On Post-Hike Malaise

After you do the thing, then what?

This morning I woke up to a car alarm, blasting again and again, for no reason, as car alarms do. Why do cars have alarms, anymore, since all they seem to do now is make otherwise non-violent people consider picking up a brick and throwing it at the car? The car alarm no longer seems to have any purpose except to add to the general level of torture that the average human in civilization experiences in daily life. Purposeless loud noises are, after all, an “enhanced interrogation” tactic. I look around for someone to confess to, I’m willing to implicate family members, neighbors — anyone at all, tell me what I did and I will sign my confession, but please, I beg you, stop with the car alarm.

Yesterday, desolate, I trudged my way through an encounter with urgent care. I’ll spare you the details. There were zoom links and insurance cards and pharmacy lines involved, you know the drill. Make it stop, I thought. I also called a phone number three times that was listed clearly on my gynecologist’s website as the phone number to call to make an appointment, and three times it rang forever, then dumped me into nowhere. Finally I called a different number entirely, that was not listed as a number to call to make an appointment, and that got me a “call center” where I could make an appointment.

Also yesterday, walking around Allston with a friend, I encountered a slimy puddle of garbage and effluvia, which I delicately avoided. I waded through 10 inch deep mud in places this summer, mud so deep I nearly lost my shoes in it, but a sidewalk garbage slick was too much for me.

If you’re wondering how things are going for me since I returned from my two months of backpacking in the green mountains, well, mainly like that.

In the mornings, I wake up and go walking, looking for trees to smell. I get very close to an oak tree along the Riverway, I put my face against its mossy bark, inhale. It’s not the same, but it’s better than nothing.

It’s not all bad, being home. I was served an excellent margarita on the back deck of one of my favorite taco joints, with one of my favorite people, and that was fun. I did miss my people. My mattress is just as comfortable as I remember, and after two months of sleeping on the ground or on a wooden platform in a shelter, or in various hostel beds of varying quality, I appreciate the comfort. I have ready access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and soft cheese, and yogurt.

Also, my coffee appears by my bedside every morning, and it isn’t instant coffee, and I didn’t have to crawl out of my sleeping quilt and go find where I’d tied my bear bag and assemble my stove and filter water and boil it before I could enjoy the coffee, it simply was there when I woke up, like magic, which is to say my husband is a magical being, and I’m grateful to be back in his vicinity again, certainly.

*****

I was warned, of course, about all of this. Post-thru-hike malaise is a well-known condition. I feel like I’ve been torn out of place, and also like I was living another life entirely, and even though I have evidence that I did this thing, lived that life, it’s so separate and different from what is here now that it feels like it must have been a dream. A long, strange, mythical, epic dream, something that was sung to me, or that I sang. That the aboriginal Australians call this kind of place and that kind of journey Dreamtime, and that sort of trail a Songline, makes all the sense in the world to me. For two months I sang to myself, counting my steps, mainly, up and down mountains, walking and scrambling and climbing and scooching and trudging north, north, north, and then I came to the end of that trail and that song and that dream, and now here I am, after four hours of riding in a car, deposited back home, in a reality that includes pointless car alarms and inscrutable phone trees and a lot of garbage and not enough of the other kind of trees. Of course it is difficult.

*****

Like many people who go on these kinds of trips, I also thought by the time I got to the end I would know the answers to some of the burning questions that face me at this moment in this, my ‘real’ life. Like what do I want to be when I grow up, for example. I was also warned, along my journey, that it was unlikely I would actually have answers to those questions by the end of my hike, and those people who warned me were right about that too. In the absence of some burning desire to do something different, my default is that I should go back to doing what I did before I left, something in the realm of helping software engineers. I met some botanists and librarians and ski patrol people out in the woods, and those all sound like better jobs to me, but ultimately I’m not motivated enough by any alternative vision for how I earn money to invest in any of those alternatives.

I’m not motivated enough by any vision right now, which is, again, unsurprising, since for the last year I’ve largely been motivated - not just motivated — truly driven — by the prospect of the thru-hike I just completed, and that is now over, and the future after that thru-hike seems just as blank now as it did before I began, despite me now being, in fact, in that future.

When I was hiking, life after the end of the trail was so very blank, so utterly obscure, that it seemed like it was probably just death. And a part of me wanted that, to wrap up the trail and to finally get to be done with life. I was very happy on the trail, for the most part, or at least content, and so it was surprising to me how much I nevertheless thought about death, not, as I often do, merely in moments of excruciating emotional pain, where thoughts of death are understandable reactions to that pain, but as a practical matter, as something that I could choose, not because I was in pain but because I was done with living. After the trail, I could be done, I thought.

Walking over Camel’s Hump I had the idea that maybe if I thought very hard, I could give myself the kind of incurable pancreatic cancer that would justify closing the ticket with a “won’t fix” resolution. If that statement makes no sense to you, that is because you have not had to deal with software bug tracking systems ever, and you should count that as a blessing. Still, I think you probably understood the point. I don’t especially want to be blamed for my own death, and god knows I still blame my friend Jay for his, but I can’t stop wishing something would take me now that I can’t be blamed for.

Of course, because I have told you all that, I will be blamed for any kind of death. This is why people like me can’t get life insurance.

As usual, now is the time I will tell you I do have a therapist, and I do not want or need your inquiries about my mental health. My mental health is the same as it ever was, and I’m still here. Yes, being out in the wilderness in July made me happier in July than I’ve been for many years, many Julys, and yes, that is wonderful, and I am grateful, and also it wasn’t some kind of miracle. It doesn’t fix everything in the world that smells wrong to my soul.

*****

One night on the trail, somewhere near the Brandon Gap, maybe, I pitched my tent in a glade of beech trees. That night at the shelter there was an ex Army Ranger and his dog, and a woman from Florida with her two children, teenage or young adult, both pretty sullen, it seemed to me, as their mother chattered about how they were Eagle Scouts and at the same time harassed them mercilessly about putting on bug spray, and they stared fixedly at their phones barely grunting in response to whatever it was she said. I was glad, watching her interact with her Eagle Scouts, that I was not hiking with my children, that my children were, even, enjoying a summer in which I was not harassing them mercilessly about everything under the sun. I was also enjoying a summer of not harassing my children mercilessly. Sometimes, before I left for the hike, people seemed to suggest to me usually via “just a question” that I was perhaps being derelict in my duty as a mother by leaving my children (aged 17 and 21, note) for two months, a question or a suggestion no thru-hiking father ever got, of course, whether his children were toddlers or teenagers. “I think it might actually be a gift to my children for me to leave all summer” I said to those people. I don’t think they believed me, but I don’t really care.

That’s a side note, though, back to the main story — I’d pitched my tent as far from the actual shelter as I could while still making use of an existing tent site, and so as Florida Mom sat up late with Ex-Ranger I retreated to my tent early, too far away to hear them talking anymore, and I fell asleep to the sound of the wind in the trees.

Around 4 am I woke to a bunch of barred owls, directly overhead, yelling at each other. The glade in which I’d tented seemed to be some kind of owl after-hours bar, and the owls, hooting and yelling, sounded like nothing so much as a bunch of drunk people rounding out a rowdy night by yapping about what they’d been up to. I caught three red squirrels, I imagined one owl saying, and the others shout FUCK YEAH, GET IT GIRL! and so on. It was a little bit terrifying, and a lot intense, and completely unexpected and very awe-ful and beautiful and wild. So wild. So utterly and completely Real.

The owls were every bit as loud as several car alarms going off at once, and every bit as disruptive to my sleep, and even more utterly out of my control, and I didn’t mind at all that they’d awakened me, I felt blessed, I felt Touched, I felt that it was precisely this, the opportunity to accidentally eavesdrop on a bunch of barred owls, that had brought me to this trail, that kept me on it, day after day, mountain after mountain, muddy step after muddy step.

*****

So. yeah. How was the journey? Wild. Feral. Free. Sticky, wet, muddy, steep, overgrown, exhausting. Scary. Grueling. Impossible. Magical. Mythic. Completely unreal, and more real than everything else.

And how do I feel, now that I finished it? Relieved. Proud. Grief-struck. Tired. Empty.

Bereft.

And how is it to be home? Strange. Sad. Impossible. Necessary.

And what will I do now? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

*****

And what did I discover? Too many things to name, right now.

And what did I accomplish? The thing I set out to do, and at the same time, nothing at all. Accomplishment is maybe orthogonal to the trail itself, or, if there was an accomplishment, it was not Mine, but something else’s. Or if it was Mine, it did not exactly serve me. The woman who set out on the trail, anyway, is gone, and I do not yet know who the woman is who returned, having Accomplished What She Set Out To Do.

I sang the song that was that trail, as best I could, and now I don’t know what to sing next. I’m in a kind of purgatory, as the whole, real, not-trail world seems to be to me, right now, a place in which I must work off my sins by waking to car alarms instead of owls and struggling my way through phone trees instead of spruce.

*****

I promise I’ll tell you more about the journey itself. I have funny stories and weird stories and incredible stories and scary stories to tell. I have jokes to make. I have lessons learned. Yes, all of that. But today, in this moment, all I can do is point in the direction of an inexplicable dream and patiently live through its aftermath, which after such a dream really couldn’t help but be anything but a rude awakening.

*****

Here’s a picture of me at the end of the hike, though, looking Happy and Accomplished and Badass, so you can pretend, if you like, that this is a simple story, where a woman set out to conquer something and succeeded. Hashtag goals, if you prefer that story to the messier one. Though I suppose if you prefer neat stories you probably don’t find any of mine very satisfying, because my stories, like me, are always Messy AF.