In my last blog about the book Hiking Zen, I shared I took an unexpected zero 6 miles out from Kent. Which involved a bit more soul searching about why I was thinking about leaving this trip (for another since this is my lifestyle). The day felt like the universe had a message for me as I look outside my tent to find a slug on my sandal. The mixture of reading the book in the state I was in led to a declaration of aimlessness being my new Katahdin. I had said it before in previous blog posts, but guess to be honest still feel the pull of reaching Katahdin by some certain time. Sometimes maybe in how present it is in the constant conversations that pass by me along the trail as the bubble frontrunners pass by.
I also think maybe I found some new purposes to hold hands with the aimlessness.
In this section, I keep running into a Ridge Runner and he appears at the shelter I’m at, making his rounds to break down small fire rings around the shelter. One of which was made by some thru-hikers the night before to make hot dogs they packed out of town. He picks up micro trash and cleans up the privy. During this time, some day hikers have walked over for a break at the shelter. My tent and I are a good hundred feet down. While I’m sitting on some tree stump reading, I hear this yelling from them, “Bear!”
“Bear coming!”
To my surprise a little black bear, very young juvenile not much bigger than a medium dog comes out of the bushes to my camp. I start clanking my aluminum trekking poles together and it keeps a distance as it passes by. At a rock wall before the stream he turns and looks at me for half a minute. In the look it feels like he’s saying, “Thought we were cool?” As while following the guidelines to scare it off, I also think about the black bear in the way it was once respected like another human tribe like talked about in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. I think about how in the autobiography I read on this trip about Lame Deer, about how bears often bring with them the strongest medicine.
Shortly after the interaction, the ridge runner comes by asking about the bear. I tell them about scaring it off and how small it was. On the subject, I talk about how small it was and raccoon-like unlike the bears in the sanctuary or Smokies National Park areas I experienced last year. We talk about how it’s like the bears raid the town of Gatlinburg and in having no fear of cars or tourist crowds, lone hikers aren’t scary at all. I talk about one running in front of me in the smokies and standing up on its hind legs to my height. In the same area a shoe was stolen in the shelter by a bear and a Durston tent was slashed. I also talk about how they have really interesting personalities for animals, like part dog and something else. By something else I mean human before the idea of human came to mean a modern network of concepts.
They say, “Yeah, those bears down there are are pretty gangster.”
Images of famous bears like Hank The Tank in South Lake Tahoe flash across my mind like a Snoop Dog music video, and I laugh at the remark.
He says, “Most people really don’t realize a lot of this trail is a zoo and not wilderness. It’s a narrow corridor and people keep making it worse for the next people.”
He refers to parties leaving trash and hikers of all varieties putting their trash places it doesn’t belong.
“The fire rings right now are the bane of my existence,” He says. “People think they are building and leaving something for the next person – but the reason we don’t have them in most of the campsites is because when they build one and burn fires they kill the microbes in the soiling in the camping area. That’s where you get all these flooding campsites, because the soil no longer takes in moisture all the flat camping areas slowly become puddles in rainfall. Many hikers just don’t seem to know how much little things out here that they enjoy are because someone is actively engineering it like that.”
‘Wow, yeah I imagine too it is hard to talk to people about it sometimes out here.” I say.
“It is,” he says. “I try to, but sometimes it feels too sketchy.”
“I can imagine.” I say. “I imagine many people who just build fire rings can sometimes be ‘good ole boys who love to support the law unless it’s one asking them to care about something.”
“It can feel dangerous for sure,” he says. “And we are just an educational position, no legal power.”
We then talk about the job, which has some pretty cool things about it. Like the freedom that exists within getting to be outside all the time. He says they get 10 days to do 60 miles and the restfulness of that kind of makes my eyes sparkle. In a lot of ways the gig hits the right notes for me. I daydream a bit about it, like how you could study so much about the environment while getting healthy and keeping the environment healthy. It’s like Edward Abbey in the Park Service without the law enforcement aspect. It is a position in Saint Augustine’s eyes that offers what the law was meant to be without punishment, only grace. Only care and education. Admittedly in the last couple years, I have stared at the job posting on the ATC website wondering if this could be the type of thing I could do for a living.
Underneath that though, is the fear. The fear this Ridge Runner skirts around, trying to care about an aspect of America it doesn’t care about at all. As you know the trail is a little bit of everything. It’s a gym to some people. A monastery or pilgrimage to many. A remaining home to animals and the people who aren’t disconnected from that nature. In the reflection of this interaction, I see one of my most traumatic experiences on the trail that I am realizing I carry with me in a lot of steps. I think it happening is something that led me more into adventure cycling than long distance hiking.
It was on the Pacific Crest Trail in something like 2018-19. Those years seem like a blur. Anyways, as I mentioned in another article I was somewhere between Christopher McCandless in Into The Wild and Cheryl Strayed in Wild. I had been living in Slab City aimlessly the winter before and the unbearable heat of the Sonoran desert was fast approaching so I hung a sign of wanted great to hike the PCT in hopes of getting donations from tourist. With what I gathered, $50, and a food stamp card that got like $189 a month I hitchhiked to the trail. I ended up working along the way at businesses of trail angels. Carmen’s Garden. Built some website for a semi-legal weed guy trail angel. A few days at Bud Pharm. I almost died a dozen times from inexperience and injuries from carrying an ILBE marine pack with too much gear.
To make a long story shorter, I ended up working at a famous hostel for a few months where the owner paid me $200 a week, fed me, and gave me a camper to crash in. Suddenly nearing a thousand dollar budget and some great hiker box trades, it was time to hike on. Only finally having this privilege, I couldn’t hike on knowing kids were being separated from their parents at the border and people were put in cages. I found myself on a train to political encampments to protest ICE instead of a thru-hike.
Afterward, I built up a $50 touring bike I rode around for months until the next season where I returned to work at the hostel. Only when I arrived, I learned I wouldn’t be getting paid for anything and my work would be increased. Wanting to get off the road a bit I accepted it. But I noticed how there was like this change in the hostel atmosphere. The year before we had such a diverse staff and it seemed like there was kindness in every direction. Now it was mostly just me and the season started with kind of an exploitation of not openly declaring the changes of the position until I was out there.
Anyways, now knowing the context of my being there. The tornado of a thing that happened was there was a day this giant of a man claiming to be a soldier from South Africa came in. He began declaring outlandish things like Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. He sat in circles of Trump-voting good ole boys and talked about how America needed to get the chains back around the savages of this country. N-word this, N-word that. The Americans who sat around him, disgusted me just as much. Some of them nodded in agreement and recanted racialized stories of looting. Some sat silent.
I went to the hostel owner and told her what was happening. I told her I wanted to ask them all to leave. What occurred in the next 24 hours is something that will never leave me. She said no. That I have to deal with this racist harmful people. That they were paying customers. That I am supposed to do their laundry. I decide I’m at least not working for them. The next day many of them had already hiked out early to get through the LA aqueduct area as is common. The owner she comes to the trailer and asks me if I’m going to work today. I ask if I can have a couple days to prepare to leave, because after that experience this is no longer the type of place I could good consciously work for. I call those men white supremacists and tell her she’s not much better than any of it for allowing such on the property. The next minute she is flipping out yelling for all the hikers at the hostel to come immediately and asks them to remove me from the property. These bewildered hikers set forth on their mission as the circle got smaller with arms reaching out.
Up went my camera, recording in one hand. Bear spray in the other. I calmly tell them my tenant rights having been in the structure over thirty days and working for the hostel. I tell them what happened and why I am being asked to leave. I declare if you come near me or my belongings, “You will be maced.” Most of them scatter off, wanting no part in this altercation. One of the guys still remaining from the circle of white supremacy sits by my trailer like a guard for the hostel owner. While I gather my stuff up strapping it to my touring bicycle before pedaling the heavy unprepared bike off into the distance.
The hostel owner is dead now, but she was wildly celebrated by thousands of hikers. Interviewed by Backpacker Radio. I tried to get the story out, but I was nobody. I also realized the more I tried to tell the hiking community, it was like talking to that circle of white supremacy. A couple progressive hiker influencers that caught wind of it tried to share the story. No help ever came. No accountability was ever had. I was just hated more. Another exploited body in the long history of colonization wrapped around these long distance trails. Then in spite of my near moneylessness, I ride a bicycle over 10k miles in several months on one of the first healing adventures of my life.
Looking back, you know maybe an older wiser me could have done some things better. Maybe fearlessness could have looked like pulling up a seat to that circle to being disagreement. While the awfulness truly does have a power dynamics at many angles, maybe there is some Buddhist or Christ-like truth to summoning a fight with fighting energy in my body. It was influenced by watching the horrors of ICE take place and a rage as one of billions who witnessed what this society did to George Floyd. I did lead with anger and retaliatory punishment like a reflection of the colonial law instead of grace. Maybe now I could deescalate or change the trajectory of such energy in my best moments.
But when I hear how maybe someone might fear educating people who have decided to destroy the microbes they don’t understand of the soil they act like they own instead of love, I see a reflection of that horrible day. Sometimes a part of me wonders if the next campsite or shelter will be that day again.
“Bears are the best medicine,” Lame Deer says.
The next day I destroy a fire ring in an unsanctioned site I see, I destroy like a stack of rocks made into a cairn.
I pick up the micro trash I see on trail throughout the day, shoving it in that convenient Durston Kakwa 55 pocket.
The ridgerunner and I end up at the same campsite that night. Walking by this racetrack all day has forgotten memories coming to the surface. My dad and grandpa tow truck drivers at the races in Joplin, MO where my brother or I always sat shotgun.
“Hell of a place to see a racetrack.” I say to the ridgerunner as he passes me.
He says, “Yeah the other day NASCAR was here – the folks out there now are the true believers. Practicing all day in hopes of one day getting into those major leagues.”
I kind of sit with that swirling around my mind like sound of the racecars.
The next morning I catch him meeting up with another ridgerunner picking him up. They ask me and another girl if we want a ride to the Mountainside Cafe. The hiking ridgerunner is handed a little box of strawberries from the other. After he devours a good chunk of it, he hands the remaining to me like its second nature. We get a table together. I order something called the Johnny Cash skillet. I recant a story from that aimless bike tour about discovering around the historical Folsom Prison they have built a bike trail being filled with commissioned art pieces dedicated to Johnny Cash. Like a forever fuck you to the prison industrial complex. This is all the little tornado spiral of my emotions while I mostly sit there listening, while also surprised for once how okay I feel sitting in this group of hikers and two ridgerunners.
We recant those bits of trail experiences about fire rings and the bears.
The ridgerunner I camped with talks about how he went sobo for the solitude and how often he had to just stop a day to let hikers he didn’t want to be around get ahead. That he found it restful and healing to just stop as these people kept going. In the statement I saw so much of what I was feeling about leaning into the aimlessness and healing. About how sometimes seeing other hikers I feel more like that bear I encountered that acknowledges my presence and then calmly walks away from the danger.
They spiral around the table talking about gentrification and extortionate rent prices. I listen in awe from the third world country I live in within America where 2-3 grand a month to exist somewhere is impossible. I listen from the eyes of a young adult made homeless by conditions following a tornado turned it all into an endless adventure after seeing the other homeless people streets be swept and swept into prisons. Like bears on the streets of Gatlinburg moved to another boundary line. In all this, I see maybe a path forward for me. Like maybe I’m here as a once upon a time student of journalism that has practiced in a Zen way to see the world as their reflection. With stories only I’m the only one around to tell.
“Assimiliationists.” I say from a long moment of quiet, referring to the progressive seeming white people that move in and gentrify a neighborhood.
“Yes,” the new ridgerunner says. “It’s like they move in and cover it in all this art, then stop doing the work while pricing everyone out.”
We talk about the invasive moths destroying the trees alongside the trail, about how there’s really not funding to stop from any forest service or the ATC for that matter. There is no one to do the work if it takes getting paid to get it done, because the money never adds up to that. It will have to be a grassroots movement to really save what is happening to this land and in the society surrounding it.
I order more food to go and wait on it outside. The strawberries reminded me of nutrition and I order a nice chickpea wrap to go. While waiting outside the remaining hikers talk about renting a room somewhere to get to the next bed and AC. Flipping through their overpriced Connecticut options. One of them says they wish there was just like a homeless shelter they could go to and they could just guard each other’s packs. Like these endless advertisements and comparisons on their backs are the only thing separating them from my third world. From having the wild eyes that don’t look at everything like something to be bought.
Almost like reading my body language, as the ridgerunners drive away in a car they slow and point out the shortcut back to the trail is between these two parked cars across the road.
In a few minutes the gentrification of the Appalachian Trail happening after all the color left the deli was much quieter and the spirit of the wilderness kept getting louder…
For most moments the rest of the day and deep breaths I get to feel free.
