Blistered Kind Of Love (32 page)

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.

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.