PCT Vol. 5: The Voice Without Words
END.
I squinted at the dead-end sign through the shimmering desert sun, which was uncomfortably bright even with my dark-tinted sunglasses. The yellow road sign was propped up on a leaning pole and surrounded by little tufts of crackling desert grass, where my road walk ended and the desert began. Next to it, there was the familiar rounded, triangular PCT emblem bolted to a squat, brown pole: identical to the others I had followed for over 500 miles across southern California.
Looming behind them both was a wide warning sign. STAY OUT OF AQUEDUCT, it ordered. YOU MAY DROWN.
The wind was just starting to pick up over the basin of the Mojave desert: a dry, dusty bowl of a place, where actual tumbleweed rolled and dust devils whorled over the cracked earth. It was hard to imagine drowning in such a place, but it was true. I would follow the California aqueduct 20 miles through this hot, flat, and totally exposed section of the desert. Beneath the desert floor, encased in concrete, a strong current of cold water flowed: ironically, the only water in this section, and totally inaccessible to hikers.
I was carrying a little over two liters of water, much less than what I would need if I had started midday. I was going to hike into the night as most hikers did, dodging the brutal heat in favor of headlamp-lit forays into the blowing dust. Other hikers would even hike from Hikertown to Tehachapi: about 40 miles. I was planning to stop at the base of the next climb.
I walked past the END sign and tapped the PCT emblem as though it was the shoulder of a friend. Then, I walked onto the aqueduct.
I had left Hikertown around 3:30, a little over an hour behind my friends Flora and Fauna. I had paced myself a few days ahead of them since we’d met on Fuller Ridge; they had caught me once in Wrightwood, as I was leaving and they were arriving. I’d purposefully put distance between us because I’d wanted them to catch me right as I returned to trail.
I’d left trail for three glorious zero days at the road crossing near Hikertown, where Ben had picked me up. He’d driven us to Tehachapi, where we’d stayed in an Airbnb and ranged wide across the desert—picking up a couple of friends I had hiked the previous few days with, M. (now Picnic Table) and J. J. had gotten injured while following my breakneck pace towards the road crossing where Ben was picking me up; two back to back 25-mile days. We’d picked them up, then delivered them back to trail. Then we ranged back to Hikertown to meet Flora, Fauna, Fire Husband, and other hikers I’d met along the way, dropping off beer and swapping trail stories.
The night he arrived in California, Ben had crawled into my tent at 2:30AM after a redeye from Atlanta and hours of driving. When dawn broke, I rolled over and smiled at his sleeping face. Feeling my gaze, he opened his eyes, and saw me in the light for the first time.
I’d lost nearly 20 pounds in the single month I’d been hiking. I’d had weight to lose—running our hiker hostel full-time had left me basically no time for training—but it was still too much, too quickly. My hunger had ebbed and flowed with the heat, and I couldn’t honestly say that hiker hunger had fully kicked in for me, even after 500 miles. I was a little concerned about my weight loss, but Ben was seeing how much I’d lost at once, and he was very concerned. He dedicated our time together to getting me to eat as much as possible, and addressing another worry he could see in me.
I had struggled to bond with the journey of the PCT. I chalked it up to the speed I was hiking: over 500 miles in one month was fast for me. I’d felt downtrodden and worn already, to the degree that I’d experienced in New Hampshire while thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail. But, I was only hundreds, not thousands, of miles into this thru-hike… my lack of desire to hike had me very worried about whether or not I would have a strong enough desire to complete my thru.
And so we drove through the gorge to Kernville, and out to Lone Pine. From Lone Pine, we drove towards the spires of the High Sierra, Mt. Whitney’s jagged array of peaks growing larger in our windshield as we drove up to Whitney Portal. I was in awe of the snow-capped mountains piercing the sky. They were so different from our ancient mountains back east, which were rounded and worn by time.
These were young mountains, and seeing them accomplished exactly what Ben was hoping. I was looking forward to traversing them, to immersing myself in some of the most remote wilderness I’d ever encountered. And I was looking forward to consistently hiking with friends for the first time of my thru.
As the sun set over the aqueduct, the winds rose from the west. First, it circled me, blowing through the alien branches of Joshua trees and past me in quick gusts. Flora and Fauna were maybe 30 minutes ahead of me, I figured, judging from their footprints and the mile marker updates we’d sent each other sporadically as we picked our way across the Mojave. But I stopped checking in as the winds began to howl.
As the trail turned north, it pushed me towards the prickly desert underbrush, blowing sand against the left side of my body, stinging against my cheek and peppering my eyes and mouth. I yanked my bandana from my shoulder strap and tied it around my face, both to protect me from the sand and to keep it from flying away. If the wind caught anything on my pack, it would be gone forever.
That night on the aqueduct was some of the hardest hiking I’d ever done. The trail turned west and I had to hike against the full force of the wind as it railed against me. It felt like the traverse over the exposed desert floor that I’d struggled with on my way to the I-10 oasis. The trail followed lonely dirt roads through this stretch, and car tires had churned the packed earth into a loose, fine sand that shifted with each step and went viciously airborne with every breath of wind.
As the hours passed, I became more leery of the headlights I could see bouncing towards me in the desert, pulling off trail and lingering behind thorny brush when cars would pull near. During the daylight earlier, as I’d walked alone on the concrete of the aqueduct, a younger, clean-shaven man driving slowly by in a tan sienna had hung out his window, calling out: “Pretty girl,” as he stared at me. “Pretty girl,” he repeated when I didn’t respond, speaking through me, not to me, and tapped his brakes.
“Go fuck yourself,” I’d retorted with as much animosity as I could muster, one hand on my neck knife, both trekking poles clenched in the other, and he’d sneered in that way all catcallers do when you call their “compliments” out for what they are: a thinly-veiled threat. One that I would take him up on. Who would win this one, you think? I wanted to ask him, brimming with energy from three days’ rest and feeling thru-hiker strong. I stared him down until his foot pressed the gas pedal again. He drove slowly, silently away, and I walked north, trailing behind his tire tracks.
10, 11PM wasn’t a time to be meeting more strangers of his ilk on the road. The few cars that I hid myself from often passed within a foot of me as I stood motionless on the side of the trail, unseen in the dusty air and darkness.
I’d wanted to hike a little over 20 miles that night, but stopped at 17 miles when I found a depression in a circle of Joshua trees. They stood over me like sentries as I pinned my groundsheet to the earth with loose rocks, weighing down everything as I unpacked it to keep it from flying away. As a nearby windmill creaked ominously overhead, I buried myself in my quilt, hiding from the desert chill and the torrents of wind.
The next morning, I took my time getting ready, because I suspected that Flora and Fauna were a short distance behind me. In our infrequent transmissions, they’d indicated that they were also stopping short of our shared mileage goal, and hunting for a low spot to hunker down in earlier than I had stopped. I was just beginning to pack up when I heard footsteps, and lifted my head with an expectant, welcoming smile.
It wasn’t Flora and Fauna, but it was another friend.
I’d met S. and his husband, Showstopper, at Scout and Frodo’s, and had expected him to be well ahead of me. Showstopper was still battling foot pain and town-hopping as S. hiked, and S. had been making miles at a pace I knew I wouldn’t match. Seeing S., bearded and dust-caked and grinning, was a welcome surprise. We traded stories before he started hiking on. By the time I was packed up, Flora and Fauna, and another hiker I’d met in passing, A., reached my campsite. I slung my pack over my shoulders and started hiking alongside them, spreading out in a companionable line as we followed a dirt road.
For the first time in a long time, I felt good about hiking. Being around friends again had instantly lifted my spirits for the miles ahead. I was excited about the beauty of the Sierra, but more than that, was looking forward to being around other hikers.
With Ben’s long visit behind me, and 500 miles under me, I knew that I could match pace with almost any hiker out here. I wouldn’t be alone as I walked through the Sierra, with its bears and water crossings and snow traverses. I would have other thru-hikers with me to commiserate over the aches and the heat and the mosquitoes.
I couldn’t stop smiling as we hiked together and caught up to S. I had only briefly been in tramilies on the Appalachian Trail, preferring to avoid them and hike my own pace. The PCT was different. It was more dispersed than the AT, where I’d taken the presence of other hikers for granted. Out here, I’d been alone more often than not—and realized that I missed the company of other thru-hikers.
As we chatted and laughed and sidestepped clouds of grasshoppers, we started to see even more hikers, more than I’d ever seen gathered in one place: taking a break by the next water source, fanning out over the landscape. I’d gone to great lengths to avoid the dreaded “bubble” of hikers on the AT, but now, solidly within a little bubble of PCT hikers, I felt almost giddy to be within a community again.
I was riding this wave of optimism when my phone rang.
As the wind swirled dust around me and windmills whined overhead, Ben’s voice crackled over the phone.
“I lost,” I heard, then silence. Then, he added, his words breaking over the wavering bar of signal I had: “Job. Everyone…” the line hissed and sputtered, “…let go."
I pieced it together. “You lost your job?”
Static hummed, the blades sliced the air over my head. “Yes,” he said, and in the one word, I heard the regret, the unasked question.
I stood there as my friends hiked up the next switchback, curving around the barren Californian hills. I watched them hike north away from me for a few moments, and my answer to the question I knew he wouldn’t ask was simple, but it wasn’t easy.
“Okay,” I said, my voice lighter than I felt. I felt a deep weight settling into the pit of my stomach, sinking down to my feet, holding me to the earth. Grounding me. “Okay,” I repeated, as the hikers ahead of me crested the hill and disappeared into the shimmering heat. “I’m coming home.”
“No.”
“Yes,” I retorted. “It doesn’t make sense for me to throw our savings at a thru-hike anymore. I’m coming home, and we’ll be okay, and—”
The line went dead as I lost signal; the call dropped. I stared at the blank screen for a few moments, then, with nothing else left to do, I hiked north, up the hill, towards more signal. As I walked, I thought of how quickly I’d arrived at that conclusion: to go home.
To quit.
As I set out on the Appalachian Trail, I wrote: Every single time I’ve thought I didn’t have it in me to keep choosing the true and beautiful future that I wanted… has been exactly the moment I realized that, instead, I actually don’t have it in me to quit. This is the first step of a 5-million-step victory lap. And I’m going to make it all the way.
I’d survived the hardest thing I’d ever done: the end of my first marriage. I’d navigated life alone for the first time. When I walked onto the Appalachian Trail, I’d already survived the unsurvivable: I’d chosen to live when I no longer wanted to, chosen to step into the unknown, the terrifying prospect of living life totally on my own terms. Unfettered, unbound, free. Beyond the confines of my marriage, I’d balked. And then, I took a step towards the unknown. Then, another.
I’d already faced something that terrified me, something I’d genuinely believed I wouldn’t survive. I’d proven to myself that beyond the doubt and the unknowns waited a better, happier version of my own life: one that I wouldn’t have known to go searching for beyond my many fears.
In the years since that hike, being alone became a place of comfort for me. I’d dated someone while I was on the trail, and as he withdrew—days, then weeks, passing between phone calls and texts—I stopped pausing on mountaintops to check for messages, and chose to hike north, alone and content. If I was honest with myself, I preferred my solitude over his company. I loved him, to the best of my ability, never having known what it was like to love without effort. I realized, too late, that love does not require you to convince yourself of it.
When Ben and I found each other again, I was single and comfortable with my life in Asheville. I lived life as I had since the divorce: totally on my own terms. Being alone, formerly a place of trepidation, became comfortable. When I realized I loved him, it was as easy as breathing, and it was terrifying. The night I knew, I pulled onto the shoulder of the stretch of highway between Candler and Asheville and sobbed. There was joy: I’d thought I would never love fully again after my first marriage; that I would always have to wade through a sea of doubt. But then there was regret, too: from realizing how deeply I’d wronged the person I left after finishing the Appalachian Trail.
The lesson that came next arrived swiftly: that I am never my best self when I stay rooted in comfort. Ben and I moved quickly: we knew we loved each other weeks into dating; we moved in together, bought a house, and started a business six months in, then we were married just over a year into our relationship. These were bold decisions, made with hard-won intuition. It was, for us, the right person, and the right time. There was no question of it. No doubt. Effortless.
I’d known on the Appalachian Trail that I needed to choose myself, to choose my hike. I had chosen my thru-hike over my relationship—and to this day, I don’t regret it, even though it was undoubtedly selfish. But here, now, in this moment, scanning my phone screen for signal, my mindset had shifted. I was needed elsewhere. I will walk with you, I had vowed, as Ben and I were married at Wayah Bald. Today, tomorrow, and always.
Ben would want me to continue, but in that moment, I no longer wanted to. Maybe I was waiting for an excuse, but even so, it felt like the right decision. Moments ago, I was joyfully hiking north with my friends, my sights set on Canada… and now, I was only thinking of the next road crossing, town; a way to fly home.
But part of me, a large part, wanted to continue north. Hike, it insisted. Achieve.
There was an unhealed part of me that pulled north, like the protestations of a tight ache from a recent scar. A completed thru-hike was tidier, easier to be proud of. It was an achievement wrapped up in a neat bow. I am a thru-hiker, I would be able to say if I continued. I have completed the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail.
Now, I had to face the messier reality: I am a thru-hiker, I would have to say. I have completed the Appalachian Trail, and I hiked 558 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. I don’t know when I’ll go back for the rest, or if I will. But for now, that’s enough.
I knew that continuing north was the wrong choice, because my motivations for doing so didn’t feel right to me. I’d never set my eyes on a goal because of the way it would appear to other people, and I wouldn’t start now. I didn’t complete the Appalachian Trail for clout, and I wouldn’t hike for that reason on the Pacific Crest Trail either.
I now knew that if I had to explain my reasons for wanting the trail; if I had to convince myself that I loved it… I didn’t really want it. I wanted to want the trail, but I needed to heed the lesson I had learned about love: that if it’s true, then it requires no convincing. I needed to leave trail, I knew. Even if it meant never setting foot on this path again.
As I had done before, I would choose the more difficult path, the one that challenged me. Then, it had been the AT, choosing to learn how to be alone. Now, it was learning how to be with the person I had chosen to spend my life with; honoring that bold, intuitive decision we’d made since we were married, maybe even since we’d first laid eyes on each other. I’d lost myself in my first marriage, and retreated into the safety of Alone.
Now, I knew, I needed to learn how to no longer be alone.
So I walked to Tehachapi, where I signed a trail register for the last time. I cried only once: when I opened the register with a metallic creak and was confronted with a tidal wave of signs that I was making the right choice.
TRAIL GRATITUDE, a bundle of stickers shouted from the pages of the journal. And I was. I was grateful for what those hundreds of miles had revealed to me. I was grateful that I was leaving the trail on such a good note: not out of frustration or injury or sadness, but necessity, with mixed emotions because I wanted to stay.
A pile of postcards was tucked into the register as well, and a note from a trail angel told me to take one that spoke to me. I picked one with a simple illustration, one that not only spoke to me, but sang:
“There is a voice that doesn't use words. Listen.” -Rumi
The trail tugged at my heart as I walked across the asphalt of Tehachapi Willow Springs Road, and turned away from it for the last time. I positioned myself on the shoulder of the highway, thumb out, facing east, looking for a ride west, knowing that I may never walk north on the PCT again. My internal compass was spinning, pointing in every direction. What next, if not this?
I felt directionless in a good way, not afraid of the uncertainty of veering so off course. But still, it pulled at me. I could see the little dusty track only yards away, beckoning. It would be so easy to walk towards it, step away from the road, continue north.
But I didn’t.
Author’s Note:
This is the end of the PCT trail journal… for now. I’ve been off trail for over a month now, and I still miss it every day. It has been hard to not feel like a failure, which, from any reasonable perspective, is silly. I walked over 550 miles through the desert, and don’t feel accomplished? So, I’m practicing sitting in that discomfort, and it still feels like the right choice… especially given what’s happening on trail now.
Beloved trail towns like Etna, Stehekin, Kernville are all threatened to different degrees by wildfires as the fire season has kicked up in earnest. The day before I set out on the aqueduct, the Post fire erupted just west of Hikertown and burned through over 15,000 acres. The friends I was hiking with are facing the reality of flipping up and missing miles as fires grow too close to the trail and closures are announced. So now, even after Ben has found another job after his company had a mass layoff and I could be on trail again, I’m still home.
I don’t know if I’ll ever return to the PCT to complete that hike. I don’t know if I’ll ever set out on a long trail like that again. I knew that the PCT would be different than the AT, but there were many times on trail when I wondered if I should hike the AT again instead—and was truly tempted to catch a flight to Maine. Hiking other, shorter trails still speaks to me: the Long Trail, the Arizona Trail, and trails in my backyard like the Bartram, all have more of a pull on me than the PCT.
What I do know is this: I am home, in all senses of the word. I’m writing this blog, and making more headway on my book than I have in months. I am covered in drywall dust (as usual) and back into a routine. I am so glad to be back in this vital, green, light-and-shadow place I call home… Appalachia.
I’m looking forward to what’s next, which is something I catch glimpses of now and then. For the first time in a long time, the future doesn’t involve walking away. It’s seeking, and finding, bit by bit, every day, the peace that rooted itself in me when I climbed Katahdin two years ago.
Or maybe it was always there.
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Thanks for reading! -Newfound
