The Things I Remember Best Are Not Things
Five years of trying to reckon with a Pacific Crest Trail adventure, plus pie
As this period of national stagnation starts to show signs of ending, promising the return of the gift of new experiences, I find myself wracked by nostalgia. Lately it seems like I have a need to exorcise some of it onto the page while we’re still mostly at a standstill.
Last week’s newsletter looked back a year, to the death of John Prine. And today’s date marks five years since I stepped out of real life and onto the Pacific Crest Trail, a thin and winding footpath from Mexico to Canada.
I will try not to wax poetic for too long. The last thing I want to be is some kind of adult version of your friend who studies abroad for a semester and talks about nothing but Bar-tha-lona for the next decade. Plus I already wrote an entire book about the whole ordeal, and if I couldn’t say it in those 392 pages it was probably for a good reason.
But the one thing I do want to share is that I have a single nagging regret about the experience. I have this same regret about my year teaching English in the Marshall Islands, a very small portion of which I described last month. What I regret is simply this: that I didn’t make more of it when I was out there. That I didn’t squeeze the life out of experiences I knew on some level I would never get to have again.
In large part this failure to seize the moment stemmed from the fact that while I was in the middle of doing these things, they felt like they would never end, even on good days. I mean this both positively and negatively—positively in “I’ll always be here, so there’s always tomorrow to take more advantage,” negatively as in “This is never going to end and I need to retreat inward to save myself.”
It wasn’t until I was maybe a hundred miles from the Canadian border that I lost the suspicion that I was a fraud, that I would never finish my thru-hike. It wasn’t until I was on the boat leaving Aur, the island I had called home for 11 months, that I felt like I was ever going to get out of the Marshall Islands and back to the US. If I know a single thing about my life it’s that I’ve created plenty of opportunities to feel lonely and unsure of myself.
Being on trail was its own kind of lonely because I felt so alienated from most other people I encountered out there. Not that I was better than them—most days I was sure I didn’t stack up at all—but because they all seemed so loose and relaxed, as willing to party as they were to hike. And all I really wanted to do was walk, because it was walking that would bring me home again to everything I was missing. Fortunately I found “my people” out there, or they found me, and in the end it was the people that made the walking and the missing and the loneliness worth it anyway.
It was the same on Aur. I wasn’t shut up indoors and missing every experience, certainly. I had a few friends I could talk to and I was sure to be picked high for basketball, being the third-tallest person on the island. But I did read Infinite Jest and the Lord of the Rings trilogy three times each and still finish 60 other novels before my year was up, which in hindsight tells me that I could’ve done with a little more socializing, too. I should have asked my host dad to take me fishing once or twice, should have accepted more polite invitations to eat at other people’s tables. I taught with sunburn and food poisoning and dengue fever, having completely eroded the barrier between my work and my life. I should have taken a day of school off, here or there.
This is all to say that I need to keep working at remembering and internalizing the old saw that This Too Shall Pass, because everything does, which is no less true for being so trite.
Anyway, now we’ve got that out of the way: how about some pie?
In planning out this Pacific Crest Trail pie it was hard not to fall into the trap of going straight back into the “berries and pine needles” motif that formed the basis for my Olympic National Park pie a few months ago. There are just as many evergreen trees and wild berries in the Cascades as there are Olympics, and it would have been an easy crossover. But the Pacific Crest Trail spans all sorts of ecosystems and terrains and I wanted to find some way to incorporate those things as well as my own fond memories (of which there are many, despite what you might assume from the mopey paragraphs above).
We’re still doing berries, though. Wild blackberries grow everywhere in the PNW, invasive species that they are, and I’m not sure any will ever taste as good as those that my friend City Time and I picked while lesisurely hiking the last hot, dusty miles into Seiad Valley, California, the last town before the Oregon border and home of a diner with a sinful blackberry milkshake.
As a tribute to the desert section of the trail, those first 700ish miles, I decided to incorporate sage into the mix as well. Sage grows everywhere along that stretch and makes for both a nice addition to a rehydrated backpacking meal and a quick emergency deodorant. It’s also very easy to grow at home, although this year’s crop is still in the sprouting stage and I had to go with store-bought. Like the fir needles in my PNW pie, I blitzed the sage with a measure of sugar in my grinder to make sure it fully incorporated. (I shredded some more and stirred it through my bowl of blackberries, too—I really can’t get enough of the stuff.)
If I wanted to make this an authentic PCT pie I knew that my filling needed to be soaked in bourbon, in honor of the bottles my trail friends and I packed out onto the John Muir Trail from Mammoth Lakes. It felt good to buck the “ultralite” consensus and carry something heavy that would make the nights warmer. However, that $30 bottle ended up costing me plenty, as the Mammoth Lakes liquor store ATM stole my debit card information and emptied out my meager checking account while I strolled unknowingly through the wilderness. I spent half my time in Yosemite on the phone with the bank instead of enjoying the park.
As a final addition—and one I’m sad to report you won’t be able to replicate at home, unless you live in this part of the country and are willing to wait a few months—I infused the bourbon with fireweed before pouring it into the bowl of filling. I encountered fireweed for the first time on the PCT, and it has remained my favorite wildflower ever since. It grows best and brightest in places that have been ravaged and destroyed by fire, and there’s probably a lesson buried in there somewhere.
Last summer my buddy Will and I took a weekend trip up into Glacier Peak Wilderness, my first foray back onto the PCT since 2016. On our way out we harvested enough fireweed from the roadside to fill the back of his Subaru. I turned the flowers into a jelly and I used an old Russian method to ferment the leaves, which when dried taste like a fruity black tea. I steeped a bag of this blend into the whiskey (with a little hot water to help it along) to complete the Pacific Crest Trail aesthetic I was aiming for with this pie.
On this go-round I solved some of my crust issues by carefully following the steps laid out in Detroit’s Sister Pie recipe book, one of my two go-to pie resources. (If you read the story of my Marshall Islands pie you know how badly I jacked that crust up—I could never seem to get the dough to roll out right, prior to this.) I had been over-hydrating and overworking and over-cooling and over-flouring this whole time, and by cutting back on all of those things I was able to execute a beautifully round and smooth dough.
This has all gone on way too long—the recipe is below if you want it. Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next week.
-Chuck
Pacific Crest Trail Pie
1 Butter & Lard Crust (recipe and ingredients here)
24 oz blackberries (fresh or frozen)
4-6 oz fresh sage (shredded)
1 cup white sugar
Zest of 1/2 lemon
1/4 cup cornstarch
1 tsp salt
3 oz bourbon
1 tsp fireweed tisane (optional)
Make the crust. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight.
Blitz half the sugar and half the sage together in a clean coffee grinder.
Combine remaining sage, remaining sugar, blackberries, lemon zest, salt, and cornstarch in a large mixing bowl. Mix gently with a wooden spoon.
Add blitzed sage sugar and mix gently.
Add bourbon and mix gently.
(If using fireweed: Steep 1 tea bag or tea ball of fireweed tisane in bourbon before adding the bourbon. Add 2-3 oz boiling water; let steep and sit until room temperature. Then add liquid to berry mixture.)
Use slotted spoon to fill the pie so that bulk of liquid drains out of berry mixture.
Bake at 375° for 40 minutes.
PS - If you liked what you read here, why not subscribe and get this newsletter delivered to your inbox each week? It’s free and always will be.