The Colorado Trail Finish: Part Three
The finale to my three-part trip video series has been available on my YouTube channel for awhile now. Perhaps you’ve already watched it. I apologize for only now getting around to posting the link here.
Maybe it was the intense lightning storm at over 12k feet one night that made me swear I’d try harder if I could just get off that mountain alive, but this CT finish really inspired me. I can’t remember the last time I felt this kind of drive and ambition in such a genuinely optimistic sense. What I mean is, I’m naturally pretty self-motivated, but I’m also a realist. I know exactly what I want, but I also know that the odds are nearly always stacked against me. Finally completing all 500 miles of The Colorado Trail after seven years left me feeling like maybe that stack of odds had tumbled off a cliff somewhere along the way.
The reality is that “the odds” are like a middle school bully who can’t stand to see me happy. I peer over the edge of the cliff and see her hanging on by her fingertips, grinning from ear to ear, reminding me that I probably shouldn’t have done something as “selfish” as backpack for two weeks when I should’ve been at home working to pay bills. As I stand there watching her grin, I hear the clinking of rocks below her as the odds stack higher yet again.
But—and here’s where the story shifts—my reality, too, is that I have never not achieved something I set out to do. I am nothing if not stubbornly committed to living life on my own terms. The truth of that statement made my fingers tingle while typing it. Perhaps that’s the ‘identity’ I can’t shrug off, for better or worse. I can see it now, etched into the side of my urn: “Stubbornly committed to living life on her own terms.”
I say “for better or worse” because it doesn’t always work in my favor. Case in point: yesterday morning I had a “tour” and “interview” with FedEx for a Package Handler position, working 5-9 a.m. M-F moving boxes off a plane and onto an assembly line. Simple work, I thought, for four hours a day to earn a little bit of extra money. We were told (via e-mail) to arrive at ten minutes to nine. Thirty-five minutes later, a dozen or so bodies were still waiting in a drab break room for someone—anyone—to come in and start our tour. When a man about my age finally came in and told us to follow him into the warehouse, the first thing out of his mouth was a lengthy, unwelcoming, near-shouted speech about how we’ll be fired very quickly if we’re even five minutes late to a shift. “If you can’t be here at 5 a.m., don’t waste my time.” And the speech went on. And on and on. Near-shouting the entire time. I felt like I was back in the Army, except that in the Army, a speech about being on-time most certainly would not have come from the mouth of someone who was just thirty-five minutes late to the meeting.
The “tour” was ten minutes long and involved us standing in the same place near the cargo plane unloading dock listening to this man give his “unwelcome” speech. A young Asian man—a student at the local university—had questions about time off for classes, but a language barrier and an impatient FedEx manager made for a very tense and awkward exchange. Shifting my weight as I considered walking out right then and there, I dove deep into my patience reserve. The FedEx manager ended the “tour” and corralled us back into the break room. “Alright then, I’ll call you in one by one for an interview, so just sit tight until I call your name.”
“I’m out,” I said, as I passed the break room and walked down the hallway to exit the building. “You can take my name off your list.”
On my way down the hallway, the manager hurried to catch up. He put his hand in the small of my back and said, “Are you thinking it just won’t work out for you?”
Um, no, sir. It won’t work out for me.
Perhaps it was the eight years of military strictness. The inability to exit situations that were toxic or downright harmful. The level of patience I had to dig up to endure… All followed by more toxicity in the civilian sector. For better or worse, it is beyond my capacity at this point in my life to willingly put myself in a situation where I’m treated less as a human being and more as a machine. A cog. Someone whose life is less meaningful than boxes of Amazon shipments on a conveyor belt.
This self-portrait is from Day One on trail, after I'd hiked about 6.5 miles in from Molas Pass & set up my tent on a small patch of dirt tucked into a few pine trees. Rain was rolling across the valley below me. There was a small waterfall behind me, coming down from the top of the mountains & flowing into Lime Creek. I ate dinner on a flat-topped boulder with the persistent sound of rushing water as my soundtrack. After dinner, I sat in my tent with the door open & watched a deer walk up from the valley to the waterfall to drink. I wrote in my journal & watched ominous clouds drift slowly over the valley for a couple of hours before closing up the tent for the night.
Time in wild places is absolutely crucial to my well-being. It's not just a hobby, or a job. It's a necessity. As Gary Snyder said, "Nature is not a place to visit. It is home." I feel that with my whole being, and I see how the dogs thrive in those spaces, too. It's why, particularly after moving to West Texas 16 years ago, I prioritize my backpacking & other trips to spend time in wild places.
I'm renewing my commitment to getting back to nature full-time, so to speak. My goal has been to buy an old reliable van to build out and free myself up geographically to be closer to the wild places I love (thus making my work as a nature photographer easier, and also giving me more "content" for the YouTube channel). It would also enable me to spend more time with my family up north without invading their small space with two big dogs and a pile of blankets on the dining room floor. :)
Everybody is not the same. Our priorities differ. The things that make us each come fully alive and meet each day with excitement and curiosity differ. As do the things that cause us to withdraw, to shrink back from life and give in to a mindset of defeat. It's okay to explore the things that wake you up inside, and to choose to prioritize those things in your daily life. Because when you do, the changes that occur make the world around you a better place.
My point in this quasi-inspirational ramble is simply to say that choosing to pursue our own path in life is difficult, especially given the weight of societal expectations and increasing economic uncertainty, but every time I get to spend a good bit of time in my precious wild places I feel compelled to renew my commitment to that choice with even more purpose. It's not magic. It's hard. But to me, it's worth it. Life is too damned short to do otherwise.
I hope you'll stick around to see what changes my channel might go through in the coming years as I work toward my goal of finding a van and hitting the road. In the meantime, I’ll continue to share the beauty of wild places with you as often as I'm able.
I know what I want. The odds may be stacked against me, as they always are, but one thing’s for certain: I’ll be out here doing what I do—as stubbornly as I do—trying to make it happen just one more time.