2021: A Tale of Two Trails

2021 is now old news. It was a year of persistent challenges, some of which I’ve met well, and others I’ve dodged. I decided to dive into this curious year of strife and adventure and summarize my feelings a bit, as well as talk about future plans and even opine on some media. And I’m cheekily publishing it in 2022, which is, I’m sure, a faux pas. Take a look at my year in synopsis, or skip right to my future plans or some talk about books and music.

Summary

The year began with my move from Flagstaff, with an acceptance that it wasn’t meant for me to be there in the sorrowful year that was 2020. I set off to live on my own and weather what I thought would be the pandemic’s end in solitude in a totally new city, Tucson. Since my new landlord insisted on a deep clean of the place, I got to do a nice winter road trip while the apartment was closed. I saw Big Bend, Carlsbad Cavern and Petrified Forest National Parks, but what I’ll probably most remember from that trip was being high up in Guadalupe Mountains National Park right when shit started going down on 1/6. What a weird, scary day! I won’t forget finding a macabrely curious park worker when I came out who helped me get caught up with the horrid details. Unfortunately, that day is going to stay infamous (unless something worse overshadows it, so don’t forget to vote in this coming year’s elections).

After moving into Tucson proper, I got to set up an apartment for the first time that was truly my own. Some inherited furniture from the former tenant, thrifting and online buys later I had a kitchen, living room, office, and bedroom, plus a patio with some hearty desert plants still kicking a year later. It’s still a rather spartan arrangement, but it’s the first time I’ve been living on my own and the lowest rent I’ve yet paid to enjoy that privilege. And I was able to sublet it without issue for the latter part of the year.

Those Winter and Spring months establishing myself in Tucson seem like a blur now that I try to recollect them. There were a few hikes with Merianne, as well as some road trips together in pursuit of trail work; those were easily the best moments in an otherwise scary, muted time in my life. It wasn’t until early April that I was able to get vaccinated and feel secure about human interaction again.

I was able to redesign this website and publish the updated version in May, a nice feather in my cap. With the warming weather and a finished site, I started interviewing for coding work, but after a few interview busts, realized that I had enough in my savings and a desire to instead spend the rest of the year adventuring. “I could pick back up on coding and work again come Winter!” was my thought as I settled my crosshairs on the 2,600 mile Pacific Crest Trail, southbound, to try and nab the second jewel in my triple crown, that would take about five months.

I found my way out to the trail in early July, spending the 4th in Seattle with a good bro, VP, and put in almost two months hiking. It was only two, for alas, a thru-hike was not meant to be. I did see some beautiful nature up in the Washington and Oregon Cascades, but the trail was a true grind this year. Mosquito swarms, very few people (and fewer I vibed with), and no campfires all left my morale consistently low. Worst of all was getting hospitalized with a freak throat infection that required a surgery to beat.

I returned to trail only to find no hikers left, choking smoke (you try hiking in a KN-95) and eventually full closures of the California forests ahead of me. I was pretty happy to bail, having felt utterly ground down compared to the joys I felt wandering in past years, and deeply apprehensive of the longevity of Western forests now that the age of climate change has undoubtedly arrived. It’s easy to forget in the shadow of California’s second year of devastating fires that Arizona had a really bad season in June with some 500,000 acres burned before a very intense monsoon season doused them.

Just prior to Labor Day, I concluded my PCT hike, having made it to Crater Lake National Park and gotten notice about the California forest system (and trails) closing. I pivoted for a month to see many of my friends in the Midwest and East that I hadn’t been able to safely or sanely see since the before times. Public transit and janky last minute flights got me around, and seeing NYC again left me wistful. There’s a decent chance I wind up back there if I give up on the quixotic desire to have my one vote count. With redistricting just completed here, I may have to move across town in Tucson now in order to vote in the competitive house district. A large part of me wanted to stay in New York for Autumn (my apartment was sublet until December), but one last burst of adventure called, the Arizona Trail.

I got to spend 6 weeks from October to Thanksgiving hiking the 800ish miles from Utah to Mexico, and it was a replenishment for my weary adventurer’s soul, where pretty much everything went right. The challenge level started high, with a snowstorm on night one being my welcoming to the Kaibab Forest. Fortunately, I made a friend, Zippers, to combat that cold with. I still fondly remember our first night camped together at 20F with my first fire in many months keeping the biting cold at bay. How’s that for a morale boost?

I’d split with Zippers at Flagstaff, but travel intimately with other cool cats in Marmot and Monkey, through the spiky overgrowth of the Mazatzals and open desert, respectively. There was also a great supporting cast that I didn’t get every detail of, including plenty of PCT refugees salvaging the hiking season, trail newcomers and hikers much more hardcore than I. What I’m getting at here, is that autumn on the AZT was a vibrant social time for me, with only the last week or so after leaving Tucson holding significant alone time, and that was buffeted with having good friends in Merianne and Wendy meeting me for my finish and bringing me back to society.

Now, for this month of December, I’ve been slowly figuring out regular life again. I’m back to climbing and juggling regularly, which are key components of my identity and fitness when not in adventure mode. I’ve also utterly lost myself in video games as a bit of an escape, notably finishing 2011’s Dark Souls. My time to goof off wears thin, however, and the doldrums of looking for proper employment now loom large as a foe I must face. 

Am I excited about working again after this hiatus? Yes, absolutely. There have been elating times in my web dev career where I’ve solved tricky problems or put together a beautiful site, and they will come again in earnest. I’m hopeful to be on a team of self-strivers and less enthused about the prospect of lone wolfing it, which has been what I’ve done as a freelance-oriented coder for a few years. The biggest woe is the actual job search, though if I’m to understand properly, it’s a seeker’s market now (you’ll recall in Spring, folks were bearish on employment numbers), so as long as I get earnest applications out, I expect to hear back and have a conversation. Or I can give in to the mercurial agendas of technical recruiters, who simplify and accelerate things in return for the surrender of agency.

In the meanwhile, I’m looking at a January (and the rest of Winter, if it comes to that) of dedicated time spent not only in applications & interviewing, but in continued skills development to stay productive. That means readers here should be seeing some new features, and I will put out an item or two on the Web Portfolio section to make it more current. First idea is to use Data Driven Documents to graph some of my data from this year’s hikes.

Future Adventures?

A lot of people are asking me with all my excitement this year, what’s my next journey? Though I feel a calling to adventure relentlessly, I am only focusing on restoring my coding career at this time and hoping to spend most of the year gainfully employed. It’s just very difficult to do both. At this time, there are no plans for anything big in 2022. Yes, I said this for 2021 too, but I really mean it this time. It’s very possible though that I relocate, or digital nomad at some point soon to sate both goals.

As for actual adventures, though I’m not actively planning anything, I do have a few ideas, in no particular order, I’ll be happy to touch on.

Riding a bicycle through Mexico and Central America looms in my mind a lot. I still haven’t spent any time south of the border, so it seems like a big splash to do it that way. I have sworn off bike touring (I called it a “death wish” after riding across the USA in 2017), but I keep romanticizing the idea in my head. I’d need to bone up on my Spanish and bike maintenance chops a lot before really embarking on any sort of trip like this though.

I’d feel more apt to take a stab at a Continental Divide Trail thru-hike over restarting or resuming my Pacific Crest Trail hike. The scarring from the fires this year in NorCal is likely to cause a huge skip or need a reroute, and I’m waiting to see how things settle on that. I’m a little apprehensive to have another season of adventure waylaid, and the CDT is less likely to be affected due to monsoonal storms and more desolate stretches.

Lastly, I’ll share my daydreams about two hard-mode thru-hikes. I could try the Appalachian Trail southbound, but starting at Katahdin in Autumn instead of Summer, so I basically spend the whole time freezing my ass off. It would be a tall order making it into the New Hampshire Whites before they become impassable, but afterwards, it would just be cold and lonely. It would be interesting to deal with snow, freezing days, a tough trail to navigate, but would there be oh so many beautiful views.

Closer by, I muse about the complete opposite in a Summer thru-hike of the Arizona Trail. Conditions would include: lethally extreme heat, intense monsoon storms, unreliable water; it all sounds so miserable. Though the highlands which constitute some 2/3rds wouldn’t be too awful, the low elevation desert, with days easily over 110 degrees, would have to involve straight night hiking. I’m not sure its ever been done in the trail’s short existence, and probably for good reason. I do think it’d be possible between waiting out heatwaves, traveling very light, and becoming vampiric.

Media

It’s only appropriate for year’s end for me to talk a bit about my media consumption, albeit belatedly. I might take advantage of this new site to do book, music, film or game critiques more in-depth and when their relevant.

What was most notable for me in 2021 before delving into specifics was that this year was when the dam finally broke for me on eBooks. I had ardently refused to adopt the format, even while traveling. The tradition of paper held between my hands was sacrosanct, and who wants even more screentime? Two factors came into play to tip my hand. First, there were the conditions of my PCT hike, that demanded unrelenting dawn to dusk days. It felt tough to justify carrying a book and digging it out of the pack. It’s a strange departure from my Appalachian days when I read a dozen books over the five months hiking, but then again, there was no time limit for me back then.

And then there was the Libby app, that I discovered through the Pima County Library system. Libby syncs up with a library and handles searching, reservations and reading of ebooks, as well as audiobooks. It was just so easy to get quality reading, and even try listening, that I dived all the way in and gobbled up a good collection of reads and listens. In my month back, I’ve since happily reverted back to the trusty feel of paper. Any time I’m traveling though, I’ll be ebooking contentedly. Perhaps I’ll marry audiobooks to long runs as well.

In reading, I’ve been most engrossed in The Expanse series. I’ve capped four of the nine novels in this space opera, with book 5 in hand ready to go. Any time I’ve picked one up, I’ve finished these 1,000 page stories in record time. I started with the TV series, but felt that I’d get a little more engrossed in print. I like the series for its “hard sci-fi” approach, with a setting of humanity having colonized the solar system but just barely eking out a life in many places, intense action married with political strife, and a lot of heroics that are balanced out with moral grayness. Unless the series takes a nosedive, priority one will be finishing up the rest of the series in 2022!

The most impactful book I read in 2021 though was Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015). This story, is set mostly in New York around a friend group of artists, centering on the story of Jude. The unraveling of his traumatic past as it bleeds to present is the centerpiece of the novel. This is a story about pain, an unrelenting pain that’s almost overbearing and will tax the limits of your empathy. It was fascinating to follow the story through to its end, and a book I struggled to put down. Thanks to Stephanie for this recommendation!

On self-help, I’ve found James Nestor’s Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art (2021) an interesting look at how we have been breathing wrong all throughout modern civilization. He cites mouth-breathing, as well as overly processed foods, as directly responsible for a human devolution. The results are smaller jaws, replete with dental problems and smaller airways. I’m someone who struggles with insomnia and nocturnal awakenings a lot, and will be experimenting with some of the exercises in this book to see if that solves my ailment.

My first audiobook was a grand trip, I decided to do another Haruki Murakami story, Dance Dance Dance (1988) narrated excellently by Rupert Dègas. I’ve read nearly all his books, and found resonance with his moody, isolated, mundane characters as they try to fix the broken elements in their lives, while also dealing with some slice of the supernatural. DDD is a stand-alone sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, which I read many years ago and forgot the plot to almost entirely; it didn’t matter much. The story picks up with a broken man putting himself back together while obsessing over a haunted hotel, where a prostitute he was seeing disappeared; it’s a quest to understand both the hotel, and the girl, and if they’re linked.

Our protagonist is a copywriter, and describes his work as “shoveling cultural snow”. That line repeats itself throughout the story as he tests it out on most characters he meets. Adjoining that are the absurdly frivolous expense accounts (think hookers, high-end restaurants and child care), and constant parallels of his experiences and labor to “Advanced Capitalism”: these drive home a theme and a pretty dry critique that honestly has aged pretty well, and felt really relatable as a freelancer myself questioning my place in society.

Finally, enclosed is an end of year Spotify playlist. I’m putting the “FM” back in HarrisonFM! I’ve really never ended my pursuit of the best new music even if I don’t have a music blog anymore. I cobbled together a list of 2021’s top tunes that I hope hit the right notes for everyone. Big shout out to Cassandra Jenkins for her album, An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, that got me in a really good way. Here’s to a 2022 with some shows for me again, perhaps I’ll even be documenting a few of them for a local outlet here.