Contour Vertigo, Bonnie & Clyde

Contouring. That’s what they call it. All my talk of fingers on a hand, walking around the fingers. That day there were too many fingers. Too many.

Now the story of Bonnie & Clyde by Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot, sung in French, comes on my computer here on the boat as I work outside in the cockpit to repair the hatchway frame, not even at my computer but suddenly drawn down into the cabin and to it, keyboard in hand and writing as the song takes me straight back into that strange sunny forest more than a month ago, that day of seemingly endless fingers, endless contouring around and along one mountainside and another, over this ridge, down that road, a long section of road walk, the sun exposure perhaps to blame for the altered state my mind drifted into later in the day.

Did I listen to this song repeatedly? Or was it just with this song that the real weirdness hit? Bonnie and Clyde.

I do not understand the French, but we all know the story. My brain knows the story, can follow the growing tension, however subtle. Knows what’s coming. And somehow that mixes with my own anxiety of being lost and alone in the endless forest. I look at the map again. It seems I have been on the same mile or so forever now. But these sections are deceiving, like loopdiloops, like counting petals. Loves me. Loves me not. Loves me. Loves.. where was I? Which one was I on?

On the map, they look like a sprung Slinky, a child’s Crayon drawing of an endless lower case m. The same clutch of contours, a bridal bouquet cast backward over the bride’s shoulder, flying blind, airborne, captured thus by the photographer’s camera, forever frozen in time now traced by finger’s nostalgic, each flower a thickly-forested ridge of some mountain range I married when I woke up this morning. "We now pronounce you man and mount…" I was half asleep! Surely I can’t be held accountable. I didn’t know what I was saying.

The same can be said of this whole ill-begotten adventure, come to think of it. I was under the influence of a strange and beautiful witch. She inhabited my right hip, put a poison and a pain in there. By day said she didn’t want a boyfriend, didn’t want the responsibility of me, but by night whispered "Take me away with you to the country, save me, love me, save me from myself."

Abnormally exhausted for mid-afternoon, a kind of vertigo in the forest, rounding the next in an endless chain of zig-zag contours each one the exact copy of the last, I, like Alice, shook my head with the strangeness of it all. And finally unable to take it anymore, sometime during the demise of Bonnie and Clyde, I staggered like a drunk off the trail and into the first available grassy spot, dropped my pack and fell hard into the grass and fast asleep in a way to mimic fainting.

Perhaps, I thought, I think back now, that is what fainting feels like. I fainted there in late-afternoon in the forest dizzy and overwhelmed and hot and perhaps a bit dehydrated and most certainly anxious over the unmistakable sense that I was not walking some straight south to north trail but wandering lost in a labyrinth, quite alone, soon to be gunned down.

And where oh where was my Bonnie then?

– Rick McKinney

Read Full Post »

Talking Grace & Falling Space

What are you doing?


I am praying.

I thought you weren’t religious.


I’m not. I’m spiritual.

Then why Grace Cathedral? Why the big church?


It comforts me. It humbles me. I find peace here. Here and places like this, I feel closer to God whoever and whatever that may be.

What are you praying for?

I’m not really praying for anything. I’m praying about. I’m I’m feeling weak today, so I am sending out a prayer to do what I cannot do, what my arms feel too weak to do, to embrace the world and within that embrace find the divine spirit and just give thanks. In the past weeks, I have come from a place of great loneliness, and last night I was reminded that I am not alone.

But you knew that. The problem was that all those people were in San Francisco and you were in the desert and the Sierra.

Yes.


So what now? You are leaving again to go be alone, most of the time, in Maine.

I’m going to be with my father and to write.

Yes, but you’ll be alone a lot there. And then you’re planning on going to go to Spain, again alone.

I know. Sounds crazy doesn’t it?

Absolutely bonkers.

Yeah. I don’t know what I’m doing really. Or why. I thought I knew. But now and again the charts get lost, you know? The plans. And the step by step instructions on how to carry them out. It’s a problem with being entirely self-lead, self-driven. Being the navigator. Today is one of those days.

So you are praying for something.

Yes, I suppose I am. I’m praying for courage and clarity.

What do you really want?

I want to continue to write this book and have it finished by my birthday, end of October. I want it final edited by Thanksgiving, published and in my hand and on iPads by Christmas.


Do you have to go to Spain and walk the Way of St. James to finish this story?

No. I suppose not. It just spoke to me as an appropriate and really majestic finish to a season of walking and writing, to yet another journey of self-discovery, or discovery of life, whatever it is I am discovering and uncovering, or recovering in my travels.

What happens if you can find no one to join you in Spain, no one to go with you, a strong likelihood at this point with your planned departure just one month away.


I don’t know. I may go anyway, on faith, if the spirit tells me that I must, to trust that I will meet plenty of other pilgrims on the way.

And what if logistics and finances fail and you don’t go at all? You’ve spoken of a kind of mock-pilgrimage, going to The Doyle Hotel in Duncannon PA and spending a month there interviewing Appalachian Trail thruhikers and wrapping up the book that way.

I may do that.

Is that wise?

Wise or not, it certainly answers to my earlier expressed sentiment that I’d rather be in an LA dive bar drinking cheap beer and writing Bukowski-esque poems. A story is a story, and every story needs an ending and that would be just as good an ending as any I think, with my imagination at play with the facts.

What are your plans for winter?

To hole up somewhere, curl up by a fire and lick my wounds, to recover from a season of physical & mental extremes, of hard hiking and a committed writing life that borders on insanity and is most certainly masochistic.

Amen.

You said it.

Will you leave me with a story?

Yes. A short one. Here you are.

The Sierra Nevada, 11,200 feet. No moon tonight. I am surrounded by high stone minarets and castle walls, lost in a sea of jagged peaks splayed out like a hand of flat black playing cards held at arms length. I go to bed on a thin foam mat still in my shoes, still in my down jacket, too tired to undress. With my head back, eyes open, I watch in awe as the vault of the heavens loses its natural adhesion and all the stars fall down on me where I lay, fall in a rain of tiny golden fires. Cool to the touch they do not burn but gather on and around me piling up like dry hail they stick and stay, and I run my hand through the stars and smile with delight. Where are you now my love? I ask the night. I scoop two handfuls of cool blazing stars together and, as one would with water from a stream, I douse myself in the mystery of ages of people staring skyward at night, pour stars over my head and gasp as they cascade down my face, the effect to my open eyes that of flying through space.

– Rick McKinney

Read Full Post »

Don Quixote & The Strobe-Lit Sunset

Windmills, windmills, windmills! Three hundred miles back I was transfixed by their massive towering beauty and the whoop-whoop of their 100-foot blades and the proximity with which the trail grazes their path. Now up here so many and so many days of nothing but windmills, I’m going a little mad with windmills! In hypnotic trance periods of walking amidst these animate giants my mind drifts into fantasy, and I become Don Quixote! I rush the giant swirling beast and thrash it with my trekking pole sabers. Come on, imagination! Conjure up a lady queen in whose honor we can fight these towering scythes to the death!

Hmm. None comes. there isn’t a woman on this journey worth fighting for. None that shown me love in the least. Well, okay. There are a few women worth fighting for, love aside. There’s The Purple Ninja. She’s sweet and not at all hard on the eyes, and she and her mate Ace have been good compañeros in these past days of intermittent dead Mojave heat and wind, wind, wind.

So I shall fight for the life and the honor of another man’s woman. So be it. And thinking of Ace and Ninja, I am reminded that the windmills are not all bad, that once not long ago I actually found them amazing to behold.

A few nights back by a spring in a soft glade of shade trees on the east face of a ridge lined with windmills like a hundred giant sentries towering over us, stalwart, still and yet busy all at once, treacherously menacingly dangerous and yet calming somehow once accustomed to them, protective, like sleeping beside giant robots programmed to protect you, we experienced something most uncommon and lovely. Ace, Ninja and I laid down our heads to rest in a sunset the likes of which I’ve never seen, a sunset of constant partial flickering eclipse, of golden light parsed strobe-like by the rhythmic whirling passage of the giant blades of windmills.

– Rick Quixote McKinney

Read Full Post »

Fellowship & An Icy Blue Otter Pop

I got stumped the other day, a Friday, while fleshing out a 1000 or so words written in the dirt on the trail, written in haste with the thunder of a billion gallons of snowmelt ripping past my camp at 10,000 feet, that waterfall smell in the air, the morning sun rising fast in a brilliant blue Sierra sky, dazzling, daunting, troubling with the knowledge of what lay ahead: vast inclining fields of snow softening with every minute I sat there writing. One wants to cross the many high snow-covered passes of the Sierra in the morning if possible when the snow is hard, when your every step won’t plunge you through its crust, tripling your labors and oftentimes endangering your shins, knees, ankles when your legs posthole straight through to the boulder fields below.

(Hmm…)

Wow. I look back, consider this last paragraph banged out in a caffeinated minute of lucid recollection of my life just two weeks ago. I’m sitting on a boat in Oakland right now, on the San Francisco Bay some 250 miles from the trail. It is Sunday. Saturday was, by my extremely impatient current work ethic, a waste: couldn’t write a word. Judging by the direction in which that paragraph went shortly after the word "stumped," I would say that I am not stumped any longer.

Or maybe I am. For I haven’t returned to the subject matter whereupon the stumping occurred. I just sat down this morning to tell you about Jack and what Jack just lent to my story.

Jack is my neighbor, of sorts. Jack occupied this dark little room in Schultz’s ShadeTree at 48 Fifth Avenue Oakland for something like fifteen years until one day he bought a big old power boat in the marina down the street, moved onto it, and I moved into his old room. It was my first time living on land in over two years. I occupied the room for about six months before vacating it to go and hike the Pacific Crest Trail. It was a wonderful six months.

ShadeTree is a vibrant eclectic community of eccentric and talented people: artists, musicians, craftspeople, mechanics, chefs, and, for a moment, a writer. The whole place is the manifested dream of one Robert Schultz, an artist whose talent for impromptu wild & imaginative oral narrative lends such life to his already-wonderful found object sculptures that when the man departs this world I quite expect his every anthropomorphic junk art creature to become animate and hit the road in search of its master like Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang and The Brave Little Toaster.

I loved my time at ShadeTree. After two years of living alone on a small sailboat, ShadeTree, just five blocks away, was a virtual explosion of socialization for me. Thanks initially to friends Rebecca and Konnie May who threw a theme birthday "Tea Party" for me and passed out invitations to every resident, I was instantly acquainted with dozens of friendly new neighbors. One such person was Jack who was no stranger for now living down the street on a boat. Far from it. Fifth Avenue dead ends at the funkiest marina in Oakland, chock full like ShadeTree with artists and buccaneers, not a boring or straight person among them. Even Jack, a former truck driver, is anything but boring. Jack is a convivial conversationalist and has an ease about him that I find restful, comforting. I could have used such a companion out on the trail.

In answer to his query, I quickly summarized my summer goals: to develop all my notes and writings from the trail in a book and publish it. Jack misunderstood me to have said fellowship. I was probably mumbling.

Publish it. Fellowship.

It was an odd and fantastically appropriate misunderstanding, given the social withdrawal I went through on the trail. Fellowship.

"Surely there was a great deal of fellowship among hikers on the trail, Rick?"

Oh. Pandora’s Box. Jack had opened Pandora’s Box, and in a Starbucks of all places, a coffee establishment I rarely set foot in but will, on occasion, when desperate for java as it is just yards from my boat, the next nearest vendor a mile.

"Fellowship is so important. It’s hard these days when everyone just kind of keeps to themselves and doesn’t want to interact," and here Jack either consciously or unconsciously cast a wary eye on the populous of the sterile Starbucks wherein we sit.

"When it comes down to it, it’s the most important thing we have."

Oh Jack you hit the nail on the head. I didn’t have enough coffee in me yet to go into detail with him how I had struggled on the trail, struggled in search of the fellowship that was forever leaving me behind. Elusive. Kept seeing its tail feathers just ahead. Heck, I don’t believe I’ve come very far yet in comprehending or processing it yet myself. So coffee or no, I couldn’t explain it. To lay a word like "devastating" on Jack wouldn’t be fair on a late sunny Sunday morning. No. Probably a bit overstated anyway.

But there is no denying that I was damn tired of my own company at the end of 900 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. I had developed a terrible case of separation anxiety the likes of which I had never experienced in my life. I watched a general sense of loneliness develop over weeks and weeks into a condition of acute panic and/or manic mood plummet to the depressive whenever someone I was hiking with would leave me behind.

And Johnny Cash comes on iTunes in a random shuffle of 5000 songs singing Trent Reznor’s "Hurt" singing my pain with the random precision of a horoscope, of a fortune cookie paper scrap of human understanding broad enough to touch us all. And Johnny sings, "Everyone I know goes away in the end."

I remember the brief time I spent hiking with the sisters, how nice that was and what pleasant company they were until we dropped out of the canyon at Deep Creek and onto this giant expanse of concrete that was a levee of some sort. They dropped their packs right on the edge of the thing, right in the sun, and began playing with their phones, it being the first area of reception in some time. I bade them join me in a small shady area across the way but they judged it too far and stayed put. It was a way’s off, and I was as much in need of a break as they, but I walked across the lonely expanse of concrete anyway and sprawled out in the shade, I could just see them out of the corner of my left eye. I thought for a moment that I must have dozed off and was having a nightmare for suddenly this enormous black raptor the size of a commercial jet swooped down and snatched up the sisters, packs and all, and carried them off down canyon never to be seen again.

Really.

Okay, not really. But it’s easier to imagine that than to cope with the reality that they just left me there, alone on that frikken levee, not even asleep for I never can nap outside a comfy bed but merely resting in the shade. Snuck away they did, or so it seemed, only to reappear at McDonald’s hours later to join the other thruhikers present there in so rudely dis-including me in their conversation and plans as to make me wonder if the all-embracing sense of community I’d encountered on the Appalachian Trail was at all extant out here in the Land Of The Weird.

There was undoubtedly fellowship on the Pacific Crest Trail. It was just hoarded and guarded like some scarce commodity, and it was rarely shared with me. And when it was, it was in tiny slivers, just enough to wet one’s appetite. Just enough to make one hunger for more, then drive them mad with desire for something which, if they’d had no taste of from the beginning, they might have easily lived without.

Between losing the sisters and my ill-timed arrival at McDonald’s that day, I had the following experience and, thanks to the relief afforded me of which you’ll soon be aware, I was able to sit awhile and write about it.

Making tracks today. Fast as my legs will carry me. McDonald’s ahead. The almost mythological McDonald’s the way it is spoken of with reverence on the trail through this hot and nasty stretch southeast of I-15. Earbuds in, tuned out, then WHOA! Stopped dead in my tracks. Diamondback rattler so close on my left I could reach out and touch him where he lay stretched out on a steep embankment. Music so loud I wouldn’t have heard his rattle had he rattled. But he didn’t. Doesn’t rattle now, no sound, no movement as I slowly turn to face him then side-step two steps north, a curious but not entirely safe distance away.

Shortly the fear – instinctual, passes, and I am frozen there, staring in.. admiration? He’s beautiful. In a creepy serpent sort of way. No. It’s something else. It’s thirst.

Madness creeping in. The heat between us makes him undulate. The rocks wiggle and warble with it. Ran out of water a half mile back. Not like me. Damn promise of McDonald’s so close and yet so far. Still six miles now. Even clocking, that’s an hour and a half, more likely two.

Staring at the snake, I watch now as it undergoes a bizarre ecdysis, quickly moulting, trading out its diamond coat for a long sheath of clear plastic. A pawn shop trade. Times are tough. I pick up and throw a stick at it. No movement at all. I’ve already taken out my Droid phone, photographed and posted the damn creature’s portrait on Facebook and still no movement.

A minute later, the transformation is complete. Snake is no longer snake but a frozen blue Otter Pop a meter long! I’m insane with thirst and this heat. Screw McDonald’s anyway. I can’t take it anymore.

With a roar primeval I dive upon the thing and grab it by the throat. With the fingers of both hands white-knuckled around it, I choke it good lest it reanimate. Then, raising it to within striking distance of my face, I bite off its head and begin sucking. Fantastic icy blue coldness coats my throat, fills my mouth to overflowing, spilling down my hands. And for a second I snap-to and my sticky-phobia kicks in and I think "How will I get that stickiness off my hands without any wash water?"

Then I remember that here on the trail, on the journey, all of the real world’s weird little ticks and phobia’s don’t matter for nothing. On the road, on the adventure, on the hero’s journey, all bets are off. The rules change. Adaptation is a daily meditation. Here when you get your hands sticky from sap, you don’t waste your drinking water. You rub them in the dirt. A dirt wash.

I’ve crossed the paths of a dozen rattlers since Mexico. It was time to change the rules. It was time for a blue freezer pop. I take the little doll head Baby Blonde out of my pocket and place her in the sand of the embankment where the snake had been but where now only a few dribbles of melted Brilliant Blue #2 now stain the sand. Speaking to her, I say, "It wasn’t Diamondback Rattler Day, was it Baby Blonde?"

"Nope. It sure wasn’t."

"Nope. It was Abby Normal and icy blue Otter Pop Day," I say with a burp as I drain the last of the long plastic snake skin.

"And Baby Blonde Day!" the head says, not a little indignant.

"Oh, sorry." And with that I bend over and touch a bit of the blue liquid to the doll’s lips. Instantly the dye stains her face and as I snatch her up and try to fix it, the mess of it dripping down the back of my hand gets all in her blonde hair as well.

I perform a quick dirt wash on my hands, then hold up the antique prop doll head from Terry Gilliam’s film "Tideland" for closer inspection. It doesn’t look good. "Oh jeezus! Now look what we’ve done. Jane’s not gonna like this one bit."

And just when things were going so well, I think. Dammit. Six more miles to Mickey D’s. I have a bad feeling about McDonald’s. Can’t explain it. Just do. It feels like the end of something’s coming. And, as usual I have no one I really know, no friends to speak of, anywhere nearby.

I look around the desert landscape for a shade tree to sit beneath and write a bit. There are none to be found.

ShadeTree! I was talking about ShadeTree. And I got sidetracked. Sort of. Fellowship. Jack mistook my words "publish it" for "fellowship" and we talked awhile about how important that is. I had fellowship aplenty at ShadeTree, and I left my fellowship there for a gamble on the psychological benefits of another walk in the woods.

But what I found on the Pacific Crest Trail was a solitary experience of very little psychological benefit and almost no fellowship at all. The existence of the latter on my Appalachian Trail hike six years ago may well account for far more of the psychological benefit of that hike than of the natural environment I walked through.

People. We need one another. We are all about one another. Chris McCandless would have been proud of me. I was stumping for his deathbed cause for the better part of my hike, regurgitating that Dr. Zhivago quote or the essence of it for most of my 900 miles. "Happiness only real when shared."

In the very end, I found I had a couple of friends on the Pacific Crest Trail. Well, at least two. And I was as acquainted as I am with ShadeTree folks with many more prospective thruhikers. But unlike my neighbors at ShadeTree, my acquaintances on the Pacific Crest were always somewhere up ahead. And gaining. I couldn’t call them up or just drop by. I could have jumped ahead to meet them, but it would have meant skipping miles and the disintegration of my complete hike of the trail.

"Well, now you’re off the trail, so what does it matter?" you might ask. Indeed. But I can go back and pick it right up where I left off. I can and do intend to someday finish it in sections. I have hiked fully one-third.

I’ve been writing all day now. Jack is long gone. But if he were here he might continue this line of questioning, that if fellowship were so important, or rather that BECAUSE as we have established fellowship is so important, surely I should have just jumped forward.

Maybe. I thought about it. I thought about everything. Every angle. Unlike my friends the Michigan Boys who synonymously pulled a Forrest Gump one afternoon just north of Tuolumne and walked off the trail, I thought about it for weeks and weeks. And my sense about jumping forward was that I would only have continued to fall behind, compounding my frustration and delaying the development of a copious pile of notes into full-fledged narrative. No. By the time I was seriously thinking about it, I was already done.

As I told someone the day I left the trail, "I’ve walked as far as a case of heartbreak and the support of my friends can carry me. For the next 1,800 miles, I would have needed a hell of lot of will power and determination to reach Canada that I just don’t have. Screw it! I’ve suffered enough. I’m gonna go enjoy the rest of my summer in comfort. Sit on a couch somewhere, who cares. Adios and vaya con Dios!"

– Rick McKinney

Disclaimer: All characters appearing in this work are figments of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is absolutely frikken amazing considering we are all living in our own story, and this is just my story. Just so. Making it up as I go.

Read Full Post »

Navigating The Wilderness

Biggest creek crossing yet. Hairiest. Scariest. I hit it at six o’clock in the evening. The snows have been melting hard all day. Creeks rise and fall by a foot or more in one day around here, low in the morning after a cold night, high in the afternoon when the melt is on. I am alone and though I have been crossing creeks all day, this one is particularly spooky. I drop my pack and being preparations. The actual crossing will take me less than a minute. A half an hour goes into preparing my pack and myself.

Everything in the pack gets rearranged. Food comes out of the bear vault, a large three gallon sealed plastic container, and in the place of the disposable food items go my phone, my camera, my keyboard, my iPod, my matches,my lighter, my stove. All the electronics get double Ziplock bagged.

Out of my one “dry bag” comes all but the most necessary items: long johns and a turtle neck, and into it goes my sleeping bag, a thin down summer bag. Lacking another dry bag for my down jacket, I opt to wear it. I reason thus: if I fall in, at least I will have it, can dry it out later.

I doff my hiking shoes and don my rubber river shoes. I remove my pants, stuff them in my pack, tie the hiking shoes to the pack. I take out my Ziplock “hiker wallet” with cash and cards and put it in the breast pocket of my hiking shirt. I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.

Standing in red & black North Face down jacket over white shirt in blue boxer short underwear with forty pound pack on my back and poles in hand, I face the beast. I must look quite a sight. The water is freezing snow melt and I am up to my crotch despite a careful inspection with my eyes and probing of the river bottom with poles for the highest stones across which to walk. As I say, the crossing takes no time at all. All the preparation is for the worst case scenario. Thankfully, it doesn’t happen.

On the far bank, I stand and with a death grip on my poles I let go a primal roar as it wells up from deep in my gut. The pain and shock of the cold water have a voice.
I don’t so much decide as simply act on instinct to walk off the shock of the experience just as I am, in my red river shoes and blue underwear. Why not. There isn’t a soul out here and even it there was I wouldn’t care. I have just stared down a hungry lion and walked away unscathed.

A little ways up the trail a few things occur to me, little hindsight specters of what exactly would have happened had I lost my balance and gone in the water. Aside from struggling to survive, to get my head above water and orient and claw my way up a bank before the creek I was crossing joined (as it would have within seconds) the raging torrent cascading down the mountain to my right on a kind of alpine slide of glacially polished rock to waterfall after waterfall, I would most certainly have lost my pack. The non-suicidal method of river crossing with pack is to unclip yourself from the pack for a speedy jettison of the latter should you topple over and find yourself fighting for your life. It was to the issue of my pack loss that my mind drifted as I walked on, now safe and feeling rather liberated in naught but my underwear.

I think, wow. I packed all that stuff safely in my bear vault. Hmm. The electronics might have survived immersion, even a long river run and waterfall drop-offs and bashings thanks to the bear proof heavy duty plastic vault. But to what end? Would I have ever recovered them? Doubtful. And my dry bag with its contents. What good would a dry sleeping bag and change of clothes have done me thirty miles down river or worse, lodged somewhere in a debris screen in the LA Aqueduct?

I formulate a new strategy for river crossings. From here on out, the phone will go double Ziplocked into the breast pocket not of my shirt but of my down jacket, which zips shut. With it will go the hiker wallet, which might well have been lost for having been entrusted only to a tiny Velcro snap on my shirt pocket on this past crossing. My hiking shoes will cross not attached to the pack but around my neck. Also around my neck: the dry bag with change of clothes and sleeping back, tied by a lanyard.

Should the entire pack be lost, at least I could walk out of the wilderness in my shoes, survive the cold nights and snowy passes between here and civilization with dry clothes and warm down, and arrive with money and a phone. Brilliant.

I feel so good at having dodged a bullet, so blessed by the beauty all around me and so free in my underwear and proud of the strong leg muscles all this time hidden under cargo pants that I hike straight on til sunset dressed just so. A doe trots unafraid across my path at one point and stopping to graze beside me as I stood motionless and watched and talked to it a bit, and then made camp on a broad flat rock outcrop overlooking the same mad cascade whose mighty fangs I had tip toed across just an hour ago. It was a lovely night alone at Mile 803 of the PCT.

There is no wind. There has been hardly more than a breeze for my entire first week or so here in the Sierra. This place is a giant fortress keeping out all wind, it seems, all the ill winds that blew so hard in the desert and on the steep climbs to get here. No more. It is a delightful change.

And it is warm. The sky is blue every day. A few clouds is all we have had. One day, the day I was up on Whitney, the sky clouded up and there was a roll of thunder, but no rain. Correction: far down below after we’d descended by foot and by glissade, crossing the area just below Guitar Lake, it snowed little mothballs for a spell. That was all.

And this was very fortunate for me. I had gambled, grieved by the weight of my pack coming out of Kennedy Meadows, I had mailed my tent forward to Independence. I won the bet. No rain. And in contrast to Norway’s threats, very few mosquitoes yet.

Yes, the weather has been perfect for more than a week here in the high Sierra. Is perfect now as I write. Was perfect last night as I braved that roaring creek. Will be perfect today as I cross yet another potentially more dangerous watercourse: The Kern. Another hiker lost not his life luckily but his entire pack to the Kern a few weeks ago.

Eleven o’clock in the morning now. Time to go. Any thruhiker would be ashamed to be seen still loitering around camp at this hour. But that is the difference between me and every other thruhiker. I have two jobs out here. And I have too often neglected this one in deference to the rules and dictates of the other. I have slowed down now for my sanity, accepting quite contentedly that I will not likely achieve a thruhike this year. Fine.

But today I must climb Pinchot Pass, then hike another ten miles or so to put me into position to make it to Muir Pass to spend the night atop that mount tomorrow night. I’m told there is a hut there. Norway will be there, and maybe the girls, too. It will be my last chance to see him, and I may as well shoot for it. He has been a kind and worthwhile enough acquaintance here on the JMT. I know he would have rather hiked with a stoner like himself, but he benefited by hiking with me, a thruhiker with stamina somewhat lower than his own, and he only a section hiker. Made him feel good, I’m sure.

I step back onto the trail just ten seconds behind a cool young hiker named Drugstore. Good fortune! I think. Someone with which to climb Pinchot. Plus I’ve been wanting to hike with Drugstore, learn his story. He hasn’t seen me. I call out to him, get no response. I squint, see the signature white iPod earbuds. Dammit! I hurry to catch up with him, but the hurrying costs me. My knees have been fine for hundreds of miles but every now and then one and then the other gets a little weird, a little unstable. I curse myself for not stretching. My knees ask so little of me, given what I’m asking of them. I stop and gently massage my right knee cap and muscles around it. Aspen leaves flutter in the light morning breeze. The knee massage only ever takes about 30 seconds and then it’s good to go again.

In 30 seconds however, young Drugstore has powered up another three switchbacks. I move out. The roar of snowmelt waters careening down the mountain to my right is a constant. Even without his iPod going he might not now hear me were I to yell out, loud as I could. I follow him steadily for a good fifteen minutes, laboring but not gaining. Then there’s no denying it. It’s time to go dig a hole. I’ll never catch him now.

Out here on the trail, pushing big miles, our bodies are intense digestive machines. Bowel movements come like clockwork. For the few people I’ve spent any time with on this trail, seems like the crack of dawn was their time. For me, it’s more of a mid-morning event.

So there goes Drugstore, my one hope of company hiking up Pinchot today. I mean, there could be someone behind him, but there probably isn’t. Whether or not there is, I have to act like there is, have to pretend there’s a whole troop of girl scouts coming up the trail any second. Which there won’t be. I’ve been arriving at ranger stations before the seasonal rangers. That’s how deserted the trail is out here just yet, thanks to the late season heavy snow pack. Anyway, just in case I have to go way off trail to dig my hole. I do, and it’s not a happy occasion.

Since the swollen creek crossing last night there’s been an air of anxiety blowing up my spine, an unsettling pointed cool draft as though from the pursed lips of some creepy little gnome flitting around behind me, unseen behind my pack. A little angst and a frustration the origins of which are not lost on me. I espied Pinchot from a distance last night hovering in the twilight of my not-to-distant future, this giant gray bat wing. It was my death, my demon, the world turned upsidedown. I was very tired. And so tired of being alone. Hiking up, up, up past all that violent downhill flow of crashing water. Beautiful but violent. Blue sky, golden hour light painting the snowy peaks to the east and all that white froth spitting, dancing, misting miasmic. Then to the north the dark side of things, that bat. But that wasn’t it.

It was the curse of my own solitary nature and how it had met up on this long and trying road with a demon ten times its size and strength. If I had to give it a name, I would call the demon Haste. For every thruhiker is in a hurry. On the Appalachian Trail, snow ushers you in at Georgia and awaits you in Maine. On the Pacific Crest, rain and snow hang inevitable like a clockwork guillotine at trail’s end in Washington and for the lucky few, at the Canadian Border. And oddly, this year, snow fell at the starting line for a select few like me who started during the freak storms in the mountains just east of San Diego.

But Haste isn’t enough to describe the devil I met in the desert, he who then followed me into the craggy castle keep of the High Sierra. He would have other names: stoicism, self-reliance to a fault, impatience, diffidence. Funny how that last word used to make me smile when my friend Timmy used it to describe the cool manner with which I attracted women. I’m not smiling now. What I never told Timmy was that my so-called diffidence was nothing more than shyness sprinkled with a bit of sidekick-aided bravado. Alone I’m hopeless with women unknown to me. Always have been.

In this case, however, I’m not talking about my diffidence, although it is powerful and self-destructive enough, the militant arm of a shyness I loathe in myself. On this trail I have gone to great lengths to reach outside my comfort zone and befriend anything walking on two legs lest it in some way curb the swelling void in me.
I’m speaking of the GREAT DIFFIDENCE spilling out of the hole of pride and self-reliance among thruhikers like all that oil gushing out into the Gulf of Mexico. In some it’s worse than in others. In some I’ve met, it’s not there at all. In most of these cases, the thruhikers are coupled. They are couples. They have each other. So there is a kindness there born of the confidence they carry as a team. But because they are a couple they move as a couple, and I feel but a third wheel.

For some strange reason, after my Appalachian Trail thruhike, I don’t feel comfortable hiking with couples. (Strange = Inside joke for those of you who have read Dead Men Hike No Trails😉

I was a couple earlier this year. I was. IN a couple.

I met her on January 2nd. A health problem had been causing her life to crumble all around her, and she’d been praying for an angel to appear and help her. I had been asking life for a companion, and I’d been looking to volunteer some of my time to help someone in need. She needed someone with a lot of spare time and patience. My lifestyle afforded the time, and my quick affection for her afforded the latter. There was mutual attraction. We were a lock.

For a couple of months it was this strange and beautiful romance like something out of period film where women wear corsets and faint a lot and gallant men catch them mid-fall and carry them to bed and sit with them until they awaken. For her condition, once diagnosed, turned out to a form of seizure disorder that caused fainting spells, sometimes of an hour or two in duration with no memory of the time lost. I saw her through an intense chain of traumatic events, and I rose to the challenges of her life in crisis with a strength I didn’t know I had, the strength perhaps, of an angel. Temporarily.

For I am not an angel. And it was only a matter of time before the powers on loan to me from the heavens wore off and my own human frailties shone through. Sometime during this flight toward the sun with waxen wings, I was reminded by a close friend that I have this health problem of my own called depression. Oh, yeah. That. I forgot.

But I believed I loved this person and gallant doesn’t even begin to describe how I loved to feel needed, to be there to catch her when she fell. So I caught her again and again until my arms dropped off and my wings melted and I fell. And in falling I really fell hard. For though the writing was already on the wall that this person would not catch me could not catch me, was incapable of reciprocating in the crisis management department, I held out hope. I hoped. I wished. I desired.

But angels are made to help mortals, and not the other way around. And mortals in the kind of distress that requires the intervention of angels surely are in no shape to handle even the distress of another mortal. Not all relationships are reciprocal. It’s good to know that. It took awhile.

Energetically I flat-lined sometime in late March. With the encouragement of friends who saw the wasted-me, I broke it off between us with a profound sense of loss but a very sober understanding that if I didn’t take care of me quick I was in danger of losing everything. It was the closest I’d come to that kind of emotional bottom-out in a long, long time.
I don’t regret anything about our three months together. It was beautiful, and she’s a beautiful soul.

If I could take back anything, it wouldn’t be from our time together, but from our time apart, from when I hit the trail, doing that “something for me” that I needed so desperately. I just wouldn’t have communicated with her once I hit the trail. Because following a period of kindness, she dropped me hard and stopped communicating when I was deepest in crisis.

Which hurt. In the Mojave. Surrounded by rattlesnakes like the dreaded Mojave Green, crotalus scutulatus with its deadly neurotoxic venom. And scorpions. And packs of wild dogs flanking you at night. And me feeling like a black sheep, the black sheriff of thruhikerville, the grist of some female stranger’s rumor milling about on PCT Facebook sites. Twenty to thirty miles between water sources. The sun so relentless as to force us into night hiking. The night strange and spooky to hike in, invariably leading to days spent in a soporific stupor beneath some miserable shade tree.

I embraced a big hairy-barked conifer and thanked God for getting me through that desert. Through it, and out of it. Alive and safe.

My bear-business done, I hefted pack and plodded upward in elevation, slower now, my campaign to catch Drugstore utterly deflated. I put in my own earbuds, pressed shuffle on the iPod and in no time a song came on that had more than once shot me right down a rabbit hole of grim self-reflection, and might have now but that Pinchot was fast upon me. It’s called “The Hole” by Townes Van Zant. If you ever need a reminder in song of where not to go, that’s the one.

At 12,100 feet in a pig pile of potential false saddles fanned-out like a hand of playing cards and all of it buried in snow, Pinchot Pass required all my mental acuity and attention to detail to navigate. Philosophical and emotional struggles were quickly put aside as survival mechanisms took over. It was precisely the kind of REAL obstacle course that I’d been referring to months earlier to my then-girlfriend as entirely navigable as compared to matters of the human heart, and mind.

Matters of human emotional complexity have no magnetic north and obey no topographic logic whatsoever.

I took Pinchot that day alone with only my compass and only the slightest clues from the mostly snow-buried trail. Pinchot, a pass that foiled many thruhikers, even those with maps. Sent them hiking up the wrong saddles, following the wrong footsteps in the snow. I did it alone and dead on.

In an odd twist of fate, I’d accidentally mailed home my next set of maps with the last at the town of Independence, sending me blind into the hardest section of the Pacific Crest thus far: the John Muir Trail. But I found that day and in subsequent days that I had a tracker’s eye for the trail, a kind of sixth sense for it. I would come off snowfields in late afternoon and down into forests still choked with snow and never lose the trail, even in the half-light of dusk.

Even as I was losing faith in the hike, I was gaining an inner strength I knew I’d carry with me. Even as my heart went out of it, my body and spirit were digging in deeper.

I am more than a survivor now. I am a mountaineer, and a damn tough nut.

I can navigate anything.

– Rick McKinney

Read Full Post »

Clean Water, Swelling Dreams & The Surreal Sheen Of Memory

Leaving Kennedy today with heavy pack, I reached some tipping point where excessive weight spelled future injury. I stopped two miles out, offloaded everything not necessary to my survival, tested the pack again, found it tolerable, returned to the Kennedy Meadows General Store and mailed forward fully 10 pounds of gear! Yes, it is all gear I may very well need, tent included, but the weight of which my body rejected with clear signals from every point of potential serious injury – ankles knees & hips, places that hadn’t hurt in 400 miles.

Carmen meets me by happenstance and we walk the evening together. Now the fun! Outside the campground just north of the meadows, we run into day hikers with children who stare with wide eyed wonder at the man and woman walking to Canada. I feel for a moment heroic.

I like Carmen. She’s a leader, the quite evident leader of the gang of three women: Carmen (also recently known as Microburst), Day-Glo, and Thump Thump (formerly Polka Dot). Carmen, alas: boyfriend. All of them boyfriends, or so I understand. "We’re all spoken for," Thump Thump said. I’d like to believe that Thump Thump has a little crush on me, but I daren’t. The other day at Tom’s in Kennedy Meadows both she and Day-Glo came to me separately and invited me to hike with them, Thump Thump adding "I’m not hitting on you or anything, but.." But after all I’ve been through socially on this trail, I dare not assume anything. I joke to a friend back home that I could write a separate, smaller book called "Never hike the PCT in a wolf suit." No. Thump Thump would have to thump me over the head, cave woman-style, to win my affection at this point.

Dwarf lavender blossoms brighten the otherwise dark mood of a burn section. They are a constant hot pink happiness at my feet. I sense in Carmen’s pace that we will not last long together. I enjoy her company while I can.

Two other things I mailed home from Kennedy Meadows earlier, before the pack overload: my MIOX water treatment unit and my hiking shoes. No, I’m not hiking barefoot. The shoes, a quite new pair of Merrell’s with Vibram souls which I was very pleased to have switched over to (from the shoes I started with) at an REI in LA, turned out to be blister-breading nightmares. I couldn’t comprehend it. They were great shoes with excellent "Superfeet" arch support. What the hell?

I got my answer one day when, while relaxing on the patio at the General Store, I noticed the exact make & model of shoes sitting outside a free exchange hiker box. They were worn, a little beaten up, and noticeably larger all around. I tried them on. Ahh! Like crawling out of the trunk of a compact car and into the front bench seat of a 1966 Lincoln Continental. I worn them around for a day and decided to give the "a walk in the park" as it were. I boldly mailed off my own brand new size 12 shoes and now wear these old worn size 13 boats. Love em.

I am reminded of a short poem I wrote back in the mid-1990s that went like this:
To embrace icons of culture
We must go to bed alone
Walk clouds in size 14 Dreamsneakers
Must open our skulls
Like dilated wombs
Must reach beyond barriers of intellect
Abandon intellect
Discard culture
Soar with beer-drinking buddhas
Hug silk-smooth madrone trees

That’s all there is to it, though I find the last line particularly interesting. Have I always been a tree hugger? Madrone. Lovely trees. My feet grew a size from 10 to 11 over the years between college and my late twenties. On the Appalachian Trail, in one month they grew again to a size 12. Six years later, I couldn’t believe they had grown another size, that THAT was the problem with the shoes, that essentially there was no problem with the Merrells. I’m a size 13 now. Just one size shy of those dreamsneakers I dreamed about long ago. Hmm.

Speaking of dreaming…

I have decided not to treat water any more. No longer will I kill it and zap it. I have decided merely to bless it, to "treat it" as it were with love, and to drink it.

I’m tired of warning signs posted over clear springs telling me I must not drink untreated. Signs posted by my government with the subtext "This message sponsored by P.U.R. Water Filters." No. I’m letting go of fear.
For every ten people treating or pumping water religiously on this trail, there are one or two quietly not treating. They are quiet, I believe, because they don’t want to be scapegoated for anyone else following their example, drinking the water and getting sick. This phenomenon is amazing to watch, and nowhere did I see it more clearly than at McIver spring.

While taking a zero day to just sit in the cabin and write, I watched one after another hiker approach the spring and ask either myself or a friend or whoever was around if the water was okay to drink. What did we think? "What do YOU think?" I finally shouted at someone, with enough mirth in my voice to reveal a kind of playfulness in my query. "Why don’t YOU decide!" Sheep looking for scapegoats.

Captain Bivy, I discovered, never treats. I treated throughout the desert, but mostly as a matter of ritual and often begrudgingly when the water looked and smelled perfectly fine. I’m of the George Carlin school of germs. I believe the immune system needs lots of practice and I give mine plenty.

It’s water! I remember when water was free! It didn’t come in wasteful plastic bottles for a buck or two a pop, nor flavored or filled with vitamins to take the sting out of spending more on water than on a Coke or a juice or a beer. What am I saying, sting? People LOVE paying for water these days. It’s astounding to me. They love paying for it. They love purifying the life out of it right at their own taps.

It’s all fear, and the ad companies and the stockholders in Water, Inc. are pleased as punch..er, water. It reminds me of that old 70s film Logan’s Run where everyone lives underground in a bubble city controlled by a master computer. Everyone’s forgotten that there’s a world up above ground where there’s fresh air and books and people older than 29. Because down in Bubbleville, they zap you in some kinda Nirvana ceremony just before your 30th birthday. Why? To ensure you don’t get old enough to figure out the whole thing is a sham.

Take it from me. The whole water thing is a sham!

[Postscript: I tossed my water purifier in a box going home weeks ago and have been drinking right out of creeks and streams and ponds allegedly teeming with giardia and cow shit and this shit and that shit through the whole Sierra. And dammit does the water taste good. And dammit is it liberating to be able to just lean over a stream and drink again, without fear!]

This morning at Mile 716, I awake my bag and all else covered in frost. Thump Thump and Day-Glo, like strange Arctic apparitions move around in the dark and pack out before dawn. I watch and wait. Sparrows swim parabolic orbits around the footbridge over the nearby river. Fifteen minutes later the sun hits and changes everything. I put on gloves and brush off all the "snow" before it can melt on my down bag. Nearby Norway, Carmen, Sweet Jesus, Badger & Jackstraw come to life.

We brush the frost from our gear, pack, fork down carbs in various forms. Pop Tarts, Cliff Bars, granola with M&Ms. I drink straight sweetened condensed milk. The boys all smoke the ganj.

B is in my thoughts a lot but thoroughly invades my thoughts throughout the day of June 18th for some reason, miles 716-734. I was eager to run home to the bay and visit her, take a break from all this, when she turned her back fast on me, said "I cannot be your anchor," and "If you came home now I’d be pissed after all the money I’ve spent on you." I was in love with her. What can I say. And Catherine asks surprised "is she still a thorn in your side?" I have no one else out here. No love. No affection. Thorn? She’s just there. In me.

Now Carmen & the girls have gone on ahead, determined to pull a big mile day today. So I have lost them too now. Why the big miles? I find more agreeable the pace and stamina and "knows this place like the back of his hand"-knowledge of ski bum Norway, former PCT thruhiker and repeat hiker of the John Muir section of the trail.

Later that night..

Reflections of McCandless around rockside fire whiskey rap music and stars blooming from fading turquoise sky. A young Norway makes a pilgrimage to the Alaskan river that Chris couldn’t cross. Describes the river, eyes bulging with fear, head shaking. Yeah, no way. No crossing. Norway says Chris was a major influence. Tells how he bought the same kinda car, drove to Alaska, walked in his footsteps, felt his pain. Dead wood at high altitude is dessicated. Our quick collection of firewood is a bone pile. I throw another femur on the fire and tell Norway of my memory of meeting McCandless while in school at Humboldt. My memory faint, all that remains now that of a strong sense I had after reading the Chip Brown story (http://www.chipbrown.net/articles/intowild.htm) in the New Yorker in 1993 that "Yeah, I met that guy!"

We are sprawled out in soft sand fixated on serpent flames licking a quickly-blackening stone. No wind. Maybe two miles up from Death Canyon, Norway and I will sleep at 9,500 feet tonight. The trees up here live a genteel existence. Plenty of elbow room. Bower room. All 300-some PCT contestants, if they weren’t spread out for 500 miles to the north and south, could easily make camp on this mountain with us. But no. It is. Just. Us.

[Postscript: Reading over this tale of our talk around the fire a week or so ago, I shake my head and sigh a bit. Norway was with me for several nights, gone most of the day and not camped at the same spot as me every night. But altogether I saw him quite a lot during his two week section hike from Kennedy Meadows to the Bishop Pass "exit" just past Muir Pass. I shake my head to recall that I divulged to him the McCandless memory, a thing I don't speak of often because, frankly, I don't remember enough to convince anyone that I actually met the posthumous celebrity of soul searching.

It's easier to just keep it to myself. A little secret between me and Chris those sneaky little Fates that like to arrange random meetings between curious minds, kill one off and leave the other to forever wonder in that post-college drug fog "Didn't I..? Wasn't that..?" only to be dismissed by everyone who wishes they really did meet so-n-so (but would never admit it) as being hindsight fantasy when in fact it is the absolute truth because THAT'S THE WAY THE UNIVERSE WORKS! God don't makes mistakes. Neither do the Fates.

To what purpose this next example of celebrity elbow-rubbing occurred in my life, I have yet to understand. Just random perhaps. Who knows. But Norway walked right into it as well, so here goes.

I was pumping Norway for details of his 500-mile walk of the ancient holy pilgrimage across southern Europe to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, which both he and Seamus had done and told me of separately, when he suddenly let out with "I met Martin Sheen there!"
(Pause for those of you who know my life story to have a little giggle.)

Norway went on to tell me quite excitedly all about how he just stumbled upon Martin Sheen one day in the streets somewhere on the pilgrimage route, not knowing that he'd walked into a street scene set of a fictional film about the holy pilgrimage to the burial place of St. James. Norway was so excited to tell me about this chance encounter that something in me should have known better than to say what I said next, but when he commented on what a nice guy Sheen was I just naturally responded with "Yes, he certainly is, isn't he." To which I added that I had dated his daughter. And hung out with the whole family. And met other celebs as a result of my years hanging out with the Sheens. And hung out at his home in Malibu a lot. Way back when.

"I mean it was a long time ago. That's wicked cool that you met him by chance on the streets of Spain. So tell me more about the pilgrimage walk?" I tried to cover my tracks.

It was too late. I'd killed his buzz, and I felt bad. If I shared Norway's love of pot, I would have whipped some out and got us both stoned right then and there. But I don't. I think the only thing Norway really liked about hiking with me is that as thruhikers go at this stage in the game, I was just slow enough that he could keep up with me and better yet, stay ahead of me. Most young male thruhikers are, at this point, too fast for a section hiker, even a former PCT thruhiker and 3-time JMT hiker and Mammoth ski instructor like Norway.

Well, Norway's gone now. Just like everybody I've hiked with and come to know, he's gone. Blew ahead of me the other day after damn near killing me with the double-whammy two pass in one day of Kearsage and Glen, the day that sent me straight into my tent for a catatonic hour before I could crawl out to place my soaking wet shoes and socks by the long-roaring fire.

I guess I could say I wish I hadn't said anything about Martin Sheen. Because my relationship with the Sheens is just dumb luck, and it really had no place in Norway's story. Thinking back on the night he told me how much of an influence McCandless had been on his life, I REALLY wish I hadn't mentioned my memory of the memory of meeting Alexander Supertramp. That's gotta be just plain insulting to someone who looks to a person like that as a hero. But then, what does all this say about us anyway? That we're a nation of star f@#%!ers and necrophiliacs, that's what.

Damn the Fates anyway. If Chris McCandless were alive today, he wouldn't be famous. If he weren't married and divorced twice over with kids in college, he'd be wandering around in his mid-forties still looking for beauty and meaning and purpose in all this, doubling up on the antidepressants to cope with the oil spills and drone bombers and the suicide deaths of friends and every now and then asking himself, "Why the hell did I ever leave that cool bus in Alaska?"

Like I told Norway, he'd be me.

[Written on or about June 16, 2010]

Read Full Post »

Ranger Anna & The Toulumne Funk Run

Cruising the 395 the day of my departure from the trail. The smell of rain in the early July air. Anna behind the wheel. Ranger Anna friend of the Michigan boys, from their days at Northern Michigan University. Freak Out and other funk tunes womp and wiggle out of the stereo and the minivan hops as it hugs the highway north to Tioga. The High Sierra soar by, fly by our western sunset windows like all life in fast forward, and I rewind in quick time to the seven passes that we have crossed on our mad treck north, there names I will never forget: Forester, Kearsarge, Glen, Pinchot, Mather, Muir, Selden, Silver. Sweet Jesus, that’s eight! And there was one more to go.

But I said no, no, no! One more and there was gonna be hell to pay! Those lonely maddening, crazy-making-in-deep-snow peligroso passes nearly killed me. Superfly now and we’re all singing along. Sweet Jesus, Badger, Anna and I. We crashed the gates of the Mammoth Brewing Company just before closing and loaded up on growlers. Bear sized beers. Anna was adamant. Party tonight in Toulumne. Ranger Anna. She and Jesus don funny hats, plaid fedoras in the front. Badger in the back wears a permanent grin handing me his growler of Hair of the Bear.

I look up at all those snow covered peaks and I just can’t control myself. I hoot and I howl and cry out. Shake Your Booty now and we do.

The whole car is a woofer, a jumping jigglebox as Anna cranks a hard left and we begin to climb. Tioga, one pass we won’t have to climb on foot.

We just climbed the worst, the best of the Sierra, the hardest terrain it could dish out without deadly winter weather but with all the snow. I drop my keyboard a moment, jump forward in the minivan, grab the handles on the backs of both forward seats and shout above the funk.

“We stepped through the wardrobe, boys! Into the land of Aslan! We have this maddening adventure that would turn anyone’s hair white, and when we step back out of the wardrobe, its like whoa! It’s as though no time has elapsed, and nobody has any idea where we’ve been or what we’ve done! Yet look at us! Our eyes our wild! Our lips are cracked, black from prolonged exposure to sun and zero humidity, and our skin is red and dried and dessicated and our toes are all blistered, our feet torn up and taped, our calves and quads are ripped.

Now it’s P-Funk and the fever is spreading. Badger is crazy for the P-Funk. The Hair of the Bear is working in me, changing me, making me hungry and horny and sleepy and happy and growly and the wind coming in the window smells of everything sweet and earthy and I am a bear and I sit back content that I have walked enough. I am ready for anything, for whatever comes next. My future is a big blank of-sudden, but big bear I, I am not afraid.

Over the pass, the golden light of late afternoon sun tops the evergreens like bright butterscotch candy glaze and all the gray stone peaks fly by so fast and I think wow, we don’t have to climb those. “But if I did,” I think, pointing, “I could get there in an hour.”

– Rick McKinney

[Written July 6, 2010 coming out of Mammoth Lakes]

Read Full Post »

The Mind Done, The Body Lumbers On

[Written June 26, 2010 at Rae Lakes, High Sierra]

I was so done walking to Canada on Wednesday the 23rd of June. I was kaput. Tears the whole way walking the 8-mile side trail out over Kearsage Pass and down past the cascading lakes below to the campground where a trail angel named Peanut Eater awaited to ferry hikers many more miles and 6000 feet down to the 395, to towns like Independence, Lone pine and Bishop. In the preceding 48 hours I had summited the highest mountain in the continental United States and the very next day climbed straight up the daunting snow covered face of Forester, the highest pass on the Pacific Crest Trail. I had done much, and I had done well.

I have endured loneliness on this walk, solitude unwanted for want of companionship with which to share the nature, loneliness on a scale beyond anything I had planned to endure. Now here in the stunning Sierra where the beauty is so great and so abundant, and thus by proportion the loneliness all the greater for want of someone to share all this with, I am done.

Standing over Bullfrog Pond on the Kearsage trail I broke down in tears and knew that I must leave the trail at once and not return until I had that partner, that soulmate, that wife, that girlfriend, that male friend, hell that bum-legged hunchback who would at least stick with me, someone with which to walk this further. I walked out that day determined to walk away.

I failed.

I believe I failed because I don’t wish to return to Oakland to my boat and failing that I don’t know where to go. I need a safe house, a safe place to go where I can download my brain, where I can open up this Pandora’s box of notes and thoughts and feelings and fresh memories and give them flesh and bones and blood and breath and send them out into the world both so that they may live on and that I may GO on to my next adventure purged of them, of this story. This has been a great adventure in many way, nay, in every way, great no matter how painful and woeful at times it tells a human tale and in that it is invaluable. I need a place to go to write out that tale. Lingering in Independence and Bishop on Wednesday and Thursday and making a few phone calls to friends, I couldn’t come up with a solution to this need.

(If anyone has any suggestions for me, please let me know by emailing me at jigglebox. It’s just me and a backpack, my folding keyboard and a Droid phone. Or it could be me and my little 20-foot RV if you or someone you know has some land somewhere and an extension cord to plug me in to electric or at the very least a house nearby where I can come charge the phone once a day. I only need 2-3 weeks.)

Unable to afford two or three weeks in a Death Valley motel even, I followed the rote habits of my body and donned pack and walked back into this great place. But yesterday following a small pack of young trail acquaintances I pushed too hard for my old bones with newly resupplied and thus extra heavy pack and followed them up over both Kearsage and Glen passes, the latter pass more intense than the first and well considered the worst by most who hike the trail. After two passes in one day and the requisite long decent to someplace down back below treeline where camping was feasible and water plentiful, I was so wrecked tired I erected my tent, fell into it and lay there for an hour, inert, unmoving, not sleeping, troubled by licks of bad dreams trying to get in, finally after an hour I was able to rise and approach the fire to warm myself and dry my soaking shoes and socks and, with slow and labored movements, to cook my dinner.

On a side note, such is the intimacy of our hiking "friendships" that no one came to inquire if I was all right the entire time I was missing from the fire. I’ve had no end of time to think on such things, and I’ve decided that the best comparison to the relationship between most thruhikers on this trail (not counting the ones who hit the trail together or bound together in tight little teams early on) is like of coworkers. You pass in the hall. You know each others names, a few biographical details, but sincere camaraderie just isn’t there.

Now it is 11 a.m. the following day. As you can imagine, the others are gone. How else would I be writing this? If I had made haste to chase them down the trail, I would not have been able to write this morning. I have not in fact have written for days and days, maybe weeks I don’t know. I have only had time for notes.

It is the pace of this trip that is killing me. And no doubt that too is why I had the instinct to pull away from the Sierra before I got any further through it, to not have it ruined by haste. My sense the other day was that I could finish on a high note. I had done Mt. Whitney and Forester Pass both in a span of 36 hours. It was awesome. But as I say, I felt I had no place else to go, so here I am back in the cage with golden bars, the fantastically gorgeous Sierra that is my great prize and my prison at the moment.

Oh, I’ll no doubt burn in some sort of hell for calling this paradise a cage, but I trust that Muir, Emerson, Thoreau would all understand what I mean. Muir especially. And Edward Abbey. They would stand in the middle of the Sierra of today and say "Thank God for these high passes and sheer walls that keeps out the masses of men and save this place for the intrepid few willing to penetrate the fortress."

I have another problem. In my confusion at the post office the other day, while mailing home a few bits of gear I no longer needed, I accidentally mailed home the maps for the next 125 miles. Without maps, any sane person would have raced out of here this morning chasing the other hikers as a dog chases a car. But not me. I’m exhausted. I could give a scrap about maps right now. I needed more than anything to sit down and say a few words about where I am at and how I am feeling. It had been too long.

Don’t worry for me. I will find my way out of here. For you to be reading this, I will have to have found my way out of the Sierra as there is bugger-all signal in this high stone walled kingdom. Besides, there are many more hikers behind me. If I reach a point on the trail where a junction is unclear, I need only wait for a few hours or a day until another hiker comes along.

I am flying on faith alone now. "But Rick," you say, "You’ve so been craving the company of other hikers, why did you let them go this morning?" I think I’ve answered that question, but I’ll elaborate a bit more. I a haven’t written in weeks precisely because I’ve been chasing companionship. Yet still most have left me behind. This little group today would have me among them, but their pace yesterday caused me harm, and they set out today planning an even bigger mile day due to end with a climb over another big pass. I can’t bear the thought.

Yesterday I developed a cough coming up Kearsage. It worsened on the climb up Glen Pass, the result of a consistent shortness of breath. I heard a young women in her early twenties complaining of a similar high altitude-triggered cough the other day. I am 43. The fast climb up Whitney was a lark for all of us thruhikers. We were able to leave our full packs at a base camp at Crabtree Meadows, take up only a very light load. The result was like the low gravity one feels under water. But with a full 45-pound pack on again, it’s a whole different story.

A parting shot:

Norway this morning blowing his nose repeatedly without a bandana or tissue, blowing what some hikers and I hear bicyclists called snot rockets. Real pleasant to observe. the girls mill about, apparently oblivious. Norway carries a mandolin, is learning to play. I’m impressed. He has also mentioned the instrument’s potential for wooing women.

I wonder how the snot rockets help with that.

– Rick McKinney

[Postscript July 12, 2010: I have since decided to join my father at his lake house in Maine for the month of August, where I will work on developing my copious notes from the trail into a forthcoming book. I am always interested & open to ideas and suggestions of new places to go and spend a few weeks or a month writing and living amongst new friends and/or new surroundings. Movement and change are two factors that seem to stimulate my writing more than anything. My boat will be here, but I intend to stay in motion.]

Read Full Post »