Nothing That Is Gone In That Direction Comes Back

To figure out who you are you've got to make peace with who you used to be

Monday of this week marked five years since I finished my thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail.

Oh Christ, I can hear you thinking. It’s literally been five years and he still touches on this like every other newsletter. It’s like a study abroad kid still calling it Bar-THA-lona after graduation.

Well, that’s sort of the point of this missive. It has been a long time and I would like to close the loop and get on with finding new and interesting things to experience, and therefore write about.

When I look at the picture of myself sitting on top of that terminus, American flag on one side and Canadian on the other, I still feel a little humbled, proud, and wistful. I will never look like that again, never feel that particular moment of triumph and elation and exhaustion again. That chapter of my life is over, and I am on to other wonderful things that have been adventures in their own rite even if I didn’t expect them to. Marriage, dog ownership, cooking, bouldering, foraging. 

From this distance I can also see things I didn’t see before, when I was in the moment. I remember how disgusted I was with myself in 2017, the year after I finished. How could I have gone from being that skinny and strong to heavier than I ever had been before in such a short stretch of time? I hated myself for it for a while, even after I got back in the gym. That I had wasted an opportunity to build on my slimness and strength instead of being forced to hit the reset button on my body, again.

Now I know. I know that to be on trail like that, going that far each day, means pushing your body beyond where it’s reasonably meant to go. I was starving, pure and simple. And—as I learned from Nathaniel Philbrick’s excellent book In the Heart of the Sea—there is nothing to be done about what your body does afterwards, when the starving ends. It is still in full panic mode, driving the appetite high and absorbing every bit of what you eat. I was always going to rebound that way, biologically, unless I continued pushing myself past the point of sanity. Forgiveness is impossible without acceptance, I think. I’m still working on both pieces.

It feels a little weird to be so focused on my relationship with my body in an entry like this but thru-hiking is, if nothing else, an exercise in fully and completely inhabiting one’s body and all its attendant foibles and failures. I have never been more keenly aware of each and every connected part in my body as I was during those long nights alone in my tent, breathing in and out in the clean air of the woods and feeling my back and legs unclench and unwind. I would run my hands along my belly and marvel at how quickly it had disappeared, melted away into an athlete’s with the miles. I would flex and relax my calves and quads just to feel the muscles coil and solidify into shapes they had never made before. I was all weathered wood and iron. 

I need to remind myself that that version of me is not buried underneath my current layers of fat and skin and whatever else. It’s not anywhere, because it’s a fragment of the past, and nothing that is gone in that direction comes back. I need to make my peace with that, and move forward—as a hiker, yes, but also just as a person inhabiting a flesh-and-blood vessel—with a healthier understanding of who I am and what my body needs now. I need to let that old version of me go.

Perhaps because it felt fitting along this journey toward making peace with myself, and perhaps because it was simply a nice day when I had nothing much to do, I took a hike yesterday along a section of the PCT that terminated in the site of one of my many low moments during that adventure: Mirror Lake.

In 2016 I arrived at Mirror Lake above Snoqualmie Pass with some kind of devastating stomach thing going on. It was all in knots and draining the life out of me and I cut my hiking day short by six miles, which was something up to that point I had avoided at all costs. (“Making the miles” is another in the list of habits from that time I’m still trying to break. When you have to go 25-30 miles a day for months on end you start fooling yourself into thinking the point of hiking is getting to camp, not the hiking itself. I am working hard at slowing down and taking things in when I hike now.) I laid in my tent, annoyed at the happy, lively families who were making merry nearby, and passed an afternoon and evening in a state of tremendous self-pity. I think I had three Snickers bars for dinner.

Five years later it was a sunny day and I had a good dog with me. I carried a bell pepper, hoping to run into a thru-hiker I could gift it to—fresh stuff is hard to come by out there—and was rewarded within a half-hour of hitting the trail. Orla waited semi-patiently as I foraged for huckleberries and mountain blueberries. She sniffed curiously at all the wondrous things out there, and why wouldn’t she? To her it was just another place, somewhere else to walk with me and breathe fresh air and soak in all the sounds.

We took a rest at the lake, and across the water I could see the spot where I had pitched my tent in misery all those years ago. I felt absolutely nothing. Just turned my face up into the warm sun and dunked my hat in the cool water. And then I got to pack my stuff up, grab my dog, and point my feet back toward home.

Thanks, as always, for reading. Normally this is where I say “I’ll talk to you next week” but I think I’m gonna take a little newsletter break for the next few weeks. Who knows!

-Chuck