Blistered Kind Of Love (31 page)

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.

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.