CDT Day 79 (8/5/23)

Miles 1893.6 (Red line 2255.3)- 1929.9 (Red line 2191.6) (36.3 miles)

Verbatim

Well. Today went as well as it could be hoped. I’m quite happy. It was a hard day. But good progress was made! The storm cycle/system continues to hold on. It was cloudy all day save for a cloud burst around noon and 6:30 pm. It was thunderstorm on with great vigor in the early afternoon. That was a daunting and fearful part of the day. The clouds were so ominous and the threat of soaking rain was very present. It was a joy, then, that it was at this time I met Taco and Star Link. Taco was so exuberant about Maine after learning I lived there. They were SOBOs heading into the storm I’d just emerged from. Neither direction looked promising.

I climbed from that rainy wet and exposed pass up into a rather forested section of the day. I came over the hill and saw what must have been 150 Elk. It was a really large herd! They were so many young ones. The mothers were alert and took off with their kin as soon as I showed any movement towards them. I watched and took crappy video as they moved up the hill. For the next two miles I could hear Elk crying out to each other in the forest we shared. I want to go hunting! I’m very hungry because I didn’t pack enough food out of Lima’s sucky gas station. So, an Elk burger sounds delicious. Haha

The trail was beautiful today under the clouds. So many wide open spaces. So much texture. So many hidden forests and streams. It’s a magical section of trail, and I’m thankful to be walking it! I do need better food though.

It may be cold tonight. My sleeping bag is damp and it smells! My body heat will dry it out overnight. I wonder what the clouds will do. I think they’re trending towards breaking up. Here’s to a cloudy, but not rainy, tomorrow! I just heart thunder… haha

I can also hear cows calling in the distance.

Post Note

You know, I’m a vegetarian. And we’re going to talk about that. So, it’s interesting to read about my pretty primal desire (hunger) for the consumption of an animal. I can remember how that felt. I was really hungry and all I had in my backpack was sugar from a gas station. I had PB&J, chocolate popcorn, gummies, m&ms, hostess doughnuts, and two bags of chips? Stuff like that. I ate stuff like that for three and a half days across 100+ miles while walking mountains and being rained on. I could have used some burger…

I grew up Seventh-day Adventist, a Protestant Christian denomination, a faith which prides itself in its cultural vegetarianism as a way of honoring the body as sacred. It’s really a beautiful belief. All bodies are sacred and are illumined with the essence and character of G-d. Being vegetarian, along with good diet, exercise, sleep, sober consumption, relationships, and purpose in life ect., really goes a long way towards enjoying and providing a meaningful existence while existing lasts. It also might lengthen your existence; which I’ve learned is something a lot of people want more than they want the quality of their existence. At all my school and church functions the food was vegetarian. I have this ethos embedded inside me.

But I didn’t grow up vegetarian. My parents were both converts to Seventh-day Adventism. One from a Dutch Calvinist family, the other from a caucasian Catholic family. So we ate meat at home. We used to eat everything except shellfish and pig (Seventh-day Adventist culture has a special emphasis on the prohibition of these foods). But then came mad cow disease and so mom stopped taking us for burgers at McDonalds. Then my older brother stopped wanting to eat chicken because he didn’t like it. Then I learned that we were eating all the fish out of the ocean and so told my dad to stop buying Salmon and stopped eating fish sandwiches at Maine seafood restaurants.

My vegetarianism morphed from being a religious obligation to being a moral/ethical calling. I don’t eat meat because there are too many humans on the planet eating all eating meat. We eat cows at the expense of the land upon which they are grazed (like the desert west), upon the wellbeing and life experience of slaughter cattle themselves (especially in places like factory farm settings or portions of the CDT where the cattle are literally devoured by bugs and relentless heat at all times), and upon the land which we grow rows and rows of corn to force-feed the cattle (as a partially digested and medicated slop because cows aren’t healthy eating corn). We eat Fish at the expense of THE OCEAN. We hunt because there are too many Deer because we killed all the animals that would otherwise eat the Deer.

I lied. I actually do eat meat. I ate so much pepperoni on trail already. But even off trail I eat meat when someone has prepared it for me. This disposition comes from my time working as a pastor. If I go to someone’s house wanting to make a positive impact on their life and then start the occasion by declining the meal they’ve prepared me, especially if I make it an opportunity to simultaneously tout my vegetarian righteousness and shame their consumption, I just put a serious road block in the way of my objective. Plus. The animal has already lived and is dead. And meat is yummy. Tastes like childhood. Eating meat is also a curious evangelistic moment. It’s funny to try and express, without shaming (which I’m not sure I do a good job at), my vegetarianism while smearing my lips and beard with the fat of the chicken leg I don’t know how to eat. It’s ironic, and I’m an unpracticed meat eater. My vegetarianism is evidenced by this.

And then there was my vegetarianism through L. She was (still is as far as I know) a stringent vegetarian. Like. I couldn’t kiss her if I ate meat. She would express confusion about how her sibling could date someone who ate meat. Any meat I did ever eat I never told her about. My commitment to L’s comfort superseded the strategy I described in the preceding paragraph. In social moments when it would have helped me to consume meat I would instead decline. And that was ok because I cared most about my partner. I wasn’t operating as an individual anymore. I had someone else’s comfort and conscious to care for. I liked L’s vegetarianism! And I liked how it encouraged me to step more fully into behaving according to my expressed ethics. And I liked that the imaginary household or family we would share would be vegetarian. And I liked that any food L cooked would be vegetarian. That the restaurants she’d want to eat at would all have a diverse array of vegetarian food.

The down side, of course, was that I felt incredibly judged if I did eat meat, and felt that the grace of her love and attention was conditional. I don’t know how you can get around that. If you say, even as a joke, “I won’t kiss you if you eat meat” it’s really harmful. I’ve imagined scenarios where we would both need to eat from a limited amount of food. Some meat. Some not. I would, of course, sacrifice by only eating meat so she could have a full potion of not meat. But then, even in the giving of that gift, she would move away from me? That’s a curious imagination. I’m a little embarrassed sharing it. But it’s my real imagination. That imagined story was always hurtful. And then of course it was hurtful when after L broke up with me suddenly being a vegetarian didn’t matter anymore.

So here’s what I’ve got to think about while I am walking through 150 Elk feeling reaaaaallly hungry for some burger because protein and fat are what my emaciated body needs much more than it does the chocolate laced popcorn I’m munching. That’s a horrible experience. Hangery. Tired. Wet, but not as wet as I was a few hours earlier. Walking with pain.

I can’t express to you the beauty of walking through a forest while Elk are all around. They call from your left and your right. You round a corner or double back with the expectation that before you will stand one of the most beautiful, wild, and tenacious animals on the planet. The world is ALIVE. Why would you want to kill and eat it?