Pacific Dream
© 2009 John Illig
Smashwords Edition
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to Cristina
Chapter 1
Preparation
“‘Do you remember, do you remember?’ ‘Yes!’ they answer. ‘Yes, we remember!’ ‘What do you remember?’ ‘This, this!’ they cry, as we run, down the wooded hillside, into the crimson valley, an open sky above our head.”
- -William Kotzwinkle, Dr. Rat
Magically Cristina.
Ostensibly, this is the story of a Pacific Crest Trail hike in two parts: the first, of walking 800 miles with my newlywed wife from Mexico to the High Sierras; and the second, of my hiking 1,857 miles from the High Sierras to Canada alone. Cristina was 29, I was 35 years old, and we had been married for only one month when we began our Pacific Crest Trail through-hike. Cristina was born and raised in Barcelona. She was out-of-my-league beautiful with dark hair, dark eyes, and a smile that could melt the moon. This had come unexpectedly, me suddenly having a Spanish wife. Cliches arise of bullfights, red dresses, guitar, Catholicism, drama, passion and black hair. She did indeed have long, straight, beautiful, flowing black hair. But to me she was simply and magically just Cristina.
This is actually the story about something entirely confusing to me, as I just can’t make perfect sense of this whole thing. Every time I think back and examine it, the picture keeps twisting and changing. I should mention up front that three years after this PCT hike that I’m about to paint came our divorce, and then came a strange time after that when I was a little bit out of control: when I had yelling attacks at two different colleagues in the span of a week; when I spun a rental car on the Mass Turnpike, crashing backwards into a guardrail; and finally when I ran head-first into the cement wall of a squash court at work during a match against one of my players, which gave me a sore neck for six months and a permanent scar. I could have died in the car crash, could have been paralyzed for life on the squash court. I was on and off medication then and perhaps just a little confused. This tale may possibly shed light on it all.
The PCT was to be my second distance hike. My first had come in walking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine back in 1993 - - but this time in 1999 the goal was to do a far crazier thing and hike the longer and more remote 2,657-mile Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. The border of Mexico is the trail’s southern terminus, and coincidentally was an area that Cristina’s countrymen had conquered and settled centuries ago. Cristina’s family name was Pedrero, from the Spanish “rock,” as her father’s distant ancestors had once worked the Andalusian rock quarries. She had the slightest trace of Middle Eastern influence in her blood, too, from somewhere far back when the Arabs had conquered Spain long ago, so that I’ve seen it happen on sidewalks in various parts of the world that she will get approached and mistaken for a long lost Arabian princess. Our future children would one day be bi-lingual citizens of two countries, we had daydreamed, with our spending idyllic summers roasting on the Mediterranean, our children growing up knowing their European grandparents, aunts and uncles. But things were never easy for us. Our marriage was troubled right from the start, for Cristina needed me to join the world and I could not. Truth is always hard to arrive at, but with her I had never felt such confusion before in my life. Now I find myself going back to the time of this hike again and again in my mind, trying to make sense of the hike and our marriage, and wondering how things might have been different. For this is a love story, too. But I am getting ahead of myself.
Let me slow down and talk about algorithms. Every human being is different, just as every animal, snowflake and grain of sand is unique. Every living thing has an essence. Every animal has an essence that is manifest in an inclination to behave certain ways under varying situations: sudden loud noise means we flinch; feel thirsty means we seek water; feel threatened means we fight, flee or hide, depending on the circumstances. We have trillions of these. Even plants have them, dictating when to bud, and how to face the sun. They exist inside us like algorithms, like the simple instructions used to program computers. Call it personality or human nature, but our every miniscule action and thought is a function of all of our unique algorithms. Cristina and I were both vegetarians and atheists, with our hard-wiring (algorithms) quite similar, which helped us bond together: see something suffer means we are moved to care for it; see an underdog and we root for it. Cristina’s algorithms went: LOVE; GIVE. Perhaps mine could have remained that way, too, except that my brain had a glitch in the system which left me living in constant emergency-mode with hard-wiring that went like this: Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go; rest, recover; go, go, go, go, go; fight, fight, fight; go, go, go. Exhausting! I took and she gave, which fit fine; but that only goes so far. I had always been a hyperactive manic child who climbed walls and drapes and trees and raced around out of my mind. Cristina had grown up quietly, without playing sports. And here we found ourselves planning to hike a long mountain chain, and neither of us knew if we would succeed. Based on my glitched-out algorithms, and given the rocky past that we’d had in our short time together - - a past I will explain more of later - - a shroud of fog hung over our hike and relationship. There was no equation to determine the outcome. A theory by Stephen Wolfram calls this: COMPUTATIONAL IRREDUCIBILITY, which says that: “The only way to know what many systems will do is just to turn them on and let them run.” I had previously loved other women in my life, but I had never loved so dearly nor respected anybody so much in my life as Cristina. She was the best person that I have ever known. Which is not the same as saying that we fit. There was no telling how this hike or even marriage would go except to set off and see how it went.
Cristina was unable to speak English when we met, which was two years before this hike. She was newly arrived in America then, and working as an au pair in the central Maine town where I lived. She had come across the ocean to get a new start and a break from some things from her past. Raised on the coast fifteen minutes north of Barcelona, she was a city girl who liked city things, and so of course she had requested au pair placement in New York City, Chicago or San Francisco. But the only spot immediately open was in rural Maine - - which she took and came and met me. Small differences in input can create vast differences in outcome. Her host family, the O’s, owned a lakeside mansion in Belgrade on forty acres complete with dock, boats, canoes, kayaks, two tennis courts, a paddle tennis court, sauna, Jacuzzi, heated floors, dogs, cats, and three tow-headed, supremely athletic children. I was the tennis and squash coach at the local college, and the O’s, in the established tradition of the wealthy collecting things, would invite me over for paddle tennis on their lighted court on snowy winter nights. I was single at the time and Mrs. O would try to set me up on blind dates, but I would always refuse, explaining that I had to meet a vegetarian, because life feels less lonely when shared with someone who understands. It was at the start of Cristina’s tenure when Mrs. O called me out of the blue one day and said: “Guess what? We found you a vegetarian!”
We do not always choose the ones that we fall in love with. I fell for Cristina immediately. We met when I walked inside the O’s house after paddle tennis one evening. She was sitting on the floor with the children and Mrs. O told her in Spanish: “You’re going out.” This took her by surprise as she had not been forewarned of our date. My first impression was that she did not stand up to say hello. Cristina’s first impression was that I had waltzed inside like I owned the place, and that after greeting her I had walked back into her private hallway to shower. She remembered feeling invaded and intimidated by that, hoping that she hadn’t left a bra or underwear hanging up to dry. We went out that night, sat on a picnic table and laughed drawing maps on napkins, showing each other where we were born and all the places that we liked best. A woodchuck emerged from the woods nearby us to munch on some grass, and Cristina tried to keep calm even though she had never seen one before, nor been aware that such an animal even existed. She kept an eye on it, chagrined, secretly wondering whether it would attack us.
Cristina initiated this hike. We were engaged by the time that I happened to mention to her one day that I longed to through-hike the Pacific Crest Trail, because I had already through-hiked the Appalachian Trail and I wanted to have that epic adventure again. It was fine to have hiked the AT alone, but I knew through photographs that the Pacific Crest Trail was so beautiful that it had to be shared. The problem was, I told her, that the time wasn’t right and I had to wait. “Why wait?” she asked me. Those two words started this journey; furthermore, she agreed to go with me. She had come to America and had agreed to marry me, and now she would follow me into the wilderness. Neither of us knew much about the west coast so we ordered trail books from the Pacific Crest Trail Association, located in Sacramento, California. The photographs showed an open trail with rocky ridge walks on high exposed ground: my favorite thing. To begin training, Cristina ran on our treadmill at home, while I ran around swatting balls at work, as I did --as a coach --every typical day. Our wedding ceremony was March 21st, 1999. We married in Portland, Maine, on the Eastern Promenade, outdoors, overlooking the ocean. We had a Justice of the Peace, no family and just a few friends. There were patches of snow on the ground and a chilly spring breeze in the air. And within a month of that wedding we would start hiking. Her parents worried: “You married this man, a man who would take you out into the woods?” My two best friends weighed in: Tom and Toot. Tom is a poet who picks up trash on the beaches of eastern Long Island, while Toot is a federal prosecutor who will become a Supreme Court Justice one day. Both of them knew the tales of the turmoil that Cristina and I had faced all along, almost from the day that we’d met. Toot said:
“You’re taking a five-month hike with your wife?”
“Yes.”
“When it’s over, you’re going to owe her, BIG TIME.”
Tom said:
“You’re bringing a marriage that is on the rocks, out onto the rocks.”
Cat’s Cradle.
Nobody carries 150 days’ worth of food in their backpack, so to resupply food along the way, you either have to buy food once a week in the little trail-side towns, or mail yourself food in advance to post offices and pick-up spots along the way. Trail books had helped me choose post office drop box locations on my previous Appalachian Trail hike, and there are also books that make PCT planning easy, so, we decided to buy food in advance. There are 26 trail stops along the PCT from Mexico to Canada - - 17 in California, 5 in Oregon, 4 in Washington - - and we would mail ourselves one small cardboard food box to each one. These towns had names like, Idyllwild, Snoqualamie, Skykomish and Stehekin; and they were a mixture of small villages, tiny resorts and holes in the wall, and we would never know their true nature until arrival. With any luck, these stops would give us the chance to rest, wash laundry, read a newspaper, use the telephone, shower, eat in a restaurant and sleep in a bed. Figuring out how to navigate through each stop is part of the fun and challenge of the hike.
I had the same Gregory backpack, Whisperlite stove and generic sleeping bag from my earlier hike, and we bought Cristina a small Gregory backpack that matched mine; also, we bought a tiny three-pound tent, built for 1.5 people, called a “Clip Flashlight.” Our focus was on packing light and carrying only what was absolutely necessary. Keeping our pack weight down would make it easier for us to hike, I knew. Then on April 12th, 1999 - - married now - - we exited Maine over the Piscataqua River Bridge and we drove to my parents’ house in Rochester, New York, for final trip preparation. Mailing ourselves food in advance guaranteed that we would have the right things, but it caused the need for some seriously unseemly pre-hike shopping: we had one night to buy food for two people for a five month hike. We had lingered in Maine for so long covering departure details (securing things at work, and turning plants over to friends), that we found ourselves in Rochester with only one day to shop. Considering the magnitude of the task, we thought it best to begin our shopping at midnight to have the Wegman’s supermarket aisles to ourselves and to spare strangers the frightening spectacle of seeing us pushing around grocery carts filled with candy bars. Cristina went along with this latest crazy plan of mine, but she was no fan of my mania. On our first trip to the checkout line we piled high hundreds of packets of noodle dishes and dozens of jars of peanut butter. It was 1:00 AM, with us the lone customers. Our cashier stared, and asked:
“Are you having a party?”
At 3:30 AM we were back at it again, loading the check-out counter this time with hundreds of breakfast bars, Pop Tarts, Band Aides, crackers, candy bars, mixed nuts from bulk food and bags of M&M’s. It was a different cashier. He looked at our pile. It was 1999 and many people believed that the world’s computers would crash at midnight at the end of the year. His eyes narrowed conspiratorially and he asked:
“Are you preparing for Y2K?”
After staying up all night packing our boxes, we set out in the morning on no sleep to get a blood test for an insurance policy that my parents had given to Cristina as a present, so that she would receive large sums of money if anything happened to me. This gift was my parents way of signaling to me that this was the type of detail one must handle in marriage. It was also their way of signaling something special to Cristina, that: “You are part of our family now, and we will make sure that you are okay no matter what happens.” Translation: “We know that you may be in trouble, as you are with our crazy son.” Cristina waited in the doctor’s lobby while I walked into a back room and rolled up my sleeve to give blood. I faint when I give blood, so to distract myself I told the nurse that we were about to go hiking for five months. She asked, “Is that safe?” Oh yes, I said, and then I fainted dead away on the floor. The next thing I knew, I awoke on my back in that little room with a terrible headache, and Cristina and three nurses standing over me. They helped me up onto a table where I lay for thirty minutes, whimpering occasionally, “Can I have some more crackers?”
I could not have Cristina lose faith in her trip leader. To be sure, I later asked:
“I was very brave, wasn’t I?”
“Yes,” she said, patting me on the shoulder without looking, “you were very brave.”
We did not fly directly to San Diego. Instead, we flew first to Florida and spent five days outside Tampa, attending the wedding of my friend Toot. I had visited Toot in Washington, DC, in 1993, on my way to hike the Appalachian Trail, and now we were visiting him in Florida, in 1999, on our way to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. The timing was perfect, as we were travelling to Mexico, and this southern swing was merely a delicious detour, part of our general momentum, like we were playing some giant game of transcontinental Cat’s Cradle. Toot’s wedding was lavish with hundreds of guests at the Don Cesar, a ten-story pink castle-hotel on St. Pete Beach. The Toots had the Presidential Suite at the Don, room 802, which was two stories high and accessible only by a private elevator and hidden stairs. The suite had living rooms, dining room, kitchen, upstairs spare bedroom, master bedroom, and a terrace outside like a football field that overlooked the hotel’s two pools, the beach and the gulf. I was best man, so we lounged in that room feeling odd to have so much pleasure preceding the pain, for the trail certainly would not be like this - - poolside waiters bringing us salads, young men with plates of shrimp sidling up to us at the wedding parties. I decided it might be better to suffer awhile first, so I dutifully hit my head on the towel rack in our shower. Blood flowed out of a long gash as I screamed: “Cristina!” Later that night at a wedding banquet a man stepped backwards onto Cristina’s toe, crunching it, almost breaking it. Such pain: this was more like it! Perhaps now the trail might seem gentle by comparison. We iced her toe for an hour, believing that our hike was over right then before it had even begun.
We hop-skipped from Tampa to Houston to San Diego, beginning at 6:00 AM on April 19th. We had sent our fine luggage and wedding rings home from Florida, and now we had only our backpacks, and also a hiking stick that Cristina had given to me as a gift. She was the best giver of gifts I had ever known. The stick was thin but strong and steel-tipped so that it would not erode while getting planted travelling border to border. On layover at the Houston airport, people stared and someone said,
“What’s that, a pool cue?”
“It’s a hiking stick.”
“Hockey stick?”
“No, a hiking stick.”
Blank stare.
“For hiking...”
Chapter 2
Campo
It is hard enough to have your foot in one world let alone two.
- - Jim Harrison, The Beast God Forgot to Invent
Purgatory.
We deplaned in San Diego where Cristina took over and navigated us on trolleys and trains from the airport to the eastern outskirts of the city and a little purgatory weigh station - - train station - - called El Cajon where we waited for a van that would take us further east into the hills, to the tiny town of Campo, California, the launch-point for the Pacific Crest Trail. The wait felt torturous because we were sunburned and exhausted. The oppressive heat outside the station unnerved us as we knew that we would have to live with it now, unable as we would be hereafter to just duck inside an air-conditioned Don Cesar hotel room to escape it. Indeed, reality flattens all northbound through-hikers here, for El Cajon is the last chance to turn back.
I held Cristina’s arm tightly, as I had been doing all day ever since we’d left the Florida hotel in early morning darkness heading for the airport. It was a habit I had, a dependency, of either clinging onto her arm or clutching her hand. I do it in supermarkets, airports - - and now I was doing it still. I had done it for the past five days, all through the Don Cesar wedding, through the parties and under the tables at the dinners and lunches. It was a little routine that we had which went like this: I get exhausted being around so many people and the only thing that keeps me going is nervous chatter… but Cristina can’t deal with my nervous chatter and it has the unwanted effect of making her grow silent… which causes me to panic and cling onto her… which makes her revert more… thus making me cling and chatter more. Cristina hated every aspect of this. Neither the talkative-thing nor the clingy-thing worked for her. Neither does the extreme opposite thing that I do, too, where I burst away so entirely distracted and independent that nothing can pull me back. When I get like that she feels that I am barely aware of her. She actually feared that now. She feared - - she knew - -that I would act this latter way on the trail: get caught up in the hike and forget about her because on the trail I am in the ONE PLACE where I feel most comfortable and do not need anyone. Inside the train station with us a skinny and shirtless albino man with double-jointed shoulder blades and quite possibly Tourette’s syndrome approached the ticket counter and repeatedly accosted strangers by screaming non-sequetors while frantically clapping his hands behind his head. Then off in a corner, an overweight woman squealed while slapping a vending machine that had eaten her money. Cristina cried and I whispered assurances over the course of our two-hour wait, like:
“It’s okay.”
“Everything will be fine.”
“It will be okay if we do not make it.”
But inside we both knew that I would never turn back. I would never give up this hike, would never turn back or quit no matter what, even if it killed me. As this was my second distance hike, I was gigantic, enormous, the largest person on earth, because I had through-hiked before and knew that I could do it again. Undertaking your first five-month hike, you find that you can be forgiven for shunning the world to take your trek - - just a brief flight of fancy - - but heading back out onto the trail again (albeit, it was a different trail for me this time) shows a pattern and leaves you with explaining to do. You can’t get away with it quite so easily the second time around because friends want to know WHY. Civilized people question you, as if you are abandoning them and proving that you really do not need their world at all. The least you can do is give them a reason. I had my simple reason: that four weeks into my previous hike, I had known that I would one day do this; had known it from the instant my AT friend “Hydro” had told me of the existence of the PCT. That was the simple reason that I sat here now. But I had to dig down deeper to discover the roots of the more complex reason for my return to this bizarre world of distance hiking, where one lives with all one’s belongings right on one’s back; and I believe that the answer I found was quite possibly this: my father was a lawyer. It started with that, anyway. I had always been proud of it, but the down side was that because of it I had grown up in the suburbs, and I did not like the suburbs. Rochester, New York, is a corporate town, home to large companies and possessing expansive suburbs that span out from the city with golf courses, country clubs, tennis clubs and large and beautiful homes. Almost constant rain makes it the greenest place on earth, and my family was comfortable, living in a large home that could not be seen from the road. Our driveway turned a bend around a thicket of trees and opened into a yard where I had grown up playing with my friends. Two streets over was Ambassador Drive, the most expensive real estate in upstate New York, with substantial stone homes like small castles that had normalcy’s like elevators and swimming pools inside. Whenever anything broke, we paid somebody to fix it. I never learned how an engine worked or how to fix a leaky faucet. But the worst thing was that any direction I faced were more suburbs, and that seemed terribly wrong in my heart because I could not escape it. Could not escape the traffic, homes, roads and cars. I felt like the only person who noticed the treachery of it. My father went off to work dressed in a suit, and came back home and we had a nice dinner. And I just did not see the point of it at all! I wanted to tear out my eyeballs and scream. The unspoken point about life in the suburbs seemed to be that I should strive to become a lawyer or doctor in order to be able to own one of these homes, and I should want to do that so I could have children and raise them to end up in one of these homes; and on and on, with seemingly no greater purpose at all. Instead, I wished I’d been raised on a ranch in Wyoming, mending a fence, and fixing our roof ourselves. Or been born in a cave long ago. Or been born on a tropical island. Beauty, to me, existed not in the suburbs but in some far-away fantasy, like on the river-plain in the Native American Indian village in the movie, Dances With Wolves.
Along with suburbs come institutions like church, boy scouts, dancing lessons, paper route, and school; but I grew up a disbeliever and non-saluter. Those organizations never answered my questions but just raised more still. At church, I looked up into the latticework of the rafters calculating how I could climb across the ceiling. Another time, I found a hidden key and climbed up behind the organ pipes on a series of ladders and platforms. At boy scouts, I would duck away and climb onto the roof. I quit church and quit boy scouts, but it took every ounce of my energy to wear down my parents so they would allow me to quit. I had my own thoughts. I broke into schools and country clubs, desperately searching for secrets that might explain why it was that people valued living this way. I never stole anything. I never vandalized. I was just snooping around, opening drawers and searching for clues. Wherever I went I turned over rocks and looked beneath. I believed that if I searched hard enough I would find some kind of truth to it all; there had to be more than just birth, school, work, death. I was raised in the suburbs and had everything there, but the problem was that nothing could touch me there. I felt that there had to be something more. Something was missing for me. Back then, I used to have a recurring dream in which I would find myself running across people’s lawns, from one home to the next, yard after yard. In my running dream I was not angry or scared, but uncomfortable. In the dream I would run through someone’s backyard, jog around bushes, jump over a low stone fence and then run through someone else’s yard, perpetually; each yard unique and ever-changing, and yet somehow the feeling was always the same - - trappedin endless suburbs, inescapable forever.
My two brothers became what they were supposed to become: a doctor (older), and a lawyer (younger); but I had barely been able to sit through school. I did not fit anywhere and I could not be shaped to submit. I did things like eat lunch alone in the school auditorium and count to a million in dashes in my notebook. In high school, I would sneak my car out (the car given to me by my parents, until I crashed it and they gave me another car) and drive across town to my girlfriend’s house in the middle of the night, sneaking into her house past her parents’ room and into her bedroom. I had no respect or reverence for anything. Even now, at forty, my life has yet to stabilize. I feel anxious and uncomfortable all the time. In some future world where they weed out misfits and cast them aside, then my life would be tragic like in “Logan’s Run,” me running away to escape the city and live with the wild ones out in the wilderness. For I want nothing more than to live. I just never can relax or find peace or calm. I cannot find my Pacific Dream. The truth is, I have only recently learned, that without medication I might never find calm. Earlier in life, I had grown to embrace all my crazy stunts and fights and car crashes and personal battles against the world. I did not fit, and I did not want to fit! I enjoyed believing that I was volatile, unpredictable and dangerous. I wore the label of black sheep of the family proudly on my sleeve. Calm and healthy signaled boring to me back then, and more than anything else I did not want to be boring. I had always been physical, climbing trees. And while I now consider organized sports to be a ridiculously overblown concept, in younger years I craved love and success, and I had always succeeded in sports. I concentrated on tennis. Specialization: it is what one does in the suburbs. Alvin Toffler wrote: “One of the most highly developed skills in contemporary Western civilization is dissection: the split-up of problems into their smallest possible components. We are good at it. So good, we often forget to put the pieces back together again.” I got mesmerized by the simple act of hitting the little yellow ball. I won tournaments and awards. I let tennis define me. But the pieces were never put back together with me.
The choice before me at age thirteen was between continuing to attend a beloved summer camp, or staying at home summers to further my tennis. The camp was a private boy’s camp in the Adirondack Mountains of northern New York, a magical place for swimming and mountain climbing. It was simply my favorite place in the world. Everything made sense to me there. I loved the smell of the pine trees and loved jumping into the lake. There was no television or telephone. But most of all, I loved the mountains, loved everything about them - - their shape, their height, their rockiness. The problem was that if I missed a summer of tennis my peers might “get ahead.” That is the thing about life in the suburbs: you have to constantly prove yourself, for there is always the fear that somebody else might get ahead. I had already spent three wonderful summers at the camp, but I made my decision to abandon it for tennis. Twenty years later, tennis and now squash are still with me; and yet also still with me is the tug of the mountains, as if signaling that the dilemma I had faced long ago has been left unresolved. In these past twenty years nothing has changed, for whenever life and human congestion overwhelm me, I need to return to the mountains for things to be right. In 1993 I had hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. In 1998 I had hiked the Long Trail from Massachusetts to Canada carrying only a book-bag and without stove or tent. Through all my years after college, I would always find a way to visit the mountains. The curious thing was that I had never been able to stay and live my life in the mountains. Instead, I would always retreat to the competition on tennis courts, and to movie theatres, bookstores and automobiles. I was attached to those things in a way that I could not sever. I felt I belonged in two different worlds. In college I once wrote a story about a boy who lived in two different worlds, and he could not decide which world he wanted to live in.
In my mid-twenties, I moved to Maine to find my wilderness, and have lived here ever since. It suits me here: I can disappear here. My running dream cannot haunt me here, for in Maine it is little more than slight exaggeration to know that if I run through someone’s yard and jog around bushes I will end up not in somebody else’s yard but heading through forest, northwards through wild land; and that feels fine, like the way it is supposed to be. I need to be at the edge of it all; and if one day too many people move to Maine then I will move further eastward, to New Brunswick, Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island. I hate that I am nervous, anxious, restless and rootless nearly all the time. My relationships have always been this way, too, from as long back as I can remember - - back and forth struggles that drag on for years without ever getting resolved. The feeling of agitation has always been with me, the feeling as if I just can never quite ever get completely filled up. I had known since my earliest cognition that I would never know or find peace and would always be lost. This defect is what Cristina walked into, anxiety that I had been carrying with me all my life. Cristina had grown up without financial or material security, but with love. Her parents had been young, with her mother 18, 19 and 21 years old when she had Cristina’s older brother, older sister and Cristina, respectively. Her father was a year older than her mother, neither ever went to college, and they both worked long hours. They loved Cristina dearly, but Cristina was left alone in the house at a very young age, and her two siblings ignored her. She told me that only much later, and I was floored when I learned about the details. As a girl, Cristina had dreamed of dancing ballet, but they had not had money for lessons. I have always wished I could go back in time and make her childhood just a little bit happier. Nobody had ever truly understood her. She became a vegetarian, on her own, at age 12 because she did not want to kill animals, and she has never once wavered from that, nor ever will.
Bonnie And Clyde.
Our van arrived at El Cajon and carried us rocking and reeling two hours east into the hills, to Campo, the southernmost PCT town, where we stepped out onto a gravel lot at 5:00 PM. Campo was not as I had imagined. In my mind’s eye it was flat, deserted, and with everything right angles and tumbleweeds blowing by. Instead, in reality, it is surrounded by hills, and the roads twist and turn. The population is just 200. Across the lot was a general store, and down the street was a post office, border patrol station, a reform school for boys, and a few dozen homes dotting the hillsides. There are no hotels, which was troublesome only because the PCT guidebooks advise hiking 40 miles north of the border as quickly as humanly possible, supposedly for us to escape the range of rouge hordes of crazed, jobless Mexicans who hop the border and might conceivably hassle hikers for food. Two old men emerged from the general store as our van pull up. They waved and came towards us. Experience enabled me to identify them at a glance as fellow through-hikers, and these would be the first two we would meet. To through-hike a trail you must walk its entire length end-to-end in one calendar year. On the Appalachian Trail these gentlemen would have been “Lugnuts” and “Sauerkraut,” or other such nicknames, but here on the Pacific Crest Trail through-hikers generally do not use trail names, so they were just Joseph, 71, from Germany; and Al, 60, from Tennessee. We were John and Cristina, not The Honeymooners, or Bonnie and Clyde. Joseph and Al had light-weight gear and high-tech clothing, yet meeting them was hardly intimidating since they were old and resembled Navy SEALS not at all. The sight of them raised our spirits and filled us with confidence: “if these two can do it, then so can we.” Yet, I knew better than to underestimate old hikers; I had met 60year-olds on the AT who could hike teenagers into the ground, day after day. These two were friends and hiking partners who told us that they had found a place to sleep in a valley down beside town at a place called the Railroad Museum. “Moo-seeuum,” Joseph said, nodding, as we realized that he did not speak English. We agreed to meet them there later since we needed to go touch the Mexican border first. It was only our first day, but we already had Maine, Spain, Germany and Tennessee represented.
Our first task was to touch Mexico before we could then turn and hike north to Canada, so we walked south out of that miniscule town and trudged
1.6 miles to the Mexican border. The ground was not marked, and there was not a single post or sign, but we followed a clear groove in the sand that led up a gently graded hillside. Halfway up the hill, exhausted, Cristina plopped down on the ground and refused to go further. I sat with her for a while. She is tough. I would never have brought her out here unless I had known she could do this. For her, this was baptism by fire, since she had never attempted anything like it before. Never mind that through-hiking means encountering broken stoves, endless miles, heavy backpacks, monsoon rain, heat, wind, cold, bad food and crazed deranged hikers. Never mind that it means bugs, blisters, dirt, deadlines, muscle fatigue, rashes, aches and pains, and months spent sleeping in a tent. I knew that she could handle it. All along there had been clues: she had hiked a few times as a child with her family in the Pyrenees; she had worked for a year as a commercial fisherman on a boat in the Mediterranean; and when she first came to America she had toured the country with Trek America traveling thirty days in a van, sleeping in national parks, riding horses and hiking about in the Grand Canyon. Most obvious was the work she had done back when she had first moved in with me, in transforming my crumbling, peeling apartment into a home. She had spent eight straight days stripping and sanding the floor, then scraping and painting the ceiling and walls. I had never seen anyone work so hard. I had never seen anything like it. Determined to a fault, she steels her mind and never lets go. There was nothing that she could not do. There was nothing that she would ever give up on. Including giving up on me. That would have to be forced on her. She rose and we continued walking.
At the top of the gentle hill we reached a brown steel fence that stretched snakelike east and west over the distant hills as far as the eye could see. There were no windows or gates. Across it was Mexico, and here was the border - - just a brown steel fence in the wilderness with a five-foot tall PCTobelisk here and nothing else at all. We reached our hands over the fence into Mexico, then turned and faced Canada with the intent of walking northward for five months until we saw Royal Canadian Mounties. Upon leaving the border, we retraced our path downhill back to town, when a border patrol white SUV Ford Bronco pulled over and stopped us. Two uniformed agents sat humorlessly inside behind mirror-rimmed sunglasses, rolled down their window and one said:
“Where are you going?”
“We’re hiking the Pacific Crest Trail,” we answered.
“Pacific Coast Trail?”
“Pacific CREST Trail. It leads from Mexico to Canada. We’re on it. This is it.”
The second man said: “I lived in San Diego all my life, but I never heard of the PCT until coming here.”
On the east coast it is practically inconceivable to find anyone living anywhere near the Appalachian Trail who does not know exactly what it is or what you are doing when they see you standing upon it. But here it appeared that we would not get that respect. The PCT does not travel near urban areas or people’s homes, and most people have never heard of it. That is its charm. This trail is hundreds of miles longer than the Appalachian Trail, and its highest point is 13,100 feet, on Forester Pass in the High Sierras - - almost twice as high as on any point east of the Mississippi River. The Appalachian Trail is continuously marked and has lean-tos and shelters all along the way, but the PCT is not well marked and has no shelters. Finally, we broke away and continued back to town and found Joseph and Al at the Railroad Museum down in the valley. This museum sits on hundreds of acres of property with multiple railroad tracks running through it and enormous boxcars randomly strewn about. It is a functioning museum in the summertime offering train rides over the border into Mexico - - “Train Rides Into the Past” - - but spring is off-season, and closed to all but through-hikers. We settled onto a dirt square beside a small building where we found two picnic tables, a drinking fountain, a wooden deck and an indoor bathroom. I set out to find Thomas Braginton, who had built and operates the museum, to ask his permission to spend the night. After I located him, Thomas greeted me and showed me his paintings, sculptures and projects. When I did not return for an hour, Al tried to reassure Cristina:
“Don’t worry, that man loves to talk.”
“So does my husband.”That night the four of us lay side by side in our sleeping bags under the stars. It was bitterly cold. We were on the trail now, away from work and telephones, televisions and computers. Six years had passed since my previous through-hike, and I was about to go at it again. It felt like I had snapped my fingers and six years had passed. Six years earlier, upon finishing the Appalachian Trail, it seemed to me like I was starting a journey, not ending one; and here I was, renewing that journey now. Back then I’d had a girlfriend named the Y, and she had moved to Pheonix shortly after my AT hike, so that was the end of it. I did not dwell much on the AT in the six year interim. I rarely discussed the trail in conversation. It was only very miniscule things that signaled a change in me: like how parking at the end of a lot and walking into the grocery store no longer phased me, or how rain never bothered me anymore but instead I had grown perfectly fascinated and worshipful of it. My only connection to that earlier trail was the vanity license plate that I had registered for my car: “ATPCT.” Nobody was supposed to know what it meant; rather, it was just a little promise to myself: it was one trail that I had already hiked, and another trail that I longed to do. For six years I had been hesitant to start the PCT, though. It had taken Cristina to come along
and provide the spark.
Through experience, I knew that I possessed sufficient fortitude to stay on the trail without quitting. The goal is to hike the whole trail, and the simple trick is just to stick with it. Less important are tricks of the trade or learned survival skills. Through-hiking is not about fancy techniques and maneuvers, not about knowing every little hiking gimmick. Only two things are needed - - to pack light and keep moving forward. Being an AT alumnus gave me confidence, and I closed my eyes and recalled the rhythm of the trail: for we do not hike these trails all at once, after all, but instead we break them into little bits and hike piece by piece, section by section, from town to town. Our first trail town was a mere 40 miles to the north on top of 6,000-foot Mount Laguna. Currently, that was all that mattered. Reaching there would give us a night in a hotel, a shower and a bed. It was powerful incentive. Town-totown is the rhythm of the trail. Despite Cristina’s injured toe and our rocky relationship, everything was going according to plan. Newlyweds, we were.Our teeth chattered. We lay under the stars outside in the desert near Mexico. Our through-hike had begun.
Chapter 3
Mt. Laguna
A 47 mile walk gives you plenty of time to think, but it is the walking rather than the thinking that
calms the spirit.
- -Jim Harrison, Westward Ho
Legionnaires.
We embarked northward across Highway 98 in the morning, the road we’d come in on, and entered a sandy land of scrub brush, lizards and cactus. On average, the elevation for the first 700 miles of the PCT is 3,000 feet - - called “High Desert” - - and there would be cactus, lizards and sand at our feet all the while. We left the Mexican border and headed north into the unknown, and neither of us knew what to expect. For all we knew we would be entering some foreign landscape like French Legionnaires crawling through the desert with buzzards circling overhead: “Water!” Our friends Joseph and Al were somewhere ahead. Overachievers, they had arisen at 3:00 AM and noisily banged about in the dark for an hour before finally taking pity on us and leaving. The unmarked trail that we followed was nothing more than a grooved trough through the sand that led through a rolling lunar landscape with VW-sized boulders dotting the distant hills. Everything sandy, outlined with sunshine and shimmering heat. This landscape looked alien to me: “The Pacific Crust!” Indeed, this was the Appalachian Trail turned inside-out. If the AT was a Persian cat, then this was a hairless Egyptian.
I was glad to be walking again. The trail’s groove - - a trough - - is a clear indentation which we could see winding along far ahead. This modest footpath leads unbroken all the way to Canada. It treks thousands of miles, through sand and snow and around volcanoes. It is marked only sporadically, meaning that you cannot always be sure that the groove at your feet is THE groove. One continual task on the PCT is to follow the groove and trust in the groove. The groove, the groove, the groove. All hail and bow down to the majesty of the groove. It was definitely a trail we were following, and every two or three miles we came to a PCT marker on a post that told us that this was the trail. The PCT emblem that appeared on these posts was an upright curve-sided triangle with a drawing of a snowcapped mountain and a pine tree, and the words: “Pacific Crest Trail, National Scenic Trail.” Quite elaborate, relative to the Appalachian Trial emblem which is just an A and a T overlapped. Soon we came to a trail split where the groove forked two different directions around a hill. We consulted our books to figure this first puzzle out. We carried three PCT books: the “Town Guide” which gives information on all the trail towns that we would be passing through or passing by; the “Data Book” which gives the exact mileage for every point on the trail; and the monstrous 516-page “Pacific Crest Trail Volume I California,” our master guidebook containing maps of the entire trail and text that gives a blow-by-blow description every inch of the way (the 384-page, “Pacific Crest Trail Volume II Oregon and Washington,” would come later). With so few PCT markings, we had the choice of either keeping our heads down reading the description of the route as it unfolded - - a description so detailed that reading it actually meant missing what we saw - - or ignoring it, walking without reading our guidebook, and frequently getting lost. Unsure now, we opened the mammoth guidebook and read:
“Now the PCT undertakes a traversing descent north, shortly joining and then leaving a jeep trail, which climbs more directly up from Hauser Canyon. Beyond it, you wind for a minute or two along a dry creek bed, then step across its sandy wash to climb moderately north, then east, through lush mixed chaparral. In spring, the heavy perfume of startling lilac-blue ceanothus shrubs hangs heavy in
the air, while a number of red-and-yellow-flowered globe
mallows line the trailside. After reaching a low ridgecrest,
you climb southeast a bit.”
I had no idea what a low ridgecrest was, let alone mixed chaparral. I did not know how long a bit was, or whether given an infinite amount of time, like a monkey in space with a typewriter trying to randomly create the complete works of Shakespeare, I would ever be able to identify globemallows trailside. Fortunately, Cristina was an excellent navigator, and she led us one side around the hill - - the correct way - - and we pressed on through hot sand, mile after mile. A plane passed miles overhead, and I knew that the Toots had left the Don Cesar by now and were seated inside this very one, flying Tampa to Hawaii for their two-week tropical honeymoon while we were sweating it out in the desert. I yelled up at the plane:
“Hey Toot, throw down some food!” But nothing came.
Quiet and relaxed that first day, we hiked 14.4 miles, and stopped at a place called Hauser Creek while it was still light out. Two thoughts struck me: the first, that I could have gone much farther if I had been hiking alone, and I hated myself for that thought; but the second was that 14 miles is a LONG way, and Cristina had done remarkably well. She had not complained (nor for the next 800 miles would ever complain) of a single thing - - not bugs, snakes, heat or hardship. This is not to say that she did not suffer, but just that she was brave about it. She was a walker, having walked 3 miles to work and then 3 miles home again during the nine years she had worked in Spain. She loved to walk city streets. Some people love to walk, and so that part fit perfectly for her out here.
Surprisingly, the grade of the trail had been extremely easy, but it had been hard walking in the open, exposed all day to the heat of the sun. All day the sun’s rays hit us directly. Our Data Book told us the distance we’d come. Including our mini-walk to the border that previous evening, this was our second day on the trail; but it felt like our first REAL day, first FULL day, nonetheless. Here near a stream were trees, a clearing and a dirt road. We set up our tent, our new one from Maine, that was built for 1.5 people. We called it: “1.5-Tent.” It was the first time we had ever used it, and we weregrateful to find that it worked and that there were no missing pieces. The Pacific Crest Trail has no lean-tos or shelters trailside (or anywhere else), so hikers have two options at night: either sleep in a tent or just lie down and sleep outside. Sleeping on the ground under the stars is called “bivying.” I longed to bivy outside every night because I hate the confinement of tents. Tents are little plastic cocoons that shield you from the world. I would have loved to just lie on the ground every night and sleep like the cowboys did in the old western movies. But I thrash about when I sleep, so I would have made a lousy bivying cowboy. I would have destroyed my cowboy bedroll every night, so that every morning all the other cowboys would open their eyes, look over and say: “What the hell, Earl?” The Western Movie Director would take a slow pan of a night scene with me and my cowboy friends bivied outside in our little dusty cowboy clearing, surrounded by cactus --our little smoldering cowboy fire and little pot of cowboy coffee on the grill, with one after another of us lying motionless and asleep on our backs, the others all lying with their hats half down over their eyes in the classic fashion. And then the slow-panning camera suddenly reaches me, and I’m kicking my legs as I rock and roll from side to side like I’m wrestling an alligator. “CUT!-CUT!-CUT! You there, Goddamit, HOLD STILL!” I had no experience with bivying, and I could not think of a way to sleep without scorpions and snakes crawling inside our sleeping bags. I need to sleep with my sleeping bag open, completely unzipped, in order for my legs to have freedom. My legs have to be free or else I go insane. Cristina would have made an excellent bivying cowboy: calm, a Virgo, she lies perfectly still. But she did not wish to bivy, so the point was moot. We set up our tent, and entombed ourselves in a small plastic world.