Moving, Moving, Moving On

This was it. The final leg of my journey was upon me, and I decided to change it up. I came across a woman form Minnesota heading to the Mohave. She wanted to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, a monster of a hike spanning something like a thousand miles. It would take her from the desert, through California, and into Oregon. This was convenient since I was dying to get home, and she let me tag along. Her name was Cheryl, and she up and decided to do the trail after stumbling across some information about it in a book. She was newly divorced, and she made it seem like this was her opportunity to shed her old life and become anew. I got the impression that she didn’t really plan on heading back to Minnesota, but unlike many of those I met during my time on the road, it didn’t feel like she was running from her past. Rather, it felt like she was rushing toward something different, something brighter, something better.

I related to Cheryl on a deeper level than most of the others. She cheated on her husband multiple times which is never okay, but I sort of empathized with her necessity to be alone. Her mother died tragically, and she had been trying over and over again to keep her family together. She fell into drug use. Nothing she was doing could remedy the situation; she was depressed. When you’re that sad, you can’t function around other people like you do otherwise, and I think she just needed to take some time to cope by herself and recognize she wasn’t at fault for any of it.

At the beginning, her pack was huge. It was kind of hilariously massive, and she struggled just to get it on. It sort of felt like a metaphor for herself: she was struggling to pick herself back up after everything that had happened, but she knew she needed to. I was impressed, especially considering how ridiculously hard the hike was. SERIOUSLY. I have never been in that much pain before, and I’m broken multiple bones. Cheryl and I had the wrong type of gas for the stove, we quickly ran out of provisions, we were lost, everything was falling apart. The only thing that kept us going was the encouragement and faith of other hikers. If they could do it, then so could we.

It took weeks of backbreaking hiking, but we finally made it. We felt disgusting and exhausted, and I offered to let Cheryl stay with me for a few days before she went wherever she was headed. After being away from my house for so long, I felt just as foreign in it as Cheryl did, and it took some time to acclimate myself to my old life again. Nothing had changed but I did; the road had turned me into someone stronger than I thought I could be. I met incredible people and saw incredible things and managed incredible feats. But as much as I had loved it on the road, I really just needed a nap, and nap I did.