You, too, can stop misogyny.
I wake up at 5:45 AM to an alarm. This is the first time I have ever set an alarm on trail, I thought it was worth a try, but now that I'm wiping the crust out of my eyes and grumbling in the dark I realize alarms are as much an abomination on trail as they are in real life. Interrupt yourself right in the middle of a REM cycle?! Pay for it the rest of the day by sliding on the scale of ever so slightly still sleepy to extremely fatigued?! Yeah, no thanks!
Carrot and I drink Diet Cokes with our breakfast because this is what we apparently do now. I spent a good portion of this trail fantasizing about cold soda, but in the tent this morning I realize I'm over it. Diet Coke was a treasure in my mind for approximately 400 miles, but now it's back to the scary chemical cocktail I've always believed it to be. Dangit. I hate when trail food loses its luster!
Sheriff Woody, Deanna, Carrot and I set out in a line. I make up a story in my head that maybe Deanna and Woody will have a beautiful romance. I imagine them surreptitiously frenching behind sequoias under the full moonlight. I think about how they don't live all THAT far from one another, how they could meticulously plan expeditions together and spend long hours identifying plants and mushrooms and routes and campsites.
"Are you and Woody gonna make out?!" I ask Deanna while we co-pee behind a pile of rocks, pretending that the stone shields make us invisible.
"No!" she laughs.
Deanna and Woody do not make out (OR SO THEY SAY!) (Just kidding, I really don't think they did/this is totally how rumors start). I tell Deanna that the world of the trail is small, so small and I fucking love romance and gossip so I made up that they did, just for fun. Deanna laughs again, shaking her head.
The hours pass like this: eat, snack, water, piss, talk in dog voice, laugh uproariously, repeat. At 11 AM I eat a clif shot block and the sugar releases into my blood stream, flooding me with the desire to fucking gooooo. I surge ahead, thinking crush, crush, crush as I hike and I cannot believe how good my legs feel, how strong I feel in my body. It took just about a month of hiking and here we are! Fuck yeah!
One foot in front of the other, I know I'm just barely hitting a 2.5 mile an hour pace but it feels like I'm flying. I focus on my gait, and then I focus on the view, and then I focus on nothing. I am so honored to be to the part of hiking where I'm no longer thinking about the deep pains of various parts of my body and instead get to focus on the void.
I love the void. The void is beautiful.
Carrot and Woody catch up to me an hour or so before we hit the alcove we plan to lunch at. Woody tells us about the flora and fauna along the way (he's a botanist!) and I am ecstatic to learn these morsels of information, though I promptly forget them. When we show up to our restaurant (chez rocks and sand) I pull out bag after bag of things I am dying to eat because they are fuel but don't care much about beyond that fact.
We are halfway through our miles today and tomorrow leaves 12 more until we finish the TRT. I hate to think about the end of our hike and I look at Carrot meaningfully.
"We really should go meet Nicole in Northern California."
Nicole has been southbounding the PCT, doing 25-30 mile days for some time. Today I feel inspired. I think I can do it.
---
We eat and eat and lay down a little and eat some more. Deanna shows up, she feels like a sponge in the microwave she says, and we discuss options. Should she bail with Woody tonight? She says she'll probably have to and we say we believe in her! We want her with us! If she stays we can all enjoy a celebratory burrito just a few miles from now! Deanna sits in contemplation and then she relents. Sponge in the microwave be damned, the sun will set eventually and Deanna is going to stay. I am excited!
With this decision, Deanna rests a little longer and Woody, Carrot and I pack up and out. We climb up a tall ridge and there are dogs at every mile, yipping and jumping and scampering and panting. One looks like a river otter and my enthusiasm swells. Finally, we reach a big open ridge and we can see two huge bodies of water: Marlette Lake on one side and Lake Tahoe on the other, meeting in the middle to make a spiral jetty. There are so many beautiful things out here- every single day. I want to take extra time and appreciate every one of them, though I feel like I rarely do.
An alarm rips Carrot, Woody and I from our collective awe. It is bleating from Carrot's phone, hard and loud and it is saying Fire! Fire! Fire! in robot monotone. In our exact line of vision thick plumes of smoke bellow up from a mountain or two away. We've run from smoke again and again and again on this trip, Woody has dealt with months of poor air quality at home in Redding, CA all summer long.
"Shit" we say, almost in unison. Shit.
Woody drove a friend's car out here to hike with us and his anxiety about that car rises before my very eyes.
"What if it burns?!" he wonders out loud.
"It probably won't burn." we say.
"but what if it does!?" he says after a pause.
Sometimes anxiety just needs to be soothed with some good old solid proof that everything is going to be a-okay. We agree that Woody should probably just crush back to the car, see with his own two eyes that it (probably) won't burn, and meet back up with us tonight. He takes off like a rocket, leaping ahead with his long legs, and then he grows small in the distance and he disappears.
Goodbye for now Woody!
I think.
I hope your friend's car is just as okay as I think it will be.
Carrot and I relax into our silent groove, walking step by step through the sand. We turn on our audiobook (When Life Gives you Lululemons, what else would two queers with radical politics and a general distaste for heteronormativity and capitalism listen to?!) and keep close so neither of us misses a word. Sometimes its just nice to check the fuck out.
---
We finish our miles and we learn this fact: Woody made it to the trailhead, hitched 35 miles to his car, and got a ride back to meet us - all before we even arrived at the very trailhead he hitched from. He must have next level sprinted those miles while we meandered with our chick lit. Carrot and I are just congratulating our friend when two hikers wander up, full of questions.
Let me paint a picture for you: please imagine two queer women, with a special app that tells them everything about everything TRT related, who are very near the end of their journey hiking the whole dang thing. Now I'd like you to imagine Woody. A great guy, has hiked a shit ton, sure- but whom lacks the specific experience of hiking this whole trail and more importantly, whom has no app to tell him anything about anything.
Do you see the scene? Carrot and I, with some knowledge about this specific trail- Woody, with no knowledge whatsoever. Now I'd like you to picture two middle aged men- lost, possibly dehydrated, very loud middle aged white men looking for water and a campsite.
"Where's the next water?" they ask.
"Just over this way" Carrot and I respond- we'd like some water too, we just consulted our data to find it- we give the information within a tenth of a mile.
"Where's the next water?" they repeat, eyes fixed on Woody- who would agree that he doesn't know shit about shit.
Again, we direct the men to the water. Again, they don't look at us to acknowledge our words. The men take out their guidebook, asking Woody to help decipher the map. We say the distance and direction to water, even louder now- perhaps they are hard of hearing? But the men won't look our way. We're just women it turns out- clueless women not even worth acknowledging! We are so pointedly ignored that it would be laughable if it wasn't also so fucking stupid. Misogyny and patriarchy are a cage, my dudes. It sure would help everything to tear the whole thing down.
The men wander away, still with no clue how to find their fucking water which is exactly what they get. I like Woody and still, when he says he hadn't even noticed the whole scenario, I am bummed. (Cis men! You too can fight the patriarchy! You just gotta open your eyes!) I tell him that now that he's seen such a thing in action he'll never be able to not notice a woman's experience/opinion/expertise being ignored again. I hope this is true, because the more people give a shit, the less this kind of thing will happen.
Deanna finds us, we laugh about the clueless men, and we all go fill up on water from a nearby campground with a spigot. I love a spigot- the water flows clear and clean and abundant and I am grateful. Tomorrow is our last day on this trail, I remember as we hunker into our dinners. I push the thought out of my head.
Tomorrow.
I think.
I'll deal with that tomorrow.