CDT Day 62 (7/19/23)

Miles 1503.2 (Red line 1722.3)- 1526.4 (Red line 1745.2) (22.9 miles)

Verbatim

The mosquitoes are really bad tonight, so I won’t write long. It’s amazing how I used to be so phased by them. Now they’re just part of camping. They swarm my hand as I write, so every other word is broken by a wave of the hand to monetarily drive them away. It’s very distracting, and makes for poor handwriting and misspelled words.

It’s impossible to eat from a continental breakfast without using plastic. Also, yesterday I bought a prepackaged Cesar said from the grocery store. So much plastic!

I was repacking plastic this morning. It’s time for a fourth bag (referencing my use of 1 gallon ziplocks to store trash). The ziplock I have cannot be filled any further. It’s heavy. It’s bulky. It’s obnoxious.

It looks like it will storm tonight. But I don’t want to put my tarp up. I think it’s so much more infuriating if the mosquitoes are in an “enclosed” place with you.

Tim (Toledo), Jim, and John gave me a ride back out to the trail today. That was so appreciated. And, Toledo let me stay for free in the hotel. I took three showers. :) Toledo talked about how “what goes around comes around”. He shared that he’d really been helped out in Steamboat. My frustration from Towhee forgetting to pay me for our stay there is resolved!

Post Note

I’m amused looking back and reading all the times, situations, and reflections I had about mosquitoes. They really were an ever present irritant each evening. I sort of became ok with it. I guess I was at the “acceptance” part of the grieving process. I never did buy a tent. They’re so dang expensive and I don’t have an income. So, I guess it just didn’t seem like a reasonable expenditure. I think that, and this was something which moved from subconscious to conscious awareness over the course of the hike, I was looking for ways to pain myself. There was something masochistic to the act of carrying my plastic. It was a way I could continue to relate to the past.

I was in so much emotional and mental distress about L. The details aren’t important. What’s important is that over the last six months I’d been unable to sleep a night through (other than through the occasional accumulation of pure exhaustion which comes through not being able to normally sleep for a number of days) without facing a sort of trauma response. I’d play a story that wasn’t mine, but which I was thrown to hold, over and over and over and over and over and over and over in my mind for hours in the night or morning or both. So, the idea that I was preparing for an evening’s rest with total faith in the arrival of discomfort and distress felt normal to me. The mosquitoes were annoying, yes. But the few hours of physical distress each night due to mosquitoes was much less intense than the emotional distress I might have felt inside (and sometimes still did feel inside) without the distraction of mosquitoes. At least it was predictable. The mosquitoes would eventually tire and I could rest for the small price of a few more dots on my face. It was better than my heart and gut twisting until all the blood was squeezed out each night.

I carried my single use plastic, sure. Really what I carried was the weight of a failed relationship. One I’d cared a lot about. One I didn’t know how to move on from. Maybe there’s some vague meaning which can be drawn from the packing and repacking of the plastic as it relates to the relational distress I felt. I don’t know. You’ve got to find new ways to pack, to describe, the same story. You find new ways to fold the narrative to make it fit for a new backpack, different listener, or a new you. With folding you highlight one aspect at the expense of another. Or you take one piece of the story and realize it’s really decayed over time. Smells quite rotten now. Another part doesn’t carry the same luster you were once convinced it did. Other portions you realize aren’t as heavy anymore and maybe might be worth keeping around. There’s some fluffy meaning making. What do you think of that?

Unfortunately I wasn’t at the point where I could take it out of the bag and the leave it out of the bag. It all had to go back inside again to continue the walk. So, there I was carrying out sixty days of trash beneath a four day resupply, thankful for the distraction of the mosquitoes again.