Section 0: Desert desert desert
In which we begin
How do you do, fellow kids? It's Shiny Objects Number One! An intimidating number to be sure, and I'm bad at introductions, so let's just begin, shall we?
Normally when I'm en route to a new trail, it's the culmination of many weeks of escalating excitement and obsession - not so with this one. While the Arizona Trail has been on my radar for a while, I have yet to do the kind of deep-dive research required to feed a true thru-hiking fervour. In fact, as I type this on the plane to Denver, I have opened the AZT Guthook app exactly once, and purchased the AZTA guidebook over airport wifi at the last possible minute.
I suppose it's to be expected, as I begin my sixth national scenic trail and seventh long distance adventure, that the bright feverish novelty of such departures would eventually fade. Certainly I was excited for the PNT - I deeply yearned to return to trail after a particularly brutal season in my personal life, which I got through only by reminding myself that I would soon be safely away in the mountains, where bad news could only come in town-sized doses and disappointments were mainly weather-related. But it did lack something of the drama of past departures; I simply packed my bag in the way I always do, kissed my Big Blue Baleine goodbye, and walked off into the woods. I suppose once you do something three or four years in a row, it just becomes your way of life rather than a grand romantic escape.
Anyone who's ever attempted a thru hike knows that the grand romantic escape is a myth anyway - I think that's why Cheryl Strayed's Wild is so universally despised among commited thru-hikers. A thru hike is an escape from nothing, especially not yourself. It is the least romantic thing you will every do. For every breathtaking vista and riotous desert sunset, there are hours and days of monotonous gravel-crunching tedium, filled with cheap terrible junk food, the same music you're already sick of, and endless acres of pine or sagebrush purgatory. Whatever personal changes or revelations come about from such an exercise are entirely the result of having spent a lot of time in one's own company, of having grown familiar and comfortable with pain and boredom, of having ample time and few distractions to consider your own bullshit, and of having had the opportunity to create human connections with other equally bored and eccentric souls. It's not transcendent in the least - more like therapy, or knitting, or shoveling snow.
Of course the beauty of the trail is its own appeal too. My primary aesthetic sense is not visual - I'm a tactile-oriented person and when given the chance to control my own living space, my immediate desire was for a blanket-nest of a bed, filled with pillows and cushions and blankets of every enjoyably contrasting texture. Rough heavy wool blankets, crisp percale cotton sheets, silky sleeping bag lining, shaggy-fluffy pillows and soft chenille throws with tassels and puffs, random scraps of clearance-bin faux fur. My most-handled object is arguably the raccoon tail on my keychain, which I obsessively stroke inside my coat pocket, and sometimes flick up and down across my nose when unobserved. All this to say, my appetite for visual beauty is one that I frequently ignore or neglect, to my own deficit. Many, many times on trail, I will pop out on a ridge or a viewpoint and feel an incredible sense of satisfaction and relief at the spectacle before me. Something inside my chest releases, my shoulders untie, all the little bodily resentments of having hiked those many miles are forgiven in an instant. Ohhhh yes, say my aching muscles, this was worth it. It's the feeling you get when you've had a nagging discomfort all day, and finally eat dinner and realize you were starving. It's the discovery of a need and its satisfaction in the same moment, and it's probably a large part of my motivation to return to the hiking life year after year.
Will the Arizona Trail be like that? I think so. Over the many trials of the past winter, my daydreams (and sometimes my night-dreams) kept returning me to New Mexico in November, on my first long trail in 2017. The PCT's Mojave in spring was lovely, but the Gila River Canyon in autumn remains one of the most magical spaces I have ever entered, and some part of my soul is always called back to the domain of javelinas and hares. Perhaps my lack of anticipation for this trail is a sublimated need, like my appetite for visual beauty. Rather than impatient delight, I have a sense of inevitability about my return to the desert. A good inevitability, like the certitude of New Years Day, or your birthday, or the transit of Venus. The desert knew I would come back, and it waits unanxious and indifferent, ready with its wide open space and elemental heat. Ready to steal through the back door of my unconcious and throw open all the windows; ready to break all my complicated human thoughts down to grains of sand. Ready with its rituals of purification, its brutal simplicity, its mortifications of the flesh. Ready with thirst. Ready with sun. Ready with snakes and thorns and bloody feet.
In one of my most beloved favourite books, Tracks, Robin Davidson records the following conversation, immersed in her 1976 camel journey across the Australian outback:
A couple of years before, someone had asked me a question: ‘What is the substance of the world in which you live?’ As it happened, I had not slept or eaten for three or four days and it struck me at the time as a very profound question. It took me an hour to answer it, and when I did, my answer seemed to come almost directly from the subconscious: ‘Desert, purity, fire, air, hot wind, space, sun, desert desert desert.’ It had surprised me, I had no idea those symbols had been working so strongly within me.
With that, I take my leave of you. My plane to Salt Lake City is taking off in an hour. I have a full water bottle and mostly intact toenails, and for the moment I am safely ensconced in air conditioned rooms with many chairs, wearing deoderant, jewelry and impractical fabrics. My feral heart is beginning to beat a bit faster at the prospect of leaving these comforts behind - maybe I am getting excited after all. I'll depart with a song; a grinding electric drone that always puts me in a sun-bleached desert mood.
Talk soon, and take care.
-Magpie