Pacific Crest Trail - Day 51

My buddy Spencer and I used to look at a cooler like this and decide which beer we’d drink the place out of. He has since grown into the most talented musician I’ve ever met and I just walk a lot and always choose Pacifico.

This sign is obviously about avoiding a head on collision while going 100 ripping around someone going 80 in a 55, but I think it also applies to life. What will we leave behind? Impressions? Inspiration? Perspiration? Stuff? A better world? It feels like America is largely a competition to acquire … property, cars, clothes, stocks, single use kitchen utensils because we never learned to use a knife … We can’t take any of it with us into whatever the afterlife looks like, yet we strive to acquire (and leave it for the next of us) nevertheless.

My backpack weighs 12 pounds. It feels amazing.

I’m reading Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be? which puts into words a lot of what I’ve felt walking through the desert for the last month and a half:

“The desert is the key symbol in this liberation. The desert is no home: it has no cities; it has no riches; it is the place of nomads who own what they need, and what they need are the necessities of life, not possessions. Historically, nomadic traditions are interwoven in the report of the Exodus, and it may very well be that these nomadic traditions have determined the tendency against all nonfunctional property and the choice of life in the desert as preparation for the life of freedom. But these historical factors only strengthen the meaning of the desert as a symbol of the unfettered, non-propertied life.”

Words like Fromm’s are a large part of why I started this attempt at expression. They’re (ultra?) light and timeless. Maybe Kerouac didn’t summit the Matterhorn, drank too much, and never found enlightenment, but he wrote and inspired and departed while leaving us some pretty incredible thoughts on a life lived with vigor. What more could be given? Or expected?

A fellow hiker was playing a song called Chicago by Sufjan Stevens on a ukulele on the patio at the Neenach Cafe. There’s an album version that’s great, but the demo is phenomenal.

You came to take us 
All things go, all things go 
To recreate us 
All things grow, all things grow

We had our mind set 
All things know, all things know 
You had to find it 
All things go, all things go