Goodbye, sublime bullshit

June 30

It was cold and damp in the trees I'd chosen for my tentsite, but I heard my new friend Owl clanking around in his impromptu cafe at the picnic area just yards away. I had no way of knowing that this meant coffee, but my keen addict's intuition told me to go invetsigate. It was enough to impel my sore body up and out of the tent a la Nospheratu rising out of his coffin; my legs jolted me over to the table, wide-eyed and vacant of mind.

My guess was correct.
And not just coffee, but dripper cones and a stove to boil water; I could make a pour-over here. This is a pretty big deal to a professional coffee nerd like myself. I have come to expect much less and be happy with it. Percolators, Mr. Coffees, ancient Bunn-o-Matics from the civil rights era, I will drink it all when I want a cup of coffee. In college, there was a commonly told joke that pizza was like sex, because in both cases, even when it was bad, it was still pretty good. This joke is, I have to say, the worst compound lie I was told in all my years of schooling. However, when you really want a cup of coffee, there is almost no such thing as a bad cup.

Anyway, I know, too much coffee nerdery. He left me to make myself a cup of coffee, which I eagerly did, using a heroic dose of ground coffee to do so. The result was ink-black, bitter, dark-roasted Peet's coffee. A related result was me going through the same process of rejuventation that happens to Popeye when he eats a can of spinach. I stuck a piece of chocolate cake in my mouth, leapt to my pack, wished everyone a great day, excellent day, toodles, and scurried off to the trail with the grace of a frightened cat.

Cake and strong coffee had an effect on my metabolism similar to pouring gasoline on a fire and then deciding to go ahead and also put in that stick of dynamite you'd found at the swap meet. I was sugar high. I mean like really high, like illicit-drug high. The trail seemed to be obliging me by flattening, widening, and generally becoming easier to hike. My one remaining trekking pole was tucked into my pack, leaving me to concentrate on my legs and feet. Flying over dirt, careening off boulders, executing antics while hopping across streams. I was making killer time and I knew it. 

The funny thing was that as the sugar and caffeine ebbed, the trail continued to improve. There were no mosquitoes to speak of, either. I looked back across the pass below to the mountains behind. Clothed in brilliant white ice and funereal grey, they seemed to hold some sublime truth. Only that truth seemed to be one which I couldn't quite absorb it. It kept getting stuck in my throat. I saw not just bold, raggedly cut beauty, but also felt the wet seep of mud into my shoes, the annoying throb of bodily danger when crossing ice, and the way the mosquitoes hit my face like confetti.
I love adventure, but in a very important sense, adventure is not what my PCT is about. It's about the miles and the open country. I come here to do big days, see lots of light, feel my mind bleach out in the constant sun and physical labor. That back there? Yeah, it was sublime, glad to have done it. 

Looking back at the Southern Sierra... screw that (glorious) noise

But goodbye, sublime BS. I'll take this PCT that winds it's way in and out. This trail of wildflowers and dust sloping ridges in the distance. No, the angles of the peaks are not so sharp, but the curves of the valleys invite the eye to rest in a way that the High Sierra cannot.

Mostly, I was happy for good trail.

Accordingly, I pounded out the miles. Ten miles, fifteen, twenty.
Sometimes the trail serves flashbacks. I suddenly remembered taking a break with the Croat, perched on our packs in these meadows of green grassy flowers and red dirt. Another turn and I was thinking about what a funny man he was, what a good trail companion. My mind was running reels of footage believed long-lost, all the way back to my childhood with Dan Mikesell, and my first encounters with a natural world kind enough to let my brain do its own thing. I didn't have to think about where my next step was going to land; it was all good trail. And that day good trail meant it was all good.

It was well after sunset when I finally slowed down and started scouting for a campsite. I found one hidden in a stand of junipers on a small lip of land above a lake. There was a majestic stone fireplace and enough wood for a week, so I made my first fire of the trip while dining on instant noodles. The fire burnt down to coals with minutes of the last bite being shoveled into my mouth. I doused the coals and let my mind extinguish itself, wrapped in my bag and covered by my tent.