Ocean: SDTCT Day 8
Pineapple's parent's house is so nice. It is big thick rugs and wide open rooms and pots of coffee and plush white chairs and c o u c h e s, like SO many couches. It is exactly like a parent’s house should be and when I wake up at five AM with seven of eleven people snoring in the room with me, I try to suck the whole house up and into me, let Pineapple's parent's house become a part of my body.
I pad my way downstairs and I eat Cheerios. I slice a banana up and I feel kind of sick. Last night at the All You Can Eat Salad Bar we decided that we were a cult, that Liza was our leader. We laughed and laughed and laughed and ate and ate and ate and I'll tell you what, that All You Can Eat Salad Bar has me pooping and pooping and pooping now.
At least this time I don’t have to dig cat holes.
By six everyone is awake and by seven fifteen we are more or less ready to go. We’ve all showered and laundered our clothes and most of us leave our packs behind, borrowing a day pack from Pineapple instead. I put one liter of water, my sit pad and a bag of vegan cheez-it’s in my miniscule daypack. We’re going just about fourteen miles today but there’s a taqueria on trail and the weather is cool and sunny. I leave my poles at home.
We navigate to the point we left the trail at yesterday and ceremoniously, we march single file. We hit the crest of a hill, there’s a battered American flag at the top. We flip off the American flag because we're sick and tired of so many things about the United States of America, though we must admit we do love it's (stolen) trails and it's (stolen) land. It’s a sad moment for the country, we say. It has been for a lot of years, decades, generations. We are just a few morsels, swimming in the soup.
I walk alone, as fast as I can and I make videos while I walk. I speed through low scrubby oak groves and I talk into my phone about my feelings. I speak into the void, I ask people to tell me how they knew that they were gay and the people of the internet PROVIDE with beautiful story after beautiful story. I am laughing and I am crying, and then I grow suddenly intensely bored with the gentle nature of the trail, and then intensely ashamed that I could be bored at all. I can’t only be stimulated when the trail is destroying me, right? I have to allow myself to breathe here with the gentle lilt, too?
Nine miles pass in the shadow of this question, and then there is the taqueria. I think the taqueria is perfect, I order a plastic tray of beans and rice and fajita vegetables and chips and corn tortillas and pico de gallo and guacamole. I clean the tray and I order the same exact thing again, this time to go. I am going to eat my beans and rice on the beach and I am going to love it.
Concrete turns to muddy wetland, and we wind through thick fog. I am going to finish this hike, in just a few miles it will be done. And then? My friends will go? I won't hear them talking about their blisters and their shit and we won't do daily mental gymnastics figuring out how best to stay together? I hate this fact! I also fucking love the ocean. I walk with this, the duality, and then I am at the beach.
At the beach there is champagne. I eat a weed gummy, which I promptly forget about until I am very very high. Audrey plays the acoustic guitar and Hadley takes a selfie and time slows way, way down.
I ask:
Have you ever looked at the individual grains in a small palmful of sand? Have you ever seen Kelly and Liza finish hiking 157 miles together, pumping their fists before they strip off their clothing and run into the sea? Have you, I have to ask, joined them, feeling the salt of the water lap at your ankles? Let it invite you into the wide expanse of it, hug you all over until you'r connected with all of your friends by aquamarine liquid, spilling up and out and over? Again and again forever?
Maybe that's exactly what happened when we finished, but also maybe it was just the weed.
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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. Please consider donating if you like the work and have the means.