Broken Record

You taste like danger/but I feel so safe in your arms

Jan 02, 2020

It's been two weeks since you last heard from me - It's a good thing I took the time off, as I wouldn't have been able to post on my regular Thursdays. But that doesn't mean I haven't been writing. Interestingly, I've written and edited two complete drafts that are nearly diametric opposites, like two sides of a record. That tension is compelling to me. While I'm generally against New Year's Resolutions, it's the end of a decade and the two halves of myself are in similar states of reflection. The differences and repetitions between them are more revealing than each essay alone. Past vs future, fear vs hope. Who am I? Get a mug of tea, put on your comfy slippers, and drop the needle on Side A.

Side A: Escape Route

I'm luxuriating in the feeling of having clean hair. In this and so many other ways, I keep the emotions and the lifestyle of the thru-hiker alive. To have clean hair is a quotidian feeling, one that's commonplace and taken for granted, but in the absence of convenient plumbing it becomes a heavenly and rare luxury. My reluctance to shower, I think, is not just the hassle of throwing a towel in my bag and running to the gym on lunch breaks. It's an unconcious desire to stay myself, to hold on a bit longer to the reality that makes the most sense to me - the reality of the wide, wild world beyond a town's borders. Dirty hair feels natural, a strong commonality between thru-hiking and vandwelling. I find I have few things to say about the actual practice of living in a van, and little patience for the narratives I see in other #vanlife Instagram feeds. It's not a grand adventure for me, or a quirky lifestyle choice that I'm eager to flaunt. I explain this by saying it's merely practical, but it's also something more fundamental than that. This is the way I wish to live, and when I'm immersed in it, it doesn't feel remarkable to me. My van is an extension of the way I am when I'm my truest self on trail, finding a path through the wilderness. I'm a scavenger at heart, neither tame nor wild. I'm not a thief or a scam artist, but neither am I totally honest. I simply exploit the opportunities available in the grey areas around the rules. I am an expert at loitering, at finding useful garbage, at breaking the social contract with a smile. I am uninterested in normality except for when the appearance of it serves me in getting what I need.

In "The Second Sex", Simone de Beauvoir writes that a young girl knows herself as "a human being before she becomes a woman", and that "to accept herself as a woman is to become resigned and to mutilate herself." Much of the horror of puberty, for me, was in retrospect based in the unarticulable knowledge of that loss of subjectivity, the expected dissociation from my true desires, and the adoption of those habits and desires which aligned with the role I was assigned. Woman, as a category, could qualify a hyperobject. The structure of it is all consuming and all containing, leaving little room for independent choice and thought. Its boundaries cannot be seen or really imagined in their entirety, but they are real and strict. Even those actions which seem to rebel against or repudiate the framework get absorbed into it, either appropriated and recast as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, or negated as individual failure and mental illness. To be a person above being a woman is an impossible task, one which most of those assigned as men will never have to reckon with. The personhood of cis men is invisible and assumed.

The first decade of my adult life has been a project of escaping or outsmarting this trap, either through outright rejection or by attempting to divert its dubious resources to my own ends. Even separating what I want from what I have been taught to want is difficult, as no person can exist outside of her social context. Mainly, what it has taught me is that a successful personal rejection of gender leaves one entirely unintelligible to the wider world. Tolerable for some, maybe, but I could not exist as a non-binary person without constant and draining discomfort. The loneliness of being misread, of being seen as ugly and unwell, of having only a tiny social circle of the few like-minded souls, of my refusal of gender being the sudden focus and derailer of conversation - it was worse for me in most ways than the nagging irritation and confinement of womanhood. To be non-binary is to be explaining, confronting, or lying by omission to most of the world. The lack of possibilities in a space where I had hoped for liberation was an existential disappointment of the highest order - where I had seen an escape, there was only a different, smaller trap. It was nine years of indecision and psychic pain, and eventually I decided that despite my occasional bouts of dysphoria, the gender I was born with was close enough. I chose, really chose, the mutilation of womanhood over the isolation of wholeness.

I could not have made peace with this devil's bargain without the succor of thru-hiking. On trail, alone or with only the company of a few close friends, the demands and expectations of conventional society melt away. Even if my companions have no thoughts on the arbitrariness of gender or a background in queer theory at all, my status among them is determined by attributes I find valuable, and the relationships I have with them and with myself have a healthier character. It also helps that I never have to wear a bra. Thru-hiking is a return to a childhood mindset of discovery, effort, and play, and it's often remarked by people on trails that you can make instant friends as if you were in kindergarten. The connection with de Beauvoir is clear to me - in a space where I am once again a child, I am once again a human being. It doesn't bother me to be called "she", because it doesn't mark me as anything. I am just another sweaty, laughing person, and the feminine pronoun only notes the particular shape of my body. What that body can do, and what it needs to keep walking, are far more important than its reproductive cells and social role.

So then - the pleasure of clean hair. Occasionally it strikes me just how unusual I am, how different my life is from even the majority of thru-hikers. Most people who hike popular, social trails like the PCT will not go on to hike another. It's easy for the dedicated lifers like me to adopt an attitude of superiority and derision towards these "casual backpackers" - I've done it myself in this very newsletter, in my sporadic allusions to AT bros. But it's not really fair to say that I'm better than them, or that having ten thousand miles under your feet signifies anything other than a certain amount of eccentricity and privilege. I'm simply different. For most, a thru-hike is a dream, or an adventure, or a stab at clarifying some thorny personal dillema through walking meditation and voluntary pain. It's an escape hatch, a vacation, a brief window from which to observe the contours of the life you'll return to at the terminus. It's an experiment. It's life-changing for anyone who takes it on, but the shape that change takes is generally less radical for others than it was for me. Thru-hiking is my life now. It's the only thing I've done that's ever made sense to me, the only thing which feels correct and fulfilling on an instinctual level. I was born for walking in the same way that sled dogs are born for snow, and the interludes between hikes feel less like a return to my ordinary life and more like purgatory. It's not surprising that my van seems unremarkable, given that worldview. I feel most at home in liminality, living as I do in the boundary of public and private spaces, poaching free wifi codes by strategically buying Cokes at restaurants and making myself a permanent fixture at the library. I am not of this world, it says. I am neither staying nor leaving, but travelling. I do not wish to settle down, to get a comfortable job with a desk, to be in a place for more than six months at a time. I won't be here for long. I don't need an apartment, and I don't want to sleep on your couch. I have all that I need at all times, and my home is always with me, or nearby. I find that I get uncomfortable when I can't see my van out the window, in the same way that I never let my pack out of my sight unless it's locked in a motel. It ameliorates some of the trapped-animal panic I feel when forced into the capitalist mode of existence.

I remember when I first realized I could never escape the trap of money. I think I was about six years old, but it's possible I was younger than that, or that the memory has gotten confused with another one in the way scenes from early childhood often do. I recall sitting in the back seat of my parents sedan - which means I was either about three, or that I've mixed up the vehicle in my mind, since my parents definitely owned a minivan by the time I was six. It's a very vivid image, sitting in the booster seat and asking my dad why he didn't just quit his job so he could play with me and not be on the phone all the time. I don't actually know what was said with any specificity. The heart of the memory is of staring out the window and turning over the series of answers in my mind, realizing with a shock of horror that absolutely everything was dependent on having money. A place to live, food to eat, water, clothes, toys, a family. Without money and a job, you could not live. My lifelong terror of being trapped began in that moment, and the thought of being captive crosses my mind at least once a day. Working for hourly wages as I do, and having had a string of particularly awful jobs in my first five or six years as a worker, I have come to view the time clock as a sort of warden. You cannot just leave when you need to. You can't walk out the door and get a breath of air, or rush home in the case of a sudden emergency, or even eat lunch or a snack outside of designated times. You must perform a cheerful customer service affect and submit to being in a prescribed location at a prescribed time. Even the freedom of expression is curtailed, and you risk firing and the certainty of a slow dissolution into destitution and death if you are unable to fit yourself in. Turing into an automaton for those hours is the only way to stay alive, and yet that dissociation and lack of agency feels like death to me.

I'm fortunate now to have a decent retail job where my competence is respected, where I have some control over my schedule, where I'm paid fairly and mostly enjoy the work I do. The deep anxiety of receiving a totally random schedule at 8pm on the Sunday before, and the trauma of being screamed at for arriving three minutes late, is all in my past. I am no longer a soulless warehouse robot, packing shoes that cost as much as my rent at 2am and being patted down at every break to ensure I am not stealing; nor am I exposing myself to death by car door in exchange for poverty wages and the semblance of freedom on the streets of Montreal. My boss has never once tried to feel me up in the creepy basement storage room, or remarked that it's a shame his son is already married "because you would make such beautiful grandchildren." I haven't had to stand mute and endure a homophobic tirade in my second language, or pretend I can't understand French well enough to know my male co-workers are discussing which of the women they'd most like to rape. I'm not at risk of being fired and having my paycheque stolen if I call in sick with the flu, or stay home to tend to a suicidal partner. My work does not break down my joints to the point that I cannot stand, and I'm not in danger of catastrophic injury. I no longer vomit from anxiety at the start of every shift. Being respected and treated like a sane, rational adult is far from the norm in my work experience, and it's deeply sad that I'm grateful for this. Daily sexual harrassment and humiliation were my sole point of reference for a very long time. I should feel rage at this mistreatment, but instead I am only relieved that it's over.

In editing this, and in trying to construct a paragraph to sum up, I notice that the words "trap" and "escape" recur throughout. I wonder if I would cease to need thru-hiking if I had ever had a life that I didn't want to escape from. If I had stable, meaningful job with a salary and time to exercise, vacation pay and money for little luxuries, would I feel so restless and dissatisfied? If I had an apartment that wasn't an extortionate death trap and the assurance of work that I didn't actively hate, would I want to go live in a tent? I don't know. I've gone too far down this path to turn back. Being free to ignore my appearance, to be profane and bold and ridiculous and strange, to walk where I like or take a nap anywhere, is the sweetest life I know. Truthfully, I don't even know what people with "real jobs" do, outside of the obvious teacher-doctor-lawyer-etc. It seems a waste to me, spending all that time indoors and looking at screens and spreadsheets, but maybe it's because I don't know the details. Maybe it feels good. Maybe that's why normal people can go run on a treadmill - they're not running from anything, so they don't need anywhere to go. They are going somewhere already. I suspect that even if I had been lucky enough to get a professional job when I was younger, I would still feel called to live similarly to the way I do now. These feelings have been with me for so long, entangled with so many of the complicated structures that rule our world, that I'm not sure any sort of conventional life would truly feel free. Being tied up in various forms of overt subjugation and control has only emphasized a tendency that was there to begin with. In a way, it might be a blessing that I've experienced such extreme and clear examples of capitalist abuse. It is obvious that the problem is not me. The problem is the restrictions that prevent me from being myself, and while I cannot shed the bonds entirely, I can at least choose which freedoms are most essential. I choose the solidarity of womanhood over the loneliness of identity. I choose a lack of money over a lack of time. I choose the small indignities of wage work over sacrificing my life to professionalism. I choose to make the trail my home, and the trade-off of being homesick half the year rather than heartsick all my life. I choose feral, and I can't imagine choosing anything else. It feels so good to be clean.

Side B: A Good Life

This could be a good life. This could be a good life. I repeated it to myself as I walked back to my van, hungry and sore with the effort of the day, a little drunk on an empty stomach and two beers. I'd just completed my AST-1 course and had a drink with the instructor, talking over the process of becoming a guide. Optimism is a new feeling for me, but I liked the way the words tripped off on my tongue. This could be a good life. It takes six to eight years on average to become a fully qualified mountain guide, and I'm not yet confident enough on steeps to expedite this by jumping straight into Ops courses and exams. But still - the small taste of backcountry that afternoon had me hooked.

Guiding still mostly works through an old-fashioned system of mentorship. There are courses and professional programs, and I intend to continue taking them. But the best way to learn a skill like backcountry travel is by doing it, which requires an experienced and commited tutor. Guides and hopefuls are a close-knit group, and you're expected to find a mentor and spend a few years with them in a deep pedagogical companionship. All I ever want in this life is community. I've never had it, save for the three months before I left Montreal on my bike tour, when Enok and Jasper and I cemented our bond. This could be a good life. I've never commited to anything like this before. Six to eight years in one place, working towards a defined goal and keeping a continuity of relationships. I'd have to be in Whistler. I would not have the open-ended aimlessness I've grown accustomed to, the safe, bleak freedom of having nowhere to be. If you don't want anything, you can't be disappointed. If you're not a part of anything, you can't disappoint someone else. I could make real connections here, real progress, real choices! I'm overdue to make a choice with consequences.

When I was younger, I was a sort of general purpose prodigy. I'm not really smarter than anyone else, but I'm quick with logic and have a good memory for facts, so I was usually the youngest and smartest in class. Adults were always telling me I should make the most of my time, that I could be anything I wanted and so I should study every subject at a high level to keep my options open. I needed to be proficient in as much as possible, while I still had time and opportunity on my side. I was so brilliant! Every door was open to me. I could do anything I wanted, and so I took that to mean I should do everything. I have only recently noticed how this advice has damaged me. I internalized the idea that I could not make choices or commit, because choosing one door meant I was not choosing the others, and I would no longer have that bright and shiny "anything". It was implied that I could not change once I'd decided, and that I must not shatter the illusion of my genius through failure. I could be anything I wanted in the future so long as I was nothing specific now. So I learned a little bit of everything, and never learned how to want. It wasn't a conscious decision to never decide - only in the past couple of months have I realised that I am not exactly young and bursting with possibilities. I'm not old, but I'm not a youth. My time on earth is finite and if I take another fifteen years to make up my mind, I'll be in my forties and still living like a teen. I need to have something of my own. I need to be an adult, and that means crossing a threshold and closing some of the doors. I cannot be absolutely anything anymore. I could never have been everything. I should have started on something years ago, and I cannot get that idle time back.

Six to eight years. I'll be thirty-three, or thirty-five. A physical life beginning when I'm already past my peak. I'm past my physical peak now, and I feel it. I'm slower to recover from injury, I can't binge on sugar without feeling sick, I get acutely terrible hangovers after only three drinks. How much worse will that be when I'm thirty-three? On my 23rd birthday, I was obsessed with the statistic that physical aging begins at 25, when the upward trajectory of growth gives way to futile maintenance and slow decline. I was running out of time to set physical bests! I had to ensure I had the strongest possible baseline, so I'd still be better than most when I wasn't as good as I'd been. I recognize how ridiculous that is, and I knew it at the time, but I couldn't shake the fear that my best years would soon be behind me. I rode my bike across Canada twice, and made a plan to become a triple crowner in the three years after that, so I wouldn't have to look back and wonder how strong I could have been. I lamented that I would be so excruciatingly old when I was finished hiking at 27, so far gone from the promise I'd had before my prodigy revealed itself as mere cleverness. If only I'd started thru-hiking when I was eighteen! I'd have gotten the accomplishment out of the way and still have time to get a PhD before 40. I didn't know what I wanted to get a PhD in, but I had been told repeatedly as a teen that I was so smart, I could easily be a professor by my thirties. It felt like an imperative. I felt compelled by authoritative approval as if I was still a high-achieving student, and craved the reassurance of a rubric or grades. PhD by age forty, got it. I'll go study. Never mind that I actually hated university, and I have a hard time sitting still in school. It is a sin to waste what God has given you, and I had been blessed with so much! It sounds egotistical, but I was crushed when I figured out that I wasn't actually a genius. It felt like I was letting everyone down.

I feel something like that age anxiety now, contemplating a late start and a long road to proficiency. It's too late to begin. You're too far behind. Give up before you embarrass yourself and waste more time. You've already missed your chance. These thoughts infect me whenever I think about starting anything, and the predictable effect is that it always feels too late to try. I started writing a novel when I was 13, and stopped editing when a 14-year-old became the youngest best-selling author. I wasn't going to win the superlative, so why bother? I've never started anything in earnest and it just keeps getting later and later. It's hard to recognize that self-sabotaging cycle and remind myself that I'm not in a race. I'm not behind anyone else. I don't have to be the best, and there's nothing I have to win. Why not now? Why not try? The trying will be fun, it will be a worthy effort in itself. Trying is not the precusor to a life, it is one! I've had an interesting time with all these years of dabbling, and that ought to count as a real life too.

Learning to guide could be a good life. It could be my life. This could be who I want to be. I could live on a big rural property just outside of Pemberton, spend my days on the mountains and periodically go up north for school - I'm applying to TRU's adventure guide program to get the basics, and if I'm accepted and I like it, I could turn it into a two-year diploma or a Bachelor's degree. I could take steeps lessons and try out for ski patrol. I could work for the outfitter and take trips on weekends. I have options. I can't do anything, but I can do something. The climate apocalypse is my only time limit, and who knows when that will be? I can pretend I still have time. I like it here in the Coast Range, or I could see myself liking it when I'm less lonely. It's a decent place to ride out climate change. Constantine could move up here. I could build a guest cabin and visit with my friends, host WWOOFers, hold a writer's retreat. I could write an offbeat trail memoir and make a little pocket change. I could learn to hunt and have a big garden in the summers when I'm not hiking, and feed myself partly from the land. I could install solar panels and make it self-sufficient. I could make myself a home here, I can see it. I think I want it. I want to have a home. It's scary to want something because I could fail and have to start over again, but I've been perpetually starting over and I'm so tired of being alone. Maybe it's time to see what happens if I stay. It's past time to make a permanent choice. Who do I want to be?

What I'm listening to:

Enough words this week, yeah? Here's an album I can't get enough of on trail -Gillian Welch's The Harrow & The Harvest. The whole thing is marvelously sad, but I'm a particular fan of “The Way It Goes".

Talk soon, and take care

-Magpie

Shiny Objects

Discussion about this post