Blistered Kind Of Love

by Angela Ballard

  Still, the day’s challenges weren’t through. Now I had to make camp without Angela. After more than two trail months, I was habituated to our routine and our teamwork—I constructed the tent and inflated the ThermaRests while she set up the bedding and started making dinner, or, if we’d already eaten, a hot drink. I didn’t have the tent with me, but I still faced a daunting number of tasks. I felt like an assembly line worker suddenly trying to integrate his task with those ahead and behind. I was lost. The simple decision of what to do first—prepare my bed, clean off, or make dinner—felt excessively difficult. I attacked the dilemma by completely unloading Big Red, an act usually reserved for town. By the time I was done, the basic camping tasks had taken three times as long as they should have, and I laid down on a soft grassy bed, completely exhausted.

  I was just beginning to relax when a loud and grating noise exploded from a manzanita bush ten feet in front of me. Click-grate, click-grate. It was a cricket, chirping ceaselessly and with a poorly tuned voice.

  “Ignore him,” I said to myself. “Ignore and sleep.”

  Twenty minutes later: click-grate, click-grate. It was as if his whole life depended on the continuation of that immensely aggravating clicking. Click-grate, click-grate, click-grate. This had to stop. I felt to my right and grabbed my Nalgene bottle and hurled it at the bush.

  Click-grate.

  Next went the stove, then the propane container, and finally the pot.

  Click-grate.

  That persistent bugger. “How rude,” I thought. “I’ll shut him up.” I dragged myself up and staggered forward. Hssssssssssssssssss. I relieved my bladder in the bushes.

  Blissful silence.

  I picked through the manzanita and ceanothus in the morning, retrieving wayward items. At least the cricket had distracted me from what I’d feared most about being alone—nighttime thoughts filled with spooks like bears, Bigfoot, and criminals.

  I slowly refilled Big Red with dew-moistened items and hoisted it onto my back. Its weight pushed sharply on my shoulders. As I started climbing, the buzzing of chain saws frequently irritated my nerves. Since leaving the Sierra we’d seen numerous areas of clear-cut forest, but this was my first extended exposure to the blight brought on by the timber industry. Clear-cuts are never attractive, but when you’ve been walking through pristine wilderness for weeks on end, the visual impact of the destruction strikes home especially hard.

  Two of the predominant victims of clear-cuts in northern California are the California red fir and a closely related hybrid, the Shasta red fir. The California red fir, abies magnifica, grows up to 250 feet tall with a diameter of two to five feet. It’s named after the color of its bark—ashy white when young, but dark reddish brown and deeply furrowed when mature. Fluorescent-green Brillo-padlike moss called wolf lichen often circles its trunk, indicating the previous year’s snow line. Some of the red fir’s lower branches grow close and perpendicular to the trunk, giving the illusion of clouds pressed against a mountain peak. On steep slopes, its trunk curves up out of the ground like a swan’s neck. Early morning in a grove of red fir can take on an enchanted aura, like a medieval fairy tale. Abies magnifica is indeed a magnificent and ethereal tree. It is also an easily harvested tree. The timber industry values the red fir not for its mysticism but for its sparse understory—it can be felled and harvested without the annoying chore of clearing deciduous undergrowth.

  Now, I’m certainly no forestry expert, and I appreciate plywood and two-by-fours as much as the next guy, but these clear-cuts pissed me right off. I was angry like a rabid football fan wronged by an official’s errant ruling. I tried to remind myself that the local economy and many families’ livelihoods depended on harvesting the red fir. I attempted to summon feelings of gratitude for the timber industry. “We should raise the price of toilet paper a buck a roll,” a Burney local had said to me, “so we’ll all feel it in the ass.” It didn’t help; the artificial swath through the forest was too painful a reminder of man’s worldwide assault on ecosystems and biodiversity. Having studied this issue extensively in college, I was well aware that on a region-by-region or forest-by-forest basis it was easy to rationalize habitat disruption and economic development over preservation. But in the big picture, we risked something much more important than job stability or affordable toilet paper.

  In his book, The Diversity of Life, botanist E. O. Wilson likens the worldwide loss of habitat and biodiversity to a large experiment, one in which the entire planet is the subject. He speculates that we may some day reach a critical level of biodiversity loss beyond which the planet will not be able to sustain life, human or otherwise. A century and a half before, Chief Sealth had warned President Franklin Pierce, “Whatever befalls the Earth, befalls the sons of Earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand of it. Whatever he does to the earth, he does to himself.” It seemed to me that in the face of global warming and epidemic levels of pollution-associated disease, these words were truer than ever.

  As I continued my stroll through the plywoods on a dusty and scorchingly hot day, my anger eventually gave way to fatigue and from fatigue it drifted to indifference. Worldwide appreciation of biodiversity would be great, but today I would settle for a trail that was reasonably free of debris. Section O had, over the last decade, gained the reputation as the most poorly maintained section of the PCT. Unattended tree blowdowns and trailside overgrowth had made this area a bush-whacking experience. The guidebook described backpacking through portions of Section O-vergrowth as being “little better than cross-country hiking.” Because of this, it is common for PCT hikers to skip Section O-shit and walk on Highway 89 or Forest Service roads instead. While I found the trail conditions to be better than expected (thanks to volunteers from the previous summer), I was still grateful for the midday opportunity to jump onto Forest Service Road 38N10, which my map showed as paralleling the trail for twenty-three miles.

  At least I thought it was Road 38N10, but I couldn’t be completely sure. Forest Service personnel must have excellent memories, or maybe they just don’t mind getting lost, because they rarely bother to label their roads. And, as I soon found out, there were lots of unlabeled dirt roads branching all over the place. After some time and several confusing intersections, it occurred to me that I was walking east–northeast rather than the correct north–northwest. Eight miles later I was greeted by the whoosh of vehicles traveling at great speeds. It was the always lovely and scenic Highway 89.

  I spent a long, hot afternoon walking along the highway’s four-foot shoulder. Trucks stacked a story high with fresh timber raced by at eighty miles an hour just feet from me; acres and acres of forest must have sped by that afternoon, all on the way to their destiny in an Ikea showroom. Each time a loaded truck passed me I ducked my head to avoid the ensuing dirt cloud and wind gust.

  Kimmo and the other JourneyFilm Crew boys must have loved this. We’d been keeping up with the JourneyFilm Crew via their periodic web updates, and I’d recently seen that they’d embarked on an extended road walk, from Old Station (mile 1372) to ten miles south of Ashland (mile 1722). They’d started out along Highway 89 and finished on Interstate 5, all the while staying at hotels and traveling light, covering 350 serpentine trail miles in approximately 150 direct, point-A-to-point-B road ones. They’d apparently abandoned the notion of breaking Ray and Jenny Jardine’s record, but Kimmo and J. B. continued to hike with speed and purpose. While Joe had dropped behind to savor the scenery, Kimmo was intent on pushing himself to the limit. Recently, he’d completed the “pyramid of death,” a five-day, 190-mile endurance test that followed a 30-40-50-40-30 mile-per-day sequence. J. B. did his best to keep up, but did so with a different goal in mind. J. B. had left his sweetheart at home, thinking of his hike as a period of reflection and growth before taking the next romantic step. Now, it seemed, he was determined to finish as quickly as possible so that he could rediscover the comforts of female companionship. After only two days as Solo-man, I
was quickly gaining appreciation for his perspective.

  Following the JourneyFilm Crew’s path on Highway 89, I was shocked to discover that by midafternoon I was only sixteen miles from McCloud and twenty-nine from Mount Shasta City. Not too shabby considering that Mount Shasta City is eighty-three trail miles from Burney Falls. Less than a mile later there was more good news: A 1970s-vintage road sign advertised Bartle Lodge, food, and cocktails.

  Bartle Lodge was a logger’s bar, and if this wasn’t evident from the dirty hats, scruffy faces, and sap-smeared jeans of the clientele, the ornamentation on the wall erased all doubt: “Destroy our country—join an environmental group,” and “Loggers pay taxes, owls don’t.” The bartender, Rufus, had white hair and a white beard and could have passed for Kenny Rogers if it weren’t for the tube of styling gel that had attacked his white mane. Rufus wasn’t particularly friendly, but he served me a beer and a 7-Up so I restrained myself from offering rebuttals to his bumper stickers, such as “Owls are loud, but loggers are loud and ugly,” and “Destroy our race—reproduce with a logger.”

  It turned out to be a good thing that I kept my opinions to myself, because after a second soda and a heavier tip, Rufus warmed up and asked me what my story was. The offshoot of the conversation was that I discovered a more scenic (and less dangerous) way to travel the next fifteen miles. Two miles up, explained Rufus, was a paved road to a campground, and from there a trail branched along the McCloud River all the way to the town of McCloud.

  Thanking Rufus heartily and trying to ignore the creeping suspicion that loggers could be good people too, I cruised those two miles and then set up camp on a patch of sand underneath a bridge. I slept well, despite the periodic pattering and scurrying of an unseen rodent and a strange drop of liquid that fell on my face in the middle of night.

  The next morning I followed the McCloud River west. Ten soothing miles passed alongside a succession of inviting swimming holes. Eventually I reached a series of waterfalls, each tumbling into magnificent pools of clear blue water. I stopped at the Middle Falls, a seventy-by-seventy-foot cascade, and ate lunch on boulders adjacent to the pool. As I ate, I caught whiffs of the refreshing spray from the impact of water on water. Two pudgy young kids swam across the pool and stood on a ledge not far from the falls, holding fishing poles and looking intently into the blue-green water. I pondered whether they would actually eat anything they caught and whether such variation might throw off a finely tuned Taco Bell diet.

  All too soon I was on Highway 89 again, being blown back and forth by logging trucks for the remaining seventeen miles to Mount Shasta City. I entertained myself during this monotonous trek by counting cars and trucks moving north and south. I wondered if Kimmo and J.B. had discovered this scintillating form of entertainment.

  Things were much more civilized for Solo-man in the peaceful town of Mount Shasta City. Round Table Pizza and the Mount Shasta Inn saw to that. Lying on a queen-size bed with remote control in hand, I tried to call Angela but couldn’t get through. I was lonely and missed her. Hiking solo was a fine novelty for several days, but without Angela I’d quickly lost interest. I’d assumed that I’d move faster without her, that the miles would fly by as I pushed myself to see how far and how fast I could go. But for the most part I’d dragged along. The crazy notion of thru-hiking seemed senseless without her there to share it. Together this hike had meaning; alone it didn’t.

  All this made me wonder about the motivational construct of solo-hikers. How does a guy like Brian Robinson, who hiked the Triple Crown (the three longest National Scenic Trails—the PCT, AT, and Continental Divide Trail) in the calendar year 2001, stay motivated? Robinson, a forty-one-year-old systems engineer known as “Flyin’ Brian,” hiked for 300 days and 7,400 miles, and did virtually all of it by his lonesome. During his ten-month Triple Crown, Flyin’ Brian averaged more than thirty miles a day through twenty-two states. Along the way he went through seven pairs of running shoes, suffered from frostbite and Bell’s Palsy (temporary facial paralysis), hiked through snow up to his hips, and climbed an estimated one million vertical feet. Why did he do it?

  “I did it because I needed a challenge,” Robinson says. “I wanted to do something I could be proud of for the rest of my life.” I can identify with Brian’s need to challenge himself and do something memorable. But the isolation? I couldn’t handle it. It would be too lonely and the payoff wouldn’t be great enough. Scaling Mount Whitney, dodging rattlesnakes, and running through hailstorms—all of those adventures would still be memorable if they were experienced on your own, but to me they were much more meaningful when shared.

  While the appeal of solo-hiking had worn off, the reality was that I still had many solo miles to cover. My dilemma was this: My initial goal had been to hike the full length of Sections O and P (183 miles) before meeting Angela in Etna. But at this point to do so would require hiking a hundred miles in less than three days without a guidebook (I’d traveled out of range of the pages I’d photocopied from Toby), without motivation, and through an extended heat wave. It wasn’t going to happen. I needed to find a map and design an alternate route.

  In the morning, my first stop was the Mount Shasta City post office. The hiker box was virtually empty, but there was a message from Amigo in the trail register.

  “Lodgepole, I have some news for you—Foxtail has left you for Douglas Fir. She told me that she was sycamore of you and needed a new manzanita.” Good old Amigo, how did he maintain such cheerful creativity while hiking? And what was he doing moving in on my woman?

  Amigo’s note mobilized a thought that had been percolating in my heart and mind for some time. While eating breakfast at the Black Bear Diner, I resolved to set aside a few minutes to visit a jeweler. I’d been carrying an engagement ring with me since Campo, and I wanted to be prepared in case the perfect opportunity presented itself. Maybe at Forester Pass, or on top of Whitney? It hadn’t seemed right, though, not perfect; we were always in a rush, or too tired, or too dirty, or Angela had a large piece of freeze-dried chicken stuck between her front teeth. Even if the perfect opportunity for a proposal had arrived, we would have been celebrating it with a ten-dollar stainless steel circlet from Miller’s Outpost. I wasn’t sure how well that would go over.

  At the local jeweler, I was educated on the four C’s of diamond picking. All of you marriage-age males out there are probably familiar with this simple guide to choosing the perfect diamond. It goes like this: C for “cost,” C for “costly,” C for “cut the crap, it doesn’t cost that much,” and C for “you can’t be serious, it doesn’t really cost that much, does it?” Or something like that. I never really got past the cost part. I am not really a good impulse shopper, so I didn’t purchase a ring that day. For the time being, I would have to keep carrying the excess piece of Miller’s Outpost baggage. The thought of a marriage proposal would continue to be a nebulous one, at least for now.

  My next stop was a bookstore, where I found a copy of the guidebook and jotted down as much Section P information as possible. I bought a map and hatched a shortcut that I hoped would get me to Etna in time to meet Angela.

  My brilliant scheme was to follow Forest Service Road 40N30 along the South Fork of the Sacramento River from Lake Siskiyou eleven miles up to the PCT. This route would save me fifteen miles of trail, not to mention the hassle of a hitchhike to Castle Crags.

  In retrospect, I am not sure what I was thinking; perhaps all that diamond shopping had gone to my head. I walked over Highway 5 past a fish hatchery and an Evangelical Free church to Lake Siskiyou. Then I hiked along dusty North Shore Drive under droopy-branched Douglas firs and looked for Forest Service road 40N30. I looked and looked and looked some more. I ended up circling the Lake Siskiyou area and nearly all of its dirt roads and trails, for two entire days. I hiked many miles—I am not sure how many, but many—and pretty much all of them in circles. At the point when I realized that Road 40N30 didn’t actually exist but instead was a figment of a mapmaker
’s imagination, I decided that I’d just walk, it didn’t matter so much where. I hiked seven miles up to Castle Lake and then half-heartedly attempted to clamber over a ridge where the map showed the PCT. I suppose the trail was up there somewhere, but I didn’t find it; instead I discovered a nice meadow where I sat down with my diary.

  I stretched out, back propped up by Big Red, and gazed at a field of long grasses, purple and yellow daisies, Indian paintbrush, buttercups, and scattered pines. The meadow was spotted with Queen Anne’s lace—fine white flowers that make a slightly domed clump. Plump black bumblebees danced around the clumps, their landings causing the flowers to bend over dramatically, nearly to the ground.

  To the northeast I had a fantastic view of 14,162-foot Mount Shasta, the second-highest mountain in the Cascades. On the PCT, Mount Shasta is viewed for 300 miles of trail, a testament both to the mountain’s magnitude as well as to the crazy zigzagging the trail does in northern California.

  “Lonely as God and white as a winter moon,” poet Joaquin Miller wrote of Mount Shasta, and I guarantee that this quotation isn’t lonely; it’s included in everything I’ve ever read about the volcano. And now it’s in my own writing as well. The streets of Mount Shasta City are lined with flags that declare, “Shasta, where Heaven and Earth meet,” which just scratches the surface of the mystical feel that surrounds this mountain. Some think Shasta is sacred; others believe that lost civilizations live in the old lava tunnels that crisscross her innards. Native Americans of the region rarely dared to venture into those dark, winding caves because they believed Sasquatch, the legendary ape-man, made his home in them. From my idyllic meadow I looked at the lonely and gigantic mountain and vowed to someday climb to its peak—maybe I’d even see Bigfoot along the way.

  My exploration as Solo-man drew to a close with a dip in Lake Siskiyou, a night in a grove of incense cedar and Ponderosa pine, and finally a several-mile road walk back to where I started—Mount Shasta City.