At some point in the ten months since I’d last ridden in a bona-fide airplane from Allentown to Atlanta, American Airlines had begun1 a probably legal but morally questionable program of deceiving passengers leaving from that small Pennsylvanian airport into thinking they were paying full airfare to fly to their destination when in reality they would be stuck riding a bus to another city that AA had actually bothered to give a shit about, such as Philadelphia or Newark. On the plus side, this gave me a nice, long ride to fume over the injustice that the bait and switch represented—so by the time I finally got to Philly, there was perhaps no greater example of the moral abyss inherent to capitalism than what that particular fucking airline had done to me.
I was heading home after five months of long days spent hiking mixed with a few noticeably much shorter days spent in town determined to do as little physical activity that didn’t directly involve the act of eating as humanly possible. I’d managed to draw out the transition between lives on and off the trail for over a week by spending several blissful, easygoing days based out of the Many Glacier campground—the area finally clear of rain, sleet, and clouds (if slowly refilling with smoke from a fire on the west side of the park). My friends AT + KT drove all the way out from Spokane to camp and hang out with me, and they’d come prepared with fresh food to cook on the portable propane stove and an extra pillow just for me. We ate, we drank beer, we went on (very short) hikes, we visited with friends working in the park or passing through it, and we sat around talking and looking up in wonder at the mountains cutting into the sky in every direction. When, at the end of this short vacation, they returned to their home in Spokane, they took me along. In the morning I boarded an eastbound flight, headed for Pennsylvania and a brief reunion with Sean Meadow, whom I hadn’t seen since she’d left the trail herself in West Yellowstone.
She met me at the airport with a bit of a surprise: rather than traveling into the Kempton valley to stay with her family as originally planned, we’d remain in Allentown until the following day. Rather than spend the evening driving, she’d booked a night at the local Red Roof Inn, which had been well reviewed as cheap but nonetheless clean and comfortable. And once we made it past the thick crowd of construction workers running a series of nonsensically loud machines, our room did indeed appear clean in the sense that the linens seemed fresh, the bathroom scrubbed, and the floor clear of debris. As we were checking the mattress for bedbugs, however, we found what was obviously a heavily-used meth pipe. We’d had no reason to suspect an infestation and had been checking out of an abundance of caution and stumbled instead across evidence of a crime beyond, apparently, the standards of what the housekeeping staff considered to be “clean.” I can grant that cleanliness may mean different things to different people, but this seemed a bit much. For that matter, comfort, too, is a highly subjective experience. At least it explained why the peephole in the door had been plugged with wadded-up toilet paper.
We made the most of it, though. Having shared a fantasy for a thousand miles of the CDT of eating bottomless breadsticks and salad at a particular Italian-themed national chain restaurant without once ever finding in any trail town through which we passed, we were finally able to make this airy, ephemeral dream a tangible reality. Thanks to the magic that is Allentown, we found ourselves seated a mood-lit booth ten minutes after one of us had thought to see if there was a brach in the city. We’d had the idea that such an outing would only be enjoyable while actively hiking—and indeed a meal that heavy and of that quantity is best consumed while you’re still burning 5,000 calories per day—but the food was actually quite a bit better than either of us remembered it having any right to be. The miracle of finding an Olive Garden in a mid-sized American city is without question a (very) small one, but after months of unfulfilled longing for carbs absolutely drowning in butter and cheese, it was a miracle nonetheless.
After a few days casually visiting Sean Meadow’s family and learning to my surprise and dismay just how deeply I apparently do not love paddle boarding, she returned me to the Allentown airport, where I boarded my bus with a great deal more civility than the man she would later witness as he discovered the true nature of his “flight.” It wasn’t the counter agents fault, after all, that some faceless executive had decided that it would be good business to trick their customers. In the end, I would be more annoyed at the man who managed to browbeat me into giving up my window seat on the ride to Philly by insisting his ticket was actually the one for that coveted spot. Annoyed by the airline’s and my seatmate’s behavior both, wearied by five months spent living in frequently less than perfectly comfortable conditions, and facing the prospect of an upcoming transcontinental flight the 13-hour duration of which my large frame would spend crammed intimately against the body of a strange man with an even larger frame than mine, I sprung for an upgrade to first class. So it was that I spent the flight to Atlanta sipping one scotch after another as I stretched out my legs with an inaudible groan of satisfaction and watched the sun sink ever so slowly behind the far-distant horizon.
When I got home, I would start the long and tedious project of cleaning and repairing all my backpacking gear in preparation for putting it into storage. This had been another long-held fantasy of mine while on the CDT, something I can clearly remember actively daydreaming about through interminable days walking through endless fields of cattle—the reasoning being, I guess, that this process would mark the end of the hike in a way that nothing else quite could. If the Chief Mountain terminus had been the trail’s final chapter, and the time spent with friends in Glacier and Sean Meadow in Pennsylvania had been a sort of laconic afterward, the Big Clean would essentially be akin to closing the book and putting it back on the shelf. There was a finality to it, a kind of closure or resolution. As I would come to remember, however, washing, drying, and meticulously sewing and resealing gear is not really something you should look forward to. While necessary, it is genuinely totally, mind-numbingly boring—and somehow there is always more of it to be done than ever seems reasonable or even possible.
It would be some time after I’d finally gotten the last piece of equipment safety put away that I would start to actually miss life on the trail: spending all day in the wild, watching the sun rise every morning, feeling the fluid energy of my trail-trained legs as they stomped up a long climb, the simplicity of having literally one thing all day to do. I’d spent so much of the hike desperate to be done with it, but eventually the memory of those long, painful hours would start to be eclipsed not so much by a view of the CDT through John Denverish glasses as by the basic need to return to the outdoors; to wake up in the mountains, far from the sound of traffic and miles from the nearest TV; to drink cold, clear water fresh from a clear, flowing brook; to breathe in the scent of pines and earth and pungent plant that grows in the high places that I was never able to identify.
What I’d really needed was not so much to leave the trail as a vacation from it. Maybe, in the end, that’s all this post-hike life really was. I’d go home and then I’d go back to work: those were real enough, all-consuming worlds on their own, but how much did they define my life or the self buried somewhere at its center? As I sat back in my plush first class seat, taking another long drink from my glass2 of 12-year Glenlivet and looking out at a sky gently fading from orange to black, none of it seemed truly concrete. This life was only my vacation from the mountains, from hiking, from the backcountry—and someday, I knew, I would have to go back. In the end, it would only ever be a question of how, and of when.
Listed in small print on the itinerary sent to me by American Airlines as “The Landline Company as American Eagle” [sic]
1) That is, begun in a way that directly affected me.
2) Seriously, a real glass! First class is amazing!!
Great article, exactly what I needed.