Hiking the Pacific Crest Trail: Respect

December 5, 2014

This is the second installment of a three-part essay on hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, which stretches 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada.

On the trail there are no books, no movies, no alcohol, and often no one to talk to. Nothing but putting one foot in front of the other and my thoughts for five days. At one point, I found myself in a pit of utter loneliness and despair, thinking of all my mistakes. Then I met a grizzled hiker named Dream Laugher. He told me a long story but it’s the end which stuck with me. He said:  "..and that was something I did right." That made me wonder what I had done right. 

And while that thought was still in my head, I read a letter from a friend which included another story—this one about a Buddhist monk who only saw his failures. The monk had built a wall with two bricks out of place. He was ashamed of that wall until one day a construction worker said, "That's a nice wall." "Are you insane?" said the monk. "Can't you see that there are two bad bricks?"  The construction worker replied, "I see those two bad bricks, but I also see 998 good bricks."

And so I started thinking about the good bricks. I stood on the rim of Crater Lake with water so blue it almost hurt to look at. And I started to let go. I walked by another clear mountain lake with snowbanks dripping into it and a rainbow reflected in its clear, cold water. There were a thousand shards of obsidian rock scattered about like black holes refusing to reflect even a glimmer of the surrounding wildflowers. And with each step, I let go a little more. And in the process of letting go of the thousand mistakes that I've made I began to find something. Respect. For myself, for the first time in my life.

For a while I thought the trail was a beautiful microcosm of life. Food, exercise, beauty. Generous people. Magic. And then I thought, why does it have to be a microcosm? 

People ask me what I thought about for all those hours, all those miles. The answer is everything. My mind never shut off, even if I wanted it to. Sometimes I obsessed about food. I just wanted to curl up with a nice hot pan of lasagna or chow down on some samosas. I think about what I'll do when I get off the trail, what I've done in the past, or sometimes I just daydream. I get songs stuck in my head. I swear I had the song "Santa Monica" stuck in my head for at least a week. Do I ever get bored? Sometimes. But I remind myself of something I read before I left: "Considering the depths of the human soul it's amazing that we would ever get bored with one another." I think the same is true for the environment.

Even just walking down a mountain or to a different face you can find yourself in an entirely different habitat. The complexity of even a single yew, ponderosa pine, aspen, or juniper is nothing short of spectacular.

Photos of the Pacific Crest Trail courtesy of Luke DeGroote.