[Disclaimer: this journal deals with sensitive subject matter and all illegal activities should be considered fiction]
The section between Etna and Mt Shasta is an incredible hundred miles, but mostly exposed. Fortunately the creeks are big and offer a cold place to dip a buff or a sun hoodie before continuing on. For the most part, you are being baked by the sun though.
I found myself hiking harder than before, maybe not necessarily going farther.
Just trying to go all out for max speed.
I felt visited by my studies of the Lakota medicine man, Lame Deer and previous realizations thinking about the Appalachian Trail Ridgerunners.
The hiking sometimes feels more like a Ghost Dance. Like a small taste of what those ultra runners like David Goggins or Andy Glaze write about when you reach the point of hallucinations. A Ghost Dance is a Lakota practice of dancing to exhaustion that often brings visions.
I found myself thinking about the rude Assistant Ranger encounter on the Oregon Coast Trail. Sitting on a rock at the end of a long day at a spot called Heaven Spring. I watched clouds and mountains change shapes. A vision that occurred to me is one that is hard to hold and harder to put into words.
Analytically: I think most laws, borders, and cities to be profoundly ugly things. With my moral utopian vision aligning with something more like indigenous sovereignty or anarchy. The realization that occurred watching the images dance in the clouds and trying to have my sun baked brain analyze them for meaning involved thinking of the whole earth as a garden and what would a ranger protecting that actually look like.
That’s when I realized many laws in this world are evil in how they lack grace. Which it is important to understand my definition of evil being reducing anything to less than being a part of all. It is maybe not the speed limit law that is evil, but the widespread lack of sanctity of human life. In a world where at the core of the law is judgment and punishment instead of grace is probably in the Christian sense the greatest sin against a Creator’s reality. If that wasn’t the core, even something like widespread surveillance in technology like flock cameras would be very different in a world built upon grace. Instead of it being used to feed hungry people or make the world better, it is being used to stalk and harm people.
The Park Ranger I wanted to be weeks before does the good of wanting to protect land from harm, while simultaneously upholding the harm of making a colonial fish bowl out of parks and wilderness areas.
As I walk with this in mind, I see the underbrush piling up in the bottom of the forests along the trails because people aren’t living here to care for it. It waits for funding for care to happen. It doesn’t come, but fires do.
The reflection in all directions I was seeing from my time at the monastery before hiking the AT feels all the clearer now. As much like myself, if the world was something like a Garden of Eden of various names across creation stories…then the world imposed on it currently has made it a rape victim. If life could be a gift and grace is the natural state, this colonial world has systemized cruelty and made us all minions of continuing harm or feel the most justified to violently retaliate.
With those eyes in the past contained in mind, I have such double feelings about my life among activists of various types. About how I held people to a moral or theoretical absolutism. While they all did the same in their own ways or in retaliation.
Instead of grace.
Born such a victim in a victimized world, I have continued the harm and I realize now any system or theory lacking such is destined to perpetuate or condone cruelty.
In Mt Shasta, I stayed with trail angels a few nights resting back into the unfortunate reality of this world. They take me out to a community bike ride and I think of all the people I’ve met on my bike rides across the country. The fallouts or lost friendships. How far I’ve gone and the shape of this country I’ve seen. I’ve been a compulsive shattered thing, judging people by their place in a world I could never even save without grace.
The pay is sometimes terrible and there’s not always many benefits, but the sun is the only badge anyone needs to uphold the laws of grace.
On the eve before my return to the trail, the little screen in my hand tells me of a lost history. The Okwanchu Shasta and Winchu tribes believed Castle Crag, called then Kukuparick a place of great visions and visits from spirits. In colonial war history, I read about how water sources were diverted to drive indigenous populations out of the area. Each drink keeping me on my path potentially shaped by that genocidal cruelty.
I hope the future heals this world.
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