In the morning we go to breakfast at the evergreen cafe with Smiles and Dr. Slosh, who are also in town, and I fret about whether or not I should leave. Town stresses me out and I don’t really want to take a zero, not yet- I feel strong and I’m not injured and it seems like I should keep hiking. But all my friends are here and if I go ahead I won’t see them until the Agua Dulce, eighty miles away.

The cafe is a greasy spoon. Soft-focus nineties photographs of children with farm animals crowd the walls and fake daisies hang from the ceiling. I look at the menu with its eggs and pancakes and decide to order a salad. I am going to do it, I think. I am going to order a salad and actually eat some vegetables right now.

When my salad arrives it is a little plate of romaine lettuce with chicken and bacon and stale tortilla chips on top. There is barbeque sauce instead of dressing. I take a bite and it tastes like almost nothing. Everyone else has big, hot ceramic plates of meat and eggs and hashbrowns. They are spreading jam onto their toast. Thyra’s pancakes are so big they hang off the edge of her plate.

This is what I get for ordering a salad at a greasy spoon, I think.

I finish my salad. Ben and Angela and Thyra and Smiles and Dr. Slosh and Sour Cream eat until they are painfully full and then there is still food left over, hashbrowns and toast and pieces of sausage. I eat all of this and then I am happy and satisfied, salad and grease and potatoes all mixed up in my stomach.

I should really stay and take a zero, I think.

Back at the motel we all lounge around, our objects spread across every surface. A boy appears in the open doorway- it is the boy who lives at the motel. He wears levis and has long blonde hair. He comes over throughout the day, asking us if we want to play hula hoop wars with him.

“Do you have any pets?” I ask him.

“Three dogs and five puppies,” he says.

“What?” I say. He runs off and reappears with an armload of huge, dusty-looking puppies. They are squealing and clawing at him. He drops them on the floor and they crawl away from us. I pick one up and put it in my lap and wrap my jacket around it. The puppy has red fur and floppy ears and its forehead is wrinkled with worry. It smells like dryer sheets. The other puppy is dirty white and has a cut above its eye. The white puppy crawls under a folded cot in the corner of the room, pushes itself into the corner and cowers there.

The boy is talking about his made-up hula hoop game.

“This is kind of sad,” I whisper to Angela. Thyra frowns.

In the evening we spread our food across the table and have a feast. Roast chicken, potato salad, romaine lettuce, salami, cucumbers, avocado. A pint of cheesecake icecream has turned to milkshake in the fridge and we pass it around, dipping lettuce leaves and broccoli stalks into it. I finally feel relaxed, like really relaxed. I am clean and warm and well rested and eating vegetables dipped in icecream. We are laughing so hard it is difficult to breathe at times. I am so happy I stayed.

I dream it’s raining and I wake in the dark to feel the smallest raindrops on my face. Like a cloud, I think. Like a cloud is falling on me.

“Sour Cream,” I say. “It’s raining.”

Sour Cream sits up in his bag and looks out into the dark.

“It’s just raining a little bit,” I say. “Maybe let’s just keep sleeping.”

“Yeah,” says Sour Cream. “OK.”

In an hour a little light is leaking through the clouds. Dawn. I sit up in my bag and pat it. It’s wet, but not all the way through. It’s barely raining, I think. Like the desert is teasing us.

We get up and pack our damp things away and hike in the cold dawn. We are in the cloud and the cloud is all around us. Next to the trail the land falls away to forever, but we cannot see it. Today we will climb for fourteen miles.

Sour Cream explains to me about quidditch as we walk, the real sport created from the made-up sport in the Harry Potter books. He tells me about shooting a deflated volleyball through hula hoops while running with a broom handle between his legs. His quidditch team, he says, is the second best in all of Canada.

I find a flip flop on the trail. When we reach the cache halfway up the mountain Smiles and Sour Cream are there, sitting in the dirt of the jeep road, playing music on a little speaker. Their sleeping bags are laid out on the grass to dry. The sun has just begun to peak through the fog.

“Did you lose a flip flop?” I say.

“Yes!” Says Smiles.

We cook a meal at the cache on our little alcohol stoves and then hike on. The desert, like it likes to do at high elevation here, turns to beautiful pine forest. Suddenly I am slow, and I feel dizzy, and there is pain in my lungs. Alititude sickness! I think. There isn’t any air in this air!

At one point there is a tarantula, just sitting on a cairn. Is it dying? I ask. It’s missing a leg and it doesn’t seem to care.

The higher we climb and the more beautiful the forest becomes, the sicker I feel. By afternoon we are still climbing and I am naseous, grumpy and sluggish. I trudge along, lifting one foot after the other. I have no idea where Sour Cream is. Mountaintop-itis, I think. I am going to start calling this feeling mountaintop-itis.

.

At the summit of the mountain is an eerie ski resort, closed for the season. There is a big, fenced-off resevoir half-full of brackish water, and creepy gondolas are shrouded in fog.

.

Now the trail begins to descend, steeply. The trail becomes a sort of ditch filled with rocks, tipping steeply down the mountain.

I am tired and dizzy and irritable and the rocks hurt my feet and I stumble, trying to get faster and faster to the bottom of the mountain. In just a few hours I’ll be in Wrightwood, a little town where I have never been, in a room that Thyra and Angela and Ben, who are already there, have rented. There will be a bed, and a shower, and I will be able to wash my clothes. There will be a store with wonderful wilted produce and cheap deli potato salad. I will lay in a real bed.

I obsess over these things as I descend with my altitude sickness, wanting them more and more and more. When I finally reach the highway Sour Cream is there, sitting in the dirt next to the trail, and I am in an awful mood. How will we get to town? We wonder. Then a woman appears with three huge malamutes and puts us in the windy bed of her pickup truck. I was just walking my dogs, she says.

Wrightwood is a little tourist thing, a couple of shops and restaurants all clustered together next to the highway. People walk along the street and music plays from doorways and cars rush by. Our room is at the Pines Motel, which is right next to everything, because everything is right next to everything. It’s a dim room cobbled together in some sort of trailer painted to look like a cabin, and the inside walls are some thin cardboard-like material painted to look like bricks. Angela and Thyra and Ben are all there, talking loudly, rested and freshly showered, being excited, opening beers. I’ve been listening to nothing but birdsong for days and staring at the trail and I feel suddenly, acutely overwhelmed. The music coming from the street is attacking me, the light is attacking me, everything is attacking me. At the store on the way to the motel I buy strawberries, oranges, a roast chicken and a tub of potato salad. At the motel I drop my things on one of the beds (I have a bed!!) and shut myself in the bathroom. If I can only shower, I think. If I can only shower then I’ll feel alright.

The bathroom is old and dirty and the fixtures are fastened to each other with what looks like toothpaste. I take off my clothes and jump in the shower and fiddle with the nobs. It turn on the hot water and it’s scalding so I turn on the cold and the water becomes freezing. The hot water, it seems, doesn’t work when the cold water is on, and vice versa. Fuck, I think. I’ve never encountered a shower this awful. I’m wet and shivering and I turn on the hot water and the water scalds me. I start to cry a little.

After my terrible shower I climb into the bed and pull the scratchy comforter over my head and cry a little more. The others are laughing and exclaiming but it’s dark and warm under the covers and I just wish I was alone, in a quiet room far away from everything. I want it to be quiet so bad I start to panic and I cry more. Anxiety anxiety anxiety, coursing through me. I hate being in town, I think. I hate it I hate it I hate it.

After a while I come out from under the covers and I feel calmer. I sit on the couch with a blanket around me and eat potato salad and strawberries. Ben is talking about dramatically jumping through the fake brick wall, into the room next door. We should do it all at once, he says. With our arms held out like this. Everyone is hilarious and I laugh. Then it’s time for bed and we pull the janky curtains over the bent and twisted curtain rod. In bed I’m warm and there’s a good down pillow, and after a while I sleep.    

I wake before dawn and lie in my sleeping bag, watching the sun rise over the lake. Sour Cream is up and about and then I can see Angela, wriggling like a larvae in her sleeping bag a little ways away. Ben and Thyra are still fast asleep in their tent on the edge of the water.

Dawn at the lake

Angela in her gazebo

Ben, Thyra and Angela are injured, but I am not. I love hiking with them, laughing with them, camping with them. But we’re on a long walk and today, they cannot walk. What is there to do?

In the end Sour Cream and I set out into the mountains, leaving the other three behind. They’ll hitch into Wrightwood on the highway, and once there they’ll rest, buy new shoes, and give their injuries much needed attention. It’s a huge relief to know that they’re taking care of their injuries, and we’ll see them again when we arrive in Wrightwood in two days.

There is a McDonald’s on the PCT. When you are near the McDonald’s there is a trail sign, a regular wooden one, and it says McDonald’s, .4 miles. Today I walk quickly through the desert, knowing that the McDonald’s junction is only 16 miles away. If I can reach McDonald’s by 1 p.m. I can hide there during the hottest part of the day, eating cheeseburgers.

Cheeseburgers. My stomach is upset this morning, and I feel a little naseous while I walk. I had stomach pains in the night that woke me up. I’ve been eating all sorts of crap, gluten and dairy and processed foods and crazy amounts of sugar, things that I know mess up my gut. I need to cut it out so that I can do a good job hiking and finish the trail, but it’s hard. Life!

I won’t get any cheeseburgers, I think as I walk. I’ll get, like, a salad. I try to visualize this salad, to make it more real. But the salad I visualize is like the worst salad imaginable. I imagine myself eating this terrible salad while all my friends eat cheeseburgers. I want to cry.

As I’m thinking about this terrible salad I almost trip over a giant rattlesnake. The snake is big and fat and stretched across the trail, and I don’t notice it until I’m just about to step on it. I catch myself and stumble and jump over it, and then I turn to look at it. it slithers a little and shakes its rattle at me and literally hisses. I walk on a few minutes, saying

“Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

And then I throw my pack down in a poky patch of shade and sit on the ground to rest. It’s really hot already. I pull out my gallon bag of trail mix, which is still halfway full, and eat some almonds. A moment later Sour Cream appears.

“I almost stepped on a snake!” He says.

The lake from up in the hills

Sour Cream

We walk through the beautiful dry hills for several hours and then we round a corner and there is a massive freeway in front of us. It is the freeway that runs through the desert between LA and Las Vegas and it is packed with cars going crazy fast.

“I feel like there is a tear in our reality,” I say, “and another reality is leaking through.”  

Then we see the side trail to McDonald’s.

“One o’clock!” I say. “We made it!”

The side trail dumps us onto a paved road that parallels the freeway. It is painfully hot on this road, and the air is thick with exhaust. Up ahead is a McDonald’s and a gas station, and then the desert again, forever and ever and ever.

Smiles and Dr. Slosh are inside the McDonald’s, sitting in a plastic booth, mountains of chicken nuggets before them. I drop my pack and wash my hands and plug my phone into the outlet beneath a huge flatscreen TV that is blaring fake news. There are lots of other people in the McDonald’s, and I stand in line with them. I am sunburnt and my clothes are filthy, but they ignore me. I feel like I am in an intergalactic space station.

I order two double cheeseburgers, a large order of french fries, and some weird lemonade that’s made with fake sugar. Sour Cream gets something similar. Smiles and Dr. Slosh have been eating for hours, and Dr. Slosh glasses the menu board with his binoculars and reports on his progress.

“I’ve eaten three thousand calories,” he says. “Not counting the several liters of coke.”

After finishing my burgers I order a reeses mcflurry, which has something like seven hundred calories. I eat it slowly, staring in horror at the flat-screen TV. Evil-seeming people and incomprehensible, brightly-colored images flash across the screen, accompanied by garbled, too-loud talking. None of it, as far as I can tell, has to do with finding water or navigating mountain ranges on narrow dirt paths. I get up and poke the TV until I find the OFF button.

Fifteen minutes after finishing my icecream I order two more double cheeseburgers. I take the patties out of one burger and add them to the other burger. I give the leftover buns to Sour Cream, and he eats them. I look down at my unwieldy sandwich as I eat it.

“Fuck,” I say after I have finished. “Fuck.”
We leave the McDonald’s in the afternoon and walk back to the PCT, which goes under the highway via an underpass. It’s a wide highway and the underpass is long and dark. Inside, the walls drip with secret water. Then there is a square of light crowded with bright green, like a portal to another world. We emerge through this square into a tangled wood, a clear little brook running through it. We hop across the brook on stones and climb out of this lush, secret green place, back into the desert. As we walk into the dusty hills we look back at the freeway and shake our heads.

How am I ever going to integrate back into the regular world, I think.

I only feel sick for the first two hours of hiking. Eventually I feel a little better, although I can still hear the lemonade sloshing around in my stomach. We drop out of the hills to a little valley and in the middle of the valley is a cache. The cache is 23 miles from Wrightwood, and fourteen of those miles are uphill- our plan is to get water at the cache, walk a few more miles, and then cowboy camp. In the morning we’ll start the long climb up into the mountains.

There are some drunk hikers at the cache, their sleeping bags spread out on plastic lounge chairs. The hikers bought armloads of tallboys at the gas station next to the McDonald’s, and they’ve been drinking all afternoon. We fill up our water bottles and keep hiking.

The trail climbs steeply up the mountain, and there is nowhere flat to camp. At last, at dusk, we find a little grassy patch in a dry streambed filled with boulders. It is just big enough for the two of us, if we spread our sleeping bags in an “L” shape. It’s a little secret spot, hidden from the trail. I drink some water and eat some almonds and brush my teeth, spitting onto the dusty path. We spread out our sleeping mats on the grass- mine just barely fits beneath the thorny, overhanging bushes. I lay under my quilt, feeling as though the mountain is cradling me. I look up at the sky, which is hazy with thin, transparent clouds. I live here, I think. In the nature. I walk on the nature and eat on the nature and sleep on the nature.

I feel safe. I sleep.

I wake, I eat bits of food with my quilt wrapped around me. My food bag is huge- it must still weigh six pounds. I brought way too much food, I think. It’s so hard to know.

My feet in the morning

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The hot springs in the morning

The hot sun comes out and we hike up the hills above the hotsprings and follow the creek downstream, looking down longingly at all the beautiful turquoise swimming holes. The creek ambles lazily among the boulders, along the little white beaches and under the cottonwoods. We are high above it in the scrubby desert. There are no trails to the swimming holes, no footprints on the little beaches. We are in a sort of wilderness here, and it is wonderful to look down on this wild water. It lifts our spirits. And yet in a way it is an illusion, all of this. It is a little strip of habitat for us to navigate, hidden in the mountains between the sprawling endless cities.

“Where are we?” We had asked some young men in fashionable clothing who had appeared the day before at our swimming hole beneath the bridge. “We walked from Mexico and we don’t know where we are.”

“San Bernadino County,” They had said.

After a few hours we turn a corner and the illusion of wilderness is broken. The hills peter out into a valley cut with roads; in the space below us is a massive concrete spillway. The river dissapears into it.

We walk down to the spillway and across it. It is very hot there, and the dust blows around us. Beyond the spillway the trail dips down to where the remnants of the river are, a little clear water running over a sandy bed cut with jeep tracks.

We cross the clear water and sit to rest on the sand beneath some bushes, where there is a little dappled shade. We fill our water bottles and eat handfuls of things from our food bags.

There is a rustle near Thyra- a giant rattlesnake, making its way through the leaves two feet behind her. We stand up and watch it wind its body into a coil, its little rattler sticking out.

“Why?” says Thyra. “Why when I’m trying to eat my lunch?”   

We’d seen another one earlier in the day, curled up on a rock next to the trail.

Suddenly Angela appears, her thrift-store desert shirt blowing in the wind.

“I had a standoff with a rattlesnake,” she says. “It was across the path and I threw rocks at it, but it wouldn’t move. I finally got around it by climbing up onto the boulders.”

The others want to rest in the shade. It’s still morning, and I want to get farther before the crushing heat of noon, so I set off on my own. I climb up into the hills again and then the trail intersects a road, and I can see a canopy there, and chairs, and some people with packs clustered around.

Trail magic! There is a couple cooking hot dogs on a grill and a plastic table with danishes, cliff bars, and little bags of fritos.

“You want a rootbeer float?” Says the trail angel cooking hotdogs.

“What?” I say. “Are you serious? A rootbeer float? Like, with real icecream? For real?”

The woman puts a scoop of icecream and some rootbeer into a red plastic cup and hands it to me along with a hotdog. I sit in a patio chair and eat the hotdog. I give the bun, soaked with mustard and ketchup, to Sour Cream, who arrived earlier and is sitting in the chair next to me. Sour Cream has been leapfrogging with us for a while, and is our adopted little bro. He’s twenty years old and from Ottawa, and regales us with stories of his mother’s cooking.

I take a drink of my rootbeer float. It’s the best thing I have ever tasted. I eat the icecream and drink the rootbeer and then I’m off again, hiking in the heat over the hills. Sour Cream is staying in the shade of the canopy to wait out the heat, and he’ll meet up with the rest of the gang when they arrive. I just want to get a few miles farther and find a little shady hole to hide in until it’s cool. There’s a stream in four miles and I think I’ll stop there.

The stream is a still pool across the path, halfway between running and dried up for the summer. The water is cool and the bottom is a gelatinous tangle of frog eggs. I dip my bottles in to fill them and then drag my things beneath a scratchy oak tree, into a sandy little patch of shade just big enough for my body. I curl up on my side to nap, but I can’t. Little insects crawl over me, but they don’t bite. I’m part of the desert, I think.

I hear the others pass after a while and I pack up and head out. I find them after a mile or two, sitting on the trail in the slanting light.

“Hey you guys,” I say, but nobody smiles.

They’ve been limping for miles- Ben’s knee is killing him, and Thyra’s foot pain has grown intolerable. Angela’s shoes are too small and her feet have recently turned to hamburger.

They are having a low moment.

We’d planned to make it all the way to a lake before dark, but only Sour Cream and I can walk without excruciating pain. Angela takes off her shoes and puts on her flip flops, and the three of us mince slowly down the trail. Ben and Thyra don’t yet know what they’ll do- they want to sit for a moment in the long light and talk it over. We hike with heavy hearts, hoping they can make it to the lake, hoping everything works out.

The three of us reach the lake at dusk, a big flat water ringed in mountains. The sun is setting over everything. We walk around the lake to a boat-in picnic site with half a dozen little gazebos. Each gazebo has a picnic table. There are no other people; there are no boats on the lake; there is no-one anywhere. Why does it always feel this way? I wonder. Like we’re in some sort of post-industrial collapse? I decide that as thru-hikers, we inhabit a different layer of reality than other people. That’s why we never see other people, while the parks and campground are always empty for us, even in beautiful weather. Why the rest of the world seems so far away.

Sour Cream and I splash into the lake and then clamber out, freezing. We wash our socks in the lake. I pick a bouquet of flowers and stick it in a blue glass budweiser bottle I pull from the spilling-over trash. I put the bottle on one of the picnic tables and then Ben and Thyra arrive and we all cook our dinners around the table in the dark. While we cook there are surprise gusts of wind, and they scatter our food and bits of tin foil across the ground. Angela’s sit pad flies into the lake, and she manages to retrieve it. We laugh uproariously at everything.

When it’s time for bed we each choose a picnic table and spread our sleeping pads on top of it. We even have a gazebo above us, in case of rain. The stars are bright above us and a warm wind is blowing. We sleep.

Waking to another cold pre-dawn, sticking my head out of my bag in the freezing dark, sitting up and eating a few handfuls of things from my gallon bag of trail mix, drinking water, shivering into my hiking clothes. It’ll warm up as soon as the sun hits, I tell myself. It’ll be so hot I won’t be able to stand it.

The forest is cold then suddenly dry and hot and dusty and then Deep Creek appears, tumbling gently through the fold between the hills. We walk alongside it, we hop across it on big round stones. The water is clear and bright in the sun and the plants along its edges are soft and green. In some places it makes deep tea-colored pools. We haven’t seen anything like it yet, this real and persistent body of year-round water- I want to put my whole body in it, I want to lay down beside it on the soft grass and sleep for a hundred years. The Sierras, we keep saying. In the Sierras there will be so much water. We keep walking.

Our plan is to stop in the afternoon where a high footbridge crosses the creek and rest in the heat of the day. We don’t know what to expect- a trickle? A puddle? Will we even be able to reach the water? I walk alone for hours, slowly in the heat, and think about my family. I have deep thoughts about my family. Who is family? These people I am related too, these people I haven’t seen in years. I don’t know anything about them, really. What are they even like? If something happened I wouldn’t even know. But there is some part of me that has thought for so long that someday a relationship will form, as though from smoke, and we will mean something to each other again. Here on the trail now I suddenly know that this isn’t true. I can just let that go, I think as I walk. They’ve let me go so many years ago, I can let them go. I can just let them all go.

We reach the tall footbridge above Deep Creek and scramble down the rocks to a beautiful swimming hole and a little sandy beach hung over with cottonwoods. I’m hot, I think, as I drop my pack onto the sand. I’ve been pushing myself through the heat of the day and I’m flushed and sweaty and covered in dust. I strip off my desert shirt and walk into the creek and dunk myself in the cold water. I move my shirt around in the current and wring it out. I stumble dripping onto the sand and drape my wet shirt on a hot rock and spread out my foam sleeping pad and sit in the sun. I cook a little pot of food and then drag my pad into the shade and curl up on my side with my hat over my face to nap.

It’s 5 pm when Angela and I start to hike again. Ben and Thyra have gone ahead. Our next water source is Deep Creek hot springs, in ten miles. We want to camp before the hot springs- everything in Yogi’s guide says that the hot springs are basically the most awful thing ever.

“Biggest disappointment of the trail,” says the guide. “Gross locals and trash everywhere.”

We pass mile 300. 300 miles, I think. What is distance, what is time?

When we get within a mile of the hot springs it is dusk and Ben and T-Rex are nowhere to be found. Angela and I are tired and our feet are sore.

“I guess we’re camping at the hot springs,” I say, resigned.

We plod on, imagining what the hot springs must be like. We picture a big parking lot, cracked cement pools, soda cans rolling in the wind. Drunk locals and boom boxes and badly pitched tents.

We have been walking along the dusty hills all day, looking down at the ravine where the creek must be. Following it downstream. Now it is dark and the trail looks down at a bright sandy clearing next to the water. We see the light of little headlamps clustered in a pool

“Angela! Carrot!”

It is Thyra’s voice, but where are we? There are no people here, no parking lot, no boom boxes and tents and piles of trash. There is just the white sand, the creek where it pools among the huge boulders, and, apparently, hot springs.

The hots springs pool is deep and clear and lined with smooth stones. It is just the four of us in this magical pool and Smiles and Dr. Slosh, who hand around a plastic soda bottle of wine they have packed in. Above us are the stars.

Our sore bodies melt into the water.

“This is the best thing in the world,” I say.

There is a man there, stoned out of his mind, with a gentle dog named Green, or maybe Queen. The dog stands close to the pool and lets us pet her with our wet hands. There are never any dogs on the trail- we miss dogs in an aching way, animal friends, pets in general. One day we spent an hour talking about hamsters. The dog’s person sits on the edge of the pool, fully clothed, with his feet in the water, and doesn’t speak. Later he will spread his neo-air on the rocks above the pool and in the morning we will pass him, still sleeping, in his bright red sleeping bag.

I emerge from the springs more relaxed than I can ever remember feeling. I stumble barefoot through the sand to the flat spot where I’ve dropped my bag. The spine of something sticks in my heel and I rip it out and look at it. There is a little blood there but I don’t feel any pain, the callus is so thick.

The sand where I spread my sleeping pad is soft and flat and warm. There is the warm air and the sound of crickets and the burbling stream. Tomorrow we’ll do another twenty miles, along the Mojave river and beyond into something I can’t even imagine. And on and on and on, I think, forever.

I woke in our basement hostel room before the others and sat in a corner in the dark, trying to work on my blog. The sun rose and light came in the little window and the others stirred and I remembered the yogurt I had, and the roast chicken, and the cherry chia kombucha, and I was filled with happiness. I sat on the floor in front of the little fridge eating my breakfast as everyone got ready for the day.

The trail angel Aloha, kind man that he is, shuttled us to the post office. Toyo was there, sitting in the little patch of grass next to the post office, his boxes spread around him. Toyo! We picked up our resupply boxes and sat there too, picking through our things as the locals eyed us curiously. Which objects? Which objects to bring on this next 104 mile stretch?

Toyo was bouncing his tent rainfly up ahead.

(Bouncing means mailing gear ahead of yourself so you can pick it up in another town.)

“What’s the weather going to be?” He asked.

“Sunny, I think,” said Ben.

Toyo nodded to himself as he stuffed his rainfly into his bounce box.

Angela and I walked to the gas station next door to get fuel for our alcohol stoves and I bought a reeses peanut butter cup ice cream bar. I sorted through the food I’d shipped myself (prunes, dried figs, almonds, freeze dried beef, dried vegetables, dried mango…) and ate it as it softened in the hot sun. It tasted better than anything in the world but I told myself that really, I needed to stop eating dairy. I can’t tolerate dairy very well and when I eat it every day it really upsets my digestion in ways I won’t go into here, gentle reader. And when that happens while backpacking… it’s really unpleasant and sort of stressful.

“I have to stop eating dairy,” I said to myself as I ate the most delicious peanut butter icecream bar ever. “I have to stop.”

But how? The hiker hunger has turned icecream into the most pleasurable narcotic on the face of the earth. But I can’t just be sick my whole hike…

We got to the hot trailhead at 11:30 and immediately had to take a break to drink water and adjust all of our clothing. My goal was to hike twenty miles, to a water source somewhere on the other side of a bunch of ambiguous contour lines. After a few hours of hiking I happened upon Rafiki, a thru-hiker from Fairbanks, Alaska, eating some snacks with a few other hikers, and I stopped and sat with them for a while. I learned that Rafiki is an archaeologist, and that she has 14 dogs.

“One of them is a house dog,” she said. To train for the PCT she’d pulled a sled across the snow for 50 miles in one day.

I ate one of my payday bars and immediately felt sick. I looked at all the dairy in the ingredients. Why? I thought. Why did I buy these? I couldn’t remember.

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I hiked on and in a few more hours happened upon T-Rex, Ben and Angela sprawled out in a little meadow, taking a break with Smiles and Dr. Slosh. Smiles had gone to the same tiny highschool as Ben, and Dr. Slosh is an ornithologist who works for the forest service.

“We’ve passed through three distinct dialects of the mountain chickadee,” said Dr. Slosh.

“What is that bird here that literally says ‘Tweet tweet tweet’?” I asked him.

“A black capped chickadee, I think,” he said.

T-Rex, Ben and Angela’s feet

I rounded a bend a little later and the soft pine forest turned to a burn- mountains upon mountains stretching away, stuck all over with the blackened spikes of trees, berry bushes crowding the undergrowth. The light was long and spilling over everything. Suddenly a lizard darted up a tree trunk in front of me, puffed out its bright blue belly, and started doing pushups.  

I have to admit, I was a little intimidated.

This is not my home bioregion, I thought. I don’t know what sorts of special powers these plants and animals have.

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The sun began to set and I walked faster, faster, still faster still. The path was soft and gently graded and I didn’t hurt anywhere. The burned forest was eerily still and at moments I felt as though something was following me. I would whip around but of course, nothing was there. It was just me, alone in the beautiful dusk, my friends a few mountain folds behind me.

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The sun quivered like an egg yolk as it set behind the mountains. I turned on my headlamp for the last half hour of the hike. The trail dipped into a little valley and I heard voices and saw the lights of other headlamps.

“Hello?” I called, and someone called back. “Hello!” The camp was an old horse camp- a metal corral and a picnic table, glorious thing. A clear little brook ran through the grass nearby.

I sat at the picnic table and assembled my dinner as the other hikers began to arrive. It was 8:30- I had walked 20 miles in 9 hours, including a one hour break. And I wasn’t even in any pain!

I happily stirred my pot of food, feeling like a little animal who lives in the forest.

I live here, I thought. I live here now.

All night at the campsite by the water it was cold and my knees ached, and I couldn’t get comfortable. The pain woke me up, an aching burn radiating from my knees down my calves and into my feet. I lay curled on my sleeping pad on the hard ground, my quilt pulled over my head to keep out the drafts. Why can’t I sleep, I thought. And when will my joints adjust. When will the aching stop. 

Dawn came but it was freezing so I kept the quilt up over my head. I heard the swishing sound of hikers passing me on the trail, so many hikers headed the last ten miles to Big Bear. By the time I was up and packed and ready to go it was seven thirty. The campsite was empty- everyone had left. Angela poked her head out of her sleeping bag. She looked confused.

“It was so cold last night,” she said.

I drank some water and then I had half a liter left. In my bleary morning state I’d read that there was a cache a mile down the trail; of course I looked again after setting out and there was no cache until the road. Ten miles on a liter of water, I thought, as the sun broke over the hills where I was hiking and the air became burning hot and there was no shade. Why do I do this to myself.

Thirst powered me to the road in three hours. There was a cache there with water, squirt, and beer. There was a rotted couch cushion in the shade. I sat happily on the cushion drinking my squirt and waited for Angela, who appeared a moment later. We walked to the highway curb but didn’t have to hitchhike- a man pulled up and popped the trunk on his rental car. Inside was a case of gatorade and a big bag of mini snickers bars.

His name was Timmer, and he was shuttling hikers into Big Bear, just because.

“You can put your bags in the back,” He said. “You want some snickers?”

“Really?” I said. “I can eat these snickers?” All I’d had for breakfast was four slices of salami, the last of my food. And then I had hiked ten miles.

I sat in the front seat and ate three mini snickers. Timmer handed me a bag of a peanut m&m’s and I ate some of those too. Food, I thought. Everything is food.

Timmer dropped us off at the hostel and we dropped our packs on the deck. There were hikers everywhere, and bright light, and the sound of rushing traffic. I felt overwhelmed and panicky and my blood sugar was desperately low.

Thyra texted and said that she and Ben were at a breakfast restaurant down the road. We didn’t know where it was or how far and we started walking down a broad boulevard, the cars rushing past us, our dirty clothes blowing in the wind. We could almost feel the heat of the concrete through our shoes.

We walked for so long it seemed impossible that we would ever reach the restaurant. At last we saw it in the distance and the small figures of Ben and Thyra, leaving.

“You’re leaving?” I said when we reached them. “But we just got here.” Inside the greasy spoon it was insufferably hot and I looked sadly at the menu.

“I don’t even want breakfast food,” I said.

Nothing was right and there weren’t any answers. The waitress appeared and set down plastic tumblers of ice water. She had many nineties piercings and was wearing blue eyeshadow layered over sparkly purple eyeshadow. I ordered a massive, greasy plate of eggs and hashbrowns and bacon. Angela got eggs and hashbrowns and corned beef hash, which I couldn’t conceptualize. My eggs tasted like liquid, my bacon tasted like salt, and my hashbrowns were crispy and perfect. Afterwards I felt ill, but at least I was no longer hungry.

We walked back to the hostel and carted our things to the basement room the four of us would share. It was cold and musty and lit by an overhead bank of florescent lights. There were two sets of bunkbeds. In the bathroom I took off all of my clothes and was astounded by how dirty I was. When I was in the nature I didn’t feel dirty, I just felt kind of like everything else around me. Now I saw that every exposed pore was filled with dirt. And sunburnt too.

I did my laundry in the tub, rinsing it and rinsing it and rinsing it, but the water never ran clear. I hung it to dry on the curtain rod above the open window in our room. Outside was the constant dripping noise of a leaking sprinkler, and you could see the feet of people sitting on the patio.

Another trail angel named Aloha gave us a ride to the big supermarket in town. It was massive and strangely arranged, like a labyrinth. We wandered around, disoriented, touching things and putting them in baskets. For some reason I bought a bunch of payday bars. I like these, was the thought that went through my head.

Back at the hostel a raging party was beginning to be underway. We hid in our room. Through the walls we could hear the sounds of drinking and disordered shouting.

“Is the door locked?” Said Ben. “Can you lock the door?”

We were leaving in the morning to start the next section- 103 miles from Big Bear to Wrightwood. I had proposed my plan to the others.

“I want to hike twenty mile days,” I’d said. “I want to do the section in five days.” I felt like I was ready.

“Ok,” they had said.

Angela and I had bought a roast chicken at the store, and some lettuce, and avocados and cilantro and cucumber and lime. We made giant salads and ate them, sitting cross-legged on the floor of our room. I also ate an entire big container of goat yogurt and a small tub of potato salad. And some celery.

I spread my food for the next section out on the floor. I was tired of running out on the last day, and this time I was bringing extra. My food bag was crazy heavy- would it be way too much? It was so hard to know.

That night, in my nice soft bed, I couldn’t sleep. It seemed that the longer I spent on the trail, the harder it was to come into town. All of it filled me with anxiety now, more so than ever- the people, the pavement, the constant sounds, the overhead lighting. Now in the dark room everyone was asleep but me, snoring and then not snoring.

Whatever am I going to do with myself, I thought.

Someone’s alarm went off at 5 a.m. and I pulled myself up in my bag. It was dark and the crickets were doing their thing. I ate some dark chocolate and my last piece of jerky and then stepped carefully across the pokey ground to pee on the trail.

“I’m claiming this trail for humans,” I’d said to Angela the night before, when I’d peed in that very spot.

It was cold when we started hiking but the moment the sun breached the hills and touched us we were hot. I took off all my layers and climbed up, up, up, out of the scrubby sandy desert and into the beatiful cool fragrant pine forest. I stopped to rest and fill my water at a stream with Ben and Angela and T-rex. I ate the last of the almonds in my trail mix.

“Only the prunes remain,” I said, displaying what was left in my gallon ziploc bag.

We decided that was the name of Ben’s metal band. “Only the prunes remain.”

Thyra and Angela were talking about the summer they’d spent working at a camp in rural Maine for the children of the very wealthy. Eddie Murphy’s son had been there.

“I don’t want to watch shrek,” he’d said. “My dad is the gay-ass donkey.” Then they’d gone to the mall and he’d spent seven thousand dollars on shoes. Another girl had had her horse flown in from france so that she didn’t have to use the camp horse.

“What’s airport security?” Another girl had asked. She’d only flown in her family’s private jet.

“Wow,” I said.

Thyra was mixing instant coffee with stream water in a plastic soda bottle. I cooked a pot of vegetable soup and rummaged around in my food bag. I only had some dried mango and a few spoonfuls of peanut butter left, and a salami; I figured I’d save the salami for the morning, for the final ten mile hike into Big Bear.

A hiker appeared at the stream and removed his cap. Toyo! It was Toyo! Toyo sat carefully on a rock and rested his pack against his legs. I offered him some dried mango, which he accepted with much enthusiasm. After a while he hiked on.

“He looks like he’s eighteen,” said Thyra of the seventy-one year old. “He looks like he’s eighteen years old.”

We climbed and climbed. I ended up walking alone for most of the day, feeling a little sick from the altitude. Then the trail crossed a road and there were the animal cages- I’d read about them in a few of the PCT guides but still I wasn’t prepared. Rectangular chain-link cages the size of a bedroom, with no protection from the sun. A grizzly bear pacing, another grizzly bear standing perfectly still, head hanging in the heat. I set my pack on the ground and looked at them. Grizzly bear pacing, grizzly bear hanging his head in the heat. No people anywhere, no caregivers, no stimulation, no interaction. Two big strong animals, driven insane by sensory deprivation and neglect. These were animals that had been in movies. Now they were “retired”. I could feel their suffering, like a palpable sensation in my own body.

I have to get away from here, I thought.

A little while later I reached a cache. The cache was a cluster of coolers in a little trampled area that overlooked a ravine. Inside the coolers was mountain dew, pepsi, pabst blue ribbon. We were getting close to Big Bear, and all the lodging establishments were competing for the hiker traffic. The names of the motels, hostels and trail angels were scrawled on the sides of the coolers. I put a pabst blue ribbon in the mesh pocket of my pack.

A mile later was another soda cache. Next to the cache was an overstuffed recliner that someone had hauled onto the mountaintop. More motels and trail angels competing for the hikers.

We had planned to camp at a little campground down the mountain a bit where there was water. It was getting towards dusk and I walked quickly, running a little on the downhills. I was imagining the food in big bear, thinking of all the things I could eat. A giant salad, I had decided. A giant salad with, like, a roast chicken on it.

I got to camp before the others and sat at the picnic table in the dusk with my quilt wrapped around me, drinking the pabst. There is nothing more glorious, when you are thru-hiking, than a picnic table. Except maybe sitting at a picnic table by yourself in the dusk drinking a cheap beer after walking 21 miles.

T-Rex and Ben and Angela arrived.

“That wasn’t bad,” said T-Rex.

“Twenty-one miles!” I said. “Bam! NBD!”

Other hikers trickled in and Angela and I wandered to the edge of camp and spread our groundsheets in the dirt. Ben and T-Rex set up their tent.

“My feet don’t even hurt,” I said to Angela. “I can’t believe it.” It was cold, and I pulled my sleeping bag up over my head. I slept.

In the morning we hiked slowly up the canyon, following the little stream to its source. The clouds blew over and the sun burst through; suddenly we were on top of the hills looking down at the canyon and it was very, very hot. The path was steep and there was no shade. I hiked fast because I only had a little water; I stared at the ground and moved my legs. I am finding my stride, I thought. I am getting faster.

The dusty trail switchbacked down the hills and then, at the bottom, there was a little stream. The stream was clear and the rocks in it were yellow, and it made a burbling sound. A few oaks bent over the stream, making a little shade.

I’m in heaven! I said.

Thyra appeared and we both sat in the water. It was cold and maybe eight inches deep but if we laid all the way down the water would mostly go over us. We turned around in the stream until we were soaked and then the others arrived. I washed my socks and laid them to dry on a rock.

We made lunch in the patch of dappled shade beneath the oak tree. Another hiker named Brian arrived and announced that it was nearly a hundred degrees. He had some tilapia in a ziploc bag that he’d marinated in tumeric and dried and he gave us chunks of it to eat.
“Tumeric is an anti-imflamatory,” he said.

In the afternoon we climbed up the hills again and into a burn. It was still hot and the sun was still bright; I stopped to rest in the shade of a huge boulder and Ben joined me. A moment later Thyra appeard. Thyra has these little straps on her pack that are like slings; a place for your arms to go while you hike. Thyra had her hands in these slings and it gave her the look of having tiny dinosaur arms.

“T-Rex!” I said, and then Thyra had a trail name.

T-Rex stopped to rest with us and handed around a bag of reeses pieces that had melted into an unattractive mass. It was weird, seeing the little insides burst from their candy shells.

“The sensations are all out of order,” I said.

Water was sparse. We were using all sorts of apps and bits of paper to figure out where the water was- the water report, guthook, halfmile’s maps, yogi’s notes. Today they were all wrong. At dusk we found ourselves looking for a place to camp, almost out of water. There was a stream nearby but we couldn’t seem to reach it, no matter how far we walked- or maybe we were just tired from the long day of climbing in the sun. At last we turned a corner and there in a gully was a spring that burbled up from the sand. Above the spring was a flat space to camp. There was already a tent there. Then the flap unzipped and a little head poked out. Toyo! It was Toyo.

We spread out our things in camp and sat on the ground, eating bits of food. We were all running low on food; I squeezed nutella onto a few graham crackers; Ben made instant cheesecake in a plastic bag. Somehow I had eaten a four-pound bag of trail mix in two days, and the others seemed to have been living on bars alone. In two days we would be in Big Bear, where we would resupply.

It was dark now, and cold. I brushed my teeth and spat into the leaves. The stars were out and all the hikerrs were bedded down in their little burritos. I crawled into my own sleeping bag and pulled it up over me. I am happy, I thought.

In the morning we met Ben and Thyra at the fountain and we all began the long slog across the windy valley of the dark lord. The sky was bright and hazy, the sand was hot, and the wind turbines churned eerily on the hilltops. We crossed beneath powerlines and through strange construction projects; in the distance was a highway.

Sometimes in the deep sand the trail was lost; when this happens the people in front make lines with their trekking poles like this:

We reached an underpass and in the deep shade were coolers of soda and beer; we sat in the dirt and drank 7up and then slogged on through the sand.

The cache

In a few miles we reached a little sign- Trail angels ahead! It said. We followed a short side trail to a tall white fence and into the backyard of a little house; there were carpets stretched across the ground, and canopies for shade, and a tall man with beautiful blonde hair named Cool Ranch appeared with a bucket of hot water and poured us epsom salt foot baths which, he said, we were required to take.

I felt alarmed by this, these mandatory footbaths. Relax, Carrot, I said to myself. It’s just a footbath.

We sat in lawn chairs with our feet in the water and other hikers began to arrive. I took a shower, I dug through the hiker box, I ate a snickers bar and two chocolate pudding cups and made a little pot of food. There was a burger king run and I ate a large order of french fries. I washed my laundry in the sink on the side of the house. Overhead the sky curdled into thunderstorms and a little rain fell. In the afternoon we packed up our things and set out again towards the foot of the mountains.

We were inching up into a dry and dusty canyon; we stopped to rest at a rusty wire fence and ate reeses pieces and then we slogged on. I could see Ben up ahead on top of the ridge, backlit with light. What’s up there? I thought. What’s beyond this strange place?

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I reached the top of the ridge and saw that the haze was gone; beyond the ridge clear yellow sun shone down on mountains the color of old velvet. We had gone beyond the wind turbines, the dusty valley; we were in some sort of wilderness now, some secret place beyond everything. The San Gorgonio Wilderness! Said a little wooden sign.

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We walked over the foothills and down into a wide white riverbed; a burbling stream wound through the riverbed and its banks were crowded with green plants and the air smelled of flowers. The canyon rose up on both sides of us; Ben pointed at some bighorn sheep, but I couldn’t see them. The light was doing crazy things where the sun was setting at the end of the canyon- What is this place? I thought. What is this magical place.

We reached a cluster of small buildings that once was a trout hatchery but was now a preservation center of sorts; we camped in a sort of park with picnic tables off to one side of it. There were no people anywhere and the animals were all around us, watching from the edges; frogs croaked and rabbits darted everywhere and Ben and Thyra saw a bobcat on the trail- and in the morning two other hikers would tell us that a bunch of coyotes had come sniffing around their tent in the night.

Dark fell and it started to rain. I set up my shelter and set my pack in the dry sand beneath a giant oak tree. Angela, who’d been hiking at the back of the group, hadn’t arrived yet- Ben and I went out onto the dark riverbed to look for her. She appeared suddenly, exhausted- she’d missed the turn for the campsite and walked an extra two miles on the trail and she’d had to backtrack in the dark.

“You got here fast!” I said.

“I ran,” Said Angela.

I climbed into my tent to sleep and found that it was full of ants. They crawled across the mesh and the walls; I tried to kill them with my hanky but they were everywhere; I would kill a bunch and more appear. They smelled like floor cleaner when I crushed them.

Finally I gave up. I am going to go to sleep, I said to myself, and I am going to pretend that there are no ants. I turned off my headlamp and began to drift off; I turned it back on and the ants were gone. I lifted up my shoe, my water bottle, and there they were- hiding. Sleeping or being dormant or whatever it is that ants do.

“Goodnight ants,” I said.