I’m a Pathological Hiker
The desert is a good place to have nightmares.
Not the type of nightmare you might see in a movie, someone bolting up in their bed, face sweaty, gasping for air. There’s little sweating — water on your skin evaporates before it has a chance to wet the brow. The air is dry and hurts the lungs. You can gasp all you want, but you’ll just end up feeling like you swallowed tiny pieces of sandpaper.
But like a nightmare, the desert is disorienting. The boulders in Vasquez Formation, forty-ish miles away from waiters serving Perrier in glasses in Santa Monica, rise up from the ground like a reminder of an ancient disaster. A cup of rocks and sand, severed from the rest of the desert by San Gabriel Mountains.
Juniper bushes grow here, rooted in stone, feathery branches indifferent to the breeze and in some ways to time itself. It can take three years for the hard shiny berries to ripen, the passage of seasons stirring no visible change in the leathery trunks.
It’s not a scary place, but the stillness will make you scream. There’s something to the monotony. An internal kind of horror, brought out by the heat, dust and loneliness.
I finish a climb up a long hill, realize I have no idea where I am. My vantage point is of little help — the same giant rocks are strewn about everywhere, as if a delusional giant decided to rearrange the landscape to his liking. The 14 freeway hums to my right, impassible except for a small tunnel on the PCT.
This is a remote part of the park. Far from tourists making Vulcan salutes and snapping selfies in front of the ‘Star Trek rock.’ Few people come here, except die-hard backpackers and weirdos. I belong to the second group.
A thru-hiker I met half an hour ago is a moth flitting between rocks in the valley below. He’d looked at me with a mixture of curiosity and pity, offered extra water. I politely refused, pointing, with a confidence I did not feel, to a gallon bottle on the side of my backpack. “Why is this strange bespectacled creature here?” I could hear him think. No one wanted to know more than me.
Like in any good nightmare, I decide to retrace my steps and head back downhill.
I started hiking alone about two years ago. Not out of an abundant love of nature. I like the outdoors, but have no desire to meet a coyote or pursue deer with a high-res camera. Nope. I sign petitions on Change.org and bravely yell about people leaving their masks all over the place in the company of closest family. “Armchair activism” clever people on Twitter call it.
I have nothing to prove. No unyielding passion to conquer raw nature dwells in my heart. I have no poetic reasons to seek solitude outside. Cheryl Strayed I am not.
I truly am terrified of all the things that could harm me outdoors: rattlesnakes, creepy strangers, mysterious insects, dehydration, low-traction shoes and my innate clumsiness, always a liability, turning a slope into a death trap.
Pebbles roll under my feet, and as I gracelessly slide down a stretch of hard earth, I begin to curse. After the usual expletives, I add, “I hate hiking.”
And in that moment, I really do. I feel the hatred in my bones, filling me with disgust for the packed, solid earth, the stubborn sun on the back of my neck, but most of all for myself, for being in this place.
Back on level ground, there’s little in the landscape to change my mind.
In the valley, yucca bushes punctuate the landscape with heartless regularity, the sky an even more depressing bright blue. My feet now sink into a patch of red sand.
A good nightmare repeats itself. No matter where you look, the view is a mirror.
I can feel myself starting to flip out. That too familiar thumping in the chest, a strange heaviness in the back of the neck, like it’s no longer capable of supporting the head. Not because I’m semi-lost or running low on water. I’m afraid of the boulders and their empty faces and the silence that presses down on the ears.
A ranger passes by in a white truck, and I gather my breaking mind. I can taste the solicitous offer of help, the humiliating ten-minute ride to the trailhead, A/C blasting, air freshener wafting a puff of artificial pine into my face. Instead, I stomp off toward what I now know is the parking lot.
Back in the car, I feel my hands shake a little. After a few moments, I back out of the parking spot, telling myself I’ll never hike alone again.
But I keep coming back. Before summer gets into full swing, I’ll probably hike there again.
It’s an odd compulsion. An erratic need to expose myself to something I know I’ll loathe.
Every time I spot my Corolla parked in some dusty lot at the end of a hike, I feel relief. I’m glad that I didn’t stay lost, that my water didn’t run out, that I didn’t get bitten by something or fall off a cliff. I’m glad that I didn’t collapse into a heap of anxiety in the crevices of the desert.
Maybe I hike to remind myself that I don’t want to die and that’s reason enough.
