I Love It from a Distance
Once you know the Pacific Crest Trail is there, you can't unknow it's there. When I fly over any of the states the trail crosses, I watch the tracker on my phone while scanning the mountains below for familiar landmarks. I look hard when the flight tracker shows us somewhere over the High Sierra. If I can just spot Half Dome, all of Yosemite will come into clear view. I know the rest of the pieces will fall into place from there, and—yes, there's El Capitan and Cathedral Rock and the pointy one in the distance that looks like Mount Doom, the one whose name I always forget because, well, there’s only so much room.
I walked that valley, up and out of it and around the east rim and back down into it again, years ago now. I took the bus back to Tuolumne Meadows and walked north from there, and I can see it now from the airplane window, where the mountains change color from blue gray to brown, right around Mammoth and Mono Lake. I wish I knew more about the geology that causes this color change, but the only explanation I can muster is some juxtaposition of the concepts "glacial" and "volcanic."
Further north, the big blue body must be Lake Tahoe. I walked around her western side, through the Desolation Wilderness, weaving between dozens of alpine lakes, most of which I never saw until I gained the view from Dick's Pass. I see even more of them now, tiny gems reflecting sun back to sky, and I wonder if anyone is swimming in them.
It’s easy to time travel when you’re on a plane, so I close my eyes and find myself back in the Sierra on a mid-July morning, the whole day ahead of me. I’ll walk for a few hours, working up a sweat and a heartbeat I can hear when I close my eyes. It's all granite here, the beaches are boulders and the seagulls are ravens. Any lake will do, but Aloha Lake is best. I'll find a place I can throw my pack and strip down.
A cold plunge threatens death before it fulfills its promise of revival. I've done it enough times now to know it’s not bullshit what they always tell you. Deciding to get in really is the hardest part; the suffering is in the anticipation. It takes practice before your heart knowledge catches up with your head knowledge, and I’ve finally practiced enough to know deep in my bones that the only way is an aggressive ripping-off of the bandaid.
Bravery is irrelevant, feeling ready even more so. Fully submerge as fast as possible and you'll be freed from the torture chamber of deliberation into the pastures of bodily reflex. You're in, and it hits you: everything tightens, everything constricts. Can you breathe? You're not sure, so you try, and with the first breath comes a scream, a yelp, you can't help it. You panic and writhe and try to find somewhere to put your feet, and it feels like you might die but you feel so unreasonably awake you know this can't be what death feels like. In fact, you must be fine, because now you're laughing and crawling out of the water toward your clothes, and the pain of nearly suffocating from the cold is instantly reframed as a necessary stop on the way to this, bliss, the best feeling in the fucking world.
The best part about this feeling is the way it lasts. As if cooled from the inside, my body feels brand new. This feeling is cleaner than a shower, more relaxing than a full-body massage, more healing than a therapy session. If it's sunny and not too cold, I'll lay in the sun for a moment before I prepare to move on, a lizard that loves the water. I dry off as much as I can with a dirty bandanna, then get dressed. Bra, then shirt, then pants, then socks, shoes, and hat. I reapply sunscreen to my face and hands, make sure I have everything in my pack, then sling it up over my right shoulder and pull my left arm through. Leaning forward to shift the weight from my shoulders to my back, I line up my hip belt and clip the buckle. Buckle the chest strap, check the shoulders. Back in the saddle.
"Thank you, lake." I pick up my trekking poles and set my feet back on that 18-inch strip of dirt, my yellow brick road. I don't know where I'll end up tonight, but I know I'm going north.
I love it from a distance. I loved it for the distance. From a distance, it reminds me how best to love myself.
That’s the promise of the trail. That’s the possibility that drew me to it in the first place and the messy, illogical, indescribable joy that brought me back to finish the hike after four years away from the trail. It’s the magic of discovering that true freedom might look different from the version that’s being sold. It’s a long-distance relationship that will evolve and expand with time, just as I will, to different ribbons of dirt, different desert towns, different waterfall mists and dive-y diners and community caretakers. Distinct, but connected—a constant reminder that we all are.
