AZT Mile 741.2, May 28.

AZT Mile 741.2, Monday, May 28. 

Walked 13.5 miles from 727.7 (plus 1.6 to loop back for water and .2 to campsite) for a grand total of 16.3. 

How the Stars Fell Into the Sky

Dear Trail Friends

I probably should not try to blog. It is 4:30 and I am sitting in my tent in an absolute funk. 

Here are some of the things that went wrong today. At the end of my second rest stop I discovered I had hiked past my water cache (as you know, my water filter not working had already gone wrong). I hiked back .8 miles and the good news is the water was there. 

Then at my third rest stop I discovered my thin mat (that I lay under my sleeping bag to protect it and also use to sit on or lie on during rest stops) was missing - evidently I left it behind at the second rest stop. I decided instead of going a mile and a half further as planned to camp nearby and decide in the morning whether or not to hike back (3 1/2 miles) to see if I can find it. I was leaning toward doing so until remembering that it was a windy airy and the chances of my finding it may not be that good. 

Then at my campsite - .2 of a mile back in the direction of the lost mat - as I unpack I discover I have lost my poop bag (this is a stuff sack containing my little titanium shovel, toilet paper, foam cleanser, etc. )I am not sure where I lost it but I am pretty sure it was before the place where I lost the mat. 

So I say to myself River I think your memory problems are really too severe for backpacking. Once you get a routine going your procedural memory is okay but in the first few days you are in constant danger of losing things. Earlier today I was thinking I might have to give hiking up because of my feet. But today I devotedly took off socks and shoes, and applied aloe and pain cream, and massages them at every rest stop. I did inverted pose twice. My feet  are doing really well after the first two 15 mile days in a row. 

But my brain - my ability to track and remember - is a much bigger problem. Doing without this particular lost gear will be a challenge, a discomfort to be sure, but I will manage. But can I continue to hike without the confidence that I can hang onto my gear? I had worked out little hooks to attach everything I carry in outer pockets so it couldn’t fall out and get lost. Great. But it doesn’t solve the problem of when I remove it and forget to put it back. 

I want to tell you something important. I feel much better blogging about this than I did sitting morosely in my tent thinking about it by myself. Your listening lightens my heart even - especially - with the heavy stuff. 

There was other heavy stuff today. A lot of the day I spent in the imaginary company of my sister Bonnie. Holding hands, walking together. It was such a thrill for her (who has been pretty much confined to bed for a long while but I think is so weak now that she may not even be able read - which has been her sustaining joy) to be able to walk and to be put of doors. And thrilling for me to share it with her -  believing as I do that such imaginative connection also has a real dimension, though exactly what it is may not be knowable. But we talked a lot - about our love for each other, about the difficult years, about how one decides whether to let go or hold on (especially toward the end of life). I did a lot of crying. She reminded me how I had danced for her on the trail years ago when my walk was a prayer for her to be able to dance again. I resisted but gave in. In a beautiful alpine meadow on Kaibab Plateau I danced to Rosann Cash singing Sea of Heartbreak. I reminded that my sister Bonnie was the first person I danced with. And I wept. There is something about these large open spaces, and all this solitude, they are big enough to contain the deep sorrows of life and to hold the joy that is inextricably linked with the sorrow. Photo 1 is the meadow where I danced to Sea of Heartbreak. 

I also walked some of the day in imagination with my niece Angel - with her spirit (she died last August). We talked a lot about love and my sense of failure loving her. She pointed out that she always knew I loved her. Maybe loving her wasn’t gratifying for me - I didn’t see her feeling loved, or beaming love back at me, or having my love help her to create a healthy and happy life. But, she said, to go on loving persistently without any gratifying outcome was a kind of love. An important kind. She said she knew I loved her. Maybe she didn’t feel loved. But she knew. 

So there was a lot of crying there too. 

Earlier in the day the trail came near the East rim of the Grand Canyon. Photo 2 collages some of those views. 

I was disappointed - since several comments in the app mentioned getting  cell service there that good old AT&T had no service. But that did not diminish the beautiful surprise of walking in solitude along the east edge of the Canyon. 

I met two people today. A woman dayhike who I spoke with briefly and a cyclist who waved as he past. Yesterday I met a beautiful family at the Lookout Tower. The father and son had stayed down (the son was considered too young to safely climb it with the lack of safe railings) while mother and daughter climbed. I commiserated with the son about life being unfair. After I climbed it I told him I thought the one who life had been unfair to actually got the better deal. We made a nice little connection. The family lives in Phoenix (formerly Minnesota); they told me the hottest temperature they had experienced was 124. The mother loves hiking and when I left I called to her “See you on the trail.” I felt sad after I left that I hadn’t formally said goodbye to the boy. But he had confided that his mother’s mother and father were “not nice” though his mother was nice and his father’s parents were nice. I felt a little protective of her - and said to him and her as well “Isn’t it wonderful that someone with not nice parents can turn out nice.” I consoled myself later that a sensitive kid like that is tuned into his mother’s pain and that by being appreciative of her I was also supporting him. But it did lead me to think about a part of me that avoids closeness with children - a result I think of my sense of failure in becoming a mother myself and in loving Angel as skillfully as I would have wanted. So there is almost a veering away from children, lest I disappoint them or myself. So Angel’s (imagined) words to me were comforting. 

Later sitting at my second rest stop (the one where I would lose my mat) I watched a bug that had settled on my jacket. One antenna was broken and one was waving in the wind. I had been listening to music since doing Bonnie’s dance and just then Leonard Cohen was singing “There is a crack a crack in everything - it’s how the light gets in.” I thought of this little guy with a broken antenna (photo 3) and me with my imperfect loving, and smiled. 

So this is one of the many things about solo hiking that I love. The way the outer world both holds and mirrors (and reflects it back beautiful) the inner. Is it so bad to be broken? He seemed so valiant waving the one good antenna. 

Maybe I will find a way to go on hiking - a way of working with my memory losses just as I work with my feet. I don’t think aloe will do it, though. 

So so much else. That can never be stuffed inside a blog. The moment when I stepped suddenly into a small woods made entirely of young shining Aspen trees (photo 4). Talk about magic. 

The realization as I walked glimpsing meadow areas between trees that part of what I love about the earth is it’s curves. 

Photo 5 is looking back after I emerged at the woods I walked through (on the left) and the curvaceous open area beside it. 

Another high point was noticing all the colored rocks and remembering how much I loved all those colors last year on the southern part of my Arizona Trail hike. I could not get photos that captured the color magic but I hope they help you imagine. Photo 6 is a collage of rocks. Photo 7 is a rock right beside me at my rest stop, a big old black rock that when you looked closer had a cluster of - I’m not sure of the word one uses for those little hidden treasures. One of you knows. 

So - I don’t know if I will back in the morning or not. I can spare the time since I made my schedule very relaxed. I am secure about water at least for now since my first cache was there, as planned. (One never knows, though...) The chances of finding the mat are not that great and the chances of finding the poop sack (a more serious loss, unless my air mattress were to puncture irreparably, or I were to be eaten alive by ants) are pretty much nil. On the other hand, I’ve been disappointed Barry hasn’t caught up with me. Maybe if I backtracked I’d have a chance to reconnect with Barry. I also have this fantasy of him appearing carrying all my lost gear ....

The point is: here I am. I can go back and look for the mat and there’s a slim chance of finding it. I can try to plan workarounds for my memory problems. But as in the Navajo story of how the stars fell into the sky, what’s done cannot be undone. I love thinking of the stars as illustrating the beautiful and confusing mess that life is. 

And trail events - even losses and misfortunes - that help me to see the beauty in the whole big confusing mess cannot be all bad. And of course you - who make this blog possible - help me to share the experience and turn it into a story. As I was walking today, so moved by the connection to the world I can only experience in solitude, I thought “I want to be able to share my solitude with somebody.” And then I thought “But that’s what the blog is!” And then I thought, as I think now, that I am very very lucky. 

Goodnight. See you on the trail.