To the border, walked 14.73 miles - total up/down: +2175/-4117ft.
To the campsite walked 3.81 miles, total up/down: +1348/-575.
Which adds up to a total day's walk of 18.55 miles, TOTAL up/down +3413/-4581ft.
But the official Mexico to Canada PCT hike ended at the border.
Dear Trail Friends,
So we did it. We hiked the entire trail from Campo at the Mexico border to the Canada border. It's hard for me to believe.
I have very mixed feelings. Certainly there is a powerful sense of accomplishment and completion and empowerment. When I look back over my life I see very very few moments when I have stuck with a dream and accomplished something I didn't know I was capable of. Maybe loving and protecting my dogs until the moment when each of them died in my arms. Being able to hold them and cradle them through that transition and to know I was faithful to them their whole lives. Maybe publishing my two poetry books. But even my retirement as a therapist feels a lot more like dropping out than completing. In fact I reflected a whole lot on that today as I walked. Realizing there is more to wrestle with in my career as a therapist than I realized. And writing the Freud book is important but it's not enough. I began to imagine a book of essays on all the ways therapy has touched my life: my mother going into analysis when I was six, seeing a therapist when my parents divorced, seeing a therapist in high school (while my mother trained as a psychiatrist and her older sister my aunt trained as a Jungian analyst in Switzerland), my father founding the counselor education Dept at San Diego State Univ and later creating an innovative student-directed multi-cultural immersion masters degree program, seeing a therapist in college, two in graduate school, meeting Chris in a therapist-client relationship, being a volunteer non-professional counselor at Cambridge women's center, doing co-counseling with my lover David, becoming a therapist myself, living through the "recovered memories controversy" while trying to come to terms with my own "recovered" childhood memory of a rape (that I never could figure out if it literally happened, or not, though its impact on the whole course of my life was huge) and my sister's "recovered" memories of satanic abuse, the experience of abandonment by therapists, the experience of abandoning a client, other circumstances where I thought I did harm to clients, clients I had the honor to be with as they died, clients I loved deeply, my own analysis with Freud, the unfinished book (but the many interviews) about couples who meet as therapist-client and become life partners. I definitely see a book of essays exploring my lifelong ambivalent relationship with therapy. It has been a major motif in my life.
What has that got to do with the PCT? Good question. I believe it is linked in two ways. One is that my dream of the PCT really catalyzed my retirement. (Although another factor in the timing of my retirement was the perception that I was in a therapist-client relationship thar was causing the client harm and from which I saw no other way to extricate myself.). The other link is the "what next?" question. Looking forward into the unknown future (when hiking the PCT is no longer the organizing theme and purpose of my life) this essay project offers itself as another part of my life integration play/work.
The PCT, as a walk from the Southern California landscape I loved passionately as a child to the northern Washington landscape I have come to love in later life, was also a life integration project.
So, in a way, it is like when one mountain guardian spirit hands me on to another along the trail. A book of essays that express in very personal ways how therapy has run through my life like a musical theme -- seems like a worthy challenge and adventure. And a fun one.
But back to the trail we walked today. Photo 1 shows the trail early in the day, making switchbacks down the side of a mountain - and up ahead a pass where I guessed the trail was going. I was thinking of thru hikers I'd met who hiked the Sierra when the snow was too deep to see the trail. All you could see were footprints heading off in eight different directions and you had to choose which to follow. I know part of that choosing is developing a sense from the contours of the map of where the trail is going. I was pleased with myself for making the guess (especially when it turned out to be right) and thinking maybe I could do a one-year thru-hike.
Photo 2 shows the view looking back from the top of the pass. The trail went a long way down, then a long way back up to the pass. The pass was the highest point of this section (over 7100 ft) and the last high point of the trail. It would be pretty much descent from then on.
Photo 3 shows the virw ahead from that same high pass, and photo 4 a little further along the trail.
Photo 5 shows a woman named Helen, 86, who hiked California in the 1990s (her 60s) and then something got in the way (Guess I missed that part of her story. Or maybe she skipped it. ) She hiked Oregon when she was 80 and is now finishing Washington. She is hiking with a woman named Moon (who preferred not to be in a photo) who she met on a trail. Finishing is important to Helen, and supporting Helen seems to be important to Moon. They walk very slowly, Helen's balance is very tenuous ( though in the past she has hiked the Himalayas and Kilimanjaro, she said). Thet walk only 5 miles a day. Their packs are big and heavily loaded with food for so many days. I commented on the heavy packs. "So what?" Moon says shrugging. "We can carry a heavy pack. "
It moves me how important finishing is to Helen. Watching her negotiate a stream crossing (one thar for me was not at all challenging) so very slowly, so very precariously, I was deeply curious why she was out here. I am so glad I asked. Wish you could have been there literally in that vast high spacious place, seen her face, heard her voice, when she said "I want to finish."
I recall when I was a child watching my father drawing a five-pointed star with a point missing. He said the brain wants to complete the picture, fill in the missing point. Something about our human brains wants to complete patterns. Make them whole. Life isn't like that. But we have, I think, a strong drive - dream, desire - to make it so.
Photo 6 shows Mountain Sweep, a 73 year old woman solo hiker who will finish the PCT this week after 10 years. She told me another woman hiker had named her blog Mountain Sweep, after her, because the younger woman hiker was so inspired by Mountain Sweep hiking solo. The younger woman was a tough triathlon athlete (as was, by the way, Mountain Sweep) but it had never occurred to her that a woman could hike alone. Mountain Sweep said "we women are learning to walk alone. To not be afraid. We can be curious. We don't have to be afraid."
To be continued in Day 13, part 2.
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