12. Until I Come Home

Colorado.

There is no place like it.

The landscape is addictive. If the coin of natural beauty is jagged, harsh and rugged on one side, and soft, delicate and sublime on the other, then the coin is balanced perfectly on edge in Colorado. Pika chirp in the high alpine under the eternal blue sky. Dense forests of pine and spruce cover mountainsides in their dark green robes, with a splash of aspen here and there just beginning the turn yellow and gold. Streams chase themselves like dogs down to the lakes under the watchful eye of moose. Pyramids of stone tower above every valley, mountain walls that seem to have been designed to catch the glowing light of sunset. It is a land not easily forgotten.

For the past five years I have lived here, skiing, climbing, hiking and working hard to make it all possible. In that time, Colorado became my home.

But where is home now?

Is it still the beautiful, unaffordable, cozy, chaotic town I’ve been living in? I suppose it could be again. But it isn’t now. In June I moved put of my apartment, sold my car, put my skis and books and a few other belongings into storage and flew away. When I left I knew I’d be back, but didn’t know if I’d be moving back. I still don’t. It is a place that I love deeply, but feel unsure about for the long-term future. In several ways it is on the decline, and investing my future in a place that may not have a bright future is a terrifying prospect. It is a place that you have to leave so that you can come back.

But do I really feel at home anywhere? I used to live in a van that I converted into a camper, and I loved it. I spent years in that van (named Eileen for her top-heaviness on sharp turns), and through it all – freezing cold winter nights, mechanical and emotional breakdowns, the scorching desert sun and more – I felt completely at home. More at home than I have anywhere, before or since. I felt at home wherever I was because I was at home wherever I was. My life could move with me. Being on trail can feel like that. I have what I need and need what I have, and can move and live freely without need of much more. Owning things is no fun – living without need of things feels freeing.

A big part of my hiking the Continental Divide Trail this year was to use the journey as a vehicle of change: a way to have a clean break from some aspects of my life before it, and to build my plan for the future. In many ways this has already been accomplished, but has also lead to more questions and more to figure out.

So many people see thru-hiking as a means of “getting away from it all,” and in many ways it is. But you can’t really get away from any of it. When in town I find myself sucked back into the same ruts of requirement: sending job applications, professional emails going back and forth, setting up interviews, booking private clients, paperwork this and paperwork that, all the things that feel like the opposite of a thru hike.

I went into the woods to cleanse my life of these things, to walk and live in a way that they couldn’t worm into my every day. And yet they so often do.

I said goodbye to my friend and hung up the phone, my last words still ringing in my ears. Until I come home. Will I be coming home? Is it still home? He is helping me get paperwork from my storage unit that I need in order to finish an application for an opportunity overseas. How is that planning to return to the place he lives, where I used to, to return home?

For all the great appeal of thru hiking, there is a difficult truth hidden in the adventure: thru hiking is a form of self-imposed exile. You are leaving your place, your home, to journey in the wilderness in search of…well, that last part is up to you. If you want to go on a thru hike, you have to leave, and life isn’t put on pause for those at home: life continues without you. It is an odd disappointment to try to call someone when you have service and not get through to them, or try to see them when you’re passing through town but they don’t have time. And what did you expect, that they’d drop everything to meet you? That they were counting down the days till you were available? Of course not. But when you only see people you’ve met on trail, people from your “old life” seem to have a certain draw.

I met my friend on the main street of the town she now lives in. She’s a professional cowgirl and a badass at that, and now has the job she’d been chasing. We used to work together at a bar and have been friends for years. She was the first person I’d seen in months that I knew from before the trail. I am the first person from before her new job and the move that came with it to visit her. We hugged and laughed and caught up and talked about the difficulties of our lives, the successes and failures and attempts to do better. Pursuit of a dream – whether it is the job you want or a walk to Mexico – can leave you lonely along the way.

My years living and traveling in Eileen and my history of thru hiking have brought me to a place where I feel quite comfortable as an outsider. Being a traveler moving through the world brings a certain simplicity with it. By definition, you aren’t at home. You aren’t a part of the community. You aren’t “one of us.” So why do it? Because you want to experience natural beauty? Because you want to get away from it all? Because it’s there? Sure, these are all good answers, but are they the right answer?

Why am I walking this road?

At dawn I found myself walking through soft pink light, a flock of birds taking wing from the lake beside me, the frowning cliff beyond just beginning to take the sun. Out in the grass on my other side, a few cowboys on horseback herd a few dozen head of cattle toward the road. The hills in the distance appear wrinkled yet smooth, like silk bedsheets. No part of the horizon could be called flat, the mountains in all directions rise and fall gracefully. When I reach the top of a hill I stop to take it all in, and am met by a bull elk snorting and panting and staring into the morning light. He comes quite close before he notices me, then turns and bounds away into the forest. The morning is stunningly beautiful and does, in its way, answer the question. This is why.

It is a strange thing, trying to find a reason for doing something as you’re doing it. It isn’t just ‘why did I start doing this,’ it is also ‘why am I continuing to do this.’ Hiking day after day, week after week needs not to have meaning but to be meaning. Sometimes this meaning comes at a great cost. As another hiker put it when we spoke on the subject, “I’ve burned my life down a few times already.”

I sat crosslegged on the beach of the Colorado River. Here at the headwaters, the river is wide and clear, a reservoir right at the beginning before the water’s journey of almost 1500 miles that carves through the mountains and into the heart of the desert before being released into the ocean. Well, it should be wide and clear. Down the slope before me I see the silty basin that ripples in the wind. The drought is well beyond critical levels, the future of western ecology highly concerning.

“Is that Zooks?” I turn to see a friend walking down the trail towards me. “Spirit! Come sit with me!” She does, and we look down at the muddy river below us. We talk of our futures, our plans and hopes for the time after the trail, and the abysmal state of the river. Will you be going home? Will there be a home to go back to? We don’t know. She stubs out her cigarette, drops the butt into her trash bag and hoists her pack with a sigh. The journey to Mexico is the journey of discovery, for this and for a great many things.

In the morning I sip my coffee and watch the surface of the river steaming in the dawn. The journey of discovery must continue, and I have some miles to go.