[pct-l] Info " Hot" off the Trail

[jjolson at uwyo.edu (Jeffrey Olson)]

I was perusing Ray Jardine's second edition "PCT Hiker's Handbook last night
and was struck by how common sense most everything he shared really was.
The opinions we offer about his ground-breaking work are so ephemeral and
small.  What came through upon this reading was the underlying "hike your
own hike."  Just what the hell does this mean????

I read this thread about the fellow who is using thru-hikers to do manual
labor and how weird and creepy the experience is.

Maybe it's because I'm 51 and have a lot of water under the bridge.  Maybe
it's because I'm single and never married.  Maybe it's because I use
backpacking to push my spiritual/emotional, and now physical boundaries,
working so that when I die I don't look back and rue what I did or didn't
do.  I want to thruhike the PCT before I can't.  I've section hiked 30 and
35 days.  These experiences whet my appetite, and my trepidation.

It's not completing the trail.  It's realizing that my path, from elementary
school to now, is marked by experiences of hiking in the wilderness.  To
hike the PCT alone, day after day, with all the emotional and spiritual
pain - I gird my loins.  I wonder what will happen the next time.

This will be part of what enables me to enter my dying with curiosity,
looking forward.  My friends, family and acquaintances think I'm weird.

What intrigues me is the whole idea that I can expect anything from anyone.
A trail angel?  Isn't this a sort of divine, unexpected intervention?  Can I
expect anything from anyone?

My experience is that as soon as I start anticipating or expecting something
from a person, place or experience, I'm a lost soul.  I can't state this
strongly enough.  If I expect anything from you, I'M A LOST SOUL!!!  What
you give me I cherish.

On a shorter section hike I met some thru-hikers, all but one, who was in
his mid-30s, who were in their mid-20s, who had banded together to ward off
the emotional edges being alone allows to emerge.  We met above Sonora Pass
on the long traverse to Kennedy Canyon.  When I asked if anyone had hiked,
or was hiking alone, one fellow spoke for the group and said it was too
hard.  His eyes were rounder, expressing the emotional maelstrom being alone
generates.  The others in the party simply ignored the question.  The
mid-30s guy wanted to speak, but chose not to.  I'm still curious what his
perception was.  His eyes were different.

My experience on my section hikes had everything to do with the life I'd
left behind to hike than what I was doing on the trail.  I know how to get
in shape, to increase mileage, to take care of my feet, to have planned well
enough to carry minimum weight and depend on my experience rather than gear.
I revel in the wilderness.  The physical stuff is really secondary.

What I experience being alone day after day, hour after hour, minute after
minute, second by second, concerned the "whole" of my life.  I hike to the
drummer of my past, beating its patterns within the tableau of my emotions
as I walk, making me get angry, then in epiphany, cry, and after crying feel
exultation.

In 1971, at 19, I left Laguna Beach alone, newly in love to hike from
Whitney to Yosemite Valley.  At Taboose Pass, the intensity of my pain drove
me from the trail.  I camped at the top of Taboose Pass and hiked down the
next morning.  20 miles later I passed out with my feet in Taboose Creek at
395 for an hour before hitching to Santa Cruz.  My friend wasn't there and I
hitched to his folks home in Los Altos Hills.  I started hiking at 5:30 AM
and arrived in Los Altos at 10PM.  Being alone was torture.  The adventure
was amazing.  I was hit on twice by men who wanted my body.

In 1993 I hiked from Red's Meadow to Whitney Portal.  The "love of my life"
had decided she needed to be alone.  The last day I hiked from Wallace
Creek(?) to Whitney Portal, 23 miles.  I was driven to re-enter the world in
which other people allowed me to bury what I was feeling.  I left the trail
with four days of food in my pack.  My emotions were so strong I couldn't
deal with them.

In 1994 I hiked from I-5 at the Oregon/California border to White Pass in
Washington, leaving the trail, but not the trip, because I had had enough.
The "love of my life," now a friend, had backed out at the last minute from
this hike.  At day 10 I was walking down the trail, hot, hungry, thirsty and
an emotional basket case.  I started crying.  I just let it out.

There was 2% that made sure no one was coming down the trail, but 98% that
just let go.  I blubbered how miserable I was, how much I just wanted to
hang out with my family, how miserable I was, how much "not fun" the hike
was.  For 10 minutes I blubbered and sniffed and snorted and blew snot and
gulped and moaned and cried.  For the next 25 days I did this at least twice
a day, and usually three to four times.  The world had me see how pitiable
and weak was a 40 year old man crying as he hiked.

I was very much aware that I was a 40 year old man who was totally out of
"control."  I didn't care.  My brother, now a Buddhist Monk at the Shasta
Abbey, talked about hiking in Nepal, and how a woman he met while he was
becoming a monk said that men would react to the beauty in which they found
themselves by getting angry.  Women cried as they hiked.  I think I was
beyond the gender dichotomies.  I just plain hurt...

10 minutes after starting to cry I slowly sniffed and blubbered to a stop.
I was still hiking in the Oregon Desert.  The trail was wide and level and
sandy.  Small lodgepole pines blocked all views.  All I saw was what I felt.
I started to feel stable as I sniffed the tears away.  I realized I'd
reached a milestone and started to exult.

I can't describe the transition between utter desolated emotional pain and
emotional exultation.  All I knew is that my steps and pack were lighter.  I
felt GOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   I was so in balance.  The pain had morphed into
joy and I realized that by actually allowing myself to hurt intensely I had
created the space in which I could experience nearly complete and utter joy.
The two combined created I AM SATISFIED WITH MY LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!  This is
the plateau.  This is where I begin on the next hike alone.

I have hiked alone since then, usually week-long warmup trips to hike with
my friends Dave and Deniece.  This summer I hiked with Dave for six days in
the Winds and realized it was time for another experience alone on the PCT.

I think of how I began this post, talking of Ray Jardine and "hike your own
hike," and realize that at 51, this has different meaning than it did at 41,
when I hiked part of the JMT with the intent to deal with the pain of losing
the "love of my life," or the next year when I opened up to whatever came,
hoping I could cope.

I think I'm lucky to have a brother who wears brown robes, shaves his head,
stares at walls a couple hours a day, and helps run the "business" of a
monastery.  The Buddhist sect he is part of views living as a "working
meditation."  Everything done, thought, felt, etc., is something that can be
"let go of" and hence learned from.

I say that because long distance hiking for me constitutes the context in
which I learn to "let go" what the surface world says is important.  I feel
lucky.  I teach in a university and have no boss.  There is still the
politics and pettiness and time wasting.  Let me go out on the trail and
marvel in how that all fades away, and tremble as what is important emerges
at the same time.

Last time it took 10 days for the "busyness" to fade and my "issues" to
emerge.  To establish a routine on the trail, to let go the busyness, to
teach myself, once again, to be in the moment of my own real life - this is
what presents itself to me.  The trail is the metpahor, not the path.  It is
a means, not an end.  Finishing is not important.  I die after all.  That is
the real end...

It's ironic that this is the Siren's call.  I can't ignore it.   Getting to
the calmness I know is possible is a possibility that won't go away.  Each
trip along the trail in the wilderness has set the stage, the possibility
for the next step in living.  I am haunted by what calls me.

Some people are book smart.  Some are hands smart.  Some are linear and some
non-linear.  Intelligence is so multifaceted and different that any
privileging of one over another is ludicrous - subject to ridicule, if one
were so disposed.

The point is that all the intellectual mind work is part of setting the
stage for hiking.  My love for a woman is necessarily intertwined with
being-on-the-trail-together.  My folks did me a grave disservice, or gave a
hugely unintended gift when they packed the family into the Marble Mountains
for two weeks in the late 50s for a couple years before heading into the
Eagle Cap Wilderness on the first family backpacking trip.

My peak experiences are the bumps of growth processes that occur during
hiking.  Success and loss in love is so transitory.  To weather the slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune while hiking courses in constant,
all-encompassing continuity of experience.  I read that and affirm it is
"mostly" true...

If I contribute to making the world a better place in which to live in the
various venues of my life, it is due to my hiking.  I love my path...

Jeff...
Laramie, Wyoming, where summer struggles to maintain itself...