When I first began this new journey, I wasn’t sure where I was going or how long. Honestly I chose the Oregon Coast Trail as a starting point in May because of familiarity in how much I have bike toured the area over the years. I knew the towns. I knew the state parks. Yet the trail did offer a little different perspective of the coastline in its hiking trails and beach walks I had not seen before.
My intention at the time was not to walk a thousand miles, but just to take a relaxing trip until I found a job worth having outside of the ski industry.
I was preoccupied at the time of becoming an Assistant Ranger at the State Parks on the Oregon Coast. As they are good seasonal work. SEIU representation and contract. Some of them supply housing. I thought maybe my extensive knowledge from riding a bicycle or hiking between Oregon and San Francisco might help.
Fortunately my last job left me eligible for unemployment as I applied and interviewed for these jobs. One couldn’t live in a house on what they were paying me…but on the coast where a place to camp, shower, and charge devices runs at $8 a night while every other town has heavily discounted Grocery Outlet stores. It felt like having universal basic income for some weeks as my frugal lifestyle rarely spent anything close to the $180 a week I was being awarded.
I was mostly feeling aimless and even directionless as I made my way south. It felt kind of like spinning to be pondering the logistics of taking so many jobs while traveling, or interviewing and then packing up camp to walk 20+ miles. The tone of the trip quickly changed to one where I would hike big miles, but then take a day off almost every other day. The days were like the rhythms of the tide, where one day I would mostly bed rot in a tent and the next I would send it to the next State Park or predominantly legal camping areas along the coast.
The Oregon Coast Trail itself is really fun for anyone who has had dreams of being a beach hobo at some point. Most of the people in the towns will look at anyone with a backpack as a homeless person rather than a hiker, it is best just to embrace that aspect. The homeless people won’t understand that you are trying to walk a 400+ mile route along the coast they live on. One food bank in Florence even has a section called Hiker/Biker where they collect food fit for traveling. They too see someone walking the coast as just as homeless as anyone else.
Something I enjoyed was the infrastructure of the bus systems, where simply learning the time tables is like having unlimited shuttle drivers to cheaper food in towns or getting beyond a highway road walking section. The route is a lot better for a non-purist mentality, as portions of it have been shaped around overpriced $50 ferries or places that will charge you that much to pitch a tent in some dirt with no amenities. I found it better to utilize the buses to make the miles to state parks more realistic or avoid the ferry systems of fishing companies all together.
For a lot of the coast, the need for help from other people was replaced by this infrastructure which was nice to rest in, as so many other trails involve a lot of hitchhiking or dependence on trail angels.
It was nice to be out there and independent without much expense.
The month of May simply felt like resting between finding the cheat codes to make the trip as affordable as possible with my previous knowledge of the coast.
My intention of finding work as a priority came crashing down when I had a bad experience with a ranger at a place called Humbug Mountain State Park.
It was raining pretty heavily and I was charging my stuff in a bathroom. An older lady ranger walked up and immediately began treating me like a homeless person to sweep off the street. Apparently it was too challenging for a ranger to clean the bathroom around a battery pack. I thought that was fine, as I could plug it back in once she was done. It was the next things she said that triggered some deep wells of rebellious rage in me as she told me I could not sit outside the bathrooms under the only awning in a downpour. I straight up refused to leave, gesturing to the conditions as she scrunched her nose in disgust. Eventually she asked me to at least move to the other side as she was doing so, which I thought was reasonable enough in the unreasonable nature of everything else.
When she was done on the other side, she came over exclaiming in a heightened condescending tone: “TIME TO MOVE!”
She must have felt powerful speaking in that tone and pretending to have authority, at least until I erupted in a belly laugh at her for minutes.
I walked to the other side, giggling about her controlling behavior and the situation overall.
She never said anything else or made eye contact again.
Truth is I was laughing at myself. At how much time I had been taking to apply for the very job she was in. To see how miserable a person could be in the job. How you can be in that uniform and so far removed from helping people on a journey, hating everything cleaning up after tourists in a bathroom while pretending she had some semblance of power like a police officer.
After the incident, I return to charging to make it through the last section of the OCT and a man approached me with a $25 Starbucks gift card.
It was accompanied with a small bible, which didn’t mean much to me in general, But did trigger thoughts about areas of interest on my last journeys. Things I hadn’t thought much about on this trip, which is more about a spiritual intersection between these words people impose on each other. Like a creator in the indigenous sense touched at meditative points of zen practice and how some Medicine Men, Buddhas, Saints, and Jesus seem so similar in action or worldview.
Suddenly becoming a Park Ranger seemed laughable, like a cosmic joke I would play on myself to possess mediocre benefits instead of being with everything.
It is funny to look back at how the only upsetting experience of this section changed the trajectory of my entire trip. Moving away from the cheat code capitalism avoidance mentality into the sorrow of the homeless made me remember a place between this duality. Where a Buddha would simply laugh and shine a toothless grin at those that seek control. Where Jesus would flip the tables, free the animals, and ignore boundaries of private property in the face of pharisees. I was the only me to be, same as them: which is everything.
It wasn’t absolute, but rather I seemed to flicker between hiking the Oregon Coast Trail and realizing no matter where I am on this planet, I am in The Garden.
At the end of the coast, I rested a few days at a WarmShowers host spot in Crescent City. St. Paul’s Church of which I have stayed in their community center many times on my coastal adventures. There I cleaned up my belongings and prepared to take a bus to Ashland, Oregon where I would walk onto the Pacific Crest Trail for the first time in several years. Walking back toward those old stories of self. The homeless hitchhiker kid who read Wild who crowdsourced throwaway gear from tourists in Slab City and hiked several hundred miles on an EBT card. The trail snaking across the continent offering apples or the whole garden in every present moment as I walk toward the past.
Place there is none; we go forward and backward, and there is no place.
– Saint Augustine
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