“Hey Lodgepole, check out Drip’s nasty gutter ball.” Crazy Legs was shimmying in his bowling shoes as he laughed and pointed.
“Foxtail, if you finish those wings, you best be moving your tail to get some more.” Duffy eyed the near empty basket of chicken in front of me.
Initially, Duffy and I had been uncomfortable with adopting trail names. In our minds, trail names were reserved for legitimate long-distance hikers. It took us close to a thousand miles to feel as if we might be worthy of them. Near Reds Meadow, we’d stumbled onto an “interpretive” side trail, where various trees were identified with placards. Duffy kneeled so I could take his picture with a fine lodgepole specimen, and as he did so a new trail name was born. It seemed appropriate—Duffy’s parents had at one time planned on naming him “Big Tree,” and as our hike progressed he appeared to grow taller and leaner—more and more like a lodgepole pine. If Duffy was going to be a pine tree, I’d better be one, too; that way we could call ourselves “The Pines.” It would be fun to share a “last” name, sort of like playing house. I immediately knew which pine I wanted to be—the foxtail, because it’s scrappy, living where no one would think it could. By becoming the Pines we tacitly accepted our trail life and the new identities that went along with it.
Crazy Legs and Catch-23 crashed on our motel room floor that night. The space was cramped and musky, the air scented with a mixture of earth, sweet and sour body odors, warm beer, and damp sleeping bags. In the morning we left the boys to the joys of television, doughnuts, and indoor plumbing as we headed to the supermarket parking lot to board a rural bus to Redding. It was approximately sixty miles to Redding; from there we’d catch a Greyhound bus to Sacramento, then another to San Francisco, and finally a plane to southern California for Tommy and Belinda’s wedding.
Upon disembarking in Redding I had an epiphany: “This,” I thought, “is the hottest place on earth.” In retrospect, I was wrong. Forget earth; it’s just not hot enough for an accurate comparison. Imagine a city on the planet Mercury instead. Temperatures in Redding during the summer months have been known to reach 115 to 118 degrees.
My sundress stuck to the skin on my back, which was dripping with sweat under the weight of my pack. Salty warm droplets ran down my arms. In the distance, the sidewalk shimmered. The air didn’t move except to blow its scalding breath on my skin. We ducked into a bookstore for relief. The air conditioning was cranking but I continued to sweat.
After only ten minutes, I hated Redding. Everything about it depressed me—the blackened store fronts, empty streets, and dingy motels. Mostly I hated that it was my gateway back to the real world. It irked me that I was getting off the trail, and it irked me even more that I couldn’t do it with complete satisfaction. I felt I was betraying my new self, my trail self, but I was going to do it anyway, because one of the things I’d decided was really important was friendship and being there for the people I cared about.
Poring over maps, calling bus companies, and jotting down timetables, Duffy and I made a plan. After the wedding in Pasadena, he’d return to the trail at Burney Falls and solo-hike for six days. I’d fly to Boston for Amie’s wedding, playing the role of attentive bridesmaid. Then I’d fly back to San Francisco and take a Greyhound first to Redding and then Yreka. From Yreka, I’d take a rural bus to Etna, where we’d meet and get back on the trail. All told, I’d skip 180 miles of trail, a 6.8-percent hole in my 2,655-mile goal. Up until this point, Duffy and I had trekked 1,410 miles together, not hand in hand, but as a team. Now he’d be traveling without me, and in the end he would have hiked more of the PCT. I hated that idea. Suddenly I felt like a failure, and our trip wasn’t even over yet. Could I still call myself a thru-hiker when this was all over? And what did it mean to be a thru-hiker, anyway?
In the long-distance hiking world, there are “purists,” and then there’s everybody else. For a purist, a successful thru-hike is defined as a hike along any of the nation’s long trails during which the hiker walks every step of the distance, unassisted and in a single season—no alternate routes, hitchhiking ahead, or Sherpas allowed. And while a pure thru-hiker is permitted to hitchhike into town, he or she must return to the same exact spot on the trail before resuming hiking. Duffy and I had joked many times about what the ultimate pure thru-hike might entail. What if you never, ever stepped off the PCT—always walked on it, ate on it, slept on it, and even pooped on it? Would that make you more of a thru-hiker?
When eighteen-year-old Eric Ryback set out on his own in 1970 to attempt the first PCT thru-hike, he scheduled just five re-supply stops at locations spaced 375 miles and twenty-two days apart. At the time, the Pacific Crest Trail was more theoretical than tangible; for much of his trek Ryback relied on map, compass, and landmarks to help him stick to routes that existed only on paper. Soon after he completed his hike, Ryback was featured on the cover of National Geographic and credited with the first-ever PCT thru-hike—an accomplishment that helped the trail gain popularity and much-needed support. Still, purists (and others) discount his hike, asserting that he strayed off the trail and accepted rides for portions of it. The fact that there wasn’t a physical trail for him to deviate from was apparently irrelevant. If a pioneer such as Ryback couldn’t satisfy trail purists, I was pretty sure that we didn’t stand a chance.
By purist standards, we were never, and never planned to be, thru-hikers. If an alternate route promised better scenery, precious water, or a chance to eat a cheeseburger, we were likely to take it. If we hitchhiked into the south end of a town, we might get back on the trail at the north end and miss several miles in between. But purism be damned, we still felt like thru-hikers. We were walking from Mexico to Canada. We slept on hard ground. We didn’t shower for weeks at a time. We starved. We froze. We overheated. We limped. We even bled. And we called ourselves thru-hikers—well, aspiring thru-hikers.
On the PCT email digest, the following question was posed “When is a thru-hike no longer a thru-hike?” On the purist side of the fence responses were predictably literal: “I’ve always thought that a summit attempt that stopped short of the summit is unsuccessful.”
More permissive points of view were exemplified with replies like, “I think the important thing is to get wherever you need to get to (this will likely be different from what you thought it was when you started). More important still is whether you became a better person for it.”
Fallingwater chimed in. “Does hiking most, but not all, of the trail dilute the accomplishment? If so, then what really was the purpose of your hike? Was it to achieve some mystical glory heaped on by your peers? Most people hike for reasons they can barely comprehend. But glory is probably the least of them.”
Jim Owen, who has thru-hiked the PCT, AT, and Continental Divide Trail, writes in his Thru-hiking Papers, “Five years after you’ve finished the trail it rarely, if ever, matters whether you did it as a purist or not. The bottom line is that when you finish you’ll be different.” There’s that word again, different. Yes, for us, many things would be different.
In San Francisco, Duffy walked me to the gate for my flight to Boston. As I handed my boarding pass to the smiling attendant, I realized that Duffy and I hadn’t been separated for more than a couple of hours in nearly a hundred days. Saying good-bye felt like having my right hand twisted off.
Compared to the other people in the crowded waiting area, Duffy looked exaggeratedly sinewy, bordering on frail. Friends’ voices rang in my ears. At Tommy and Belinda’s wedding they’d called Duffy “Skeletor” and asked whether he’d been an extra in the movie Schindler’s List. And I was leaving him alone? A heat wave had been predicted for northern California, so not only would Duffy face a continued fight with malnutrition but also a long, arid section of trail. I was worried. If anything happened. . . .
Getting off the plane in Boston I navigated the airport, a bus, and then the subway as I traveled to meet Amie and her mom. They were all laughter and questions. I was exhausted. Everything was
so loud and fast. I thought I might short-circuit from sensory overload. The motion of the T and then the car made me nauseous. Traffic fumes made me gag. Constant noise gave me a headache. My body was in Boston, whisked there by a 747, but I felt like my soul, continuing to travel by foot, was still on the PCT. There was no telling when it would catch up and in the meantime, I was neither here nor there.
Writing about my “vacation from my vacation,” years later, I find myself just as conflicted as I was then. Even now, those 180 missed miles loom long. My hiking hiatus did, however, help to recharge my energy stores and consider my hike from a new perspective. It was during my “time-out” that I remembered that hiking was a privilege. I didn’t want to waste another minute of it.
As Amie’s wedding night slipped by, I slipped away. Sitting in a rickety wooden phone booth, I tried calling the last number Duffy had left for me. The phone rang and rang. I envisioned an empty motel room with a broken air conditioner hanging precariously out the window and a brightly colored, shiny bedspread. I went back out to the caterer’s tent in the garden, now illuminated by the glow of twinkling white lights. I was reminded of a recent morning on the trail and smiled.
A friend caught me. “What’re you smirking for?”
“Nothing, really. Something about the light made me think of a morning on the trail.”
“Yeah? Tell me.”
It had been barely dawn. The sky over the Hat Creek Rim was still a deep bruiselike purple. The sun was just peeking out over the horizon, bathing the tallest of the scorched tree trunks in golden light. We stumbled onto the trail and were moving slowly. The muscles in the arches of my feet were tight and painful; they’d be that way for the next half an hour or so, until the steady pace forced them to relax. A few birds twittered, but otherwise there was silence. Like most mornings, we’d cover our first few miles without talking.
We’d slept under a deep green canopy of pine trees the previous night. I could still smell the needles’ sweetness in my clothes as we passed out of forest and into a dry meadow. Fifty yards ahead Duffy loped along, wearing his purple fleece hat, a generously sized article that perched precariously on his ears. Suddenly, the quiet was destroyed by hooting, woo-wooing, and whoas. With his trekking poles flying in all directions, including straight up in the air and out to the sides, Duffy sprinted off directly perpendicular to the trail. He took Rumpelstiltskinlike high steps, bounding over scruffy bushes and charred tree trunks. Big Red bounced high off his shoulders and landed back against him with loud thuds. It all took only thirty seconds, but I doubled over in deep belly laughs. I laughed harder than I had in months, certainly since we’d left Campo. The air resounded with my howls of joy and Duffy’s yelps of panic. Then I saw what the uproar was all about: Heading in the opposite direction, bobbing through the grass, was a fluffy black and white tail—a skunk, nearly as panicked as my bounding boyfriend.
I don’t think my friend found this story nearly as amusing as I did. I guess you had to be there. Thankfully, there was where I’d soon be.
My return trip to California was filled with crowded bus stations and airports. Finally, in San Francisco, I stepped through diesel-laced fog to board the bus that would take me back to Redding. Glancing at me, the bus driver asked, “How ya doing today?”
“Good.” I meant it. After all, I was now within 340 miles of my rendezvous with Duffy.
“You can’t be too good,” he said, “if you’re going to Redding.”
I had to stay in Redding that night because I missed the last bus out of town. I left the bus station at 10:30 in the evening and walked down Butte Street toward a strip of cheesy motels. Wearing my purple pack (don’t believe Duffy when he says it’s blue) and flowered dress, I stuck out like a redneck in Manhattan. The streetlights were dim, and the air was irritatingly close and searing, the kind of temperature that ignites tempers. I walked fast and tried to look big and unafraid. I checked into a crumby motel, dumped my stuff, and returned to the streets of Redding because I needed to eat. I’d passed a Wendy’s a few blocks away and jogged there to grab some dinner. On my way out of the Wendy’s parking lot a white pickup truck with three guys in the front pulled up alongside me. The men leered and laughed. They called me “baby” and other endearing names. I somehow managed to resist their charms and strode briskly away, but as I turned a corner the pickup followed, just a few yards behind me. I turned another corner in an attempt to lose them, but they stayed on my tail. I ran across a grassy median and a parking lot, taking a route to my hotel that would be difficult for an automobile to follow. Sprinting with my room key clutched in my fist, I leaped over flowerbeds and didn’t look back.
During August of 2000, forty-eight violent crimes were committed in Redding. That’s nothing compared to San Francisco, New York, or Philadelphia. But still, I shouldn’t have been walking those streets, not in the dark and not alone.
Winded and scared, I jumped into my motel room and immediately deadbolted the door and locked the windows. It must have been ninety-five degrees in the room, and the AC made weak buzzing noises. Tomorrow I’d take a Greyhound to Yreka and then a rural bus to Etna, where I’d meet Duffy. The thought of seeing him made me feel safe again.
The Misadventures
of Solo-man
IN JUNE 1990, AT THE AGE OF EIGHTEEN and a few days from high school graduation, I embarked on a three-day “vision quest” along the shores of Pyramid Lake in western Nevada. The trip, organized by my progressively minded school, was based on the Native American tradition of sending young boys near or at the age of puberty into a trial of meditation, fasting, and physical challenge. To Native Americans, the details of the trip are unimportant; the significance lies in creating a “period of solitude in which we seek an inner revelation—a vision—which grants profound meaning and direction on our life.” In search of such profound meaning, twenty classmates and I fanned out across the desert for three days of solitude. I fasted for two days, meandered for hours through the barren hills above the lake, wrote prolifically in my journal, and tried to focus on achieving a better understanding of myself.
Much later, just before our PCT adventure, I looked back at my vision quest journal, hoping that I’d written something substantive that would help prepare me for our upcoming trek. My sixty pages of scribble began like this:
“I can hear a cricket chirping, he chirps ceaselessly. It is as though his whole existence depends on the continuation of that one monotonous sound. Pyramid Lake is a spectacular place, especially in the late evening. They say the sky often turns red, but it didn’t tonight. I feel very much at peace here in the desert.”
And then, after several more pages of description and bland philosophy, I found fifty-six and a half pages of rumination on one thing and one thing only: girls. The girls I liked, the girls I dated, the many girls I attempted to date, on and on. Reading this, I was disappointed. I hadn’t found any sort of divine truth on my vision quest; I’d merely spent the time plotting romantic strategy, a “girl quest,” if you will. “Perhaps now,” I thought, “ten years later, I’ll find greater meaning in a trial of solitude.”
For six days I’d travel alone north from Burney Falls as “Solo-man.” I was excited to hike alone, to make each and every decision for myself, to walk at my natural pace without stopping to look back, and to have hours of time to myself. I was also scared—scared that I wouldn’t like it, but mostly frightened of being frightened. It had been a long time since I had spent a night in the woods alone.
Returning to the trail at Burney Falls, it turned out, was just as difficult as getting off of it—actually more so, because I didn’t have Angela around to look cute and help get hitchhikes. By the time I’d negotiated the six steps required to get back to the trail—plane, shuttle, taxi, Greyhound bus, rural bus, and hitchhike—a full day and a half had gone by. But at least I had a guidebook section with me; I’d managed to photocopy Toby’s Section O before we left Burney for the wedding.
Record
heat was blasting the West, and wildfires and brownouts were plaguing California. My last night in civilization, low-lying Redding, had been so steamy that I’d pulled the mattress off the bed at the Econo Lodge and placed it right next to the econo air conditioning unit. And still I’d slept in a pool of my own sweat. It wasn’t much cooler at Lake Britton, two miles from Burney Falls, when I headed uphill. My pack was feeling heavy and unwieldy due to an assortment of items taken from Angela’s pack—sleeping bag, titanium pot, stove, and ground cloth. As I climbed 2,500 feet over dry and exposed trail, with just one water source along the way, I was miserable.
Over the past seven days, I’d physically and mentally atrophied from trail life; my back ached, hot spots rapidly formed on my pinky toes, and sweat dribbled down my forehead. Worst of all, I’d lost the mental edge. I thought about quitting, turning around and heading right back to Burney. It might take several days and a dozen modes of transportation, but I could find my way to SFO Airport and from there to Boston. I’d meet Angela in Andover, Massachusetts for Amie’s wedding and afterward we would take Amtrak back to Philly. I’d have no trouble filling the rest of the summer with golf, pool parties, and barbecues, lots of barbecues. There’d be leisurely mornings with a couple cups of coffee, afternoons sunning myself by the pool, and big juicy chicken thighs on the grill. It was tempting, very tempting, but as my stomach screamed, “Chicken!” my legs stoically whispered, “Canada!” After nearly three months on the trail they knew no other direction, and by the end of the day they’d carried me fourteen miles, to Peavine Creek.
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