Читать книгу The State of Determination - Aaron J. Nicholson - Страница 3

When you live your life in the manner I chose during my first twenty-two years—reserved, unadventurous, compliant, and above all predictable—you begin to develop a swelling inside. A pressure starts to develop: a pressure which, although barely noticeable at first, becomes increasingly irritating and eventually the foremost focus of your mind. All those years of discreet blandness and unquestioning normality fueled this bloating in my being. It became apparent that a release was needed, and that this release would probably be the most illogical, unplanned, and ridiculous undertaking of my life—a blatant backlash against my policy of predictability and reasonableness. As the pressure mounted, it required only the tiniest prick of a pin to cause a catastrophic explosion. That pin prick occurred in November of 2007.

It was my last term at Oregon State University. I was finishing up the final twelve credits of my English degree, which required only three days of classes per week. This meant that most Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays were primarily spent sitting on the couch in the front lobby at Avery Lodge, a student housing co-op and my place of residence. During these extended relaxing periods (some of which lasted as long as seven hours) I made a habit of starting small talk with the other residents who were on their way in or out of the building. If time were not pressing, many of these residents would sit with me for a few minutes to chat before heading off to class or to their rooms to attend to some sort of obligation they called “homework.”

On one particular day, my good friends Brendan and Jenny happened to be seated with me in the lobby. Brendan was a housemate and Jenny lived in the women’s co-op next door. Both are avid outdoor enthusiasts. The conversation turned to backpacking, and I began to discuss the five-day trip I had taken the previous summer. The trek had been from Elk Lake to Big Lake in the middle of the Oregon section of the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT), which, in its entirety, stretches from Mexico to Canada through three U.S. states. I had gone with my two long-time hiking buddies Andrew and Guy. I have always enjoyed the outdoors, but somehow, as I was speaking to my friends, my recollection of the pristine mountains and untouched wilderness areas caused me to become exceptionally excited. I mentioned to my pals that I thought it would be the experience of a lifetime to travel the entire north-south length of Oregon on the Pacific Crest Trail.

“Well, why don’t you do it?” Brendan abruptly asked.

“Yeah, it’s better than sitting on the couch,” Jenny added.

They both stared at me with encouraging looks on their faces, looks that seemed to be repeating their recent comments over and over. It was as if they had issued some sort of challenge and I had to accept. I gazed at the worn-out couch on which I was seated. My old friend urged me not to listen to them, but to stay and keep him company forever. I looked back at my human friends, who were still staring at me. The internal pressure began to provide a throbbing sensation. Suddenly, I exploded:

“Why the hell not? Yeah, I will do it!” Brendan and Jenny immediately applauded my decision. We began to discuss some preliminary logistics, specifically when I would leave and what I would pack. Then Jenny asked an important question:

“How often do you think you will restock your food supply?” I had never needed to use food drops as all of my previous backpacking trips had lasted just a few days. What’s more, I had heard that leaving supply packages in the care of resorts and campgrounds along the trail was somewhat expensive. I answered with what I thought was a difficult but not altogether unreasonable solution:

“I think I’ll just carry all my food with me.” I was immediately assailed by laughter from the duo.

“Do you know how heavy your pack would be?” Brendan asked me.

“Probably pretty heavy,” I answered, “but I can carry quite a bit of weight.”

My good friends, either thinking that I was joking or that I would soon realize the impossibility of such a task after purchasing all of the food to be packed, did not press the issue further that day. They merely voiced their support of my decision to hike the entire Oregon section of the Pacific Crest Trail.

December 7, 2007 was the day I graduated from the University. I moved into a dilapidated lime-green house in Corvallis with a few former Avery Lodge residents. Wanting to save some money for the big adventure (and continue to pay rent), I spent the next few months desperately searching for a job. I started looking for copy editing and the like, thinking that I should put my English degree to use. My failure in this endeavor soon caused me to question whether it had a use. Eventually, I began to apply for server positions at local restaurants, desperate for any sort of income. Most places viewed my degree as an over-qualification and would not hire me for fear of losing an employee in a few weeks, that is, as soon as I found a way to take my first career step. I began to despair.

In mid-February, however, things began to look up. My good friend and hiking buddy Andrew informed me of his intentions to travel to California to make some quick money as a petitioner. Apparently, political and business interests that wanted certain initiatives on the ballot would pay on a per-signature basis for petitioning services, and a mutual friend of ours lived with a petition coordinator in the San Jose area. Andrew had done this four years earlier and made quite a bit of cash. He encouraged me to join him. Although I was hesitant at first, I crunched the numbers and realized that I would be flat broke in less than two months. With no other options, I consented to go with him.

My housemates threw me a combined birthday and going-away party on the first day of March. Great fun was had by all, from what I can remember. The next day, Andrew and I packed everything we thought we’d need for the petitioning trip into the back of my orange 1977 Toyota Celica GT. The suspension was nearly bottomed-out. On the morning of March 3, 2008, we departed. After buying several tanks of gasoline on the way to San Jose, I had $36 to my name, most of which was the cash in my wallet.

The petitioning stint was more lucrative than I imagined. We spent seven weeks standing in front of large retail stores and meandering around farmers’ markets asking strangers for their signatures on a collection of completely unrelated petitions. Of course, rejection was common, but with a big, cheesy smile and a well rehearsed pitch, a surprising number of passers-by were willing to sign. Every day was the same, except that once a week we would knock off early to organize our signatures for submission that evening. It was tedious, to be sure, but by mid-April I had saved a respectable sum. By this time most of the ballot initiatives had been qualified, and Andrew and I decided to return to Oregon.

I still had a room (and a fifteen-inch-high lawn) waiting for me at the green house. Using my newfound dough, I upgraded some of my backpacking equipment. A 109-liter pack, a white gas folding stove, and a lightweight down sleeping bag were the first major purchases I made. I was soon able to test this gear. In California, Andrew and I had decided to go on a hike as soon as we got back to Oregon. We chose the Rogue River Trail, the first trail that Andrew, Guy, and I had traversed together. The launch site was the Grave Creek boat ramp. We hiked from there to Foster Bar, a distance of forty miles, and then turned around and hiked back. We covered eighty miles in nine days. The new gear worked great and there were no mishaps, except during the last night we spent on the trail. I got food poisoning (or something symptomatically very similar) and was so sick I could not sleep. The next day we hiked nine miles back to Grave Creek. I nearly passed out a few times.

In June of 2008, my roommates and I decided to abandon the green Avery halfway house. I had planned to move to Eugene and into a house with some other friends of mine, but this was not slated to happen until early August, just before my departure date for the big hike. As a temporary solution, I moved into my sister’s apartment in Eugene. It was there that I began logging a journal for the PCT trek. The first entry records my basic plan of attack and some of my reasoning for attempting such a preposterous journey:

6/25/08

I have recently decided to undertake a great and somewhat ridiculous project: I will hike on the Pacific Crest Trail from the California border to the Washington border. This trans-Oregon adventure has been resting dormant in the back of my mind for a while, but recent changes in my circumstances have convinced me to pursue it now. Specifically, I find myself with no commitments, unemployed, and with a decent amount of money in savings. I will probably never get the opportunity to take this much time to myself ever again, so now is the time. The excursion will commence in early August, immediately following the two-week road trip I’ve planned with my Corvallis friends. Start to finish, the trek will span about 460 miles. I will carry all of my food and supplies with me—no restocking points. I will go alone.

To prepare, I’ve purchased some new equipment: a new pack, sleeping bag, stove, and compass. The pack is 6650 cubic inches (incredibly large). The sleeping bag is goose down and weighs less than three pounds despite being the extra-long version. The stove is a white gas backpacking stove with a 30-oz fuel bottle. As a result of their largely unfounded worry, my parents have given me a satellite communications device, the operation of which I have yet to figure out. It must have cost quite a bit. It also requires a paid subscription to operate, which I am reluctant to purchase.

Arranging my menu should be a fairly simple task. I’ll need to calculate how many days I’ll be on the trail and estimate how much food I’ll eat per day. With a light pack, I know I am capable of three miles per hour. Given that I will have a rather heavy pack on this trip, I probably should not count on hiking more than twenty miles per day. At eighteen miles per day, I could theoretically accomplish the entire 460 miles in about twenty-five days. Of course, I’ll need to factor in a few days for rest. Also, if I am dropped off on I-5 (I plan to hitchhike to the beginning and from the end of the trail), then I will need to hike an extra thirty miles south to get to the border, where my south-north trip will begin with me retracing the thirty miles I just walked to get from the intersection of the PCT and I-5 to the California-Oregon border. This sounds inefficient, but it’s the only realistic way I can hike the entire Oregon section. I will start at I-5 in Oregon, hike south on the trail to reach California, then hike back again to I-5 and continue onward to Cascade Locks on the Columbia River. Adding rest days and this additional thirty miles should put the trip at about a month. My pack and gear without food should weigh no more than twenty pounds, so if I limit myself to one and a half pounds of food per day, I’ll have a sixty-five-pound pack. This is at least 50 percent heavier than any pack I have carried, and although I am sure I can achieve it, I have never actually hiked eighteen miles in one day, even with a thirty-five-pound pack. Is this sounding crazy yet? To limit weight, I am considering leaving the stove and cookware at home. That will mean eating nothing but dry, cold food for one month. As long as that food is high in calories, I should be able to pull it off.

Today I printed some topographical maps of the Oregon PCT. They are quite detailed and will be very useful. Some guy edited existing maps by inserting mileage from the Mexican border to various landmarks on the trail. Encounters with civilization (stores, restaurants, highways, etc.) are also listed—not that I should need them.

This project sounds insane, I know. But once I complete it, I should return with such a great sense of accomplishment that I will never again doubt my ability to do anything. The absence of self-doubt is the only sure-fire way to do whatever you want in life. This trip is only the beginning.

The road trip mentioned in the entry was another excursion I planned to fund with my petitioning cash. My Corvallis friend and former Avery housemate Nick had proposed that a few of the Avery alumni go on an extended road trip of the western U.S. As I had the money and certainly the desire to visit places I’d never seen, I eagerly consented. The goal was to leave in mid-July. Nick had already done all the planning, and had told us that we would visit eight National Parks. One of these was Yosemite, home of the famous Half-Dome. I had formulated the idea that sandals might be a worthwhile investment for the PCT hike because of their low weight and good ventilation, and the hiking we were planning to do on the road trip would be a great way to test this theory.

Shortly before we left on the road trip, I realized the folly of my intended food plan—the one and a half pounds of food to be consumed on a daily basis. I realized that there was simply no way of knowing exactly how much ground I could cover in a day, especially considering how heavy my pack would be. I reworked the numbers, assuming that a pack 50 percent heavier than normal would slow my pace by about 33 percent. The food quantities I came up with still seemed very likely inadequate or possibly superfluous—there was just no reliable way to tell how fast I was going to travel. I then developed a brilliant eating schedule:

7/10/08

New plan. Rather than estimate the amount of time I will spend on the trail and then estimate how much food I will need in order to exist for that amount of time, I’m just going to estimate how much food I will need to fuel my efforts for a specific distance. Basically, I need to guess how far a pound of food will take me and then do the math for the 460 (or so) miles. Assuming I take only calorie-rich food, I imagine I could travel ten miles on one pound of food. Therefore, I should bring forty-six pounds of food.

This new method of food estimation just occurred to me a few minutes ago as I was sitting on the couch. It is superior because it is not based on my rate of travel, which is as yet an unknown. I previously proposed three miles per hour (or whatever I said in my last entry), but it could be more or less than that. Reason, or reasonableness, would seem to make me think that I am incapable of maintaining that rate for an extended amount of time, especially with such a heavy load. My personal motivation to achieve the unthinkable, which seems to be the driving force in this ridiculous Pacific Crest project, says otherwise.

The rest of this entry I will include for the sake of completeness, and to demonstrate my tendency to be foolishly stubborn at times. It showcases an embarrassingly illogical endeavor:

. . . just the other day, my motorcycle quit on the highway about ten miles outside of Florence. Unable to summon aid by phone, I commenced pushing. I quickly realized that this was a great test of my physical stamina, and I began to use the odometer on the bike in conjunction with the watch on my wrist to calculate my rate of travel. I was able to achieve twenty-minute miles [unreadable] . . . This was happily surprising. Of course, I was on smooth, flat ground, my load was on wheels, and I only pushed for about an hour and a half before I was able to contact my father using my phone. Never mind that. I knew I could have gone all day. Remember the time I walked from the U of O to the Eugene airport in under three hours? . . .

I’m leaving on the aforementioned road trip in three days. I hope to acquire hiking sandals before then so I can have an adequate testing period. After the trip, I’ll have [unreadable] . . . for the hike.

We covered a lot of ground on the road trip. The most notable stops were National Parks including Yosemite, Sequoia, King’s Canyon, Death Valley, Las Vegas (a different sort of park), Zion, Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Crater Lake. We day-hiked in almost all of these. The most strenuous expedition was up Half-Dome in Yosemite, which I accomplished in the sandals. The journal entry I recorded upon my return from the trip chronicles this particular trek and the lessons learned from it:

8/6/08

Back from the road trip! Eight National Parks taught me a valuable lesson: The sandals I bought on sale were not made for hiking. The first adventure I attempted with the sandals was a seventeen-mile, 4800-foot-gain excursion up Half Dome in Yosemite. By the end, my knees were in pain. Two more days of hiking in them left me in agony, so I did the rest of our hiking in my sneakers . . . they definitely proved to be superior, even though I’ve worn almost all the way through the soles. I’ve given up on taking the sandals on the adventure, so today I bought some nice wool hiking socks to help keep my feet cooler in the boots. I’ve never used wool before (I’m normally too cheap to pay ten bucks for a pair of socks) but I’ve heard it’s much better.

I finally came up with a definite menu, the details of which comprise much of the remainder of this entry:

Yesterday I purchased food for the trip. Using the one-pound-for-ten-miles rule, I bought fifty pounds of food. The trail is about 460 miles, but I’ll add a bit for the backtracking from the border to my Oregon drop-off point. Also, I plan to take the detour to Crater Lake and climb the South Sister. All in all, it will be about 500 miles. Here’s the breakdown:

Raisins	2.5 lbs
Summer sausage	10.5
Peanut butter	8.0
Marshmallows	4.0
Cheese curls	1.5
Apricot-almond bars	4.5 (25 bars)
Cookies, Bavarian import	2.5 (13)
Marshmallow-rice treats	2.0 (13)
Energy bars	4.0 (25)
Sesame snaps, Polish import	2.5 (25)
Macadamia nuts	2.5
Cashews	2.5
Artificial maple syrup	3.0

From this fifty pounds of food, I have formulated the following menu, to be followed every ten miles:

Raisins	1.0 oz
Peanut butter	4.5 tbsp
Marshmallows	5
Summer sausage	3.3 oz
Syrup	1.0 oz
Cheese curls/cashews/macadamia nuts	2.0 oz
Apricot-almond bar/energy bar	1
Cookie/marshmallow-rice treat/sesame snap	1

Following this plan will give me at least 2000 calories per meal. That should be enough to fuel me for ten miles. Even with all those calories, I’m sure I will still lose weight.

I set up the account for the satellite messenger. My contacts will receive via email an “all’s well” message and a link to my location on Google Maps. I plan to press the transmit button every evening so that my progress can be monitored by my friends and family. I’ve included my own email in the list so I can view my path when I return.

I’m considering contacting the Register-Guard about the possibility of an article in their Outdoor Life section. They probably would not write one until I return, but a preliminary interview might be helpful. Also, I could include them in the satellite messenger email list.

All my stuff is currently sitting in my living room waiting to be packed. Are you ready for the complete list? Here it is:

Backpack	8 lbs, 8 oz
Sleeping bag	2 lbs, 12 oz
Water filter	1 lb
Hydration pouch (full)	6 lbs, 8 oz
Tube tent	14 oz
Satellite messenger, with Li batteries	12 oz
Camera, with alkaline batteries	1 lb 2 oz
Sunscreen	4 oz
Bug repellant	2 oz
Soap	2 oz
Notebook and pen	10 oz
Sleeping pad, foam	5 oz
Cell phone	6 oz
Topographical maps	8 oz
Compass	1 oz
String	2 oz
Extra AA batteries	4 oz
Flashlight, with battery	4 oz
Pocket knife	2 oz
Safety pins, 4	Negligible
Mole Foam	1 oz
Toothbrush	1 oz
Toothpaste	1 oz
Fork	1 oz
Emergency poncho	1 oz
Total weight	24 lbs, 15 oz

I have yet to obtain the backup water bottles for use on long stretches of the trail without water. I will carry these empty except for the handful of times I will need to store water in them. The thinnest plastic bottles available (the disposable type) will weigh about one ounce for both of them, bringing my total gear weight to an even twenty-five pounds. The following is a complete list of clothing:

1 Hat	3 oz
1 White T-shirt	4 oz
1 Long-sleeved thermal shirt	5 oz
2 pr Wool socks	6 oz
1 pr Boots	3 lbs
1 pr Shorts, with ventilation liner	3 oz
Total weight	4 lbs, 5 oz

So, the total weight of all the previously-mentioned items, plus the weight of the food packaging, stuff sacks, and other seemingly negligible items I’m sure I forgot to record, is just about eighty pounds. I don’t own a scale, so I used objects of known weight to estimate the weight of my gear by comparison. Still, I think that the eighty-pound estimate is good to within plus-or-minus five pounds.

It is worth mentioning that I no longer plan to hitchhike to the beginning of the trail. My father, who is just a tad bit worried about my safety, invented a reason to go to Ashland so that he could drop me off at the beginning of the trail. I will still have to hike south a bit to get to the border, but he will get me close. Also, my friend Ty, a resident of Lake Oswego, offered to pick me up at Cascade Locks and take me at least as far as his place. Getting back to Eugene from there is still unknown in terms of transportation. My sister might be willing to pick me up.

Yesterday, I planned a trip in the Eagle Cap Wilderness Area with my friends Andrew and Guy. Our plan is to begin that hike immediately after my return from the ridiculous hike. I wonder if I will feel up to the challenge.

Here my preliminary entries are concluded. If you’ve deduced that I was a reckless, under-experienced, foolhardy individual, you’re probably right. Nevertheless, I was determined to prove to myself and to the rest of the world that I could successfully complete this absurdity. It became almost as much a matter of pride as a matter of enjoying the outdoors. Failure was not an option. I had played up the whole thing to so many people—most of all to myself—that an incomplete journey would be humiliating. I departed for the adventure convinced that only death or a severely debilitating injury could stop me. I simply had to do this.