CDT Day 2 (5/20/23)
Miles 23.1-44.7 (21.6 miles)
Verbatim
I woke up at 2 a.m. this morning thinking of L ——. I am not well when unable to sleep. I started walking at 2:30 and enjoyed moving through the scrub by headlamp, shining my light above the bushes like a periscope to illuminate the next trail sign. There’s no formal trail to follow through the scrub, but you can walk to the sign. The stars were beautiful. I could see the Milky Way, but only faintly. I’m thankful for that. The Milky Way is like the main allure of the boot heel. I also passed several kangaroo mice, and wondered if their long tails were beneficial or not. Easier to run, skip, jump, and distribute heat. But perhaps easier to be caught by. I don’t know.
Trail today was exhausting and rough. I’d done 21.6 miles by 12:30 and my knee was killing me. L met at 44.7 and was my savior. She fed me a miso haystack, gave me ice for my knee, and brought me chocolate milk (the plastic of which I packed). Then we drove and got a shower from the Lordsburg KOA which she’d stayed at last night. We fought. She held me in her truck while I cried. Now she’s making pasta for dinner while I write. She is so good to me, and for some reason I am not okay when she’s gone. L made me promise not to hurt myself today. I don’t know how to make room for her in my life; or how to fit myself into her life.
Post Note
I’m noticing how disjointed some of these sentences are. For example, referencing a promise against self-harm and then immediately moving into a questioning of compatibility is quite the anti-segue. A harsh turn, for sure. I remind myself now that the writing of my journal was often interrupted by the flow of the real world around me. A hawk might have ghosted by. Perhaps the wind picked up and in response I ruminated on what lay beyond my pen and page. Maybe L had shared a comment or noodle and by the time I returned to the paper my mind was elsewhere. Writing in my journal was also constricted by space. Most of my entries conclude right at the end of a page. I suppose I thought it would be wasteful to continue onto a new line and page only to abruptly stop. Yet, neither do I seem to cram words into the bottom of pages to finish my thoughts.
L really was good to me that day. I was so sick of walking already. Everything hurts at the start of trail. Day 3 is traditionally regarded as the worst. But, I’d walked 44.7 miles within a 24 hour period on little sleep. I was wrecked. I’m not the kind of thru hiker to “24 hour challenge,” a challenge where one walks without stopping in order to achieve maximum mileage for the period. I always thought that challenge sounded like a good way to get hurt and end your hike. I’d walked because I wasn’t able to sleep. And because the only way to quell the terror inside my gut seemed to be to hunker next to L.
She’d brought me chocolate milk. A thru-hikers dream liquid. Fat, salt, protein, sugar all packaged in an easily consumable (and quite tasty!) medium. Chocolate milk is good, and I could feel it. But, I realized that I’d be having to carry this 12 volume-ounce plastic bottle in my backpack for the duration of my trip. All 2,650 miles. I’d decided to walk while packing all my plastic. No non-biodegradable waste would escape my will to suffer under its weight, bulk, and rot until the end of the trip. I thought it was a good idea long before my relational trauma. I wanted to illustrate, in however limited a way, that our plastic use weighs us down! We throw our plastic in the ocean, in landfills, in the trash. But then it gets into our air, our fish, our water, and our bodies. So, what if a hiker couldn’t get rid of it. Had to carry it. Had to find a way to fit the weight and bulk and rot into the backpack, shoulder it, walk with it, and camp with it.
And so L’s chocolate milk bottle became the first of my pieces of trash. Sure, I’d eaten some plastic wrapped foods on my initial 44.7 miles. But this was the first moment I’d consumed something, had the oppurtunity to throw it away, and realized I couldn’t. I remember L looking at me holding it and sharing that I didn’t have to pack it, not that at least. I think she might have taken it from me? If so then I stole it back. It went into the bottom of my pack and there it stayed. Maybe be a quarter ounce of plastic? A permanent quarter ounce which carried the single gift of 350 calories of chocolate milk. Yes, even gifts can come with weight. And even gifts with whom we share love. And there with the bottle in my hand, sunset and shrubs around, it was clear to me that the weight of plastic would compare to feathers against the weight of the heart.