CDT Day 100 (8/26/23)
Miles 2399.7 (Red line 2744.1)- 2427 (Red line 2771.4) (27.3 miles)
Verbatim
I am eating in my tent this evening at an established campsite in the Bob. A risky choice for sure. But I am so hungry. I was in a rush to get to camp because I expected there to be people here. I saw so many backpackers today out of Benchmark. So, I expected a social dinner with lots of people cooking backpacker pantry meals that smell much better than my cold soaked ramen. Oh well…
I’m so thankful to have done an upper 20’s day. My backpack was so. heavy. The trash weight is ridiculous. I have a hard time sitting down or standing up. I stand up with my pack on like an old man. Feeble and off balance and shaky. I told so many inquisitive backpackers today about my light sleeping bag and tarp and thin pad. All the while I’m wearing a huge pack. Hey that ramen was good! A different brand, and you could really taste the fried noodles. Nice.
I walked alongside the Chinese Wall today. It’s an incredible escarpment. There’s not much more to say. Just breathtaking. I had fun imaging dwarves living up in it. :) It was a good way to celebrate day 100.
I chatted with two cool people today. Tim, a native Vermonter turned Montanan. he was just such a pleasant guy to talk to for twenty minutes. A real kind soul with an easy smile. I told him about my hitch yesterday and he smiled, sighed, and rolled his eyes. haha. The other guy I met was Ranger Rick, a retired firefighter and volunteer NFS ranger here in the Bob. He was super excited to advocate that I go fight fires in Alaska. 25% more pay. A short season where they’ll send you out to the lower 48 for operative assignments and credentialing afterwards. And the opportunity to live on a military base where things are really cheap. I told him I’d rather be a fire tower lookout guy. He said that was cool too and gave me his info.
Call ——— and ask for Ian ___. Say Ranger Rick recommended you call about being a fire lookout and that you have great backcountry experience and can appreciate being alone for the summer. Ask to be considered for fire tower work. The number is for the Choteau Montana office for backcountry trails and wilderness. Ian is head of that department. Heck, thanks Ranger Rick! Maybe I could work a fire tower next summer.
I think trail will max take ten more days. That’s nice to think about. With the red like that’s only 205 miles left. And then maybe another 25 to get out Chief Mountain. Let’s wrap this trail up!
Post Note
I had shouldered a really heavy pack that morning. It was the heaviest it ever got. Gear was wet from the overnight rain and dew; I remember yard sailing my entire back (and ziplock bags of trash) over a small clearing by the side of the trail around ten when I took “lunch”. My bag was full of five days of food, which was something like 20,000 calories. My bag was full of trash. I was walking with a 70L bag. 2/5ths of it was full with a bubbling cauldron of plastic with a sheen of biological slime. When I’d pull things out, like on this penultimate trash morning, they’d be covered with a grey substance which would dry, and then flake, in the bright sunshine. It’s reminiscent of the same sort of grey funk I get in my crotch when I walk in the rain or heavily encumbered by layers. Which is just so totally gross to me. I and I don’t know which way is grosser; imagining that whatever naturally goes on with my body is also going on with my non-living waste, or that whatever is going on with my non-living waste apparently also goes on with my body. So there I was at ten in the morning eating a lunch I was desperately hungry for but really should have waited later to eat because my lack of discipline now would mean corresponding hunger later. But, I rationalized, the penitence hunger on the other side of those 20,000 calories would occur with a much lighter pack and therefore be easier to manage. That and I would (should) be within striking distance of more food on the other side of those calories as well. Why suffer now when I can suffer later? I’ve been asking myself that question my whole life.
I expected someone to come along, since it was a busy morning close to a trailhead and really beautiful escarpment, and comment on my trash. But no one came along for the whole thirty minutes I sat there. I’d seen people all morning, and would continue to see people. It reminds me of a similar sort of aloneness which I experienced while tantruming in the Winds. Suddenly, at a really low moment, I was alone and had to figure out how to pick myself back up again.
But I did have some pretty great conversations that day. Both Tim and Ranger Rick were really awesome folks. Ranger Rick was an evangelist! He wanted me on the team. I think he knew thruhikers because he knew exactly how vulnerable I was to, and in need of, a good idea of what to do next. Thruhikers often drop everything, or have it dropped for them, when they set out on a trip. That’s not true for everyone, but I imagine that there’s a pretty distinct look an older man can distinguish in a younger man when that younger man is coming to the culmination of a task and doesn’t know what to do next. “HELP. I don’t know how to ask for help”. Is probably a good articulation of that distinguishable appearance. So Ranger Rick opened up with something like, “do you know what you’re doing next”? Nope. I don’t. Go be a fireman my son, he said. Only problem is, I don’t want to be a firefighter.
Firefighting seems pretty interesting actually. I’ve read Young Men and Fire and thought it a great adventure. Apparently you can die fighting wild fires, though it doesn’t seem to happen too often. Which is just the right amount of death for the mystique of a young man. I don’t want there to be a real chance I could die, but I do want you to think there’s a real chance I could die. Anyways, I get that chance at death by riding my bicycle in both a recreational and, with ever increasing capacity, in a task oriented/practical way. Bikes are the future. Bikes are life, and maybe death. So I don’t need to fight fires for that reason.
But fighting fires is really tempting because I don’t know what to do next. I could fight fires to be a part of something! I could go to battle against fire! God, life and its labyrinth is so much easier to navigate if you have a clear enemy, and the moment after a thruhike is definitely one of the times when the labyrinth seems to be at its most convoluted. I think most people chose an enemy which they battle against. For some people it’s another human. They find themselves absorbed by nationalistic identity. Or religious fervor. Maybe you war against Russia or China or Republicans. Maybe you war against the unbelievers or impure. Or maybe you chose a supernatural enemy! And this one is tricky because it offers a bit of a glimmer of hope. It’s better, I think, to war against an enemy you can’t actually do anything against. Like, good! Fight the devil. He’s not real anyways, so you won’t be doing any actual damage to anyone. If you’ve chosen “them” (whomever “them” is to you) as an enemy you’re actually going to go hurt them. If you chose something not real instead you end up swiping at fog instead of life. The problem with picking an “unreal” enemy is that one’s vitriol for that enemy has only ever seemed to become real in its application to other real living beings. You might hate the devil, but you know you can’t touch the devil so you touch other people instead. Or, you acknowledge that they only way you actually can hurt the devil is by hurting his associates. And so it hasn’t accomplished anything after all.
Then there’s another echelon of enemy which people can pick. Foremost in my mind is the practice of medicine/science and its war against death. This is a nice enemy to chose, I suppose, because you’re working in support of human life and against a form of life (virus/bacteria/disease/dying) which we, at this point, consider sub-human or threatening to the human. I get a little tripped up here and don’t know what to do with myself. I believe that everything is sacred, connected, and alive. So, how do I learn to love virus/bacteria/disease/dying too? The scope of that question goes FAR beyond the task of this little chat about firefighting so we’re going to leave it. Anyways, people chose to make sickness the enemy and then at least they’re helping “people” (people being known as who/what we currently consider people). We’re going to forget the litany of potential, probable, and historical abuses leveled at living creatures in the name of “science” or “medicine” for the point of this point.
When COVID-19 came along and lots of people were dying I had a really heavy thought. I do believe that the world is overpopulated with human beings. That doesn’t mean I think we should eradicate ourselves with some sort of culling. Nor does it mean I don’t think we can’t fit more of us. I merely don’t think we should fit more of us onto our little marble floating in our cosmic heaven of life potential and entropy. More is not more in this regard. Quality beats quantity; especially when good quality may implicate a longevity which results in a higher total of quantity throughout human history. So I was intrigued by COVID-19’s potential to kill people. I was sad to see all the pain, death, and confusion. I was worried I would lose those I loved. I wanted no part in perpetuating the deluge of death which was the pandemic. I was willing to potentially sacrifice my own well-being and life (what with all that anxiety about vaccinations) so as to do my part in protecting those around me. I got my shots. But I was intrigued.
When COVID-19 came around there was a planetary enemy: a virus and its disease. We could rally together against something that wasn’t fighting against each other! We could come together to do damage to subhuman or extra human entity and there by spare ourselves, if only for a time, the hell that is our ever-generating capacity to do damage to ourselves. But then there were people like President Trump who wanted to make it a nationalistic issue anyways. Fuck that. You’re missing the opportunity for peace Mr. Trump. This isn’t a moment for you to take advantage of other people. This is a moment to work together! If we’re talking massive dips in population then universal disease is much better than universal war or famine because of the potential for human collaboration against a mutual threat... All of them will be horrible, but at least the aftermath of disease might leave people unified against a threat. Famine and war (always connected) leave us angry at each other.
I often wonder if we shouldn’t pick someone so completely and totally unassailable to war against so we can all work together to fight them and not each other. Aliens would be a good option! Except damnit Aliens are humans too. I always loved playing video games were you saved humanity in a desperate fight against the overwhelming odds of a biologically obscure and technologically advanced Alien civilization. You always learn in the end that Aliens are humans too. At least that’s what I took away from those games.
Maybe G-d would be a good enemy to chose. I like that. Fuck you G-d. :) There’s something so cathartic about saying that. If G-d is real there’s so much to be mad about. There’s so much to love too I guess. Every time I say Fuck you G-d I say it with a sort of wry smile on my face. I’m always smiling, though can feel my heart wrenched up inside in the same moment. It’s sort of like that “whatever this gift is you gave me is really messed up but I like it anyways and sort of resent that” feeling. You know? That’s me at least. People FREAK OUT when I say something like that though. So, I’ve been learning not to say it anymore.
But hear me out. G-d is so inescapably beyond whatever the hell we think we’re talking about that if we tried to fight God it wouldn’t do anything. So if you believe in God and are worried we might hurt God by fighting God you don’t need to worry. G-d can take it. And fighting God could be useful. Let’s think practically here. What if we, as a complete human civilization, simultaneously took all our nuclear rockets and launched them to an obscure location in space where some religious fanatical leader had convinced us God lived. Complete planetary nuclear disarmament accomplished in an instant. The world would be a better place. Of course G-d doesn’t live there in the nuked spot of space because G-d animates each any every one of us. G-d lives on earth if you didn’t know. That’s literally the only thing that keeps bringing me back to Jesus. Lord knows I’ve broken up with him so many times.
SO FIRE is another one of those enemies. Like medicine against death. Fire is not human and loves to thrive when it’s present and be gone when it’s done. So why shouldn’t I go fight fires? I’m finishing a thruhike and it would be nice to have something to do next summer. It would be nice to have an enemy and be a part of a group. That security is tantalizing. But I don’t really want to get caught up in the fanatical militaristic camaraderie that is having a “noble" enemy to go vanquish. I don’t want to look around and realize my comrades are all connected based on our antagonism for fire. Hell, fire is beautiful. Fire is rejuvenating. I’d much rather look at it. I loved to watch the fire burn low on a summer/fall night in Maine. I’ll go look at fires from a fire tower instead maybe. The peace of being up high all alone would be nice I think.
It’s all sacred. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.