By the end of my PCT thru-hike, I found myself thinking of the trail as an entity: my personal deity, immense and ruling over all, and my beloved, close and tangible, entangled with me. Typical anthropomorphizing tendencies, I told myself. Of course we do this during such an intense experience. Or maybe I’m just going nuts. That’s pretty normal too, on trail.

But maybe it’s just the nature of love.

How can you hold in your mind the whole of a love for something so large, so vast and varied, something that transpires across an expanse of space-time?

I’ll get to loving people in a minute. What about the things we say we love? Is it really love, that attachment and fondness? What are those inanimate objects that mean the most to us?

A house perhaps, full of memories and cherished objects. A favorite spot in a park, by a river. A precious piece of gear that enables countless adventures. A gift. A prize. Something imbued with meaning. Something that was hard to get. Something that brings us joy.

Most of those somethings aren’t all that physically big, in the grand scheme of things. You know what they look like. Their place in your life may be large, their presence may stretch across the fabric of time, but their physical being is something you can hold in your mind’s eye. One image for one thing. You have their measure.

What about those more complex, infinitely more powerful, living loves, for people?

Those mental files take up more storage, both on the time scale and in terms of what it means to encompass their physical existence. People change and move. A million expressions, how they were in one place and time, then their aging self in another place and time. Dancing around each other through the cosmos. People are also more than the pieces of themselves they reveal to us, even in the most intimate relationships. We never know the entirety of others in their autonomous lives and beings. They have so many facets. To love a person is to hazard the shape of that vastness and pour love out into the unknowable universe.

Is it not somewhat similar, the experience of falling in love with a piece of space-time that stretches across months – years, really, with the preparation and post-trail experiences – and thousands of miles, across the most diverse biomes, bursting with so much beauty that the mind’s eye can never take it all in? To love the PCT is to love the muted shades of a desert sunset, and also the glint of sun and moon off glaciated peaks cradling pristine lakes, and the lush depths of old-growth forests, and the trail itself, be its surface sand, or soft pine needles, or dried oak leaves, or crushed lava, or rough-hewn granite, or pavement, or mud, or snow, or a jungle gym of blowdowns, or just a million hues and textures of dirt.

And that’s just what she looks like. I was tactile with the trail – I wanted to use all my senses to take in the reality of being in that experience. My fingers brushing cactus spines, metal trail blazons, water flowing, tree bark, lichen-encrusted rocks, dripping branches after a rain. So many faces, so many moments. Loving something so big and beautiful and changing within itself, while you move and change alongside it, is like the experience of loving no other non-living thing. Which means, by default, that it feels closer to loving a living thing. Like a person.

Sometimes I marvel at the strength of the feelings within me for the trail, so many months after the end of my thru-hike, and probably forever. How can I be so in love with this thing?

How could I not be?

How much and how powerfully I lived, when I lived on this strangely-dimensioned plane of existence. It’s astounding to me that the trail is always out there, no matter the season, that incredible long and narrow creation running through these places. Year after year, the quality of the light on that ridge just so, the beauty of a specific tentsite just so, the feel of the earth flowing underfoot just so. It blows my mind that I was there, in all those moments, and that now others are. And that I could ever be anywhere else.

So much exhilaration and joy, and now a lifetime to process it and try to find that feeling again.

First love.

*

“When we’re dead and gone,
will the mountains remember?
or just carry on,
moving as slow as the forest grows,
and turn our bones into dust,
an untold legend is lighting up…”

— Lord Huron, “The Birds Are Singing At Night”

“No helmet on,
kiss the cross,
stretch your gloves,
best of luck
you were born wild,
September child,
stone to sand,
then back again…”

— In The Valley Below, “Hold On Tight“