The next day I did something quite out of character for me. I got high with Norway. I never get high. Not with marijuana anyway.
This is not because I’m some kind of weed teetotaler such as Charles Bukowski professed to be later in life, but because it just doesn’t work for me. (I loved watching taped interviews of Bukowski denouncing drug use, “dope” in particular because it makes you dopey, this from a lifelong professed and proud drunk.) No, I don’t smoke it because it makes of me just what Bukowski said: a dope. I just get stupid. Or I wanna take a nap.
But I also can get freaked out. It’s mostly for this latter reason, although nearly everyone I know smokes regularly, that I still don’t.
Once upon a time, a drop-in clinic shrink denied my refill request for my normal anti-depressant and instead put me on the anti-psychotic drug Risperdal when I answered his query as to why I didn’t smoke pot with “Because it sometimes makes me paranoid.” As if no well-adjusted person had ever had that reaction to marijuana before. Dumb young Berkeley doctor. I took one pill, experimentally, and felt so disconnected from my body and soul the next day that I dumped them forthwith over the side of my boat and into the San Francisco Bay. There were some “well-adjusted” fish in the marina that day, I’m sure.
Somewhere about mid-morning on July 19 by a place smartly named Sharknose Ridge at about Mile 739, I decided to smoke pot with a relative stranger after years of turning it down from very close friends. Not that it mattered I was soon to discover, for no sooner had we smoked than in my stoned stupor I fell behind Norway and he, stimulated by a drug that’s as familiar to him as air, zoomed on ahead out of sight. I was alone again, and man was I stoned.
I wasn’t stupid. I mean, going into it I made an informed decision based on feeling safe in a beautiful forest on a beautiful day in a place called the Golden Trout Wilderness. What could go wrong?
Famous last words. In fact, everything went fine. No paranoia befell me. Maybe this owed to the whole journey being such a crucible with many non-drug induced periods of psychological pile-driving that somehow a little external influence on my mind in the form of smoke wasn’t enough to rattle my sense of self.
My sense of self held just fine. I came out of it with a bit of a headache. I spent a lot of time running my palms and fingers over various textures of tree bark, lichen and stone. Otherwise it didn’t amount to much. Certainly not to an accelerated pace, as was the magic it worked on Norway and other hikers like Worldwide. Worldwide was a great guy, one I knew only briefly precisely because he would get stoned and hike 30 to 40 miles at a stretch. Or so he said. I never witnessed it. But I believed him. Especially since he was one of only a few people to acknowledge the wrong done me by the one he so nicely renamed “Sugar Drama,” adding a whole stream of expletives to his observations of her as he assured me not to “worry about that psycho bitch.” How could I not like the guy?
At Hiker Town, Worldwide introduced me to an app on my Droid phone called Google Star Map (we had the same phone). The night after he left, never to be seen by me again, I spent a good half hour wandering the yard out there in the Mojave beneath the stars, earbuds in, Enigma booming out of Pandora Radio online, tripping out on the
constellations, once largely-foreign to this impatient learner, now all there with names and gyroscopic relative motion to my own, and me twirling, whirling in slow motion, making the gods dance for me and all of it coming from this computer in my hand, no longer just a phone but a portal of sorts to endless worlds and endless information and endless music and art and literature.
I am writing this book from said “phone.” It will post in pieces to the Internet before it becomes a book as a whole. What a strange and wonderful freak of creation is that. This. All of this.
Am I stoned? Where was I?
Oh, yes. stoned got me late for dinner, so to speak. The goal for the day was 18 miles out, not a huge day but big enough for the Sierra. Aside from the time lost to caressing trees, the day’s big hurdle was the elevation. At 11,145 feet, Cottonwood Pass stood higher than anything I’d yet climbed on the PCT.
In late afternoon, I hit the intersection of Mulkey Pass Trail. The first potential exit for resupply since Kennedy, Mulkey takes you down to Lone Pine fully 22 miles to the east. When I got there, three young section hikers with whom we’d been sharing the trail for the past two days, two men and a women, were chatting up an old man who’d hiked up to the pass for the day.
Twice in the past two days I had passed this little group sitting together in the shade, one of the guys reading to his friends from a hard bound book. In brief snippets, I couldn’t place the work. Here and there I had met them each in passing, learned their names and a little about them. I might have stopped and joined them, but that some powerful energy prevented me. To whit: the woman excited me in a way no thruhiker woman yet had.
She wasn’t any different than most, not significantly more attractive, and just as young as much of the hiker gang, an attribute that had gone from novelty to a pain in the ass seemingly overnight for this writer.
But something about her, and perhaps in my place on the trail, how long and how lonely, triggered in me an impulse toward candor far beyond anything I normally exhibit. I felt sure the next time I saw them if I stopped I would not be able to control my tongue and would blurt out, “Excuse me guys but I can plainly sense that the lady here and I are of a like mind and in mutual need of a good roll in the pines. If you don’t mind we’ll be going off a ways for some privacy. Mind watching our packs? Thanks.”
Is that true? I wonder. Could I really have come all this way without finding all but maybe one of the women on the trail attractive? Could that really be the case? Or am I just saying that in defense of myself, of the indifference with which I was treated?
I believe we must first feel desirable to desire. That doesn’t sound like it would hold water with any psychologist, but I’m going to stand by it in this case.
I am a man who needs to feel wanted, desired, 100 percent. Does that make me needy? Maybe so. At any rate, give me the slightest indication that I am not welcome, that I am not wanted, and I’m gone. Not exactly good attributes for mating in a world of mixed emotions and
competition. Definitely not good attributes on the PCT, where not one clearly-available woman in 900 miles made me feel the least bit desirable and very often quite the opposite.
“Where are you headed? Headed to the North Face, are ya?” the old man was talking at me. I was leaning on my poles, staring up over my glasses into the woman’s eyes. The stare was mutual. I didn’t get the reference at first until the old man pointed to my hat. My general distaste for brandishing logos unassociated with me or my journey might have inclined me to go along with his joke. But then the bastard outright insulted me.
“You must be the slow poke. Hiking with that Jack guy, aren’t ya? He passed here an hour ago. You got a hustle ahead of you if want to catch up with that handsome Jack. That boy’s fit!”
I’ll fit you, you old smart ass, I thought to myself.
“You should have told him off to his face! Told him off right in front of those kids. Why not?” Norway explained to me how he would often use the trail as a kind of training ground to test out speaking his mind to people. “You’ll never see him again.”
I’d made it to the pass just before dark. Jack and Norway had made camp beneath the only two shade trees on the only semi-flat section of the pass not covered in snow. I mention shade because I can envision many a cowboy picking that spot to tie up their horses. But shade wasn’t an issue at this hour. The sun was down and it was colder than shit up there at eleven thousand feet.
Now that’s probably one of the few if not the only and I hope the last time you’ll see me describe something as colder than shit. But I do so here for good reason. Because Jack and Norway were camped right in the middle of a pile of shit.
It was like some kinda voodoo thing where the horse (and cow? Could cattle possibly have wandered all the way up here?) shit was laid out all around them where they nestled in their bags listening to The Be Good Tanyas and David Byrne from an iPod on a pair of little portable USB speakers Norway carried. Unless I wanted to go off and camp by myself, which I most certainly did not, I had no choice but to jump right in the shit with them and cowboy camp there in the horse crapper.
Both snug in their bags, the boys just watched as I paced around imagining enough space for myself in the small area between the two standing trees, the two men and all their gear, and a couple of large logs arranged around the tiny camp. Luckily, all the dung was as frozen as we were, so I just kicked it around to make space for myself on the ground. On a warm night, it would have been unbearable.
- Rick McKinney
Camp Dung Heap at 11,000 feet. The boys, still in their bags, await the rising sun.
