Flagstaff AZ. Jun 4.

Flagstaff AZ. Tuesday Jun 5

Walked 2.2 miles down from rest stop at 786.5 to stateline campground at 788.7. Slept Saturday night at campground. Then rode 174 miles - 3 hours - with Trail Angel Tim to Flagstaff. Stayed Sunday with Tim and Melody. Stayed Monday at hostel in Flagstaff. 

Dear Trail Friends,

So much has happened since I wrote my last post Saturday afternoon, from my rest stop overlooking Utah and the Vermillion Cliffs. 

The last two miles were among the most beautiful of the entire hike and I could feel how the colors, textures and shapes of the rock formations called to my soul. What a strange and wonderful thing it is to feel such a call. To my surprise the rock formations that I had glimpsed from the viewpoint became closer and more visible (photo 1 shows the trail near the end) as I walked down to the campground - I had expected to lose sight of them as I hiked down. 

As I arrived at stateline campground and the end of the AZT, I was greeted by a fellow hiker planning to start a section hike south to Flagstaff the next day and eager to talk with me. I realized, from my inability to summon the energy to be minimally polite and friendly, that I was exhausted. I am still puzzled by that exhaustion, except to speculate the usual difficulty of transitioning back from trail solitude to real life was complicated by a realization that this might be my final hike, that my abilities to continue both planning and executing long distance hikes were uncertain. I was as gentle as I could manage - and did write down the locations of probable water caches for him, and wish him well. 

I found it hard to set up my tent and even wondered if I had reverse elevation sickness from my descent.  But I did summon the energy to walk up the path to a view of my (truly) last sunset on the trail - shown in photo 2,along with my tent with the cliffs lit up by the setting sun, and a small precariously balanced rock cairn (that seemed to reflect the fragility I felt) Ihat I built on the campsite picnic table 

I felt anxious about the return to civilization and being with people. I felt both grateful for and overwhelmed by Tom and Melody’s generosity. I guess it brought up fears of being unworthy and not giving back (to them, to the universe) enough. It is odd but I don’t think/feel that way in the wilderness. I have more trust. (Trust - That essential social skill that I want to practice and strengthen.) one way I addressed my anxiety was by trying to make my scruffy self a little more presentable. I had grown a little bit of an old lady beard and of course did not have my shaver along. But I used my little scissors (that I carry in my emergency bag) to clip the chin hairs back a little. It occurred to me as I did so that it calmed me down, and I thought that preparing for social interaction (by washing, dressing, makeup or whatever) can be a kind of ceremony of  preparation or purification. A trust- building or calm-building deremony. So I thought to myself - and laughed aloud at myself- clipping chin hairs is practicing a social skill. So of course I offer you photo 3 - to be “read”  clockwise - starting in lower left) to illustrate River training in social skills and ceremonially transforming her mood. 

I slept deeply, despite anxiety that I may have misunderstood campground rules and taken a site reserved for others (I guess, in retrospect, that this mirrored my anxiety about the return to civilization and am I taking what belongs to others, not “getting” boundaries, etc). In fact the campsites were all “first come, first served” but I had misunderstood a lounge chair chained to the table as a gift/blessing from the gods to me - when it was in fact a chair belonging to an RV and laying claim to the site. I do tend to misread social codes! (And I do find comfort in the story about Coyote throwing the stars into the sky - because the story suggests that the Law really isn’t clear to anyone - that confusion is part of our shared experience of this world, not a personal defect of mine). 

In the early morning I found the RV in the campsite driveway and the owners’ stuff on the table. I packed up quickly and left, embarrassed that I had poached on someone else’s claim. 

It was 7am when I arrived with my pack, all set and ready to go, at the entrance to the campground. Melody had told me Tim would arrive at 7:30am instead of 9am - (once they heard I arrived the night before) - but now, at just 7am,  I saw a white car approaching the campground and knew it would be Tim. He had left at 4am and arrived at 7am. I was so glad I was ready!

The ride back with Tim was amazing. I found myself falling in love with the landscape and dreaming of hiking more in Northern Arizona and Utah. Tim who knows and loves the landscape loved sharing it with me. I felt deep peace and happiness.  I think we both did. 

The high point of the journey was our stop at a place (whose name I do not remember) where the Hopi (I think ) used to stop on their first night on the sacred pilgrimage to the Grand Canyon to gather salt. Tim pointed out the petroglyphs and when I wondered outloud what story they told, he said that he had been told that each one represented a clan. So when I looked at a series of cornstalks I imagined a clan with that symbol and year after year the carver saying “Here I am” (or “Here we are”) and while carving aware of the ancestors who had gone having been here before, and carved their symbol into the rock, and the descendents who come after who would be here later and add their symbol. Tim and I talked about rapid change in the world and how different it must have felt to be so connected both to place and to the presence of past and future generations repeating the same pilgrimage. (Also a high point for me was when the sign said no entry without a permit from the tribe or tribes - the tribal names probably Hopi and Navajo had been scratched out - and Tim just decided to enter anyway. It made me wish I could show Tim and Melody the sacred burial grounds on Orcas at Madrona Point, which the Lummi Nation has closed to visitors because some were going off trail - mostly homeless young people I think, who would probably go on disregarding the sign). Anyway photo 3 shows some aspects of this place - whose sacredness I think we both felt. 

It was wonderful to return to Tim and Melody’s welcoming home and fall into the arms of their hospitality. They have a spacious upstairs room with bathroom (including a huge jacuzzi bathtub) that they offer to their hiker guests. I discovered the balcony this year with its view and with the sound of their backyard fountain. An utterly peaceful place (Photo 4 combines views from the balcony with a close up of the fountain - meant to suggest the sound. ) 

When Melody and Tim invited me to stay two more nights (instead of going to the hostel) I became aware of fairly intense fear. I sat on the balcony and used my old EBT skills (I kept saying alternately “I feel afraid that... “ and “I feel secure that...” I felt afraid of making the wrong decision - of staying, getting overwhelmed by social exhaustion, and saying or doing something that might hurt or harm them or our relationship. And I felt afraid of going and having that damage or harm in some way, or of it being a refusal to receive fully the gift of their caring for me. But when I practiced (and surely this is a social skill) looking at the “other side,” digging inside myself to find secure feelings, I realized that even in all the fear I felt secure that I (and they and our relationship) were all part of a larger “unconscious design.” That I could feel secure that  my decision whatever it was would form a part of that greater unconscious design. There I sat on the beautiful balcony of their home feeling that deep sigh of trust (and chest opening and breath entering) - and realizing that I was practicing social skills by practicing balancing emotions (in this case balancing fear and security). As I write about it, the work of balancing emotions seems similar to the art of balancing rocks - and I think of the little cairn I made on the picnic table. 

Monday morning Tim and Melody and I visited the Museum of Northern Arizona - which Tim had talked about during our drive. I loved seeing the pottery, jewelry, tools, mocassins from different places and  times - yet perhaps my greatest joy was when the three of us walked a small trail into and through and out of a lovely little canyon beside the museum. Tim joked that we were walking to Utah and it did feel like a small symbolic pilgrimage (and an honoring of the original dream/plan that Melody and I had made to walk that together, and then that Chris’s Sicily dream had made it impossible for me to do at a time that worked for Melody.) Tim started to sing “this is the song that never ends” and it reminded me of writing in this blog about granddaughter Amanda and great granddaughter Cora and I had a secure feeling that even in all the rapid change of our modern world our desire to keep love and friendship and the generations going - to hand life and the future on - is a song that will never end as long as we exist as a species. 

Photo 5 shows Tim and Melody at the edge of the canyon before we started our walk on the little path. Photo 6 shows me toward the end. I realized I had forgotten to ask someone to take the usual celebratory photo of me at the monument marking the end of the Arizona Trail. But in some sense this walk with Tim and Melody represented more fully the completion of my hike/pilgrimage (especially considering that I saw it as a pilgrimage to Ribbon Falls and so about the emergence of social relationships out of darkness into light - and perhaps that has come to mean for me, paradoxically, both a clearer ability to perceive ‘right relationship’ between people and a deeper acceptance of the inevitable confusion and lack of clarity, and a trust that they can be part of a larger unconscious design that embraces opposites, like darkness and light, curse and blessing, harm and help, as all part of something mysterious and beautiful). 

By the way, just in case you notice that I am not dressed in my dirty hiker clothes, the outfit I am wearing in the photo was found in the hiker box at Tim and Melody’s. There seemed to be a lot of tiny stickers in the pants, which Melody as an Arizona resident was used to dealing with, she just got some tough tape and rubbed my butt with it til the stickers were all gone. Melody’s a no-nonsense, blunt, outspoken, doing-what-needs-to-be-done kind of a gal. Which makes her a lot of fun, deeply lovable and (as she herself so winningly acknowledges) difficult. 

People have always been an important part of these trail walks. Mostly we have met and parted, though I did have the surprise accidental reconnection with Meander (with whom I began my PCT hike) near the end of it. Tim mentioned that he is also a recluse and much as he loves all the people from so many different places that he meets as a trail angel during hiker season, he also loves when the season is over and life gets quiet again. At heart he is a hermit. 

But these relationships sometimes continue. Tim and Melody invited for dinner Sunday night their young friends Peter and Esther (early thru hikers who actually lived with them four months while finding their own place in Flagstaff, now 8 months pregnant with their first child - and Esther’s mother - also an AZT hiker - being the person with whom Melody actually hiked part of the trail  she originally planned to hike with me). 

Melody later said maybe it had been too much for me to be with them when I first came off the trail. Well - yes - both too much and just right. 

Let me end with a photo of Melody and their dogs Noah and Tiber. I fell almost as much in love with their dogs as with Tim and Melody last year. I love how Tiber is listening to Melody. 

So here I am. I made the decision to move to the hostel and, though ambivalent, was relieved to be free of the complexity of human interaction. I stayed in my room from 2pm on, didn’t even take a walk or go out for dinner. Just wanted to be alone and digest my experience. I just now awakened at 1 am (its now almost 2:30) and decided to finish the blog. 

I have the feeling that the blog is a bit “too much” too, but I’m willing to trust it as part of the unconscious design. I think this will be my last blog for this trail. It’s been a long walk and an important one for me. Including the Sicily “detour” (and the way giving priority to Chris’s dream and braving the social trail of the tour turned out to be a part of this pilgrimage, even if that connection is expressed mostly implicitly here - perhaps through the theme of practicing social skills, introduced by Peter Downing in relation to the Sicily tour) - and how it changed the walk. Including the fact that I did not know - I really did not know - if my feet could do it - and they did. 

Including - most of all - your willingness to walk with me, making the reflections and connections in this blog possible. 

Oh - and there’s always one more thing. (Especially for River who has a hard time with endings). There’s a dream of another trail - maybe a whole different kind of hike with day-hikes from a rented camper-van in Utah, maybe with Chris - or maybe another solo hike on a wilderness trail like Colorado or New Mexico. AND there’s a dream of another group lecture tour with Chris - this one exploring the world of her (and my) beloved Professor Freud - visiting London (where he died), Vienna, Prague (to visit Nearby Pribor where he was born and also the camp at Terezin where his sisters died), Salzburg (the site of the first International Congress of Psychoanalysis), and Bad Gastein (a bath and favorite vacation and resting place for Freud). For me, for whom The Freud of my imagination has been such an important analyst, teacher, soul guide and beloved friend, this will be a pilgrimage and also I think an exploration of the relationship (harmonies, connections, conflicts, tensions) between subjective (inner, imaginary, spirit) realities and objective (factual, historical) realities. 

So I am hoping these dreams may come true, and that I will have the opportunity to walk again with you through them. 

In the meantime, may you dream your life beautiful, and may your dreams come true. And thank you so much for walking with me. 

Bye for now. See you maybe next year.