MAN IN THE MIDDLE
© 2009 John Illig
Smashwords Edition
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To my nieces and nephew, Emma, Melissa, and Andy, and with great love for my dearest little peanut, Francis.
Also To TEAM LOCUST
Chapter 1
Reaching Mexico Be bold, and mighty forces will come to your aid.
—Goethe Crazy Cousin.
If you measure success on a hike as walking every inch of ground from beginning to end, then my two previous hikes were successful. If you measure it by how well you stay true to yourself and treat nature and those around you as best you can, then I think both my previous two hikes were successful, too. Certainly, there’d been trying times. And I’ve been through a divorce. On my first hike, I was young; on my second hike, I was troubled. But I think I’m okay now. At least, I’m self-aware. It’s important, because this time it won’t be easy. Nobody takes the Continental Divide Trail lightly. Still, it had to be done. Reason being simply that that’s just what you do when there are three trails and you’ve already hiked two of them. It wasn’t any more complicated than that.
America has three celebrated hiking trails and they follow longitudinal mountain ranges. They’re the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, and Continental Divide Trail. A reverential subculture of long-distance hikers calls them the AT-PCT-CDT. They roll off the tongue easier when abbreviated that way. Holding varying degrees of difficulty, the AT is comparatively easy, the PCT is trickier, and the CDT is quite impossible. Proportionally, they’re what addition is to multiplication is to calculus; what junior high is to high school is to a doctoral program in optical engineering; what a wagon is to a tricycle is to a flaming stunt-trick unicycle. You get the idea: the CDT is rough. To through-hike you must walk the entire length of a trail in one calendar year. Complete all three and you earn the hiker’s coveted triple crown. The CDT was what all I had left—all thirty-one hundred miles of it. You save the hardest for last. Keep in mind, however, that this was just walking after all.
The Continental Divide Trail follows the Rocky Mountains up New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. The tricky thing was that in 2005, the CDT wasn’t yet continuously connected, so in some spots you just had to improvise and hike along from town to town as best you were able. Also lacking were lean-tos, maps, and a through-hiker handbook. There’ll never be lean-tos on this one, and that’s okay, but the other things mattered. Trail headquarters was the newly formed Continental Divide Trail Alliance. They claimed that their goal was to finish the actual path of the CDT by 2010, but they’d misjudged it by dozens of years, since it’ll take them many decades to turn this into a continuous trail. That boded ill for me, since navigation isn’t my strength. And few people’d be out there to help out. The trail wasn’t finished, nor was it popular like the others. It was more like the crazy cousin. Each year only a mere twenty-five people embarked to through-hike the Continental Divide Trail. I was just hoping to meet a few of the other twenty-four.
Four Stacked Boxes.
Necessity demands that the Continental Divide trail isn’t the same as the Continental Divide. The trail only loosely traces its namesake, occasionally following the actual Divide, and other times just crossing back and forth over it. The Divide is the spine that splits our continent’s watersheds in half. No water crosses from one side over to the other. Theoretically, all water west of the Divide eventually reaches the Pacific Ocean, while all water to its east reaches the Atlantic. Although it hydraulically splits the country, the Divide is left of center and not truly in America’s geographic middle. The designers of the trail have been fixated on keeping its route as close as possible to the actual Divide at all times, often at the expense of hiker safety, convenience, and sanity. If they’d give the trail license to occasionally take the most scenic, direct, and convenient route, then perhaps there’d be more than twenty-five people attempting it each year. Somebody should maybe tell them that.
Forming a mental image of the Continental Divide Trail is tricky but here’s help: four stacked boxes, each large and left of center as they climb, are the Divide states of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. The bottom box has a funny boot-heel in its southwest, while the top box has an irregular western edge that hangs down over Wyoming as if to cling on and keep the stack from toppling. In order, south to north, these are the fifth, eighth, ninth and fourth largest states in America. The mountains run west of center up all four boxes, and the Continental Divide Trail hangs like a rope that’s being hit with a stick. Upon reaching Montana, the trail briefly follows the Montana-Idaho jagged border. Idaho thus technically holds a smidgeon of the CDT, but I just sort of discount that and instead only picture the CDTas being in the four box states, for the trail soon leaves that border and climbs northward through Montana’s interior. The major cities in those states lie east of the mountains. One thing was certain: the trail zigged, zagged, and was the furthest thing from a straight line that you could imagine.
Sequential.
Transient as tackling these hikes makes me seem, some alter ego inside me has somehow managed to secure roots, in that I’ve held the same occupation for sixteen years. I’m a coach. It’s a job that I cling to and love with every ounce of my soul. I coach the obscure sport of squash and have done so at two different colleges in Maine: first were five years at Colby College, and then came eleven years at Bates College. Coaching gave me summer freedom, which let me dabble with very long walks.
My first motorcycle came after my divorce, when in 2002 I bought a used Honda Shadow. It was my sole transportation preceding this hike. I’d never owned a motorcycle in my youth, or else I’d probably be dead by now. Finally well past my wild years, I was careful and mellow on the motorcycle. It made for interesting times, driving to grocery stores through the Maine winters. It gave me practice in dressing warmly. It kept me outdoors, which I loved. I slowly got my bearings back postdivorce, until I realized one day that I’d go hiking again. It comes to you just like that—a few years pass and then you get the itch. You just know when it’s time to head back out.
A psychologist once told me that I was the most sequential person she’d ever met. It’s true that I operate sequentially, tackling just one thing at a time and finishing it before going on to something else. It gets in the way of my functioning, as multitasking is impossible for me. It’s like how this twelve-year project of hiking three trails had kept me prisoner all the while—had perhaps kept me from fulfilling other goals. But if that was the case, then at least it’d soon be over. It wasn’t too late for me. This was my last summer to through-hike. Afterward, I’d be ready for a home, remarriage, some land, and some kids. A couple of dogs, I hoped, like one black Lab and one white German shepherd. I wanted those things, wished to build my own home with a mountain view, deck, wood-burning stove, claw-toothed bathtub, windows, bookcases. I’ll pour myself into that. Make sculptures outdoors. Devote myself to my family. We’ll create our own holidays. Celebrate solstices. Have fun. Laugh a lot.
That was my dream. My paternal instincts were welling up in a major way.
I was almost through with this project. But I couldn’t say that I wished it was over. Couldn’t say that because I was looking forward to this hike. I couldn’t wait to begin, to get back on the trail and test the waters and see what this infamous CDT was all about. See whether I could handle the tough one.
“I’ll be back by September first,” I told my boss, the athletic director.
“That’s what you said the last time,” she said.
(Ouch!).
“This time I mean it.” I’d exceeded my deadline the last time. After my Pacific Crest Trail hike of six years earlier, I’d returned to my job sixteen days late. I couldn’t let that happen again. If I could begin the CDT by May 4, that’d leave me four months to finish and return for the start of the new school year on September 1. That wasn’t much time, though. I’d need wings on my feet. I’d need to average one month apiece for each of the four states. I’d need everything to go according to plan. But things don’t go according to plan.
Divorce was hard to go through. It took time, but I survived in one piece, and now I look back and it seems like another lifetime ago. It’s possibly made me a better coach, for it’s increased my tolerance for others. I have greater empathy and am less judgmental. Everyone experiences wrenching moments in life, and you wouldn’t wish those on anyone.
Another thing which helps me coach was that I was such a nightmare as a college player. I’d broken rules, transferred schools, joined a fraternity, gotten in fights. The law of unintended consequences has it that now there’s nothing my players can do that’ll fool or surprise me. They can’t pull tricks that I’m not on to. But coaching tires me. I immerse myself in the job. I’m married to my job. I love my players so dearly that they’ve become like a family to me. An extended family. They partially satiate my paternal instincts, because I care so much about them. But I’m still a kid, still laugh at their jokes, listen to their music. I’m no military figure who requires their fitting into a mold, acting as one, and marching in lockstep. Instead, I finesse every situation and treat them as individuals. I want them to question life, but I get tired when they question me. It’s the only way I know how to do it, still I find it exhausting. Each season’s conclusion finds me collapsing at the finish line, ready for a break, ready to spend my summers recovering before fall hits and the students return and the cycle begins anew.
Dreams.
With a backward twist of my wrist, I rode my red motorcycle away from Bates College on April 21, leaving my squash teams and the squash building behind. Our squash building was off-campus. The college had planned to build a new facility in the gym, but that’d fallen through, so instead we went a different route and rented a medium-sized warehouse four miles away. We’d gutted the inside and erected five squash courts. I’d call it a cold and distant outpost, except that it was spacious and warm inside with carpet, sofas, and stereo. It was a perfect situation.
Cold icy rain drenched me, testing my resolve from the onset. I bailed, having only reached Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on my first night. Next day was better. Sunshine. I bypassed Boston and motorcycled to Lowell, Massachusetts, where I parked at the library, the first building I’d come to. Inside, I inquired if they’d direct me to Jack Kerouac’s grave. It was one of only two things that I wanted to do on my way to Mexico.
Inconceivable that Kerouac was here, and I lived so close without having ever before paid homage. People from all over the world thrill to come and see his grave, and I was only now finally doing it. I felt as if I’d a list of wishes and was checking them off, fulfilling my dreams while I could. It’s never too late. He’d actually once worked in this very library, they volunteered. They’d a room devoted to his books. They gave me a flyer with directions to the cemetery, and back outside I went, riding to the end of town. The cemetery was average-sized and nondescript, off an average-sized and nondescript road—like any cemetery off any semi-quiet road. No fanfare. I rode my motorcycle inside, down along the little streets where dead people lay inside coffins beneath the grass in their quite peaceful final neighborhoods. I found the grave. Walked over and looked down upon it.
Strange to think of bones lying underground (and, what: clothes around the bones?). I want to be cremated when I go, burned outside on a sandy beach on a Native American funeral pyre. There were a few coins placed on the tombstone and a couple of notes. There was a small flag from Sweden—random—and flowers. But that was all. Kerouac had died at age forty-nine while living in Florida with his third wife. But Lowell was where he’d been born and raised and had been a football star. So here was where they’d placed his grave. He was troubled, depressed, alcoholic. But wide open. Unafraid. My spirit was nothing like his. I’m tight and closed, I know that. It’s my brain chemistry. He was a man without borders. It amazed me because I’m a person of so very many borders. From the very first sentence, I’d cherished his novel, The Dharma Bums. That book was why I’d come here—to be near the person who’d written it. I rode away, two towns over to Concord and Walden Pond. It was my second and last pit stop.
You can actually go to Walden Pond. You can actually go there and see the water. I’d lived in New England for fifteen years, in which time I’d driven every inch of its roads to all its colleges and universities with my squash teams—but I’d never before been to Walden Pond. I couldn’t think of anyplace better to visit, as Thoreau remained current for me. The image of a home just slightly removed was appealing to me. It helped me envision my future. Thoreau was a visionary poet, and he was certainly talented, but he was uptight like me. This land was owned by his friend Emerson, who’d suggested he build a cabin and live here awhile to collect his thoughts and follow his dream of writing a book—do it as a way of getting over his despondency over his older brother’s death. Sensitive man, he was. That plan worked out well.
I loved being here midday, midweek, in the spring while it was deserted. In the parking lot was an exact replica of the cabin he’d built for twenty-eight dollars, with replicas of his bed, desk, stove. Now, a sidewalk circumnavigated the lake. I walked halfway around to the spot where Thoreau’s cabin had stood, at the cove beside Wyman Meadow. Only the foundation remains, but you can stand and see the same view he’d enjoyed. You can see from where, exactly, he’d gotten his water. I picked up a pebble to take with me to Mexico. I found a secluded spot and undressed and slipped into the lake, submerging completely. I imagined that the same molecules that’d once touched Thoreau’s skin were now touching mine. But I knew it didn’t work that way.
It felt wonderful to dress again and put on warm clothes and ride off on my motorcycle. It was invigorating to balance on two wheels, draw back the wrist and lift and lower the toe and bend into turns and feel wind rush against my face as the scenery changed. Two dreams were checked off the list, and only two remained for the rest of the summer. Of course, the last two were big ones: riding across the country by motorcycle and hiking the CDT from Mexico to Canada.
Fossils.
My September 1 deadline dictated my starting the hike as quickly as possible. For that reason, I’d take only major highways to Mexico. I told you, I was no Kerouac. I dropped south to the Mass Turnpike and rode westward, picking up the New York State Thruway. The dismal stretch past Albany, of Schenectady-Utica-Herkimer almost did me in as it always does. If someone had told me to follow my heart right at that moment, then I’d simply have turned northward and ridden up to the Adirondacks to live in a mountain home there for the rest of my life. But I wasn’t on that course just yet. I’d embarked on a different mission.
Upon reaching Rochester at midnight, I slipped inside my older brother’s house and slept on a sofa—he and his wife and their kids, upstairs. The cash register was ringing for them in a major way, as my brother had taken over direction of his surgical practice. They were about to upscale dramatically by moving into a castle the size of an aircraft carrier, but they were still a few months shy yet of flipping that switch. I spent two days in Rochester, playing with my nephew and niece. Those kids had become the perfect age. I’m not excellent with the very small, but once they get big enough to kick and catch and throw and take practical jokes and play Monopoly and appreciate sarcasm, then I morph into Crazy Uncle Johnny and am much more fun. The lone exception for how I am with the very young is with my ex-wife’s son Francis. I adore that little guy. All these kids tug at my heart. Inside leaps the thought: I want this. When it finally becomes my turn, I’ll be an older father, but a wise one.
I practically froze motorcycling westward past Buffalo. I was on the move again. Rain fell and pummeled me so chillingly that when I reached Erie, Pennsylvania, I aborted my plan of continuing to Chicago, and instead dropped immediately southward to escape the blustery Great Lakes. Trucks flew by and I feared for my life. I couldn’t recommend this to anyone. About the only good thing was that I could lean back against my backpack, which I had bungee-corded to the backrest. I spent the night in Pittsburgh. Not in Pittsburgh but in a hotel outside Pittsburgh, in a spot possessing zero Pittsburgh-ness about it. That’s how it is around all our cities. Everything looks the same now and anything can pass for anywhere. Two five-hundred-mile days took me next into St. Louis past the arch (Gateway to the West), and into Tulsa, Oklahoma. I was tiring now, losing steam. Two subsequent three-hundred-mile days took me to Amarillo, then into New Mexico. The ride had offered amazing sights—like dozens of firework stores and the largest cross in america.
New Mexico’s otherworldly landscape was a vision that I’d previously seen only in photographs. I rode to the western side of the Rio Grande and turned off at a few scenic overlooks, so stunned was I by this world that was chopped up, eroded, and red—the earth all rusty and orange and red, red, red. All cratered, with strange formations, striations, lines, cuts, swales, swaths, and deep trenches. There was little greenery. It was unlike anything we had in the east. My heart beat quickly. My deepest feeling went: You mean I get to walk through this? Two rest days in Albuquerque found me enjoying the only American city that possesses three Us and two Qs. The lips touch only once when you say it, early on; then it’s the base of the tongue against the throat, twice, in and out. I briefly visited Old Spanish Town. A block from there was the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, which I entered to spend the day looking at dinosaurs. Those fabulous animals had once lived here, running around in the places that I’d be walking through. They’d certainly been warmblooded egg-layers. Ancestors of modern-day birds. They’d been here when there once was a great inland sea, with its western shore at the eastern Rockies. New Mexico is fossil-rich. Huge numbers of dinosaur fossils lay buried underground here, the same as they did in Montana. I stared at the skeletons and imagined them flesh-covered, birdlike, and very much alive, with quick twitches and wiry legs, chasing me through New Mexico’s dry, red, crumbling landscape. I wouldn’t last long in that mismatched skirmish. I’d need to make like a mammal and find a cave or climb a tree. Or use my big brain and build some fantastical weapon.
My motorcycle died three hours south of Albuquerque on Monday, May 2, ten days after I’d left Maine. Heading southbound on Highway 20, my gear shift broke and fluid spilled out. I pulled into Truth or Consequences, on the western shore of the Rio Grande. There were natural hot springs in this town that’d actually been named after the television show. I sat in a diner next to the highway and waited for a tow truck to come and collect me. Impressively, my motorcycle had made it across the country to within a mere sixty miles of my destination. Now I hitched a lift.
My tow truck driver smoked cigarettes and his girlfriend sat between us, so I kept my passenger-side window rolled halfway down for air and was just incredibly grateful for the ride, this ride sponsored and cost-free thanks to my prescient membership in AAA automotive emergency help. Modern life has conveniences. They let me out at Pacachio Storage in the city of Las Cruces. I locked my bike inside container number sixty—so I was on foot now. Pacachio Storage unit key in my pocket, and pack on my back, I walked into town and checked into a hotel.
There’re people who love to help, and I’d already identified one. A week earlier, I’d called the CDTA headquarters in Colorado. They’d explained to me that no official CDT starting point existed, but that soon a permanent route would be established. They gave me the name Marc Hackola. Said that he lived in Las Cruces, worked for the Bureau of Land Management, and was charged with creating a new starting route. The CDTA sold four books with information about the trail, one for each state. I’d bought them over the phone with a credit card and had asked them to mail the books to Hackola for me. From my Las Cruces hotel room, I called the BLM and got connected to Hackola’s line. I left a message on his office telephone answering machine with my name and location. I was awakened that next morning by Marc Hackola knocking on my hotel room door. He handed me my four CDTA books.
Blimps.
No exact place started the CDT in the south due to the trail’s being incomplete in 2005. If any place should’ve been marked and well-organized it was the start, so its lack signified the kind of experience I could expect. I avoid clichés when I coach, but one thing I’ve always told my squash players is that Chinese characters contain words inside words, and the word opportunity is contained within the word for crisis, meaning that inside every crisis there’s an opportunity. My opportunity here was to be creative, find a good route, and gain confidence. I just had to figure out the first common denominator of all possible starting points and decide how to reach that spot from the border.
The town of Silver City was the first common denominator in the south. Hikers chose different ways to get there. The original route had been to start down in the bottom of New Mexico’s boot heel, at the Antelope Wells passport station. From there, a forty-five-mile, shadeless, hot, highway walk led directly northward to Hachita, and then a few more days of road-walking led to Silver City. Antelope Wells wasn’t a town but just a border station with gates, guns, lights, barbed wire. Police. I studied my New Mexico road atlas and planned my own route to Hachita. Route 9 ran parallel to lateral Interstate 10 to its south and was within a few miles of the Mexican border, so I decided to choose a random spot off Route 9—as close to the boot-heel drop as possible—and from there I’d walk southward until I reached the border, and then walk northwestward to Hachita. Make my own way. Cross country. From Hachita, the route to Silver City was clear. That was how I’d start.
I rode a Greyhound bus one hour westward to the small town of Deming with its long country blocks, Wal-Mart, decaying hotels, and visitor center. I ate in a café and made final trip preparations. I spent one final night in a hotel, and that next morning, May 4, prepared to leave. I rode a taxi westward out into the desert.
“The state flower of New Mexico is the Wal-Mart shopping bag.”
My AW-Taxi driver Roy said that while pointing at brown plastic Wal- Mart bags that were stuck and flapping in the breeze on the barbed wire fence that lined both sides of Route 9. He was African American, a Vietnam War veteran, was retired from computer work, had a couple grown kids, and had moved to Deming less than a year ago. He was running the taxi just to help the town. He said I was crazy for asking to be let out at the side of the road here. No cars, buildings, homes, or people in sight. Just a few small mountains on the distant horizons, and otherwise nothing but endless barbed wire fence.
Low little prickly chaparral bushes covered the desert floor. A roadrunner ran by and my taxi driver didn’t bat an eyelash.
“Make sure you watch out for government blimps,” he told me.
“What?”
“Government blimps.”
“Yeah?”
“They’re in the sky. They watch the border. They can see everything that you’re doing.”
He sounded paranoid and I stood hoping that this part of our conversation would quickly pass, but then he pointed up into the sky to the north.
“There.”
I couldn’t see anything, but he kept on pointing…and I still couldn’t see, but he still kept on pointing...and then I saw it! It’d taken several seconds for my eyes to adjust to the vast openness of a sky devoid of clouds, but then there it was: I could make out a blimp in the sky far away. I’d never have seen it. Why I should care if it saw me was a different matter. It’s a crazy world of secrets. A crazy world of guns and blimps and border stations.
“I wouldn’t go out there because I don’t like snakes,” he said.
With a slow U-turn taxi driver Roy drove off. It was a lonely sound, hearing the car pulled away. I hadn’t the luxury of starting out with a hiking partner. My friends all worked. I crossed the road and climbed over a chest-high barbed wire fence. It was the first of hundreds that I’d climb over that summer.
Ubiquitous is what they were on the CDT. The entire Rocky Mountain byway should be renamed: land of the barbed wire fence. The red sand at my feet gave way and was poor footing. Chaparral bushes were everywhere. They were just wide enough that you couldn’t step comfortably over them, so I constantly hadto choose to walk either left or right around each one. It kept me from enjoying arhythmic gait on a sure course, and made the going slow.
When I finally came to a fence after two nervous southwestward hours of sandy, overheated, off-trail anticipation, it wasn’t a big metal affair like they had at the Mexico-California border on the PCT, but instead it was just another barbedwire fence. A dirt jeep road led east-west parallel to it here on the American side.There were some quasi-official-looking signs on both sides of the fence, some inEnglish, some in Spanish. I reached my hand over into Mexico, and so I’d begun.I had one international border down, one to go. It was only the second time in my life that my skin had been inside Mexico. The first was six years earlier on the PCT. Neither visit had lasted longer than a few seconds. Mere seconds with a hand stretched over a fence isn’t the most thorough way to experience a country, its culture, its people. I walked westward along the border.
Dusk fell, catching me still on the dirt road at the border. I wasn’t carrying a tent. I set down my blue nylon ground cover and lay on it in my unzipped sleeping bag looking up at the stars. I’d been nervous about bivying, not knowing how itwould go. I’d slept in lean-tos on the Appalachian Trail and had slept in my tent on the Pacific Crest Trail, so bivying was new to me. Now, I found it was easy. I just lay down and slept. That’s the meaning of bivying—you just lie down onthe ground.
I was alone, and yet with me were friendly old hiking ghosts. The memoriesof all my old Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail friends were here withme. Thoughts of all those crazy hikers rose to the fore—Hydro, Mozyin’, Ponder Yonder, Chinook, Kilgore Trout, Blazer, Easy Stryder, Hunter S. Thompson-Ron,Dana, Zoomsteen, and the Junkyard Dog. I could see them all shuffling across the deserts, skipping through the woods, sliding down the snow, jumping over boulders, climbing up mountains. Smiling and laughing as they went. I thoughtof all the miles and all the times we’d shared together.
Even my ex-wife Cristina was here with me, too. I can’t talk much about her, for that’s not what this story’s about. I’ll mention her once or twice, to be sure, because she’s still a part of my life, but she’s no longer my spouse, so it’s not fair to anyone if I discuss her too much. I will say that she’s a friend of mine to this day. Shall be my friend until I die. I think the world of her and I always will. Ilove her to an extraordinary degree. It wasn’t the kind of love that made me wish I was back together and remarried to her. No, events had transpired as they’dneeded to happen. It was more just a love of extraordinarily deep admiration of her kindness, patience, and selflessness. She’s the best person I know. It makes me feel good about myself, knowing that I care so much about another person.
I’d do anything for her. So yes, with me was everything that I’d learned on my two previous hikes. My experience would come into play. My summer had begun. Little fanfare existed out here.
Chapter 2
Under Way
Had we succeeded well, We had been reckoned amongst the wise: Our minds are so disposed to judge from the event.
—Euripides Off Prozac.
One crazy initial feeling, postdivorce, when out on trips with my squash teams, was turning in and lying down in hotel rooms in strange cities, knowing there was no one that I had to call to check in with. I felt the same sensation here, felt it all over again. There was good and bad in it. Out here, the greatest thrill for me would come in reaching Montana and grizzly bears. Ursus horribilis is the great bear. Every moment until then would leave me no escape from the thought of it. I won’t carry a gun. I’ll be the intruder and will enter the northern Rockies gingerly. I won’t bear grizzlies any ill will, even if one should decide to eat me. My plan was to carry an umbrella and somehow find the nerve to unfold it during a grizzly encounter, do so as a bluff to make myself appear larger, to make nearsighted grizzly bears decide not to risk a fight with strange, upright, stick-legged umbrella man.
The CDT’s listed at thirty-one hundred miles, but I feel that’s overesti mated. When one day a complete route finally gets established, it’ll surely be measured at less than that. Each state on the trail had a unique personality: New Mexico held hot exposed road walks; Colorado was snow and lightning at high elevation; Wyoming was grizzly bears calmly waiting with their mouths open at Toegwotee Pass (south edge of Yellowstone National Park), ready to chomp down on hikers much like Kodiaks behave when they stand in Alaskan streams effortlessly waiting for unsuspecting spawning salmon to fly inside their gaping jaws; and, finally, Montana was where any hiker still left standing gets eaten by grizzlies at some point before reaching Canada. It’s important to know what you’re getting into.
I was off Prozac. My last pill taken on the day I’d left Maine two weeks earlier. Already I felt different. It takes awhile to work into the system, and it takes awhile to work out. My glow had worn off and my sparkle was gone. But there was no one out here for whom to sparkle and glow. I didn’t feel great. For the past two years I’d experimented with existing on small, medium, and large doses, the largest of which made me actually sing while walking to my office in the morning. With the middle dose I could manage, but it made me drowsy during the day, and I’d grit my teeth and feel a bit drugged. The lowest dosage allowed me to cope. With zero of it, I feel flat. It gives me a little bit of erratic behavior every time I go off it. Erratic behavior, like awakening at the Mexican border and walking through the desert. There was no great reason for me to have suddenly stopped taking the Prozac. Some people take it only seasonally in the winter, to compensate for the decrease in sunshine. Perhaps through wishful thinking I was trying to be like them. I’d gotten off it that previous summer of 2004, when I’d stayed in Maine and had played tennis tournaments every weekend. I’d started dragging, though, growing progressively worse, until by early June I couldn’t take the sadness any longer and I went back on it.
Part of why I’d gone off it then and now is that having a dependency sucks.
After a while you just don’t want to have to be taking anything anymore. You want to believe that you don’t need anything. When you’re taking it you feel okay and so you forget how it feels to be without it, so you lose your fear of going off. You forget the sadness. So you go off it. Back during that previous tennis-filled summer I’d told myself that I’d get by without it because my squash season had ended and I didn’t have to run practice and deal with my players’ emotions. It was spring and summer, and the long days were filled with ample sunshine. And besides, if I ever felt bad, I could easily retreat and remove myself from whatever I was doing, and go home to take a nap. This time, I was repeating all those same arguments. I’d fooled myself into believing them once again. Like here I was enjoying the utmost freedom imaginable—so how could I really get sad? I felt sad, though. I felt down. All this crazy discontented restlessness never seems to leave me. I’ll never be done with it. The most I can do is survive. I look and see expressions of it everywhere. It lies in the poetry of Robert Frost: I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light.
Frost masked his restlessness and depression, but it’s clear to those who understand. My father was a hardworking and modest attorney who always helped others. He was fine with my choices. If anything, my life in sports was partly his fault for having always played games with me and my brothers outside when we were kids. He was always throwing a ball for us. Always taking us to climb trees and dirt bluffs. The thing with me was that I’d just never grown tired of the bouncing ball. My mother, on the other hand, had grown up poor in the Deep South, and her father had died when she was fourteen. My mother had struggled with mental disease and she carried a chip on her shoulder. She’d done her best with us and had raised us to become something.
That was where Cristina’d come in and had changed my life in teaching me that I didn’t have to be or become anything. That it was okay that I just was. It wasn’t that I’d never heard it before or didn’t know it on a rational level, but Cristina was the first one to help me truly internalize it. She’d saved my life. It’s why I’d married her. It’s also why I’ll love her forever and will always be on her side. But it wasn’t enough for us. I doubt that my place is to impart wisdom or pass down life knowledge to my squash players, but if there’s one lesson I wish I could give them then it was just that—they don’t need to be or become anything. If they can be decent and kind, then I already love them for who they are. Creepy for a coach to talk about loving his players, but there it is. It’ll be what I want for my own children, too.
After my Appalachian Trail through-hike of twelve years earlier, my then- girlfriend the “Y” moved out west. She’d ultimately returned to New England, got married, had two children, but we’d never really found ourselves able to restart our friendship. Just a few things had happened that’d soured me. It was different after my split with Cristina. Our continuing friendship means the world to me. She’d gotten me on Prozac and that was of great help. The two previous times that I’d tried going off it have sucked. I shouldn’t go off it again. I don’t need a large dosage, just a small dosage has worked miracles.
My going off it entirely wasn’t the way for me to go. Yet here I was off it. I wondered how it’d affect my hike.
Hachita.
The mesa I walked upon stretched so widely that it offered no sensation whatsoever of standing tall. The surrounding landscape was flat in every direction, contrary to the image of a dramatic ridge-walk that a Divide connotes. Only an altimeter revealed the truth, that the ground here was six-thousand feet elevation, higher even than the summit of Maine’s tallest peak, Mt. Katahdin at 5,267 feet.
Hot, dull and flat, this was nothing like the start of the Appalachian Trail in the severe, cold, craggy, densely forested irritable mountains of Georgia which are freezing in springtime, so through-hikers get rained on, snowed on, iced on while battling straight up and down, into and out of chilly, slippery, drizzly gaps. This was nothing even like the start of the Pacific Crest Trail in the high rolling desert hills of southern California, where boulders and hillsides with trees add personality to the land.
Strewn about lay discarded empty plastic gallon water jugs, evidence of whatever mysterious people who were out walking around. If the state flower of New Mexico was the Wal-Mart bag, then the state debris was the Empty Plastic Gallon Jug of water. It reminded me of the warnings I’d gotten from all the miscellaneous people I’d met over the past few days while in transit making my way here: be careful of snakes which’ll bite you; be careful of Mexican border crossers who’ll take your stuff; be careful of American drug runners who’ll kill you; be careful of Native Americans who’ll bother you if they find you on their land; be careful of ranchers who’ll shoot you if they see you on their property; be careful of government agents who’ll catch and detain you and give you a cavity search. It’s always that way when hiking a trail—everyone helpfully, patiently telling you about all the scary, impossible obstacles that you’ll have no chance combating. But I saw no one. Not even a snake.
I knelt and pushed into the sand, planting like a peanut the pebble I’d carried with me from Walden Pond; then I trudged northwestward, trailless, cross-country, on May 5, back to Route 9, feeling for all the world as if I were alone in the universe. My feet hurt and my backpack weighed too much. I’d a heavy sleeping bag and more food, books and trinkets than I needed. I’d lots of water, but I needed that. Water is heavy, but you can never have too much of it in the desert.
I reached Mad Max, Road Warrior, deserted Route 9 and walked four hours along its burning asphalt into Hachita. My feet hurt so badly they reduced me to the pace of a very, very, very, very fast snail. Hachita was the size of a football field with a café, gas station store, post office, and a few homes. With a population of fifty, it was no booming metropolitan hub. It was smaller than New York City, Jakarta, Tokyo or Mexico City. You could lasso it with a rope. Cars pass through to Mexico and back. Standing there, I couldn’t help but think, What would my life be like if I lived here? I had no answer for that. William Least Heat Moon had driven through here three decades ago and described seeing “dust devil” plumes of sand spinning in the wind around town, lifted by thermal pressure. He said: “That’s something else about the desert: deception. It can make the heat look like water, living plants seem dead; mountains miles away appear close.” He compared his feeling of discovering a bar in Hachita to that of an ichthyologist finding the first millions-year-old fossil fish coelancanth still alive and swimming in the sea.
At Hachita’s post office, I collected a long thin package that looked certain to contain a pool cue or fishing rod, but it was really an umbrella that I’d bought weeks earlier and had mailed to myself here to fool nearsighted grizzlies. It wasn’t that I expected to see grizzlies at the post office or anywhere near the Mexican border, but just that I wanted to experiment with hiking with an umbrella to see if it could be a viable grizzly solution later, up north. Down here, I’d use it for shade. I took the CDTA books which cover Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana, and mailed them ahead to Chama, New Mexico, up near the Colorado border. I’d deal with them later.
“No charge,” the postal worker said.
“Wait. What?”
“Yeah, there’s no charge for that.”
I was confused. “What do you mean? I totally have money. I can pay for it.” “No,” she smiled.
First, she’d let me into the store just as she was closing, and then she’d taken an interest and asked me about hiking the CDT. Now she wasn’t accepting any money. She was really coming through for me.
“Okay, but here’s the thing,” I said: “One day, for real, there’ll be hundreds of hikers coming in here every single spring, and you can’t possibly pay for all of them.” But she wouldn’t let me pay. I wondered where the money would come from; whether it’d come from her pocket or if she had some way for the government to pick up the tab somehow, as if it was free.
Hachita’s café had capacity for twenty if you squeezed in to try to set a world record, but I was the only patron. The café was nothing more than the front room of the owner’s ranch home, and she sat in back watching television. A guy pulled into the parking lot outside to sell snakes and lizards which he’d caught in the desert. Another car pulled in when he did, to look at the wares, suggesting that it’d been an arranged meeting. The reptiles were in hundreds of glass containers in the back of the station wagon. It was awful. I doubt that the guy would enjoy the experience if some technologically advanced being swooped down and scooped him up and stuck him in a glass jar the size of his body and traded him off, or cut him into little pieces for one reason or another. It made me sad. Kurt Vonnegut would agree.
Putting my feet up in the Hachita café was rude, but necessary because they hurt so much. A hiker sometimes takes liberties—moral shortcuts or allowances. Nobody with manners was here to talk me out of it (I was alone). My feet were overheated and swollen from a mere one day’s desert walking, and elevation slowed my blood from rushing into them. Ice would help them even more, but I hadn’t yet reached a level of desperation great enough to force me to go through the steps of procuring ice and a pan. Instead, I just sat and ordered food and drinks. I couldn’t wait to eat. Hunger’s the best sauce, as the saying goes. I studied my ripped-out page from my New Mexico road atlas to see what lay ahead. The answer was more road walking—sixty-three more miles of northward road walking would take me into Silver City. The roads were the “official” route, according to the CDTA’s New Mexico book.
The trouble with that CDT book and those for the other three states was that the total set weighed more than a vanload of giant medicine balls. Each book had random, non-through-hiker information comprising 95 percent of its content. The books contained such seemingly endless information on side trails, flora, fauna, alternate routes, history, and hiking tips that it was hard to sift through and find the exact information you needed. Searching through the books was possible while sitting in a café eating, but I couldn’t do it while out on the move in the sand beneath the unforgiving sun. Worse was that the maps in the books didn’t help. They were large-scale close-ups devoid of perspective as to what lay nearby. All the pages were high gloss and heavy, and pack-weight spells trouble for through-hikers.
If the CDTA cares about attracting through-hikers, they’ll need to change it. They’ll need to create a true through-hiker’s handbook by condensing the four books into one volume, printing it on cheap lightweight paper, excluding the photographs and all other non-through-hiker extraneous information, and doing a better job with the maps. For now, at this early stage of the trail’s development, that was too much to ask. Look no further to understand why only twenty-five people set out to through-hike this trail every year. The ATand the PCT both have helpful through-hiker handbooks, and that’s what makes those trails manageable and the number of hikers on them large. It was a bit like whether the chicken or the egg came first. The CDTA won’t make a through-hiker’s handbook because they don’t think there’s a market for it, but all they have to do is examine the traffic on the other two trails to know that there could be if only they’d make the book.I walked over to the gas station store next door and bought candy bars and chatted with the owners about the CDT. In walked a terrifically charismatic dark-haired young man in blue jeans and T-shirt with penetrating blue eyes and a movie-star smile. Laughing and reeking of pot, he proceeded to roll and twist on the floor, showing us some yoga moves as well as two balancing tricks that he told us he’d learned from an amateur boxer in Chicago the other day.
“Twenty-two years old,” one of the store owners told me once the young man had left.
“Just bought a large spread nearby,” the other owner said.
Spread? “He has money?” I asked.
“He won fifty-thousand dollars in eight seconds last month.”
“How’d he do that?”
“Pro rodeo rider.”
“He’s one of the ten best steer riders in the world.”
I left the café at dusk, in order to night-hike and make a few miles up the road while the temperature was cool.
Smoke Balls.
Squash is growing. People still don’t know of it because it doesn’t televise well. It’s funny to me, and purely coincidental, that I’ve been a vegetarian for twenty years and that I coach the only sport that shares its name with a vegetable. There’re sixty men’s and thirty-two women’s college squash teams in the country, and we’re rapidly adding more. Most have varsity status, but a few are only club teams without full funding. Most are in the northeast, in New England and beyond, stretching to New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. However, teams have cropped up in other regions of the country in recent years, too, with Stanford, Cal Berkeley, USC, Utah, Washington, Notre Dame, Northwestern, Tulane, Vanderbilt, Virginia, Georgetown, George Washington, Denison, Penn State, Drexel, and the United States Naval Academy all having traveled to play in Team Nationals this past year. Nationals was at Yale, which has a stadium court made of four glass walls and has 360-degree viewing all the way around it. Glass-backed courts have changed the game, because now it’s quite spectator-friendly as it’s visually and audibly interactive.
In men’s squash, the national intercollegiate team champions for the past ten consecutive years has been Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut. They’ve beaten the standard bearers Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, plus all other takers for ten years without losing a match. Their win streak is 194 matches and with no end in sight. It’s the longest winning streak in history for any college team in America, for any sport in any division. There’s only one division in squash, and every team is able and willing to play every other team in the country. Except Harvard. Harvard plays very few matches. They ignore everyone else and focus obsessively on trying to beat Trinity.
Squash is scarcely known in America, but it’s popular in the rest of the world. It’s played in 147 countries. That’s because the rest of the world has always played a more enjoyable, more athletic version of the game than we have, so they’ve had more fun with it. Up until a dozen years ago, American squash was played on a narrow court with a hard ball. Until then, it was mostly a county club and prep school sport in this country. That all changed in the early-1990s, however, when American squash converted to the international standard of the sport by playing on the wider court and switching to play with the softer version of rubber ball. Now we play the same game of squash that’s played in the rest of the world. That’s started an influx of international players, because here young men and women can study while playing for their college squash team. Trinity College has taken advantage of it.
Trinity’s been able to recruit players from all over the world. Their current top-eight players are from Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Sweden, Brazil, and four from India. Nine players comprise a varsity intercollegiate starting line up, and the only American who started for Trinity last year was their number nine player, Tom Wolffe Jr., from New York City, who’s the son of author Tom Wolffe. At Team Nationals you can see papa Wolffe in his white suit and bow tie walking around signing autographs. Other top teams have international players, too: Princeton’s current top-five men are from Mexico, Egypt, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and El Salvador; Harvard’s top-five men are from Switzerland, Israel, India, and two from Canada; and currently my Bates College men’s team has players from El Salvador, Zimbabwe, Hong Kong, and Kenya. I’ve also recently had players from Jamaica, India, and Thailand. Diversity keeps things interesting. I’ve hung up a quote which says, Only when all those around you are different will you truly belong.
Seventeen of the top-twenty ranked players in intercollegiate men’s squash are international students. They dominate. It’s because they’ve been playing the softball version of the game longer. And because some of the best athletes in other countries are on the squash court. The incoming talent has revolutionized squash in this country. It’s a wonderful thing. Squash is less snooty now. There’s diversity now. Inner city squash programs have sprung up in Chicago, Boston, New York, New Haven, Providence, Poughkeepsie, Philadelphia, and San Diego. The level of play keeps rising. There’s trickle-down effect, as excellent American players who once fed exclusively onto Ivy League teams are now having to look for other teams on which to play. Duke, Emery, Boston College, Vermont, Colgate, Purdue, UNC, and NC State all have club squash teams. Stanford has built an eight-court facility and has just hired the leading American coach. Stanford’s women have varsity status, and soon they’ll be giving out scholarships. Look for future Malaysians on the Stanford women’s team. At some point it’s going to explode.
During the second half of the season each year I’m always so tired by running practices and traveling every weekend that I stop playing and I get out of shape. This year had been no different. The result was that I found myself on the CDT out of shape. It was part of the reason why my feet hurt so terribly now. The solitary miles gave me time to think of my squash teams, and of all the players I’d left behind. When each year’s season ends, they catch up on their homework and there’re no more practices for me to run, which sucks the energy out of me like a vacuum. The season ends so abruptly that it hurts. I discuss the phenomenon with other squash coaches and they tell me that they feel the same way.
From Hachita to Silver City, the route was nineteen miles northward up dirt road 147; then four miles westward along an unnamed dirt road parallel to busy mega-highway I-10; then through a bridge under the interstate; then twenty-nine miles up seemingly endless dirt Separ Road; and, finally, fifteen miles up paved Highway 196 into town. The way was dry, hot and exposed to the sun. And I was utterly alone. My feet hurt so much that I spent two of the next four days off the trail resting in a dirt-cheap hotel room in a defunct dying town called Lordsburg off Interstate 10. In and out of Lordsburg was a hitchhike, so I hadn’t missed any ground.
Each of those first few nights, I lay by the road under the stars. Everyone’d told me to be wary of Havelinas, which apparently were little hairy pigs. I saw a group of one dozen and they skittered away. My first night from Hachita, I took colored smoke balls out of my pack and lit a few, like a kid, fascinated. It was bright enough at night to see their red and green smoke colors rise up and drift away. Fire and smoke—the world’s oldest television set. Or maybe it was ocean waves. Or passing clouds. Or tree branches blowing in the wind. I’d gotten the smoke balls at a firework store on my way to the trail. I’d entered one to see if they had something which I could use to scare a grizzly, and they’d sold me a very loud banging explosive that was shaped like a crayon and self-ignited upon striking it like a match. It made a deafening noise. The saleswoman had thrown in the colored smoke balls for free.
I was starting out okay, but there were lots of things that I could’ve done better. I could’ve started the trail in better shape. I could’ve started with a hiking stick. I always like carrying a hiking stick, but I didn’t have one now. I hadn’t managed to bring one on the motorcycle and hadn’t been able to find one in the stores in Albuquerque, Las Cruces, or Deming. I could’ve started with one metal ski pole that twists in the middle and slides down into half its own size for easy transport. I also could’ve begun with a lighter backpack. I could’ve brought just a tiny summer sleeping bag instead of my current heavy, warm monstrosity. Easy to think of these things later. Harder to figure out in the moment when you’re on foot, unfamiliar with your surroundings, and unsure of what the places ahead will be like.
The north end of Separ Road led me through a narrow canyon under high cliff walls. The perfect place for an ambush. Here stood the first trees of the trail. May 11, on the seventh day of my hike, I staggered the final leg, up Highway 196. Just five miles shy of Silver City, I did a strange thing in the mini-village of Tyrone and the Tyrone post office. My feet hurt so much that I could barely stand. Perhaps brilliant, perhaps deranged, I emptied the contents of my backpack into a box at the Tyrone post office and I mailed them to myself ahead five miles up the hill to Silver City—then I walked the final bit carrying zero weight on my back.