[Disclaimer: this journal deals with sensitive subject matter and all illegal activities should be considered fiction]
Leaving the St. Paul Church from Crescent City I’ve stayed at a few times on my coastal bike tours, I took a bus to Ashland where I stayed with a trail angel named Sue.
In a first ever of my adventures, these hosts let me borrow their car to drive to Medford for gear and resupply.
After a failure to hitch, another trail angel took me out to the trail.
At first hiking south felt a little too…populated. As there was something shelter-like every 20 miles or so. One of them a historic cabin, which I slept in with shoddy decaying infrastructure that reminded me of forest club houses my brother and I would build out of spare wood/ nails.
A piece of writing on a diamond blaze really caught my eye and returned me to a place I was on the Appalachian Trail. In an earlier, not currently published writing on The Trek I talked about my friend I lived a few years with in intentional communities killing himself in Hawaii jumping off a cliff. How his mother was told by locals about the spirits of the dead coming back to visit us in the form of butterflies.
This diamond white PCT blaze had scribbled on it in sharpie, “follows the butterflies.”
I wondered to myself if that piece I wrote on the AT had a deep effect on someone hiking the PCT or if it was simply coincidence that I said the butterflies were blazes to follow if you want to learn something from the dead.
Walking along in June, I saw hundreds of butterflies a day. Often I had to watch where I stepped. One in particular went out of its way to move back under my foot in my dodging like it was intentionally trying to be crushed. I stood there a while, staring at the fragments of a butterfly. Somewhere in it, I felt my dead friend’s dark humor as he laughed and said it is nothing to make the jump again.
In the next civilization of Seiad Valley, I slept on a nice couple named Erica and Amber’s porch. Then took a zero three miles from their house where I had the only campfire of the trip alone before forest fire season began. Little did I know the next day I would only make it 13 miles and experience a whole day of rain.
I camped under a big tree near a spot called Buckhorn spring. Under it someone has stashed a Jameson bottle of whiskey. While the next day it constantly rained, the bottle stared at me with its temptations. Instead I stayed in my tent all day listening to talks on the Plum Village app.
To tell the truth, I was full of fear about all the dead branches looking over my tent. Hard to stay there 24 hours in a 1-person tent and not picture one taking my life. One of the talks was called the Six Earth Touchings, which could easily be one of the simplest spiritual things to learn for profound results. Part of it was about accepting my own inevitable death and thinking of my dead friend, or his potential return in butterfly form. I accepted that a branch might kill me and all that it means is I become the part of me without thoughts or form. Another part of the Earth Touchings involves finding such a truth in other religions. My friend, the butterfly, and my own death means only melting back into all creation.
I got the best sleep on the trail that night as the rain tapped my tent, knowing it could kill me and in the right light isn’t such a bad thing.
The next day I finally hike on after giving the tree the whiskey for not killing me and save another the temptation.
I stop to talk to a femme presenting person with braided hair within a mile of my camp. Mostly because in the dozen hikers I’ve ran into so far, they seemed to be the first non-cis white guy cosplaying hikertrash through their wallet. Noticably on their pack is a CDT tag and on the other side a dreamcatcher. I learn they too stayed in their tent all day for the cold rain. I tell them about the trail angel couple with the porch to sleep on, referring to it as the safest place in Seiad Valley.
A mystical side of me sees the dreamcatcher as a sort of spirit blaze and a part of me wonders if it caught my nightmares the day before…
Another couple miles down at a water source I needed an older white guy asks about the previous hiker, then asks if I thought they were hispanic in a entitled way that makes my skin crawl. All the while bragging about it being the last section of the whole PCT left for him. Meanwhile he shows me chewed straps on his pack from rodents he had to rig together. Incredible for someone to hike the whole of the PCT and never experience salt seeking critters until now, if you ask me. Sometimes you learn all you need to know about a person within 5 minutes of meeting them.
I dreaded going to Etna as a town because it made itself seem expensive and put a price on everything. I got a bizarre double feeling about the place. As everything downtown was this sort of plastic smiling for tourists vibe. While Farout makes you think expensive trail angel shuttles are the only option, when the hitching came easy. While the park itself was often filled with children’s laughter, there was also deeply carved swastikas in wood around the area I had to remove with a pocket knife.
I considered the swastika removal services my fee for camping and felt less guilt about the $10 shower token machine allegedly accepting quarters.
The next morning a post office worker picks me up in his personal vehicle with the little USPS sign above it on the roof. He is wearing a shirt that says, Kill All Pedophiles as he tells me it’s against the rules to pick up hitchhikers. I wonder to myself if he means that as like an Epstein statement or if he was on that spectrum of bigots that think all gay people are some kind of predators. Instead I tell him, I always kind of wanted to be a post office driver, working outside with the benefits.
“You’re getting valuable work experience today then.” He says, handing me the tote of mail as I open mailboxes to place mail along the way to the trailhead summit.
When we part ways I am excited to be back on trail, away from all that.
I start to walk feeling like a butterfly transforming again, as the sun sets me on fire and I sweat out their terrible harm swirling like tornadoes from their minds I quietly encountered echoing all too much in every step until peace returns in the growing distance.
🦋
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