160. In their survey of AT hikers, Crouse and Josephs found that the average thru-hiker lost eighteen pounds. I’d already dropped twenty-five, and we were only halfway to Canada. It was too much; continuing at this pace I’d soon be skinnier than a Calvin Klein model.

  What was to blame for my drastic downsizing? Well, the simple answer was a big fat calorie deficit. I estimated that I’d been consistently running a thousand-calorie deficit daily. Considering that fat is burned at a rate of 3,500 calories per pound, it doesn’t take a mathematics degree to figure out that I’d long since burned through my fat reserves. But as much as I harassed Angela about her eating habits, food distribution was only a small part of the problem. The timing of my bout with giardia had been unfortunate; I lost my appetite at the very time when I needed it most, as we were tackling a long string of strenuous miles through the Sierra. And if we’d bothered to consult Ray Jardine, we’d have recognized additional culprits.

  Our base pack-weights were high, so there wasn’t much leeway for carrying extra food. This, according to Jardine, is ass backwards: “Even though reducing our pack weight is extremely beneficial, reducing food weight is entirely counterproductive.” To make matters worse, our food choices were perhaps just as dangerous as the portions. Our diet was rich in foods that Jardine disdains—processed flour products such as bagels, crackers, Pop Tarts, and macaroni, as well as energy bars that Jardine considers no more than “high-priced candy bars.” And freeze-dried meals—well, in Jardine’s opinion, you might just as well be eating Styrofoam: “I suspect that those who eat freeze-dried foods are feeding, instead, on the reserves stored in the cells of their own bodies.” He recommends products that are not only heavy, but also often difficult to obtain on the trail—fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, legumes and potatoes, seeds and nuts, eggs and cheese, meat and fish, and the incomparable power food, corn pasta.

  Pretty much the only food group in our repertoire that Jardine would have approved of was the peanut. We did eat lots of peanuts. We never tired of the peanut or its offspring, and with each day they seemed to become a larger component of our diet, so much so that we sometimes joked t
hat our trail names should be “The Peanuts”—“Skip” and “Jiffy,” “Smooth” and “Crunchy,” “Salted” and “Honey Roasted,” or even “Snoopy” and “Linus.” But even the mighty peanut could not hold off the evil forces of thinning, and so, as we neared Burney, I eagerly anticipated a week of buffet-style eating.

  But before any buffets, we’d have to navigate the Hat Creek Rim, a notorious stretch of trail many hikers refer to as the Hot Creek Rim. Sitting just a few miles from Hat Creek and its verdant canyon, Hat Creek Rim promised thirty exposed, fire-marred, and waterless miles. This was the longest waterless stretch of the entire PCT. Luckily, our friend Amigo had arranged for a cache along this water-starved walk. Cache-22 he called it in his note at the Old Station Trail Register. Cache-22 would be of tremendous assistance; I’d learned that it didn’t take much extra weight to make your pack feel awfully unwieldy. Yes, Big Red would be thankful, and so would Purple Precious—she’d be spared three excess liters of water. Angela had started calling her pack “Purple Precious” a while back. I didn’t find the name all that appropriate. First of all, the pack wasn’t purple—never was purple. It was and is blue. Second, the only thing precious about it was how precious little it often carried.

  Later that day, loaded light and loving it, we were off, inspired by Amigo’s words in the trail register, “I had a dream and I lived it.” Hat Creek Rim was indeed hot and dry, but not nearly as unpleasant as I’d expected. We had unobstructed views back to Lassen and forward to Mount Shasta. The sparse forest of ghost trees that populated the rim was unlike anything I’d seen before. The trees looked as if they had been attacked not only by a forest fire but also by a blender. Portions of them were chopped off at strange angles. With a bright pink sunset providing a glow to walk by, Angela and I excitedly discussed plans for the upcoming wedding. We were eagerly anticipating the opportunity to see friends, catch up, and tell stories. Several nights at a hotel, a steady diet of junk food, and maybe a movie or two—those were added bonuses.

  Somewhere along the way, perhaps shortly after we were chased a hundred yards by a group of curious cattle, the tone of the conversation changed. We both had misgivings about leaving the trail, especially since we’d hit a nice groove. Angela, in particular, was scared. She’d decided to attend a second wedding after Pasadena, in Massachusetts. Amie was one of her best friends and Angela was her bridesmaid, so I fully supported her decision to go—I would have done the same thing. The conflict, though, revolved around my decision to return to the trail at Burney for a week of hiking without Angela. She was upset, partly because I wouldn’t be going to the wedding with her, but primarily because I would be hiking a section of trail without her. She wanted to be with me for the entire trail, didn’t want miss any part of it, didn’t want to have her accomplishment the least bit diminished.

  I understood her sentiment, but another tight deadline stared us in the face. We needed to be done by September 16, shelling out Canadian dollars for souvenirs and Molson Lights. As it was, we would probably have to skip a section, or at least a portion of one, in order for me to get back in time to resume medical school. My feeling was that if one of us were hiking a section, then at least we’d be minimizing what we both had to skip. We did, after all, aim to write a book about the experience. Our discussion never really came to a satisfactory resolution. It was a no-win situation. Our long-distance hike had already required many sacrifices and compromises. This was yet another one.

  In the morning all was forgotten, at least for the time being, as we wound along a gullied trail. The excitement of a real vacation was setting in and I found myself daydreaming of greeting old friends, pick-up basketball games, and late-night dancing to Kool & The Gang. My daydreams, however, were rudely, and nearly disastrously, interrupted by a sunrise skunk encounter. I luckily escaped, barely avoiding being sprayed with uniquely outdoorsy cologne.

  Later that afternoon, after much dry and dusty hiking, we arrived in Burney and checked into the Charm Motel. It was an ironic name, considering that Burney itself lacks any recognizable charm. Basically, it’s a strip-mall town along Highway 299. After settling in and checking bus schedules, we bummed a hitchhike the eight miles to Burney Falls State Park to retrieve our re-supply package.

  Throughout our trip we seemed to get a disproportionate number of rides from people who were intoxicated in one way or another. We’d already risked our lives with Tim, the psychedelic in Julian, as well as the Twizzler-eating drunk girl in Idyllwild, and now we rolled the dice with a tipsy cowboy and his front-cab booze-mobile. I don’t know whether our experience speaks more to our desperation to find a ride, or the fact that someone needs to be majorly buzzed to think that picking up two dirty, scraggly hikers is a good idea. Either way, this cowboy wasn’t shy about his drinking. We’d been in the car all of three minutes before he pulled over to a mini-mart to grab a six-pack of Mike’s Hard Lemonade for his thirteen-year-old son and a twelve-pack of Bud for himself. Thankfully, and graciously, they waited until after dropping us off at Burney Falls to resume their father–son bonding. In retrospect, I probably should have called the police on this guy the second we reached Burney Falls, but we were appreciative of the ride, and given what we’d seen of Burney, for all we knew he could be the police. So instead, we stopped briefly to admire the 129-foot Burney waterfall cascading over moss and rock into a large blue-green pool and then proceeded to the camp store.

  Seated on wooden picnic benches outside the store, surrounded by a forest of beer bottles, were Casey and Toby, Catch-23 and ol’ Crazy Legs. Toby was sporting a long, thick beard that nearly engulfed his face. His hair was long and shaggy. Casey had thinned out considerably; his cheekbones were now prominent, enhancing the intensity of his green eyes. Only his calves, meaty as ever, had been unaffected by generalized trail thinning.

  “Holy shit,” said Casey when he saw us. “Where did you guys come from? Duffy, man, you are one skinny dude.”

  “I was just thinking the same about you.”

  Time-out

  “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO SAY, all I know is that the next few months are going to change my life.” These words had been scratched with a hurried hand in the trail register at the Mexican border. I can’t remember what I wrote in that first register (I’d been hurried, too), but that unknown hiker’s entry remained with me as if imprinted on the insides of my eyelids, so that sometimes, when I laid down at night, it was the last thing I saw before drifting off into exhausted slumber.

  My life was changed. I was changed, although I couldn’t quite figure out how or when it had happened—or even exactly what it was that had happened. Perhaps I walked a little taller, and a little stronger. Thru-hiking hadn’t turned me into an über-athlete or anything, but like my feet, I was becoming tougher. I think I was also gaining a better perspective on my life, something fairly typical among long-distance hikers and anyone given nearly limitless time to ruminate.

  I once read a newspaper article about thru-hikers in which a young man was quoted as saying, “Even if you are with your best friends on the trail, you are ultimately by yourself as you walk. Many hikers get homesick. But most grow into the mountain quiet, and as they walk, experience remarkable clarity, recognizing exactly what counts for them and what does not.”

  A smoky haze blurred the neon lights. Fallingwater, Drip, Crazy Legs, Catch-23, Duffy, and I were bowling in Burney. In between turns, Fallingwater amused himself by picking out the spelling mistakes on the bowling alley’s menu while Drip munched on “Bufalo” wings. Duffy grinned like an imp. The simple pleasure of playing a game seemed to bring out the children in all of us and we stayed as late as the establishment would allow, sharing trail stories and wondering what lay ahead. Interestingly, we never talked much about our “real” lives but rather left them to hover in the background like ghosts. Maybe this was because we didn’t want to think about going back, or maybe it was because we were in the process of reinventing ourselves, and real life would never be the s
ame anyway. Most likely, though, it was because our trail lives were so immediate. Our feet and the earth beneath them—these things bound us together and seemed so much more important than the identities we’d left behind.

  I think this is part of the reason that long-distance hikers adopt trail names. So far from home, first and last names and the lives attached to them can seem distant and irrelevant. The trail is an equalizer such that it doesn’t matter if someone is a minister or a stockbroker, a teacher, an engineer, or an artist. More important is your hiking style (fast, slow, gimpy, or agile), your gear (heavy or light, homemade or brand name), your sense of humor, your generosity of spirit, and identifying physical characteristics. Names like Cantaloupe (for the girl who ate a lot of them), Hazmat (for the guy whose rain suit made him look like he worked for the Department of Transportation’s Office of Hazardous Materials Safety), Casino (who won big at roulette in South Lake Tahoe), Charity (for her effort to raise money for one), the Abominably Slow Man (which speaks for itself), and of course Crazy Legs, helped create community and showed a recognition of the fact that not only were our bodies in transit but so also were our souls.