The Golden, Mysterious Road

Memoir 2009

Photo by Katie Moum on Unsplash

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My fiancée and I backpacked for a night recently in the Los Padres National Forest (the San Rafael Wilderness) on a trail called the Manzana, about an hour-and-a-half drive east of Lompoc on Highway 246 (and some narrow dirt and paved back roads). I’ve been backpacking most of my life, since I was 11 or 12 and my father first took me in the mid-1990s. But it was Britney’s first ever trip. (She loved it.) The trip made me think of Big Sur, and backpacking in general, which then brought up memories of my wild Kerouacian hitchhiking days (in my lurid drunken twenties). Since we watched the 2012 movie On the Road right when we got back from our adventure, I couldn’t help but writing of one of my many thumbing memories from back in the day. (The movie is pretty good but of course pales in comparison to the classic 1957 novel.)

The memory is as follows. It was 2009. I was the not-yet-ripe age of 26. I had still roughly 15 months of alcoholic drinking left in me before I hit bottom in September, 2010 at the tender age of 27 and got sober. I’d hitchhiked from Portland up north to Seattle a la Interstate 5. I was sleeping under the 520 freeway bridge (yes, really) above Lake Washington by the University District, aka the “U-District.” There was a little trail under the bridge which led to a “secret spot,” a little area which was perfect for my single-man REI tent. All night long I heard the sounds of cars and trucks rushing above me on the road, and felt the constant vibration of the rumbling of heavy tires and metallic bodies. I used to bathe in Lake Washington when no one was around.

Often I’d hide my pack—which always included a copy of two thin paperback books: On the Road and Into the Wild—and wander aimlessly around the U-District, checking out the hot normal college girls, eating a $2 slice of cheese pizza, walking into the University bookstore just to smell the books, and feeling lonely and desperate and alone, yet thrilled and on fire spiritually and like I was “following Kerouac’s ghost around.” Kerouac, I knew by then, had died a miserable alcoholic at the age of 47, broke and living with his mother in Florida, in 1969, as if somehow knowing the 1970s were not for him. Ditto his old road buddy, Neal Cassady, who died at 41 in Mexico in 1968. Both were destined to live fast and die young. Tragedy but with a thick smear of artistry and beauty.

Anyway one day I decided to head out of Seattle—I was suddenly sick of the city—and I gathered all my stuff and grabbed a final pizza slice and jumped on an eastern-bound bus to somewhere I’d looked up that had hiking, a little mountain town called Snoqualmie about 28 miles due east in the Cascade Mountains. I’d always been a restless young man, wanting many things at once, both the town and the city (the title of Kerouac’s first novel published in 1950 to mostly loud silence).

When I got off the bus I had only my pack. It was sometime around mid-June. Mountains jutted up looking intimidating and glorious. There was a stretch of “downtown” with restaurants and bars. A creek or small river ran through the town. I grabbed some supplies—food—from a little local grocery store and then walked around until I found a little hidden sleeping spot by the creek under a small bridge. It was sensual and serene and quiet. My thinking was very emotional and dramatic and highly imaginative back then: I imagined myself living a novel. My life as novel, I thought. Life as fiction. Fiction as life. Autobiographical writing: Like Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Jack London, etc.

The next day I found a local trail. I got some cheap breakfast (sausage and eggs) from a greasy spoon and then started heading towards the trailhead, which was four miles off and included trudging up a mountain a ways to get to. After a while I decided to hitchhike. I stuck a thumb and before long was picked up by an older man alone in a faded red Toyota truck, the “T” gone leaving only “oyota” in white across the red back. I’d hurled my pack into the bed of his truck with a loud metallic clang reverberating, the sound of my aluminum pack poles clashing with the hard metal bed.

Along the way I asked the driver to pull over near a tree on a cliff above a roaring river. I jumped out, walked to the other side of the thick tree, dug around into my pack, pulled out the two books and one thing of Jetboil fuel (full) and two apples and a thick pot. I left the pot there behind the tree and loosely buried the rest of the stuff. I was relinquishing myself of extra weight. I’d pick the stuff up on the way back down, in a matter of days or whenever I came out of the wilderness. I had my little Jetboil stove and Top Ramen packets and a small bag of rice and protein bars and trail mix and enough to survive on for a few days.

I jumped back into the car and we headed on to the trailhead.

*

I ended up going into that wilderness for close to five days. I was a young, ignorant, dumb risk-taker with too big of an imagination, too much desire for good writing material, and having read too many damn books, On the Road worst of all. But I was also having a great time. I’d always loved chasing the edge, going right up to the very end of the metaphorical cliff, looking down at the valley below, thousands of feet straight down. I’d done it in high school driving 100MPH at 3am on the dangerous, windy Villanova Road, in Ojai, where I grew up, my Isuzu Rodeo full to the brim with buddies, all our windows down, all of us drunk (me included), blasting The Misfits or TSOL or Agent Orange or Dead Kennedys, hitting the straightaway before the 90-degree turn and flipping the headlights off just to see what would happen. We were 16, 17 years old. Death wasn’t even a concept. We’d live forever. We could do anything. We were invincible.

And I did it now, a decade later, thumbing around America and walking alone into the woods—not a soul on Earth knowing where I was, no cell service—for days at a time, unprepared. Life was a risk, an adventure. I lived existentially: I created my own existence. I made my own choices. I was nothing if not an individual. I was nothing if not pushing back as hard as I could against my parents and their bourgeoisie aesthetic. I wanted to smash all that, throw the red brick of punk rock through the thin stained-glass window that was the American Middleclass.

*

I ended up going about twenty miles back. I saw not one human soul. I hiked all day and then made fires and ate Top Ramen and munched on half-melted trail mix. At night I slept by the rushing river and gazed up at the billions of brilliant pulsating white stars and I smiled and sighed and thought to myself, Yes. This is what life is all about. I felt like Sal Paradise or Huck Finn. Some days it rained lightly, summer showers, and other days were scorching hot. The trail was clear in some parts, overgrown and menacing or almost gone in others. No matter what I kept going.

One night three days in I had a big fire and I suddenly realized I was out of food. I mean nothing. No rice. No Ramen. No snacks. No trail mix. Nada. Finito. Zero. I spent maybe fifteen minutes in a near-paralyzing panic. Then I calmed down. I reminded myself—for the millionth time—that this was all writing material, an adventure. I thought of everything Sal Paradise had gone through in On the Road, and also in Dharma Bums, and ditto Chris McCandless in Into the Wild. Krakauer had gotten thousands of letters after publishing that book (Into the Wild) saying that McCandless had just been a spoiled middleclass brat and an ignorant imbecilic buffoon to boot. He wouldn’t have died in the wilds of Alaska in that broken down bus had he been smarter, been wiser, researched the area more, knew what the fuck he was doing. I knew these letter-writers—mostly local Alaskans who knew the land rigorously—were right.

And yet I also shook my head and rolled my eyes at them: Couldn’t they grasp what McCandless had been doing? He was leaving all that middleclass bullshit behind for real adventure. You can’t be a real writer by being safe, by spending loads of dough on some fancy MFA program. The best writers never even finished college. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Kerouac, Miller, etc. The best writers of the 20^th century had been autodidacts. Life experience: That’s what you needed.

Anyway, besides the lack of food I had two other problems: The soles of my hiking boots were coming off, literally, and I’d somehow also run out of water purification pills. My camp was right by the water but I’d been warned about drinking straight from it. Giardia. I was twenty miles up in the backcountry, like I said, but at a legitimate campsite with four other areas for camping, but all empty.

Around 11am that morning—seemingly out of the thin blue air—I heard the purring, growling noise of engines and then I saw, magically, three Rangers in olive-green uniforms riding up the trail in four-wheel quads. I was filled with excitement. I rushed over and told them my situation.

“Unfortunately,” one Ranger said, turning his quad off—he was tall and thick with a little blond goatee, probably in his mid-thirties wearing thick black hiking boots—“We can’t legally bring you back down with us unless you’re seriously injured.”

I sighed, blowing warm air through my mostly-sealed mouth. “Damn.”

“But,” he continued, while the two other rangers—both older and with crew-cut hair and brown boots—ogled me from a ways off, wondering who the strange random hiker was, “There’s something else we can do to help.”

The Ranger got off his quad and told me to follow him. We walked down the campsite a ways, paralleling the rushing river. About five minutes’ walk down, he stopped and pointed to the ground near some trees and said, “Dig.”

“Dig?” I gazed at him, confused.

“Buried a few inches deep right there are a bunch of MREs, Meals Ready to Eat. They’re freeze-dried and sealed bags we leave in the campsites for emergency situations for Rangers and fire fighters in case they need em.”

A big smile spread across my face. “Thank you. What about water?”

He shrugged, already turning around and walking away. “You’re on your own there.”

*

That night I dined on a lovely meal of lasagna from a freeze-dried MRE bag. All I had to do was boil water in my Jetboil mini-stove (I still had half a can of fuel) and eat. It was glorious. For water I said Fuck it and just filled my Nalgene bottle straight from the river. I could have boiled water for drinking, letting it cool a while, but I was too impatient. I left my boots, which had gotten wet in the river, near the fire that night which I left going. I slept on the ground in my bag with a jacket and beanie, no tent. It was perfect.

The next morning I realized I’d burned my boot soles clean off. They peeled off the boots like loose glue. Luckily I’d brought an old, torn pair of low-top Chuck Taylors in the bottom of my pack. They were not good for hiking in the mountains but they were better than being barefoot. (Barely.)

I ate another MRE, stuffed two more unopened ones in my pack, and, early, around 7:30am, headed out, back in the direction—twenty miles away—of the trailhead I’d begun at. It was Day 5.

*

It took me nine hours of continuous hiking to make it. I’d taken a few brief breaks, chugging river water and stopping once to boil water at a tiny creek and eat an MRE. My fuel was out. No more water left. One MRE remaining. I hiked and hiked and hiked. No people. Man alone in the vast wilderness. I thought about back home, in the Bay Area, where I’d been living since 2008. My ex and I’d left San Diego, traveled Europe for five weeks on a settlement I’d scored from a multiple-roll car crash I’d been in in 2007, and then moved to San Francisco, miraculously finding a room in a seven-room house for $500/month, which we split between the two of us. She worked as a server in a trendy restaurant in Tiburon, Marin County, north of San Fran, and I worked picking up and delivering medical clothing. We both took college classes, she at S.F. State, me at CCSF (City College). We’d broken up in June, 2008, six months after moving to the Bay Area. We’d both stayed.

Finally, around 5pm—still plenty of light due to summer—I made it to the trailhead. I was overjoyed. I nearly fell to my knees and wept. I was beyond exhausted, even though the whole way back had been mostly downhill. I felt filthy. I needed a shower. On the road back in those days I’d go days, even weeks sometimes, without a shower, but this was different; I could literally feel the dirt all over my body, in my fingernails, in my ass crack, on my feet, in the creases of my hands. I was a mountain man.

I started hiking down the mountain, along the shoulder of the paved road. Trees shaded me. The river below the cliffs, as before, rumbled and rushed. Sunlight slanted down against and through the green dappled leaves. I felt like Odysseus returning to Ithaca. I was an alien, foreign to society and normal/conventional people. I’d survived an ordeal, both physical and psychological. I beamed, feeling alive and proud. And yet another voice deep down criticized all this tomfoolery and said something like, When are you going to grow up and become an adult, get your life together? That was my mother’s voice, my father’s. I swatted it away.

After about a mile a car slowed down. A nice little Mazda, gray and shiny. The car pulled up. A man was driving, his wife in the passenger seat. He looked to be in his fifties, with a slight gray mustache and mischievous blue eyes.

“Need a ride?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

He nodded, “Get on in.”

So I stowed my pack in next to me in the back seat and sat down. We moved. When we got to that tree I asked him to stop. He did. I jumped out and dug up the books and the fuel and grabbed the pot and got back into the car. He drove me all the way back into downtown Snoqualmie. I thanked him and got out.

I slept that night in the same little spot by the creek as I had when I’d first arrived. In the morning my stomach felt queasy and I started throwing up. After 24 hours of this—and bad diarrhea—I realized it was from the river water, drinking it straight. Giardia. Damn it. But 48 hours later it was gone.

My week in this small mountain town was over. I felt it in my bones. I started walking west along the highway, towards Seattle. From there I figured I’d get a bus or thumb back down to Portland, stay a few days, and then make my way slowly back down to California, to the Bay Area. As Kerouac says in On the Road, I could feel the pull of my life coming back. I needed to go home. Of course I didn’t actually have a home. Not then. It was always the same: Get some little cheap room in an apartment, in San Fran or Oakland, work hard for six, eight months, save up, and then hit that golden, mysterious road. I’d been going for three months by now. It was time to return to something. It was time to get a job and an apartment again. Find a woman. Drink.

But it was only 15 months later that I quit drinking for good.