Zero Days

by Barbara Egbert

  The next morning, I was relieved to discover that the snowstorm that was supposed to blow in overnight had not arrived. It was crisp and dark when we left camp, walking by headlight. With luck, we would reach the border this very day. We set out with determination, rather than jubilation. Mary in particular remembers being cold and tired more than anything else. We eventually left the Middle Fork of the Pasayten River, turned left, and before long, the snow was again deep enough that the trail was covered and the route difficult to find. We crossed Frosty Pass, where the most recent storm had left thick, wet snow plastered against the trees like stiff white flags. The wind that created those frozen banners must have been ferocious. In mid-afternoon, we rejoined the Pacific Crest Trail at Castle Pass, only a few miles short of our goal.

  Late in the afternoon, as the path curved gently downhill, we caught our first glimpse of the monument marking the north end of the trail. We crept up on it as though we were afraid it might run away if it saw us first. And then we were there. We touched the monument. We had reached the end of the Pacific Crest Trail, all together.

  It was 4:30 p.m. on October 25, 176 trail days since we had left the matching monument at the Mexican border, 2,650 miles away, and we didn’t even try to contain our excitement. We were dancing, cheering, shouting, high-fiving each other, jumping up and down—deliriously happy. We were so thrilled, not even the bitter cold could cool us off. We stood in front of the monument in the snow and sang the trail song we had composed over the last many months. Any animals not already hibernating knew something big had just happened at the border.

  Our finishing was a surprise to a lot of people. In fact, the trail register for that year had already been removed from its home in the base of a small, hollow obelisk on the border, and a new one had been placed there instead. So we, along with the other late finishers who came through a few days ahead of us—Old Dirty, K-Too, Bald Eagle, Nocona, and Chacoman—signed the new register, carefully writing the complete date so that there could be no doubt about when we crossed the border, and no doubt that Scrambler and Captain Bligh had truly completed the trail in one calendar year.

  We set up camp a few hundred yards north of the border. It was very cold, and we weren’t very comfortable, but Mary nonetheless penned this jubilant entry in her journal:

  Day 176: We finished! We are finally done! I am so glad! We just have to walk out, and it’ll be all over at last, and I’ll be warm and dry! I kissed the monument, and we are set up just inside Canada. I will be home soon!

  I felt sorry for all those thru-hikers who finish up in glorious weather, after only five months on the trail, with hardly a blister, in the pink of health, and who feel sad and disoriented and rootless—disappointed that their trip is over and their trail friends are scattering and now they have to go back to ordinary life.

  There was no such feeling of disappointment for us. There was relief that we’d somehow slipped through a window of opportunity in the weather. And there was joy and anticipation at the thought of telling all our friends and relatives that we had succeeded and were heading home. But our overwhelming emotion was triumph.

  We spent our first post-PCT night back at the North Cascades Basecamp, after a large meal at the Duck Brand in Winthrop, during which Mary kept drifting off to sleep. Once in our room, Mary was comatose within seconds in her prized upper bunk bed, and Gary was soon in dreamland, too. It took a little longer for me to fall asleep. Because of the freezing weather during our last few days on the trail, I had worn my stretchy black balaclava over my head and neck the entire time, including in the sleeping bag. My jaw had to work extra hard every time I talked or ate. Now that the thing was finally off my head, my jaw muscles went into spasm, and my twitching chin kept me awake. But that was OK. We’d finished!

  EPILOGUE

  MONTHS BEFORE FINISHING THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL, Mary, Gary, and I had talked about the best way to make the transition from trail life back to the routine of home, school, and work. We had planned to take three or four days to drive down the coast, staying in seaside campgrounds and getting used to being around people again. We knew from the trail journals we’d read, and the long-trail veterans we’d met, that the change could be difficult.

  Mary and I had even created an imaginary resort at the Canadian end of the PCT in which thru-hikers would be able to spend a few days re-learning how to sleep in a bed, eat at a table, use a bathroom, and make small talk. We imagined a multistory restaurant, with trail food served on the top floor, for backpackers whose digestions had become accustomed to nothing but granola bars, freeze-dried meals, filtered stream water, and large quantities of chocolate. Diners would sit on their packs, logs, or boulders. The next floor down would feature the kind of fast-food on which thru-hikers typically gorge themselves during town stops. Diners would have to sit on benches and eat off tables, but they wouldn’t have to wash up, and they could eat with their fingers.

  The next floor down would feature “real” food, and customers would be expected to bathe first, use knives and forks, and discuss topics other than blisters, giardia, bear canisters, stream crossings, and the progress of other backpackers as discerned from trail registers. This floor would feature plate-glass windows through which non-backpackers dining in the next room would be able to peer in, and the thru-hikers themselves could look out to see how ordinary people dress and behave. In the bottom-floor restaurant, the two groups would be allowed to mingle. Outsiders would be permitted to ask the questions that everyone from the wider world seems to ask about the PCT, and thru-hikers would be obliged to answer them—without (ideally) laughing, snorting, or rolling their eyes. In turn, the outsiders would be encouraged to re-introduce subjects such as who’s running for president and which teams are playing in the World Series. Upon successful completion of this course of adjustment, each thru-hiker would be handed her boots, backpack, and a bus ticket home.

  Thru-hikers all have stories to tell about making the transition back to their ordinary lives after they get off the trail. For many, the transition is way too long—they may have to find a new place to live, apply for graduate school, begin job-hunting, or rebuild suspended relationships. We had the opposite problem. Our transition was way too short.

  Because we finished so late in the season, and because I had promised my bosses at the newspaper that I would be back before election day, we packed up after our last night in Mazama and drove to Cascade Locks so that I could walk across the Bridge of the Gods and be able to say that I had completed all of Oregon. (Gary escorted me across with the car, the same way I had escorted the Captain and Scrambler a month earlier, although this time it was after dark.) We spent the night in a motel near Salem, Oregon, and the next day we drove the 500 miles home.

  The day after that, I went back to work. That abrupt transition to the real world is not something I would recommend to other thru-hikers. I couldn’t remember how to log on to the computer or even turn on the desk lamp, and I had to get up and walk around every 30 minutes, or my cramped muscles would lock my joints into place. I warned my boss that I might be a little slow adjusting to office life and advised him that if he saw me trying to dig a hole in the carpet, he should remind me that the San Jose Mercury News has flush toilets.

  Mary had a more gradual reintroduction to her old life. She stayed home for a week, sleeping, eating, and getting caught up on material in her textbooks, before starting sixth grade two months late. And even then, it took some time for her to get used to her old friends and their lives. While Mary’s classmates admired what she’d accomplished, they couldn’t really comprehend it. But that period of feeling like an outsider didn’t last long, and she quickly began enjoying the company of her friends and classmates again.

  Gary would have had plenty to do even if no extra chores arose once we returned home. All of our gear had to be cleaned, sorted, and packed away, and all of our digital photos had to be loaded into the computer and organized. The furnace had to be put in order for the co
ld weather that had already arrived in Sunol. Our financial affairs required immediate attention, and the cats demanded constant petting to make up for the months of separation.

  But that was only the beginning. The dishwasher broke the first time we used it, probably because the 10-year-old machine hadn’t been operated for several months, and during that time, some normally flexible component had become brittle. Gary made a quick study of Consumer Reports’ recommendations, bought a new dishwasher, and installed it in just a couple days. Then our computer began acting up, and he had to do more research, decide on a replacement, and get that up to speed. The Ford Escort and our household water filter broke down in rapid succession. Our 80-year-old house needed as much attention as our cats, being overdue for all the maintenance that had been put off for the past couple years while Gary made sure everything was in place for a successful thru-hike. And then there was the day Gary came home early from an errand and announced, “The van almost caught on fire!” We ended up replacing that, too.

  Amid the stresses of our return to work, school, and the hassles of daily life, we welcomed the occasional reminders from other people that we had accomplished something extraordinary. Mary spoke to school groups and at the annual conference of the American Long-Distance Hiking Association-West. Months after our return, the San Jose Mercury News ran an article I wrote about our journey, accompanied by Gary’s photographs. A sister paper picked up the story, so our words and pictures eventually ran in newspapers across the Bay Area. Shortly after the story appeared, we boarded an airplane in Oakland for our annual trip to the East Coast. Mary was looking around the cabin when she spotted a woman looking at a recent travel section from the Contra Costa Times. “Look, Mom,” Mary said excitedly. “She’s reading our story.” The woman turned around, stared at Mary, and exclaimed, “You must be Scrambler!” She had saved the story to read on the plane, and promised that now that she’d met its subject, she’d make sure the young nieces she was flying to visit would read the article, too.

  I was pleased that she planned to share the story with her family and hoped her nieces would be inspired by the accomplishments of a girl their age. About two years after we began our PCT trek, I was enjoying a little web wandering on my office computer, when I came across a father asking for advice about how to entertain his son on backpacking trips. He explained that he had resisted letting his son accompany him until the boy was “old enough.” The child had finally reached this milestone at age 12. Poor man. He had it exactly backwards. He should have been taking the kid along since infancy. By the time the kid was 12, it would have been Dad struggling to keep up. And entertainment? For a child who has been brought up in the wilderness, the trail itself provides plenty of opportunities for fun.

  This father’s remarks got me thinking again about how much our lives had been enriched by sharing all of our adventures as a family. It would have been easier if Gary and I had tackled the PCT as a pair, leaving Mary with relatives. But 10 years of backpacking as a family not only prepared us for our long-trail adventure, it made it unthinkable that we would do it any other way. Then and now, we do things together. Even though they had finished the entire trail in 2004, Gary and Mary returned to Washington two years later to accompany me on a 320-mile journey toward my completion of the trail. I now have just one section of about 120 miles around Glacier Peak for my final PCT expedition, and I’m confident I’ll finish with my family by my side.

  Now, three years after our journey, while helping prepare Mary for her first year of high school, I find myself flummoxed when asked what we learned about ourselves and our family by hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. At first blush, we didn’t learn anything. We already knew how to survive in the wilderness, how to function under stress, how to entertain each other, and how to watch out for each other’s weaknesses. If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t have taken that first step on the trail. On the other hand, our knowledge in each of those areas became much deeper based on our experiences.

  The lessons we learned about each other’s personalities were more subtle. Gary and I learned that Mary could bounce unexpectedly from being a 10-year-old to an adult, and back, with dizzying speed. In a pinch, we knew we could rely on her to rise maturely to the occasion. Also, she developed an instinct for the trail much faster than we expected. By the time we reached Oregon, she was offering advice about practical decisions such as where to camp and whether to drink from certain water sources—advice that deserved to be taken seriously, even if Gary and I didn’t always realize it.

  This wasn’t an easy trip for Gary. But Mary and I came to realize that no matter how frustrated he was with his ailments, or impatient with my map-reading shortcomings, or angry with some misbehavior on Mary’s part, he would always take care of us. He never forgot his responsibility as the captain of our little crew. About myself, I learned that I can put up with just about anything if the goal is important enough. Pain, uncertainty, frustration, hunger, filth, exhaustion—the things I find hardest to cope with in daily life are things I can overcome. And that’s a very good feeling!

  The one big lesson we all learned was how to persevere in the face of uncertainty. As enjoyable as backpacking can be, often it’s anything but. Much of the time, one of us was in acute pain or even feeling seriously ill, and the hardest part was not knowing whether it would get worse or better. But we supported each other and kept going, anyway.

  Togetherness can be wonderful, but there were those times when being stuck with each other, day after day, was an ordeal. Hiking with a child was a great deal of fun, but it did add a big load of responsibility for Mary’s safety to our heavy packs. No doubt, there were times when Mary felt that having her hyper-vigilant parents along was a huge burden on her, too. She could never decide to just do nothing for an afternoon, or even get away from us for a few hours of solitary rambling or reading. Those rare occasions in which she had a room to herself for one whole night were a major treat. Still, she persevered—and she succeeded.

  Uncertainty can be exhilarating. It has to be for a thru-hiker, who would otherwise quit at the first close escape from disaster. Uncertainty leads to learning important lessons the hard way, and it’s those lessons that keep you alive later. As Dusty tells his cowboy partner on “Lives of the Cowboys,” my favorite Prairie Home Companion sketch: “Good judgment comes from experience, Lefty, and all the really useful experiences come from bad judgment.” I would add that bad luck also leads to some important learning experiences. I had a severe fright in the southern California desert when an ice storm blew in and I came close to suffering hypothermia. Gary crawled out of the tent in his underwear during the worst of the storm in order to tie down the tent more tightly, and Mary crawled into my sleeping bag to share her body warmth. By the time we reached northern Washington, we were dealing with the possibility of hypothermia every day, but I don’t remember being nearly so frightened about it. We just kept on moving through the snow, the cold, and the rain. That scary experience months earlier taught me how to prepare and to persevere against the uncertainty of late October’s weather in the North Cascades.

  While hiking the PCT meant persevering through bad days (not to mention the scary, frustrating, angry, and painful days), what I remember most is a good day. It was one of those velvety-warm summer nights when I paused outside the tent to find the Big Dipper and follow its pointer stars to the North Star. As I whispered to myself, “That way to Canada,” I knew that the two people who mattered the most to me were right there, sharing my dream.

  A couple months after we returned from Canada, we went for a walk in our Sunol neighborhood. It was pouring rain, and cold and windy. We quickly became soaked. Returning home, we changed into dry clothes and settled down at the window with cups of hot cocoa. We sat there watching the rain fall, and chuckled delightedly over our dry feet, warm hands, abundant cocoa, and, most of all, the knowledge that we didn’t have to go back out in the rain unless we wanted to. We were deliriously happy with our good fortun
e. Because we remembered what it was like to be miserably cold and wet when more days of misery awaited us, we could enjoy the warmth and hot food and a roof over our heads more than ever before. But we also knew that when we wanted to, we could go back into the rain and hike for miles. Because we’ve done it. Because we know how to do it. And when the time comes, we’ll do it again.

  APPENDIX

  THE FUTURE OF THE PCT

  WHEN WE HIKED THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL in 2004, 11 years after the trail was officially completed, 250 or so people were on the trail with us as thru-hikers, and thousands more were walking parts of it as section hikers, backpackers, and dayhikers. One old-timer told us that when he first hiked the trail in 1977, there were no trail angels or water caches, and the trail itself was not even completely constructed. Today, the trail is complete, fairly well-signed, blessed with enthusiastic trail angels, and still uncrowded.