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pcttrailsidereader · 1 year

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Excerpt from 'Walking Home'

I happened to meet Rick Rogers and one of his hiking partners in 2018 near Dove Springs in southern California. My friend Billie Robinson and I were headed toward Walker Pass. We had set up camp near an abandoned mine site when Rick and Cool Breeze passed by. Turned out Rick was from the same county Billie and I are in northwest Washington. That was a fun coincidence. Fast forward to 2023. A friend shared a book about someone's PCT experience entitled 'Walking Home'. As I began reading I noticed that there was something familiar about the author. Reading further I was sure I had met Rick. I looked back at my journal from the section where I had met the fellow from Conway and sure enough, there he and Cool Breeze were. I was intrigued and finally got in contact with Rick after meeting him several years ago.

Most hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail take zero days in towns every week or so to resupply, wolf down some easy calories, and just plain laze about to let their bodies recuperate and recharge.

Moving through nature at foot speed mile after mile creates its own reality, and it’s easy to feel more at home there than in any other. Zeroing in town, everything looks artificial, or alien, with people and machines doing unnatural and incomprehensible things. It can be disorienting for some and their thoughts and behavior can be affected. And some hikers, especially those fragile of mind, should just never zero, even when they resupply. Stopping can be just too weird for them… ]

Zero Days In Oregon

I had to stay put and kill a couple days in Medford while I waited for my lightweight tent and sleeping bag that my wife had mailed. I would be relieving my backpack of the heavy tent and sleeping bag that I had carried the 800 miles I’d walked since she had mailed them to me in Chester. Also going was the bear can I’d carried through 450 miles of it. From here north, fully half the weight I carried on my back would be gone.

I’d rented Medford’s best thirty-dollar-a-night hotel room. After a look inside, I decided to splurge for an extra amenity, so went to a nearby hardware store and spent another four dollars on some painter’s plastic to drape over the bed. I put my sleeping bag on it and sat down. A small TV was perched atop a dented microwave that in turn sat on a cigarette-burned corner stand next to the window. A cheerful TV newswoman was cautioning her viewers to stay indoors, as breathing the wildfire smoke outside was a serious health risk. I sat on my sleeping bag and plastic drop cloth, and contemplated the newswoman’s warning, while simultaneously trying to discern the origins of the stains on the walls of my room. As a civilized person of discernment, I realized that all risks are relative, actually. I went outside for a walk.

The next two days, while I waited for the mail to bring my lightweight gear (and for the antibiotics to calm my bladder down), I made little adventure walks around town. The built environment, as much as could be seen in the smoke haze anyway, seemed grimier, and somehow deficient compared to the trail’s scenery. The geometry of the sidewalks and walls was simpler, more planar, and lacked the curves and fractals that my eyes had grown accustomed to seeing. Their colors too, especially in the smoke haze, were less interesting.

Still, there were some landmarks of interest. Shopping Cart Island was among my favorites. There was a bike path along the creek and greenway that formed a sort of border zone between a shopping mall on the one side, and an industrial park on the other. A bridge connected the two, and it had a wide sidewalk bordered by a low guard rail. It was easy to lean over to watch spittle slurp down to the creek.

Apparently, the homeless people that lived in the thickets beside the bike path in the greenway took shopping carts from the mall’s parking lot and brought them back with them. It would have been rude to leave their shopping carts on the bike path in front of their camps in the thickets, so instead they thoughtfully threw them off the bridge and into the creek below.

The shopping carts had strained plastic bags and odd articles of clothing from the creek, and these partially submerged accretions were covered all over with scum and algae. They had made a sizable island in the creek’s sluggish current, and the disturbance spawned semi-predictable patterns of spinning little whorls. Dropping a globule of spittle into one of these took real perseverance.

That night, I had a phone conversation with Monica. Back home, she was having some trouble with subcontractors, and at one point told me that she wished I was there. I did too. There, on the painter’s plastic alone in my creepy hotel room the Trail adventure wasn't much fun, and it was difficult to see what novelties I had to look forward to. I’d walked nearly fifteen hundred miles already, and I was pretty sure I’d gotten the hang of it by then.

“Look, I have a rental car,” I said. “I could be home tomorrow and just put an end to this now.”

“Well, I just sent your stuff in the mail,” Monica said.

“I’ll just call them and have them send it back.”

“No, you can't do that.”

“Sure I can. Easy-peasy.”

“No, I mean you can’t quit. What would you tell your son if you just quit halfway through?”

“Halfway through? I’ve walked the whole length of California.”

“Your goal was to complete the PCT,” Monica reminded me. “California is only two-thirds of it. If you quit now, you'll have a hard time explaining it to Matthew. Besides, he’s looking forward to finishing the trail with you when you get to Washington.”

“Hmm.”

“Not to mention that you will regret it as soon as you get here, and you would continue to regret it for the rest of your life if you come home now.”

I held the phone but didn’t talk into it. Monica doesn’t enjoy silence, and neither can she abide indecision.

“I don't want you coming home any other way than by walking. Don't come home,” she said. “I don't want you here.”

My next room, in Cascade Locks, had a number of things that the Medford room hadn’t, like a door for the bathroom for instance. But it lacked those special features of interest that can make a stay so memorable. Missing was the Rorschach mold pattern in the shower stall, and the cigarette burns on the bedside table. And the light switches and the doorknobs didn’t have those layers of grime accreted to them that leave your hands feeling conveniently greasy and moisturized after you’ve touched them.

It had a nice view though, across the street towards the post office, with the Columbia River as backdrop. There’s not a lot of land between the single row of buildings fronting the main street and the river behind them, but there is some, and most of that the PCT hikers have claimed for free camping. They’ve named it, actually, calling it Shrek’s Swamp.

There was a great old-fashioned place for ice cream near the post office, and while I was there nursing a root beer float, I watched a guy wearing an oversized white button-down cotton shirt and a denim kilt walk into town. He had a large leather sling bag on his back, carried with a single strap of macrameed jute rope worn across his body. He was balding, had a scruffy red beard and freckles, and looked to be on the verge of an unpleasant sunburn.

Lately, I had seen a lot of people that had spent a lot of time outside, and he was a guy that looked as though he’d spent a lot of time outside. He wasn’t a through-hiker, though. His sling bag and strap were more suited for thumbing rides than for carrying gear over long distances, and he wore woolen socks in sandals. His clothes showed wear, but somehow, subtly, not in the same places as hikers’ clothing.

He was looking down as he walked, and it looked to me like the freckles on the top of his head were larger than the ones on his face. This didn’t make sense, because over time I thought, the skin on his face should have stretched more than the skin on his skull, so that his face freckles would have been bigger than his scalp ones. I decided that I must have misjudged them at first glance.

But as he came abreast of me, and I was making more careful observations, he must have felt my eyeballs on him because he stopped briefly to shake off my gaze with a quick stare-down and a curt nod. I nodded back to acknowledge that I would return to minding my own business and let him see my eyes slide off of him and back down to the root beer float in my hand.

I went back to my room, stripped down, and put on my rain gear. Everything else, I took to the hotel’s coin-op laundry. I went back to my room again to wait, but with nothing on underneath, rain gear gets sticky and uncomfortable. I took it off, so was sitting on the bed naked when I heard a ruckus outside.

I stuck my head out the window and heard shouting. “Hey, this is for PCT hikers only. You’re no hiker.”

Then another voice, “Yeah. This isn’t a homeless camp, so beat it, Scuzzy.”

I saw the denim kilt guy come back out onto the street from between two buildings. Apparently, he’d tried stopping to rest in that area the PCT’ers used for free camping, Shrek’s Swamp, and some of them didn’t like it. They were chasing him off with hurled threats and insults.

Even though he was already retreating, the first voice yelled again, louder, “And don’t come back again either, loser!”

That didn’t seem fair to me. I mean, they didn’t own the place, and they weren’t paying anything to camp there either. Maybe the guy was dressed a little funny, and maybe was homeless even, but really- his situation wasn’t all that different, materially, from the lifestyle we through-hikers had been living since spring. Those guys needed some perspective, needed to look within themselves to find some tolerance and understanding. I decided to illuminate them.

“Hey! You’re all a bunch of losers!” I yelled towards the Swamp.

“What? Who said that?”

I leaned farther out the window. “I did,” I yelled back. “You’re all a bunch of squatters, a bunch of freeloaders, a bunch of dirt-bagging, monkey-butts.”

“Oh yeah? Why don’t you come down here and say that?”

“I would, but I don’t have any clothes on!”

“You what?”

“Yeah, you heard me. You’re all dirt bag camping for free, and I have a hotel room. I paid for it, and I have a TV in here.”

“So?” The voice I was anonymously yelling at didn’t seem all that impressed, and I realized that paying for a TV wasn’t something that necessarily inflicts a through-hiker with jealousy. If I wanted a shot to land, I’d need to communicate something that would.

“AND, I have a bathroom door!” I added. “And YOU DON’T!!” I pulled my head back inside and closed the window, confident that my point had been made, and sat on the bed again naked and alone, and watched the little television in the little room that I had paid for.

But it was golf, and it was boring.

To read Rick's book 'Walking Home' follow this link:

Walking Home; Common Sense and Other Misadventures on the Pacific Crest Trail by Rick Rogers