Pre-Hike Post 2 - February 28 2017

2/28/17 Patagonia AZ. 

Warning: No trail news yet. This is all pre-hike reflections on what this particular hike, at this particular time, means to me as a pilgrimage. 

Dear Trail Friends,

Here I am at the Stage Stop Inn in the tiny (<1000 people) town of Patagonia. After talking with Ken,  the shuttle driver who picked me up at Tucson airport, I gather that the community is a mixture of multi-generational Hispanic ranching families, artists and writers, retirees, part time residents, and refugees from the city (like himself and his wife) who cobble together a living in order to live in a special place.  Ken ran a nursery in his former life and lovingly described and named the trees as we drove into Patagonia. Here's a window I saw while walking down the one street of downtown Patagonia. 

 

Here's a photo just outside the Tucson airport when I was waiting for Ken:

 

Yesterday, on Orcas Island, just hours before Chris and I drove to the ferry it began to snow heavily. The roads were slippery especially on hills, and a lot of cars had slid off the road or pulled over. Some were stopped in the middle of the road.  It took us an hour and 20 minutes to do a drive that usually takes only 20 minutes. We were amazed that we caught the ferry and very grateful that our Subaru could handle road conditions that defeated many drivers - including a lot of guys in heavy trucks and professional drivers (we saw two FedEx vehicles pulled over). 

Then there was a freeway closure of interstate 5 in Seattle because of an overturned propane tank truck.  So the drive after the ferry was also challenging. 

Is this an omen about my hike/pilgrimage, I wondered? 

I do understand that this hike is partly about fear for me. The planning and preparation has involved more fear than my former hikes have. I think this is partly because there is not as much guidance and help as there was for planning the PCT hike. 

I also realize that the PCT was a hike between the two landscapes in which I have felt most deeply at home: Southern California and Washington. The PCT hike was a weaving together of my childhood and adulthood experiences of home. 

Arizona is different for me. We first met (Arizona and I) when I was 5, and my family was moving by car from Milwaukee to San Diego. We had left behind the only home I had known. The new home lay in the future, in a  place not yet known. Arizona was part of the passage, as if it were that liminal space of "betwixt and between." 

Three years later my parents divorced, and a few years after that, my mother remarried a widower with four children and moved to Oklahoma City.  (Remind me to tell you the story sometime about how my FBI stepfather was informed the night before his wedding - after the FBI completed their investigation of my mother, his fiancée - that he was being transferred from San Diego to Oklahoma City.) 

Since my father had primary custody we four children henceforward would see our mother only in the summertime.  Our commute between the two homes (San Diego and Oklahoma City) passed through (when by car) and over (when by airplane) the state of Arizona. 

Once again, betwixt and between. 

Once again associations with loss and fear. 

Sometimes I don't recognize something as home until I lose it. Since the Trump election I feel as if I have been cast out from the Eden of pre-Trump America. It didn't seem like Eden at the time but it sure looks paradisiacal now. I feel "betwixt and between" in relationship to the political world around me. Frightened and disoriented. 

I have recently read a Zuni origin story about Ribbon Falls, a place in the Grand Canyon that is a sacred place to the Zuni people and also the hoped-for destination of my hike. 

Ribbon Falls is the place where the Zuni people emerged out of the dark fourth world into the light of Father Sun.  In the dark, the people could not see each other. They would step on each other, urinate on each other, spit on each other. 

The idea of people living in darkness - and mistreating each other because they can't see each other - as part of a story about a journey out of darkness into light - moves me. And it gives me hope. 

Maybe my journey through Arizona -  this journey that seems to trigger fear and pain in me - can be a ritual prayer for a journey out of darkness into light. For me, and for our suffering nation and world. 

And it isn't all or nothing, this journey. Every time I really see people, or allow others to see me, we are emerging together out of darkness into light. 

My friend Nina, whose husband Patrick is in India (his spiritual home), sent an email about a Hindu holiday, Maha Shivarati, that Patrick was celebrating. 

She sent this explanation: 

Every year, Maha Shivaratri is celebrated by those who follow Hinduism.

In every luni-solar month of the Hindu calendar, there is a Shivratri on the 13th night and 14th day, but the biggest celebration of the Hindu god Shiva comes once a year, in late winter – either in February or March – and before spring arrives.

Maha Shivaratri means ‘the great night of Shiva’ and was celebrated this year on 24 February. 

According to the most popular legend, during the great mythical churning of the ocean – known as Samudra Manthan, and conducted by gods and demons so that nectar could be obtained to make them immortal – a pot of poison emerged. This poison was so potent that nobody was prepared to even touch it – it had the potential to burn the whole world. The only one who could get rid of the poison was Lord Shiva, who agreed to consume it.

The poison was so deadly, that if any had entered Lord Shiva’s stomach – which represents the universe – the world would have been destroyed. He held it in his throat, which then turned dark blue as the poison took effect, and became known as Neelkanth.

Maha Shivaratri is a day where Hindus acknowledge their thanks to Lord Shiva for protecting the world from this poison.

This story touched me. Maybe I want this pilgrimage to also express gratitude for the many times and ways our world has been protected from poison. I am wrestling with the fear and anger that come with this political liminal space - this space in which the old sense of being at home in the political world has vanished, but I have not yet found a new home (what might that new political home be? Might I find a form of political activism that would satisfy my moral conscience without going against the way of my soul?)

I identify with the Hebrews' years in the desert,  having lost their home in Egypt and searching for the promised land. 

I notice how susceptible I am, in this time of political loss and confusion and fear, to fears about the trail. 

Will my shoes and clothes and gear be tough enough for this trail that several seasoned hikers describe as the toughest terrain they have ever hiked? 

Will I make it through snow st high altitudes, (reportedly 18 inches deep in places for tomorrow's hike)? 

Will I tangle painfully with jumping cholla? 

Get ripped up by catclaw over-growing the trail? Get stung by a scorpion or bit by a rattlesnake (notorious for crawling into sleeping bags and shoes)?

My friend Bonnie B. suggested naming my fears in order to befriend them. So now I imagine three friendly singing and dancing desert guides: Chula Cholla, Kitty CatClaw, and Scarlet O'Scorpion. 

 I saw a big poster featuring Scarlet O'Scorpion at the Seattle airport.

 

 So I googled and learned that scorpion venom is being used in some promising new experimental cancer treatments. I think of a quote I still recall from when I read James Joyce's Ulysses at 17 (that was well before my mid-30s memory loss problems, but I'm still amazed I remember the quote.) "Remedies where we least expect them. Poisons the only cures."

All this is, in some not yet coherent form, related to my pilgrimage. If you have read this far, I am amazed and grateful. Thank you for walking with me. 

I really should add that the drive to Patagonia from the Tucson airport was spectacular. This landscape feels radically different from anything I have walked through before, and I am already falling in love with it. 

So...I will see you in the morning - when I hope to walk from the trail head at Montezuma Pass first south to the Mexican border, and then North up the mountains and into the snow. 

Toward the promise of a place where the people can emerge out of darkness into light. 

Pre-Hike Post 1 - Monday Feb 20

Dear Trail Friends,

I will leave in 8 days for Arizona where I will (health and weather gods permitting),  begin a walk through the southeast Arizona deserts, up and down the tall mountains referred to as "sky islands," all the way  to the south rim of the Grand Canyon (and, if I am in good enough shape, down to the bottom and partway up the other side to Cottonwood Campground, then back down and up again to the south rim. ) I hope to hike from March 1 through April 23. 

 Photo 1 is a shot of a map showing an overview of the trail:

 

Every time I have prepared for a trail I have had to struggle with my physical limits and with fears and anxiety. A new physical worry this year was sparked when I noticed greatly increased difficulty with uphill hiking and swelling/edema in my legs (just above my socks) that reminded me vividly of my father's congestive heart failure and made me realize I was the same age, 69, that he was the year he had his first heart surgery (also the year I completed my masters in counseling in the program he founded, marking the beginning of my career as a therapist and my adult friendship with my father.) Yesterday for the first time since I began training in December I am was able to hike up our little 2400 ft mountain with a full pack weight and at a reasonable pace, and lay down that worry. 

This particular walk in its aspect of pilgrimage or spiritual adventure is very much about my relationship with my father and my career as a therapist (from which I retired on Feb. 14 2013, the fifth anniversary of his death). In late 1984 (the year of our first vows ceremony) my father invited Chris and me to hike into and out of the Grand Canyon with him. While training for that hike I developed a toe problem that led to surgery. During recovery from surgery I made the decision to change careers (from technical writer to family therapist) and enroll in my father's program. So this hike, particularly the hike into and out of the Grand Canyon, revisits an unfinished challenge in my life from more than 30 years ago. It reminds me how apparent failure and thwarting can lead to unexpected openings (out of the failure of the Grand Canyon hike came my new career as a therapist and my deepening mature friendship with my father). I expect the hike will involve reflections on that career, its beginnings (and the way it was intertwined in its beginnings with my relationship with my father), its middle ( and all the wrestling with my limits as a therapist and my impossible hopes to deliver my clients from all seemingly unnecessary suffering), and its end in my retirement (and my post-career passion for spiritual adventures on wilderness trails). 

I love the way hiking couples the sublime and the practical. Photo 2 shows 5 of my 10 resupply boxes - hoping to give you a hint of the long slow labor involved in planning meals and resupply locations, dehydrating food, assembling other necessary supplies (sunscreen, hand cream, pain cream, tooth powder, first aid supplies, pads for my still somewhat unpredictable bouts of diarrhea, etc etc. ), packing them into boxes, collecting addresses and mailing schedule. 

 

Not much more to say now. My early start should protect me from the worst desert heat and water shortage, but I sure hope the high mountain passes (several are 9,500 feet - higher than anything I've done since the first year when I hiked the Sierra) will be passable, not full of snow. I love the way adventure involves walking into the unknown, and absolutely requires that I embrace not knowing. Each time I embark, I practice a level of trust that is rare and valuable in my life. Not only trust that things will work out for the best, but also trust that I can endure things that don't work out the way I hope, and that exploring this beautiful world is worth the risk. 

Thank you so so much for walking with me and making the solitude a rich vast openness rather than painful loneliness. 

See you on the trail!