03.07.21

This bed is fluffy. This bed is located 20 minutes from the trailhead where the AZT crosses interstate 83 just over 100 miles from our starting point one week ago at Coronado National Memorial. We pulled off for resupply and showers. Our new buddy Hopper or “Brian Without Borders” has stayed the course, moving north to meet a friend by Roosevelt Lake. These little chance meetings in the middle of nowhere. Sharing your life with a stranger, only you’re not strangers at all. You both chose to be here on the Arizona Trail for some reason, sweating it out day after day, tracking the water sources and nighttime temps. On any given day you are walking, sweating, shivering, navigating, eating, collapsing in your sleeping bag between deep groans of sudden respite. You’re off the feet. You’re already fading and then it’s morning. The trail is punctuated by such simple measures: A pee break, an extra crumb found in the bottom of a ziplock, a slip of the foot, the right sunscreen. Again, like the last big thru, you slowly meld with the land. Again you are the stuff of nature, listening with the same attentive ear as any other animal...but you’re not one of them. You’ll hitch a ride around 1pm in an air-conditioned Tacoma driven by an army wife with a great ease and friendliness about her, who points at the Pecan trees all in rows and drops you at the big fluffy bed. You’ll go through the routine like clockwork, like you jumped from the PCT to the AZT and allocate quarters for a washing machine while you simultaneously map out the next stretch, measuring mountains and average speeds and checking for incoming reports on any and all data points relevant to the next five days. You’ll do it because you work better this way, as painful as it has been to admit over and over and over...and you think for a moment: “They’re probably right. I am better out here.” When we wake up the sun has just shown through a valley or lit up a distant pass. When we walk 20 miles we walk with intention. Everything requires engagement. Each step means something if only that you’re one step closer to camp. And that’s what it is: A series of small steps in a much larger one that you can’t measure; at least not just yet.