These Pictures are Worth 2380 Words: Photo Essays of the Pacific Crest Trail
With the Trail, there is a definite beginning and a definite end. The markers are there, their dated, 1970s-esque posts sunk into the ground. One is near the border fences of Mexico, the other is in the midst of a clear cut that stretches up and down mountains, basically in the middle of nowhere, and makes one wonder what the hell borders like these are good for. The US of A will make its presence known, whether it be to keep out people who want a better life or to show dominance over a tract of remote land. In between these scars, thankfully, lay the path, and my job for five months was to keep walking from one post to the other. Just keep walking.
Did I have any idea what I was doing? Clearly not. One look at me says it all. Look!
Dayglo hat? Check. Granny shades big enough to fit over emo glasses? Check. Lack of proper footwear? Definitely. Pair of shorts that I hijacked from my brother’s dresser two nights prior? I’m sporting them with reckless, rolled up abandon. How about that XXL North Face shirt, cost $5, and now thoroughly worn down, that I swindled in Hanover, New Hampshire, because, having hiked 500 miles without a shirt on the Appalachian Trail, I figured it was time to purchase proper “town clothes.” Still got it. Worn down, washed five times too many sleeping bag that felt the presence, via piss and sweat and more piss, of all those beers on the AT? It’s there. Patched up rain fly, the one without accompanying tent, stakes, and poles? Stuffed in that women’s backpack somewhere. Hiking poles on loan from a good friend who bought them after a trip, years back, to Yosemite but had never once used them? A gift, I say! Old visine eyedropper bottle filled with bleach? Got that. Kindle and cell phone? May as well. Toothbrush, sawed off like a shotgun? Wouldn’t leave home without it. An old cat food can with holes punched in it as a stove and some HEET from the gas station to keep the fire burning? You know it. Ceremonial smokes, of the Camel Turkish Silver variety, that a college girl I was sleeping with before heading out gave me as a present? Accounted for. Baby Bic lighter? Certainly. And five days’ worth of high calorie, high sugar, high fat, high everything-bad-for-you food still wrapped up in plastic shopping bags? Well, calling it food is being kind, but I had it.
Needless to say, I was not Santa Claus when it came to preparation. I had no list, and even if I did, I wouldn’t have given it the once over, let alone checked it twice. Not everyone—okay, no one—was as ill prepared as me for this adventure.
To my right, Nate, my heterosexual life partner and spirit guide through and through. He has a gift with words, and a knack for gear. Some women he’s been with complain that he is more intimate with his gear than he is with them, and his latest love was that stupid cowboy hat. Any conversation for the first few weeks, inevitably, would be sucked into the black hole of his headgear. The advantages of this marvel were endless, and Nate, not much of a singer, would somehow end up singing its praises from up on high. It was a good laugh to get things off on the right foot, and it sure was good to have Nate back. He, too, was coming out of a funk. For the last year, the year after we hiked the Appalachian Trail, he was living in Birmingham, Alabama. He, like me, followed a girl, and things were not working out well. When I paid him a visit in October, six months before, I let him know that I was going to hike the PCT in 2012 come hell or high water. The invitation was there, and he took it. In the interim, he had applied to Princeton Theological Seminary, his late father’s alma mater, and was accepted. Greek classes started in summer, and he was going to hike as long as he felt like he needed to hike, all the while knowing full well that his future was in his hands, or perhaps his feet.
To my left, Pip. Pip had also been along for the AT joyride, though he did not follow his girl afterward. No, no. He went west and fought fires. As part of that gig, he would sometimes go to Las Vegas for a casual rave while on the clock. On his good days, he is like a modern Huck Finn, only much, much taller. Some passersby have even called him a giant. His imagination is full of silly ideas, he tinkers with things, and he has a right hook that can knock a 250-pound man out cold. Believe me, I saw it happen behind a church in historic Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, on a forest floor that was littered with rusty cans, broken bourbon bottles, and the like. The victim? Another good friend who was in need of some tough love, now immortalized in the annals of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy’s photo album with a split open nose and hungover grin. But that’s neither here nor there. Pip wasn’t looking for that sort of battle, not this go round. It didn’t take much to talk him into hiking again. He had some affairs in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he had wintered after his summer as a hotshot, but nothing major enough to keep him off the trail. Pip was a go.
Fourth, TC, a gentler giant. In May 2010, when Nate and Pip and I were still talking about and scheming out our imminent southbound AT jaunt, TC was going solo in SoCal. After 100 hot miles on the PCT, PCTC was no more. He phoned home. As hikers simply say, he got off trail. The promise of adventure, of diving into the unknown, was no longer with this beast of a southern man with a beastly red beard and tiny, red shorts. But he had had a taste of trail life, and that small sample was enough to draw him back out and give it another go. Equipped with new gear and a new attitude, TC was my perfect counterpart.
Fifth, and finally, there’s that totem pole to the trail: the southern terminus. When compared to the majesty of the trail itself, the copse of posts piled into the earth hardly constitutes a monument. Still, for those who hike, it makes for a good photo op. “I started this thing at the start!” we say. It’s a shot for the papers, like those in San Diego that ran some photos of us to let the world at large in on our little secret. Of course, no hiker would see the photos in print because the going ons of the world at large, of politics, or of disaster, had little bearing on our world.
And what a world. Unabashedly, our universe became very narrow in scope, which allowed us to have deep connection with the walking and talking that filled our days. There is an intimacy developed with repeatedly pulling up, exhausted, as the sun goes behind the mountains, always the mountains, and you fetch water from the creek, make camp, and savor the few flavors of dinner, whether all alone or with others. It’s austere, yes, but only on the surface. Below it, the subjective sensations run deep. Going out for a weekend trip, however respectable it may be, is not the same as a thru-hike for there is not enough time to readjust to the rhythms of the universe. It’s not so much a difference of tuning out or tuning in after months of 20 or 30 mile days. It’s a matter of becoming attuned. Being attuned is awareness, both in and out.
For TC and Nate, they became attuned to the fact that they were going to stop hiking. Since their goals were not to hike the entire PCT, they were not failures. Their goals were to hike a good hike, and that they did. Nate hung up his hiking hat. However, it was no longer the cheap bundle of straw. No, that piece of shit fell apart after 600 miles of love. In its stead was a cheap Remington ballcap. Still a piece of shit, but a newer, usable, lovable piece of shit that got him to the schoolyard back at Princeton so he could hit the books before a full fall schedule. TC, on the other hand, had eschewed his tiny, red shorts for a carbon copy, essentially, the only difference was that they were blue. New shorts, new man. At the end of the day, TC had bested his 100 miles, call it his trail of tears, and made it 1,000 miles to the Mecca of US National Parks, Yosemite. There he got off trail, rode into San Francisco with my father and brother and Nate, and surprised his then girlfriend by asking her to take his dirt encrusted hand in marriage.
It was weird to no longer be with “The Frat,” as some other saunterers started to call us. As a group, we were quite rambunctious, loud, and, admittedly, annoying. Maybe that had to do with the fact that we had actually begun hiking, from day one, under the team name, “The Artful Dodgers,” though that quickly fell into disuse. It didn’t fit us, so we eventually came up with “The Greater Sheboygan Metropolitan Area Mall Walkers’ Association,” or “The Mall Walkers” for short. That, it seems, didn’t help our case in terms of endearing us to other hikers. At least, not immediately. By the time we all congregated not far from the Yosemite Valley Chapel to celebrate our hike, illegally with some Bookers’ bourbon, we had been on trail for a week shy of two months. Our bonds, inside jokes, and demeanor certainly were juvenile. But it kept us going, even if it meant going a little insane, too.
Three months and a week later, Pip and I reached that other copse of posts as transformed beings. Our appearances, unmistakable. I guess that’s what happens when you are on a shoestring budget and don’t give a flying fuck as long as you are out walking. Wild, right? Hence the black and orange Frankensocks on Pip’s feet, the butterfly sweater I had to don after my women’s silk blouse, the one replete with built in shoulder pads for comfort that cost a whopping $2, literally fell off my back a day before the finish. The Umbros? An illusion. They’re some knock off brand I picked up at a thrift shop in Burney, California, on a respite from one of my three visits to the local McDonald’s that day. Nevermind that the crotch ripped out. Nothing a little floss can’t stitch back together. Gone were the toughest socks known to man, Darn Toughs, the socks made from 100% pure kitten’s fur. In lieu of the best, I settled for the worst, most generic pair of white athletic socks one could find precisely because one could find them. They served their purpose, and they served it well. And what of those emo glasses? Where did they end up? The bottom of Lake Chelan.
Only 70 miles from British Columbia, I was going against the advice of a United States National Park Service Ranger who told me that I should not jump off a 40 foot cliff into Lake Chelan because it was dangerous. How dangerous, I asked. Dangerous enough, apparently, that a kid recently broke his back and wound up paralyzed by his leap of foolish faith. I promptly asked the ranger to direct me to this point on the map. She told me that if I knew where to look, I’d find it in a few short minutes as long as I turned left out of the park headquarters. Sure enough, Pip and I found it. At this point in time, I was not the goddamn teetotaler I am today, so suffice it to say, I was raring to go with plenty of bourbon and beer pumping through my veins. I should mention, too, that Pip’s mom, Helen, accompanied us to the cliff. All I asked of her was to take photos, to document our downfall. In giddy schoolgirl fashion, Pip and I craned our necks over the ledge to see what exactly we had signed up for.
This was our line of reasoning: Fuck. Fuck it. Face your fears. Fly and fall.
So we did. This wasn’t our first aerial rodeo, and on my previous jumps I had always taken my glasses with me, in hand, so that, upon arising from the cold waters, I could see in clarity the surrounding beauty. It’d always worked fine, thus I declined Helen’s invitation to safeguard my glasses while I leaped and swam back to shore.
That is how I lost my one and only pair of glasses. I never carried a backup or spare anything. It seemed silly because I could easily get what I needed with a little patience and perseverance. The Trail, as the mantra goes, provides. I’d encountered countless, beautiful instances of this over the previous five months, and being within one resupply of the end, it was another instance of magical, dumb luck that when I, dripping wet and caught in a drunkenness with life and libation, walked back into the park headquarters they had a pair of glasses in their lost and found that worked. Stunning.
My transformation now complete, it was easy to see that I had more in common with Santa Claus than I initially realized. Those glasses were a perfect fit and were a fitting end to our sauntering sojourn. From the getgo, all of us at the terminus had one desire, one passion: to hike. When people ask what the trail was like, I am humbled by the immensity of the experiences in which I partook or witnessed, and the only way I know how to begin to explain it is by saying, “In the beginning, we had our word. In the end, we have our words.”