Days 124 and 125
Miles: 0
Portland

My burning desire to finally get back on trail and to start the final push to Canada has been thwarted by my burning desire to hang out in Portland, eating delicious food, taking naps, and seeing old friends. Snap. On top of that, doing our food resupply for this last stretch seems to be a three-day process for me and J. One day to buy, one day to pack the boxes, and one day to mail them…

The weather is beautiful, heartbreakingly perfect, the sort of weather you don’t even realize is weather until you think back on days full of lunches on patios, long bike rides around town, evenings outside: Portland in the summertime.

Our chores are almost done. We’ve been to REI (new undies and socks). We stopped by the Snow Peak store, full of titanium and other things we can’t afford. I bought a new titanium spork. This one is purple. I also bought a beautiful wool blend, long-sleeve shirt, on an incredible sale for a still outrageous price, to replace the purple one I’ve worn down to rags. J convinces me that’s it’s too beautiful to ruin hiking, so I just put in the box of things to mail home instead.

Most importantly, we bought hundreds of dollars of groceries. We sat down on the sidewalk in front of Safeway in downtown Portland and ripped everything out of the excess packaging (so much packaging!) and bicycled it back to J’s brother’s apartment. J’s brother&girlfriend are healthy types, the sort of people who have a house full of delicious, nutritious, organic food and a drawer of high-end chocolate, and it is downright embarrassing to be doing our hiking resupply in their house. J and I wait until they leave to do the necessary work of divvying up bags of candy bars (pounds and pounds), 2 lb bags of gummy bears, 2 lb bags of sour patch kids, 2 lb bags of skittles, potato chips, wasabi peas, instant potatoes, pop-tarts, tortillas, tuna packets, brownie mix to stir in straight with our instant coffee, and on, and on. Once it’s all sorted and packed into USPS priority boxes, J tries calling some of the resupply stops in Oregon to see if we can re-route some of the boxes there (that we never picked up) to resupply stops in Washington. Shelter Cove resort won’t even talk to PCT hikers about their boxes unless you’re there in person to pick it up, and we are no exception. Other boxes we simply can’t find. (J threw away the tracking numbers back in Reno, and I’ve been upset with him about it ever since. I should probably get over it, but it continues to be a problem, over and over. Don’t throw away your tracking numbers! Don’t do it!) But! finally the Big Lake Youth Camp kindly agrees to forward a box for us.

Aside from chores and the temptations of the good life here in Portland, the biggest reason for our delay is PCT days. I’d never heard of PCT days before yesterday, but apparently it’s a thing – a thing sort of like kick-off (aka ADZPCTKO). It’s in Cascade Locks, right where I will be getting back on the PCT, taking place at the same time I will be getting back on the PCT, and I have a ride. (It’s 3D to the rescue again.) I wasn’t initially interested in going to PCT Days – I don’t need any gear, and I don’t know that I’m particularly excited about getting caught in the hiker bubble that will inevitably result. And, one more thing that I don’t particularly like to acknowledge to myself, is that I’m still not sure how I feel about my bicycle detour, and I’m definitely not sure how I want to talk about it to all the other hikers who put the miles in the hard way. (The real way?) There are the things that happen in your life, and then there’s the narrative you spin out of the raw material. I’m not sure that the narrative isn’t more real than the facts. The facts disappear with the passing of time, gone through your fingers the moment they’re over, but the narrative – the story – persists. Every day I spin that narrative a little bit more, here on this blog, choosing what is positive, what is negative, what I will preserve, and what I leave to moulder on the dust-bin of a leak memory.

I don’t have a story to tell yet about the bicycling. It hasn’t needed to be a story, it still was. Now it’s over, and I get to create it from scratch.

Meanwhile, last night in town. A mad push to finish some blogging, a last night with friends. Forward and onward.