What You Can't Carry With You
One meditation remains for me, the loudest lesson learned from life on foot: Internalize your sense of home, and you will never go without comfort.
Bones, my trail name, has evolved (as our monikers often do) to encapsulate a stripped-down and bare method of moving through the world with minimal attachment, the result of extended periods of living out of a backpack, then out of a vehicle, then off the grid in the remote West.
What I do is messy, and it's incongruent with any other type of way I've ever learned to live. It's a perpetual question of minimalism informing lifestyle vs. lifestyle informing minimalism. A constant question of choice, but it allows ample space for growth if growth is your thing.
It is never precisely as it seems either. There are numerous misconceptions about what it means to boondock, thru-hike, travel in any capacity.
Our imagination fills in the gaps in between Instagram captions.
There's always a party in town, an art or music event, a friend with a couch; there's a job out west.
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Siri, open Tinder.
It's thinking like a mammal and ruminating on the construct of "wilderness." Its picking things up and putting them back down.
It's being proficient at starting over, at becoming a stranger and learning as a beginner. It gets easier each time to the point that leaving becomes your drug of choice.
It's holding no expectations and letting go of attachments.
It's an exploration of loose skills that transcend "real life" while simultaneously informing it. I acknowledge that life on the road is a series of orbits and rhythms often out of form with one another. I began by connecting dots of experiences between hiking season, and I've effectively done little more than extrapolating my thru-hiking experience to sustain something marginally broader. I am obsessed with the sensation of space itself as much as the iconic historical imagining of the West. I give credit for this obsession to my Texas upbringing - a place that, despite evoking depth with its sheer vastness, remains lacking in other nuance.
Something snapped in my mid-20s: a Saturn return, a messy breakup, a shift in priority. I wish I could trace this catharsis to a measurable point, but the slow spirals of life are gradually leaned into and often less thematic than we'd like to pretend. Our vision tends to fragment long before we notice it doing so. We might wake up somewhere far from home with little recollection of the choices that led us there, or at least this has been my experience.
Suffice it to say I was content before leaving, but some uncharacteristic (for the time) boldness shook me in my sleep to say, "this is absolutely worth risking unhappiness." I'd dedicated my life to self-expression, mostly through music, which was seeming trite and a bit self-indulgent with each bleary-eyed month of restaurant work and routine. Passions fade with the seasons, and fuses reach their bitter end. As abruptly as I left Texas for Nashville at 18 to follow a whim, in 2017, I disembarked the familiar again on a chance opportunity to guide backpacking tours on the active volcanoes near Antigua, Guatemala. My eyes opened abruptly to adventure in a way I'd never allowed, and my threshold for experiencing the natural world was amplified.
The western states and a longer hike seemed a logical next step.
Thus began a currently-standing trend of being wholly and indisputably in over my head, as a lifestyle.
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Before hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, I had never set foot in California, Oregon, or Washington. Before hiking the Arizona Trail, I had never set foot in Arizona.
Before the volcano gig, I had never been on my own in a foreign country. Overland travel, thru-hiking, dirtbag travel, living on BLM, or in National Forest - main fixtures of my current routine are all so intricately interwoven that it is often a challenge to disassociate them. How I shop and save, how I interact with locals, how I recreate - all fundamentally affected by minimal, bare-bones extended travel, or as I've often coined, vocational tourism. That is to say, life without predictability.
I've learned to seek solace in what truly little I can control, like what foods I eat, how I occupy myself, and to let the rest go.
"The trail provides," our time-tested trail adage, becomes "You are exactly where you need to be."
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To curb inevitable post-trail culture shock, I dove headfirst back into reality as a tourist. Hobbling gained plural definitions while hitching to Vancouver from the northern terminus. Blind drunk and clad in black rain gear dancing awkwardly at a goth night in East Van, too far from home to know embarrassment, I counted my last jingling coins for PBRs with new friends. Eyes glued to the opiate horrors of East Hastings and the disapproving gazes the general public displays towards pedestrians in cities, I dwelled in the weight of our culture, and it's lack of regard for the atypical. Too far from the trail community to be relevant, hovering somewhere between privilege and destitution. Far from the urban bastions of late-stage gentrification in cities like Asheville or Austin where the lingering semblance of progress masks mass evictions and the negligence infused depravity of the decaying urban West. Oh, California…
My documentary-induced wild west vision has evolved and remodeled itself to include the subsequent truths about our role in the true and gritty stories of these places, far past the flashes of histories that have inspired other brainy white guys to act out their privileges by waxing poetic for a unilateral audience.
The Western US is both home to our cultural revolution's high-water mark and the front line in the battle for equity in the natural world. It holds the breath of our identity regardless of how positively or negatively our identity is viewed, and is a stark and sobering glimpse of the future of this identity. It's difficult to speak coherently about the relationship to the land as a modern individual, and even more challenging to discuss with folks who haven't experienced our public lands in the way we are privileged to while thru-hiking. Nevertheless, we ramble on the disruptive nature of the lifestyle bleeding in through to every inch of life.
Eager to find my bearings and drawn to the Northwest's ethereal pulses, I turned attention to the San Juan Islands, searching for work. Washington is my spiritual home, or at least I felt so in the summertime. Mesmerized, I hitched south from BC to Bellingham, where a wandering shelterless Buddhist monk blessed my pilgrimage out to the ferry in Anacortes. We roamed the streets for a day, in deep meditative session on sleepy back roads lined with blackberry bushes and Sunday drivers. He illustrated the ether hanging low over the region and the nature of its unique reality. The instruction I received that day echoes still - that you are the universe experiencing a human body, not the other way around.
"The islands only open themselves up to you when you're ready, and close themselves off when their work with you is finished," someone would tell me years later, of the same archipelago.
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I never made it back to Washington in the Fall of '18, despite no less than three occupational opportunities and a fierce crush struck on the ferry out to Orcas. In a way, when I remember my shamanic encounter in Bellingham as if at this particular juncture, I defied fate and slipped resoundingly into an alternate timeline. Perhaps I wasn't ready.
Nevertheless, it was October, and the final PCT hikers were crossing into Canada for the year. The fever pitch of trail life was dissolving into the changing season. Wheels turned in time with the harvest season in Northern California, and I found myself drifting again. Working my way at first through gigs in familiar towns, then by tugging at strings of connections, I found myself on the fringes, many miles up labyrinthine dirt roads in secret gardens, beyond sight of anyone except by air. Leaning into the task, I embraced the timelessness of being off the grid and being married so inseparably still to the climate and physical ramifications of living outdoors. I thought of myself as a potted plant, photosynthesizing, sitting in the sun with the other flora, feeling as old as a redwood tree, and content as can be. I could stare off into the vastness of the mountains and reflect somberly of the great distances I had walked with my friends in the months prior. A scramble occurred as we evacuated the farm where I was working from that year's historic forest fires. Being the most flexible in terms and obligation, the shuffle supplied an extended stay in the region that carried over until I finally bailed to Arizona to hike again in the following spring.
In Flagstaff, after hiking from Mexico to Utah in late spring of 2019, I'd work a rural mail route six days a week, performing trail magic on Sundays and servicing Arizona Trail resupply boxes throughout to fill my days. It was still seasonable then for northbounders, so I maintained a water cache just north of town, knowing when to restock it based on the volume of traffic passing my Horse Lake Mesa campsite, just a day's hike south of Flag. Occasionally I would link up at a brewery with folks passing through, entertaining the role of trail angel and subliminally nervous about dipping my toe too far from the trail community. As the season bent into the monsoon, I'd wake hurriedly to the sound of rain on the roof of the truck parked in the Coconino, panicking about mud and my lack of 4-wheel drive. In June that year, we had a winter storm advisory, a firm reminder of the equipment necessary to sustain life at 7,000'. Keeping to myself, I never confided my living situation to coworkers until turning in a two-week notice. California was calling again, and after a lengthy detour through the vistas of Utah, I found myself yet again facing West.
When you aren't rooted, you're waking up with yourself every morning as a stranger. You rely on coffee shops for free wifi, learn how to sustain yourself on the fewest ingredients, shower at truck stops, brush your teeth at red lights, question the nature of every interaction. You learn to laugh deeper and easier, move fast when necessary, and take the scenic route. The irony of choosing indigence over comfort can be found in every shred of truth hanging in the balance of our monologue.
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It's an exploration of skills that transcend "real life" while simultaneously informing it. To describe my experience is equal parts personal and unmentionable. I am challenged and impressed by the extremities of the human spirit and our tendency to push ourselves beyond comfort. The achievements of my peers will, in my mind, always be the driving inspiration to continue to push my limits.
In transience, you're always a tourist but also always a local. There's a strange and odd comfort in the art of being nobody, about walking with silent intention. You're introduced and characterized as "my traveling friend" to someone's parents or "my hiker trash pal" at a holiday party.
You're stringing together near-arbitrary connections to fulfill a momentary sense of belonging. You strive for the authenticity of community and buckle as it forms and reforms around you. In a way, this is as organic as community can be because relationship often becomes the fixed point in an ocean of uncertainty. People are the hardest to let go of.
The question remains in the search for simplicity: what do you really leave behind? When everything is subject to the chopping block, it's hard to know in terms of relationships if things are simplified or are they just given up on.
A grim acceptance arrived this year as I celebrated my final 20-something birthday again in the mountains alone. The older I get, the more difficult it is to explain my life, and the less I feel inclined to. It's all subject to change as it always has been, and that's the only guarantee. In a way, it can feel like forcing space for myself within the narratives of friends with more traditional definitions of stability, telling stories of bygone chapters of life that share no resemblance at all to anything present, forfeiting to platitudes of family members wishing that you "do whatever makes you happy," and then resolving to honor this in the only way known, by leaning in and barreling full-tilt into yet another sunset.
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