A soft wind blows, rustling the willows. I slowly open my eyes-a soft white light, sweet, fresh, fills my vision.
It is morning.
The theater and darkness of the previous night, the previous year, are but a fading dream. My mind slowly awakes-my breathing is even, and calm. I am warm and awake, wrapped in my sleeping bag. Everything is okay. I am in the California wilderness of the Sierra Nevada mountains, on a weeklong hike to condition for the Great Basin Route.
Da Bear hears me stir, and I hear the zipper of his tent- ziiiiip- and he comes to start coffee, and the stove lights, comforting in its familiar hiss-gentle morning conversation, and the warmth of companionship.
I am alive, with this body, this brain, this connection to ancient and recent past, this tremulous brilliant connection to future. My flight over the stars has been put aside for now, for I am awake, And another day has come, and it is time to hike.
In the fall, I stared over the edge of the abyss, into the darkness. Alone, unloved, directionless, my four apartment walls closing in on me in the center of this beautiful mad city, burying me, suffocating me. But it is not fall now. It is no longer a time to be sad-to explore the vacuous depths of blackness beneath me-because that time has passed, and I have come through, my head bobbing above the raging stream as I gasp for air-as I claw for life.
I will not break. I will live, as I must live-shooting away like a rocket, upward into the atmosphere, burning, All On. I will do this because I must.
Once again, like so many times before, the nurses have carried me through this dark time, though they did not know the impact they had. Sweet, pragmatic, hard-working-two feet firmly on the ground, firm hands on my arms, the expectation and trust of competency that drives my flow. Side by side with me doing the good work I love so much, the work of birth-a million connected, happy moments as we stood vigil to Los Angeles giving birth in a pandemic. Through the fall and winter we threw one starfish at a time back into the sea, in the words of the old proverb- “It mattered to that one”-thank you, my new friends-I’m sorry the time was so short.
Da Bear and I found each other in the winter, walking one hundred and two brilliant miles across Death Valley, glittering sun and extraterrestrial landscapes. In the eyes of a fellow thruhiker I immediately see the depths of gentleness and love that can only come from ten thousand miles in the wilderness-when you know your place in the earth, that you are one precious being-at the same time tiny, and loved-a welcome creature in this place-impossible to adequately describe to those who do not know the passion and exhaustion of three thousand miles of continuous trail, the rumble and crack of distant thunder, the ancient smell of sage, the calm in your body, a thousand and one stories that you share, though you have only just met.
We will walk one thousand miles in sixty days, in a continuous loop on Dirtmonger’s Great Basin Route, a new and challenging track across fifteen mountain ranges in Nevada. We will bury food, and water.
I will share a daily story of our travels here, as I have done in the past.
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