an old goddess, both eternal and resurrected. her bones are grand, varied, tangible, ethereal, and not even fully her own. her soul reflects her natural beauty, her visage wields power over hearts and souls. her being stretched across this great distance, her arms warm and opened far along these lands. she offers plenty to her devoted followers, but she does not do this freely.
she lays upon her apostles a passenger. she conjures the cloud of igottadomiles over their heads every morning, rooting their eyes upon the horizon. this is no curse, her disciples enjoy this exchange. ever reveling, but seldom lingering in her bounty. for when they do, the igottadomiles fog creeps and their eyes become hazy unless focused on that line between land and sky in the distance. and so she grows in influence and her legends multiply, for it is easy to love the gottadomiles as it is easy to love the great goddess.
i love this goddess. for the past almost five months she had me in her tender embrace, breathing igottadomiles fog around my senses. as those months progressed i kept getting glimpses past the fog at the world beyond. ever the fog would thicken and refocus my efforts.
the fog got in the way of me spending time on a lavender farm. the fog pulled me from mount shasta, i didn’t even try to go play on her slopes. the fog recently stopped me from going rafting down to a rodeo. the wind blows, and the strength of the fog changes.
this is me getting off trail but it’s not sad promise
I’ve now done about 4000 miles of long distance trail. Bouncing from town to town following that thin earthen line is still great, i love doing it. Much much slower than most of the other hikers out here, but i do love long trail life. I’m comfortable saying that i’m pretty good at it too, this delicate orbit kept around modern society. I am also eager to break free of the trail’s certainty to pastures of different colors, to adventure through rural and urban environs.
oh jeez i spent too much time on this i didn’t sum up the past few days on trail
Northern Oregon continued to impress. The rain threat only escalated, to a point where it was spooky for about one day straight. Boy all the PCTers were terrified, one guy chastised me for shrugging at his horrifying prophecy that the rain would linger for days. It didn’t, but i did sleep like a rock that night, lulled into comfort by the gentle crinkle tinkles of a non-angry rain on my tent. It was exciting to walk across a ridge immersed in a cloud with the wind whipping around me though, reminded me of Maine.
Hella burn areas, a lot of this state has burned up recently. I like burned forests, they’re still and creaky. All the little baby plants reaching up to the stars and the still standing corpses of their progenitors.
I spent a few hours at a resort with little electricity. It was a cozy place that unfortunately ran out of ice cream. I lingered too long and got swept up into having a wine party on trail that night and it was great. Shoutouts to Machine and Yukon, those boys hike hard and city harder.
I did six miles of roadwalk to get a resupply from a gas station in the shadow of Mt Hood. I lingered there too long and did my Hood ascent in the dark. As i continued to climb the treeline broke and i could see lights in the distance calling to me. The wind was howling and the moon was just breaking on the horizon. It was super cool and i camped right next door to the big ol breakfast buffet at Timberline Lodge.
Buffets on trail are a big deal. The prospect of eating as much as possible while you’re out there at peak hunger puts dreams into your head and passion into your stomach. It’s an even bigger deal that this buffet isn’t even .1 mile off trail.
The guide app i use has a comments section for each waypoint on trail. For this lodge people took John Muir quotes and changed words so they were about buffets, the lowest hanging fruit being “the buffet is calling and i must go.” I’d reference more but i already deleted the app and i can’t be bothered.
The breakfast buffet was great, i ate until it hurt and then i pushed some more. Our waitress said that if i played guitar she’d buy me a drink, but after breakfast i could barely breathe and she left before i got the chance. I sat catatonic, mooching off the wifi for a couple hours.
When i could locomote again i spent a while just looking at the lodge. It’s a real cool building in a real cool place, no wonder Kubrick used it for the Shining. Eventually i found my way to the pub and found some hikers still getting their drink on and i was happy to join them. At around 5 we stumbled our way out of the lodge and barely made any progress before it got too dang cold.
At the pub the word got spread that there was trail magic the very next day at about 6pm 17 miles up trail. I dug deep, hiked hard, and made it just in time. I accidentally took a side trail that added a bit of a climb but might’ve been shorter overall, and i intentionally took a side trail that was longer so i could see a cool waterfall.
The trail angel picked up six of us in her pickup truck and drove us the 20 minutes to her place. They had hot tubs and two cats and a nice creek and a cool house. Spaghetti for dinner and you know i ate up until it hurt. They told us of this 3000 mile rickshaw journey they’re planning for next year that sounded cool and scary.
We got moving slowly the next morning, and i loosely made plans with all the other hikers to do 15 miles to a lake knowing that i probably wouldn’t make it and like of course i didn’t
In the final stretch of trail Squirrel caught up to me. I had met him on the AT up in Maine so it was cool he caught me right before i hopped off. And wouldn’t you know it, Jason who is now Eastwood, going sobo, crossed my path. He had gotten off trail for a bit because of foot fracture and was doing sobo to see his family one more time. With that i was pretty satisfied, i threw on Hyper Potions and coasted down to Cascade Locks.
That night i watched a 30 minute movie about the big fire that almost wrecked Cascade Locks last year and ate a tube of Pringles faster than i thought was possible. This morning i said goodbye to a few other hikers and hopped the bus to Portland.
eh that’s good for now. it’s weird getting off trail. the thru hiker life doesn’t have a slot for my current plans or mental state so it’s interesting seeing how everyone reacts. i guess bittersweet is the closest word i can use but it’s not even that bitter. the sad part of not spending time with all the humans i grew fond of out here is basically over and mostly has been for hundreds of miles. there’s a few phrases i’ve been using but the one i keep coming back to is that i don’t think that the pct has anything left to teach me. i’m comfortable with the societal orbit of long distance trails. since around tahoe when i got that forsaken backpack i got really good at sitting and existing in places and my skill has only improved since then. A task called anyways, a wedding in Iowa to take place in a fortnight that i received an invitation to on top of Mount Whitney months ago.
so, next season, on whatever this is: it’s two thousand miles to iowa city, i’ve got a full backpack, half a pack of plain bagels, it’s hot, and i’m wearing cotton clothes
hit it.
🍕
off trail? on trail? it’s still the trail? what is the trail? why is the trail? how are you doing today, trail? i’m fine, thanks, i’m here about four and a half years after the previous section of words with all these addendums fresh from a more weathered body and soul.
i’ve been calling it the gottadomiles lately, i think i prefer it that way. i pruned some language from those paragraphs as well, too cruel to this trail goddess and trail goddesses everywhere. was it really the unprecedented times that emptied out the arizona trail when i set out on it? or my digital cruelty to the trail goddess powers? no it was probably the unprecedented.
the gottadomiles and i came in contact again out on the AT in Vermont in 2022. late in the NoBo season; the nights bit with wind instead of mosquito. a defined mileage to the finish line, a due date, a simple math to give a ‘miles per day.’ a perfect storm descending of gottadomiles fog. i loitered at a ski patrol hut on a bald mountaintop as nobos paused for meals while counting how much further they had to commute for the day.
lol these dry pct hikers all anxious about rain. thanks, appalachia, for saturating me with rains and hardening me to their trials. give it one more state, they’ll all be in cascades of the stuff i bet.
buffets are still big deal, special occasion to really see what i can do.
at the front desk of the hotel you could ask to hold the axe, you know, that axe, the one from the shining? mr jackson dullboy nicholson himself held it as he calmly entered that bathroom where his wife and child were waiting. do you remember that do you remember the shining? well don’t worry, because ‘HERE’S JOHNNY’ is burned into the wooden handle, deeply burned into it, in a gaudy way that feels like a disservice to both a cinematic relic and the memory of the perfectionist director who labored on it. but it sure is the thing that he said in the movie do you remember?
some fun reunions right at the end there, just what the doctor ordered. the trail provides.
man i dunno 