I bailed out of Leadville as the snow was setting in. It was late afternoon, and the storm that had triggered the hasty teardown of my campsite that morning would seemingly follow me for days afterwards, all the way to California. Whatever spontaneous wind that had lifted me to Colorado only to dissipate for three days with no trace had seemingly resurfaced. I bolted at first to Aspen with my vision blurred and with my less-than-aerodynamic packing job shuffling the truck sideways with each blast of frigid mountain air. In Aspen, the snow eventually turned to rain. I joined other motorists waiting out the weather in the parking garage of a ski resort for an hour before diving further below through dizzying tunnels and winding passes. A glimpse of a sunset poked through momentarily, backlighting each cloud in an other-worldly veil while lightning outlined the scene from the corners. Fully awake, I drank it what I could while maintaining a breakneck downhill speed that would somewhat spare my brakes and gas mileage.
I stopped for the night two miles from the Utah border, at an established BLM campsite. I parked in the furthest corner I could find, as to not disturb the well-settled in RV campers and boondockers nearby who had undoubtedly been roused by my late-arriving headlights. I “cowboy camped” (a method that I scarcely indulge) on blessedly dry earth near the hood of the truck where we could whisper little secrets to each other all night, my sniffling and readjusting on my bedroll and it’s engine creaking and cooling after such a fierce haul. I watched meteors flying high above the desert and sighed in the icy cold clarity of it all, the mystery of the cosmos overhead melding with the mystery of the Nissan’s mechanical syllables, clicking and dripping and sighing and, thankfully, blocking the wind from my head as I slept.
I hastened my way through Utah, only stopping for a few hours to visit an old friend who was also passing through Salt Lake City on her own cross-country endeavor. There I was regaled with her accounts of lost summers at Glacier National Park, plans of adventures in Hawaii, Joshua Tree and beyond. After pushing a week of relative solitude, my interactions with strangers being limited to an exchange of pleasantries with convenience store clerks and baristas, it was the warmest welcome not only to see a familiar face but also to hear from someone with similar motivations. Our visit, brief as it was, stalled just long enough for the storms to catch me. For sixty miles across the salt flats I followed the lonesome taillights of a swerving 18-wheeler with little else in view, mirroring the steel nerves of its driver for barreling through those high winds with such a heavy load. Another silver sunset vaguely broke through, illuminating the ribbon of salt deposits along the rough corners of the lake and its subsequent waterways and drainage ditches. I pushed on as the highway climbed yet again, napping intermittently at rest areas and gas stations until arriving just outside of Reno in the late morning of the following day. Another lesson, I figured, on harboring expectations in regards to time. I’m learning, slowly, to allow the energy of the situation to dictate my operation of it instead of determining in advance how I ought to present myself or how I ought to behave. I’m admittedly pretty clueless about how I am perceived by others. At least, within fixed communities like the hiking world or in an art/music community there exists a social framework and a context that validates everyone’s interactions. Without context I’m a pretty lost individual, socially speaking. A better way of illustrating this is by merely addressing that the longer anyone spends by themselves, they weirder they’re going to seem. It’s easy to program responses and exchange pleasantries, but when channeling whatever focus you’ve been accruing after long days spent in nature, isolation or both, you encounter a bridgeless connection between planes of contradictory rationales. This, to me, is exhausting, especially when meeting strangers. On the PCT, there’s what we call “the two-thousand mile stare”. It’s an uncanny, expressionless recognition of distance that’s characteristically worn on the face. If you’ve ever followed a cat’s gaze as it traces invisible landmarks on a blank wall, you’ve seen something very similar. This bridgeless connection I refer to is ultimately a version of this - merely an inability of the mind to articulate whatever the senses have been throwing towards it for an extended period of time in a non-contrived, non-chemically-induced kind of way. I’m learning to embrace it as a form of transcendence, found by repeated mechanical actions that lend themselves, unintentionally, to meditative practice. Sometimes it feels as if the only way I’ve tapped into this phenomenon is by being too mentally fatigued for my brain to argue with it. We all learn fluidity, whether we call it by that name or by another. Each occurrence of true time dilation - punching a clock on shift work or “waking up” ten years into a failed relationship - is an expression of our actual misconceptions of time. We expect things to work out linearly, that’s how everything else works, right?
Whether its the stark resemblance to the small-town settings of all my favorite 80s films, or the heartwarming hospitality of my friends in Quincy, or that my visits here all differ in number of days and motivations, or a combination of all these I’ll never know. Quincy, while hiking, encapsulated the beauty of Northern California for me, and as a resupply point, the size of the population allows equal parts anonymity and familiarity. The town felt more and more like a refuge each time I arrived back in it, especially now after all the storms in the high country and lonesome moments across the desert. I stepped out of the truck and caught my haggard reflection in the window of my friends’ house. I laughed, thankful that Halloween was just around the corner.
Comments