Success these days

If your name is anything other than Aporrectodea or Dendrobaena, Thelephora or Cantharella, we have probably not had a conversation in the last week. I have been hunched in front of my computer, writing my thesis. Due in 9 goddamn days.

It is one of those damp, gray days that Central New York does so well. The kind of day when you want to sink between the cushions of an old couch and listen to Neil Young. I'm coming out of my writing stupor to tell you how EXCITED I am to have scored 60 boxes of gluten-free mac & cheese for 50 cents a pop today.

And that is just the type of thing that makes me exceedingly happy these days.

6 lbs of dried beans and gear

Moments are ticking down like heavy steps. 12 days. To write and synthesize and eulogize the last 2 years of effort into an inadequately dull paper about mycorrhizal fungi. Hours pass by. For everything that I have done and planned, there are a dozen things undone on my constantly growing list. 

Meatloaf playing his usual outdoors game - food or toy? - with a Ganoderma mushroom

I know, deep down, that I can wake up tomorrow and stuff my old backpacking gear into my pack and head for the border, and everything would be just fine. The stress and self-doubt will dissipate as I walk. But that doesn't stop the list from growing.

• We need to renew our passports. 
• We need to figure out how to get from here (New York) to there (California).
• I need to find new homes for the things that have piled up during the last few years.
• I need to cook more dried beans, and dehydrate more dried beans. 
• I need to try my dehydrated beans to make sure that they are edible. 
• I need to figure out what we are going to eat aside from beans. 
• I need to spend less money on wine and waffle fries.
• I need to earn more money.   

It doesn't seem so daunting, I suppose, when you put it down in writing. Thesis, passport, beans, money.

Food planning has taken so much more thought than I am used to. On the PCT, there are remote sections where you need to mail yourself a box of food to resupply. Almost everyone uses mailed resupply drops at a few spots along the trail. I'll be doing ~10 resupply boxes, because (as of a year ago) I've got a really special gut that gets pissed whenever I eat gluten. And if there is one thing that doesn't go well with backpacking, it's diarrhea. That means no pop tarts, no granola bars, no pasta sides, and no pizza. And so I have been stocking up on rice pasta and dehydrating beans, still unsure as to how I am going to combine the two, and what Craig is going to eat.

I have most of my gear already. I'll be starting with some older supplies, and changing them up as I need to. I hike in Chacos sandals, sometimes with incredibly awesome darn tough socks. I wear old running shorts and tank tops. I'll bring along a desert shirt with sleeves! and a rainbow-colored desert straw hat from Mali. I will have long underwear for sleeping and cold days. I will send myself a rain jacket for the Sierras. I will have one extra pair of underwear and socks, that I will wash and hang to dry on my pack. For town, I have a light cotton dress with a hot pink and blue diamond pattern.

My pack is a Granite Gear Vapor Ki from 5 years back. My sleeping bag is a North Face Cat's Meow from 9 years ago, that traveled with me during the cold parts of the AT. My shelter is a North Face 2-person tent (Tadpole, I think?) that Craig and I will share. I have a voluptuous Thermarest Prolite inflatable pad that I found returned, new, to REI on sale for $40. A sheet of Tyvek homewrap for a groundcloth, bought on Ebay years ago. It's not the lightest set of gear, but it'll do. 

I usually use a cat food alcohol stove, but there are stricter open-flame laws in California this summer on account of the drought. We'll probably be bringing along Craig's MSR pocket rocket and buying fuel canisters along the way.

In my miscellaneous bag, I'll have my little flip phone and charger. My camera and its charger. I'll have a little notebook, and two pens with duct tape wrapped tightly around them. I'll have some tablets of iodine and ibu profin and Benadryl. A small comb, a little bag of Q-tips, tweezers. A tube of sunscreen, a tube of toothpaste. Floss, a toothbrush. Contact solution and glasses in a hard case (ask me about the last time I brought a soft case camping). A steripen borrowed from my adviser to sterilize water with UV radiation!

I have a limited budget for this trip, so we'll be making do with some heavier lightweight gear, and passing up on a lot of zero days (when you don't hike at all, and stay at a hotel and shower and eat cartons of ice cream and overdose on internet).

Meatloaf and Fatty

The snows came, alright. There is a foot of heavy wet stuff blanketing the neighborhood, making the city look beautiful. (at least for a day until the snow gets pummeled into brown slush and the garbage emerges from hiding). I hunkered down with the dogs and rode out the storm indoors, eating nachos and cooking beans for the dehydrator.

Until yesterday, my biggest worry about hiking the Pacific Crest Trail wasn't rattlesnakes or injuries or my meager budget. My biggest worry was finding a temporary home for Meatloaf. Meatloaf is my loving, wild, 70 lb, poorly-trained pit bull. I had originally planned to take him on most of the trail with me. When he was dropped off two years ago at the vet, 2 months old and very cute, I thought, "this will be my hiking companion."

Meatloaf on the NPT

Meatloaf and Elisa napping

Last summer, my friend Elisa and I hiked the 120-mile long Northville-Placid Trail that bisects Adirondack Park. It was Meatloaf's test run. The first two days of the trail, he was in doggy heaven. He would sprint ahead, sidebags swinging wildly, and sprint back. He kept close watch on the pack, darting between me and Elisa. He licked our cooking pot clean, and at night burrowed head-first into the bottom  of Elisa's sleeping bag. He would sleep the whole night down at the base of her bag. By day 5, however, Meatloaf would cower whenever I would pick up his now-almost-empty backpack. Every time we would pass a shelter, he would curl up in the corner hopefully, looking very worried when we hiked on. By the tenth and last day, I was carrying Meatloaf's backpack, he had lost about 10 lbs, and I had to coax him out of the shelter into the rainy morning. 

Meatloaf slept a full 48 hours after our hike. Like this.

So, backpacking with Meatloaf was out. At least on the PCT, with the physical nightmare of transecting a DESERT with a dog. Not to mention the logistical nightmare of getting around all of the massive national parks and CA state parks that don't allow dogs.

The good news is that my friend Tina offered to dogsit for Meatloaf for the summer! I am going to miss him like crazy, but it is such a relief that my pup will be well-cared for by someone I trust. 

Our other dog, Fatty, is a 12 year old malamute, and will be spending the summer with Craig's parents in Minnesota. While Fatty is, by all accounts, a terrific asshole, he is also 12 years old and (a little bit) less high maintenance than Meatloaf.

Fatty in White Sands, New Mexico. Regal as ever.

So, a GIANT thank you to Tina and Craig's parents for keeping our incredible dogs company during our absence. This hike would, unexaggeratedly (should be a word even if it isn't), not be possible without your generosity.

Flashbacks and spring

Spring is glimmering for the first time this year. The sun has been high and bright all day, and the snow is melting, releasing little puddles of dog shit all over the lawns and sidewalks. It feels like the end of a long winter, not just literally, but metaphorically. Like I am the one defrosting, coming back to life, seeing the hope in the light at the end of the tunnel. Another snow storm is brewing for tonight, the weather channel says. I hope that I can bike back from work before it begins.

The closer this trip gets, the bigger the emotional swings. 

I hiked the Appalachian Trail a long eight years ago, when I was 21 and felt like a different person. I keep having these vivid flashbacks to the start and finish. To December of 2005 (2005!) when I was in Cusco, Peru. Wandering the cobbled streets, so tired of being a tourist and alone. Homesick in a way that I didn't think was possible. Hatching a brand new plan - buying a plane ticket home for New Years. Forgoing the Inca Trail and Manchu Pichu because it just wasn't fun anymore. 

Back in Western New York, falling asleep reading about hiking trails on my parent's couch swaddled in my sleeping bag at 2 in the morning. Running on the treadmill at the gym, red-faced and determined. Testing my windproof mittens by rolling down the window of the car and sticking my hands out at 70 mph. Missing an exit on the thruway days before departure, and having to pull over and sob, for no reason.

And then suddenly, in my memories, I am in Georgia, hiking through the cold fog. Donned in fleece pants and carrying too much Ramen. Giggling at hikers' jokes at the shelters, hurting so badly I thought my hike was done before I'd even left the state.

Me on the AT in Vermont

In August, I returned to college, to the friends I'd left almost two years before. To a carpeted basement home and a bed, and classes, and stillness. I did laps around the arboretum, feeling like a hamster on a wheel. I walked the 6 miles back and forth to the grocery store, my backpack loaded with all of the things I had been craving for months. I fattened up, saw the college counselor. "Maybe it's not you, maybe it's this place," she said. I clung to those words. The winter passed, long, harsh and frozen, like all Minnesota winters. Spring came, and I thawed with it. 

CA coast

That year, full of anxiety, and growth, and joy, and depression was eight years ago, and still it feels more vivid than any other since. I wonder what this year will bring.

Kiwis vs. Earthworms

It just started to snow again. I am sitting in my office, on the fourth floor of an old, concrete, sometimes leaky behemoth on the hill overlooking the city. I am wearing my balaclava, summoning the motivation to cram my notebooks in my backpack and jump on my bike, and peddle the four miles to work. It's snowing. AGAIN! 

Things are starting to speed up and my time is ticking down in weeks, not days. Four weeks from today, I will hand my thesis to my committee. Six weeks, I will defend my thesis. Eight weeks, I will leave! Yesterday, I got our PCT permits in the mail and zipped over to the bar to open them with the boyfriend. Today, I killed an hour of crucial thesis-writing time researching the cost of bulk dried fruit on Amazon. Figs and raisins were cheaper online, the rest were cheaper at the grocery store.

How am I supposed to find the time to write about earthworms when there is dried kiwi shopping to be done!