Author: pilgenfritz

And so we came off the trail a few days early and a wise decision but Now What? What to do when the plans you had made need to be abandoned, when where you thought you would be is not where you are? Now what?  

And what’s this? The only thing that’s sore after the days on the trail is my right hand. I mean really sore and now I see swollen. I call other hikers to ponder the mystery and they agree with my diagnosis that it had to be gripping my poles too tight descending those four and a half miles off the Priest. I get recommendations on new poles to purchase and I continue to ignore my sore hand and wish it were otherwise. When days later things are not otherwise, I wonder if perhaps it might be a good idea to get my hand checked out. At first the doctor thinks it might be an infection, maybe a bone chip, perhaps tendinitis. All I know is that whatever it is, this is not how I want it to be.

Another round of tests determine that it seems to be tendinitis and my right hand confined to a splint for “a week, perhaps two.” But it’s not only my right hand that’s bound, it’s me, bound up in pining that I’m not finishing the last section of the trail we had abandoned now that the weather has cleared and not able to do the writing I’d been looking forward to.  

When the boat gets tippy in gusting wind, when things get out of sorts, too often I return to do all the things that aren’t helpful to do in disorienting times when things are not like I want them to be. 

I remember sailing that day when the wind came up and I clung on tight – held the tiller, held the mainsheet – did not, would not, let go until the boat tipped and began filling with water. I remember what I so often forget and feels so unnatural, when things get disoriented, the key is to let go. Let everything go and the boat will come around, head up into the wind and stop.  

Perhaps now, the time to not deny or fight or bemoan the disorientation but to let go and let the disorientation set the sails to a new orientation. 

It’s the old adage of instead of trying to change it, fix it, to see it and feel it, accept how it is. To put down “not how I want it to be” and “poor me” and pick up “this is how it is”. To not keep endlessly pursuing and bemoaning what I can’t do but the opportunity to ponder what I now can.  

When I am so set on my little plans and goals I can’t see all I am missing that is not included in my nice little plans. But when the plans have to go and I finally stop trying to get them back, I get to see what is there, out there beyond that tight little path of my plans and goals.  

In the disorientation of the present, I get to wonder again, what really matters?  Maybe I have other options. Maybe paths I had abandoned can be re-imagined and re-interpreted. Maybe I can turn all that energy I put into pining for an imagined past or bemoaning plans I can’t now complete into the creation of a vibrant future.  

Last Sunday afternoon I went to the Wild Church Spiritual Community in D.C.  We gathered in the woods by the Potomac surrounded by bright yellow beech, a floor of brown dry leaves and contemplated the gifts of the dark. 

After a 20 minute time of wandering the woods, I came back with my seven words I heard in the listening, “It couldn’t have happened any other way.”

So in the last weeks off the trail, amidst everything not as I would have had it be, thankful for the gifts of what is. Thankful for the gift that disorientation has given in slowing and showing possibilities I might never have seen. 

But now that we’ve decided, breathed into a plan 

No cell service.

No one home at the house across the street.

Not so sure we should wander to the trailers down the hill

No service up the hill under the power lines either.

A quick decision as I hear the truck rounding the bend 

To stick out a thumb and point at the phone and get a ride 

With the nicest of men

To the apple store that no does not sell computers.

Where there’s a phone and someone coming to shuttle us 

And the nicest of young men who found home here 

In the mountains where his grandfather lives

Who had moved to L.A. to learn home was not there

Where people gawked and wondered 

How he survived out there back East in the woods

Where you needed to chop your own wood and grow your own food. 

No that was not survival he realized, this was home.

Survival was what he needed there in the city.  

He pulls the rocking chair out onto the porch and a spot in the sun.  

I had no idea how tired I was until I sat and stopped.  

The old Chevy pulls in and the old man steps out

Thinks I’m sitting out here selling apples

Instead of a weary hiker off the trail

I wish I felt like walking again the old man says as he hobbles away 

Now I can barely stand up.

Looking down the road listening for the shuttle 

Wondering where the road leads

And when the planet started to die

Of what can no longer be saved 

And now needs to be grieved

Of what we can’t stop doing and what we now must  

And home. 

You can leave your sins at the shelter 

On the top of the Priest

For sections of trail you never completed

And the food you stole  

For all the heavy stories you need no longer carry 

Through crunching November memory and leaves

But we have no time for confessions today

Step out towards descent and down

Where the winding path becomes our prayer

Our confession and absolution

As we turn away from the sun

Cold shivering wind over the ridge

Until we turn back warm faces lit by sun’s rays

37 turns back and forth 

Turning

Returning

Down the Priest

Descending into grace 

And clarity that our trek must end

Before pushing on, ascending the next ridge,

The prospect of two, three more nights 

Falling freezing temperatures

We are not prepared for this

For the good of the group,

Time to call it a hike, give thanks 

And wonder, 

Now what?  

The Grouse Hunter

This second day, the trail quiets, and opens. Instead of everywhere in mind and memory, I’m also here. I’ve been out on the trail a lot the last three weeks and perhaps it’s why it doesn’t take so long to feel the heavy fog lifting between me and what is here to take in. I see it today – the brown and green leaves beneath my feet, the scattering of pink flowers on the edge of the trail. Find myself here with the gray weathered oaks, bright green moss, blue and white sky. 

The bird twitters.

The brown and white shaggy nose appears sniffing. He found me again.  

The orange hat and vest coming slowly up the trail below. 

Now three long shaggy noses sniffing. It’s the second time today they’ve found me and not the grouse they’re after.  

These old trees are nice, the grouse hunter tells me, but not for animals, birds, growth and grouse. For a rich undergrowth, the woods need fire or logging like they do in Maine and Michigan. Up there are where the grouse are; here, I’ll walk 150 miles to find 5.  

I remember the only times on the trail when I was frightened

Startled by the sudden flapping of grouse taking off through trees. 

How it is that freedom does not come without cost

And flight leads to both life and death

Of all I need to die to, 

To let go, to be here.

Mountain Goat

The little boy leaps the rock 

Knock knock jokes echoing across the valley 

To the hiker below who bellows answers

On the other side of the door

Who says he never expected to see 

A talking mountain goat out here.  

Katrina 

You’ll meet few people like me out here, she says.

Mostly men, and hardly another Black woman anywhere,

But it doesn’t bother me,

Here is where I come to meet the Lord.

My mother worries about me out here 

I tell her not to

Here on the trail you meet the nicest people

Who would help me if I needed it which I won’t.

What is frightening is not out here in the woods,

It’s what’s there at home. 

Out here I find what I need 

To survive in the city. 

Matthew 

At the bottom of the hill

He waves me over 

Do you want something to eat?  

I’ve got Brunswick Stew

A Pepsi or Gatorade?

And here, take a chair by the fire.

You are the embodiment of Trail Magic, I tell him 

But he doesn’t know what that is 

Has never heard of the gift of surprise on the trail

Of food, water, rest and welcome. 

Later we walk up the hill together to see the sunset

And on the way talk of the ways of grace 

Of how it’s discovered through grit and grime 

The losses that are life

Of how it is that heart-break can lead to heart-softening and opening

That for one to know deep joy is to have known deep pain as well,

As the man of sorrows kneels to smell the sweetness of flowers

How the final word is Love. 

The trail breaks out into a wide field

But this is not it, we need to push on, 

further up, the next ridge

To the scattering of friends on blankets

Couples taking selfies towards the sunset 

Coloring the valley orange and pink.

That night the stars most glorious.

As he drives away,

And I turn back,

I jump at the sight of two bright red eyes in the field,

Flash my light at the deer, 

So regal, so still, 

Sign of unconditional love and grace 

This good omen that your spirit guides have been near.  

  

Wake to fog and cold

As tents rolled and packs packed 

The first drops of rain

All day its cold and fog

Snow and sleet as we ascend

And wonder on how the fog 

Makes the colors so bright

Remember how he spoke last night 

Of how deep pain makes way for great joy as well,

We push on to get down off the ridge

So cold, so damp this night –

Too cold to open the knife

Too cold to hold the pen to write

Only to cinch the bag tight,

Cuddle in the warmth 

Of this day most beautiful 

And oh, so miserable, 

No place I’d rather be.

After the long day on the trail

The others gone to sleep 

The steady croaking of peepers

And bubbling of brook

Crescent moon through tree tops

Breathing

Listening

Remembering the dark zendo that night

After the long day of meditation

The others headed for home

The flickering light of the single candle

Shadows sweeping the floor

Breathing

Listening

On the deck of the ship

Rocking gently in a sea of stars

Long ribbons of Moonlight

After the long day of shouting 

Hot sun on a tumultuous sea

Breathing 

Listening

In the morning

Sitting here on the log 

A bowl of hot oatmeal

Steam rising through treetops,

Watching for bears.

Breathing 

Listening

But now, 

this night, 

after this long day,

Everything stilling,

Nothing to fear.  

He’s hardly said hello to them when the man at the shelter asks,

Did anyone ever tell you you are intense?

Yes, he laughs, they have.   

The conversation drifts to hemlocks and hiking. 

His companion out here on a quest to find her name. 

Poet?, she wonders. No, not quite right.  

Later, he asks his friends if they think he is intense.

It’s when you’re not talking I notice it, she says, when you go away in your head.

He laughs, remembering when he’s been told this before.  

Later, meets Moccasin again. 

Why do you think I am intense, he asks. What is it that I do, I mean, what behavior shows that, that something I think I am doing right now? He laughs. They all laugh. Looking each other in the eye, tracking their thoughts, noticing everything, never letting go.  

Along the way we talk of the reality TV show “Alone” where the contestants get to choose ten items to help them survive for weeks in the wild with the likes of grizzlies as neighbors. 

As we walk, I think of all the things I carry that I could not imagine surviving without —freeze dried food and BoBo bars, stove and fuel, lighter and headlamp, tent, sleeping bag and pad. A change of clothes and extra socks. Rain coat and pants. First Aid kit and emergency poncho. Bandaids and bear bag. Knife and spork…

As we talk of survival in the woods, we walk by the remnants of the Brown Mountain community. Stone walls wind along the stream, two tall chimneys in the woods.  A community of formerly enslaved persons, they stayed on here after the Civil War and made home along this stream bed raising their families, supporting one another. Raised hogs, grew corn.   

Sold their land in 1920 to the Forestry Service. Were they forced off the land? What horrors of Jim Crow did they bear? Who was lynched? Were they part of the Great Migration to the promised dream of the North? 

As we walk, shifting our packs, weary after ten miles, our first day on the trail, think on their weariness, the cruelties they endured, all they survived to make home here in this valley.

As I set up my tents for the night, blow up my air mattress, shake out my sleeping bag, think on all they knew and could teach us about true survival. How easy we have it and how we struggle and suffer here in these same woods this night with all these tools they never could have imagined.  

A cliché and so true: We survive alone with difficulty. Together can do and bear what we cannot alone. 

That night backpack spewed open with dry bags stuffed with supplies, wondering, what was it I was looking for?

We started off the wrong way. Pushing uphill off the Parkway a half mile because, well, north is uphill to the right, isn’t it? Because sometimes the map is unclear as you like to say when you actually needed to pull out the map to see. 

Later that night when we do, it’s all so clear. And yes, sometimes you need to go the wrong way to find the right way. 

Thankfully at the top of the ridge, a sign to the shelter and a little South marker pointing down the trail.

Hey, aren’t we supposed to be going north?  

Alas yes, so a half mile downhill to cross the Parkway and begin again.

All week I’ve been thinking about pushing and breathing to find our way. Sometimes pushing when we need to be breathing and sometimes breathing when we need to be pushing. It’s not always easy to get it right. These built-in signals that tell us so certainly what to do, these habits and instincts that can’t always be trusted. Sometimes, just old patterns that need to be released so we can push and breathe or breathe and push to a new way.  

How often I’ve got it backwards. Sometimes waiting when it is pushing that justice demands. Sometimes pushing when it is listening that is required. I do not come easily to the way of the trail. It takes learning through a lot of mistakes to find the way. 

Now breathing our way downhill I find myself pushing ahead for the open vista like I have expected to see in Maine. But the hills here are different hills, the views here through leaves of gold, green and red. There is nothing to push towards. This is the view through a curtain of bright foliage. 

The trails here unlike any I’ve discovered in northern New England, no roots or rocks to trip over, just a wide smooth trail. A new way of walking required.

The pushing and pulling in the wrong way leads in a few miles to sore hips. Not yet used to the way of the trail it usually takes me three days to find the way to a new rhythm and way. 

Perhaps, I’m working too hard. Carrying concerns I can do nothing about and am slow to put down. What if my car is broken into? What if all I’ll have left is what’s in my pack? Will I make it to Kentucky on Saturday? Wondering on the choices and path that have led to this discovery of backpacking in the woods. I never could have imagined this, to have imagined choosing this.  

Commit again to breathe into each step with care.

We pause at the bubbling stream. White clouds drift overhead. A raven caws.  A prayer to settle into autumn, into a release and letting go like this, for the dying of today to be a brightening into yellow, orange, a spark of red.  

Large hemlocks felled along the trail, victims we learn of a hemlock blight. In the 1950’s a small aphid like insect was first observed feeding on hemlock in Virginia, an exotic pest native to Japan and China.  Today half the range of hemlock in the East is infested and the entire range of eastern hemlock at risk.  

Not all of the dying is beautiful and yet all becomes fuel for new life.

The trail quiet, the thru-hikers long since gone.

I keep on hoping around the next bend to see that elusive view.  

Instead, the first hiker we meet who asks about the weather and if we’d heard a report, wondering and worrying about what this wind might be blowing in.  

I stand for a moment amidst tall dark trees. At the upper branches, leaves twirling in the wind, golden leaves gently falling in the breeze. To let go like this, to release what we need no longer carry. If only it were that easy. Perhaps it is.  

I step out on the way.

That night, the solace of peepers lull us into dreaming.  

One month out since setting out. One week out since coming off the trail again. Even here, off the mountain, still climbing. Still practicing climbing the mountain.  

A first take at remembering and writing, a few days later at the cabin in the West Virginia woods along the New River, older than the hills it runs through.  

Later, an early morning in Berea, Kentucky, starting again, looking back at these days in the woods. In the separation, the time apart on the trail, a frame made for noticing, for seeing what can’t be otherwise. We’re always climbing the mountain, we just don’t usually see it as we’re going through the motions, through the day without a distinct and noticeable beginning, middle and end. Without the physical awareness that climbing is what we are about and made for.

And today, this early morning of orange, gold and crimson leaves, a fall not yet finished here, see things now I couldn’t see then. See things differently than I did a week back in the cabin in the woods on that morning writing up the notes and later at breakfast at the diner. See the desire to see things, find meaning. To be on a journey that is going somewhere. See there is no pure memory. We are always remembering differently through the lens of today.  

I made the call two weeks ago on the way to meet my friends and head out on the trail. Pouring rain in the parking lot outside the closed McDonalds by the Mobil Station. Wherever this is, it is not home but a by-way, a way-station, an in-between. A good place to talk about home and how possibly to get there.

He reminds me what has happened. There has been an ending, a leaving of a frame, an institution, a location, that defined an identity and way of life.  

And now, out here, experiences of dislocation and location. 

Yes, joy and presence and in the naming of it, yes, to see it all the clearer, all the more. Those particular moments that linger – the kayaks in the glassy still bay, the mist rising, the sun setting gold across the water. These moments to return to. The pure joy of being here in the outdoors, in the beauty, the swing of the trail. That day of cold and rain and sleet and the light so gorgeous.

And this as well, in the heading out into this unknown, a mind and ego that longs to return again to the only orientation its got, to what we had been and are no longer. The ways and relations of the past that helped define and make who we understood ourselves to be. The memories we conjure up to find ourselves recognizable. This tightening, gripping, holding onto a story that is no longer there. A hand hold without anything of reality to hold. A dream.  

But how to dream forward – how to reach out and grab hold of something not yet there, unseen and unknown.

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog”, E.L. Doctorow wrote, “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” 

I turn on and off the high-beams wanting to see a bit further down the road. Wanting somehow to see further that is not possible. We can only see this far.  

Crawled out of the tent in the dark, following the sound of the stream. Following the beam only as far as it would show, until I am here at the edge of the stream, kneeling on the log, filling the pouch with water.  

Out there on the trail in town, running the dark roads, stars shining bright above, turn to something off there in the field, a grunt, a shuffling, something beyond which my light can see. 

Vow to use this time of challenge and beauty to work deeply within. 

Vow to seek not refuge in the dream of the past or fretting on the future but to bring awareness and curiosity to all of it here, now, the dreaming and dread, the spinning and certainties.  

Vow to notice it all – this present joy, this breath of life, this regret, this expectancy. To find location in the dislocation. The home that is here in all of it.  

Yes, it’s about hiking the trail and the process of getting there. Not about getting to the top. Yes, a certain compassion and acceptance that there are peaks and valleys – that this is the way. A way where wider arms are needed, beyond either/or to a both/and kind of living.

An awareness that I sometimes see, that all comes and goes, nothing stays the same. And so to get all the nourishment out of this time by bringing a curiosity to all of it. What is this joy and what of this melancholy?  What is this aliveness?  What is this craving?  

Where is this belonging, where this home that is not outside to cling to or inside to attain, but that is here already in all of it.

Sometimes, arms stretch wide to touch.

Sometimes, heart softens to see.

I start the car, pull out of the dark lot to the thumping of wipers in the heavy rain.  

The coyotes yapping and howling in the moonglow outside the door of the cabin.

Unzip the tent, crawl out into the starlight and rain.