Freedom, Escape, and a Big Fat Leviathan Post About What I Miss About the Trail

Half the campus left with their parents for Bryce Canyon this morning. All the bags and vehicles and gear and general running around the parking lot like headless chickens tired me out significantly as I tried not to mow anyone over with my little Hyundai Elantra. I'm excited to go out with the next wave of girls on Sunday and I'm pleased that my school principal wants me to stay out for another four days, twice as long as any of the other teachers.

I'm excited, I'm sad. I know it's not going to be like my adventures in Arizona. We'll be camping in tents right off from the road, drinking bottled waters and eating breakfast burritos from huge grills and cobblers from Dutch ovens. I'm pulling out my old trail shirt and Dickies and wearing all my leather satchels, bracelets, and headbands, but I'm afraid they're going to seem like a costume instead of a persona. There will be nothing death-defying, nothing hard or gritty or extremely, powerfully beautiful. Instead, I'll be climbing trees trying to flee from worried, rich parents who want passionately for me to know just how much more important their child is from all the other children and what I must do better in my classroom to get their money's worth.

So here is another list. A list of the freedoms I miss from walking the desert mesas of the Bloody Basin, of Cherry Creek. These are the things I dream about when my classroom walls keep out the sun and the wind and the florescent lighting fogs my eyes until I'd rather keep the lights off and skulk in the darkness, waiting for my next opportunity to hop into a dinged up Chevy Suburban and kick dust all the way to nowhere, until nowhere becomes everywhere and the blue sky hangs like a magnet over the burning, thriving soil of the Sonoran.

THINGS I MISS ABOUT THE TRAIL:

1. You can go to the bathroom anywhere. You want to be away from water, but besides that, you don't even need toilet paper. Juniper needles are not only effective, but antiseptic. There is no greater personal moment than the one you take at the break of dawn on the top of sun-licked mesa looking over vast valleys of dark purplish hills littered with saguaro cacti. I will never not love going to the bathroom outside.

2. Finding and revisiting secret places. Nothing beats hiking down lonely creek beds that haven't seen human footsteps in years or more to suddenly find a storybook grove of trees next a deep crooked elbow of clear water and being able to stay there for two nights. Shelters become established, bookshelves are created from logs and branches, hammocks go up and socks get dried out officially. Anybody who has read My Side of the Mountain or The Boxcar Children know that just because you don't have a letter of certificate doesn't mean you don't own a place. I have whole rooms and sanctuaries waiting for me in the desert, scattered on invisible paths I know well enough to walk without compass or map.

3. Finding your own water. Nothing is less anti-climatic then going over to the sink and filling up a tall glass of tap water. On the trail, water is life and water is everything. You spend full days searching for good water and anyone who has walked the trail long enough knows what it's like not to find it and what it's like to find it after so long. There is a book called The Search for Delicious that was my favorite book until I discovered Roald Dahl in second grade. The people of the kingdom looked far and wide for the definition of "delicious" until they all got tuckered out after a full day of battles in the teeming heat of a summer's day. They went down to the creek at the center of the woods and declared the cool fresh water as the true meaning of "delicious." Fruity, I know, but I was, like, seven-years-old. And there were elves in it.

4. Dropping pack after a full day of sweaty hiking. Walking the trail means your back is sweaty from about 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Especially when that's the week you are carrying a satchel of soapstone for carving or obsidian for pressure flaking. You feel top heavy and powerful--like a rhino. Finding that perfect campsite and letting that tarp full of all your worldly possessions slide tumbling to the dusty ground at your feet is like sprouting wings. It's like your whole body has become an orifice for air and you are breathing in from all pores. Then, you collapse back onto it and your pack is the most plush, warm, comfortable pillow of your life.

5. Harvest Moons. Nothing beats a low-lying orange-tinged harvest moon creeping up over the cowtank while you are chewing the fat with a band of grungy, adorable teenage boys around a healthy blaze of a fire you gathered your own firewood for from the surrounding woods. The moon makes you feel like Butch Cassidy, like Ichabod Crane, like Shakespeare's elvish Puck.

6. Cheesecake. I would love to escape to the trail for a fat, heavy, dirty-looking cheesecake. The crust is made with flour and brown sugar and enough water to make dough. You press the dough around the bottom of your tin cup to make a bowl about 1.5-2 inches deep and cook it in ashes and coals until it is golden brown and not doughy anymore. You slide the crust bowl from off your cup and mix three parts powdered milk with one part tang or Gatorade powder (lemon is oh, so good) or if you are lucky enough to have a hot chocolate packet or cinnamon with you, dear heavens above it is so delectable. You add just the slightest amount of water to make a thick cheesecake paste and you fill your crust with it. Walnuts and almond shavings are also recommended. Then, you'll want to take a flaming stick over the top of your cake and bake the top to fully enhance the cheesecake facade. Let it sit awhile in the cool of night. Take a bite. Make yourself sick. It'll totally be worth it. Save it for the morning if you want, but don't come whining to me if it starts to rain or blizzard on it tonight.

7. Nightwatch. I know, seriously. I complained about it for months, but nothing beats sitting around the embers of a fire that already contains so many jokes, so many story-tellings, so many crises averted and concerns resolved or in the midst of resolving. It's lonely and deep and dark. It gets to the point you are relieved and entertained by the tarantula that lurks in the shadows ahead or the scorpion that freaks out and runs away because he was hiding underneath the book you just picked up. Drifting between dreams and consciousness, watching over the sleeping mounds around you like a shepherd over sleeping sheep. I'll never forget the blizzarding night that I was joined by three of my boys who weren't successful at keeping the snow from drifting under their tarps and wetting everything they had. The four off us tended a fire of snapping, steaming wet sticks and told stories until they slept all around me and I watched to make sure they didn't sleep too close to the licking of the flames.

8. I miss being on the top of everything. I'm trying to not quote Titanic here. I miss hiking up beastly, angry, loose-rocked, snake-filled, catclawed hillsides and cliff faces and at the end of the day standing on the edge of a slight ridged finger that rides across the face of the earth and drops down on all sides. I love being above the vultures and the hawks, seeing where creeks came from and where they're heading, tipping my hat towards peaks we reached on earlier weeks, peaks we'll get to in coming weeks. I love hooting, echoing, fading. I love rowdy bands of boys and hyper bands of girls whooping and hollering and singing as we buttslide all the way down to Cherry Creek.

9. I miss the bands. I miss the mini-families. I miss the adventures and the camaraderie and the trust. I miss the sittings and looking into people's eyes and feeling my heart fit to burst when someone else feels the prickings and lets themselves tear up or lets themselves get quiet or lets themselves laugh for the first time in too long. I miss sitting against rocks and letting teenage boys talk to me and ask me questions while we file stones into beads and pendants. I miss girls lying along grassy hillsides with me, eating purple papago lily blossoms and talking about our dreams and our truths and our fears. I miss hot houses and Olbas Oil. I miss walking onto the trail and hearing former bands call out my name and scream out the Japanese words I taught them. I miss naming people after noble symbols of nature, of animals, of trees, of rocks and weather. I miss their last weeks on the trail and feeling them trying to hold and suck dry all their last moments. I miss escaping into the desert and keeping them dry and safe. I miss hiding them away from all the shit that happens in high schools and neighborhoods and lonely, confusing hotel rooms and rich, decadent, deceiving parties.

10. Number ten. What to say. I can't believe this blog post got as long and drawn-out as it has. I just wanted to say a few words as I sit in this classroom and babysit the math classes while the math teacher is camping. I don't even know who if anyone is reading this. I miss the simplicity of the trail. I miss the checklist of things to do each week, each day, each hour. I miss the pulse checks, the steady documentation of goings on, the no-tracing and the pow-wows. I miss everyone being on the same page and working with the same mindset. We were never perfect at it--never. And I like where I'm at now....I really do. But going to see the secretary isn't like walking into the offices I left in Arizona. Therapists don't know me really and staff don't know me really either. I miss not being on the same boat and in the same crew as everybody else. And now, I'll stop whining and get back to work.

Finito.