Spent this morning at Costco. Paid for the membership and took a leisurely stroll through gigantic isles with a gigantic cart checking things off the list I'd written up. High calorie high fats. Some straight up junk food that just to fill the caloric needs of a thru-hike but also lots of nuts and other things. Two big boxes of Emergenc-C packs and fruit snacks and whatnot. Spent around $250 and filled up the back of my old station wagon. Then over to Sprouts for bulk items needed to create my 'high calorie trail bricks'. About 1,000 calories each. First batch was ruined when I thought 'broil' might be a good setting. Next batch was hard as a rock but worked. Third batch I took out sooner and I think it'll work a lot better. All these little details. Lots of little calculations and basic math and calorie/price ratios vs days on the trail etc. Eesh. I filled tons of Ziploc bags with various combinations of nuts and raisins and Cheezits. Counting out tiny crackers one by one to get 'one serving' just right. Overkill I'm sure, but it's easier that way. I finally got my first wave of anxiety about all this when I went outside into the cold to find a plastic bin to put everything in. "What if...what if...yes, but what if?" All those thoughts started swirling in my head. What if the trail bricks I've made don't work? What if I get stranded or lost and panic and wind up way off? I spoke with my mom and Randy in the midst of all this. The good news is that Randy offered to purchase an ultra-light tent after I sent pictures of the accumulated gear. I'd bought an alpine 4 season tent when I thought this spring would be spent tackling fourteeners in the Rockies. This whole thing started when I was back in Arizona trying to fall asleep to a documentary about Reinhold Messner. Funny. Instead I stayed awake glued to the story. His accomplishments and records. His sheer drive. I was taken by his philosophical way of approaching each challenge. The reasons why you'd sell everything to try and climb Everest without supplemental oxygen. After that I'd watched virtually every extreme mountaineering documentary and movie I could get my hands on and decided it was time to get back into 'reality' for a bit. I'd spent too much time away as it was. Holed up and working on music like a madman for years now. It's all given me a great deal of pause and quite a few moments of sober reflection about how it all came down to music in the first place. When and where and why I made that 'leap' headlong into a world that's been equal parts inspiring and completely frustrating. Why I compromised so much to be in bands. To build a studio. To tour. Why I stuck to my guns and why I continued to do it. In my early twenties there were profound levels of anxiety that I dealt with constantly. Part of it was the milieu and aspects of forcing myself to negotiate scenes and persons I would have rather avoided. But I just did it. I told myself it was worth it on some fundamental level and years later I'm still on board with the basic tenants and reasons. I strove to find beauty I suppose. That basic idea evolved. Learning curves were encountered and digested. The price though...I don't know what price I paid. The relationships and paradigms I allowed and the bridges I casually torched along the way. And then one night I was looking for more content to watch and I stumbled across this thing called the PCT. At first it felt like a compromise because I'd run out of mountaineering docs, but a little seed took root in late November. By mid-December I'd accepted that I need a change. A mental cleansing. With everything our family had confronted this year in terms of reality and mortality my heart went from sorrow to firm conviction on an hourly basis. The central theme, I felt, was that life is too short to even assume one can hide from it. I needed to know what role music was playing in that. Was it just 'in me' or was it a cleverly crafted coping mechanism. Maybe it was both? So, there it was...and here I am, having no idea what hiking for 5 straight months is actually going to entail. From everything I've read, most people abandon the trek because of emotional stress, not physical. There are various injuries that prevent one from continuing. A simple sprained ankle or blisters can derail the romance of a thru-hike without notice. Most people however, simply find it too difficult to assume the role of a lone human on a desolate trail day in and day out. I wonder what I'll feel. That wave of anxiety crept up...and it's not an unfamiliar feeling at all. But for all the treks and adventures and possibility therein, I'd hate to find myself more terrified than excited. A decent balance would suffice. There's honestly no way to approach something like this without a bit of old fashioned human reservation. I'd watched videos about other people's mental approach to the PCT. There's even a book written about the psychological aspects of all this...but again, it's balance. Most of what you do on the PCT is put one foot in front of the other. Let it happen. At least that's what I gather. I haven't done an epic trip since...well, backpacking Europe was trying but in very different ways. Cycling across the country when I was fourteen...I didn't even know what I didn't know. I was a hot-shot Jr. cat racer with something to prove. The rest of my 'team' were students and teachers from Santa Barbara and I thought I was the next Greg LeMond. I've instinctively sought out extremes throughout my life...or reveled in goals and ideas that I couldn't find anywhere else but my imagination. It provides a solid identity at the end of the day...but the downside is that when you revel in the fringe, when you think you're out to protect your solitude and space 24/7...ultimately it's yourself that you end up dealing with more than anything else. There's a healthy level of fear that accompanies some of these things. The price of independence maybe. I've tried and failed to convince two friends to go with me. It just sounds absurd on the surface. Needless to say, all my friends are musicians and the idea of spending 5 months consistently in the middle of nowhere sounds about as fun as learning how to raise porcupines. Most of my days, for the past 10 or so years were spent thinking about the acquisition of exotic keyboards and consoles. Tape-op comment boards. Festivals. A/B youtube microphone comparisons and analog vs digital debates. Wringing my hands over the nearly imperceptible and often irrelevant differences between pre-amp tone. And suddenly well...you get out into nature and nature doesn't give the slightest shit about any of that, which is good. Slightly terrifying and good.
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