Sorry this is late coming. It took me a while to process, and I’m still
not so sure I have correctly. I’m home from Arizona. Besides walking, I’d gone
down there to get a feel for the place and the people, to see if Monica and I
could spend our winters there. I came home with a sour feeling about the place,
and I’ve been trying to sort out how much of that is truly Arizona and how much
is just my perceptions. The trail beat me up pretty good, both physically and
mentally, so maybe I wasn’t the most impartial of observers.
I’d assumed the AZT would be like the Pacific Crest Trail. They’re both designated National Scenic Trails, after all. But once you get a day or two south of Flagstaff, the trail isn’t maintained. The land’s origin is volcanic, with potato-sized lumps of basalt lying around on powdery ash. Without maintenance, the ash blows or washes out and makes walking extremely unpleasant. The rocks would slide and roll under my feet, turning my ankles and jarring my back. It probably isn’t the best place for a guy nine months out of spinal surgery.
Another irritation was the trail’s nonsensical layout. I know it’s dumb, but to me, it felt like a personal insult.
I taught computer mapping classes at Skagit for twelve years, and one of the things we covered was least-cost path analysis. You could tell the computer, for instance, that it’s easier to move fifty meters across the land at the same elevation than to go one meter up or down, then ask it to find the best route from point A to point B.
The PCT had largely been laid out for pack trains by pioneers and miners long before computers, but it follows a least-cost path: consistent, majestic arcs around mountains, through passes and around the next mountain. It’s beautiful, pleasing, rational. It’s a joy to walk. A couple days south of Flagstaff, the AZT turned stupid. Sometimes it went straight up a rib, sometimes off its edge. It would start traversing a bowl, then change its mind and start switchbacking, with short, pointless jags. And whatever it was doing, it wouldn’t keep doing it.
If the trees are thin enough, or if I’m out in the open, I have this odd thing, call it an ability maybe, to sort of blur my vision and see the landscape as if a topo map has been draped over it. I can see contour lines over the landscape, and can, in my mind’s eye, see a red path where a trail should be. On the PCT, the real trail and my imagined one were usually together.
That didn’t happen on the AZT. I could never understand why I was walking where I was, and I walked with a persistent pit in my stomach, feeling like I was lost even while standing on the trail.
Another thing that made me a sourpuss was that my Garmin died. After it quit, I walked fifty miles off trail to Sedona, where I thought I might be able to buy a replacement. I couldn’t. And Amazon wouldn’t deliver one to a Hub Locker. Monica and I decided I would go on without.
Finding my way with just my phone wasn’t a problem, and
checking in with Monica and Paul only when I had cell service seemed
sufficient. Until I met the rattlesnakes.
A lot of the trail is so overgrown that you can’t see your
feet, and when you step on loose rocks, which is almost all the time, you don’t
know where your feet will end up either. This isn’t good in snake country.
Meeting a couple snakes a day was enough to teach me where to expect them, and
in those stretches I’d extend my hiking sticks to their maximum length to beat
and poke at the brush in front of me. Imagine a psychotic blind man on a
sidewalk expecting a curb.
But even then, I wouldn’t know where a snake was until it
rattled at me. And always, too close. I was outside of cell service nearly all
the time, and without my Garmin, if I were to step or fall onto one and get
myself bitten, my most likely course of action would just be to lie down and
die there next to the bastard. I seriously considered not taking my daily blood
pressure medicine, thinking that hypertension might partially counteract the
symptoms that come with becoming envenomated. Ultimately, I decided against it.
Having a stroke with no way to call for help would make it harder for my wife
to live with me than to just quietly die with the snakes and leave her in peace.
Dying in the snakes’ company bothered me, because most of them, except for a
small green one, were total jerks.
And the snakes weren’t that much different than a lot of the people I met down there. There was nothing big to point to, just a lot of hard-to-explain little things that seemed to add up. For example, when I’d get into a town and a hotel room for a rest day, I’d turn on the local news. Toward the end of the broadcasts, where you’d ordinarily expect a feature about pumpkin patches or corn mazes, they’d run segments like the one in particular I remember about how to help law enforcement track you down after you’ve been abducted.
You’re supposed to spit on the ground, scratch yourself and
bleed on things, and leave hair and boogers behind so tracking dogs can follow
your scent and investigators have material to collect for DNA samples.
I don’t watch Fox News. These were on local NBC stations,
and it made me wonder: do Arizonans find these features useful? Why? Are these the
kinds of things you need to know to live there?
And the political ads were insane. It was just before the
big election, and Arizona is a battleground state. People were being bombarded
with candidates out-faithing and trash talking each other. The ads didn’t sound
like candidates explaining why you should vote for them. They were more like anxious
recruitment videos to convince zealots to fight off the infidels. No wonder
people there were feeling edgy.
The morning after I’d set out on my last leg, I had everything packed and was on the trail by five-thirty, walking by headlamp. A few hours later, the trail joined a rough rock-crawler track, and I came across a woman parked there in an old Subaru. It was incredible that she’d gotten it up there.
I picked my way down and found her sitting behind the wheel wearing earmuffs. She’d spent the night there with three cats and what looked like all her worldly possessions, including a banker’s box full of files in folders.
“Am I ever happy to see another person out here,” she said.
She was thin and pale, and I wondered if she’d stolen files and was now running from something or someone. She told me her name was Saturn and that she was avoiding highways to drive to Flagstaff on backroads. Besides the earmuffs, she wore a puffy vest over a tank top that left her arms and most of her shoulders bare. I looked for bruises, but didn’t see any.
Now that it was daylight, she was thinking of going a little farther up the track.
“Don’t try it,” I said. “I’ve just come from there, and I can tell you it only gets worse. You should really turn this thing around and head back out.”
“I can’t. I don’t even know how I got here,” she said. “I drove out here in the dark. Last night, I saw lights from a town below and I think the road will get me to there.”
I looked at the offline maps on my phone. “I don’t think so,” I told her. “It looks like this road keeps climbing a ways and then just peters out.”
I couldn’t talk her into turning the car around or letting me do it for her, so there wasn’t much I could do to help. I marked her coordinates on my phone and walked on. As I left her behind, I could hear her talking to her cats.
“Okay, let’s all take a breath,” she said. “Let’s not panic.”
At the next high spot I had cell service, so I tried calling 911, but the call wouldn’t go through. The signal was strong enough for a text, though, so I sent Monica the coordinates and asked her to call 911 in Mount Vernon. She did, and later I found out that the dispatchers used Saturn’s coordinates to figure out whose jurisdiction she was in. A short time later, a sheriff’s deputy from Arizona called Monica to hear what she knew. He’d have liked to talk to or text with me, but by then I was out of range again.
Meanwhile back on the trail, around noon I came across some guys riding ATVs, and when I told them about Saturn and her cats, they went five or six miles down the road to tell a Forest Service crew they’d passed earlier. Soon enough, two Forest Service guys in a Jeep drove up and stopped beside me. They seemed irritated to have been put out and seemed to blame me for it.
The ornerier one told me they weren’t authorized to expend government resources on rescues or to render assistance, and that it was federal policy to let idiots in the backcountry who get themselves into trouble get themselves back out of it.
“I don’t think this lady is capable of doing that,” I said.
“That’s tough,” he said, and looked at me as if that too, was my fault.
“We can’t just leave her there,” I said.
“Well, we’ll call it in to the sheriff’s office,” the somewhat less ornery one said. “See what they want to do about it.”
When I got back into civilization and cell service a few days later, I called the deputy Monica had talked to, and he was happy to fill me in.
After talking to Monica, he’d tried driving the sheriff’s office’s four-wheel drive out to the coordinates she’d given him, but the road got so rough that he was afraid of wrecking it. He retreated, but came back with the local search-and-rescue crew, who had rock crawlers. They reached Saturn just before dark that evening, sitting in her car in the same place. They took her, her cats, and all her stuff down the mountain and got her into a motel. The deputy had also put her in touch with an off-road salvage operator who would be retrieving the Subaru shortly.
“I still don’t know how she was able to get herself there,” he said.
“Did anyone else report her being stranded out there?” I asked.
“No, just your wife,” he said. “Good thing she did, too.”
So apparently, the Forest Service guys hadn’t called it in after all. What happened? Maybe they forgot, or maybe they didn’t believe me. It’s disappointing. Judging by the political ads I’d seen in my hotel rooms, Arizonans take great pride in the Christian values our country was founded on. So, does federal policy discourage acts of kindness? Or maybe those guys in the Jeep turned mean because they weren’t out on the trail and were subjected to more TV ads than I was. Whatever the reason, it struck me as strange, and not very Christian either.
I walked into a weekend again before getting out of the last section. It happened to be the white-tail deer season opener.
I met a pair of hunters who had what looked like a military sniper setup
they’d carried in a couple hundred yards from a dirt road. One guy lay prone
behind a huge rifle and scope on a tripod, and his partner sat on a folding
camp stool behind a taller tripod mounted with enormous spotting binoculars and
a tablet computer. They were sat right next to each other but communicated
through headsets boom mics they were wearing.
They were aimed across a draw toward a ridge at least a mile and a half away, but over the path I needed to walk. Were they actually shooting something over there? And if they shot it, how were they going to retrieve it?
“You guys have something over there?” I asked. “I need to get down this trail, but I can wait a bit if I need to.”
The fellow with the spotting scope huffed and shook his head as if I were interrupting an important mission. “Go, then,” he said.
“It’s all right. I don’t mind waiting a little.”
The shooter mumbled something, but without a headset, I couldn’t tell what.
The spotter talked to me again. “Go on, just go. We’ll be shooting over your head anyway.”
I went and they did, and I didn’t much like it.
The next day, Sunday, on two separate occasions I met guys wearing pistols and tactical gear along with their hunting rifles and neon orange caps, parked in trucks or ATV’s along Forest Service roads. Both times, they greeted me with a strangely aggressive “Hey, Buddy. Buenos días!” But it wasn’t in the way you’d politely greet someone in Spanish. They delivered it like a challenge, in a heavily Americanized accent. It sounded more like “BONUS DEE-ASS.”
Then they would stand with their hands on their hips, close to their guns, looking at me and waiting for my response. The hair on the back of my neck stood out, and my spidey senses told me to chuckle and answer, “Good morning,” in English. And both times, forcing those little laughs brought a wave of nausea with them, but I did it anyway because I didn’t want them drawing weapons or zip-tying my wrists together.
Maybe they were ICE officers on holiday, or maybe they’d been listening to the same podcasts and had deputized themselves as vigilante Minutemen or something. By this time, I wasn’t walking with the springy step of a fresh backpacker, and I may have looked like a border crosser to them. Maybe my instincts were completely wrong, and the rattlesnakes and rolling rocks, the thunderstorms, and peculiar trail routing had gotten to me. But at the time the feeling was very real, and I knew how I felt afterwards. I hated them for turning me coward.
By then, I’d had time to reflect about that prayer meeting I’d walked past on Baby Doll Ranch Road. You may remember the circle of men in camouflage, holding rifles with their heads bowed while another man read from a Bible. They were on my left when a shot came from my right, shockingly close, just as I drew even with them. I never saw whoever fired it.
Dale, the rancher I met after leaving the road and scrambling through the brush, said he thought they were a little wacky but harmless enough. It was the last day of elk season, he said, and noted that there were no elk around. People were frustrated and just shooting at things, who knew what. But the more I thought about it, the less I could believe it was a coincidence. I’m pretty sure somebody wanted to scare me.
Now I know you can’t blame MAGA for everything, and I don’t know how the prayer group, the snipers, or the ICE guys were planning to vote. They weren’t wearing campaign buttons or anything like that. But it all seemed awfully MAGA-ish to me, and not in an eye-rolly or count-to-ten sort of way. But these folks I’d met on the trail were dealing in intimidation and plausible deniability, standard fare for the red hat crowd. With an unhealthy dose of lethality thrown in for good measure, for Pete’s sake.
And I don’t know how or where to talk about this, so I’ll put it here. There was this custom in the area, strange to me, to have toilets singularly designated for men or women in unnecessary places. Espresso stands, for instance, would have two porta-potties outside, one pink and one blue. I went into a pink one once and found a urinal funnel attached to the wall inside just like the blue one. Go figure.
Anyway, at the Fossil Creek Waterfall trailhead, where I’d camped earlier while getting back to the AZT from Sedona, there were standard concrete Forest Service vault toilets, marked for men or women as dictated by local custom. There was nobody around, so curious, I looked inside the women’s vault. Inside was an enormous bear-proof trash locker bolted to the concrete floor. It was about the size of a public mailbox and must barely have fit through the door. Taped to its top was a laminated sign that said, “For feminine products.”
I know it sounds trivial, quirky. But I’ve dealt with the Forest Service, and in my experience, nothing happens there, no matter how insignificant, without planning meetings, requisitions, supervision. Manager types had decided that thing needed to be there and had worked through the administrative process to get it and then ordered somebody else to haul it out and bolt it to the floor. How did that happen?
I imagined a meeting in the district’s Forest Service offices where someone points out that women will be coming to this trailhead, and so of course, they will be menstruating. Maybe, besides possible border crossers, or hikers walking past prayer meetings, or pesky-assed do-gooders, people there are especially sensitive about women menstruating in the back country. It’s an odd bit of prurience, to me anyway, that smacks of a Beavis and Butthead style of misogyny. It’s just freaking weird, and another uncomfortable, unknowable thing about my time on the AZT.
I didn’t only meet unlikable people there. There were thunderstorms the first couple days on that last leg. They were a lot less troublesome than snakes, because they announce themselves early enough that I could find a good place to stop alongside the trail, put on a poncho and sit and arrange it over my backpack mother-hen style before being unloaded upon. I’d get a good cool washing for ten minutes or so and then move along, easy enough. But there were enough of them to hold up my progress through the section to the point where I’d run out of food. I’d be one dinner short before the next town with a grocery store.
There was a campground I could walk to eight or ten miles off trail, so I went there thinking I could beg a ride to a bar and grill just another eight miles beyond that. My neighbors at the campground were a wonderful family, young parents of a twelve- and fourteen-year-old. They were inventing rules for a game that involved bouncing a volleyball off a mini tramp towards each other when I went over and offered to buy them all dinner if they took me with them to the restaurant. I explained how I’d gotten myself short a dinner.
“You must be nuts,” the dad said, “to carry food a hundred miles before eating it. I can’t imagine.”
“We’d love to ordinarily,” the mom said, “but we just got here. And had to make two round trips from our home in Tucson, about eight hours towing with our truck. One trip to get our boat out here, and then back to bring out our camp trailer. We’re kind of driven out.”
“And it’s her birthday,” Dad said. “Why don’t you go to the cooler, grab yourself a Caesar salad. She’s packed too many of those anyway.”
Mom bounced the volleyball back at her husband. “Nonsense. I’ll make you a plate of hot dogs and fixings and bring it over to your tent,” she told me. Not long after, she did just that and they were good.
But in the days just after that I met the snipers, the guys
who were ICE agents or Minutemen, and more snakes, and decided that I wasn’t
really into hiking the Arizona Trail anymore. There was another couple hundred
miles of it ahead of me, but I’d kind of lost my curiosity to see it.
The last day I met up with a friend of a friend, who lived nearby in Scottsdale and does a lot of hiking. In fact, she’d completed the AZT just the year before and had been sort of my cheerleader via text the past couple weeks on the trail. “You’re hiking through wonderful country right now,” she’d text or “you’re coming up to my favorite part of the entire trail.” Then I’d get there and wonder “How?”
Alice met me at the hotel I was staying at that last morning and took me back to the AZT where I’d just quit. We hiked another mile or so south on the trail, then turned off to climb the Picket Post, which looks a lot like Devil’s Tower with a big scar on the front of it. Imagine God chopping firewood, but one of the rounds doesn’t split completely. Where His axe hit left a place humans can use to scramble to the top.
During the scramble, Alice told me that she had hiked the AZT with seven other women over a period of four years, averaging a bit over two hundred miles per year. And they never carried camping gear, or extra food, or extra water. See, the trail is cut through with dirt roads and jeep tracks so for any weekend outing on the trail, one of their husbands could drive out and support them. They’d be met with lunch on folding tables, and walk into camps at night to dinner cooking and the tents already pitched. To support their eight hundred and fifty miles of walking, they estimated that they’d racked up seventy thousand miles of driving.
It made me feel, well stupid. I mean, it’s at least ten kinds of more sensible than what I’d been trying to do. If you ever think to hike the AZT, don’t be an idiot. Do it the way they did.
After the scramble, Alice dropped me off in Phoenix where I
could rent a car for the drive back to visit family in Vegas and to fly home. On my way out, though, I decided to visit Prescott. When my dad was
dying, one of his ICU nurses told me she commuted two hours each way to work.
She wanted to work on the cutting edge of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, she told
me, but didn’t want to live in Phoenix or Scottsdale.
“Why?” I’d asked.
“Because living in Prescott makes me a better human,” she’d said.
That seemed worth investigating.
It was late by the time I got a rental car and drove there,
so I stayed overnight in a hotel.
I’d assumed the AZT would be like the Pacific Crest Trail. They’re both designated National Scenic Trails, after all. But once you get a day or two south of Flagstaff, the trail isn’t maintained. The land’s origin is volcanic, with potato-sized lumps of basalt lying around on powdery ash. Without maintenance, the ash blows or washes out and makes walking extremely unpleasant. The rocks would slide and roll under my feet, turning my ankles and jarring my back. It probably isn’t the best place for a guy nine months out of spinal surgery.
Another irritation was the trail’s nonsensical layout. I know it’s dumb, but to me, it felt like a personal insult.
I taught computer mapping classes at Skagit for twelve years, and one of the things we covered was least-cost path analysis. You could tell the computer, for instance, that it’s easier to move fifty meters across the land at the same elevation than to go one meter up or down, then ask it to find the best route from point A to point B.
The PCT had largely been laid out for pack trains by pioneers and miners long before computers, but it follows a least-cost path: consistent, majestic arcs around mountains, through passes and around the next mountain. It’s beautiful, pleasing, rational. It’s a joy to walk. A couple days south of Flagstaff, the AZT turned stupid. Sometimes it went straight up a rib, sometimes off its edge. It would start traversing a bowl, then change its mind and start switchbacking, with short, pointless jags. And whatever it was doing, it wouldn’t keep doing it.
If the trees are thin enough, or if I’m out in the open, I have this odd thing, call it an ability maybe, to sort of blur my vision and see the landscape as if a topo map has been draped over it. I can see contour lines over the landscape, and can, in my mind’s eye, see a red path where a trail should be. On the PCT, the real trail and my imagined one were usually together.
That didn’t happen on the AZT. I could never understand why I was walking where I was, and I walked with a persistent pit in my stomach, feeling like I was lost even while standing on the trail.
Another thing that made me a sourpuss was that my Garmin died. After it quit, I walked fifty miles off trail to Sedona, where I thought I might be able to buy a replacement. I couldn’t. And Amazon wouldn’t deliver one to a Hub Locker. Monica and I decided I would go on without.
And the snakes weren’t that much different than a lot of the people I met down there. There was nothing big to point to, just a lot of hard-to-explain little things that seemed to add up. For example, when I’d get into a town and a hotel room for a rest day, I’d turn on the local news. Toward the end of the broadcasts, where you’d ordinarily expect a feature about pumpkin patches or corn mazes, they’d run segments like the one in particular I remember about how to help law enforcement track you down after you’ve been abducted.
The morning after I’d set out on my last leg, I had everything packed and was on the trail by five-thirty, walking by headlamp. A few hours later, the trail joined a rough rock-crawler track, and I came across a woman parked there in an old Subaru. It was incredible that she’d gotten it up there.
I picked my way down and found her sitting behind the wheel wearing earmuffs. She’d spent the night there with three cats and what looked like all her worldly possessions, including a banker’s box full of files in folders.
“Am I ever happy to see another person out here,” she said.
She was thin and pale, and I wondered if she’d stolen files and was now running from something or someone. She told me her name was Saturn and that she was avoiding highways to drive to Flagstaff on backroads. Besides the earmuffs, she wore a puffy vest over a tank top that left her arms and most of her shoulders bare. I looked for bruises, but didn’t see any.
Now that it was daylight, she was thinking of going a little farther up the track.
“Don’t try it,” I said. “I’ve just come from there, and I can tell you it only gets worse. You should really turn this thing around and head back out.”
“I can’t. I don’t even know how I got here,” she said. “I drove out here in the dark. Last night, I saw lights from a town below and I think the road will get me to there.”
I looked at the offline maps on my phone. “I don’t think so,” I told her. “It looks like this road keeps climbing a ways and then just peters out.”
I couldn’t talk her into turning the car around or letting me do it for her, so there wasn’t much I could do to help. I marked her coordinates on my phone and walked on. As I left her behind, I could hear her talking to her cats.
“Okay, let’s all take a breath,” she said. “Let’s not panic.”
At the next high spot I had cell service, so I tried calling 911, but the call wouldn’t go through. The signal was strong enough for a text, though, so I sent Monica the coordinates and asked her to call 911 in Mount Vernon. She did, and later I found out that the dispatchers used Saturn’s coordinates to figure out whose jurisdiction she was in. A short time later, a sheriff’s deputy from Arizona called Monica to hear what she knew. He’d have liked to talk to or text with me, but by then I was out of range again.
Meanwhile back on the trail, around noon I came across some guys riding ATVs, and when I told them about Saturn and her cats, they went five or six miles down the road to tell a Forest Service crew they’d passed earlier. Soon enough, two Forest Service guys in a Jeep drove up and stopped beside me. They seemed irritated to have been put out and seemed to blame me for it.
The ornerier one told me they weren’t authorized to expend government resources on rescues or to render assistance, and that it was federal policy to let idiots in the backcountry who get themselves into trouble get themselves back out of it.
“I don’t think this lady is capable of doing that,” I said.
“That’s tough,” he said, and looked at me as if that too, was my fault.
“We can’t just leave her there,” I said.
“Well, we’ll call it in to the sheriff’s office,” the somewhat less ornery one said. “See what they want to do about it.”
When I got back into civilization and cell service a few days later, I called the deputy Monica had talked to, and he was happy to fill me in.
After talking to Monica, he’d tried driving the sheriff’s office’s four-wheel drive out to the coordinates she’d given him, but the road got so rough that he was afraid of wrecking it. He retreated, but came back with the local search-and-rescue crew, who had rock crawlers. They reached Saturn just before dark that evening, sitting in her car in the same place. They took her, her cats, and all her stuff down the mountain and got her into a motel. The deputy had also put her in touch with an off-road salvage operator who would be retrieving the Subaru shortly.
“I still don’t know how she was able to get herself there,” he said.
“Did anyone else report her being stranded out there?” I asked.
“No, just your wife,” he said. “Good thing she did, too.”
So apparently, the Forest Service guys hadn’t called it in after all. What happened? Maybe they forgot, or maybe they didn’t believe me. It’s disappointing. Judging by the political ads I’d seen in my hotel rooms, Arizonans take great pride in the Christian values our country was founded on. So, does federal policy discourage acts of kindness? Or maybe those guys in the Jeep turned mean because they weren’t out on the trail and were subjected to more TV ads than I was. Whatever the reason, it struck me as strange, and not very Christian either.
I walked into a weekend again before getting out of the last section. It happened to be the white-tail deer season opener.
They were aimed across a draw toward a ridge at least a mile and a half away, but over the path I needed to walk. Were they actually shooting something over there? And if they shot it, how were they going to retrieve it?
“You guys have something over there?” I asked. “I need to get down this trail, but I can wait a bit if I need to.”
The fellow with the spotting scope huffed and shook his head as if I were interrupting an important mission. “Go, then,” he said.
“It’s all right. I don’t mind waiting a little.”
The shooter mumbled something, but without a headset, I couldn’t tell what.
The spotter talked to me again. “Go on, just go. We’ll be shooting over your head anyway.”
I went and they did, and I didn’t much like it.
The next day, Sunday, on two separate occasions I met guys wearing pistols and tactical gear along with their hunting rifles and neon orange caps, parked in trucks or ATV’s along Forest Service roads. Both times, they greeted me with a strangely aggressive “Hey, Buddy. Buenos días!” But it wasn’t in the way you’d politely greet someone in Spanish. They delivered it like a challenge, in a heavily Americanized accent. It sounded more like “BONUS DEE-ASS.”
Then they would stand with their hands on their hips, close to their guns, looking at me and waiting for my response. The hair on the back of my neck stood out, and my spidey senses told me to chuckle and answer, “Good morning,” in English. And both times, forcing those little laughs brought a wave of nausea with them, but I did it anyway because I didn’t want them drawing weapons or zip-tying my wrists together.
Maybe they were ICE officers on holiday, or maybe they’d been listening to the same podcasts and had deputized themselves as vigilante Minutemen or something. By this time, I wasn’t walking with the springy step of a fresh backpacker, and I may have looked like a border crosser to them. Maybe my instincts were completely wrong, and the rattlesnakes and rolling rocks, the thunderstorms, and peculiar trail routing had gotten to me. But at the time the feeling was very real, and I knew how I felt afterwards. I hated them for turning me coward.
By then, I’d had time to reflect about that prayer meeting I’d walked past on Baby Doll Ranch Road. You may remember the circle of men in camouflage, holding rifles with their heads bowed while another man read from a Bible. They were on my left when a shot came from my right, shockingly close, just as I drew even with them. I never saw whoever fired it.
Dale, the rancher I met after leaving the road and scrambling through the brush, said he thought they were a little wacky but harmless enough. It was the last day of elk season, he said, and noted that there were no elk around. People were frustrated and just shooting at things, who knew what. But the more I thought about it, the less I could believe it was a coincidence. I’m pretty sure somebody wanted to scare me.
Now I know you can’t blame MAGA for everything, and I don’t know how the prayer group, the snipers, or the ICE guys were planning to vote. They weren’t wearing campaign buttons or anything like that. But it all seemed awfully MAGA-ish to me, and not in an eye-rolly or count-to-ten sort of way. But these folks I’d met on the trail were dealing in intimidation and plausible deniability, standard fare for the red hat crowd. With an unhealthy dose of lethality thrown in for good measure, for Pete’s sake.
And I don’t know how or where to talk about this, so I’ll put it here. There was this custom in the area, strange to me, to have toilets singularly designated for men or women in unnecessary places. Espresso stands, for instance, would have two porta-potties outside, one pink and one blue. I went into a pink one once and found a urinal funnel attached to the wall inside just like the blue one. Go figure.
Anyway, at the Fossil Creek Waterfall trailhead, where I’d camped earlier while getting back to the AZT from Sedona, there were standard concrete Forest Service vault toilets, marked for men or women as dictated by local custom. There was nobody around, so curious, I looked inside the women’s vault. Inside was an enormous bear-proof trash locker bolted to the concrete floor. It was about the size of a public mailbox and must barely have fit through the door. Taped to its top was a laminated sign that said, “For feminine products.”
I know it sounds trivial, quirky. But I’ve dealt with the Forest Service, and in my experience, nothing happens there, no matter how insignificant, without planning meetings, requisitions, supervision. Manager types had decided that thing needed to be there and had worked through the administrative process to get it and then ordered somebody else to haul it out and bolt it to the floor. How did that happen?
I imagined a meeting in the district’s Forest Service offices where someone points out that women will be coming to this trailhead, and so of course, they will be menstruating. Maybe, besides possible border crossers, or hikers walking past prayer meetings, or pesky-assed do-gooders, people there are especially sensitive about women menstruating in the back country. It’s an odd bit of prurience, to me anyway, that smacks of a Beavis and Butthead style of misogyny. It’s just freaking weird, and another uncomfortable, unknowable thing about my time on the AZT.
I didn’t only meet unlikable people there. There were thunderstorms the first couple days on that last leg. They were a lot less troublesome than snakes, because they announce themselves early enough that I could find a good place to stop alongside the trail, put on a poncho and sit and arrange it over my backpack mother-hen style before being unloaded upon. I’d get a good cool washing for ten minutes or so and then move along, easy enough. But there were enough of them to hold up my progress through the section to the point where I’d run out of food. I’d be one dinner short before the next town with a grocery store.
There was a campground I could walk to eight or ten miles off trail, so I went there thinking I could beg a ride to a bar and grill just another eight miles beyond that. My neighbors at the campground were a wonderful family, young parents of a twelve- and fourteen-year-old. They were inventing rules for a game that involved bouncing a volleyball off a mini tramp towards each other when I went over and offered to buy them all dinner if they took me with them to the restaurant. I explained how I’d gotten myself short a dinner.
“You must be nuts,” the dad said, “to carry food a hundred miles before eating it. I can’t imagine.”
“We’d love to ordinarily,” the mom said, “but we just got here. And had to make two round trips from our home in Tucson, about eight hours towing with our truck. One trip to get our boat out here, and then back to bring out our camp trailer. We’re kind of driven out.”
“And it’s her birthday,” Dad said. “Why don’t you go to the cooler, grab yourself a Caesar salad. She’s packed too many of those anyway.”
Mom bounced the volleyball back at her husband. “Nonsense. I’ll make you a plate of hot dogs and fixings and bring it over to your tent,” she told me. Not long after, she did just that and they were good.
The last day I met up with a friend of a friend, who lived nearby in Scottsdale and does a lot of hiking. In fact, she’d completed the AZT just the year before and had been sort of my cheerleader via text the past couple weeks on the trail. “You’re hiking through wonderful country right now,” she’d text or “you’re coming up to my favorite part of the entire trail.” Then I’d get there and wonder “How?”
Alice met me at the hotel I was staying at that last morning and took me back to the AZT where I’d just quit. We hiked another mile or so south on the trail, then turned off to climb the Picket Post, which looks a lot like Devil’s Tower with a big scar on the front of it. Imagine God chopping firewood, but one of the rounds doesn’t split completely. Where His axe hit left a place humans can use to scramble to the top.
During the scramble, Alice told me that she had hiked the AZT with seven other women over a period of four years, averaging a bit over two hundred miles per year. And they never carried camping gear, or extra food, or extra water. See, the trail is cut through with dirt roads and jeep tracks so for any weekend outing on the trail, one of their husbands could drive out and support them. They’d be met with lunch on folding tables, and walk into camps at night to dinner cooking and the tents already pitched. To support their eight hundred and fifty miles of walking, they estimated that they’d racked up seventy thousand miles of driving.
It made me feel, well stupid. I mean, it’s at least ten kinds of more sensible than what I’d been trying to do. If you ever think to hike the AZT, don’t be an idiot. Do it the way they did.
“Why?” I’d asked.
“Because living in Prescott makes me a better human,” she’d said.
That seemed worth investigating.
But here’s the thing. This person was nice. Just by being there and talking to me, they made me feel that everything could be okay for the first time in a long while. When they said, “Our French toast doughnut is incredible, you’ve got to let me heat it up for you,” I felt safe. I felt it physically, and the stress I’d accumulated from being out there on the trail with armed men and rattlesnakes was washed out of me by this unclassifiable, kind-hearted human warming me up a doughnut.
Actually, I could and did classify this human. They were very different from the armed and venomous ones I’d been with. I’d always accepted people whose gender wasn’t clear to me, but I’d never thought much about needing them around. Their presence asks a community to make room for people who don’t fit its usual categories, and how comfortably they can live there tells you how welcoming that community really is. I want to live somewhere that gets that kind of practice.
Then I visited the library, thinking I might use the
computers to type some things to the cloud with a keyboard before I forgot them.
For a lark, I browsed the travel section and found my book, Walking Home,
on the shelf between Bill Bryson and Rick Steves.
I went back to the help desk to get the librarian to pose
for a selfie with me.
“How long are you here for?” she asked. “We need to have a meet-the-author event, you have to do a reading.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “Anyway, I can’t. I have a flight booked out of Vegas tomorrow.”
This made the librarian genuinely sad. “Well, please come back. We’ll set something up.”
Screw the AZT, I thought. When I go back to Arizona, I’m spending all my time in Prescott.
Maybe it will make me a better human, too.
“How long are you here for?” she asked. “We need to have a meet-the-author event, you have to do a reading.”
“You’re kidding me,” I said. “Anyway, I can’t. I have a flight booked out of Vegas tomorrow.”
This made the librarian genuinely sad. “Well, please come back. We’ll set something up.”
Screw the AZT, I thought. When I go back to Arizona, I’m spending all my time in Prescott.
Maybe it will make me a better human, too.
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