Kaibab Camper Village, zero day. May 31.

Kaibab Camper Village, zero day. May 31. 

Dear Trail Friends,

It is past 6:30 and I had hoped to tuck myself in early - around 6 - and wake up early and start hiking before dawn. I still hope to but I do want to write a little bit about my rest here. It did turn out to be deeply restful. And I did get to practice my social skills. 

Yesterday afternoon I walked along a lovely little up and down trail between Kaibab Camper Village where I am staying and Jacob Lake Inn. I was hoping to have a beer and use guest WiFi at the restaurant, or to take advantage of a last minute cancellation and get a room that had WiFi. 

On the way I met Corette (photos 1 and 2). I wish I had a little video of her. Like Chris dancing her lectures, this woman spoke with so much embodied animation - hands, face,eyebrows - that I could feel her passion for life. 

Now it’s already a day ago and I doubt I can remember what we talked about. I know for sure she spoke of her Grand Canyon “roam” and I got curious. She talked about how she plans trips. Finding a place she dreams of seeing,like the Grand Canyon. Then studying the whole route between for opportunities to explore places or connect with people (such as I think maybe an uncle or great uncle and cousin that lived almost en route between her home in San Antonio Texas and the Grand Canyon. She planned several days on each rim giving herself freedom to discover how she would explore them. 

As we walked along she said she had four bars of coverage on her iPhone - and it was ATT. I tried mine but got the usual “no service.” Tried a restart. Still no service. I had heard the iPhone 8 was better - maybe it could pick up weaker service. But four bars when I got none? 

We walked along and she pointed to some branches and earth and needles piled up against a fence. She said that water must flow there sometimes, she recognized that as “wash” - we have it in Texas too, she said. Then she pointed out careful piles of wash that looked almost like burn piles “but they’re not,” she said. “They are to provide habitat for wildlife. We do that in Texas too.” Walking with her was like walking with Peter Downing - the way she noticed things and thought about them. (Photo 3)

She spoke of her one daughter - the person she usually travels with (they used to camp but bought a small trailer as a concession to her husband who does not like to travel and worried about them in a tent). The daughter couldn’t come on this trip because she was busy with graduate school. I asked and learned the daughter was studying biochemistry at Johns Hopkins. That brought a flood of memory of the summer after I graduated from college. I visited my friend Paul Patterson who was just finishing his PhD in biochemistry at Johns Hopkins. We became lovers and within a year I had dropped out of graduate school at U of Wisconsin (for reasons unrelated to Paul) and moved to Cambridge to join him where he was doing a postdoc at Harvard Medical School. Paul died a couple years ago and his widow Carolyn has written amazing emails about her walk through grief that have been an enormous gift to me. As was her generosity when he was dying -  calling to let me know, conveying my message of love to him. It’s funny I don’t think Corette was a very educated (in the schoolbook sense) woman but her clearly brilliant mind and her vibrant passion for life and learning were a lot like Paul’s. Is this part of practicing social skills? Noticing what to love about people?

Corette turned back after a bit and I walked to the Jacob Lake Inn - but there were no rooms at the inn and the restaurant wasn’t serving except full meals (I was not hungry - had eaten plenty of trail food and it was a little bit hot). They had a bar-like area but even there explained that they didn’t have the right kind of license to serve beer without food. I could buy a bottle of beer at the store if I wanted. In the end I bought a big bottle of smart water which I gulped lustfully down while paging through a photo book called Beyond the Wave about hiking in southern Utah in the less known places - the Wave for those of you like me who are ignorant of it - became a major destination after Microsoft used a photo of it as a screensaver. It’s a wild rock  formation which is like walking in and through wildly flowing waves of water. Those photos and photos of similar less sought after places filled me with physical longing to hike in Utah. This book was about day hikes though. I don’t think there is a long distance wilderness trail there. 

Anyway - walking back to the campground -my searches for WiFi thoroughly thwarted - but still having had quite a pleasant and restful afternoon - I was walking past the place where Corette had spoken of “wash” (I think that’s what she called it) and the piles created for habitat, enjoying remembering her energy, and took out my iPhone to take photo 3 (above) so I could share her story with you,when I noticed three bars of cell service on my iPhone. I had forgotten to turn it off and the damn thing had picked up a signal after telling me definitively “no service,” (it’s that kind of mixed message, Ms IPhone,that makes the whole subject of date rape so messy. Don’t say “no” unless you mean it!). So I learned a new fact about my iPhone. “No” does not always mean “no.” It means “wait and see.” Not only is it wise to restart it, it is also wise to wait at least a full minute after it tells me “no” to see if it really means it. 

But this changed EVERYTHING. I texted Chris. I started to edit and upload my blogs. Unfortunately it was getting dark so I decided to just upload them and forget about edits. Suddenly I was a happy camper. A rest day here? Why not. What a restful place - now that I had found cell service. 

I did manage to get lost on my way back focusing on uploading the blogs and not where I was going - and thinking it was a simple path where I could not make a wrong turn. I was mistaken. And nervous — since I had not brought my headlamp (I thought - actually it was in my pocket). I did use my iPhone light and I did make it to my tent and I discovered upload all five blogs - a bit of an accomplishment since they took about 3 minutes each and I had to keep watching the screen and tapping it if it tried to go to sleep (which I know from experience aborts the upload). 

So I slept well - and I did have a weak signal even in my tent so Chris and I have been able to talk several times (for the first time since I left). I also - in firming up my plans for the end of the trail - got a generous offer I could not refuse. Tim (of trail angels Tim and Melody I fell so in love with last spring - Melody and I were going to do this hike together but Chris’s Sicily tour upstaged our plan and she didn’t want to hike this late in the season because of the heat - but she is coming to see me on Orcas this coming June - Tim will visit briefly then go spend time with his daughter in Seattle) - I have to stop and catch my breath, that’s another of those sentences that never ends (remember the song our granddaughters taught us the summer we took them to Europe? This is the song that never ends, yes it goes on and on my friends, somebody started singing it not knowing what it was, now they’ll continue singing it forever just because, this is the song that never ends...and speaking of songs that never end, Amanda who was 13 then and now is in her early 30s became the mother this spring of Cora George. So there was a sentence back there that began with Tim and the gist of it is that Tim is going to drive all the way from Flagstaff to the end of the trail to meet me when I arrive. Our “date” is for 9am - I don’t know how long a drive it is but I imagine it is many hours. The canyon south to north rim drive is 200 miles, for example. And Flagstaff is I think south of south rim and the trail end is north of the north rim. But my apple and google maps don’t know how to find the stateline campground so I can’t ask them how long the drive is. “This is a big deal” I told Melody. “We love you,” she said. Now there is a social skill I need to practice. Learning to receive love. Of course they fell in love with me, just as I did with them. Duh. 

I want to reread the part of my blog about my time with them before I see them again - refresh my memory and re-open my heart. 

What else did I do today? I took a nap. I went to the laundry room to recharge my phone and sew up a hole in the butt of my pants (there’s another one now but I’m not doing any more sewing today). In the laundry room, I met a woman named Mary Ellen who was a sixth grade English teacher from - oh dear I am not sure I remember where. I know it was not a big city. Maybe 17,000 inhabitants. So she goes to the tire store, the grocery store, the school and meets her former students now playing their adult roles in life. “A lot of people in this city are your students” her grandson says. She loved teaching them and when she travelled because her husband’s work involved reward trips for buyers or distributors or some such - she would come home and learn all about the place and create a curriculum about it. One of the books she loved to teach was Mocassin Trail, a novel about the Oregon trail. That’s a trail I wish were a wilderness trail I could hike. 

Mary Ellen told stories about her great grandfather who came west to avoid fighting in the civil war, of her grandfather who lost an arm (from falling on a track in front of a train as a boy) but who managed to become both a judge and a superintendent of schools, so that as she grew up she could say to herself, if grandfather could to all that with only one arm, certainly I can do this. 

Photo 4 is Mary Ellen. So I am really training my social skills. I actually had a lot of nice interactions with people in the laundry room. Interactions that were relaxed and not stressful. 

Did I mention walking over to the Inn and having breakfast there and relaxed conversation with the young waiter? And then talking with Chris on the trail “home” (to my campsite) - the trail is where the best cell service is. 

So what more? I was going to talk to you about Jacob Lake that turns out to be barely a pond now but that has an important role in history (Mormon and cattle rearing history) as the only year round water source on the Kaibab plateau - and about the white tailed Kaibab squirrels that exist only in this plateau. 

But I didn’t really have the energy to read much about them myself. But in case you have more energy than I do: photo 5 is Jacob Lake (with privies in foreground) more or less from my tent. Photo 6 and 7 are photos I took of info posted about Jacob Lake in the campground office. Sorry they are indecipherable but that’s the breaks. Photo 8 is about Kaibab squirrels. Their tails are very white. If I see another one I will try to get you a photo. 

Oh I forgot to tell you. At breakfast I practiced social skills by looking at people and imagining them as all coming from somewhere and having stories. As having joys and sorrows, seeking to love and be loved, to accomplish things and gain respect from self and others, and sometimes succeeding and sometimes failing. That made me look at them curiously (instead of fearfully). But I watched one young girl shrink away from the man beside her (her father, I assumed) and saw what seemed to me a sad hopeless look on her face and I felt a strong - well, to use an Arizona word - flash flood of pain. This led to many reflections about the ways I seem to lack certain boundaries. Whether the pain I feel when I “sense” others pain is real or imagined, or both, the fact is I get flooded. I don’t seem to have quite the sense of boundaries others have. And I cope with pain by making up and telling stories. And so all my life I have trespassed because what to others is clearly not my pain or my story feels to me like my pain and my story. This got me to reflecting that my fear and avoidance of people started very early with my sister Bonnie and my not “getting” the boundaries between her pain and my pain, her story and my story. And it being unbearable to me that I then became a cause of more pain to her (by violating her privacy) and she a cause of more pain to me (by her anger). So that was one way human interaction became unsafe for me. It was amazing how flooded I was by this young girl’s real or imagined pain. It gave me a lot of compassion for myself as a child. 

So hurray for me. I really am practicing social skills and training myself in trust. It’s a lot harder than walking solo on a wilderness trail. But it can be very beautiful too. 

Thank you for walking with me. See you tomorrow on the trail.