(What else would I be doing?)
There's no way to "catch up" with an account of my slow northbound progress at this point; I'm just having to accept that I'm living an anthropology lesson. Maybe as a hiker I better appreciate how agriculture allowed formerly nomadic peoples to sit the fuck down once and awhile, to turn their minds towards something besides the pursuit of traveling food. I'm not trying to make excuses, but I tell you what, walking twenty-some miles a day doesn't leave a whole lot of time or energy for writing about walking twenty-some miles a day. (I don't know how other hikers do it. I really don't. My hat off to them.) At the end of a difficult stretch, particularly, the very last thing I want to do is rehash how awful it was, one painstaking iPhone-tapped letter at a time. And truthfully, many many many of my days are terribly boring. The elevation profile, the daily milage, the quality of the trail tread, the distance between water sources, the contents of the food bag--these things relentlessly dominate a hiker's thoughts. And they're very boring. They don't make good blog copy.
Which is not to say it's been a boring three months. More that I don't know how to parse what I'm doing.
Camped on the western side of Kearsarge Pass, just before our resupply exit, Paul asked if the trail was everything I'd dreamed. I said honestly that it was a lot harder than I had expected. Most of the things I've done in my life, even if they proved difficult at the outset, have been things I could learn, master, and grow bored with. Hiking hasn't been like that. In one way or another, regardless of how much or how quickly I learn, every day is a struggle. Getting and carrying enough water, choking down food I can't stand, coping with the heat, bearing the weight of my pack, dealing with gear failures, trying to take care of my body, smelling worse than ever in my life, and marching twenty-odd miles of difficult, constantly-changing terrain on top of all of it. Every day. It hasn't gotten any easier. Every day kicks my ass.
When I was in Sierra City I received a wonderful, surprising care package from Charissa, a friend from Antarctica. I enjoyed the contents of that parcel enormously, but perhaps the most valuable enclosure was her short note, bearing words of encouragement and a quote from Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It rides in my pack now, in the ziploc bag of maps. Three months of hiking are more than enough to dispel any dewy-eyed notions of pursuing a transcendental wilderness experience--I genuinely don't know why I'm here, why I'm doing this to myself. But Dillard makes me think that she knows why, and somehow I find that comforting. I should read the book sometime, I suspect.
"I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air; whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under wind-rent clouds, upstream and down. Simone Weil says simply, 'Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.'"
