Here in the Feed Store at Hiker Town, PCT Mile 518, everything is familiar, funky, comforting. I sleep on an old cot by a pot belly stove with no stovepipe, behind the stove an old Blackjack table, oval, all set up for play as though a bunch of cowboys just got up and left, a century ago. The walls are covered with Old West… well, everything. A cowhide, rifles, bellows, old lanterns, old canteens, bayonets, satchels, a saw, washboard, a bull skull, tapestries, various half-faded portraits of long-faded people, a sombrero and dozens of other costume hats and cowboy hats, a giant sepia portrait of a steam locomotive, spurs, pistols, an ancient egg beater.
On the other side of the front door from me, bags of chicken feed, dog food, cat food for all the resident critters. Where I sit, a desk, sun-bleached, beaten, delaminating, perfect. It could be cast in gold for all its value to me after weeks on the trail without a comfortable writing surface, and all the more valuable because it is mine, for the moment; for five bucks a night donation the whole outbuilding and its Old West Feed Store facade are on loan to me alone, and it’s a kind of heaven. Old plank sidewalk out front, requisite wooden barrels upended flank the door, two stout sentries to hide behind in case a gun fight breaks out. I sit here looking out on the Old West mockup town through the Feed Store front window, the view pleasantly impaired by dozens and dozens of antique bottles of blue and brown, of unique shades of yellow and various greens, old oil lamps, a Hemingway aqua blue glass insulator, elaborate old Aztec chess pieces missing heads, noses, here and there an appendage, and two porcelain rocking horses—their paint so flaked as to make them look festive, like two tiny rocking horse piñatas.
As I sit and write with the door open for the benefit of the breeze here in the hot Mojave, now and then a chicken will try and wander in. I have been asked to keep them out. I gently discourage their entry. Nearby a rooster crows. The wind blows. The shack shakes and shimmies. On a shelf above the bags of feed, a cat sleeps on a hat. Without having asked for anything really, this is exactly what I needed. A little respite and a place to write.
From here, from this vantage on the PCT hiker world, I have almost achieved a manageable perspective on the events of the past week or so. That is to say one of whimsy, of who gives a damn, and hot damn ain’t that just too ironic!
For those of you who were following Facebook as well as this web log, you may have noted that my writing—at that moment in the form of short FB updates and a picture of a snake—ceased just shy of Mile 342, the highly anticipated and overblown McDonald’s at Cajon Pass on I-15. After my McDonald’s visit, I didn’t feel much like writing. More like spitting.
My arrival at McDonald’s couldn’t have been more badly timed. Well, there could have been a shoot-out. I guess that would have been worse.
As it was, a hydra-headed thruhiker beast arrived shortly behind me, doffed its five packs and sets of poles, ordered food, arranged its five sweaty heads and five smelly bodies at a safe distance from me across the restaurant, and proceeded to eat, never letting one of its ten eyes stray toward the one lone thruhiker sitting by himself across the way.
Not even when I got up and invited myself to join this group… er, beast, was there any kindness or congeniality or any of that “hey you’re one of us” camaraderie that one might expect from a tiny microcosm of long-distance hiking freaks poking ever-so-unsubtly into the odd reality of big-chain real-world interstate-side commerce, together.
No, there was no togetherness about it. It was like high school, or worse, junior high school. In an odd twist, one of the beast’s talking heads turned out to be from Beverly, Massachusetts, the very place I had attended that nightmare called junior high school. Finding this out about her, I was quite pleased for a moment, thinking “Surely this will be an avenue of commonality between us.” No such luck. That woman, who was sitting right across the table from me went an entire hour without making eye contact with me. They all did. They invisibilized me. I can hardly remember when I felt more the pariah. If I had to guess I’d say junior high school.
Socially, things just got weirder that week. I enjoyed a very pleasant trail-side visit from family. My father, out from the east coast on business, filled his rental car with sis, her husband, and my two nephews Jacob and Matthew, and they made the 80-mile trip to Wrightwood. We had a great afternoon together. Alas, the buzz from their visit was hardly sufficient to carry me through what came next.
A prominent trail angel, after I’d stayed at her home, informed me that she’d been forewarned about me, that a woman hiker was posting disparaging comments about me on Facebook in a place where other trail angels would be reading. She told me the name of my libeler. I was stumped. I’d met the woman in passing, exchanged only a few words. The woman was ahead of me at the next trail angel home, two days’ hike. It was a long ponderous walk. It was a short and awkward stay.
As far as my social life on the trail was going, this was the last thing I needed. Some drama queen I didn’t even know filling in the blanks for everyone about the loner guy without a clique. Great.
It was a rough week.
But now, looking out my window here in the Feed Store watching the timid white folk, the very white citizenry of Thruhikerville scuttle on by (not that it has anything to do with this story, but thruhiking is a decidedly white sport), I can chuckle at the humor of it all. Oh, the irony! I’m the black sheriff in Blazing Saddles, and it seems word’s got out. Everyone stays clear of the negro sheriff. Even the sisters that shared the trail with me for two days scoot on by with a fairly evident disinterest in stopping.
Whatever. I can laugh. When it gets this weird, you have to laugh.
Let’s change the subject, shall we?
To understand the way we walk, the way the trail requires one to walk, I suggest the following exercise. Take out a piece of blank paper. Now draw the outline of your hand, slowly tracing each finger and your thumb. Now, imagine the squiggle of lines you’ve now drawn represent the trail. Imagine yourself walking around the point that is your thumbnail. On the Appalachian Trail, you’d never see the path ahead. You would never know where you were but be assured you’d be taken up and over every mountaintop in the trail’s path. On the PCT, however, one can see forever.
Thus, when you round that point that is your thumb, you can see your pinky. At the very least you can see the tip of your next finger, but in order to get there you have to go way back into the crevice that is the recessed area between your fingers. All this is a very long and drawn out way of saying that it isn’t far from your pinky to your thumb, and it doesn’t look far sometimes from one point on the trail to another. The task of the hiker out here in the west where one can see for miles and miles is to walk that short distance from pinky to thumb the long way, perhaps the longest way, over all the contours, tracing the fingers and toes of the mountains that unfold into the deserts like so many outstretched hands.
This is work. This is real honest hard work. And we do it from dawn till dusk most days (leaving little time or energy to write). I have been walking in the deserts, high and low, of southern California now for nearly five weeks and I’ve about had it up to my iPod earbud-stuffed ears with desert winds and desert plants and the extremities of desert weather, an absolute manic cocktail of meteorological and psychological highs and lows with little in between.
Walking in the rain and wind the other day where the trail traces the San Andreas fault somewhere east of the I-5 and Gorham and just southwest of Lancaster, I thought to myself, no, this sure ain’t Chris McCandless romping through the forest with Eddie Vedder backing him up on guitar as he converses happily with his apple about what a tasty apple it is. No, that day and most days out here on the trail are more reminiscent of Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now describing the difference between what R&R means to the American soldier and what it is for Charlie. For the Vietnamese soldier it was a little more cold rice in Hell.
Actually, I think the name of the song on the Into the Wild film soundtrack is “Tuolumne Meadows.” So, maybe when I get 200 miles up into the High Sierra, my journey will be more like McCandless with an Eddie Vedder ensemble. More talking to happy apples and less cold rice. That will be nice. Something to look forward to.
For now, I’m looking at 40-some miles of flat Mojave Desert, which I will set out to begin crossing at sunset tonight to beat the heat. From Highway 58 near Tehachapi, I will hitchhike into the town of Mojave to pick up a supply box, return to the trail and commence to walk the final 140 miles of desert on approach to Kennedy Meadows, the southern gateway into the Sierra.
So, adding that up, I’m only 380 miles away from happy talking apples! Half of that a treacherous desert full of venomous snakes, the other half the John Muir Trail so overloaded with snow in late season that avalanches aren’t out of the question. Yay!
No, seriously. I’m actually starting to get excited about the Sierra. And I’m not going in alone, and I’m pretty sure I’ve found a crew or at least have acquainted myself with enough of my fellow thruhikers that some kind of team will congeal at Kennedy Meadows. As for the snakes ahead, well, can’t be any worse than the snakes behind, and I just danced right past all of them.
I think it’s gonna be just fine.
Since I started writing this, I have found a little crew here at Hiker Town. There are four of us, all with names starting with A, planning to do the next big section together.
Together.
Imagine that?
More on that next time. Thank you all for reading, for your continued love and support. I feel it.
—Rick McKinney
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