Hello Trail Friends
I am sitting in my tent -- it is still light (only 6:15pm) and quite hot, but there is a cool comfortable breeze blowing into my tent. Wow am I tired!
Chris and I drove from Seattle to Red Bluff CA yesterday (actually I drove, she had a bit of a back ache which fortunately cleared up). That was an exhausting 10 hour drive. We enjoyed the town of Red Bluff and eating a simple dinner at a restaurant near our Motel 6. We set the alarm for 4:40am so Chris could get a cup of coffee when Starbucks opened at 5am and we could drive the 2 1/2 hours to my trailhead and get my off to an early start.
Alas, my i-phone thought I wanted the alarm to go off at 3am. We were fully dressed and ready to go when we checked our watches and discovered it was 3:15am, not 5:00 am.
It didn't seem worth trying to go back to sleep so off we went driving the dark winding road to Quincy. It took a bit longer in the dark but we reached the trailhead and I began my hike at 6:30am. A kind thru hiker showed up just in time to take our photo before we said goodbye. Photo 1 is me in my Life is Good nightgown (a gift from sister Judy) at the motel 6. Photo 2 is us at the trail head.
I don't understand what happens when I step onto the Pacific Crest Trail. I love my hikes in Moran Park, but this is a whole different quality of being. It's as if I step into a different kind of time and space, away from ordinary life. I round a corner, see a meadow, and find myself saying out loud "Here I am" with a sense of amazement and wonder -- that this place, this moment, this being I call "I" all come together.
The day's walk was unusually beautiful. It reminded me of walking in Switzerland. I kept thinking about my various anxieties and uncertainties (most of all the GI problems, will I have enough pads and toilet paper? Enough space in my extra odor-proof bag for the used ones? Will I be able to manage the logistics of dealing with that particular unwanted flow?) and a line from a poem my friend Jeff is writing "it would be a different life/if I walked into the unknown knowing. "
The walk on the PCT feels like a walk into the unknown. Most of this walk (over these four years now) I have been uncommonly lucky. Today (the diarrhea was alas worse) I am not so sure. But there is something wonderful about walking into the unknown and not knowing how it will all work out. And saying yes, loving it enough to say yes. For better or for worse.
I already notice my modesty is disappearing. When I am trying to negotiate a soiled pad and a hole in the ground and a hiker passes me squatting with my pants down (some way off the trail but still slightly visible) I just say "hi."
Oh by the way I know when someone whines about their problems as I am likely to do in this blog everyone including me feels obliged to come up with solutions. Please know that I have explored this condition thoroughly via Internet, western medical practitioners and alternative, and done a whole lot of things and basically it remains a mystery. Please join me in accepting it as something we don't understand and (at the moment) cannot control. Which is to say, please don't offer advice if you can resist doing so, and if you can't, so be it. I probably wouldn't be able to either. I keep accepting that it's over determined and inexplicable and unpredictable like weather and then try to identify yet another food culprit to eliminate from my ever shrinking list of seemingly safe foods.
I am also very susceptible to elevation symptoms and am noticing tiredness, nausea, balance issues, slow thinking and difficulty doing simple manual tasks (like setting up a tent). Actually this tent site turned out to be very challenging-- it's not flat at all, at quite a steep tilt, and small -- I tried two different set-ups before finding one that seemed to work. But it's also true that I forget how to do things and have to relearn them (oh yeah, I use a ziplock baggy to scoop water from the creek and pour it into my to be filtered water bottle. Now why didn't I remember to bring one of the right kind and size baggies, and what am I going to use instead?)
Photo 3 shows a little pine tree in the magic sparkle of morning sun -- part of the "I am here" chorus we all seem to be singing to one another. And photo 4 is a glimpse of the landscape I am walking through.
While I discourage advice, your healing thoughts, wishes or prayers would be very much appreciated. Please pray for healing for my poor troubled tummy and intestines, and for me to find the courage to continue the hike in spite of the difficulties.
On the humor side --since this blog clearly is going to live up to the name Chris son Eric gave us of the "diarrhea diaries" -- my dear friend Chris who has survived 100s and 100s of surgeries in part by bringing foolery and comedy into the surgical room (once he came dressed as a gorilla, most recently being treated for an umbilical hernia he showed up with a very lifelike plastic pile of (dog)poop smuggled into the sterile surgery room on his navel. "You all knew I was (a) fool of shit, he told them. No one gets to take the sacrosanct medical rituals seriously when Chris is around.
I hope to take myself lightly on this walk -- dance dripping and laughing down the trail, a fool of shit...
And with that, may the seemingly endless dripping from my bottom side end even as I manage to bring the seeming less endless babbling from my top aide to an end.
Thanks for walking with me!
River
Ps oh my gosh I almost forgot to tell you about photo 5! My friend Alexandra told me -- when I told her I cannot walk across a single log "bridge" without falling, my balance is not good enough -- that she walked across such single logs sideways, facing upstream. Now in this case I didn't have far to fall but it was a very narrow log over a little marsh and I tried Alexandra's method and made it across with dry shoes. Yippee!
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