As always, trail stats first. I’ve officially finished the desert, a whopping 702 miles and the longest of the trail’s five segments. Along the way, I’ve seen 23 snakes (12 rattlers), six deer, and likely thousands of lizards. I’ve had two beers (on trail, that is) and ten packets of tuna. We’ve averaged 17.6 miles per day that we hiked, including our “zeros” (the days where we don’t hike) and “nearos” (the days we only hike a couple of miles). We’ve taken four of those.
Now for a new thesis: slowing down in the moment is the alchemy of memory.
Just a touch after hitting 500 miles, we cruised into a promising-sounding water source that turned out to be a singular (albeit clear and cold) puddle mid-trail. It was comical and tragic all at once, and we were laughing when an older hiker approached from behind.
As we slowly filled our water bottles with what we could scoop from the puddle, he introduced himself. His name was Perpetual Motion, or PM for short. Now in his mid-to-late sixties, he explained that he had hiked the trail once before in 2017. His body, he said, felt older. Made sense, we conceded. There is less water this year at this time, he said. Seemed relevant, we agreed.
Then he went into specific changes – how different campsites had transformed and sections had re-wilded. He spoke with brilliant precision about the sections up ahead, and could recall shocking details about trail from nearly a decade before. It was incredible to behold, and a testament to the ways in which slowing down our lives cements moments to memory.
I’ve noticed it on my own trail journey, too. Free from 60 MPH highways and multitasking and social media and all the fast paced stuff and things and colors and sounds flying at you all the time and the to-dos competing for space in your brain and the pulse of not doing enough and doing too much and everything all the time… without all this, it all slows down.
It’s one foot, then the next.
Wake up, coffee.
Pack up, walk. Walk. Walk.
Stop to ogle at the beauty of it all. Walk. Take a thousand mental pictures. Walk.
It’s every campsite, embedded in memory.
It’s moments, collected, one by one. Hours or days spent looking at the same mountain, features blazed into your brain from every angle. And then, the view from the top. A deep breath, and onward.
It’s slow, and it’s complete.
And you remember it all.
