“Armageddon In Retrospect”

AT Day 106

Miles Today: 0

AT Mile: 1709.3

(Yellow Deli Hiker Hostel)

Today is July 25th.

I used to think that July 25th would be one of my most celebrated days of the year. But things often don’t turn out the way that we think they’re going to turn out. Whether that’s for the better or for the worse, I don’t know.

I thought that July 25th would be a joyous date in my life, but it’s turned out to be a yearly reminder of my feelings of isolation and loss.

Which in the end is just another *thing* to get through, like everything else.

—

I didn’t get the chance to write as much as I wanted to last night. To be sure, I *did* write last night, but of the ten thousand things that I wanted to get onto the page, I only managed about seven.

The excuse has been my lack of a keyboard for the last week, but now that I’m back at Rutland, I was able to get my new keyboard and can’t pretend that’s what prevented me from writing more until now; I had other excuses.

It was all the distractions that prevented me last night. All of the excitement of having completed the Long Trail, the access to food, conversation with my friend from Arizona and the few other hikers here whom I haven’t seen in many hundreds of miles. It was the ice cream. It was the going to dinner with my friend from Arizona. It was calling Boots to check in. It was ordering my supplies for the next trail town. It was reaching out to my friend to have my next pair of trail shoes shipped ahead…

We’ve been through this before…

It shouldn’t sound like anything new. But perhaps the take away is that we, as people, live dazzlingly complex lives, and just because we change the context or main storyline of these lives, doesn’t mean we should expect our day to day existence to be any less dazzlingly complex. Life on the trail is a lot like life off the trail, and a scatter brain on trail is still a scatter brain in a trail town.

—

I do worry a little bit after days like today, and how scattered I feel–how difficult I find it to hold more than one thought in mind at a time. I get flustered and overwhelmed more easily out here than I remember back before the trail. There could be a lot of things causing that, but I suspect that much of it is a product of the simplicity of the trail.

On the trail you get a routine, and every day sort of follows a similar unfolding. You wake, you break camp, you hike, you filter water, you set camp, and you go to sleep. That’s the basic premise of every day. But then when I get into a trail town there are a whole bunch of things to do, and basically none of them are the priorities that I have on a day on trail.

When I get to town I love all the luxuries, but I come to the edge of panic attack when I have to walk down the road in a town like Rutland. Actually… the Rutland part has a lot to do with it, I’m sure. There’s a bad drug problem here. Bad bad. It’s obvious after walking the streets for thirteen seconds.

But I walk down the street to try and go to the store and I nearly breakdown with the traffic zooming by, the car horns, the train going by, the speaker blairing music, the “Help Find Jessica” poster, the guy with two amputated legs rolling down the sidewalk beside me, the dog shit that the owner never picked up, the advertisements to eat at every fast food restaurant you can think of, the thought that I’ll have to be back in this world again after the trail, the thought that just because I’ve been on my hike doesn’t mean that my world is magically better after it’s done, the… the… the…

If you’ve been reading me from the beginning you know that I can keep going with these lists. The items and the lists don’t matter though. They’re merely examples of the point.

The point being–I find myself getting overwhelmed in trail towns more lately. And I worry about how that’s going to manifest after the trail.

—

I’m taking a Zero in Rutland at the Yellow Deli, intentionally to rest physically and in all of the other ways. I needed to get my mind off of hiking. I needed time to write, refeed, and relax.

I literally *needed* a day to reflect.

Writing happens to be one of the primary way I accomplish that task.

I don’t want for this hike just to happen and then be done. I want to take in what I can and capture what there is to be captured within the experience.

I needed to reflect.

And so here we are.

—

I wanted to reflect back on the Long Trail. I wanted to use this journal to talk about those eleven days after parting from the Appalachain Trail and completing the Long Trail.

Those were amongst the most unique and important days that I’ve had since starting this hike in Georgia, and I had a lot of time to think back on the Appalachain Trail and on life outside of the trail since I’ve been on the LT.

—

Separation Anxiety was a big part of my 11 days that I spent off the Appalachain Trail. As I wrote in my other journals, it caught me off guard how emotionally wrecked I felt after leaving the Appalachian Trail to hike the Long Trail. I hadn’t realized how much security and safety I’d found in the AT until taking a left turn at the Maine Junction to follow the LT to Canada for the last 11 days.

That day was the 14th of July… two years to the date of when my exfiance called off our wedding and led to the end of our relationship. It was also one year to the date when the only other woman I’ve dated seriously since the engagement called it off too.

It wasn’t until leaving the Appalachian Trail on July 14th that I came to realize that this is a pattern in my life for the last three years: The things that bring me safety and security are taken from my life on the 14th of July.

All those same feeling from losing Danielle and losing Kristen came back after I left the AT for the Long Trail, although I didn’t know what was happening within myself as it was going on. All I knew was that I felt awful after making that departure. I felt alone, lost, and abandoned. Since I ended up going a few miles after the Maine Junction without seeing Plinko, I thought that maybe he’d left me too by staying on the Appalachian Trail. My heart was literally primed for abandonment.

One thing worth noting within this is that unlike the last two years, the departure from the AT was *my* choosing. It wasn’t thrust upon me like the loss of my last two relationships. But it still brought about those same feelings of being lost and abandoned. I spent long hours and miles with that contemplation–that it was just as hard for me to make the separation even though *I* was the one who chose to do it.

I reflected back on that song that impacted me so heavily a month or two back on the trail–Tool’s “Push It” (No, not the song by Salt N Peppa).

Before the mushroom trip on trail where I heard that song and came to a halt, I had never listened to that song from a third person point of view; I’d always thought of it from first person point of view. But to listen to it as the pleadings of a partner is what stopped me in my tracks. It led me to better understand my ex’s decision to end our engagement and relationship. It helped me to empathize with the difficulty and challenge that she had to have gone through in that chapter. In short, it took me out of my shoes and put me into hers.

It’s still been immensely challenging for me to come to peace with the harm that came from that event and the impact it’s had on my life since then. But it was a big step in the direction of progress.

—

The first two days on the Long Trail were a massive transition away from the Appalachian Trail.

I wondered if I would end up crying when I got to the end of the trail yesterday, but observed in that last mile before the Canadian border that it wasn’t going to come this time around. I had decided that it wasn’t going to impact me that heavily, and then when I actually saw the monument, I felt something change inside of me. I ended up heavily tearful, and I cried for at least a minute or two before wiping them away and stepping up to the monument to touch it and call my hike complete. I wiped my tears and turned back to Plinko.

The LT is very different than the AT.

The trail is significantly more overgrown and brushy! Most of the time that you’re hiking the Long Trail you’re in direct contact with vegetation as branches, trees, and shrubs scrape up against you on your march forward. I literally lost track of the number of times that my hat was pulled off of my head by tree limbs or the number of times I was stabbed by a broken branch. Plinko said that he took a bad one to the bicep and it made him wonder if he’d seriously hurt himself.

The Long Trail is also far steeper with a lot more elevation change than the Appalachian Trail… which is saying a lot! Here’s how I’ll compare: On the AT I had 30 mile days where the elevation gain was around 7,000ft. But on the Long Trail I had *more* than 7,000ft elevation gain in 20 miles! So literally 1/3 more elevation gain and descent on the LT than the AT.

And the climbs and descents themselves are *steep*! There were several times where I’d have to use hands and feet to climb up or descend a slope. Once I was at the top of a crack where I had to get down and I literally just tossed my hiking poles down and reverse-rock-climbed down. When I caught up with Plinko an hour later and mentioned it to him, he said that he knew *exactly* the spot that I was talking about because he had to do the same.

The LT was also more technical than the AT. The best way that I’ve found to exemplify this is in how many times I f*cking fell down on the Long Tail compared to the AT!

On the whole AT I’ve fallen to a point where my hands hit the ground maybe 4-5 times. But on the Long Trail I took that many falls *daily*! All the way up to the last mile of the trail yesterday, I was still falling and hitting the ground.

The Long Trail had two days that were much longer water carries than anything else that I’ve seen on the AT where both Plinko and I had to use our full water capacity and camel up on water before leaving a source.

And the mud… the mud, the mud, the mud…

There were stretches that went on for miles that were like playing an extended game of The-Floor-Is-Lava. Only instead of lava, the floor was potentially knee-deep muck.

Navigation on the Long Trail was more difficult and we ended up having to check maps a lot more often…

—

But there was also a lot of good and beauty that I found in the Long Trail.

It was much quieter than the Appalachian Trail. Plinko and I had one shelter where we were the only ones there for the night, and we heard from other hikers who found the same often on the Long Trail. That would almost never happen on the AT.

I felt like there were more birds in the air, or I should maybe say that I heard birds more often than what I heard on the AT. I think maybe it was due to fewer people on trail.

The Long Trail climbed to the top of more high peaks than the AT and through a lot of ski resorts, which I felt was kind of cool if only for the sake of changing things up a bit.

And at the end, I felt more a sense of pride in having hiked the Long Trail than I feel in the AT. This isn’t at all disparaging to the AT, per se. But with how many people are on the AT by comparison, it’s easy to lose sight of the specialness of the hike. But there were so few people on the LT that it made things feel more magical in a way that I find difficult to define.

—

For all the things that happened on the outside, I wonder if just as many changes didn’t also take place inside of me.

It was a tumultuous experience.

At the beginning I felt that sense of being torn away from what I loved–the feeling of being abandoned and disregarded and unloved. I felt alone and I questioned my choice to continue hiking the LT.

On the second day after leaving the Appalachian Trail, Plinko was having a really rough day and I honestly asked him if he wanted to continue or go back to the AT. It was the only moment where I seriously entertained the thought of quitting. But he refused and said that he wanted to go on. I’m glad that he did. I would have followed him back to the AT if he’d wanted out.

I have wondered since that day if maybe I asked him because I was secretly wanting to go back to the AT myself and I was just trying to put the decision on him. Honestly, I don’t know. It may have been both.

Plinko and I didn’t spend much time “together” on the Long Trail. We rarely hike together as it is, but I noticed at camp that we also didn’t talk much. Maybe that had been the case before leaving the AT, but I hadn’t noticed it as much because there were always other hikers for me to engage with. But I noticed heavily when it was mostly just the two of us out there that Plinko and I interact very infrequently. I’m obviously the more talkative of the two of us, but there were times where I felt like he wasn’t saying anything to me for much of the day without prior prodding from me.

That fed heavily into my feelings of insufficiency while we were on the Long Trail. I would let it get into my head that I’d done something to upset or anger him and I’d start playing back through everything to try and find where I’d gone wrong. But I think at the end, Plinko is just a very quiet and internalized person. When he does speak he’s very intelligent and well spoken, and he picks his words carefully; I respect him tremendously for that. But the silence that existed between us for a great deal of the Long Trail was hard on my head and led me to feel insecurity.

I write about this because it was impossible not to reflect it back on my previous relationships–specifically the ones that ended on July 14th. It led me to try and empathize with my two past partners who made the decisions to end our relationships. It made me try and be in their shoes and feel the way that they must have felt.

It led me to have a kind of empathy for them that I hadn’t been able to muster before.

—

Yesterday was obviously my last day of the Long Trail. Plinko and I had just under 9 miles to the border where the Long Trail ends and Canada begins, and we wanted to get there around 10:30, in order to have time to ride back to Rutland where we had plans to stay last night and today.

We woke early, which I had not wanted to do, but I understood the necessity for. But then I spent all morning thinking about how I do not like early mornings on trail and that I’d rather be hiking later at night, as I did in the earlier part of the Appalachian Trail.

I was “in it” yesterday morning… frusterated, tired, and feeling isolated. Plinko and I didn’t talk at all yesterday morning either; he’s normally quiet in the mornings, but that left me feeling insecure in myself, wondering if I’d done wrong, going back to questioning if I should have hiked the Long Trail in the first place, wondering if I’m going to be the same person I was once the trail is over, wondering if I’m just wasting my time, wondering if I’m asking too much of the relationships I have in my life, wondering if I’m good enough, wondering what good enough means, wondering why I’d ask these questions in the first place…

All in all, I wasn’t doing well yesterday morning, at least until the mushrooms started to pull me out of it. Yesterday morning was hard at the beginning.

I thought to myself several times that I felt like I was regressing back from some of the progress that I’ve made on the trail. Regressing back from the feeling that I’d healed from the loss of my perspective marriage. Regressing back from feeling like I can thrive in independence. Regressing back from the feelings of forgiveness that I thought I’d found.

But in retrospect…

Maybe it’s not as linear as I want transformation to be. Maybe it’s not an A-to-B type of thing. Maybe we take one step forward, two back, three forward, one back, so on and so forth. Maybe recovery doesn’t unfold like the walking of a thru trail. Maybe progress is harder to follow than that.

—

We took pictures and things went from overwhelmingly emotional to joyful as quickly as the tears had arrived to begin.

—

All in all the Long Trail was a tremendously important part of my hike of the Appalachian Trail.

It was an active choice to leave the AT to begin with. It was the harder decision. It was a painful separation, but I think that it made me stronger. There were moments where I questioned myself and hated myself and regressed in my feelings of self-love. But in the end, I think that it was really good for me.

—

Today is July 25th and this was supposed to be the second anniversary of my wedding.

It didn’t play out that way though. Instead I’m left with a scar on July 25th.

But tomorrow’s another day.

Back to the AT tomorrow.

Wormwood.