Dear Trail Friends,
I walked a little further than my feet and knees wanted to go today (these steep ups and downs are pretty demanding on them) but I am pleased that tomorrow I should be able to hike down to the ranger station at High Bridge in time to catch the 9:15am shuttle to Stehekin and arrive there by 10:15. This should give me plenty of time to pick up and sort through my resupply box and do my laundry and find out if I can change my Friday reservation at the Lodge to Thursday. There is a free campground nearby, the real issue is getting access to the lodge wifi ( I do not know of restaurant guests can use it or if it is reserved for lodge overnight guests). I hope of course to make contact with Chrissy and others by email (there is no phone service except a pay satellite phone), and to upload my blogs.
I also will need to sort out where to stay the night I don't stay at the lodge. The free camp ground is appealing but there is also Stehekin Valley Ranch where food and lodging (primitive cabins) is a package deal and the food is, according to some, the best on the trail. I might be able to reserve a place on their guest shuttle and go there for dinner even if I camp, but breakfast and lunch are open only to cabin guests. The price (as of my old guidebook) was $100 including all three meals. I might do that if they have a cabin available Friday (and I can switch the Lodge to Thursday). In any event I want to make my way to the ranch office and make a reservation to ride the shuttle for dinner both nights.
What I most look forward to, though, is not food, but contact. I have missed being able to upload my blogs and talk with Chris or exchange emails.
Early this morning I took a successful walk across a single log bridge. See photo 1. It wasn't quite the real thing though. I could lengthen my poles and reach the creek bed so if my balance started to wobble I could brace myself. I am still concerned ( and will probably still scoot myself across horsey style) about losing balance on a single log high above a river, with no way to brace myself. Walking sideways helps, but not if I wobble in the back to front dimension. Then I would go plop and that could be messy.
Still it was an accomplishment and I felt proud of myself.
I enjoyed the long morning hike immensely. To take advantage of the early cool, I started hiking at 5:15am. A little too early it turns out. I needed both of my headlamps plus my iPhone light to find and follow the trail! From now on I think 5:45am should be the earliest I start. The dawns are getting a tiny bit later every day. And I hiked a little more than 7 miles (which in this terrain took me until 9:15)
before my first breakfast stop.
I noticed how my attitude toward the mountains has changed. The peaks look playful to me. I think of some fun-loving God making mountains the way boys make Lego creations. See photo 2
Then I think of all the invisible forces like gravity, electromagnetism, the forces that hold subatomic particles together -- how they are a modern scientific version of the gods. Instead of having stories, they have mathematical equations. For me I think of gravity as a kind of god a lot on this trip. Think of myself held in (and surrendering to) the hand of gravity. It seems to represent all the mysterious forces that shape my destiny and are unknowable to me. (Given that I no longer believe as I once did that mathematical equations were ways of knowing these gods).
That led to reveries about the arc of the story again. Thinking how math formulas are a substitute for narratives as a way of explaining the gods. But even our notion of "the arc" of a story is applying math to narrative. I thought about my math days. Of functions like sine and cosine (geez am I even spelling them right, those long ago familiars?) that undulate up and down. Like the arc of a story that climbs up and down mountains. And how if I recall them correctly derivatives were the tangent to the curve and had something to do with the rate of motion and integrals were the area under the curve. So maybe as a person interested in integration it's the area under the arc of the story that ought to interest me?
I've also been thinking a lot about how the PCT resembles analysis. The paradox of walking a human-made and maintained trail through a human-managed "pristine" wilderness. Similarly, in analysis, one uses language, the ultimate tool of consciousness, to fashion a trail through, and encounters with, the wilderness inside ourselves, the processes that are not conscious or voluntary. And as I walk the pct I think how small I feel and how big and mysteriously unknowable these mountains are (we can make up scientific narratives about how they came into being but we can never know why).
Photo 3 shows the mountains that were so immense beside me as I walked.
Photo 4 shows the view from the stream where I sat on a big rock and ate breakfast.
I sat on that rock with my feet dangling down and felt very young and innocent. Sometimes I like the rests best. But I think part of pushing so hard (besides the fact that it is such fun to be able to learn and grow and break through what I believed were my limits at an age at which more and more I am going to have to accept decline and loss of abilities) is that the exhausted state sometimes makes possible a luminous joy in just being present in the moment, when I stop to rest.
Which reminds me of stories I left out of yesterday's blog. One was Billy Goat saying that when people ask where he lives, he gestures to the woods and his tent and says "Here. This is home. This is where I live." I resonate very strongly with that and it makes me feel happy about putting the PCT symbol tattoo right above my first tattoo that says "Home is where the heart is open to the flow of life. "
The other two people at the camp (perhaps in response to my excitement at meeting Billy Goat the trail celebrity) told me they hiked the PCT with Cheryl Strayed of Wild fame back in the 90s. (Which did impress me, not because of her celebrity, but because of tackling the trail in a time when it was much harder to do.). CJ the woman told me that, when she met Cheryl, Cheryl was smiling and laughing and lighthearted. But when they put on packs she told them to go ahead, not wait, because it took her a long time to put on her pack. And once the pack was on, she was this totally different person, grim, frowning, bent over, but utterly determined. Once when Cheryl was struggling up a difficult ascent CJ gave her pack a boost, with the result that Cheryl fell down. What a great story about helping. Violating a person's need for independence, and harming rather than helping. Despite the best intentions in the world. (No wonder my analyst friend Rachel quotes an analyst trainer who said "God help the analyst who wants to help his patient. "
The man (trail name Jolly Rancher) spoke of a chair Cheryl carried on the back of her pack. We all talked to her about how heavy it was, he said. Then when we got to camp and she set it up and sat down, we all envied her.
Photo 5 is another view of the Legos-mountains through trees. It was a lot of beauty to walk through.
To be continued in Day 6, part 2.
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