Days 13-14: Going Nowhere (VVR-Fresno-VVR)

The VVR greeter poked at the SIM tray of my phone with my sewing needle. “Ouch, it stabbed me”, she said – took the phone inside the wooden general store. She returned triumphant with the little gold SIM sparkling in the sun. “Safety pin did it!” But still the phone wouldn’t turn on, or off. It cycled through a startup loop featuring logos, a glowing blue light, occasionally an emblem of a dead android and an option to factory reset. 

A tech worker-hiker named Squirrel had a go at factory resetting, but the phone’s death spiral continued. He suggested maybe at altitude a cosmic particle could have flipped the phone – it had happened with a European election-counting computer. “A photon could have done it”, he offered before walking off to his tent. The greeter suggested I go and take my 8-minute hot shower without the phone – I think registering that I was pretty close to pathetically crying over it. Although I was looking forward to getting clean and running laundry and eating a full meal cooked by someone else and not featuring an iodine-tablet stock as the base ingredient… what I was really looking forward to was VVR wifi and catching up on texts and, yes, this blog. If the time differences worked out, maybe calling some loved ones and hearing their actual voices. 

I went and took my shower. I got into a clean floral frock and threw a Tide pod into a hot wash with my vile grey skort and decreasingly-orange donkey shirt and my Darn Toughs, which had started the trip in lavender-lime hues but were now so full of brown dust they coughed clouds of it at every opportunity. I pitched my tent in Mushroom City (a flat sandy zone of trees and hammocks and laundry-lines above the nylon domes and cocoons and my hiking-pole-hoisted pyramid). “Cool ‘mid!” said another hiker. Nobody complimented my 1990s Eurohike jumbo backpack (the entire trip). 

The other hikers sat around drinking craft beers and FaceTiming their beloveds and I could do neither of those things –  so I lolled in a hammock and scrawled in my notebook and drew a picture and read 5 books from the lending shelf and identified a lot of the creatures and plants I’d seen so far on the hike. I listened to the cook’s choice of music (pummelling metal) waiting for my veggie burger and I hung up my clean laundry in the baking sun-breeze and I brushed my teeth a lot. I booked onto a shuttle to Fresno for the next day. I heard a hiker who was hopping around between the really long-distance trails (PCT, CDT) say “hiking takes enough energy – I’m not blogging about it too”. I rummaged through the laundry loaner clothes bins (organised “tops”, “bottoms”, “undies”) and found a mustard-yellow kids’ Champion hoodie that I pulled on over my floral dress as it got dark and then cold. 

I joined a circle of hikers sitting on upturned tree-stumps around the sparking campfire, asking questions and listening to their stories of hiking here from Mexico and rattlesnakes and veganism and having $300,000 in the bank and which were the best battery packs for the trail. They were all so sorry to hear about my broken phone. I said “better breaking the phone than my leg, eh”, and I meant it. A Southern-states gent asked if he could sit next to me and our trail talk turned pretty quickly to real talk and jokes that landed and made us both laugh loud. We stopped pretending to be part of the group conversation, discovered that we both worked in the performing arts and emergency medicine – fields that seem to foment non-mainstream perspectives, dark humour, intense camaraderie. Like me, he’d lost his mother suddenly and relatively young – I wasn’t at all surprised to learn this. Had I been madly scrolling and thumb-blogging and WhatsApp-bantsing on my phone in my tent, I wouldn’t have made any of these connections. I pushed my palm into the shoulder of his puffy-jacket and said “I am so, so sorry” and I meant it with my entire heart. 

The next morning the hikers went off hiking and I stayed in Mushroom City, foraging in the hot metal bear boxes where people left unwanted food and supplies. I munched on some premium protein bars and walnut-heavy trail mix and pawed through the non-food box looking vainly for warm night-gloves or maybe an abandoned puffy jacket that someone had ripped or hated. No luck. I bought superglue from the store and properly fixed the flipflops I’d sewn together at Cathedral Lakes. I painted my nails with the remnants of a green-gold varnish my sister had given me a while ago – I’d mailed it with my resupply to finish off and discard. I still felt sharp sadness when it was time to throw the empty bottle away. I read about hawk identification and packed up my pyramidal world of ziplocs and fabrics and footwear and charging cables, and loaded the pack into the white minivan that showed up mid-afternoon. 

The road out from VVR was built in the 1930s, and it was a hard, precipitous drive – boulders and potholes boggling our heads left-right-left. The shuttle driver, a former school-bus operator, steady and solid and talkative. We inched our way off the mountain through burned areas – she said that any burned tree with foliage up top was “healing from the inside” and could potentially restore itself in about 7 years. In the 3-hour drive she shared some of her dramatic life-story – I asked questions and exclaimed, “This is literally like a movie plot!” The privacy-respecting synopsis is that sometimes – against all odds and over the course of decades – truth and love can win. The other passengers dropped at the airport, she drove me to the Quality Inn and made sure they had a room for me then insisted on driving me to Walmart for my phone quest (“these are long blocks and it will be dark on the way back”). 

I strode into the supercenter past the ranks of shopping trolleys, past an unhappy circle of people being sternly addressed by a police officer. On the high security camera, I did a double-take at the assured, tanned woman walking fast and hard across the vinyl. It was me, changed and confident from the trail and the circumstances. At the back of the store, there was one AT&T handset that might be compatible with my SIM. It was $79; I cashbacked for the shuttle fee and had a driveby glance for puffy jackets (none) on my way out of the store. I left banknotes in the cupholders, and the driver said she’d get me from the hotel in the morning. 

After a frustrating and brink-of-tearful half hour prone on the hotel bed trying to set up the new handset which seemed to require calling AT&T from a different phone (the hotel landline) to find their call center was closed for days… I had the SIM in and the same screensaver of my sister glowing and the texts and emails flowing in and out. I thought I’d be excited to sleep in a bed rather than on the cold ground, but I barely slept. I drafted blogs and answered questions and around 2am my sister was awake in the UK and we spoke in real-time for a long time. We hadn’t been this long without hearing each other’s voices in, probably, years. I curled into a corner of the kingsize bed, determined that the guys shouting along the hallway were partying not fighting, and slept for what felt like 20 minutes. 

Back up the mountain, the whole area much hazier than yesterday. “Smoke from the Chico fire” said the driver. Back to VVR and booked on the next morning’s ferry back to the trail – I re-pitched my tent in Mushroom City and raided the hiker boxes (not for the first time on this trip, eating an entire block of sharp cheddar cheese and calling that dinner) and swung in a hammock thumbing out blog posts. Though I didn’t feel it would be a good idea to continue on with a broken phone, I hadn’t thought once about quitting the trail. My blisters and fat ankle had healed up over 48 hours, and with a new handset and a stuffed bear canister I was raring to go.