2-22-18
I'm less than a month away...phew. Everything creeps up. Last minute purchases. Thin rain poncho. Tent footprint. Suggestions from my mom and Randy who have spent the great majority of their lives outdoors whether counting birds along the San Juan or spending nights deep in Mexican parks having their tents broken into and having their photography gear stolen right out from under their noses. When we lived in Phoenix as kids I'd always beg to 'go to the snow' which meant the White Mountains or somewhere else around Flagstaff. I remember craving these trips, often for no other reason than it meant steaming cups of ramen noodles next to campfires at night. My mom has always been connected to nature in one way or another. Whether planting 40,000 trees along the Verde River at Dead Horse State Park or helping develop riparian habitats up the road between Cottonwood and Sedona. Her and Randy's existence revolved around the everyday communion with the outside world. From the morning light of the sun room in their Lake Montezuma home she'd sit in the morning, adding birds to her bird count that would get sent off to an international database at Cornell University. Until the diagnosis, and even after when I'd visited, this is how she's spend her mornings. A pair of binoculars and a notebook.
When I was young I craved the outdoors too. In Rimrock we'd found very little to do as kids so I took up cycling around the age of twelve, first staring at footage of Greg LeMond on VHS in his 80s victories to Hans "No Way" Rey performing daring feats on his trials bike. My first road bike was a Huffy from Wal-Mart that I'd begged for before Christmas one year. $125 dollars. At that time I assumed a basic road bike was all I needed. I rode my first century (100) miles on this bike. While other more seasoned cyclists looked on in astonishment and some snickering at my hapless getup, I rode and rode against the wind and sun for hours. It would be another year before I picked up my first Mexican Bianchi with real racing slicks and learned the ins and outs of competitive racing.
My training grounds took me up I-17. Thought Sedona, Camp Verde, and though Clarkdale to Jerome which was an old mining town perched on the side of the mountain. I still maintained other sports but cycling had stolen my heart. I rode to school every morning rain or shine and racked up miles and logged charts in my training notebook with the dream of getting picked up by the olympic team or some pro outfit that would land me in the Tour De France someday. It seemed like this was all that mattered. Whether various locals tried to run me off the road, spit from buses, or threw rocks in my wake I was obsessed. It meant one thing: freedom.
In 1994 at 14 I was able to join a group of kids and two teachers from San Diego heading from Solana Beach to Yorktown Virginia. We took four months, completed the RAGBRAI in the middle and came back down to Missouri to finish the ride east. At the eastern shore we were met by a news crew, a group of scouts, and each given honorary citizenship to Yorktown. A mere matter of weeks later, after sleeping on the ground and dodging hurricanes, I was sitting behind a desk as a freshman in high school, feeling more out of sorts and dogged by anxiety than I'd ever imagined. Whatever 'this' was, it wasn't for me. I couldn't concentrate. None of my values lined up with anyone at school. Everything inside me pleaded for some kind of escape and I'd made elaborate plans to run away to Jackson Hole Wyoming, London, anywhere that I could live out some kind of romantic version of the world in my young head.
But slowly, as it happens, I was assimilated. Then it was girls. Then it was music. Then it was the delusion that I was actually fitting in on some level...regardless of the constant feeling in the pit of my stomach. By the time I was 17 I'd dropped out and was taking college courses by day and working a night shift at a Denny's. I tried, as so many young men try, to live in two worlds at the same time and...and that led me to New Mexico.
The failure to fully acclimate to this world. I felt maligned by compulsory participation on so many levels that didn't answer any of my pressing questions...that cared very little about the individual and everything about scores. Same old story. But I didn't care for hierarchies and the people that led them often seemed more out of touch than anyone else.
New Mexico allowed me to give up with a shred of grace. And so I did. When I was 24 I poured everything into music. My heart my soul. Even when it felt wrong and foreign I pressed on. I'd come back to the practice space (a storage facility) well after dark to work on mixes, sometimes sleeping there, and using the world of sound as a blanket to hide in. At least that's how it seemed. I still have no idea if any of it is necessarily 'good'. I never cared about creating little pop songs to begin with.
Of course, I'd always had a relationship with music but it didn't fit into the prescribed definitions of cool. I didn't care about genres and sub-genres and scenes. I didn't care what was new. I could have gotten by with John Barry and Mark Isham soundtracks at any point, cycling aimlessly around Santa Fe in the summer. I'd make playlists of traditional music from every culture around the world I could find. Klezmer, African ritual drums, Kabuki, Peruvian flutes, you name it. I still get a level of satisfaction when I come across something like Soviet disco or Yellow Magic Orchestra. These are little gems and the used record shops are brimming with piles of lost dreams and candles that burned briefly while someone poured their hearts into it. In the midst of that I needed to constantly move.
I had to go...anywhere. Europe and then touring with a couple bands. I'd always arrange endless road trips and tours and click off places I'd called to play at. I remember not even caring where I played as long as I had to travel to get there. Years of this. Over and over. Nonstop. Holding a crummy job to pay for all of it because a career was simply out of the question. Learning graphic design and drawing and photography along the way. Building houses and working in bike shops and restaurants all within a matter of months. Late nights at Kinko's and waking up on couches with strange odors in strange parts of different cities. There was a time when I would have done this indefinitely because it felt right...now matter how wrong certain parts of it were. I suppose it engendered a sense of independence that required constant movement and a basic skill-set to thrive in. At once shows would be massive, then a month later I'd be playing to an empty room, then thirty people at a venue that wasn't even set up for what we did.
Slowly though, as it happens, the satisfaction quotient wasn't being met and I retreated again. I missed something. Missed freedom. I felt I was tangled in too many relationships that didn't make sense. That I couldn't explain. That did nothing to make me a better person at the end of the day...and I began desperately wanting out.
So it happened. But it happened over 3-4 years very slowly.
I find myself here...still in New Mexico, about to embark on what will easily prove to surmount all previous expeditions in terms of physical demands. To move, yes. On foot. On an average of 17-25 miles per day for five months.
Nothing I've attempted before has required such a precise level of pre-planning which I'm happy to do. Every purchase, every training hike gives me pause to consider the full ramifications. To be honest I'm not worried. I'm not overly-excited either. I feel more tactical than anything else. What's left to do? What am I forgetting? How can I get the pack lighter? There are questions and what-ifs that linger but they don't keep me awake. Solutions jolt me when needed and I can only hope it continues this way.
I've read the blogs. The advice. The videos. The documentaries. Hell, I even watched "Wild" but that was well after I'd decided to give it a go.
There are no guarantees. No magic shortcuts, and often no cell phone service. Food is packed in and trash is packed out. An unplanned day off the trail means a reappraisal of the trajectory and whatever adjustments incurred therein. An injury can mean being stranded or the end of the trail for many. Oddly, this is exactly what I like about it. It's not as if I'll be in complete solitude, but there will be plenty of it from Mexico to Canada. It's before great adventures that I'm prone to reminisce and take stock of the past; of all the various elements that lead up to something. On the hand...this has been in the mail for some time. I just hadn't looked up long enough to pull the trigger on anything outside of music in a couple years.
Randy sent me an article called "The Art of Walking' and it really hit home. Before deciding on this I'd been heading out more and more. Walking here. Doing photography there. Camping. Just driving to places I could walk...and honestly something happens when you walk long enough. There's initial fatigue. Then after quite a few miles you hit a stride. The mind clears. Thoughts come into focus. Old psychological debts are forgiven and quietly repaid or reappraised. It's difficult to describe. "Solvitur Ambulando". "It is solved by walking". Somehow. I've come to firmly believe it and the article listed a good many notables who had undertaken the philosophy as a given and a daily sacrament of sorts. It was a bit of good validation for what I'd been suspecting myself.
My living room is filled. The kitchen is filled. Every corner is filled with boxes of food or things that are going to be made into food. Right now the house smells like cookies from the chocolate trail bars I've been cooking nonstop. It's a slow process. As far as gear goes...my best estimate after taking a tally is that I've spent about $2,000 on physical supplies and it's taken about four months of working one regular job and few side things and extra shifts to make that happen. Randy was kind enough to take notice of my base weight and offered to buy an ultralight Big Agnes Fly Creek for me from REI. Another $300 spent on USB solar panels, titanium sporks, butane, sun hats, rain covers, and filtration systems.
The food was something I wasn't too sure about. Most people ship some food and buy the rest on the trail which seems reasonable. If I was from another country or another side of the US it'd make perfect sense. But I'm within a reasonable shipping distance-to-price locale and having seen what touring in California can do to a bank account, I went with the option to send all supplies ahead, which will take some finesse and timing but friends have stepped up to help out on that end.
The downside is that this is what I've bought and this is what I have to eat for 5 months. Over and over again. I've read stories of people breaking down and showing up at a diner just to get an old fashioned American breakfast and I don't suppose I'm beyond that possibility at all. I'm a big fan of eggs and bacon mixed with the smell of coffee as soon as I wake up so there are obviously some compromises to understand...
Sleeping...my problem is that I have a terrible time sleeping if I'm too cold. This won't be an issue in the desert but once I reach the Sierras and head into late summer in rainy Washington...I'm not going to think about it. Hopefully I'll just be 'broken in' by the time I reach Kennedy Meadows.
My pack is heavier than average, but if I know anything about my body I know it's built for endurance. That is, I can't sprint worth a damn but I can do things methodically for a long time. Maybe that's why I dropped out of the 'band' thing and built a situation where I'm perfectly content to stare at screens and make little clicks for hours at a time.
My last day of work is the 17th of March. On the 19th my friend and I will head west, stopping in PHX to see my mom, who is doing well. Progress is slow but it's moving forward in a linear way on time as it should. What an insane bunch of months we've all had. In a way I got jolted to the core. Awoken to the fact of just how very short life is. I'd lost my friend Jimmy a few years ago in a random zip-line accident up north of Santa Fe. It felt like that took years to process on different levels. Just how fragile we are...but how easy it is to waste time. To live and not live at the same time. I've gone through those periods...the slow numbing churn of what feels like nihilism or severe cynicism...but the truth is, almost anyone can plan anything and do it if they want to. Those limits are largely self-imposed and may appear on the surface as safe alternatives to danger, but oh what a clever lie that ends up to be at the end of it all. What a small destructive seed it can be.
I watch documentaries about the great climbers lately. I've seen them all a dozen times. Reinhold Messner. Anatoly Boukreev. People who deliberately go toward danger. Reinhold has lost a good majority of his peers over the years to avalanches, falling seracs, bottomless crevices, exposure, cerebral edema, etc. Boukreev is among them. After saving the lives so many in '96, he was hit by an avalanche on Annapurna barely a year later.
I watch these videos firstly because I love to climb mountains but also there's an element of knowing these brave people did far more than camp along a well-marked trail for five months. Hell, Messner created new routes on some of these mountains, often solo. Maybe I want to know that, while there's inherent risk in anything, I won't be spending any nights above 13,000 feet.
When I was young I craved the outdoors too. In Rimrock we'd found very little to do as kids so I took up cycling around the age of twelve, first staring at footage of Greg LeMond on VHS in his 80s victories to Hans "No Way" Rey performing daring feats on his trials bike. My first road bike was a Huffy from Wal-Mart that I'd begged for before Christmas one year. $125 dollars. At that time I assumed a basic road bike was all I needed. I rode my first century (100) miles on this bike. While other more seasoned cyclists looked on in astonishment and some snickering at my hapless getup, I rode and rode against the wind and sun for hours. It would be another year before I picked up my first Mexican Bianchi with real racing slicks and learned the ins and outs of competitive racing.
My training grounds took me up I-17. Thought Sedona, Camp Verde, and though Clarkdale to Jerome which was an old mining town perched on the side of the mountain. I still maintained other sports but cycling had stolen my heart. I rode to school every morning rain or shine and racked up miles and logged charts in my training notebook with the dream of getting picked up by the olympic team or some pro outfit that would land me in the Tour De France someday. It seemed like this was all that mattered. Whether various locals tried to run me off the road, spit from buses, or threw rocks in my wake I was obsessed. It meant one thing: freedom.
In 1994 at 14 I was able to join a group of kids and two teachers from San Diego heading from Solana Beach to Yorktown Virginia. We took four months, completed the RAGBRAI in the middle and came back down to Missouri to finish the ride east. At the eastern shore we were met by a news crew, a group of scouts, and each given honorary citizenship to Yorktown. A mere matter of weeks later, after sleeping on the ground and dodging hurricanes, I was sitting behind a desk as a freshman in high school, feeling more out of sorts and dogged by anxiety than I'd ever imagined. Whatever 'this' was, it wasn't for me. I couldn't concentrate. None of my values lined up with anyone at school. Everything inside me pleaded for some kind of escape and I'd made elaborate plans to run away to Jackson Hole Wyoming, London, anywhere that I could live out some kind of romantic version of the world in my young head.
But slowly, as it happens, I was assimilated. Then it was girls. Then it was music. Then it was the delusion that I was actually fitting in on some level...regardless of the constant feeling in the pit of my stomach. By the time I was 17 I'd dropped out and was taking college courses by day and working a night shift at a Denny's. I tried, as so many young men try, to live in two worlds at the same time and...and that led me to New Mexico.
The failure to fully acclimate to this world. I felt maligned by compulsory participation on so many levels that didn't answer any of my pressing questions...that cared very little about the individual and everything about scores. Same old story. But I didn't care for hierarchies and the people that led them often seemed more out of touch than anyone else.
New Mexico allowed me to give up with a shred of grace. And so I did. When I was 24 I poured everything into music. My heart my soul. Even when it felt wrong and foreign I pressed on. I'd come back to the practice space (a storage facility) well after dark to work on mixes, sometimes sleeping there, and using the world of sound as a blanket to hide in. At least that's how it seemed. I still have no idea if any of it is necessarily 'good'. I never cared about creating little pop songs to begin with.
Of course, I'd always had a relationship with music but it didn't fit into the prescribed definitions of cool. I didn't care about genres and sub-genres and scenes. I didn't care what was new. I could have gotten by with John Barry and Mark Isham soundtracks at any point, cycling aimlessly around Santa Fe in the summer. I'd make playlists of traditional music from every culture around the world I could find. Klezmer, African ritual drums, Kabuki, Peruvian flutes, you name it. I still get a level of satisfaction when I come across something like Soviet disco or Yellow Magic Orchestra. These are little gems and the used record shops are brimming with piles of lost dreams and candles that burned briefly while someone poured their hearts into it. In the midst of that I needed to constantly move.
I had to go...anywhere. Europe and then touring with a couple bands. I'd always arrange endless road trips and tours and click off places I'd called to play at. I remember not even caring where I played as long as I had to travel to get there. Years of this. Over and over. Nonstop. Holding a crummy job to pay for all of it because a career was simply out of the question. Learning graphic design and drawing and photography along the way. Building houses and working in bike shops and restaurants all within a matter of months. Late nights at Kinko's and waking up on couches with strange odors in strange parts of different cities. There was a time when I would have done this indefinitely because it felt right...now matter how wrong certain parts of it were. I suppose it engendered a sense of independence that required constant movement and a basic skill-set to thrive in. At once shows would be massive, then a month later I'd be playing to an empty room, then thirty people at a venue that wasn't even set up for what we did.
Slowly though, as it happens, the satisfaction quotient wasn't being met and I retreated again. I missed something. Missed freedom. I felt I was tangled in too many relationships that didn't make sense. That I couldn't explain. That did nothing to make me a better person at the end of the day...and I began desperately wanting out.
So it happened. But it happened over 3-4 years very slowly.
I find myself here...still in New Mexico, about to embark on what will easily prove to surmount all previous expeditions in terms of physical demands. To move, yes. On foot. On an average of 17-25 miles per day for five months.
Nothing I've attempted before has required such a precise level of pre-planning which I'm happy to do. Every purchase, every training hike gives me pause to consider the full ramifications. To be honest I'm not worried. I'm not overly-excited either. I feel more tactical than anything else. What's left to do? What am I forgetting? How can I get the pack lighter? There are questions and what-ifs that linger but they don't keep me awake. Solutions jolt me when needed and I can only hope it continues this way.
I've read the blogs. The advice. The videos. The documentaries. Hell, I even watched "Wild" but that was well after I'd decided to give it a go.
There are no guarantees. No magic shortcuts, and often no cell phone service. Food is packed in and trash is packed out. An unplanned day off the trail means a reappraisal of the trajectory and whatever adjustments incurred therein. An injury can mean being stranded or the end of the trail for many. Oddly, this is exactly what I like about it. It's not as if I'll be in complete solitude, but there will be plenty of it from Mexico to Canada. It's before great adventures that I'm prone to reminisce and take stock of the past; of all the various elements that lead up to something. On the hand...this has been in the mail for some time. I just hadn't looked up long enough to pull the trigger on anything outside of music in a couple years.
Randy sent me an article called "The Art of Walking' and it really hit home. Before deciding on this I'd been heading out more and more. Walking here. Doing photography there. Camping. Just driving to places I could walk...and honestly something happens when you walk long enough. There's initial fatigue. Then after quite a few miles you hit a stride. The mind clears. Thoughts come into focus. Old psychological debts are forgiven and quietly repaid or reappraised. It's difficult to describe. "Solvitur Ambulando". "It is solved by walking". Somehow. I've come to firmly believe it and the article listed a good many notables who had undertaken the philosophy as a given and a daily sacrament of sorts. It was a bit of good validation for what I'd been suspecting myself.
My living room is filled. The kitchen is filled. Every corner is filled with boxes of food or things that are going to be made into food. Right now the house smells like cookies from the chocolate trail bars I've been cooking nonstop. It's a slow process. As far as gear goes...my best estimate after taking a tally is that I've spent about $2,000 on physical supplies and it's taken about four months of working one regular job and few side things and extra shifts to make that happen. Randy was kind enough to take notice of my base weight and offered to buy an ultralight Big Agnes Fly Creek for me from REI. Another $300 spent on USB solar panels, titanium sporks, butane, sun hats, rain covers, and filtration systems.
The food was something I wasn't too sure about. Most people ship some food and buy the rest on the trail which seems reasonable. If I was from another country or another side of the US it'd make perfect sense. But I'm within a reasonable shipping distance-to-price locale and having seen what touring in California can do to a bank account, I went with the option to send all supplies ahead, which will take some finesse and timing but friends have stepped up to help out on that end.
The downside is that this is what I've bought and this is what I have to eat for 5 months. Over and over again. I've read stories of people breaking down and showing up at a diner just to get an old fashioned American breakfast and I don't suppose I'm beyond that possibility at all. I'm a big fan of eggs and bacon mixed with the smell of coffee as soon as I wake up so there are obviously some compromises to understand...
Sleeping...my problem is that I have a terrible time sleeping if I'm too cold. This won't be an issue in the desert but once I reach the Sierras and head into late summer in rainy Washington...I'm not going to think about it. Hopefully I'll just be 'broken in' by the time I reach Kennedy Meadows.
My pack is heavier than average, but if I know anything about my body I know it's built for endurance. That is, I can't sprint worth a damn but I can do things methodically for a long time. Maybe that's why I dropped out of the 'band' thing and built a situation where I'm perfectly content to stare at screens and make little clicks for hours at a time.
My last day of work is the 17th of March. On the 19th my friend and I will head west, stopping in PHX to see my mom, who is doing well. Progress is slow but it's moving forward in a linear way on time as it should. What an insane bunch of months we've all had. In a way I got jolted to the core. Awoken to the fact of just how very short life is. I'd lost my friend Jimmy a few years ago in a random zip-line accident up north of Santa Fe. It felt like that took years to process on different levels. Just how fragile we are...but how easy it is to waste time. To live and not live at the same time. I've gone through those periods...the slow numbing churn of what feels like nihilism or severe cynicism...but the truth is, almost anyone can plan anything and do it if they want to. Those limits are largely self-imposed and may appear on the surface as safe alternatives to danger, but oh what a clever lie that ends up to be at the end of it all. What a small destructive seed it can be.
I watch documentaries about the great climbers lately. I've seen them all a dozen times. Reinhold Messner. Anatoly Boukreev. People who deliberately go toward danger. Reinhold has lost a good majority of his peers over the years to avalanches, falling seracs, bottomless crevices, exposure, cerebral edema, etc. Boukreev is among them. After saving the lives so many in '96, he was hit by an avalanche on Annapurna barely a year later.
I watch these videos firstly because I love to climb mountains but also there's an element of knowing these brave people did far more than camp along a well-marked trail for five months. Hell, Messner created new routes on some of these mountains, often solo. Maybe I want to know that, while there's inherent risk in anything, I won't be spending any nights above 13,000 feet.
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