Together: SDTCT Day 4
We agree to be up and out by 7 and instead everyone is actually hiking by 6:45, which I tell ya- this doesn’t happen with a group of three most of the time, let alone eleven.
We climb on a wide dirt road, we’re carrying five liters of water each. I keep waiting to feel it drag me, but somehow it doesn't. Is this what hiking without anemia is like? I'm thinking so.
Kelly had a shit emergency in the night, Hadley’s phone charger stopped working, my steripen just won’t turn on, Callie kept getting woken up by the sound of flapping dyneema in the strong wind. Everyone is in great spirits though, bouncing and singing up the trail, winding past holiday weekend RV campers, Sierra Club groups exploring the wild flowers of the Anza Borrego, and into sandy washes. We hit ten miles of hiking by ten AM And I celebrate by having perhaps the most perfect on trail shit I’ve ever experienced. I dig a nice easy cat hole and go in about 30 seconds and I do not have to deal with the ache of trying to squat in the heat because it all happens so fast. I emerge from the bushes smiling.
I want to take a break at mile 168, but I hear Beau and Audrey are at mile 170 so I forge on. I love the concept of everybody, going a little further to see the people who want to see me. Beyond my sister I don’t really have a family, or I do have a family but they don’t love me, or they do love me but they don’t know how to demonstrate it. As a result I am near obsessed with this togetherness; it's beautiful and important to me, I will hike as long as I can to get to it.
And lunch is worth it besides. Everyone’s there, as promised and they’re cowering under the largest creosote bush I think I’ve ever seen, so large that maybe it’s not creosote at all. We eat the last dregs of our food, we’re going to town today and so it’s all chip crumbs and melted and then reconstituted chocolate bars, and we laugh and laugh and laugh at nothing at all.
After lunch, we climb 2000 feet. It’s hot, people are breaking out in heat rash, Hadley is perhaps allergic to the sun. The road is eroded and curved, relentless up and we are amorphous, stretching out to silently suffer hike in silence and reconvening each time there’s shade to breathe and breathe and breathe and say Holy Fuck.
The climb ends. Kara books the group two hotel rooms off of the two shreds of service at the top of the ridge. Carrot is coming to meet us in Julian with her van, she’s bringing the dogs and bag salads and baked tofu. I am buoyed by this fact, and so I go, listening to Bad Bunny and charging forth, dancing a little with my trekking poles while I walk. I cut through a large dry grass field, singularly focused. Eventually, the tall dry grass field spits me out, and there I find Raine and Callie. Hadley is lumped in a pile, asleep. One by one the rest stumble out and together, we hitch to Julian.
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This section of the SDTCT is on unceded Kumeyaay, Cocopah and Cahuilla land. My writing is a part of a fundraiser for Border Angels, a humanitarian aid group based out of these beautiful borderlands. My next entry will not go up until the fundraiser meets $2500, so please consider donating if you like the work and have the means.