I seem to never finish my “dailies”When blogging a trip. There is so much to say about the end of the Pyrenees. I don’t have the words, even now, for what happened in the weeks and months after I set foot on the Mediterranean and tried to start my new life in the Netherlands. It didn’t work. No matter how strong I am. No matter how much I (we) fucking wanted it to work. No matter how chaotic the US is and how stable Holland generally is. No matter a thousand things that should have lined up-they didn’t line up. My body turned on me and subsequently my mind did as well. I came back to the US on November 15 and just went to Jocelyn’s for around a month. I took a travel nursing assignment in Long Beach, CA, I thought for 3 months. Then, Covid-19 hit. I’ve been here ever since. Long Beach is colorful, diverse, beautiful, chaotic, and so incredibly comfortable. This has been a great place to wait out the pandemic a little bit, and to work in birth. It’s been just fine. I feel none of the strange, terrifying, cloying vacuum that filled my insides when I was in Europe. I am no longer losing my mind.
I don’t understand what happened to me and to us. I still don’t understand. I am still heartbroken.
People try and tell you things. “Well, you tried.” “It’s totally understandable.” “There must have been something off-balance in the relationship, that you just didn’t see.” I appreciate peoples’ kindness, as always. And none of these placations scratch the surface of what happened and what it meant to me, to both of us. This wasn’t just one of sixty ideas I have had, to be discarded like a faulty vacation plan. It was a powerful, stabilizing, life-giving love, like a funnel in the ocean-a force that draws you that drowns out the noise. And yet, at the same time, with things as they stood, it was impossible. I watched my mental health, my ability to execute and plan, fragment away like an old stale cracker, finally culminating in a mild psychotic break the beginning of November. I am embarrassed at how apparently fragile I am, when I take care of immigrants every night at work, outside Los Angeles California. I ache for the things that fell away through my fingertips, and I also know that I couldn’t survive. I have not made sense of this and will think about it all for awhile in the sage and talk it over with the marmots.
Living in California has filled me with life energy again, even as the tears live just below the surface, I think they’ll sink a little deeper some day. I have gone into the high Sierra many times in these months. And I have made a few friends who understand, who have strong legs and wild eyes, gentle souls and crazy dreams, with whom I have gone up and Further In, Further In. I can not express how grateful I am for these friends.
And a plan has developed and taken form-an exciting and challenging new traverse, one thousand miles in Wyoming and Montana, plotted and hiked once by a particularly plucky young man that is a friend of friend Katie from the Haute Route Pyrenees. Katie, myself, and friend Sergey from Seattle will leave July 19 to attempt the Greater Yellowstone Loop, a one thousand mile, wild and remote route that is half off-trail and goes through the Gros Ventres, the Tetons, Yellowstone, the Wind River Range, and I imagine many miles of hot wind and scratchy sagebrush. I think this will be the most challenging trip I have ever done, because of its remoteness and the off-trail nature of the trip. I am so very ready.
I will be blogging this trip on the daily, as I have before, because I believe the details will be of some use to future folks who may want to attempt this route.
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