[6] highs & lows in northern cal - text

Hello my dear, dear readers,

It was the best of years, it was the worst of years. Books always put it best. :)

Here’s my way overdue rundown of the last two weeks. Skip ahead for the more rambling prose-y pontificating bit.

• After parting ways with Abu, Uncle Yudha, and Sandy, I made my way nice and slow through the first bit of Oregon in the midst of a record breaking heat wave. Took loads of side quests, including a few hours in the aptly named paradise loop and a few more meditating by the coolest waterfall I’ve seen to date, which I will surely wax poetical about later down.

• Spontaneously hitched a ride with Sierra to a PCT hiker festival in Cascade locks with an incredibly big-hearted and kick-ass posse of lady hikers who call themselves the tough old broads (their YouTube channel is here -> https://www.youtube.com/@tobpct). They also graciously let us bunk with them for the weekend.

• Attended said hiker festival, which featured many hiking vendors, two raves, loads of faces I thought I’d never see again, and most excitingly, a lecture!!

• Spent a spontaneous evening in a hostel in Portland that left me very ready to be rid of civilization come morning, then took a train down to northern California to avoid fires and smoke absolutely cooking Oregon, skipping about 600 miles of trail and ending my 6-day off trail hiatus.

• Made it about 30 miles out of Dunsmuir before catching a nasty case of some mystery virus that had me feverish and double dragon-ing (think: flames, both holes) for two long, tough days. Slept no more than four hours total, soaked my bandanna through w tears, and almost called it quits on the trail. Also, saw a bear (less scary this time).

• Didn’t quit! Hooray! Fever broke two nights ago. last night, I ate and held down my first real meal in a few days: mango sticky rice with black sesame seeds. Drool.

It was bittersweet to part ways with my Abu. I left Cascade Locks happy knowing he’d made some peace with my journey, but also knew I’d miss him like crazy — only a very decent Abu would carry a gal’s fully loaded pack, back issues and all, for a solid 20 minutes on trail for her, just to “see what it’s like”.

Oregon’s wonderful off trail adventures made the parting somewhat softer. Ramona Falls — man oh man, how to describe. A narrow stream runs over a cliff edge, expanding outwards through hundreds of winding paths carved over centuries into the cliff face, like a hydraulic plinko board of sorts. There must be a near infinite number of paths a single drop of water could take to reach the bottom. Just as there are countless ways for each hiker to hike their hike (or human to live a life…), adapting her voyage as fate dashes plans and decrees new directions.

And fate, by way of the Tough Ole Broads, decreed I would dance! TOB: The daughter-mother-aunt combo of legend. I’d been hearing about PCT days for a while —  it’s basically a music festival/comic con for hikers — and I didn’t plan on going; I dreaded the prospect of giant crowds of intoxicated strangers scattered with folks i kinda sorta knew. It sounded  like a college party. And I very frequently regretted going to those.

But the broads were very cool and generous and so fun to be around — wisdom emanates from them like they’re just exhaling the stuff out — and I was having a great ole time hanging out with Sierra too. My intuition was tugging at me to make the irrational choice. So after a brief call w mama (“Just go!”) I hopped in Margie’s track and headed back to Cascade Locks.

The TOB had rented a beautiful little cabin on a ranch overlooking the mountains. It was a good 20 minute drive from the festival, set comfortably apart from the chaos. We chatted with them over pizzas and fruit cobbler as the sun set over the mountains. They’ve all led many lives; one a wildfire fighter turned veterinarian, another a hippie commune mother turned doctor and infectious disease specialist; another an archaeologist turned ranch and horse caretaker.

And now here they are, reincarnated as thru hikers, adapting the trail to their bodies’ particular needs. “we’re highlight hiking,” one of them coined the style of driving to the parts of the trail they’re most excited about, and making their way those parts slowly through as their injuries allow. It’s exactly the sort of trail philosophy I like to embody.

And they’re also using their time and resources to help out lucky hikers like me, if they’re willing to be helped. This is what I’m learning on trail, particularly from the TOB. The more I open myself up to the universe, the more I send out love and openness, the more I try to quash my base curmudgeonly instincts and natural suspicion of folks’ sincerity and motives, the more love and loveliness the universe hurls back at me. I’d never experienced like I have on trail how much love a stranger can offer, if you let them. 

The festival itself was also a real doozy. As mentioned, there was live music and much, much dancing. I’ve seen some hard crews, be it at Pakistani wedding or Brooklyn Arab electronic show, but dare I say … hikers go harder than any crew I’ve seen? I doubt I will ever again see a 100 person conga line to mosh pit to interpretive slow-motion movement circle in the same set, but I’m holding out some hope. Each person in that crowd moved their body with such feeling and freedom, refreshingly unbothered by the silliness or unsexiness of their movement. I’ll never forget that sense of liberation. And I hope the next time you find yourself on a dance floor, you can close your eyes and find it for yourself too.

It was also quite surreal to find myself in such a soirée after five weeks of near solitude. Even more surreal to be dancing my shorts off as, around us, the forests burned on nearly all sides: north, east and south. You could smell the smoke, sickly sweet, setting heavy over the floor. When the world is on fire, and no one with real power and resources is taking the problem seriously enough to stop or even slow it, and the folks who actually give enough of a shit to take notice and fight back against the sixth mass extinction are called “eco-terrorists” instead of the real capitalist terrorists funding the genocide this planet’s life …well, what can you do but dance for an evening? (Hopefully I will do more when I’m back in civilization? Considering I buy from said capitalist terrorists. This is an accountability parenthetical).

Anyways! Festival, hiking. The post would be incomplete without a brief description of a terrific lecture on mental health and hiking I sat in on. I learned hiking is good for your brain not because it magically erases stress and depression, but because it builds up brain infrastructure to be more resilient in the midst of stress or depressive episodes. And that benefit continues after hikers get off trail too, which I’m interested to see in myself inshallah.

I also learned about a phenomenon called soft fascination — absorbing the totality of a green environment by walking in or simply witnessing a park or forest or rushing river. Soft fascination restores a fatigued brain in a way that a city street doesn’t. You need the greenery, the stillness of scene, and the space to be mindful — it’s something akin to a meditation. ‘Twas pretty neat to hear that ~science backs up a claim that I bet any thru’er could tell you: we hike cuz it makes us gosh darn happy. (well, mostly happy, and other times, it rips us apart… more on that later).

I’ve been thinking since then about who has access to green spaces. If it’s true that nature is a medicine, then everyone should have a right to its prescription - a spoonful of lake, a breath of cold mountain air at dawn, a shot of hot light grazing the back on an otherwise overcast day. These balms might be enough to soothe a troubled mind a lifetime over. Maybe, one day, I’ll play some role in their distribution to others, especially those who don’t know what good it might do for them. This newsletter is a start, I think.

Which brings me to another festival highlight: meeting and chatting with Detour, the first Pakistani American thru hiker I’ve met. Detour hiked the PCT two years ago, and had a really interesting perspective to share — he grew up in the US during that time when assimilation was necessary for survival and being not-white didn’t come with the social capital it weirdly sorta does today.

I was pretty stoked to meet someone else who could understand the strangeness of straddling worlds that seem often diametrically opposed. We were both of communities to whom trail life was something completely alien. And we both loved trail culture, but found it… I’ve tried to reword my descriptor here from something more accurate than “predominantly white” a dozen times. That isn’t quite the problem. It’s not really their presence; it’s more a lack of ours. A realization — something is missing!! — that swells to a hurt, on occasion, as I’ve spilled some ink on previously. So it was really sick to meet someone else who felt love for both desi and hiking communities, and at once, could feel something missing from each that the other could offer. And who understood the importance of sharing the magic of trail life with folks back home to bridge that divide (and sharing part of home w trail folks — Detour does this by brewing chai for friends on trail). Not to mention who could speak of places like Hunza valley, Khunjerab Pass, and even Malaysia with love.

I am less eager to relive the last few days of plague (as I have Christianed my unnamed virus), but I will share what was on my mind when I was going through it. While I still had the ability to form coherent thoughts, I wondered about the difference between grit and self-punishing stubbornness. At what point does a suffering you’ve chosen for the sake of your self-betterment just become plain suckiness, no benefits accrued? is there any point in suffering? Things surely can’t always just feel good, right — without bad things, we’d have no basis to compare the good stuff. But goshdarn, sometimes the bad hurts so bad it’s unbearable.

When I lost the ability to form coherent thoughts, my mind painted pictures of what post-trail life would look like. I spent hours designing my perfect day. It starts with a late morning cuddling and reading in bed with Amaya and Jibran, Abu downstairs frying up pancakes on an absolutely battered saucepan, Mama begging him to use any spatula besides the metal one on the nonstick… etc etc (kidding, Mama, I know you’ve zenned out about that stuff).

These were my happiest moments of those days of plague, but also my most concerning. It was easier to be stuck in fantasy than to look up from the ground and out over the presumably stunning vista id spent the last two days climbing towards… some escape the PCT was proving to be if I was mentally escaping its pizzaziest moments. Should I really be here, then, or should I be at the Shahzad-Loo breakfast table?

Yesterday morning after my fever broke, things got better. Weirdly, I had one of my best days on trail. I slept 8 solid hours. I wrote an ok poem draft; my first on the trail. I started off at noon. I felt abundantly grateful: to my body for going so far on so little, to my brain for making some decent realizations, to my improving ability to let my thoughts flow without fear. If I thought about the future, it wasn’t with any rush to enter it. I’ll be where I’m at, and for now, that’s a-walking.

In the spirit of continued thanks:

I’m thankful to my mama for checking up on me and providing cheery reminders of home while I was sick. Worth every garmin message limit overage cost and then some. She’s also managing all my resupply boxes while going through a “biblical” year (flooding! Plagues! Migration!) and absolutely killing it. I do wish I could hug her right now — so if yours is within hugging distance, take the opportunity for me.

I’m thankful for my new tree friends of northern california for grounding me in the present: the ponderosa pine, that proud and tall beast, with its scaly bark and cleverly high up fire-avoidant branches. The incense cedar, sleek red and soft-leaved … less-cleverly low branched on its trunk, but at least it’ll waft a sweet scent if it catches aflame.

And of course, the Douglas fir, that ancient, divine creature. On my first day back on trail, I lay down in a hollowed out Doug-Fir for a bit and thought about never leaving, recomposing into the soil, seeing what magic could come. For those who have read the Overstory, that crazy plotline finally clicked for me. For those who haven’t… I do recommend :)

And I’m thankful for my renewed faith. For context, I was raised in a Muslim household and still call myself a Muslim. But there are certain principles of Islam I confess I’ve struggled with over the course of my life. To list them all would require a separate newsletter, but the relevant one here is the question of Allah’s existence. I worried when I was younger that my lack of unwavering belief in Islam’s fundamental pillar meant Id be unloved by my loved ones, or perhaps even that I was evil deep inside. (Weirdly did not maintain this judgement for the rare out atheists/agnostics in my extended family, who are still loved if not the object of disgruntled tirades by certain elder relations).

The guilt and fear have been pretty ineffective vehicles for delivering belief in a higher power, unsurprisingly. But bearing witness to the mountains and trees and waterfalls, not to mention the kind deeds of passing strangers, has been pretty damn convincing. These moments of wonder pierce past my oft-cynical rational mind to that place where there is only feeling. They gesture at some divine force of goodness and love and justice that must be in this world, for such wonder to exist, for me to be here bearing witness, at least IMO.

Perhaps most convincing, though, is discovering the faith was already within me. On the hardest day it was belief that got me through. Belief in my ability to get through hardship, belief that my family would be waiting for me on the other side with pancakes on the table, belief that all would work out in the end as it’s meant to. That last belief was like a base intuition I couldn’t shake — despite every bone in my body telling me to stop walking and buy the first plane ticket home, some unshakeable conviction deep within that it’d be alright had me moving onwards. (And even if, tomorrow, it feels right to buy that plane ticket, that’d be alright too).

I’m thinking now of a quote that I read somewhere on trail: logic proves solutions, but intuition discovers them. I ask you —What does your intuition tell you? I’m not trying to proselytize or anything. It might have nothing to do with the divine, or bring you to an opposite conclusion from mine. But I do suspect the-collective-societal-we has lost touch with our intuitions, in this era where the instinct to google “what is purpose of life” or maybe more accurately “what is purpose of life Reddit” so often overrides the instinct to sit and think on it.  And by consulting my gut instead of the internet, I’ve found a path toward truth, a re-opening of a door I thought was closed to me. This has been a privilege.

Ok, if you’ve made it this far, bless you, and I’m so sorry for not editing this post down. Promise I’ll wrap up soon!

Preview of what’s ahead: hoping to catch my dear pals Max and Bex (college homies, but also life homies on lock) near Lake Tahoe soon. Planning to enter the Sierras with Sierra on September 7. The fam is moving around that time (Amaya and Jibran are starting ninth and sixth grade respectively at cranbrook lord oh lord) so if you’d like to send snail mail, ask me for the new addy. Letters to the old address will still reach but take longer.

Two questions for you, dear readers — what more do you want to know about my travels? No question too small: what’s in the pack, how do I know where I’m going, how I use the bathroom, etc. Also: is the email newsletter format readable, or too drone-y — would Insta or some other platform be easier for you to stay updated on my shenanigans? Just pondering the accessibility/sharing of this experience with my community stuff… but also, keep in mind I could barely keep up with BeReal. :)

Xoxo,

Alu

PS: this email was too long to attach photos, so I stuck them on a different page. See here: